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Democracy & Solidarity with James Davison Hunter and David Brooks

September 30, 2024
Overview

Can America’s civic crisis be fixed? For most of US history, the tensions between an abstract commitment to justice and flourishing and a political reality that so often fell far short were held within a shared sense of unity and solidarity around the ideals of the American experiment. Why has this now unraveled, creating the civic conflict, disorientation and exhaustion we see today?

James Davison Hunter, author of the new book Democracy and Solidarity: On the Cultural Roots of America’s Political Crisis, helped us understand this story. David Brooks, author and columnist, offered a response and thoughts on how to recover what we’ve lost.

With thanks to our sponsors:

Impact Foundation

Scott and Lisa Herndon

Paul Klaassen

Two Anonymous Donors

Gregg and Julie Petersmeyer

Lindsay Hutter

Speakers

  • JAMES DAVISON HUNTER
    JAMES DAVISON HUNTER
  • DAVID BROOKS
    DAVID BROOKS
  • CHERIE HARDER
    CHERIE HARDER
Transcript
PETE PETERSON:

Well good evening. If you can grab your seats, I know that more seats, speaking of which, are being brought in. So if you haven’t been able to find a seat, I know that we’re bringing some seats here. Uh, to my right. My name is Pete Peterson, and I’m the very grateful dean of Pepperdine Graduate School of Public Policy. And it’s a delight to welcome you here to the National Press Club for another, uh, collaboration between the School of Public Policy and the Trinity Forum. Usually when I introduce myself, I bring you greetings from Malibu, California, which is where Pepperdine is based. And I take it as God’s sign that something wet was falling from the sky. This today, I take that as God’s sign that it’s time for me to return, which I will tomorrow. But, uh, I’m also delighted to say that Pepperdine really does believe in the importance of D.C. as a place for offering our unique view on politics and policy. And starting in January, the School of Public Policy will be opening what we’re calling a new DC track, essentially a bi coastal master’s in public policy degree, in which students will begin with us in Malibu and then conclude their time at Pepperdine Building here in DC. I think, frankly, all people heading into the polarized world of policy and politics should spend some of their years in Malibu, California. And so, in many ways, we’re just performing a service. Um, it should be something that at least if you leave California, it’s something you can always reflect upon. And by saying that we offer a unique perspective on politics and policy, uh, is the discipline of sociology in particular, which is one that we also bring to this our graduate program. Sociology, as you know, is the study of individuals and cultures, how they interact, how individuals shape cultures, and how cultures shape individuals and Cherie. I was looking back at our last 12 plus years of events, and this tonight is the first time that we are welcoming a sociologist to the stage. And I’d love to say that that’s remiss on our part, that we’ve missed that opportunity as we’ve welcomed historians and theologians and political scientists. But frankly, there aren’t a lot of great sociologists out there. Uh, this is a real problem for the discipline folks. People who are rational, non-ideological people who just treat the discipline as it is as opposed to creating a world they believe they want. Um, so it’s a real honor to be a part of this evening and welcome someone like you, doctor Hunter, to the stage this evening. It was that great California sociologist, the late Robert Nisbet, who once said modern public administration has been generally dominated by the 19th century rationalist view of society as a vast aggregate of unconnected political particles. And that, in many ways is how public policy has looked at people like us as unconnected political particles. And it’s the field of sociology that really does connect sometimes the very quantitative, very technical work of public policy with real human beings. I wanted to close, before turning it over to Sherry with a quote from one of our core texts, something else written by what some call one of America’s first sociologists. This is my pocket edition of Democracy in America. And as many of you know, uh, de Tocqueville is famous for a phrase that he developed called self-interest, rightly understood. It’s this understanding that the freedom that Americans experienced. Many thought would turn naturally into selfishness. But somehow Americans, through their willingness to work with others, either through faith based organizations or other associations, were drawn out of themselves, and in that they experienced a certain what he called self-interest, rightly understood. But he comes to this particular sentence here, which I think frames tonight’s conversation. He writes, and I quote. One must therefore expect that individual interest will become more than ever the principle, if not the unique motive of men’s actions. But it remains to know how each man will understand his individual interest. How will we understand our individual interest? Will it be purely out of selfish gain or monetary victory? Will it be out of just pure political victory? Will it be out of the tribes that we create? Or will there be something larger that can actually draw us out of ourselves? That we will understand our self-interest rightly? This, to me, is the foundation of the relationship between the School of Public Policy and the Trinity Forum. And so it is. Without further ado, I welcome my good friend Cherie Harder.

CHERIE HARDER
CHERIE HARDER:

