It's funny to read this today. On the way to work, I heard an advertisement for Brook's new book The Road to Character, which is mentioned in the footnote of this OpEd. I often get a sense of sincerity and self-deception from Brooks that makes me unable to read his opinions as genuine. This is a book promotional piece about doing things for others rather than yourself. The self-deprecation may be sincere, but it is generic. His argument for a fake-it-until-you-make-it morality seems fitting for the public position he has taken as a compassionate conservative. Compassion requires understanding. From my experience, compassionate people want to understand others, and aren't satisfied to respect them from a distance. To me, Brooks represents someone that struggles to map his own moral code upon the behavior of others. He seems unable to accept that his moral code might fail to map, or that any one moral code cannot inform all behavior. IMO his work is a description of this struggle.
I usually shake my head at David Brooks, but this was quite a good column. Edit: Oh, he's promoting a book. How selfless and inspiring. I can go back to my head shaking, I guess.
I do find it hard to trust an article about how to be genuine written by a disingenuous person, though.