Thank you all. Good to be back here for my third. It's
clear none of you went to my first two
cuz they were disasters.
Today I'm going to talk to you about uh
how America recovers and you will
understand why uh I am known as the
irrational optimist at all my
workplaces.
workplaces. The story I'm going to tell is based on
my prediliction.
my prediliction. Some people are technological
determinists. They think technology
shapes history. Some people are uh
economic determinist. They think
economics does. Some people are
political. Uh I think minds shape
history. That culture shapes history.
It's how we think, how we react. And
that culture is the main driver of
politics, of history, and of just the
way we see the world. There's a guy at
the University of Michigan named Richard
Nisbet who did these experiments where
he asked people from America and people
from Asia to describe a fish tank he put
in front of them. And the Asian people
tended, not all obviously, but tended to
describe the vegetation of the fish
tank, the nature of the water, the whole
context.
context.
context. The Americans just described the biggest
fish.
fish.
fish. He did a similar experiment. We looked
at people looking at the Mona Lisa.
People from Asian cultures, their eye
cicades moved all over the painting.
People from the US, their eyes just
looked at the mouth and the nose.
And so his explanation for this, his
theory is that 2500 years ago, a bunch
of Greek philosophers like Aristotle
described a way of look of looking at
the world that emphasized individual
agency.
agency.
agency. At the same time, a bunch of Asian
scholars, but people like Confucious
developed a way of the world that
emphasizes harmony, context, and inter
relationship.
relationship. And so these cultural differences show
up even in the way our eyes move in
front of a painting. I know about this
in politics. If you look at the
electoral map of 1896 and the electoral
map of 2024,
it's pretty much the same map. The
populace, William Jennings Bryan, in
1896 won the South, Texas, Appalachia,
the West.
the West.
the West. The American populist of 2016 and 224,
Donald Trump, won the mostly the exact
same states. They switched political
parties, but the populist cultures of
those places stayed exactly the same
over 100 years. And there was a great
book called Albian Seed by a guy named
David Hacker Fischer, a historian who
said that New England was settled by
people from southern England who always
had a a priority. They valued
educational, emotional restraint, and
being active in civic life. West
Virginia 300 years ago was settled by
the Scots Irish who came from the
northern border of England and Scotland.
And they f they uh valued military
service, honor, and shame. And to this
day, people in Appalachia commit more
crimes, are more likely to be in the
military, have lower educational levels
than people in New England. And so
that's 400 years of cultural stability.
Now, cultures can be very stable. They
can also change really rapidly. and they
change the way science changes. There's
a dominant paradigm and then that
paradigm shifts when it stops working
for people. And so over the next few
minutes, I'm going to try to sprint
through the dominant cultural paradigms
of the last 70 years. So we'll do this
quickly. I was driving years ago in
Washington DC and on Sunday nights our
local NPR station broadcast old radio
shows and I happened to hear a
rebroadcast of a radio show named
Command Performance which was a variety
show that went out in the 1940s and I
happened to hear the episode that aired
on VJ day 1945.
It was taped live
just hours after Americans won they'd
learned they'd won World War II and the
host Bing Crosby gets out there just
they've just learned they've won the war
and he says I guess all anybody can
think about is to thank God it's over
and today our deep down feeling is one
of humility
of humility and I was really struck by this tone of
of quietness after just winning World
War II. Later in the show, an actor I
hope some of you remember, a guy named
Burgess Meredith, gets out there and
reads a passage from Ernie Pile. And
Pile uh writes, "We won the war because
our men are brave and because of many
other things like great allies and great
material blessings. We did not win it
because destiny created us better than
any other people. I hope that in victory
victory, we are more grateful than
proud." I was really struck by that tone
of humility. So I go inside from the
radio show. So, I turn on a football
game. I watch a quarterback throw a
pass. The wide receiver gets tackled
after a two- yard gain. And the
defensive player does what all defensive
players do. He does a victory dance in
honor of himself.
And it occurred to me I watched a bigger
victory dance after a two-y gain in
football than after winning World War
II.
II.
II. And that suggests a different culture
back then. It was a culture of moral
realism, an awareness that we're all
sinful
sinful
sinful and we're we should be aware of human
frailty. And so the first thing we
should do is trust institutions that'll
make us slightly less selfish than we
are. So back then 1940s and 50s,
military, government, corporations,
union, and the church. People had faith
in authority and trust in institutions
and trust in their local community. If
you grew up in Chicago, you didn't say
I'm from Chicago. You said, "I'm from
59th in Palaski." You picked your local
neighborhood where you had tight
community. Back then, there was no TV
and no air conditioning. So, in the
summertime, the doors were all opening.
The kids from the neighborhood were
running into any house, eating at
whatever fridge they happened to be
closest to. At that moment, it was very
hard to be a loner in those communities.
There was dense community, a lot of
social capital, and a lot of neighbors
looking after each other and a culture
of self- aacement. I'm no better than
anybody else and nobody's better than
me. Joe Deaggio, when he hit a home run,
he did not do a bat flip.
George HW Bush, the elder President
Bush, who grew up in this culture, when
he was running for president, his speech
writers would write paragraphs into his
speeches uh saying why you should vote
for me, why I'm so great. And he refused
to read those speeches because it was
part of the culture of self- aacement.
And one day he finally broke down. He
agreed to read the paragraph about
himself and he got a call from his mom
and she said, "George, you're talking
about yourself again. Cut out those
speeches." So that was the culture of
the 40s and 50s. In every mo cultural
moment, the seeds of the future are
already present. In the 1950s, there
were a lot of people who looked at the
culture and said, "It's got some
virtues, but it's got something wrong."
First, it's too suspicious about human
nature. There was a guy named Carl
Rogers and Dr. Benjamin Spock who
decided we should uh humans are not
sinful. Humans are basically good. We
should liberate them so they can
exercise their goodness. Uh and there
was and so and then there there were
other critics within then who worried
about the conformity of the 1950s. There
were other critics who worried about the
lack of opportunity for women, for
blacks, for all basically all minority
groups. And so they wanted to tear down
this culture. And so in the 1960s they
more or less tore it down. The food was
terrible. There's no opportunity.
