David Brooks: evaluation

Transcript context

…Thank you. In your first question, you alluded to a kind of a communal mentality in the 1950s, and an argument could be made, I think, that maybe that was born out of the sense of mission from World War II. And I’m wondering if there is hope and if we are optimistic, if something short of war, what kind of crisis . . . or do you foresee something? Or is it an anti-Trump movement that could bring that kind of sense of communal ambition or collectivism and goodwill and love together? Yeah. If we got invaded by Canada. [laughter] Not even all of Canada, just part of Canada, the weaker part. I do think there are times where cultures have turned around and without war. The two examples that I know most about are Britain between 1830 and 1848 and America, as I mentioned, between 1890 and 1910, say. In both those cases, there was a religious revival first, which made everybody much more communal. Then there was a civic revival, which I described, and then there was a political revival. It seems to me we’re not going in that order. I think we are genuinely having a civic revival. I don’t see, despite what I said earlier, not really a lot of evidence of a religious revival. A lot of upsurge of institutions and responses. I’m hoping that’ll lead to a political revival down the road. One of the things that 1950s culture . . . And I’ve got Jonathan Sacks on my mind, but I think he has a good metaphor. The problem with that 1950s culture was that — he calls it a guest house culture. The Protestant establishment owned the country, and everybody else was just guests in it. And if you behaved according to the cult of the laws of the Protestant establishment, they would let you in. But there wasn’t really ownership, and that became . . . The reason there were so many tight communities in Chicago, say, in African American neighborhoods, Italian neighborhoods, Polish neighborhoods is because those people did not have access to Michigan Avenue. The community was in part caused by lack of opportunity. Sacks says we smashed that up for good reason because we didn’t want to live in somebody else’s house. But then we went to what he calls the hotel culture, where we’ve all got a private room. We don’t really invest in the building; we don’t really know our neighbors. And we’re seeing the aftereffects of that, too. I have tremendous faith in humans’ ability to solve their problems. So I assume we’ll find a way to create a much more communal organization, but we’re not going to go back to the 1950s. But it would be an Airbnb culture then? Can I take that metaphor that far on the way? [laughter] That gives me hope.…

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