David Brooks: The Quest for Deeper Meaning

thank you it really is a pleasure to be back here I get such comfort from just walking over here I got to say the crappy little hotel called the hotel Wales over on Madison if you want to boycott afterwards I'll be over there just walking in seeing Susan back in the green room coming out here the podium seems to be getting taller but aside from that I'm good I always say when I'm speaking to the 92nd Street Y crowds that I know I should be brief that you didn't come here to hear me speak you came here to hear yourself speak and so I'll try to get out of the way and let you indulge in what you love best for people who've seen me before read my column or see me elsewhere you probably know I'm a pretty bookish person I grew up in Stuyvesant Town not too far from here and when I was seven I read a book called Paddington the bear and I decided in that moment I wanted to become a writer and and I've been writing ever since I remember in high school I wanted to date a woman named Bernice and she didn't want to date me she wanted to date some other guy and I was thinking you know what is she thinking I write way better than that guy and so our values our values were different and it wouldn't work and so I was writing through high school and then in when I was 18 the admissions officers at Columbia Wesleyan and brown decided I should go to the University of Chicago [Music] and so I I did you know my the famous saying much Chicago it's where fun goes to die but my favorite saying about it it's a Baptist school or atheist professors teach Jewish students st. Thomas Aquinas that's and that too is a bookish place we had kids wore t-shirts that say sure it works in practice but does it work in theory and so and so I spent a lot of time a library I made sure I did double major in history and celibacy and I wasn't like today's students let's say where I teach at Yale if I asked him you know what are you doing at Spring Break they say you know I'm you know cycling across Thailand while reading to lepers they're all doing this amazing stuff but I did learn some skills that my students have which is how to dominate classroom discussion while doing none of the reading which stood me in good stead for my current job and then I did this is true I managed a boxer while I was at Chicago that nameless Fierstein who grew up in 96th Street here he we called him the kosher killer we didn't he didn't wouldn't actually practice boxing we read books about boxing and then his boxing title in the Chicago Golden Gloves competition his career lasted around 92 seconds one uppercuts and I did then I went in in a career with had a lot of bookish and commentary and that's what I do I do a segment called shields and Brooks on PBS some of you may know we want to call it Brooke Shields that would have been better my joke about mark is that he's been doing this job longer than I their segment is now called shields and Brooks and before that it was shields and gergan or shield since you go and then shields and gergan and then shields and Coolidge I think it was shields at Makaveli at first it was goes back and we do have a certain demographic if a 93 year old lady comes up to me in the airport I know what she's gonna say she's gonna say you know I don't watch your show but my mother loves it and so and so you get to learn how to try to appear smarter and appear bookish and I actually read a good commentary if you're in a meeting how to appear smart by a woman named Sarah Cooper if somebody mentions a percentage while giving a presentation you restate it as a fraction so they'll say Oh 25% you say oh one in four that that seems very smart if you do that so also it's also seems smart to construct meaningless Venn diagrams so you say the past the future and the present you say we want to be right here in the Venn diagram those always seem smart too and so I've lived this kind of life hopefully getting a little more emotional I think I've gotten more feminine as I've gotten older I'm the only man in America to finish that book Eat Pray Love by Paige runs in 2003 I was actually lactating it's kind of amazing and then I wrote this book the social animal which is a book about emotion my friends joke to me writing a book about emotion is like Gandhi writing a book about gluttony it's not the natural thing and then most recently I wrote this book on character and I learned actually in the course of writing in that book that writing a book on character doesn't give you good character and even reading a book on character doesn't give you good character but buying a book on character does give you good girls I recommend that so basically I'm underlining one key point here is that you know I get paid for being bookish and for writing but I've one thing I've learned is that the rational part of the brain is the third most important part of our consciousness and the first is the desiring heart the need for intimacy and love and connection I read recently about a guy who bought a house with a bamboo stand by his driveway and he hated bamboo so he chopped down the bamboo and then he took a shovel and dug into the root system and took an axe and chopped up all the roots and then he took this big buck at a plant poison and poured it all over the what remained of the roots and then he put three feet of gravel on top of the plant poison then he covered the whole thing over with cement and two years later a little bamboo shoots sticking up through the cement and I think we all have that in ourselves which is our desire we have something we're just like existential sharks were on the move because we're always desiring something and what we desire most fully is the desire to be connected connected with one another and the famous grant study done in Harvard where they took these guys in from the 40s today the men who grew up with no deep love were three times more likely to suffer from mental illness 2.5 times more likely to suffer from dementia when they were elderly and they made 50% less money over the course of their careers or we're personalities are really wired by love and we seek that sense of wholeness the kind of wholeness that luiz de Bernier described in a book called Captain Corelli's Mandolin he that book early in the book he's an old guy talking to his daughter about his relationship with his late wife and the guy says love itself is what is left over when being in love is burned away and this is both an art and a fortunate accident your mother and I had it we had roots that grew towards each other underground and when all the pretty blossoms had fallen from our branches we found out that we were one tree and not two and that's what the heart wants the second most important part of the consciousness I think is the soul now I don't ask you to believe in God or not believe in God that's not really not my department but I do ask you to believe that you have a soul that there's some piece of you that has no shape size or color because of infinite value and dignity rich and successful people don't have more of it than the rest of us and what this thing does is it yearns for righteousness we all want to lead good lives and meaningful lives filled with purpose I've never met anybody who didn't want to really want to lead a good life even when you interview someone who's a criminal or has behaved terribly they either try to persuade you that what they did was actually good or at least excusable and so we all want to build not just a good life but a a yearning for justice and sometimes it happens early in life sometimes in late I've noticed especially with people over a