There's no creativity. There's too much
conformity. There's too much
organization man behavior. And so the
60s the dominant paradigm is the age of
liberation. Let's throw off restraint so
we could have a more fair society, a
more creative society. Don't conform to
others. Be true to yourself. There were
two quarterbacks in 1969 who played
football in the Super Bowl against each
other. One guy was uh 1950s kind of guy,
Johnny Eunitis.
Johnny Eunitis. High socks, crew cut hair, extremely
boring.
boring.
boring. The guy on the side I was rooting for in
that Super Bowl was a guy named Joe
Nameoth.
Nameoth.
Nameoth. Long hair, swinger, playboy. Nameoth
wrote a memoir called I can't wait until
tomorrow because I get better looking
every day.
every day. And so that's a shift. And little me, I
was involved in that shift. I was there
in 1966. The hippies in Central Park in
New York had a thing called a bee in
where they would go just to be. And one
of the things they did is they had folk
dancing and singing and they put they
set a garbage can on fire and they threw
their wallets into it to demonstrate how
little they cared about money and
material things. I was five and I saw a
$5 bill on fire in the garbage can. So I
broke from the crowd, reached into the
fire, grabbed the money, and ran away.
And I say that was my first step over to
the right. Um but it it was part of that
moment.
moment.
moment. Some decades reverse the earlier decade
like the 60s reversed the 50s. Some
decades consolidate and the 1970s
consolidated the cultural shift from
restraint to liberation of the 1960s and
we harvested a lot of creativity in the
1970s. So some of the classic rock songs
were written then Stairway to Heaven,
Freeird, Born to Run, Bohemian Rap City.
Some of the great movies were created in
the 1970s. The Godfather, Chinatown,
Star Wars, Annie Hall, Taxi Driver,
Apocalypse Now.
Apocalypse Now. That was a benefit. The disadvantage is
the liberatory movement of the 1960s led
to chaos. Social chaos in the 1970s.
Between 1960 and 1980, the divorce rates
more than doubled. The share of children
born out of wedlock more than tripled.
Violent crime tripled. Drug use
exploded. I was living in New York City
in the 1970s and everybody got mugged.
There was a serial castrator on the
upper west side of Manhattan who would
lure kids into Central Park and castrate
them. His nickname in the paper was
Charlie Chop off. But such was the chaos
of New York in those days. It wasn't
even a big story. We just all were used
to a level of chaos.
Uh and so the 70s took the that creative
energy that individualistic let's be
free to be me and you you and me and
they built on it to create a lot of
great culture but it also produced a lot
of chaos and then out of that chaos a
loss of institutional authority social
trust trust institutions collapses in
the 1970s there's the myi massacre
there's defeat in Vietnam there's
Watergate there's the decimation of
American manufacturing ing. There's
bankruptcy in New York. There's hostage
taking in in Thran. People lose faith in
the idea that our institutions are
basically functioning.
basically functioning. Out of that chaos comes the next
cultural moment in the 1980s,
which was if the 1960s was bohemian
liberation, arts, creativity,
the 1980s was what you might call a
bourgeoa backlash. People who looked at
Woodstock and didn't like what they saw
decided we need to reimpose bajgeoa
values. And bourgeoa values are things
like being self-disciplined, showing up
on time, dressing neatly, wearing a
suit, being entrepreneurial, and
believing in institutions.
Uh, and so you saw the beginning of
Ronald Reagan, you saw Margaret
Thatcher, the vigorous virtues. Uh, you
saw uh the emphasis on character. They
wanted to reestablish back to basics
more on the conservative side. And there
was a James Q. Wilson, a famous Harvard
sociologist who said, "The most
important change in how one defines the
public interest that I've witnessed over
the last 20 years has been the deepening
concern for the development of character
in the citizenry. So it's basically a
reestablishment of old-fashioned
bourgeoa traditionalism in the 1980s. I
was sort of there for that, too. I
graduated from University of Chicago in
1983
1983
1983 and in that year a alumni of this
institution, a guy named William
F.Buckley came to campus. He had just
written a book called Overdrive and I
wrote a parody of him for being a named
dropping blowhard in the school paper
and I'll read you the first paragraph. I
wrote this with when I was 21 so forgive
me. Uh, William Free Market Buckley was
born on December 25th, 1925 in a little
town called Bethlehem. He was baptized
on December 8 28th and admitted to Yale
University on the 30th. Buckley spent
most of his infancy working on his
memoirs. By the time he had learned to
talk, he had finished three volumes. The
world before Buckley, which traced the
history of the world prior to his
conception, The Seeds of Utopia, which
outlined his effect on the world order
during the nine months of his gestation,
and The Glorious Dawn, which described
the profound ramifications of his birth
on the social order. And so I did a
whole series of jokes like that. I
remember I wrote when Buckley was at
Yale, he formed two magazines, one
called the Buckley Review and one called
the National Buckley, which he merged to
form the Buckley Buckley. And so and so
he at the end of the interview he says
David Brooks if you're in the audience
his speech I mean I want to give you a
job and that was the big break of my
life. Now sadly I was not in the
audience. Uh I had been hired by PBS to
debate Milton Freriedman on TV and I
mentioned this earlier and it was Milton
and we were going to debate economics. I
was then a socialist and Freriedman was
a Nobel Prize winner.
