"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.
History is full of examples of moral revival, when social chaos was reversed, when behavior was tightened and norms reasserted. It happened in England in the 1830s and in the U.S. amid economic stress in the 1930s. It happens through organic communal effort, with voices from everywhere saying gently: This we praise. This we don’t.
Every parent loves his or her children. Everybody struggles. But we need ideals and standards to guide the way."
Moral revival "happens through organic communal effort"? Sorry, David, you lost me.
But not to worry: If Hillary and Bill return to the White House in 2017, I'm confident they will provide the "ideals and standards to guide the way."
Jeffrey, make no mistake - we live in the Orwellian world.
ReplyDeleteBrooks scribbling is moralizing column in one of the least moral places in New York is as absurd and indecent as Obama offering his "extraordinarily good deal to extraordinarily barbaric Iranian regime"
I am sorry, Jeff, my comment is clearly scrambled (I modified something in an unfinished way), but I hope the meaning is still obvious.
ReplyDeleteIt is. Thanks!
DeleteWhat kind of "organic communal effort" is required to get the USA's teacher's unions to undo forty years of brainwashing a false narrative of "evil white men engaged in imperialistic destructive capitalism"'?
ReplyDeleteObviously, David Brooks lives in a vacuum because all it takes is one NYC co-op shareholder meeting to know that "organic communal effort" is a myth, one that only happened once in history: when William Morris wrote his utopia "News from Nowhere", which is a better slogan for the NYT than their ongoing lie of 'all the news fit to print'.
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