certain age that their their life has this shape of two mountains and the first mountain was the mountain they thought was going to be their mountain to climb they got out of school and they thought they were gonna be a doctor or whatever and so they began climbing that mountain and the first mountain is usually about building up the ego establishing it and they figure out how you can make a difference in the world and they sometimes they got to the top of the mountain and they found that unsatisfying they achieved the success they dreamed up but it didn't suddenly didn't fill their soul or they fail failed and got knocked off the mountain or something really bad half unlike the death of an offspring or something like that and they found themselves in the valley and in the valley they had actually a clearer vision of what their life is all about then they had up in the first mountain and they realized there's a second mountain to climb and while the first mountain is about establishing the ego the second mountain is often about renouncing the ego the first mountain is about building an identity and building yourself up the second mountain is more about pouring yourself out the first mountain is more professional and the second mountain is more spiritual and you find again and again people who especially in the second half of their life have devoted themselves wholly towards some act of incredibly generous giving some cause they passionately care about some relationship they nurture and they realize now I have a bigger mountain to climb and I notice it never ends and that mountain especially in the second half of life is driven by this soul this part of us that especially when you're young is sort of like a reclusive leopard it's the part of you that doesn't care about money or status or Facebook or any of the everyday things but it feeds off transcendence and awareness of one's place in the cosmic order a feeling of connection to unconditional love truth justice beauty and home and for long periods as I say early in your life maybe it's the Leopards high up in the forest you're not really thinking about it you're busy raising kids whatever but then there are spare moments when you feel its presence you feel that spiritual ache sometimes it can happen in the middle of the night you wake up as my friend Christian Wyman puts it when your thoughts are like a drawer full of knives you have one of those bad nights sometimes it happens in moments of joy you're surrounded by your family and you're just overwhelmed by a joy that is greater than anything you could experience at work and you become conscious of the fact that this is a joy you could never earn and at such moments you just want to be worthy spiritually worthy of that kind of happiness but then I think there are moments in the middle of life late in life where the leopard comes out of the mountains and it just comes right in the living room with you and it stares in front of you and it asks you for your justification what's your purpose in life what's your mission what did you come for and there are no excuses that moment everybody sort of has to throw off the masks and some people have given these deep questions no thought and they have to live with that knowledge and some people though they don't that it's not a problem because at the top of the second Mountain live that sheet they've gone on the far side of selfless service and they've their self has faded away and they were there just enmeshed in doing something deeply good for the world and so that these are the things I think drive us and our mind our logical mind is there just to sort of navigate and one of the things people do with their desiring hearts and with their yearning souls is they want to build societies that are not just good for themselves but where it's easier for other people to be good they want to build not only institutions that help people that inform and educate and care and nurture but they want to build whole cultures and collectively we get together and we create cultures and these cultures are supposed to help us solve the problems of a moment and for the next few minutes I'm just going to tell you about three different cultures that have succeeded in this country built by people who want to solve their problems I'm a believer and I didn't make this up there's a woman a social scientist I read said history moves forward in this process ratchet hatchet pivot ratchet and what she meant was we ratchet up we solve a problem we create a culture that works and it works for a while but then it stops working and we have a problem and so we hatched it apart we chop it up but then we pivot over and we create another of culture that works and we ratchet up again she says never underestimate the value of human ingenuity to solve our problems and you just have to endure the patience of those hatchet periods when we're chopping up the old culture that doesn't work 1848 in Europe was a hatchet moment when you had all this turmoil 1905 the industrial era was a hatchet mom 1968 was one and we happened to be living in one right now and it's easy to get disorganized so let me just describe three of these cultural shifts the first era I'll talk about was between 1932 and 1968 and people created a culture that was very group oriented they had to challenge tackle some big challenges like World War two and the depression and so they had an ethos which was we're all in this together they went for big organizations like the Army labor unions the IBM and they lived in very tight communities if you lived in Chicago in the 1950s there's a great book called The Lost City about this you followed that you probably had the same job your father and grandfather had of the Nabisco plant you probably joined the same union they joined in your neighborhood you were part of his tight community they didn't really have TV or air conditioning there so in the summertime everybody kept their doors open and the kids ran all between the houses there was constant rounds of barbecues and coffee klatches and babysitting coops constant trading of household goods if they somebody asked you are you from you didn't say I'm from Chicago you said I'm from 59th in Pulaski because your neighborhood was so tight it was just that crossroads and you served big organizations there was a guy named John Ferry who worked from the Democrats state legislature and he worked for boss Daly's machine if you want to go into politics you serve the Machine and he served in the machine in the state legislature for twenty years and then at the end boss Daly said you know I'm gonna reward you with two years in Congress in Washington just as a capstone of your career and when he was sent to Washington they asked him how can a vote when you get there and he said I will go to Washington to help represent Mayor Daley for 21 years I represented the mayor in the legislature and he was always right and so that's deference to an organization and there were a lot of really good things about that culture really tight communities real sense of membership and belonging a lot of humility there were some weaknesses of that culture racism sexism and semitism emotional coldness the food was really boring and so people decided around the sixties that it was time to get rid of it it was too conformist too crushing of individual spirit and so they chopped it up and to me the simpler ship from one culture to another is symbolized by me by one of the biggest football games of my childhood it's Super Bowl three in 1969 and 1970 where there were two quarterbacks facing each other by the end of the game both of whom