And you can imagine how well that debate
went on. You can go on YouTube today and
if you write in the subject line David
Brooks Freeman, you'll see a picture of
21-year-old me with a big head of hair,
these 1980s large glasses that were
apparently on loan from the Mount
Polymer Lunar Observatory. And I make an
argument I've read in a socialist
textbook. He destroys it in about 6
seconds. And then the camera lingers on
my face for 30 seconds while I try to
think of something to say. That was the
show.
show.
show. And so the 1980s, Freriedman and
Buckley, with whom I fell into
eventually,
eventually, uh they that bourgeoa backlash reversed
some of the things that happened in the
60s, but not everything, not the 1960s,
not the individualism. And so we have
that cultural moment in the 1980s, but
then you shift and just as the cultural
values of the 1970s consolidated the the
break of the 1960s, the values of the
1990s consolidated some of the things
that happened in the 1980s. And
basically the 1990s were an age of
cultural synthesis.
cultural synthesis. The primary move was convergence. Things
in the 1990s that had divided people
began to break down. The Berlin Wall
fell, communism fell, the European
unification came together, the Oslo
peace process. We thought we were going
to have peace in the Middle East. And I
was a foreign correspondent for the Wall
Street Journal in those days. And I saw
this convergence coming together,
opposites seemingly coming together. I
saw it abroad. I was in Moscow on the
day when uh the Soviet Union, what was
left of it, tried to stage a coup and
oust the democratically elected
president of Russia, Boris Yelten. and
tanks rolled to Russ his office,
Yelton's office. I followed them. I went
there and I met a woman who was handing
out sandwiches to the Democratic
protesters to defend Russian democracy.
She was 93 years old. Her name was
Valentina Kosva.
Valentina Kosva. And I asked her life story and she said,
"Well, I grew up in the household of the
Zar during the revolution, the civil war
that happened right after the
revolution. and I was lined up to be
executed by the Reds and my mother
begged them to let not kill me so she
didn't. Then I got married and my
husband in the 1930s was sent to the
Gulog and I never saw him again. In the
1940s my two sons were killed in the
battle of Stalenrad by the Nazis. In the
1950s my second husband was they raided
our apartment one night. They grabbed
him. They sent him to the Gulog. I never
saw him again. In the 1960s, she was a
member of the Calmic people, which is a
Muslim community in Russia. She was sent
into internal exile. So, every bad thing
that happened in Soviet history happened
to her. And my brilliant interviewing
technique was the following. And then
what happened? And then what happened?
And then what happened? And it seemed
like things were coming together. And it
seems like things were coming together
internationally. And it seemed like
things were coming together
domestically. The great cultural move
domestically in the United States during
the 1990s was an attempt to reconcile
the Bohemian values of the 1960s with
the bourgeoa values of the 1990s.
And you could see it uh in shopping.
We had the creation of the the New York
Times wedding page and in the 1990s in
the information age economy, education
was rewarded with money. And if you
looked in those years at the New York
Times wedding page, the wedding
announcements, people back then used to
call it the mergers and acquisitions
page.
page.
page. It was Princeton marries Yale, Goldman
Sachs marries Scaden Arps, Fulbright
marries roads, Sumakumloud marries
another Sumakumloud. You would never see
a Sumakumloud marry a Magnum Kablau
because the tensions would be so great
in that relationship. They and so, you
know, they would all go reciting their
vows while holding the the rubber ducky
they had during their Supreme Court
clerkship. It was the emergence of a new
educated class.
educated class. And they were people who had bohemian
values, but they were upper middle class
now. And so they wanted to show through
their spending the same thing those
hippies with the garbage can in the 60s
wanted to show. I don't care about money
and material things. I'm not shallow
even though I make seven figures. And so
they created Whole Foods for such people
who um didn't want to buy avocado for
from some a store that didn't take a
stand on offshore oil drilling.
They created Trader Joe's for such
people where all the cashiers look like
they're on loan from Amnesty
International. Um, they solved the snack
problem. Snacks are morally problematic
because they can lead to obesity. So, at
Trader Joe's, they sold snacks like
veggie booty with kale for kids who come
home and say, "Mom, mom, I want a snack
that'll help prevent colon rectal
cancer." So, they had
and so there was a whole mode of Bobo
consumption. And you could spend any
amount of money on any room that was
previously used by the servants. And so
if you went into a bobo home, they had
these things that look like nickelplated
nuclear reactors, which were actually
the auga stove. And then they had over
here this refrigerator that was
apparently zero just isn't cold enough.
So they had these sub-zero refrigerators
that people went for. And it was a whole
mode of consumption. And it seemed like
this reconciliation between cultural
opposites that the culture wars between
the bajgeois forces of Jerry Fwell and
the Bohemian forces of Abby Hoffman, it
seemed like they were reconciled.
We shift to the next decade, the 2000s.
The 2000s produced a shocking loss of
faith in this reconciliation.
And so you had a loss of faith in a lot
of things. 9/11, we lost faith in our
own safety. The Iraq war. We lost faith
in our ability to do good abroad. The
financial crisis, we lost faith in
unregulated capitalism. The internet and
social media. We lost faith that we
would all come together if we could only
communicate with each other. Democracy
stopped spreading around the world and
began what is now a 26-year retreat. And
a loss of social connection. And
finally, a loss of moral knowledge.
As if you've gone to my previous
lectures, you know I love the phrase,
"All of life is a series of daring
explorations from a secure base." People
need a secure base. They need a secure
financial base, emotional base with
their friends, but they also need a
spiritual base. And for the last 30 or
40 years, we have told successive
generations of young people, find your
own truth, come up with your own
morality. And if your name is not
Aristotle, you can't do that. And so we
left successive generations morally
naked and alone without an unformed
sense of what's my moral philosophy. Uh
and we left no shared moral order. If
I'm going to have trust in you, I have
to have faith that you will do what you
ought to do. And that faith is based on
the idea that we agree on what we ought
to do. And if we don't agree on what we
ought to do, I can't trust you. And so I
mentioned in the 1970s what they call
institutional trust plummets.
In the 2000s interpersonal trust
plummets
plummets
plummets before then if you ask people do you
trust your neighbor? 60% said yes.
Today it's 30% and 19% of millennial.
So there's been a loss of common faith a
loss of common trust.
And when you get that loss of trust you
get surges of populism.
Populism is a belief system for people
who feel betrayed.
Fanaticism is a response to existential
anxiety. The existential anxiety of
feeling in a world where you can't trust
anybody else. Pew Research Center asked
Gen Z and and Millennial, do you think
most people are selfish enough to get
you? And 72% of people in these
generations agreed with that statement.
