David Brooks is wrong (in a useful way)

Bear with me for a moment; something bugged me this week and I needed to react.

In his final act as a NY Times employee, David Brooks said that today’s political and cultural crises are a consequence of “moral ruination” and “privatized morality” over the past 50 years. As a result we’re missing “basic shared standards of how a person should behave.”

Whatever you think of Brooks—personally it’s that his function at the Times was to convince well-off people that everything that might make them uncomfortable is unnecessary—I think it’s worth reacting to this opinion in a bit more depth than either a nod or a sneer.

Principles vs practices

Brooks is a conservative in the pre-Trump sense so it makes sense that he thinks this, but it seems to me extremely wrong. At least in the American context I don’t think there’s a widespread rejection of moral principles; there’s no wholesale argument that fairness, kindness, justice, forgiveness and so on aren’t good things. The conflict arises when people disagree about how to achieve those principles in practice (and particularly when those principles get filtered through politics).

And that is because the organizations and systems that purported to apply those moral principles—as seen by a kid who grew up in the 1960s—don’t actually apply them consistently. Think of the corruption of the Presidency from Nixon to Clinton to Trump, or the discovery that the Catholic Church concealed and enabled sexual abuse, or the widespread acknowledgement of police violence. My hunch is most people still know the right principles, but are disillusioned with how they’ve been applied. And to anyone below retirement age right now, looking back on political and economic history from Watergate and Vietnam to Iran Contra and 9/11 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the hollowing out of American industry in service of profits, the succession of economic crises in which no one was held accountable and in fact those responsible profited greatly, the encroachment of digital and corporate powers without the mediating influence of government…I think it’s totally sensible that someone with that experience would think that David Brooks’s recipe for moral living (pretend like it’s 1958) is insufficient.

Moral commonalities

The reason this matters, I think, is that it highlights a difference between liberal and conservative outlooks—I use those terms in the political spectrum sense, not specifically to mean Democrats and Republicans today. Seemingly without realizing it, Brooks conflates “shared morality” with “shared respect for the systems that used to teach and enforce certain morals.” When people lose the latter he sees it as losing the former.

What makes this even stranger is that Brooks claims that for all of American history until about 1975 we had a “shared moral order”, and that everyone acknowledged “moral law was written into the fabric of the universe.” I can’t imagine that this understanding was more widely held in 1960 or 1860 or 1760 than it is today. If you asked white Protestant American landowners you might get a pretty tight set of opinions about appropriate behavior (though if you’ve worked on the history of sectarianism you’d know that this alignment is not guaranteed), but I suspect diversity of opinion has always existed. In the past the number and range of people who could speak publicly about such issues—and be heard—was much smaller.

However, I do think most people still feel very strongly, in a way that is “written into the universe” that the principles of justice and fairness and mercy are good things and worth pursuing. There is, of course, splintering of opinion about how to apply those principles to the messy facts of actual existence, as well as splintering of agreement about the facts of existence itself. These are serious problems, but not what Brooks describes.

Engaging with these weird comments by Brooks, I’ve come to see that I understand moral landscape in almost exactly the opposite way as he does. I think this durable moral sense is about the only thing we have in common anymore.

An even more old-fashioned perspective

On the surface I’ll admit this is a difficult claim to support. There are so many flagrantly amoral actors about. How can I say that Stephen Miller, for example, respects fairness and justice and mercy? Well, failing the standard is not the same thing as rejecting the standard altogether. I’ll refer to an older and more conservative authority, CS Lewis, who articulated this contradiction as part of his argument for God. Nearly everyone, Lewis says, has a sense of what good behavior consists of. There are differences around the edges and across cultures, differences about the extent to which you owe this good behavior—only to your group or to all people—but most people understand that you, for example, shouldn’t lie and cheat and hurt, that you should be generous and kind and courageous. Nobody follows this sense of moral rectitude perfectly, and there are some people who don’t understand it, but that’s a small number.

As evidence of this claim, consider that most people who deviate from this universal principle of right and wrong still argue that they are, on some deeper level, adhering to it. Miller would undoubtedly say that it’s fair and just to treat people who have entered the country illegally in various unpleasant ways. You’ll forgive me if I don’t spend time looking up his quotes on the subject. The point is that (for the most part) even people who are acting to produce evil intend good. They still appeal to fairness or whatever other positive principle, even as their actions produce different outcomes. This doesn’t mean good and evil don’t exist. As Terry Eagleton briskly put it, one must “repudiate the brand of mealy-mouthed liberalism which believes that one has to respect other people’s silly or obnoxious ideas just because they are other people’s.” Brooks is right that moral relativism would be profoundly destabilizing; I just think he’s wrong about how prevalent it really is.

Grounds for optimism?

There is a lot of moral instability nowadays, but my point is that the destabilization comes from somewhere else. There isn’t actually mass confusion about what constitutes a good end; most people are striving towards good and by so doing some are getting it catastrophically wrong in ways that hurt other people. This is nothing new. What is new is the range of opinion expressed, and the range of people who can express it. What Brooks sees as a society completely adrift and unable to agree on right and wrong, is a society where a greater variety of people are seen pursuing happiness, fairness and justice in ways that feel true to them.

Now, if morality is mostly about behaviors and prohibitions—thou shalt not do these particular things—then this variety of behavior can be wrong by definition. But I think the covenant of grace has replaced the covenant of the law. I think there are different ways to express your sympathy with that offered grace—in fact, there must be. And if morality is mostly about empathy and generosity, then the breakdown of guiding systems, which Brooks decries, can be a necessary precondition for morality rather than an obstacle.

In any case, I think it’s oddly reassuring that “trying to do the right thing” is still such an animating principle. A return to civil society (even if it’s one that might not satisfy Brooks) might be as simple as agreement about a common set of facts and an upwelling of mutual tolerance—or even avoidance. This is a daunting prospect. But not quite as daunting as it would be if no one actually recognized the same bedrock of good and evil.

P.S. Trump and contemporary “bag culture” are probably the biggest challenge to this way of thinking about morality, but I think even those examples can usually be understood to fit. How many of Trump’s supporters see him as a necessary evil, like a strong and unpleasant medicine, to correct a damaged system and in pursuit of a greater good? And how often does he himself complain about unfairness? How many bag influencers and grindcore bros preach the get-mine gospel because the systems that were supposed to support and guide you are broken? These are not the positions of people who reject moral categories entirely; they’re positions of people who think there’s a workaround to get a particular outcome they want while ignoring the contradictions and costs, and that they’re justified in doing so because of some mitigating circumstance.


This, of course, is also an old story—it’s practically the definition of moral error. It’s not some new wholesale rejection of moral categories. Or so it seems to me.