grew up in western Pennsylvania ten years apart one of them was Johnny Unitas who was like a 1950's kind of guy crew-cut high-top shoes boring white button shirts were off the field he won't ever it when he left the field after every game he always thought of something boring to tell the reporters that was sort of the job on the other side of the field was my favorite player of that era Broadway Joe Namath $5,000 for coats he posed for pantyhose commercials he had long hair he was a swinger he was anti institutional he wrote a memoir called I can't wait until tomorrow because I get better-looking every day Johnny Unitas would not have entitled their memoir with that and so that's a shift in culture suddenly it was favorable to be young not old expressive not reticent casual not formal rabble not a conformist individual not institutional the new ethos was individualistic I'm free to be myself and this ethos also gave us a lot they was right for the moment it gave us the civil rights women feminism the peace movement Age of Aquarius I don't think we could have had the information age economy if we didn't have the rebellious individualistic spirit that came out of those times and it gave us a culture I wrote about early in my career the Bobo people with 60s values and 90s money and these are people who shop in the Whole Foods and the Trader Joe's all the progressive grocery stores where all the cashiers look like they're on loan from a machine you know those people my favorite section of Trader Joe's is the snack food section because they couldn't have anything like pretzels and potato chips that would be vulgar so they have these seaweed based snacks for kids to come and say ma mom I want to stack that a whole prevent colorectal cancer and they had been and so that culture was good for a time it really created the modern economy and it was just a much more dynamic culture than the conformist culture the 1950s but these days were sort of running out the string on it and we're in the middle of another hatchet period we've become we've seen the excesses of individualism and it manifests itself in a couple of crises that are overlapping the first is a crisis of isolation in nineteen eighty twenty percent of Americans reported feeling lonely now twice as many do 35 percent of the people over 45 in America today are chronically lonely a generation ago only percent of Americans lived alone now 40 percent do in 1970 married couples entertained friends in their home on average 15 times a year now the number is 8 the fastest-growing political party is unaffiliated the fastest religious movement is unaffiliated since 1999 suicide rates are spiking and suicide rates suicide is just a proxy for loneliness 55 or 65 thousand people die every year from opiate addiction and opiate addiction is slow-motion suicide and so it grows out of that loneliness that grows out of individualism maybe gone a little too far the second crisis is an institutional crisis distrust of authority it used to be in the era of we're all in this together 80 percent of Americans said I trust government do the right thing most of the time now it's about 20 percent people feel alienated from their institutions worse they feel alienated from each other if you ask people a generation ago are most people around you trustworthy you would get 60% say yeah people around me are trustworthy now it's 32 percent and 19 percent of Millennials distrust in institutions fell all at once between 85 and 75 basically Vietnam and Watergate distrust of each other falls by age cohort if you're born in the 30s and 40s you still probably have a hot little high distrust a high trust for people around you if you're born in the 80s and 90s you probably have low distrust each cohort is getting less trustful as they go along and as my friend Bob Putnam of Harvard says it's not perception it's reality people are less trustworthy because people are less trustworthy they're behaving worse toward each other and that produces low trust and the third crisis is a crisis of meaning it's stunning to me that if after all we've learned about the human brain that depression rates and mental health problems are rising not falling and I see it in my students and I see it in people in their 20s I've come to call it the Telos crisis they get out of school they have a setback in their mid-20s and they collapse nietzsche has a phrase hew has a why to live for can endure anyhow he you as a why to live for can endure anyhow if you know why you're doing something you can survive the setbacks if you don't know what your purpose in life is then every setback is crushing because you don't have some long-term thing you're shooting for and I see the fragility especially in the young and a sense of a loss of purpose a loss of meaning a spiritual yearning that is goes unfulfilled because they've been asked to find their sense of purpose their sense of meaning for themselves and by themselves if your name is Nietzsche or Aristotle maybe you can come up with your own personal philosophy but most of us need connection and most of us find connection by launching ourselves into other human beings and they have been denied that David Foster Wallace as usual was ahead of the curve when he said he described something that doesn't have much to do with physical circumstances or the economy or that stuff that gets talked about on the news it's more like stomach level sadness I see it in myself and my friends in different ways it manifests itself in a kind of lost Ness this is a generation that has an inheritance absolutely nothing as far as more null values as concerned and so the individualism has created these three overlapping crises of isolation of alienation and of meaning and what happens when people are left naked and alone they do what our genes tell us to do which is they revert to tribe they go back to their primal and fundamental identities which are tribal identities and the populace have understood this I happen to have a spend an afternoon with Steve ban and a few months ago and it was fascinating it was like being with Trotsky in 1905 but the guy had a total plan for where he wanted to move the country he Trump was only one part of the plan he knew whose intellectual paths were he knew who the the international allies were Viktor Orban and Nigel Farage and he had a sense of a movement and he young and the basic thing he understood was that when people feel lonely they can't give them globalization they want to have a sense of tighten it tribes and so the people who are rising they have a sense of the power of tribalism they know how to expose the decaying and old culture in the 1960s there was a guy named Abbie Hoffman who wasn't a great political theorist but he was great at political theater at creating plays that shows how ineffective the old system was sometimes I think among other things Donald Trump is this the Abbie Hoffman of our day that he's good at exposing the rifts in our country and poking a red hot sticker into it they understood how the culture is shifted in the early part of the 1990s I covered Europe and I covered the end of the Soviet Union the end of apartheid the fall of the Berlin Wall European unification Mandela coming out of prison the Oslo peace process in the Middle East it was all good news and seemed to be barriers coming down liberal democracy and triumph the last thing I cover just before I came home was the Yugoslav civil war and I didn't think much of it at the time but in retrospect that war was the most important thing that happened while I was over there because the tribalism and bitterness that it set off has