By David Brooks Opinion Columnist January 30th 2026
David Brooks is one of our most eloquent social commentators. He has written this last OpEd for the New York Times which gives us his opinion about the culture in which we are serving and what we might do to be part of the renewal. Here are some excerpts- click the link to the article which is quite long.
……We have become a sadder, meaner and more pessimistic country. One recent historical study of American newspapers finds that public discourse is more negative now than at any other time since the 1850s. Large majorities say our country is in decline, that experts are not to be trusted, that elites don’t care about regular people. Only 13 percent of young adults believe America is heading in the right direction. Sixty-nine percent of Americans say they do not believe in the American dream……..
We’re abandoning our humanistic core. The elements of our civilization that lift the spirit, nurture empathy and orient the soul now play a diminished role in national life: religious devotion, theology, literature, art, history, philosophy. Many educators decided that because Western powers spawned colonialism — and they did — students in the West should learn nothing about the lineage of their civilization and should thereby be rendered cultural orphans. Activists decided persuasion is a myth and that life is a ruthless power competition between oppressors and oppressed groups. As a result of technological progress and humanistic decay, life has become objectively better but subjectively worse. We have widened personal freedom but utterly failed to help people answer the question of what that freedom is for.
The most grievous cultural wound has been the loss of a shared moral order. We told multiple generations to come up with their own individual values. This privatization of morality burdened people with a task they could not possibly do, leaving them morally inarticulate and unformed. It created a naked public square where there was no broad agreement about what was true, beautiful and good. Without shared standards of right and wrong, it’s impossible to settle disputes; it’s impossible to maintain social cohesion and trust. Every healthy society rests on some shared conception of the sacred — sacred heroes, sacred texts, sacred ideals — and when that goes away, anxiety, atomization and a slow descent toward barbarism are the natural results.
It shouldn’t surprise us that, according to one Harvard survey, 58 percent of college students say they experienced no sense of “purpose or meaning” in their life in the month before being polled. It shouldn’t surprise us that people are so distrusting and demoralized. I’m haunted by an observation that Albert Camus made about his continent 75 years ago: The men of Europe “no longer believe in the things that exist in the world and in living man; the secret of Europe is that it no longer loves life.”
We could use better political leadership, of course, but the crucial question facing America is: How can we reverse this pervasive loss of faith in one another, in our future and in our shared ideals? I do not believe that most people can flourish in a meaningless, nihilistic universe. Despite what the cynics say, I still believe we’re driven not only by the selfish motivations but also by the moral ones — the desire to pursue some good, the desire to cooperate, to care for one another and to belong. Life is about movement, and the flourishing life is the same eternal thing, some man or woman striving and struggling in service to some ideal…..
Edmund Burke argued that culture, which he called “manners,” is more important than politics. Manners, he wrote, “are of more importance than laws. Upon them, in a great measure, the laws depend. The law touches us but here and there, and now and then. Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform, insensible operation, like that of the air we breathe in. They give their whole form and color to our lives. According to their quality, they aid morals, they supply them, or they totally destroy them.”
The good news is that culture changes all the time as people adjust to meet the crises of their moment. In the 1890s, the Social Gospel movement, with its communal emphasis, displaced the social Darwinist culture, with its individualistic, survival-of-the-fittest emphasis. That cultural shift eventually led to political change: the Progressive era. American culture also shifted radically between 1955 and 1975, producing a culture that was less conformist, less sexist and racist, more creative than the one that came before, though also one that was more atomized. The culture war that began in that era produced both the modern left and the modern right. American culture today is already vastly different from how it was during the Great Awokening of 2020.
We Americans went through hard times before, and we have always recovered through a process of cultural rupture and repair. Some old set of values and practices has to be torn away and some new ones embraced.
If America could once again restore its secure emotional, material and spiritual base, maybe we could recover a smidgen of our earlier audacity. Oscar Wilde joked that youth is America’s oldest tradition. Maybe it’s time the country matured, and combined youthful energy with the kind of humility and wisdom that Reinhold Niebuhr packed into one of his most famous passages:
Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/30/opinion/david-brooks-leaving-columnist.html