My grandfather
Bernard Levy played a big role in my childhood. When we weren’t exploring New
York City together, he was writing letters to the editor of The New York Times
from his law firm’s office in the Woolworth Building in Lower Manhattan, and if
memory serves, he might have even gotten a few published. He had died by the
time I got hired as a columnist here, but he would have been my first call.
That journey from the little tenement house he grew up in on the Lower East
Side to my position at this newspaper is part of our family’s experience of the
American dream.
It’s been the
honor of a lifetime to work here, surrounded by so many astounding journalists.
But after 22 wonderful years, I’ve decided to take the exciting and terrifying
step of leaving in order to try to build something new.
When I came to
The Times, I set out to promote a moderate conservative political philosophy
informed by thinkers like Edmund Burke and Alexander Hamilton. I have been so
fantastically successful in bringing people to my point of view that moderate
Republicans are now the dominant force in American politics, holding power
everywhere from the White House to Gracie Mansion. I figure my work here is
done.
I’m kidding.
In reality,
I’ve long believed that there is a weird market failure in American culture.
There are a lot of shows on politics, business and technology, but there are
not enough on the fundamental questions of life that get addressed as part of a
great liberal arts education: How do you become a better person? How do you
find meaning in retirement? Does America still have a unifying national
narrative? How do great nations recover from tyranny?
When I think
about how the world has changed since I joined The Times, the master trend has
been Americans’ collective loss of faith — not only religious faith but many
other kinds. In 2003, we were still relatively fresh from our victory in the
Cold War, and there was more faith that democracy was sweeping the globe, more
faith in America’s goodness, more faith in technology and more in one another.
As late as 2008, Barack Obama could run a presidential campaign soaring with
hopeful idealism.
The post-Cold
War world has been a disappointment. The Iraq war shattered America’s
confidence in its own power. The financial crisis shattered Americans’ faith
that capitalism when left alone would produce broad and stable prosperity. The
internet did not usher in an era of deep connection but rather an era of
growing depression, enmity and loneliness. Collapsing levels of social trust
revealed a comprehensive loss of faith in our neighbors. The rise of China and
everything about Donald Trump shattered our serene assumptions about America’s
role in the world.
We have become
a sadder, meaner and more pessimistic country. One recent historical study of
American newspapers finds that public discourse is more negative now than at
any other time since the 1850s. Large majorities say our country is in decline,
that experts are not to be trusted, that elites don’t care about regular
people. Only 13 percent of young adults believe America is heading in the right
direction. Sixty-nine percent of Americans say they do not believe in the
American dream.
Loss of faith
produces a belief in nothing. Trump is nihilism personified, with his
assumption that morality is for suckers, that life is about power, force,
bullying and cruelty. Global populists seek to create a world in which only the
ruthless can thrive. America is becoming the rabid wolf of nations.
Nihilism is
the mind-set that says that whatever is lower is more real. Selfishness, egoism
and the lust for power drive human affairs. Altruism, generosity, honor,
integrity and hospitality are mirages. Ideals are shams that the selfish use to
mask their greed. Disillusioned by life, the cynic gives himself permission to
embrace brutality, saying: We won’t get fooled again. It’s dog eat dog. If
we’re going to survive, we need to elect bullies to high places. In 2024, 77
million American voters looked at Trump and saw nothing morally disqualifying
about the man.
It’s tempting
to say that Trump corrupted America. But the shredding of values from the top
was preceded by a decades-long collapse of values from within. Four decades of
hyper-individualism expanded individual choice but weakened the bonds between
people. Multiple generations of students and their parents fled from the
humanities and the liberal arts, driven by the belief that the prime purpose of
education is to learn how to make money.
We’re
abandoning our humanistic core. The elements of our civilization that lift the
spirit, nurture empathy and orient the soul now play a diminished role in
national life: religious devotion, theology, literature, art, history,
philosophy. Many educators decided that because Western powers spawned
colonialism — and they did — students in the West should learn nothing about
the lineage of their civilization and should thereby be rendered cultural orphans.
Activists decided persuasion is a myth and that life is a ruthless power
competition between oppressors and oppressed groups. As a result of
technological progress and humanistic decay, life has become objectively better
but subjectively worse. We have widened personal freedom but utterly failed to
help people answer the question of what that freedom is for.
