David Brooks: evaluation

Transcript context

…[laughs] There was a guy named James Q. Wilson, who wrote a great book called The Moral Sense, which I highly recommend. Irving Kristol’s wife was Gertrude Himmelfarb, a historian, really, of how morality changes across civilizations. That strikes me as absolutely essentially true. I don’t think it’s possible to understand America today without understanding the fact that most people used to feel held within a moral order. George Marsden is a historian who said that what gave Martin Luther King’s rhetoric such power was his sense that morality — right and wrong are built into the natural law of the universe. That segregation is not wrong in some places. It’s that segregation is always wrong; slavery is always wrong. That sense of a held moral order was essential to the existential security of all people in our society and our ability to settle disputes, because we had an understanding of right and wrong. That begins to go away relatively early. Back in 1955, Walter Lippmann, a great columnist, wrote a book called The Public Philosophy. In that book, he says, if what is right or wrong is determined by what each individual feels, then we have left the grounds of civilization. I think that was profoundly true. Gertrude Himmelfarb and James Q. Wilson would say that there is a moral order and we have shredded it, and we’re living off the fumes of that order. Once that goes away, then you’re in trouble. I think they were right about that. So, we’re all going to sign up for being neocons, but what’s the fundamental dimension where maybe you’re not a neocon if there is one?…

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