been determined everything that's come since we see tribalism now dominating our politics negative polarization where people say I don't really like my party but I really hate the other one you have tribalism that dominating identity movements on campus and you have this distinct tribal mentality which is a warrior mentality it's always us them the core of life is always combat and conflict politics is war ideas are conflict societies tribal as tribal build walls erect barriers believe in conspiracies you get this apocalyptic siege mentality that Donald Trump is so good at exploiting mistrust is their world view and from Donald Trump to the elections this week in Italy tribalism separatism are on the March you see these surging and liberal movements and I think it grows out of a culture that stopped nurturing relationships and so that is the problem growing out of us is people's yearning to be in some form of relation and if they live in a culture that no longer gives them a healthy set of relationships they're gonna go for the unhealthy kind and yet one of the things I've noticed and this is especially true in the last four or five months that people are stirring the people you know we right now we're in a cultural mode where we go from we're all in this together to I'm free to be myself to return to tribe and yet all around the country I find people who don't want that tribal future and they're coming out of their houses and they're getting organized so over the last three or four months literally hundreds of foundations and organizations and individuals have emailed or called and said I want to start something I want to do something positive should not it's not about Donald Trump Donald Trump is the wrong answer the right question it's to get at the things that really gave us Donald Trump and I've I've been so heartened by this outpouring of incipient activism but I notice a few things about these people and me too we're much more clear on what we're against than what were for we sort of have phrases cultural pluralism ethnic diversity civic conversation free flow of ideas but we don't really have it the kind of coherent convicted movement that I heard in Steve Allen's mouth second were dispersed and disorganized we're just getting started we're all over the place third we tend to be defensive and demoralized surprised by events a little depressed a little back on a field heels feeling a little politically homeless and of these groups that are starting I noticed they fall into five or six buckets the first bucket is civic education we have to relearn why we love democracy the second is social capital building we have to rebuild communities create organizations that really nurture the third is social mobility healing the class divide the fourth is depolarization getting people and right and left together to actually talk to each other the fifth is secular Sherman's a sense of a crisis of meaning how do we get the hash holes and boobers and reinhold neighbors of our day out to talk to the spiritual crisis in the country the six is what do we do about the global World Order but what strikes me is that all these things which are now dispersed are all part of one thing one part of one big effort to heal wounds to bridge divides and it reminds me a lot of the 1890s they were in a period like our own economic transition immigrants surged corrupt politics and within five years after a period of disillusion and disgust people got into action they created all sorts of community organizations within five years the boys and girls Scouts were created the boys and girls clubs the settlement house movement the social gospel the n-double-a-cp a lot of the union movements the temperance movement you had all these things coming together and eventually they realize they were all one thing the progressive movement and they really turned around the country and I'm hopeful that somehow together we can bring together all these dispersed groups and say we're all trying to heal the social loneliness that undergirds so much of our problems and the divides so let's try to figure out what were for let's try to hold up a better way to live because as you can tell I'm a cultural determinist I think social transformation follows from personal transformation when people find a better way to live out democracy and to me the ethos that should replace I'm free to be myself has not returned to tribe its I commit to you it's a series of commitments a series of promises we make to each other and it seems to me that we make four big commitments in our lives most of us do to a spouse and family to a vocation to a philosophy and faith to community and friends and the success and fulfillment of our lives depends on how well we choose and execute upon those commitments the way that Ruth did to Naomi where you go I will go where you Lodge I will Lodge your people shall be my people and your God my God where you die I will die and there I will be buried now a commitment is not tribe tribe is building a community around hatred there's always another commitment and community is built around love the best definition of a commitment I know is falling in love with something and then building a structure of behavior or around it for those moments when love falters Jews love their God but keep kosher just in case just have a structure of behavior and so it starts with love and it starts from a very different place I have heard a story from a guy in Houston who's a hairdresser and it's about a young woman who was living in Houston and she was a pianist and she was going to go off and move to San Francisco to be with her fiance and she said before she'd go she'd get her so she went to this salon and euston called a to de perry and she walks in she sees a guy cutting hair and she goes back to the where do you put on the gown and she calls up her mom and says I've just seen the man I'm actually gonna marry and so she gets her puts on the gown gets her hair shampooed and she's sitting in the the chair with the guy who runs the place named dahveed who's cutting her hair and he's asking her what her life story is and she says well I'm a concert pianist and I'm about to move to San Francisco to be with my fiancee but I won't do it if you'll marry me and so as the V tells the story he looked at his scissors and he said I never felt more free than I did at that instant and he said it's a deal and they've been married 17 years now not all of us fall in love that quickly but we do fall in love with things too a husband and wife to a location to a career to a faith and when you fall in love with something you want to make a commitment to it you want to make a promise to it the act of falling in love instills us to want to make a promise to be faithful to that thing forever and not only a promise but a promise in not expecting a return when you make a promise to love your spouse you may get a return but that's not why you made the promise you make a choice to renounce furture choices the Jewish tradition we call it a covenant Rabbi Jonathan Sacks said emphasize the difference between a contract and a covenant a contract is a transaction a covenant is a relationship or to put it slightly differently contract is about interest a covenant is about identity it's about you and me coming together to form in US and that's why contracts benefit but covenants transform and so commitment is a promise made out of love and it gives us a bunch of things our commitments give us our identity when you introduce yourself you define yourself by the things you are really committed to they give us a sense of purpose in 2007 the Gallup