Thanks for that, Pete, and I’ll just add my own. Welcome to all of you to tonight’s evening conversation on democracy and solidarity. Pete, thank you again. As Pete mentioned, it has been 12 years. The Trinity Forum and the Pepperdine School of Public Policy have been partnering to bring events like this to DC and elsewhere, and it has been just a real joy and privilege to be able to partner with you in the school, so thank you for that. I’d also just like to in addition to welcoming all of you here, we are so thrilled to have such a complete capacity crowd. If there’s anyone who kind of struggles in. I know that the balcony is not open is now open. You can kind of go out down the road and or down the hall and pick it up the entrance there. But thank you for coming on a kind of gloomy and rainy night. I also like to just welcome a few special guests. We’re really delighted to have our board chairman, Richard Miles and his wife Phoebe here, as well as board members George Clark and Shirley Hoekstra. Uh, thank you for your service and all that you do to kind of help lead Trinity Forum wisely and well. If you had friends who wanted to be here tonight but couldn’t make it for one way or for one reason or the other. Fear not. We will be recording tonight’s evening conversation. We’ll be posting it probably sometime next week, both on our website at TFF.org as well as our YouTube channel so you can tune in then. And while we are always hesitant to ever encourage people to spend more time on social media, in the next few days we will be posting different photos from tonight’s event so you can log on. Tag your friends. All of those good things. If you are one of our first time visitors or otherwise new to the work of the Trinity Forum, a special welcome to you. Part of our mission at the forum is to cultivate, curate and disseminate the best of Christian thought and to host programs like this evening conversation tonight to provide a place for leaders to wrestle with the big questions of life in the context of faith, and ultimately to come to better know the author of the answers. And we hope tonight’s conversation will be a small taste of that for you today. Certainly one of the big questions of life is how to live well with others, what constitutes a just and flourishing society, and how to pursue it. And one of the biggest questions in the Christian life is what it means to love one’s neighbor, both in the personal and the public spheres. These questions have always been challenging and contested, but they seem to have grown increasingly divisive, as well as demoralizing. Disagreements over how we should order our common life together have hardened and curdled into a civic crisis of contempt, incomprehension and estrangement. Our divisions seem increasingly deep, our differences more threatening, and our ability or even interest in bridging those differences seem slighter and more shriveled. We’ve reached the point where, according to a recent Washington Post poll, more than 40% of Americans polled reportedly viewed their political opponents not as misguided, mistaken, even disastrously wrong, but as evil. And nearly 20% of partisans on each side of the aisle admit to quote, thinking on occasion that the country would be better off if large numbers of the other party died. Perhaps it’s not surprising that a recent Axios poll found that a fifth of Americans say they would support a national divorce, where Republican leaning states could form a different country from Democratic leaning states, such that one could literally exile those that they disagree with. I’m hoping here that there’s some overlap between the people wishing death on the other party and those hoping for divorce for them. Otherwise, it’s even even more scary. In the words of one of our guests today, we’re at a moment when the answer to the fundamental question about the vitality and longevity of liberal democracy can no longer be assumed. Not because we are polarized, but because we no longer have the cultural resources to work through what divides us. So how did we get here? How did we arrive at the place where so many of us feel disconnected from and divided from each other that we report hoping for a divorce from or the death of our neighbors? And even more importantly, what can we do to restore and weave solidarity and a love for neighbor into a civic fabric that has been frayed by nihilism and moved together towards a renewed commitment to the common good? These are big questions, and there’s no easy answers, but to help us wrestle with them wisely and well. I’m delighted to get to introduce two extraordinary observers and analysts of our cultural challenges. One a scholar and a sociologist, and the other as a journalist. James Davis and Hunter and David Brooks. James Davis and Hunter is the Bruce Levinson Distinguished Professor of Religion, culture and Social Theory at UVA, where he also serves as the executive director of the Institute for the Advanced Study of Culture there. He is also, I’m very proud to say, a senior fellow of the Trinity Forum. In addition, he is, to quote our other guest, quote, the nation’s leading cultural historian who is credited with coining the term culture wars in his 1991 book by that title, a work that was provocative, even controversial at the time, and is now recognized as being both prescient and even restrained. He’s the author of several other influential works as well, including The Death of Character, science, and the good. His important work To Change the World, which articulated a vision of faithful presence within cultural institutions, is a hopeful model of Christian civic engagement and his new release, Democracy and Solidarity, which we’ve invited him here today to discuss, is a truly excellent, if deeply sobering, work on the cultural roots of our political dysfunction and the cultural preconditions for civic renewal. Joining James is David Brooks, or, as we like to think of him, the nation’s leading cultural columnist and commentator. He’s an op ed columnist for The New York Times, a writer for The Atlantic, and appears frequently on PBS NewsHour. He also served as the founder of the Weave project, which is currently at the Aspen Institute, which strengthened and expanded local efforts to build community and connectedness. He is the author of many, many books, many New York Times bestsellers, including The Social Animal, The Road to Character, both number one New York Times bestsellers The Second Mountain and his most recent and excellent book, How to Know a Person The Art of Seeing Others and Being Deeply Seen, which offers insights on rebuilding community and solidarity at a deep relational level. After a conversation, a moderated conversation between our guests. We will have an opportunity for questions from the audience. So be thinking of those. James and David, welcome. Great to have you both here. Thank you. So, James, we’ll start. Yes.

JAMES DAVISON HUNTER
JAMES DAVISON HUNTER:

Well, first of all, thank you for having me. And thanks everyone for coming, I should say. Having a sociologist here is a bit of a dubious proposition. There’s a story about a young woman who had a serious illness, and she went to her doctor and said, um, you know, how much longer do I have to live? And he said, well, it may only be a year, but, um, is there anything I can do? She asked, and she said, and the doctor said, well, you could move to the Midwest and marry a sociologist. And she said, well, will that cure me? And the doctor said, no, but the year will go by much more slowly.

CHERIE HARDER
CHERIE HARDER:

So, James, let’s start with your book, Democracy in and solidarity, which is an incredibly important one, certainly a sobering one. And it opens with the assertion that democracy is in crisis, and that crisis has a cultural source, which you define as the erosion of solidarity. And so, just at the beginning, we should probably get our term straight. What do you mean by solidarity? And why is it so important?

JAMES DAVISON HUNTER
JAMES DAVISON HUNTER:

So I choose the word solidarity, mainly because the word consensus, which is the word most often used, is simply inadequate to describe what’s really going on. Consensus is a rationalist term. It is about a certain set of agreements that are rationally derived and rationally achieved. And in a population that is as complex, diverse as Is ours. Um, the concept of consensus really has limited use. It’s certainly important in the realm of criminal justice and the realm of public policy, where people do have to actually come to agreement. But most of what unites a people, and this is true not only in the realm of politics, but also in the realm of other institutional realms like the family within religious and faith communities as well. Most of what unites us is not a rational consensus as much as it is a sense of being part of a shared project, a sense of of something at stake that we share. Quite apart from our differences. It is at least as much sociological and emotional as it is rational and and the concept of Solidarity, it seems to me, is a more capacious idea of social cohesion. Every institution, from a family to a government requires some agreement, some cohesion. Otherwise, institutions fall apart. Governments are ungovernable. Nations are ungovernable. But, um. So you have to have something that binds a people together, that binds the people within an institution or an organization in a family together, or it just doesn’t work. It’s also true in the nation. We have to have something that binds us together. And and if we don’t, it’s a real problem. So the focus of the book was not on polarization. As you mentioned in the introductory comments, but rather on what’s happened to, Um, that adhesive that at one point bound us together. And that doesn’t seem to be binding us together any longer.