That is the definition of high distrust.
And a lot of that loss of faith was a
loss of faith in us. And I'm speaking as
a member of the educated class that we
they lost faith not only in each other,
they lost faith in us, in the leaders of
society. And partly because they'd seen
what happened in the 2000, they said,
"Are you guys running this country?"
And secondly, they saw the social chasm
that had opened up caused by systems of
the meritocracy that by age three,
affluent parents are are twice as likely
to send kids to preschool than less
affluent. By sixth grade, they're four
grades levels ahead. Uh by uh by 18, a
kid in the top 20% of earners is one in
five chance of scoring over 1400 on the
SAT. A kid in the bottom of earners have
a one in 50 chance. That produced a
chasm that we see today. People with
high school degrees die 10 years sooner
than people with college degrees. Five
times more likely to have children out
of wedlock, six times more likely to die
of opioid addictions, 2.4 times more
likely to say they have no friends. And
so it was a loss of faith in each other,
a loss of faith in the leadership of
society, a loss of faith in ourselves,
which led to the sadness, the
depression. 45% of high school students
now say they're persistently hopeless
and despondent. And then a loss of faith
in the future.
A loss of faith in our future. Ipsos
asked Americans, "Do you think America's
in decline?" 59% of Americans say
America's in decline. They asked young
people, "Do you think America's headed
in the wrong direction?" Only 13% of
young people say America's headed in the
right direction. Gallup asked people,
"Do you tr do you believe in the
American dream?"
American dream?" 69% of Americans said they didn't
believe in the American dream. That is
an exoset missile designed aimed
directly at our common life together
because we are a very diverse society
held together by a faith in the American
dream. And when that faith goes, we
fracture.
fracture.
fracture. And so there's this rise of pessimism
uh this sense of humiliation.
Humiliation
Humiliation is felt when people feel they are not
granted equal standing they think they
deserve.
deserve.
deserve. Humiliation is when people feel they've
denied been denied human dignity.
Humiliation is when they've been denied
something like a homeland they think is
their right.
their right. And so in the crisis of faith of the
2000, it was magnified.
And so we get to a point today
where a lot of people feel humiliated.
And if there's one thing we know from
history, it's how powerful humiliation
is in driving world events.
The Germans felt humiliated after World
War I. The Arab nations felt humiliated
after the Six-Day War. Bin Laden felt
humiliated by American bases on his
homeland.
homeland.
homeland. Russia felt humiliated after the Cold
War.
War.
War. The China scholar William Callahan
writes, "The master narrative of modern
Chinese history is the discourse of the
century of national humiliation."
And domestically today in our current
culture, and I'm talking about today,
from 2013 to today, a lot of people have
felt humiliated. Less educated people,
rural people, religiously orthodox
people, oppressed minority groups,
oppressed gender identity groups,
struggling young people. And what
happens, I'm doing a fantastic job of
showing you how things are getting
better, right? Um,
what happens is that I'm just trying to
describe the problem before I make the
U-turn.
Inner pain turns to outer hostility.
Humil humiliation, which is a form of
inner pain, turns into resentment.
Resentment begins with a feeling of impotence. I can't control my own life.
The system is running me. I'm not
running the system. Someone has
something I want. Someone has
demonstrated a superiority I cannot
match. I feel a shortage of agency and
control. I feel unseen.
Resentment is about social standing.
Someone makes you feel inferior to them.
It doesn't offer you the recognition and
the respect that you deserve as a human
being. Those people don't even know I'm
here. I go to the Midwest a lot and it
used to be once a day somebody would
say, "You guys think we're just fly over
country." Now when I go to the Midwest,
I hear that seven or eight times a day,
people who feel unseen.
And so democratic capitalism, it turns
out, according to a German philosopher
of the early 20th century, Max Sheller,
is the perfect breeding ground for
resentment. People in cast societies
don't feel resentment because they don't
think they deserve to be at the top.
In democratic societies, we all feel we
deserve equal dignity. And when you
produce a society that advocates for
equality but produces inequality,
you get resentment because people have
not been given the equal dignity that
the system and our culture says they
deserve.
deserve.
deserve. And so a resentful person uh uh
fermentss.
fermentss. When you feel resentment, it's often
against somebody who's your social or
status superior.
status superior. And often you can't express your
resentment because you need them.
They're powerful. They're the boss. So
it bottles up and fermentss. And Sheller
says the way it fermentss is pretty
consistent across centuries.
Resentful people feel uh they devalue
the things they feel they lack. the
things they can't get access to, whether
it's education, fame, success, virtue,
they say, "Oh, those things aren't worth
worth getting anyway." They develop a
classic sour grapes response.
And so what Sheller says is resentment
creates a spiritual contraction. People
begin to think those things, the loftier
registers of human life, the things they
can't feel they have access to, they
begin to just cut those off. They said
those things are not important.
We all sort of know that some we all
want a lot of things. We all sort of
have an instinctive sense that some
things are higher and nobler than other
things. that sensual pleasures are good,
but they're probably not as valuable as
career success. Career success is good,
but it's probably not as valuable as
friendship and social virtues.
Friendship is really good, but it's
probably not as noble as wisdom and
knowledge, which is probably not as
valuable as justice, which is probably
not as valuable as holiness.
So, we all know, I think instinctively,
that some values are higher than others.
And I think instinctively we have a
sense that the best life is an ardent
life and the kind of thing we train we
hopefully prepare our students for here
is an ardent life where people are
reaching upward to discover the higher
things.
things.
things. And the problem with resentment is they
do not even see the higher things. They
have contracted their value system. So
the higher things are declared
worthless. And Sheller says, "Such
people are self-poisoned."
I remember when um his first term,
Donald Trump was in France going to the
war cemeteries off the Normandy beaches
and you could see he just couldn't
understand it. He couldn't understand
why anybody would sacrifice their life
for a country. He said, "Those people
are suckers." And that's a man who
cannot even see the higher virtues that
would cause you to want to to sacrifice
your life for a country. The love of
country is higher than self-interest.