Organization asked people around the world what do you do you cent you feel think you have a sense of deep purpose and meaning in your life and the country around the world where most people said they had this sense of deep purpose and meaning in life was Liberia the Netherlands was last and it's not whose life was so much sweeter and Liberia than in the Netherlands but to survive there people had to make deep commitments to one another they had tight intense relationships our commitments lift us to a higher level of freedom in our culture we send to think of freedoms absence of restraint but there's a freedom for which is to have the freedom to play piano you have to tie yourself down and actually practice commitments build our moral character when I was when my first son our first son was born in Brussels he came out with a super-low Apgar score and the nurses took him away to intensive care right away and so it's one of those hairy moments where he comes out he's all blue and they whisk him when he's gone and I remember thinking that night you know we didn't know what was gonna happen to him and I remember thinking what would happen if he died after 30 minutes of life would it be worth it to have a lifetime of grief for his mother and I and if you had asked me that question before the kid is born I thought of course not what's 30 minutes of a life that's not even aware of itself compared to a lifetime of grief for two human beings but after and I suspect parents will get this after the child is born you because you've made this commitment to it of the sort you didn't even know what's capable you were capable of or existed and the love is so deep that you totally get the idea yeah of course it would be worth it the life of a child even for 30 minutes is of infinite value and when you make that commitment sort of against your will just because it just happened to you then you start wanting to sacrifice for the kid and you start you I want to go out running but I'll push the baby carriage and you'll begin to do selfless you'll be much more selfless than you ever thought capable of within the structure of commitment and the the habit of selflessness will incur and engrave certain character to character traits on to you that were not there before and in those way in service to the things we love we mold ourselves and become better people and the final thing that our commitments give us is a sense of communion and joy I've become one of the great blessings in my life in the last few years is that I every Thursday night I go over to a house in DC with a little community and it started because there was a couple there named Cathy and David who were probably about my age and they had a kid in the public schools who had a friend named James who didn't he didn't have a mom who was really functioning his dad had split and so he had no food no bed and they said well James can stay over with our house if he wants to and so James would come over and eat and stay at the house occasionally and then he had a friend and then he had a friend and he had a friend and now when you covered in Kathy and David's house on Thursday night where I do for dinner there are 25 or 30 kids they're sitting around the table and their mattress is all over the floor everywhere and I remember the first time I went in there I reached out my hands to to say hello to introduce myself to one of the kids and said we don't really shake hands here we hug here and I'm not the most emotionally Danse monster of guy on earth but they have a complete intolerance of social distance and that's a level of intimacy and connection and community that is truly valuable I have a friend named Bill Milliken who cut his teeth working here on the Upper West Side back when it was dangerous doing youth programs and he I asked him you know what programs change lives and he said you know I've been doing youth work for 50 years I've never seen a program change of life the only thing I've ever seen change lives is relationships and it's creating those intimate bonds that grow out of commitments that's different than a tribal bond and different than the individualism and isolation we're stuck with and the final thing commitments do is they give us a sense of joy and I do think we're put on this earth to seek a sort of moral joy and I've sort of been collecting quotes about joy of people who've experienced the depths of her the heights of joy and the first thing you notice about the expressions of joy is that it's always in unison with other people people that rarely completely joy us alone I had a professor of history named William McNeil who experienced it while marching with troops in world war ii he said words are inadequate to describe the emotion aroused by the prolonged movement in unison that drilling involved a sense of pervasive well-being is what I recall more specifically a strange sense of personal enlargement a sort of swelling out becoming bigger than life thanks to participation in a collective ritual Robbie Wolfe Kelman was walking with Selma to from to Selma with Martin Luther King and he said of that experience we felt connected in song to the transcendental the ineffable we felt triumphant celebration we felt that things change for the good and nothing is congealed forever that was the warmest most transcendental spiritual experience meaning and purpose and mission were beyond exact words meaning was the feeling the song the moment of overwhelming spiritual fulfillment David White a poet writes that joy is a meeting place of deep intentionality and of self forgetting the bodily alchemy of what lies inside of us in communion with what formerly seemed outside but now is neither dance laughter affection skin touching skin singing in the car music in the kitchen the quiet irreplaceable and companionable presence of a daughter the sheer intoxicating beauty of the world inhabited as an edge between what we previously thought was us and what we used to think was other than us and so we live in a culture that is filled with isolation and tribalism and the anger that flows out of that and many of us are stuck in that culture asking why and being appalled and being daily depressed and anxious but I just have universal faith in ingenuity and Americans energy to change things and so I do think you see these good things all around the country and they all point in the same direction they point away from isolation they point away from the version of individualism we lived with they point to communion and solidarity and healing and I just happen to think that we're on the verge of something there will be a new birth of covenants for the country thank you EP thank you now if they turn up lights we have time for Question and Answer and we can talk about Paul Manafort for the next 20 minutes thank you so much for your words I'm struggling with the difference between tribalism in the negative way that I think we all are experience it under under the guise of populism and on the other hand the sense of strengthen and identity that we get from community being a Jew from being a woman or being gay they're important ways of connection that help to build community and build relationship with others and I wonder where that if you have a sense of where that lying sort of morphs from the positive of building relationships through identity to the kind of negative tribalism that's really rendering us apart so much these days so I am I I think they superficially look the same but are deep down Clos from different roots and so you know you think well I want community being a Jew being a Christian being a woman real african-american