CHERIE HARDER
CHERIE HARDER:

You know, David, um, one of the things one, anyone who regularly reads your columns realizes is that you came to this the same kind of conclusion many years ago, but perhaps through a slightly different way. I remember reading a column of yours, I think, from 2019, before the pandemic had happened. Talking about the pain that you saw just when you were going out, giving different speeches from people there, which really stemmed from a lack of connectedness. And I would love to hear you say a little bit more about how you came to that realization, about the importance of solidarity in the erosion of it through essentially observation of, um, normal people in their normal lives, suffering from a lack of solidarity and connection.

DAVID BROOKS
DAVID BROOKS:

Well, I try to get outside Washington to get in touch with the real America, and I often go to Malibu to. And I don’t know what people are complaining about. America. Seems fine to me. It seems very beautiful. I also want to thank Siri and get my thank yous out of the way. I was thinking walking over here the first time I came to a Trinity Forum event was over ten years ago, 12 years ago, and Trinity Forum has been central to my coming to faith. I think it’s been one of the institutions that has really helped me along. I, I came to, I say, I came to faith, I became a Christian in 2013, which was like investing in the stock market in 1929. It wasn’t the best moment. But I learned what American Christianity was here on this, in this room. Uh, American Christians, you know, they they read Andy Crouch, they read Tim Keller, they like to read James Davis and Hunter. Uh, and so that’s what the evangelical community is. That’s that’s what it is. And I told this to a buddy of mine who runs a seminary now or did. And he said, oh, you thought it was all the Shire? You thought the hobbits were the whole world. But no, there’s a there’s a bigger world out there. And then finally, one of the sayings about journalists is we have the ultimate power to power, to choose who to be co-opted by. So we get to choose the people who will tell us what to think. And a lot of what I know about American culture, I learned from this guy, and I used to call myself a comic sociologist. So I would like interview I would like to analyze cultural artifacts like New York Times wedding page, which they called the the Mergers and acquisitions page. It was like. Goldman Sachs marries McKinsey. Magna cum laude. Magna cum laude. You would never see a magna marrying a summa cum. Speaker5: So I think I’d be curious to know the mega story I would tell of what happened was that when this country was founded. Our founders. Said, well, these people are wonderful in many ways, but they’re fundamentally egotistical and sinful. And so we have to if we’re going to make a democracy out of these people, we’ve got to do a ton of moral formation. And James’s really career has been writing in different books, the history of this process. And, um, and, you know, a moral formation. One of my favorite formulations I must have got it from one of your books is a Stowe school in England, where the headmaster says, we try to turn out students who are acceptable at a dance, invaluable at a shipwreck. And that’s moral formation. Or, to quote the Gospel of Ted Lasso. He was asked, what’s your goal for his football team? And he said, I’m just trying to help these fellows become better versions of themselves on and off the field. That’s moral formation, in a sense. And so we had all these morally formative institutions in the depth of character. James writes about all this, and some of them were secular, some religious, some were left, some were right, but they were just all variety. And then the story I would tell was that in 1945 to 1955, the founder’s view of human nature was abandoned by a lot of people that were naturally good inside and its institutions that are evil. And if you think you’re naturally good inside, then you don’t need to do moral formation because you’re already good. And so a lot of moral education went away. And one of the things that went away with that was not only what I wrote about my last book, just basic moral skill building. How do you ask for an awful forgiveness? How do you break up with somebody without crushing their heart, but also the sense of a coherent moral order that we all are enmeshed in? And so George Marsden wrote that what gave FDR or MLK rhetoric such power was the sense of an eternal moral order that if nothing, if slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. If segregation is not wrong, nothing is wrong. So he had that sense of a moral order. But then we decided if we’re going to self actualize, we don’t need to have a moral order. We can come up with our own morality. And if your name is Aristotle, you can do that. Most of us can not do that. And in the 1950s, Walter Lippmann wrote a book, I think, called The Public Philosophy. And he said, if morality is what each of us individually chooses to feel, then we are outside the bounds of civilization. And his book was slammed by people like Arthur Schlesinger and East Coast establishment. But I think it was prognostic. And what comes true, and at the core of a lot of what I think about sociology is a psychological concept by a guy named John Bowlby that all of life is a series of daring explorations from a secure base. And that base for most of us, is going to be family. It’s going to be some philosophy or faith. It’s going to be an attachment to a specific place. And these are choices that we don’t. We don’t choose these things. And so the central conservative truth is that for liberal, choice based institutions to flourish, they need to be based on institutions that proceed choice that are illiberal like faith, family and flag. And when liberalism eats away at those core non chosen but more covenantal institutions, then it’s eaten away at the foundations it needs to survive. And I would say that’s a lot of what’s happening.

CHERIE HARDER
CHERIE HARDER:

And James, David mentioned briefly some of the the assumptions and philosophies of the founders. And you had mentioned that one of the what you call one of the most important sources of affirmative solidarity was what you called the hybrid enlightenment, which I’m sure you’ll say a little bit more. But, you know, essentially the sort of unique American combination of the rationalist enlightenment, along with American covenantal ism and Calvinism that helped form the ideas and ideals of certainly the country for many years. And those ideas and ideals have always been contested. There’s a bunch of contradictions in them, and we have been working them out ever since. But you have claimed in your work that that consensus, that hybrid enlightenment is spent and exhausted. How did we spend out that? That consensus, that animating kind of idea and ideal, which helped provide the solidarity that has kind of helped bind the nation together for so long.