Donald Trump could never understand John
McCain.
McCain.
McCain. What drove McCain because he believed in
those higher virtues. And Donald Trump,
who is resentment, resentfulness
personified,
personified, just couldn't quite get that. And what
you see on the right, but I think also
on the left, is a form of nihilism that
believes that whatever is lower is more
real. selfishness, egoism, lust for
power,
power,
power, those things are real. Altruism,
generosity, honor, integrity, and
hospitality, those things are mirages.
Ideals are shams that the selfish use to
max mask their greed.
People who are disillusioned by life,
who are resentful, who are cynical, they
give themselves permission to embrace
brutality, saying, "We won't go fooled
again. It's doggy dog. If we're going to
survive, we need to elect bullies in
high places. We need to elect bastards.
The last time I was in this room was
about a month a half ago, and a
professor named Brian uh Garen was
teaching a class on how to create a
better world. And he started the class
with a video on that screen. And one of
them was Steven Miller, the Bush aid,
saying international contracts, those
are nicities,
are nicities, but life is about force. Life is about
power.
power.
power. And then he had another video Garston
did of Pete Puda Judge saying, "No, life
is not about force and power. It's about
cooperation and friendship and
agreement." And you see these two
worldviews. Steven Miller is resentment
personified. And in that class, the
students went on to debate the Meian
dialogue from Thusidities. And in that
dialogue, the Athenians say the strong
do what they can and the weak suffer
what they must. And that is essentially
the position of resentful people who
have cut off human values at a middle
level. And it creates a sense of
catastrophism that the and you see this
on the social justice left as well as
the MAGA right. The systems of society
are fundamentally rotten and oppressive.
We are facing a catastrophe. And this
cynicism begins to peel like wisdom
because I see through the sham of
idealism. I see reality as it actually
is. And so you can congratulate
yourself, but all you're doing is
cutting yourself off from the highest
values. And that's what this decade,
this decade of resentment is doing. And
when you're in the middle of a decade of
resentment, politicians find it easy to
motivate people by appealing to their
dark passions.
dark passions. It's not the desire for belonging. It's
not the desire for respect. It's not the
desire for virtue. It's not the desire
for wisdom. It's anger. Who am I angry
at?
at?
at? It's hatred. I can be angry at you and
still love you. But if I hate you,
that's a comprehensive rejection of who
you are. It's fear. Fear is fine if you
understand what you're afraid of. But
when it becomes a generalized fear of
everything, it becomes incredibly
destructive. It leads to the search for
scapegoats.
scapegoats. And finally,
And finally, politicians find it easy in an epic like
ours or this period of resentment to
advertise their the urge to dominate, to
appeal to the urge to dominate, what St.
Augustine called the libido dominandi,
the peace within all of us that seeks
power over others. And leaders found it
very effective
very effective to appeal to these dark passions in our
age. I don't agree with Michelle Fuko on
much, but he did say that the essential
struggle in life is against the fascist
in each one of us. And this age arouses
that kind of fascism.
And so
And so
And so I've tried to describe the the bohe the
moral realism of the 1950s, the Bohemian
rebellion of the 1960s, the
consolidation of that rebellion in the
1970s, the bourgeoa backlash in the
1980s, the consolidation and the
convergence of the 1990s, and then the
loss of faith and the resentment of the
21st century culture. Where are we
headed in the future?
Well, could get worse.
One of the things Democrats think is if
we can show that that George Bush or
that Donald Trump is doing a bad job,
then the voters will swing over to us, I
would ask them to look at the polls.
Voters are not swinging over to the
Democrats. When Donald Trump does a bad
job, it's not people swing from left to
right or from right to left. People
swing from crazy to crazier.
If say the Iraq the Iran war is a
complete catastrophe,
complete catastrophe, it's not like people are going to say,
"Oh, the Democrats had a better foreign
policy." They're going to say, "America
is screwed up from top to bottom." One
option is the decade ahead, we will see
levels of distrust, alienation,
resentment we've never seen before.
I don't think that's going to happen.
Uh, I think what's going to happen is
that our people are going to do what
they do in moments of cultural pivot,
which is they realize, well, this old
paradigm ain't working for us. The
resentment, the loss of faith, this
ain't working for us. They're going to
realize we've abandoned our humanistic
core. All the things that nurture
empathy and orient the soul toward
justice and virtue and goodness are
diminishing in our life. religious
devotion, theology, literature, history,
philosophy.
philosophy. We got to get back in touch with those.
And so I think there will be a humanistic turn.
humanistic turn. Humanism is the perfect antidote to
nihilism. The kind of humanism that gets
taught at this university is anything
that upholds the dignity of each person.
When students are reading about
Antiggony trying to bury her brother,
Lincoln rebinding the nation in the
second inaugural, Martin Luther King
writing that letter from the Birmingham
jail, that's humanism. Even as simple as
Tracy Chapman and Luke Combs Combmes
singing Fast Cars,
that's humanism. That's uplifting the
human dignity and introducing people and
connecting people to the highest
registers
registers
registers of human nature. Humanism is a worldview
based on an accurate conception of who
we are. That we're capable of cruelty.
We're also greatness capable of great
achievement and accomplishment.
And hopefully what a education does in a
liberal arts institution like this one
is prepare people to have the highest
desire so they can control their lowest
and egotistical desire.
And they do this by making excellence
attractive to the young.
They hold up this scientist, this
theory, this book, this hero, this
writer, this wise person
and they say life is essentially a
struggle on behalf of certain ideals.
The person we are reading about in this
course has lived that life of struggle
on behalf of ideals. You should try it.
And so I see universities as a
as creators and feeders into of our
national uh passions of our national
life. And the most
effective antidote
effective antidote to uh resentment
is earnest admiration.
Finding people whose lives are so
impressive and so inspiring that it
cracks through the feelings of
resentment and distrust. You can't argue
people out of them. You have to show
them there really are things that are
worth dying for. There really are lives
that are noble.