whatever that can come in good and bad forms being an American can be a soul give a life-giving thing or destroying thing and to me it starts with a basic sense of security that if you have a scarcity mentality then everything is under threat and everything is zero-sum and therefore you're constantly making these friend enemy distinctions that you see life as a combat for for resources which others are trying to grab from you if you have an abundance mentality then you do not see life as a zero-sum game you see your life and your communities nestled in one another and that you being a Jew doesn't take anything away from someone else being a Christian in fact you celebrate that and if one of my heroes is Edmund Burke and Irish phosphor and he has a famous passage about the little platoons which he means are the small units of community but he's careful to say little platoons don't exist in isolation they're nestled in each other the little platoon of the family is nestled in the neighborhood the neighborhood in the community the community in the city the city and the region the region in the country the country in the world is it it moves up by a series of ladders toward and each fit into another and so when something comes out of love it just has a tendency to expand Plato had this concept which I think it's the best concept of Education I've ever heard which is the ladder of loves and he said if you want to teach some a student first teach them about a beautiful face and once you teach them about a beautiful face they'll see there's a higher beauty which is a beautiful personality and once they see a higher beauty of the beautiful personality they'll see there's an even higher beauty of a beautiful society of justice and once they see that beauty they'll see an even higher beauty which is truth and once they see that beauty they'll see the higher beauty which is the total beauty of the universe the transcendent beauty from what she said nothing can be added and nothing can be taken away and it seems to me community that comes out of love and abundance just wants to expand and it doesn't it does not want to erect barriers it just doesn't want to wreck barriers because there was always more to enjoy can you talk about the Millennials and where they fit in to all of this so I teach a lot I just spent about a month touring from one college campus to another and so a Millennials the first thing I learned about Millennials they hate it when people my age talk about them nonetheless I have opinions the first thing that we said is the spiritual yearning is intense as one of my students said to me we're so hungry we're so hungry but the second thing that's so striking to me is how little they've been given by us and so I don't know about you I go to a lot of commencement talks a lot of convocations in the spring and the point of a commencement talk is they get a person who's achieved a lot of career success to give a speech in which he or she says career success doesn't really matter but then when you ant when you would analyze the talks students are coming out of college and they want to know what to devote their lives to where to plant themselves and we adults hand them these big boxes of nothing so they say well what should I do with my life and we say be free be autonomous and they're like drowning in freedom they want to know what to devote themselves to and then they say well where should they say well where should I go to learn about what I should do they say look inside be true to yourself you do you follow your passion the you is the one thing that hasn't been formed yet so it's complete garbage advice and then to add on the pressure we say the future is limitless take risks it's complete garbage advice and so we have given them an inheritance of little and the thing that disturbed me most about this recent round of interviews was well the two things one a loss of a sense of nation if I would always ask who are your heroes and that was always a tough question there there none left to mind occasionally somebody would say well maybe Pope Francis or a couple said Ellen DeGeneres but it was tough but if they did say somebody and I said well who has credibility as a change agent and they would say local always local the local teacher the parent it was right on the ground and then I would ask about the country and they say I don't really think Americans have a common culture or I don't really have much confidence in the country and that's borne out by the statistic do you think America's the greatest country on Earth boomers way up here Millennials way down here and that's partly borne out by their life experience I was alive you know toward the tail end of the Civil Rights from when I got to see a really good thing I saw this the Cold War a really good thing I got to see America do some really good things you know I heard stories World War two but in their lived experience America is the financial crisis Donald Trump in Iraq so no wonder they have limited faith in the national projects and to me the hardest thing which I think has to change somehow is what is our national story I grew up like many of you I grew up my family was four generations on the Lower East Side and we were I was raised by my grandfather that I think America stories an Exodus story we left oppression we cross the wilderness we came to the promised land and we're trying to build that thing and Puritans had that story every immigrant group had that story the founders wanted to put Moses on the Great Seal of the United States because they had that story Martin Luther King talk more about Exodus than about the New Testament he had that story and I tell it to students I did it every campus I visited over the last month and they look at me like I'm crazy that Promised Land this country is too screwed up to be a promised land and so what's our uniting national narrative the only one I can think that everyone will that will have credibility is the Redeemer nation the Lincoln's second inaugural this is an experiment it's been betrayed we screwed it up but we can come back and that's sort of what Lincoln did in a moment of division but they see the country nationally very different and their categories of thought are very different and as a friend of mine Jonathan Haidt puts it Hite puts it if you been on a college campus in the last three years you really don't know what's going on it's utterly changed in the last three years in good ways but not so good ways all right I think you did a wonderful job I always enjoy listening to your speeches I think though however on the other side of the coin what you're losing sight of is that America democracy itself was based on like you indicated community people getting together various places to meet and worship and so on and that was the backbone of the historic picture of why times changed throughout history the way they did I think with the creation of the internet we now live in a world which is tricked going dramatic dramatically very very quickly where you can really just live your life the way you want to if you watch Fox News as an example you're living in a totally different world then somebody who's glued to MSNBC I'm in my 70s so when Walter Cronkite got on television you had to listen I mean either either you believed him you didn't or you would think about it now you don't have to do that anymore you go to Sean Hannity boy he's right on or Rachel Maddow she's right on so I don't know how you're ever gonna get to that loving place you're talking about the compromise with the increasing segregation of people well I like to think we have