JAMES DAVISON HUNTER
JAMES DAVISON HUNTER:

So. It’s important to begin with the recognition that that it was the the great democratic revolutions of the 18th and 19th century were the offspring of the enlightenment, an intellectual and cultural Revolution and most of the readings of the enlightenment that you’ll see or hear about. Read about. Um. Project a vision of the enlightenment that was mainly French. The fact of the matter is that the the French Enlightenment was just one version of it. And it was different in Germany, different in Scotland, different in England. And given the fact that about 90% of the colonists came out of Great Britain. Um, they brought the British Enlightenment, but also because most of at least a lot of the colonists were also religious dissenters. They brought Calvinism as well. And so the hybrid enlightenment in, in the, in early America was this blending of, um, Different sources that included classical republicanism. It included Lockean individualism. It also included deism, but it also very, very powerfully included, um, Reformed Christianity. And it was that blending that produced an ethical vision. And this is sort of the sort of a base point of the argument that democracy before it is a set of political institutions and practices and rituals. Democracy is a an ethical vision for the reconstitution of public life in a way that was intended to extend justice and freedom and equality to more and more people. Um, it was an ethical vision first and foremost. And the problem with the hybrid Enlightenment was that it was inherently flawed. At the beginning. It was flawed because it promised in our political documents. And by the way, I should say that that politics served that ethical vision. It wasn’t coterminous with that vision, but it it served that vision. It was an attempt to enact that ethical vision. But the problem was that the it was flawed because it promised freedom to its citizens, but then denied freedom to large swaths of its inhabitants. It promised equality, but denied equality. It promised toleration, but denied toleration and in important ways. And those were some of the inherent contradictions. So the story I tell is a story of how our political culture and our political institutions have worked through. Um, these contradictions. Uh, over the course of its history in ways that would ultimately, uh, expand the range of freedom and equality and toleration to more and more people that it would that the nation would in fact become, um, would live into its those ideals. Um, um, um, so the problem is that, um, I think over the course of the past 250 years, and especially in the course of the past of the 20th century, spilling into the 21st, is that elements of the hybrid enlightenment have evolved in ways that are now perversions of their own highest ideals. I see this on the left, and I see this on the right. Um, you know, just one illustration. Um, there’s a lot of talk today about, um, white Christian nationalism. The fact of the matter is that throughout the 19th century, um, uh, the political, um, culture was filled with the ideas of millennia, um, of a kind of post millennial perfection. Um, it it drove nation building. It was extraordinary. And it was held across the board. It was secular, it was religious, it was white. It was black. Um, uh, white. Christian nationalism was, in fact, a nationalism that was embraced by everyone. And and when you read some of the sermons, uh, written by, um, As African American bishops and pastors. They’re communicating the same vision. A vision of hope, really. And this was even at the time of the nadir. The worst moments of of of of discrimination and in the 19th century, early 20th century. So, um. Where do you find sort of that vision of hope anymore? You know, one of the points I’ll make very quickly before, um, concluding here is that I tend to look at culture not only on the surface of what is visible really to everyone, but also into what is implicit, what is taken for granted. And and at the heart of a culture are the answers to basically five questions. What is the nature of reality? How do we know reality? Who is a person and a member of the the human community. Worthy of its privileges and protections. How do we treat other people? And what is the point? What is the direction of it all? The heart of culture in its most taken for granted and most powerful form. Are the answers to the question of metaphysics, epistemology, anthropology, ethics, and teleology. So when you dig deeper, underneath, what you find is that there is no longer any agreement about the nature of reality, how we know reality. Who is a member of the human community and worthy a citizen worthy of its protections? You cited the statistics yourself. Of course. No agreement on our public ethics. And then finally, we have no story that we share in common about the nation of where it’s where it’s come from, where it is and where it’s going. So at the deepest levels of our culture, um, there’s no solidarity, there’s no agreement. And there is this unraveling that, uh, leaves us in, I think, the pickle that we’re in right now.

CHERIE HARDER
CHERIE HARDER:

David, I want to ask you about James questions about epistemology, ethics and metaphysics in in your book, How to Know a Person, you you quote, I think it was Parker Palmer talking about how every epistemology has an ethic. And we’re at a time where, you know, as James was saying, we have a very I mean, there’s big differences not only between our conception of right and wrong, better or worse, but even, you know, true or false or real or unreal. You’re in the business of essentially trying to help define and describe reality for your readers. How do you think about doing that? Um, you know, when when there is so much contestation over what’s real and true, how do you how do you encourage and solidarity and an ethic of that when our epistemology seems so messed up?

DAVID BROOKS
DAVID BROOKS:

