Brooks's "moral direction"

I've simply come to expect that David Brooks will write things that no one else in his league is writing and only a few other widely respected cultural commentators are saying. He's a classical conservative who is not always politically conservative. 

This morning's NY Times op-ed piece, "The Cost of Relativism," contains a paragraph that is somewhat more self-reflective than most of the content of his essays, and it goes like this:  

People sometimes wonder why I’ve taken this column in a spiritual and moral direction of late. It’s in part because we won’t have social repair unless we are more morally articulate, unless we have clearer definitions of how we should be behaving at all levels.

I am too much a Calvinist not to agree with him, as I most often do. In this morning's piece he looks at our world and sees a scary landscape attributable to an insufferable loss at the moral core of the nation. We're in sad shape, he says. [He's just read Robert Putnam's new book, Our Kids. You can read or listen to an NPR interview with Putnam here.]

Think of Brooks as a minor prophet--well, okay, maybe a major one. We're in bad shape, he says, and we'd better get better. His is the rhetoric of the religious right, even though he doesn't mention abortion or gay marriage.

He claims moral revival isn't impossible, then claims the U. S. of A. went through one in the 1930s. That's a perfectly typical Brooks argument because most of his conservative friends would probably disagree. If the 1930s are known for anything, Republicans might argue, it's for FDR's America becoming "the welfare state."

What Brooks means, I think (and Putnam would surely agree), is that these days we must learn to care for each other, not just ourselves. The title of Putnam's book is telling: Our Kids. We need to hold each other to clearly known moral standards, especially when it comes to raising our children. As Hillary once wrote, It Takes a Village.

And just exactly how do we do that? How do we hold each other to the test? Aye, there's the rub.

A couple of weeks ago, I visited a high school as a guest writer. Before I got there, I assigned the kids to read an old story of mine, something I wrote almost 40 years ago, assigned it because it happens to be set right where the kids live. The story features a father who can't forgive her daughter for getting pregnant before wedlock, a father who tells the preacher that his daughter has to confess her sin before the whole church.

I'm old enough to remember such rituals, but the high school kids I was talking to were horrified. They thought such an event was medieval torture, which it may well have been. In fact, they couldn't believe a church would do that, even though consistory minutes tucked away in their own churches' safes I'm sure include any number of similar stories.

The reason for a church's public handling of its public sinners was its belief in open confession and mutual forgiveness, in a public morality. Too often, however, public sins were simply the occasion for public shaming. But then, for the most part, public shaming probably worked.

But was it right?

It's never all that difficult to look at the world and claim that grace has departed. I don't doubt for a moment that those high school kids wouldn't believe that upstanding white Christians beat up African-Americans on a bridge just outside of Selma, Alabama, fifty years ago this week, just because they wanted to vote.  I'm sure Selma's white people that day also thought the nation was losing its moral core.

Still, I like David Brooks because he's made me think this morning, make me wonder, make me reevaluate. He's right--his own columns have taken on a "spiritual and moral tone," and we're better off for his moving in that direction.