a loving place at the op-ed section of the New York Times now I know it's an excellent point you know when Gutenberg invented the printing press the initial reaction was including from Martin Luther was this is great we can all communicate with each other information is cheap and we will have hundreds of years of freedom and a priesthood of all believers but 150 years after the Gutenberg press was 150 years of vicious religious wars the the central unifying information flow was dispersed and people picked their own ones and they had vicious religious wars and Neil Ferguson makes of Sanford makes the comparison today when the internet happened our first reaction was this is great we can all talk to each other and the exact opposite has happened now how how can we combat that to me that the there are two problems here one is the self ghettoization you describe and I remember Fox News for a while when this was about 10 years ago they have these little Chiron's on the bottom of the screen and the problem is that some people get up and watch Fox from 6 a.m. until 11 p.m. just Fox and the KY runs were burning into their TV set so they had to move them around so it wouldn't destroy the TV and so that to me was a symptom of like tunnel watching and so that's one of the problems just information flow the second is just the distance it's sort of online and social media communication is pseudo communication it's not the kind of communication we have face-to-face and so if you read the comments section of my on the bottom of my column which I don't recommend I used to do it but I got so depressed that I you know want to kill myself and then I made my assistant do it and he got so depressed so we just have to shelter but it's based on just vicious you know what its status one-upmanship but if you ever write back whoever writes to you the most vicious email if you ever write back and establish a human connection immediately they're polite because they suddenly relish oh there's another human being on the other end of this but social media doesn't really encourage that so it's not only the ghettoization but the the the style of communication now to me the only way we can do that is is through face-to-face conduct you know I do think most of us all of us in some way have some responsibility as citizens to join a club that meets once a month with people completely unlike ourselves and that that's the only way I can see to get around this drop because we're not going back to Walter Cronkite and the the hard thing is there's a sociologist named Mark Dunkleman who says we have three levels of our relationships we have our inner ring which is our family and tight friends we have our outer ring which is our five hundred friends on Facebook but the middle ring is like the PTA the Rotary Club all the civic organizations that you you get together with people unlike yourself to do a project in your community and it's the middle ring that's been eviscerated and so somehow the recreation of these middle ring institutions through civic engagement and through actual more participatory life seems to be the only way we can get around this problem how much do you think all of this activation or Civic community is forged because there is a crisis you know I've thought about all these issues for many years as many of us are if we live on this planet and it seems that the most unifying events in history come from crisis FDR Churchill all the different periods of time the Vietnam War I worry that what we're having is an extended period of I hate to say peace because it's really not peaceful but on our home turf issues that are not really unifying because everyone has the luxury to think about themselves we're not worried about taking our pots and pans and giving them to the war drive as people did you know 40 50 years ago or rationing food and so what frightens me is whether or not we're heading into a period of time that this dis unification will lead to a crisis and that crisis is what will somehow force us together or or not yeah so when I've spent a lot of time thinking about when the country's turn around turn themselves around and most of the time are in war there's no question about it but I've there are two moments that I've read a lot about that happened in peacetime and one was 1832 1848 in England and in 1830 the country is falling apart class divides like crazy real social decay was totally normal in 1832 for a guy to get drunk at work go home and beat his wife there was no judgment against that by 1848 Victorian morality kicked in and there was total judgement against that and so what happened in 1838 and 1840 you had a bottom down political movement to clean up government and to expand the franchise and then you had a top-down reform and bottom to bottom up social movements one was a movement called the Chartist movement which was a workers movement sort of unionization and the other was a religious revival and both those things created all this cohesion and then you look at the Progressive Era which I keep coming back to innate in the 1880s we were totally individualistic and the culture was the social Darwinism selfishness is good and that was destroyed by something called the social gospel movement which was sort of a religious revival sort of left-right religious revival and that turned around the idea that selfishness was good and then once the idea turned around all these organizations I mentioned earlier sprung into life and then after they sprung into life then Teddy Roosevelt made them political so you had ideas community politics in that order and to me we did it that at worked and so we don't have to reinvent the wheel but getting the ideas right in the community right and then the politics will be third I have a guy I went to college with who was one of the major screw-ups in my class he wouldn't mind me saying that he was he would admit that so of course he created a hedge fund and now he's worth 18 billion dollars a little bit and so he called me I was with him last summer and he said he gives money to big Republican candidates and he hates Trump he gave a lot of money to Kasich last time John McCain Romney whoever will be anti Trump and he said well who should I give to this time and I could figure some names maybe there's this guy Ben Sasse from Nebraska but it occurs to me that's the wrong level on which to answer the question the pot the problems we have today are not fundamentally gonna be solved by politics first we've got to have Civic renewal first intellectual renewal first and politics then maybe two more questions thank you very much for this very enlightening speech I wish you could talk a little bit more especially since you were just discussing Millennials about the education system when I was a kid we had to learn civics citizenship civic responsibilities in the state where I live social studies all that has been downplayed it's not considered very important anymore my university stem is now everything it's all a cost-benefit analysis the administration's cutting back on the number of arts humanities and social studies students so how do you address that when the university administration or even in the high school said well we got to train these kids for jobs it's an expensive life out there so when you really get down into the weeds how do you deal with these kinds of educational problems yeah well having spent this month talking to Millennials about what they know about American history one of the women a graduate student at Yale told me you know in my high school education the American Revolution merican Revolution was a rounding error we did