Yeah, I wish there was only contestation. I wish it was only that we disagreed. And so one of the things I like about James’s work is that you stay in the depths of reality. So solidarity is just a better word than community. And if God knows, it’s better than social capital. Speaker5: And so like there’s a phrase I read recently that the Christian concept of forgiveness is just a deeper concept than the secular concept of tolerance. And so every secular concept, there are deeper concepts that are more capacious with the whole human condition. And so to me, one of the the core problems is not only did we disagree, but we’ve got internal moral chaos. And so I would tell the adjoining story to James’s enlightenment story. To me, the enlightenment grew out of the wars of religion in the 17th century. And there was the French, as James mentioned, which was more rational, like we don’t trust religion, we don’t trust faith. Let’s go with reason. And then the the good guys are the Scottish Enlightenment guys like David Hume and the Irishman Edmund Burke. And they said, no, don’t trust reason. Reason is weak. Go with the sentiment. So what we call the emotions and the passions. And you famously said, reason is and ought to be the slave to the passions. But the key thing was that you had to educate the passions. You had to have a strong moral core, educated. And the way you educate the passions is through what Edmund Burke called mores or culture, basically. And Burke said, manners are more important than laws. Laws touch us here or there, but mores and manners touch us everywhere, and they really create us. And so that was that gave cohesion to people. But then that gets eroded away. For the reason I said earlier is just the loss of moral formation, the lost of of really the renovation of the heart. We put it in those terms. And the Scottish Enlightenment had a more accurate and a more biblical view of what epistemology is in the Bible. Knowing is not just some rational thing, it’s not objective and scientific. Knowing can be scientific, but it can also be. To know is also to have sex with and covenant with. It’s got a million. It’s a whole person process. And so to me, when the passions of the heart are unformed, you become slave to the passions. And so to me, it’s the psychological and spiritual crisis that is really the core of the problem. And you find all these weird statistics that that are in my book. 54% of Americans say that no one knows them well. The number of people who say they have no close personal friends is 45 is up fourfold. Since 2000, the number of 40 year olds who have never been married was 8% 20 years ago, and now it’s 25%. And so you’ve just and then that is accompanied by sadness and meanness is accompanied with intense depression. So or pessimism. Maybe you could say it. And so the you look at the number of high school kids who say they have no shot of success because Americans are so unfair. That’s like 45%. And if you think America is so unfair, you can’t control your own life. You have no internal locus of control. Of course you fall apart. And so it manifests on the right and left in different ways. On the right, as catastrophizing society is going to have the flight 93 election. And on the left as neuroticism. And so we’ve asked young adults, do you suffer from mental health problems more than half the time? 35% of conservative kids say, yeah, I do, which is terrible. But if you ask progressive kids, it’s 57%. And so you can’t disassociate the mental health crisis from our politics. And to me, it’s ultimately a crisis of meaning, a crisis of where do I belong? What do I hang in for? And just I’ll talk later about my solutions. But I do think ultimately it is logical. Every epistemology implies an ethic. If the way you look at the world determines who you are in the world. If you look the way a lot of people do as a scary world, then you’re going to see threat everywhere. If you look in a generous world, then you’re going to see people doing the best they can. But we don’t have that generosity of spirit because we have no internal psychic security. And that creates all sorts of violent and nasty counter revolutions. And so to me, this is unlike a lot of the we’ve had a lot of social crises in this country. But I don’t think we and now we’re materially so much better off than ever before, but spiritually so much worse off.

JAMES DAVISON HUNTER
JAMES DAVISON HUNTER:

Well, just a footnote to this. Everyone knows the name John Locke, and John Locke was one of the heroes of the English Enlightenment. But if you ever read his essay Concerning Education, you will read from Locke this enlightenment figure who is always understood to be this secular icon, again of the English Enlightenment. And his advice is that children should memorize scripture. They should be memorizing the creeds. They should their parents, their community should be surrounding them to form the character, as well as the knowledge and virtue of young people. And by today’s standards, he would look like a fundamentalist, for sure. It’s really worth looking at. Yeah.

CHERIE HARDER
CHERIE HARDER:

So, James, In your book, Nihilism plays a big role. And one of the critiques you have of Christian’s involvement in the public square is that Christians have fundamentally misunderstood the enemy and have been so focused on culture war issues that they’ve missed the most important culture war, which is against nihilism. Now, I can imagine you’ve received push back to that, people saying, look, you know, abortion, sexuality, you know, these aren’t peripheral. These are really important issues. Why do you believe that the war against nihilism is the most important culture war?

JAMES DAVISON HUNTER
JAMES DAVISON HUNTER:

So every social order will have a culture. And I think we we focus on polarization because it’s so obvious and it’s playing out. It’s, you know, polarization now extends to dog walking and to diet. And it’s not just about politics. It’s about pretty much everything you can imagine. And The New York Times faithfully reports on these conflicts. So I thought we created them.: Um, but part of what I think is interesting is that underneath the polarization and what seems to be these incommensurable claims of one side against the other and vice versa. Um, that a a new culture, in fact, a new common culture has actually emerged, um, and is underwriting our politics today. Again, culture underwrites, um, our, our political system. And I think fundamentally it is a culture of nihilism and it’s nihilism. Um, when when Nietzsche writes about nihilism, he talks about it as being both passive as well as active. And the passive nihilism is the nihilism that we’ve been reading about from social scientists for the last 150 years. It’s about disenchantment. It’s about alienation. Um, it is about the loneliness, the breakup of community, the breakup of ancestral and organic, uh, social relationship and, uh, A social ties that has proceeded apace. It continues. It’s not written about much these days in the social sciences. Um, but but what used to be called the mass society critique is every bit as valid today. Um, and more so, in fact, than it was when it was, um, inaugurated. You know, in the early in the middle of the 19th century. What’s new is I think the active nihilism and active nihilism is essentially a cultural logic. Cultural logics are not about truth. Cultural logics are about meaning. And the dominant cultural logic is a logic that begins with with a narrative of injury, a narrative of woundedness. And what it leads to is the search for the cause of that injury or that woundedness and. Ultimately, it leads to an ethics of revenge, and that cultural logic is at play every bit as much on the right, every bit as much among certain, uh, Christian voices and Christian communities as it is on the left, and vice versa. It’s a shared culture. So how do we fix something like this? I know that’s eventually where you’re going. We have to take the full measure of the crisis that we’re in. And my argument is that what used to underwrite democracy, which was a flawed but nevertheless, um, uh, inspired and ultimately humane vision that contained the ingredients for self-correction and for improvement that that’s largely unraveled. And what’s replacing it is this culture of nihilism that’s animating our party system. It’s animating our our candidates and how they treat each other, look at each other, look at each other’s, uh, supporters and so on. And until we understand the depth that the enemy is in fact not the other side, but in fact, the enemy is the nihilism that insinuates itself within almost all of our public institutions, and not least our political institutions. We’re really not taking the full measure of the crisis in front of us.

CHERIE HARDER
CHERIE HARDER:

Will you anticipate what the next question would be, which is, yes, what do we do now? You have argued for what you called a renewed moral imagination and a reconstituted humanism. David, I think you have said before that the revolution will be moral or it will not be. What does a reconstituted humanism look like, and where would we even start?