The most
grievous cultural wound has been the loss of a shared moral order. We told
multiple generations to come up with their own individual values. This
privatization of morality burdened people with a task they could not possibly
do, leaving them morally inarticulate and unformed. It created a naked public
square where there was no broad agreement about what was true, beautiful and
good. Without shared standards of right and wrong, it’s impossible to settle
disputes; it’s impossible to maintain social cohesion and trust. Every healthy
society rests on some shared conception of the sacred — sacred heroes, sacred
texts, sacred ideals — and when that goes away, anxiety, atomization and a slow
descent toward barbarism are the natural results.
It shouldn’t
surprise us that, according to one Harvard survey, 58 percent of college
students say they experienced no sense of “purpose or meaning” in their life in
the month before being polled. It shouldn’t surprise us that people are so
distrusting and demoralized. I’m haunted by an observation that Albert Camus
made about his continent 75 years ago: The men of Europe “no longer believe in
the things that exist in the world and in living man; the secret of Europe is
that it no longer loves life.”
We could use
better political leadership, of course, but the crucial question facing America
is: How can we reverse this pervasive loss of faith in one another, in our
future and in our shared ideals? I do not believe that most people can flourish
in a meaningless, nihilistic universe. Despite what the cynics say, I still
believe we’re driven not only by the selfish motivations but also by the moral
ones — the desire to pursue some good, the desire to cooperate, to care for one
another and to belong. Life is about movement, and the flourishing life is the
same eternal thing, some man or woman striving and struggling in service to
some ideal.
Where do
people and nations go to find new things to believe in, new values to orient
their lives around? Where do they go to revive their humanistic core? They find
these things in the realm of culture. In my reading of history, cultural change
precedes political and social change. You need a shift in thinking before you
can have a shift in direction. You need a different spiritual climate.
By “culture,”
I don’t just mean going to the opera and art museums. I mean “culture” in the
broadest sense — a shared way of life, a set of habits and rituals, popular
songs and stories, conversations about ideas big and small. When I use the word
“culture,” I mean everything that forms the subjective parts of a person:
perceptions, values, emotions, opinions, loves, enchantments, goals and
desires. I mean everything that shapes the spirit of the age, the moral and
intellectual moment, which constitutes the shared water in which we swim. In
this definition, every member of society has a role in shaping the culture. We
all create a moral ecology around ourselves, one that either elevates the
people we touch or degrades them.
Edmund Burke
argued that culture, which he called “manners,” is more important than
politics. Manners, he wrote, “are of more importance than laws. Upon them, in a
great measure, the laws depend. The law touches us but here and there, and now
and then. Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase,
barbarize or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform, insensible operation,
like that of the air we breathe in. They give their whole form and color to our
lives. According to their quality, they aid morals, they supply them, or they
totally destroy them.”
The good news
is that culture changes all the time as people adjust to meet the crises of
their moment. In the 1890s, the Social Gospel movement, with its communal
emphasis, displaced the social Darwinist culture, with its individualistic,
survival-of-the-fittest emphasis. That cultural shift eventually led to
political change: the Progressive era. American culture also shifted radically
between 1955 and 1975, producing a culture that was less conformist, less
sexist and racist, more creative than the one that came before, though also one
that was more atomized. The culture war that began in that era produced both
the modern left and the modern right. American culture today is already vastly
different from how it was during the Great Awakening of 2020.
We Americans
went through hard times before, and we have always recovered through a process
of cultural rupture and repair. Some old set of values and practices has to be
torn away and some new ones embraced.
Trump is that
rare creature, a philistine who understands the power of culture. He put
professional wrestlers onstage at the last Republican convention for a reason:
to lift up a certain masculine ideal. He’s taken over the Kennedy Center for a
reason: to tell a certain national narrative. Unfortunately, the culture he
champions, because it is built upon domination, is a dehumanizing culture.
True Humanism,
by contrast, is the antidote to Nihilism. Humanism is anything that upholds the
dignity of each person. Antigone trying to bury her brother to preserve the
family honor, Lincoln rebinding the nation in his second Inaugural Address,
Martin Luther King Jr. writing that letter from the Birmingham jail — those are
examples of humanism. Tracy Chapman and Luke Combs singing “Fast Car” at the
Grammys — that’s humanism. These are examples of people trying to inspire moral
motivations, pursue justice and move people to become better versions of
themselves.
