Here’s a word that we don’t hear very often these days … character.

As David Brooks says in this video, the word ‘character’ has an old fashioned, stuffy and stodgy connotation that maybe seems out-of-place in the 21st century.

So what’s the point of spending any time and any mental energy on an idea that’s past its use-by-date? After watching this video, there’s plenty we can learn from David and lots of good ideas we can use for our Switch ON Living Wellbeing plans.

David is another of our favourites at Switched ON Living. He is a New York Times columnist and a weekly commentator on the PBS Newshour program.

For all of us who have watched David over the years on the Newshour, we know that he’s blessed with a deep, deep, deep sense of decency and vast common sense.

David also has a wonderful ability to articulate the complex, a skill in full use here as he defines his five levels of character.

But before we talk about the five levels of character, we need to take a step back and look at what David says are the five enduring relationships in our lives – to our family and spouse; to a faith or a philosophy; to a vocation; to a community and to friends.

Humans are innately social creatures and these relationships are the broad bonds that tie us to others. We also use these bonds to create our self-image.

David describes character is our adherence to these bonds through five ascending levels of commitment:

•    First Level – “you can count on me”
•    Second level –performative character traits, grit, self-control, thrift, modesty, moderation, self-reliance, the   qualities that make us good students and good employees
•    Third Level – finding the balance between our sometimes-conflicting commitments
•    Fourth Level –overcoming our first, serious setback in adulthood, climbing our ‘second mountain’
•    Fifth Level – transcendence to a life spirituality and / or commitment to others.

David is most eloquent and persuasive in his descriptions of the five levels of character and uses stories to great effect to illustrate the differences between them.

The video is longer than many others we feature in the Retire Better blog series and its content is more esoteric.

But it’s so worth the extra effort for us aged over 50 to listen to what David says.

The speech in the video was obviously for an audience of educators, and throughout David makes many references to the character-forming role that teachers have in shaping young lives.

Self-improvement is not the preserve only of the young. We’ve all signed up to Switched ON Living because we’re just hungry as any adolescent to know about ourselves and to understand our world.

One of the terms that David uses in his speech is ‘moral ecology,’ the idea that we seek among the great moral traditions of civilisation – Greek, Hebrew, Christian, Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist, the Enlightenment, etc – the one that suits us best as our foundation for living.

We can safely add David’s five levels of character to our moral ecology. The word might sound quaint, but its essence is eternal.

If you want to know about David’s understanding of character, here’s a link to his book, The Road to Character.

In the meantime, the easiest way for Australians to see David is his weekly segment on Newshour. David is a conservative political and cultural commentator, and in stark contrast with so many other alleged conservatives, he’s rallied at every opportunity against the descent away from traditional conservative values by so many on the right of politics.