DAVID BROOKS
DAVID BROOKS:

Speaker5: First, I would tell a slightly different story. Which about the act of nihilism. Psychologists have a concept. The hardest thing to cure is the patient’s attempt to self cure. And so you take the the nihilism. You take the loss of inner moral coherence. And people try to fill that with politics. And politics is a seductive form of social therapy because it seems to give you a sense of belonging. I’m putting on a team writer, Team Blue, but you’re not really in community. You’re just hating the same people. It seems to give you a sense of moral action. I could take action to help the world, but you’re just being indignant on Twitter. You’re not sitting with the homeless. You know. You’re not sitting with a widow or serving the poor. And it seems to give you just a sense of purpose, but it just lands you in moral war. And so people aren’t. In a normal society of the politics of redistribution, where should our resources go? But we live with the politics of recognition, which is I need to feel affirmed, and I need to feel you ashamed. And so that’s this self therapy that’s so destructive. Now, where do we start? I mean, I’ll tell you a story of someone who was part of a moral renewal movement or experienced it in her own life. So there was a woman in Amsterdam in the 1930s named Eddie Hilson. And Eddie Hilson was a very disturbed, unimpressive, spoiled, and narcissistic young woman. And she keeps journals, though, and as narcissistic people do.

Speaker6: Uh.
Which is not to say all journal people are narcissists only in my experience. But I’m sure there are others. So she’s a mess. The Germans invade, take over Amsterdam, and she barely notices in the journal she’s all about herself. But as the occupation lingers, she begins to see families disappearing, and she begins to enter the minds of others. And at one point in the turmoil, she said, I was knocked down on my knees to pray. She had not been religious at all. She said I found myself a healer in training and as the hardship goes, she begins to really see others. And amid the cruelty, she refuses to not see others, and she see her journals getting more holy and spiritual. She volunteers to work at the work camp where Jews were taken before they were shipped to Auschwitz. And she is like a saintly figure there. And she writes, the the misery here is quite terrible. But some nights walking along the barbed wire fence, I feel God’s presence. I’m in joy. And it’s just this spiritual flowering of a person in a very short couple of years. And she was eventually killed in Auschwitz. But her biographer writes of her, her transformation because came about through her practice of close observation. It was the act of closely observing others that brought about a spiritual awakening herself, because she really could see others. A woman with a similar life, a Jewish woman also of the same age, was Simon Weil, and Simon Weil similarly said attention is the ultimate act of generosity and prayer, as she says, is unmixed, unmixed attention. When I read that, I thought of an interview that Dan Rather gave or had with Mother Teresa, and he asked her, when you’re praying, what do you what do you think of what is God saying to you? Oh, no, he asked. Yes. When you’re praying, what do you say to God? And she says, well, I don’t say anything to God, I just listen. And Dan Rather says, well, what is God saying to you? And she said, oh, he’s not saying anything. He’s just listening. And that act of mutual listening, I think, is a beautiful, somehow a mystical concept. And that so that idea of the power of attention to bring brings forth a spiritual renewal of the world. Uh, and so, in my view, it’s it’s how we attend. It’s that act of attention that is the early part of moral renovation. And so in my last book, I tell the story. I had a diner in Waco, Texas, and I’m having, um, breakfast with a lady named LaRue Dorsey who presented herself to us, to me as a stern, disciplinarian, tough drill sergeant lady. She’d been a teacher before she turned 93, and she said, I love my students enough to discipline them. And, uh, I was intimidated by her. Uh, Into the diner walks a mutual friend of ours named Jimmy Darrell, who pastors to the homeless in Waco, and he comes over to our table and he grabs Mrs. Dorsey by the shoulders, and he shakes her way harder than he should ever shake a 93 year old. And he says to her, Mrs. Dorsey, Mrs. Dorsey, you’re the best, you’re the best. I love you, I love you. And that stern disciplinarian turns in one second into a bright, eyes shining nine year old girl. Through the power of his attention, he brought forth a different version of her. And so to me, in all these cases, moral social renewal and personal renewal are intertwined. And it begins with that first act of attention, of seeing the other person with the eyes of Jesus. Basically. Yeah, that’s the that’s the first early step. And then when you do that, then you can get better at the things I read about in the book, which had to be a good conversationalist, how to be a good listener, the basic moral skills. I had a student at Yale who, um, she had had four boyfriends, and they all ghosted her at the end, And nobody had ever taught those young men. Hey, it’s only decent to have a breakup conversation and be, here’s how to do it. And so, of course, she was filled with distrust because she thought, of course, the next guy’s going to ghost me at the end. And so to me, it begins with that fundamental act of human attention. Yeah. So, yes, I mean, I think the question for me as a sociologist for all my sins is, um, because I think you’re exactly right. And I think what’s happened over the course of, um, of the history of modernity and now late modernity, is that the social conditions that allow for that kind of attentiveness and recognition have largely disappeared. And in part, identity groups are compensatory social organizations. For what used to be provided by communities, whether they were faith communities or families or just sort of local organic associations. And they’ve been obliterated. Um, in the context of, of the modern and now late modern social world. So how do we reconstitute the social conditions in which. People can learn those skills again, to be seen, but al

JAMES DAVISON HUNTER
JAMES DAVISON HUNTER:

So, yes, I mean, I think the question for me as a sociologist for all my sins is, um, because I think you’re exactly right. And I think what’s happened over the course of, um, of the history of modernity and now late modernity, is that the social conditions that allow for that kind of attentiveness and recognition have largely disappeared. And in part, identity groups are compensatory social organizations. For what used to be provided by communities, whether they were faith communities or families or just sort of local organic associations. And they’ve been obliterated. Um, in the context of, of the modern and now late modern social world. So how do we reconstitute the social conditions in which. People can learn those skills again, to be seen, but also to see. And I think this is a place where the church, um, has a lot of experience. It can lead in ways that are spectacularly beneficial, um, to address that problem in ways in which we don’t need to find these shallow substitutes for the real thing. Um, and it’s the it seems to me that’s in part the the conversation that you and I need to continue to have for how to scale the very p