Uh and so you can read about them and I
assign them when I assign books.
And so the question is, does America
have the vitality for one more cultural
revolution, one more cultural churn, one
more shift to the paradigm?
And we seem a little demoralized right
now.
now.
now. But when I ask people what made them who
they are, nobody ever says, you know, I
went to vacation Hawaii and that made me
the person I am today. Nobody ever says
that. They always part to a hard time.
They point to a moment of rupture and
repair when their life fell apart and
they built it back better. I went
through a period of rupture and repair
in 2013. My kids were leaving home to go
to college. My marriage had ended and I
was living in a crappy apartment feeling
intensely lonely.
intensely lonely. And I think I mentioned this earlier but
in one of the other lectures I read
three books. one by a guy named Paul
Tillik who said that moments of
suffering interrupt your life and remind
you you're not the person you thought
you were. They carve into the floor of
the basement of your soul and they
reveal a cavity below and they carve
through that and reveal a cavity below.
So the moments of hardship like the one
we're in nationally you see deeper into
your own nation or your own self than
you did before. Second, I read a book by
Henry Nen who said um when you are in
pain, you have to stay in the pain to
see what it has to teach you. And I was
like screw that. I want to get out of
the pain.
the pain.
the pain. Third book was I read by a guy named
Frederick Bner who was a novelist and
also a pastor. He said in moments of
pain you can either be broken or broken
open. And when you're broken you callous
yourself over. When you're broken open,
even in those moments of greatest
suffering, you make yourself even more
vulnerable. Because only if you do that
are you capable of change.
And I would say in history, we have case
after case of countries breaking
themselves open and saying we need to
change. If you look at Britain in the
1820s and the 1830s, Australia in the
1970s, Germany and Japan after World War
II, South Korea in the 1980s, Rwanda
after 1994, Chile after 1990s, or you
look at our own country, look at those
periods of paradigm shift of rupture and
repair. The 1770s, the revolutionary
period, Andrew Jackson's populism,
1890s and the progressive era, 1960s.
Look at how much culture has changed in
the last 70 years. Look at how dynamic
our culture is. Do we really think that
the same country that shifted in the 60s
from the 50s, that shifted in the 80s
from the 70s, that shifted in a bad way
in the last 20 years? Do we really think
our culture has stopped?
I just don't.
I think people are going to see this
paradigm is not working for us and we
need a change and I think they will
diagnose that the problem is a spiritual
one a psychological one emotional one a
cultural one we need a shift in values
we need a shift in the spirit of the age
the zeitgeist the what we call the
dominant paradigm that's just
tremendously valuable and it depends on
people cultural shifts doesn't happen
from from the top it happens from all of
us it happens in universities but it
also happened in the arts It happens in
community organizations. It has in
religious organizations. Culture is the
common collective response to the
problems of the moment. And people just
spontaneously shift. That's how these
cultures change.
cultures change. And I have every confidence looking at
history, we've been through this before.
It's a question of how we all act.
Whether we decide we're in a doom loop
of resentment and we just say stop.
Stop. We're not going to participate.
We're going to find people who exemplify
the higher virtues. I was at a bar some
couple years ago and if you had seen me
there, you would have said sad guy
drinking alone,
drinking alone, but I call it reporting.
And uh I was scrolling and it was like a month after October 7th. And as you can
imagine, I was on Twitter scrolling
through all these brutal images
and uh
and uh
and uh they was horrible.
Uh but then I scroll across an image
that was different and it was an
interview probably done like in the
early 60s with James Baldwin.
And Baldwin is talking to an unseen
interviewer and he says, "You know,
there's not as much humanity in the
world as one would like,
but there's more than you would think.
There's enough."
There's enough." And then he says, "Well, you got to
remember when you walk down the street,
every person you see, that person could
be you. You could be that person.
And and that person has so much in
common with you." And so you've got to
look at those people and say, "That
could be me. I could be that wonderful
person. I could be that shitty person."
And you've got to decide who you're
going to be.
Now, James Baldwin, because of the way
he'd been treated by this country for
his race and other reasons, have been
treated pretty shabily in America.
He had every right to be calloused over.
He had every right to be bitter.
And sometimes he was bitter. Sometimes
he was angry if you read his writing.
But even in those this circumstance
he was defend making a statement that's
the ultimate source of humanism that
every person you see you could be that
person that person could be you. And the
phrase that leapt in my mind when I saw
that was defiant humanism.
That even in the crulest and most
resentful and suspicious and distrustful
times, it's possible to say, "No, I'm
standing for the higher virtues. I'm
standing for the highest ideals. I'm
standing for the deepest humility. And
I'm standing for a cultural shift
against resentment and toward
admiration."
admiration." And I think we're all called upon to do
that today. Thank you.
I have time for comments and questions and as always make your questions long
and rambling with no question at the
end.
>> You talk about cultural shift. Can you identify any catalyst that might prompt
it?
Mr. Rogers. I realize he's dead, but his when that
movie came out a couple years ago, I
don't know if you ever saw that movie,
there was a documentary and a Tom Hanks
feature. And I was just struck how
people were
people were they were crying. I was crying. People
liked that image of goodness.
And the second gospel I'll site is the
gospel of Ted Lasso.
I don't that show took off because there
was just a guy who was good and he had a
theory of moral formation
which is that uh he was asked what do
what do you um
what version uh what do you hope for
your team FC Richmond? He said our goals
for this season is not to win a
championship. It's help these young
fellas become better versions of
themselves on and off the field.
That's a perfect definition of moral
formation. People are hungering for
that.
that.
that. Anybody who is out there lifting up
spirits, uplift,
spirits, uplift, people are ecstatic and hungry for that.
Tomorrow, for the third time in my life,
I'm getting interviewed by Oprah.
Uh, and I I get to tell her about um
tell her about Yale University. Um, and
one of the things nice things about
Oprah is she does uplift.
