This post is a follow-up to my previous one, “Self-termination is most likely.” In that post, I cited two researchers providing blunt, and bleak, prognoses for the future of human civilization, due to the climate crisis and the growing economic and political inequality around the world. I did so out of the belief that we can only live sanely when our problems and challenges are clearly recognized, even if there is no apparent solution. Both of these realities, however, have for years had “elephant in the room” status in much of our public and political conversations.

After writing that post, I became aware of two recent essays by New York Times columnist David Brooks. I have lambasted Mr. Brooks multiple times in the past and I am afraid I am about to do so again. I don’t think  of him as a “bad” person but rather as one who regularly seems to be willfully ignorant and misleading about our social situation. As a prominent writer for arguably the country’s most prominent newspaper, right or wrong his words have influence and impact.

On August 7, the Times published Brooks’ essay, “Why More People in the World Are Feeling Hopeful (Except Us).” The column is a response to a couple surveys purporting to show that people in poorer, less developed countries are generally feeling more positive about their lives than the citizens of the wealthy industrialized world. Here is the beginning of Brooks’ analysis of the situation as it’s experienced here in the US.

I would say the most important social trend over the past decade has been the disconnect between our nation’s economic health and its social health. Over these years the American G.D.P. has surged, wages have risen, unemployment has been low, income inequality has gone down. At the same time, the suicide rate has surged, social isolation has surged, social trust is near rock bottom. According to a Gallup survey from January, the share of Americans who say they are “very satisfied” with their lives has hit a new low. According to the 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer report, only 30 percent of Americans feel optimistic for the next generation. What’s going on here?

“What’s going on here” is right! Brooks is not a stupid man. But how do you explain such a pollyannish view of American society? “GDP has surged” yet the profit from that surge is being held by the top economic elite. Yes, “wages have risen” in dollar terms but adjusted for inflation, real wages have not risen for fifty years. Unemployment is low but the number holding multiple jobs to sustain themselves has never been higher. And then this howler, “income inequality has gone down”, is blatantly false. In reality, it has reached a level not seen since the Gilded Age of the Robber Barons of the late 19^th century.

For Brooks, our problems stem from a change in our culture and values the happened during conservatives’ favorite bogeyman, the 60s.

[W]e in the West have aggressively embraced values that when taken to excess are poisonous to our well-being…. Since the 1960s we have adopted values that are more secular, more individualistic and more oriented around self-expression….

The countries that made this values shift are seeing their well-being decline, according to that Gallup thriving survey. The countries that resisted this shift are seeing their well-being improve. The master trend in recent Western culture has been to emancipate the individual from the group, and now we are paying the social and spiritual price. 

…

Let’s be clear about what’s happened here: greed. Americans have become so obsessed with economic success that we’ve neglected the social and moral conditions that undergird human flourishing. Schools spend more time teaching professional knowledge than they do social and spiritual knowledge. The prevailing values worship individual choice and undermine the core commitments that precede choice — our love for family, neighborhood, nation and the truth. There’s a lot of cultural work to do.

While there are individual exceptions, of course, I do not believe greed is a trait of most people, nor are many “obsessed with economic success.” However, it is not uncommon among the very rich, many of whom do value having ever more and more, for the power it brings and to raise their status with each other. Movie director Oliver Stone got it right when he had his Wall Street lizard character, Gordon Gecko, declare, “Greed is good.”

Nor do I find that people “worship individual choice” (what does that even mean?). Yet, beginning with the Renaissance and the Reformation, the freedom to make personal choices has been the bedrock of Western Civilization. And millions came to America specifically to find that freedom and to get away from the bondage imposed on them by “family, neighborhood, nation and the truth” as religious and political authorities determined it to be. Even Jesus understood that the ties of family and community could be both a blessing and a curse.

In a column two weeks later, Brooks takes on “The Rise of Right-Wing Nihilism.” In this case, loss of faith in our culture is the key.

A few months ago, I had lunch with a young lady who said, “The difference is that in your generation you had something to believe in, but in ours we have nothing.” She didn’t say it bitterly, just as a straightforward acknowledgment of her worldview.

Faith in God has been on the decline for decades; so has social trust, faith in one another; so has faith in a dependable career path. A recent Gallup poll showed that faith in major American institutions is now near its lowest point in the 46 years Gallup has been measuring these things. But the core of nihilism is even more acidic; it is the loss of faith in the values your culture tells you to believe in.

… I was reminded of an essay [by] sociologist James Davison Hunter…. “A nihilistic culture is defined by the drive to destroy, by the will to power. And that definition now describes the American nation.” … Nihilists, he continued, often suffer from wounded attachments — to people, community, the truth. They can’t give up their own sense of marginalization and woundedness because it would mean giving up their very identity. The only way to feel halfway decent is to smash things or at least talk about smashing them. They long for chaos.

Brooks tries to convince us that this desire to “smash things” is the result of people becoming fed up with “progressive sermonizing” and being force-fed the woke agenda. But there are times when Brooks hints that this destructive impulse is the result of something bigger than watching too much MSNBC, and that our society’s rising hopelessness and nihilism reveals a growing despair over people’s prospects for a meaningful and rewarding life. What Brooks and others won’t face is that this despair will only grow worse, and be expressed in more bizarre and dangerous ways, if we continue to refuse to face the real problems staring us in the face. They have forgotten that, as Jesus taught, it is the truth that sets us free.

As I said above, Brooks never really acknowledges the growing gap in wealth and political power between the haves and have-nots. Nor does he ever mention the climate crisis or the pall it is casting over young people, especially, as they consider their own future or that of their children. And so I am focusing on Brooks as an example of how society’s elites, especially, seem to want to divert our attention from our biggest problems, to instead obsess over the “culture wars” and our need to somehow discipline ourselves and become better people.

In conclusion, Brooks tries to grasp at some evidence that his betterment is underway.

One spot of good news is the fact that more young people, and especially young men, are returning to church….  From the anecdotes I keep hearing, young people seem to be going to the most countercultural churches — traditionalist Catholic and Eastern Orthodox.

They don’t believe in what the establishment tells them to believe in. They live in a world in which many believe in nothing. But still, somewhere deep inside, that hunger is there. They want to have faith in something.

It could well be that “more” young people are going to church (it couldn’t be much less), but whether that number is significant is doubtful. The distrust of institutions he cited earlier certainly hasn’t exempted organized religion. But I would say that a hunger for meaning and mystery is inherent in our nature. Here the insight of the French theologian and mystic, Teilhard de Chardin, is helpful and important.

“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.”

A separation from spirit is the root of the growing crisis of Western Civilization. Spirituality and materialism have always been in tension during this time but only recently has matter come to dominate spirit so profoundly. In Teilhard’s understanding, then, we are trying be something we are not, with evermore painful and destructive consequences.

Our hope is not in a new political agenda promoted by some charismatic leader. Nor is it in getting people to go to church again. Rather, it is in our awakening to our true nature, to rediscovering the spirit within us and centering ourselves there. In the ancient language of Jesus, this is what he meant by discovering the kingdom and being born anew. In doing so, we discover the spirit not just within ourselves but within everyone and everywhere around us. We come to a new understanding of life and of this world in which we live, of their mystery and of their pure giftedness, and of the love which brings it all wonderfully and amazingly alive.

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