not cover it and I came away thinking whoever decided we should stop teaching in American history and schools did a really effective job because it's not being taught and really come becoming radicalized in the idea that civic education isn't a very important central step of what we need to do to give people a a sense of what happened be a balance sense of our history yeah we have a lot of shameful things that happen in American history we also had a lot of amazing people who fought shameless things from the very beginning and getting a balanced sense I was just raised you know maybe my grandfather really had this immigrant mentality to think this was this really was the most amazing miracle that we've inherited you know what there was James Madison there was Alexander Hamilton this Latino hip-hop star from the heights there's like that we just we were the lucky inheritors of Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman and Jane Addams and to be born here is just to be born to win the lottery and that sense we don't have to go overboard and whitewash history but that sense I still think I still tried to tell the young people this is true and it's not a lie and so that I think is one thing that has to be done we do need to work on civic education the second thing that I think we've chopped out of our schools I talked about the heart and the soul we've chopped that part out and I've covered education reform since 1983 since the nation at risk report and the one thing I've learned in all that time can a big schools little schools charters with vouchers whatever but education is elementally the love between a teacher and a student and the more you abstract away from that you're more you screw it up and that one of the jobs of the schools is to teach students what to feel and that what you when you read Whitman you experience his exultation when you hear Mozart's you you experience a certain emotion when you read Sylvia Plath you experience what sadness is and all these things educate their emotions they widen your repertoire of what to feel and feeling is not a natural thing you have to be taught it I once saw a Taylor Swift interviewed on 60 minutes and she was asked why her songs were so sad and she said well there are 23 different kinds of sadness and she said there's your boyfriend leaves you sadness and she played a little tune your cat dies sadness your mom is mad at you sadness and she's an expert in sadness and knowing how to feel properly is part of an art to life and you have to be taught that by experiencing these things through poetry art and music and all that stuff and the final thing and this is I don't know about you I I left my college sort of sick of it but I feel more attached to it now than I did thirty years ago because I see more and more how it formed me and one of the things my school did it taught me how to see see you think that seeing is this this thing you just look at and see the world but if you cover politics you see that seeing clearly is not a normal thing it has to be taught people see what they want to see or they see what their prejudices tell them to see John Ruskin had this line the more I think of it the more I realize that the most important thing any of us do is see something clearly and describe what we saw in a plain way that a thousand people can talk for one who can think but a million can think for one who can see and that has to be taught by reading or well or Tolstoy or CS Lewis people really see clearly and I'm all for the stem and the career prep but we have amputated the students of there we've just treated them like brains on a stick and then us had a really negative delete aureus effects one more question over here Thank You mr. Brooks quite a bit of your discussion tonight has been about tribalism isolation and I guess alienation what you're talking about is it cyclical or do you think we're living through a time which is sort of profoundly unique I you know some I think cultures change and we do have periods of greater and lesser individualism as I remember the 19th century was one we have cultures of greater or lesser religiosity 1913 was one of the less least religious periods in American history and then it went up in the 50s and now it's going back down again and so these things go in sine waves I'm not sure I'd say it's cyclical I do think there are a couple of things about politics politics is a competition between partial truths all big debates have some truth in them and individualism and solidarity are two ends of a continuum security and freedom achievement and equality the big issues are usually two ends of a freedom and that the crew and the art of life is keeping a balance and that's one of the reasons I'm a moderate I rarely think that one ant one one side has all the truth it's about balancing depending on the moment we're just sailing on the ship in stormy seas and sometimes you got to really know a little right sometimes you lead a little left just to keep the thing afloat the second thing you learned about politics is that the lows are lows the lows are lower than the highs are highs what I mean by that is when politicians screw up the bad effects are much greater than the good effects when they do something right and therefore it's important to be cautious and incremental and the third thing I think is true that I think we've lost sight of is that politics is a limited enterprise I write about politics a lot it matters but I hope in none of our lives is it the most important thing but the things that really matter our relationships the state of our souls the state of our moral character and that you know Susan and I were talking about this backstage about this poll where people are asked would you mind if your son or daughter married somebody the other party and in nineteen seventy five percent of Americans were mined today forty percent would mind and when my kids bring home a potential spouse I hope my first question is not what's your party registration but what has happened is that as all these other below senses of belonging have stripped away whether being a Jewish American a Polish American whatever people have gone to the ones communal thing they can still latch on to and they've assigned ultimate meaning to your political identification and once you do that party becomes your ethnicity compromise becomes dishonorable and you you can't have a natural politics there's a word for that in the religious traditions and the word is idolatry putting a medium thing as your ultimate thing and the thing about a dollar tree is it seems to work in the beginning that first hit of opium seems to work feels great but the more you do it it works less and less and asks more and more and so until the end it asks everything of you and gives you nothing and so we happen to be in a moment where political idolatry is the phrase of the day and people think their rightness and wrongness depends on taking a position in politics and I'll end with a couplet from a hero of mine Samuel Johnson he said of all the things that human hearts endure how few are those that Kings can cause or cure that politics is important but I keep coming back to what has been my theme of the evening was about connection intimacy relationship love all of the things that middle-aged white guys are very uncomfortable talking about thank you [Applause]

Channel: The 92nd Street Y, New York

Views: 43,123

Keywords: 92Y, 92nd Street Y, David brooks, conservatism, tribalism, the road to character, ethics, politics

Id: UG6KsronKLc

Length: 68min 40sec (4120 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 19 2019