And I I the two the sec first time I was
interviewed her was in 2013. The second
time was in 2019. And after the second
interview, she says to me, "David, I've
never seen anybody change so much
before. You were so emotionally blocked
before."
before."
before." And that was actually a good moment in
my life because she's Oprah, right? She
should know. But it shows. And the sign
is you can change. It doesn't matter how
old you are. Humans change through
lifespan
lifespan
lifespan and we're older getting older as a
country but the country can change and I
just find there's a tremendous hunger
for uplift of any variety even that
Tracy Chapman Luke Combmes variety and
and there's a market for that and a lot
of Democrats think the way to beat Trump
is to be like him only more leftwing.
I just think that's so wrong. I just
think people are going to want it. Just
as after Watergate, people wanted Jimmy
Carter, who they associated with
integrity after living through the last
16 years, people are going to want a
complete moral bath.
And it the counterprogramming smart move
to me for a Democratic candidate is to
offer uplift. And it wasn't the time for
say Cordy Booker or Pete Buddha Judge in
2020, but it may be the time in 2028 for
that kind of I'm I'm different. You you
you've had enough corruption. You've had
enough sin. You've had enough
resentment. Let's try a little hope. So,
I see a question over there in the in
the red sweater.
>> Hi, thank you so much for um your lecture. I was wondering if you think um
the election of mom Donnie is the
beginning of this new cultural shift. I
absolutely do. I agree with Mamani on
if it's 10% of issues, I'd be surprised.
And he watch that guy get interviewed.
He smiles when he talks. He's having a
good time. He's uplifting. He's happy.
He's inspiring. He believes in the city.
He believes in the people of the city.
I just think you compare him to a lot of
the angry Democrats, frankly, and
there's a reason why he I think ran as
such a magnetic campaign. So, as I
saying, it's not about policy. I don't
agree with him on rent control, his tax
policy. I don't agree on any of that
stuff,
stuff,
stuff, but I love watching the guy talk because
he reminds me of somebody who loves a
city and wants to do good right by a
city and he wants to do right by all the
cities.
cities.
cities. And also I was there on the day it there
were it's 24 inches of snow fell and the
streets were cleaned. I was very
impressed.
impressed. So I'm a political foe of Mamani and a
personal admirer and I think he's part
of the change
maybe in the front right here.
>> Thank you so much. Um, I know you're a reader of Victor Frankle and one of my
favorite quotes from him is when he
talks about how um, success must ensue
as the pursuit of something bigger than
yourself. And I was curious how you
think that works with the glimmer that
you get in your eyes that you talked
about last week and also trying to do
better for your country.
>> Yeah, I the I talked for those who
weren't here last week about the gleam,
the ambition in somebody's eyes.
And it can be in a poor kid. It could be
an affluent kid. But that I'm going to
make a difference in the world. I think
it's that gleam is not only for career
success. I think that gleam is an
assertion. I'm going to live a life of
true value.
true value. It's not just about the money. It's
about, you know, I mentioned this ladder
of loves that we all have a sense that
some of our desires are higher than
others. Plato took advantage of this. He
said, "The way you educate the young is
you show them a beautiful face." Uh, and
when they see that beauty, they'll
realize there's a higher beauty, which
is a beautiful person. And when they see
that, they'll see there's an even higher
beauty, which is the pursuit of truth
and wisdom. And when they see that
beauty, they'll see an even higher
beauty, which is the pursuit of justice.
And they'll realize there's an even
higher beauty, which is the transcendent
beauty of the universe from which
nothing can be taken and nothing can be
added. And so it's called the ladder of
loves. And I think when people are
ambitious in the best way, they want to
ascend that ladder of loves. They want
to chase those ideals. And Frankle was a
psychiatrist who was set in a Nazi
concentration camp, a bunch of them. And
he had a few propositions, a few things
he learned there. One that when you take
everything away from people, what is
remaining? And he says what we talked
about in the camps was food and
spirituality.
spirituality. So Abraham Maslau was wrong. Maslau says
we need to have a some financial
security before we can worry about
spiritual security. That is wrong. It
was wrong in the camps. I've been to
poor places all around the world and
poor people are just as curious and
interested in their spiritual growth as
as any rich person and probably more so.
The second thing is the people who
survived the camps had something outside
the camp. They would had devoted their
life to a book project, a spouse, some
sort of commitment. And so they had a
sense of purpose and meaning. And so he
says the primary motivation of human
beings is not for status, it's not for
money, it's for purpose and meaning.
The third thing he attests to is the
idea that you can derive purpose and
meaning from the way you respond to
suffering. If you respond in a dignified
way, that's a source of meaning. And
then the final thing he says that I'll
mention here is that you don't find your
purpose and your meaning by asking what
do I want from life? Because Frankle
didn't ask to be put in a concentration
camp. He says what is life asking of me?
what problem is life asking of me?
And so you got to go out to where the
problems are. And it's hard to find a
sense of purpose and meaning in life at
an office in McKenzie, frankly.
No offense to McKenzie.
Um
Um
Um uh but so I gave that advice at Swany
University a couple years ago and a
woman called me a month a few months
later and said, "Professor Brooks, I
just want you to know I've quit my job.
I'm walking around Washington DC looking
for my problem.
I was like, "Don't take me that literally." Uh, but but I do think he's
right. And that I think the the job of
this place is to give students things to
love that are higher even than a nice
job of McKenzie, which is fine.
Uh, and I do think if you don't the the
gleam, the ambition is not primarily a
material ambition. That's cutting off
the high value system.
If you really are attached to the
highest of values, your ambition is a
sort of spiritual ambition, which is
what Franco was talking about.
Um, maybe I'll give you some work on
that side. Now,
>> thank you for your your wonderful, you know,
know,
know, I'm just so happy to be here. Uh
but uh I'm thinking about the no kings
just demonstrations and the and the
amount of love coming out of Minnesota
and and it's kind of getting in into
part parts of our our communities all
over the country. And I think that we
are on on a shift, a positive one. And
I'm I'm very excited about it. And I was
just thinking what what you what you
think about those those pre those
demonstrations. I mean the idea of
having fun like going out and having
putting on like
you know these these these costumes that
are and they're dancing with you and
it's just beautiful. It's beautiful. So,
um,
um,
um, you know, I noticed that like I I I
became a Catholic nine years ago and I
didn't know about Catholicism and I
thought I I'll never go to that church.