DAVID BROOKS
DAVID BROOKS:

Yeah. Can I–I’m going to try to convert you to being the wildly unrealistic optimist that I am. Um, so first, just a little historical story. I read a book during Covid called The Politics of Disharmony by a great political scientist, Sam Huntington, and he says, you know, I’m reading American history. I don’t really believe in cycles of history, but every 60 years or so, America seems to go through what he called a moral convulsion. And these are times when people get disgusted with established power. There’s great levels of distrust. Formerly marginalized groups demand to be included. A highly moral, passionate generation comes on the scene. There’s some sort of new form of communications technology. And Huntington says what happened in the 1770s or the revolutionary generation happened in the 1830s with, um, Populism. Andrew Jackson in the 1890s and the Industrial Revolution happened in the 1960s with all the turmoil there. And these are moments where you we have to chop up the culture in a lot of the institutions that used to work and are no longer working for us. And so, writing in 1981, he says in this book, I don’t know if I believe in 60 year cycles, but if it happens sometime around 2020, we’ll have another moral convulsion. And I was like, okay, credibility earned. Yeah. And and so the good news about moral convulsions is we have a culture, a paradigm. It works. But then it gets stopped working and we chop it up. So we had a pretty communal culture through a lot of the 20th century, but it got boring in the 50s and conformist, and it was racist and it was sexist. So we chopped it up. And we’ve had an individualistic culture for the last 60 years, and God knows we’ve taken that to the extreme. And to me, a lot of what we’re doing with chopping it up. And a friend of ours says we’re moving away from the phase of individualism. We’re just having a massive fight about what kind of community we want. And I do think people are rejecting some of that individualism. And my wife sometimes said in the 90s, people didn’t want to be labeled. Now they’re too eager to be labeled. But. And so to me, there are communities growing to figure out a healthy form of community. And I think, you know, Trinity Forum is part of this effort. Your center is part of this effort. Comment magazine is part of this effort. You go around to college campuses everywhere. It used to be character education was just not on the agenda. But now almost every campus I visit has 1 or 2 professors who are doing character education, moral formation. And students are flocking. And so I do think there’s like a just this dispersed movement of people thinking not only how do we build community? Nobody’s going to build a community for the sake of community, for sure. But how do we find an essential moral order that we can believe in together?

JAMES DAVISON HUNTER
JAMES DAVISON HUNTER:

Yeah. So just one comment. Um, so these are things that are observable and. They’re possible. And they may even be likely. Um, we’re watching these things unfold, and I don’t think we actually know the answer. Might. And you may be right. Um, and I certainly want to get behind all of the good things that you’re talking about. My sort of hyper macro view of things, though, is that. A lot of times people don’t pick the metaphors, right? And I’m not saying you’ve got the metaphor wrong, because I think there may be cycles that operate within larger patterns. My tendency is to view economics. It’s the dominant metaphor is one of cycles, and that tends to work in politics. The metaphors is of of a pendulum. It swings back and forth. But with regard to cultures and civilizations, I think the metaphor is the life cycle. They are born and they’re almost always born out of sacred cultures. Now that can be renewed. And we’ve seen that happen. But. You know, I remember the moment when I was watching the the Clarence Thomas hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee. And, and Thomas is explaining how his judicial philosophy is rooted in natural law. And the thing that struck me was how he was ridiculed. I mean, just mocked mercilessly for leaning into a tradition that’s been important to Western civilization. So there’s this sense that Jerusalem is no longer a credible source of moral authority, but neither is Athens, in a way. And, um, and that got me thinking about that. So I’m not sure exactly what’s going on. But I do know that this is the fight worth having.

DAVID BROOKS
DAVID BROOKS:

Yeah. One quick point. So I’ve asked Bob Putnam, another person who’s a political scientist playing sociologist, um, who? Um, you know, I asked him he wrote this beautiful book called The Upswing about decline of trust and all sorts of terrible things that are happening in society. So I said, well, tell me about a time societies rebuilt their moral core. And there was a case in Britain from 1815 to 1848 where, you know, in 1815 it was totally normal to get drunk at work, go home and be your wife. But by 1848 there was some of the early Victorian morality had come in. You had the Chartist sort of a union movement. You a top down, bottom up. You had all sorts of stuff going on, and it really was a better society. And our country. In 1890, we had the industrialization which created all this poverty and chaos and growth and all this. But you had waves of immigration. You had massive political corruption. It was not unlike our era. And so what happens is the Social Gospel movement, which is a communitarian movement, replaces social Darwinism, which is more individualistic. And then the 1890s, you get a civic renaissance, the creation of the settlement house movement, the environmental movement, the NAACP, the union movements. You get all these new institutions because the old 18th, 19th century institutions were for in America, they were we were raising kids on the plains of Kansas, and now we had a million kids in Cleveland, and we’d have new institutions. And then you have the progressive movement. So it goes cultural, civic, political as a three stage sort of. And that seems persuasive to me. And the key thing that I think about a lot is you used the word scaling. Like, we can all be nicer people and that would be very important. But how do you scale? And we have a friend, Howard Usak, who said something to me once. You’ve probably heard this a million times, but I haven’t. Um, trust is built by relationships, and relationships don’t scale. Just takes a long time. But norm scale. If you can change the norms that people, they change their behavior, then they’ll change their soul. And at we’ve we were in Florida and we ran to a lady who was helping elementary kids across the street after school. And we said to her, do you have time to volunteer in your neighborhood? And she said, no, I have no time. And we said, are you getting paid for this? And she said, no, I just helped the kids cross the street after elementary school. And we said, what else are you doing today? And she said, well, on Thursdays we take food to the I take food to the hospital, so the patients will have nice food to eat. And we said, do you have time to volunteer in your neighborhood? And she said, no, I have no time. And her what she was doing was not volunteering, it was just neighboring. That was her norm. And if we could shift the norms, then you shift behavior, and then eventually you shift people’s hearts.

