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.
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.
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 Awokening 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.
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.
— © New York Times, by David Brooks