Never because of what they did and all
this all this stuff. And it's like but
it it's like you know I found I kind of
found my my my spir my spirituality
>> and um
>> and um
>> and um and so I'm I'm really uh I'm really
impressed by how we can always change
>> for the better.
So on on No Kings, I I was also
impressed by them because
when you do a protest movement, if you
can do it in a way a that's joyful and b
that's self-disciplined, then you put
the regime in an impossible position.
They either have to let you do your
thing, in which case you own the
streets, or they have to crack down on
you, in which case they de they
demonstrate their own incivil, their own
savagery. And the civil rights movement
was an example of this. I thought no
kings, especially the early uh Minnesota
ones were a perfect example. And I like
them because I'm a centerrite guy and I
felt comfortable there.
And if you're waving a flag, I feel
comfortable. I'm getting a little
worried. The last round it was like
Bernie Sanders, Jane Fonda, Joan Bayz.
It was like getting a little lefty for
me. like
me. like
me. like like are we really gonna relive the 60s
like Joan Bayz, Jane Fonda? I don't
know. Um so I want them to to be this is
a movement for all of us and not just
sort of the boomer NPR listeners and so
I worry a little about that. But in
general uh I feel I I've been very
impressed and admiring coming to faith.
I came to faith in 2013.
It's a bit like investing in the stock
market in 1929. It was not the best
timing,
timing,
timing, but just one of the, you know, an
exemplar. I I I taught a course here. I
used to teach Dorothy Day.
And Dorothy Day was a was a young woman
who um
who um
who um uh she read books and she enacted the
books she was reading. And
unfortunately, she read a lot of dstifi.
And so she did a lot of drinking and
carousing and whoring around. It was not
good. Suicide attempts. Um but then when
she had her first child,
she I'm going to mangle the quote. She
wrote an essay what it was like to have
your to deliver birth because all the
other essays she'd written about
delivering were written by guys. And so
she wrote at the end of that essay she
described all the pain. But then she
wrote um if I had composed the greatest
symphony, sculpted the greatest
sculpture, or written the greatest
novel, I could not have felt the more
exalted creator than I did when they
placed my child in my arms. And with
that came a need to worship and to
adore. And her heart was broken open and
she needed to worship somebody. She
decided would be God. And she decided it
would be the Catholic version because
that's where the people were. And she
spent her life um not only serving the
poor but living with the poor. life of
radical altruistic service and I
assigned her book the long loneliness
which she wrote when she was like 35 or
40 in one class with 24 students here
and the final assignment was of all the
books we read in the class pick one and
apply it to a problem in your own life
and 19% 19 of the 24 students picked the
long loneliness and the best essays were
written by atheists and orthodox Jews
about Dorothy Day but they they were
inspired by her And my final Dorothy Day
story is she was asked at the end of her
life by Robert Kohl's. Do you think you
wrote that memoir at 35, now you're 80,
do you think about writing another? And
she said,"Well, you know, I tried that
once. I sat down with a legal pad and I
wrote on the top, a life remembered by
Dorothy Day and I sat there and I
thought of the Lord and is his visit to
us those many centuries ago and I was
just grateful to have had him on my mind
all that time." and she realized I don't
need to write anything. And that level
of serenity is something I just find so
admirable and beautiful. So she's an
example of you can earnestly, whatever
your faith or non-faith, you can
earnestly admire the way she lived her
life. And that's the kind of thing that
breaks through the cynicism, the
nihilism, the resentment. Maybe if we
have time for one more of which maybe
right here.
right here. So, why haven't we elected a woman to be
president yet?
president yet? >> Is it too early?
>> No, it's way overdue. Why Why haven't we
elected a woman president yet?
>> Um, I I think the Democrats are saying
that they should they got to elect a
white nominate a white guy this time. I
think that's bad thinking. Uh, I think
the two women who were nominated by
Democratic party had flaws in their
campaigns. Uh uh Hillary Clinton won
more voters of color than Kla Harris
did. Kla Harris won more men than
Hillary Clinton did. If the problem here
is racism and sexism, it's not clear to
me that that's the problem. I think both
those candidates were flawed. Clinton at
a moment of populist uprising was seen
as the epitome of the establishment. Kla
Harris had 100 days to run her campaign
ahead of a deeply unpopular party after
a candidate was shown to be not ready to
run again. And so I do not think, you
know, I I do not think that a country
that elected Barack Obama that lavishly
admires Michelle Obama is unready to
elect the right female candidate who
comes along. And so I I think one of the
flaws of the Democratic party is they
pay too much attention to demographics
and not enough to positions.
And if your party is way to the left of
the American median on immigration, on
cultural values, doesn't matter who you
are, it's going to be hard to get
elected. And for people rooting for
Democrats, the numbers are just terrible
right now.
right now. Trump is very, very, very, very, very
unpopular.
unpopular. except next to the Democrats.
And so this is a party that still has
some work to do in my view to turn the
page. And I don't blame, you know, Chuck
Schumer is not going to save us.
I don't blame Chuck Schumer. That's not
his job. When I'm what I'm emphasizing
here is we need a cultural shift. And
the cultural shift happens among the
artists, among the writers, among the
intellectuals, among people who run
museums, among all of us. Politicians
are busy fundraising. They're busy about
the the next election, the next news
cycle. They are not going to lead an
intellectual shift. And so when you look
at big historical change, you get a
cultural shift, you get a civic shift,
and then politics follows on. Donald
Trump could not have gotten elected in
1996.
1996.
1996. because the country was not in a
resentful mood in 1996.
2016 he fit right in. And so you got to
wait for your cultural moment and the
culture has to shift before the
politicians can produce that kind of
shift. Well, thank you so much for all