Humanism comes
in many flavors: secular humanism, Christian humanism, Jewish humanism and so
on. It is any endeavor that deepens our understanding of the human heart, any
effort to realize eternal spiritual values in our own time and circumstances,
any gesture that makes other people feel seen, heard and respected. Sometimes
it feels as if all of society is a vast battleground between the forces of
dehumanization on the one side — rabid partisanship, social media, porn,
bigotry — and the beleaguered forces of humanization on the other.
If you want to
jump in on the side of humanization, join the Great Conversation. This is the
tradition of debate that stretches back millenniums, encompassing theology,
philosophy, psychology, history, literature, music, the study of global
civilizations and the arts. This conversation is a collective attempt to find a
workable balance amid the eternal dialectics of the human condition — the
tension between autonomy and belonging, equality and achievement, freedom and
order, diversity and cohesion, security and exploration, tenderness and
strength, intellect and passion. The Great Conversation never ends, because
there is no permanent solution to these tensions, just a temporary resting
place that works in this or that circumstance. Within the conversation, each
participant learns something about how to think, how to feel, what to love, how
to live up to his or her social role.
One of the
most exciting things in American life today is that a humanistic renaissance is
already happening on university campuses. Trump has been terrible for the
universities, but also perversely wonderful. Amid all the destruction, he’s
provoked university leaders into doing some rethinking. Maybe things have
gotten too preprofessional; maybe colleges have become too monoculturally
progressive; maybe universities have spent so much effort serving the private
interests of students that they have unwittingly neglected the public good. I’m
now seeing changes on campuses across America, from community colleges to state
schools to the Ivies. The changes are coming in four buckets: First, a
profusion of courses and programs that try to nurture character development and
moral formation. Second, courses and programs on citizenship training and civic
thought. Third, programs to help people learn to reason across difference.
Fourth, courses that give students practical advice on how to lead a
flourishing life.
I look at
these efforts with growing admiration and enthusiasm. My questions are: How can
I get involved? Where do I go to enlist? (In my particular case, the answer
turns out to be New Haven, Conn.) And of course, the forces of humanization are
needed not just on campuses but also within every company, community and
organization where people are engaged in the vital search for good conduct,
ethical leadership and a greater wisdom about what is truly significant. My
books have been attempts to bring humanistic thinking to popular audiences, and
wherever I go I confront people who long to feel uplifted, who hunger for the
wisdom that has been handed down by sages and prophets through the centuries.
If you’ve read
my columns, you may know that one of my favorite observations from psychology
is that all of life is a series of daring explorations from a secure base.
People need a secure base. Part of that base is emotional — unconditional
attachments to family and friends. Part of that secure base is material —
living in a safe community, with a measure of financial stability. Part of that
secure base is spiritual — living within a shared moral order, possessing faith
that hard work will be rewarded, faith in a brighter future.
My friends in
the abundance movement say that America has a housing crisis, and they are
right. But more elementally, America has a home crisis. When people do not
believe they have a secure emotional, physical and spiritual home, they become
risk averse, stagnant, cynical, anxious and aggressive.
This is not
the way America is supposed to be! For centuries, foreign observers have
complained that, if anything, Americans are too idealistic, too optimistic, too naïve,
always rushing off to try new ventures without anticipating the cost. The most
astute of those observers have always noted that beneath the crass, striving
materialism of American life, there is a propulsive spiritual wind, driving
Americans to move, innovate, self-improve, venture boldly into the future. This
is Lin-Manuel Miranda’s energy infusing the musical “Hamilton”: “I’m just like
my country. / I’m young, scrappy and hungry.” This is John F. Kennedy’s
Inaugural Address: “Together let us explore the stars, conquer the deserts,
eradicate disease, tap the ocean depths and encourage the arts and commerce.”
If America
could once again restore its secure emotional, material and spiritual base,
maybe we could recover a smidgen of our earlier audacity. Oscar Wilde joked
that youth is America’s oldest tradition. Maybe it’s time the country matured,
and combined youthful energy with the kind of humility and wisdom that Reinhold
Niebuhr packed into one of his most famous passages:
Nothing that
is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by
hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any
immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we
do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by
love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or
foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore, we must be saved by the final form
of love, which is forgiveness.
I’ll miss a
lot of things about being a Times columnist — the readers, the colleagues, the
endless learning that the job involves. The job title alone is good for my ego!
But I think I’ve found a project and a cause that are worth devoting the final
chapter of my career to.
Thanks a
million, everybody.
-David Brooks
