The New York Times told two separate stories earlier this week, with no apparent recognition that they might be related. On September 12, David Brooks published a column decrying the moral “relativism and nonjudgmentalism” of the young. On September 13, a front page story announced that “Soaring Poverty Casts Spotlight on ‘Lost Decade,’" explaining how the economic decline of the bottom half of the population over the past decade has grown worse during the financial crisis. What do the two stories have to do with each other? Brooks writes as though the country has – or should have – a set of shared values. Yet, he ignores class and cultural differences in the way values are formed and expressed. In doing so, he fails to address the most critical question the country faces: how can we maintain a sense of shared values when the institutions that support one part of the country flourish at the expense of those critical to the part of the country in decline. In short, the decline of the middle class and the soaring poverty rates the second story describes are far more significant issues than anything in Brooks’ column.
Brooks misses the connection between the two because he conflates a centuries-long phenomenon – the development of modernism — with more recent changes that are appropriately a source of concern: the decline of community. Studies of the difference in values between modernists and traditionalists emphasize, as does Brooks, the importance of community. These researchers find that traditionalist communities, whether they consist of specific church groups, developing world nations or working class neighborhoods, tend to be characterized by close kin networks, while modernist communities have networks more likely to be defined by something other than blood ties. These differences mean that the source and content of moral transmission varies: modernists tend to rely on individualized internalized values transmitted within private networks while traditionalists depend more on the health of institutions that articulate and reinforce pubic values.
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What Brooks doesn’t tell you is that the real crisis in contemporary American society is the weakening of the institutions that serve those on the losing end of the American economic ladder. One of the startling observations in the Moynihan Report of the mid-sixties was his finding that as jobs disappeared from rustbelt inner cities so, too, did church attendance. A half century later, Brad Wilcox has found the same thing among the working class more generally. With economic decline that has disproportionately affected traditionalist America, the institutions that produced cohesive communities, including churches, schools, families and civic organizations, are in decay. Modernity with all its faults, however, is not the principal source of the problem. And the risk Brooks does not acknowledge is that attacks on modernity in the name of morality often become attacks on tolerance. Let’s address the real sources of institutional decay and stop conflating the challenges of the last few years with the cultural changes a millennia in the making.
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