JAMES DAVISON HUNTER
JAMES DAVISON HUNTER:

Yeah, well, I think they’re we completely agree, because in every one of those instances, there were the cultural resources to build upon a new civic life. And that’s really the heart of that observation at the end of the book, which is about reconstituting an ethical vision for the flourishing of society. And there I again, I think that historic Christianity offers tremendous resources. In a way, there’s the possibility of reviving the hybrid enlightenment, but reviving it in ways that recognizes that we are an even more diverse society and in a way, can draw upon even other resources that that are new in a way to.

CHERIE HARDER
CHERIE HARDER:

Well, there’s so much more that I could ask, but we’re going to turn to you all for questions. And if you have been to a Trinity Forum event before, you know that we give three guidelines for questions. We just ask that all questions be brief. All questions be civil, and all questions be in the form of a question. So so we have two roving mics here. Just you just put your hand up, we’ll call on you and then wait for the mic to come there. Right there. Second row. You could stand up and say your name. That’d be great.

ATTENDEE:

Hi there. My name is Greg Curcio. Um, this is specifically a question for you, David. Um, conspiracy theories, in my opinion, have a great effect towards eroding goodwill within groups of all kinds. As a journalist, I’m interested in how we combat conspiracy theories and reestablish reality despite the growing mistrust in traditional, largely secular news organizations.

DAVID BROOKS
DAVID BROOKS:

Yeah. Um, well, conspiracy theories, again, are a social therapy. They make you feel like you’re elite because you understand what nobody else understands. They make you feel wise because you’re onto the game and they make you feel superior. And so it’s a it’s if you’re feeling anxiety ridden, inferior. Conspiracy theories are just tremendously attractive. Now, what doesn’t work to cure a conspiracy theory is fact checking. If somebody says we never sent a man on the moon, that was all made up saying, well, Buzz Aldrin was at the moon, he wrote a testimony. We have images of the fact checking all that does. When you challenge conspiracy theorists or any piece of misinformation with facts, you’re just forcing the conspiracy theorists to defend their position more aggressively. And so, to me, what what what solves that is you have to get into the inner anxiety of the person that’s leading them to go into the conspiracy theory, and that is only done through respect. And so when somebody comes up to me and hits me with the conspiracy theory, my I realize my only job is to ask 3 or 4 times to stand in their standpoint. It’s like, where are you coming from? Tell me more about what you believe. Tell me more about what you believe. And I may not persuade them, but I’ll have offered them respect. And there’s a great conversation in the book. Great book called Crucial Conversations by a guy named Joseph Gurney and a whole bunch of other people. And they say in that book, uh, in any conversation, respect is like air when it’s present. Nobody notices when it’s absent. It’s all anybody can think about. And so every conversation is taking place on two levels. What we’re nominally talking about. But then the undercurrent of emotions as we speak with everything I say, I’m either making you feel safer or less safe, more respect or less respected. So it’s that offering of respect that I think has the has the potential. And one of the things we did to to reduce conspiracy theories, one of the things we did wrong in my news business is we basically told all when I joined, I’m old enough that they were working class people in journalism. They were high school grads. Now they’re none. And 52% of employees in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal went to like 26 colleges. So if you went to one of our news organizations and swung an ax, you had eight people who used to work at the Harvard Crimson, which would be a good idea, by the way. Um, but but but so basically, one of the flaws in our industry, and it’s a great industry, I’m very proud of working. All the places I work at is that we told half the country their voices didn’t matter. So of course they’re going to distrust everything we tell them. And so it’s that underlying exchange of respect is the way to solve, not solve, but address misinformation and conspiracy thing.

JAMES DAVISON HUNTER
JAMES DAVISON HUNTER:

I would only add The conspiracy theories are about meaning making. They’re not about truth. They think it’s about truth, but it’s really about meaning making. And everything else that David has said is exactly right.

ATTENDEE:

Thank you. Elizabeth Oldfield and I’m coming from the UK and feeling very strongly that we’re about seven years behind you. The deep, deep division that you were experiencing, the data shows, is not quite as entrenched in the UK, but we’re on the same trajectory. And I my sense is that our shared institutions, particularly the BBC and the Church of England, acted as a bulwark for a while. You know, we had a shared story for longer. We had shared rituals, we had a sense of shared belonging. And that’s all going. So I guess my question is, if you could go back in time 7 to 7 years of a decade ago in the US, what could have been done then so that I can go home and see if we can do that, then?

JAMES DAVISON HUNTER
JAMES DAVISON HUNTER:

I think we have a real leadership problem. I think and that leadership problem is not only political. It is within the most important and influential institutions of our society. Um, and I think part of that problem is a problem of the moral formation, um, of of leadership. Um, I think it is the lack of imagination, um, a moral imagination. Um, and I would say a lack of courage is probably the most obvious thing that’s missing right now. I think there are people who genuinely want to, Contribute an important and influential ways and in sacrificial ways. I don’t think a lot of them have the moral imagination to know how to do that, and especially in a context where social media, the media more broadly, is just relentless at deconstructing and attacking and undermining any effort of goodwill in the public sphere.

DAVID BROOKS
DAVID BROOKS:

Elizabeth, if I could go for 1/32, one of the things that we noticed when we go to the UK is pub culture. And you see eight guys hanging out, just talking for hour upon hour. And when we’re in those pubs and said, this one’s my wife and comment and Ann Snyder, I remember my wife’s name, editor of combat magazine. Um, but that the guy culture seemed healthier. And I would say that seems true in most places around the world. So I would. And so just to have guys with deep friendships, um, and, you know, Brits are funnier than we are. Uh, I grew up in a culture. I say this in my book. I joke, I grew up in a culture. Our family was think Yiddish, act British. And so we were super Anglophile and tried to be funny, but that that culture of male camaraderie is still strong in the pubs. And the culture of male isolation is stronger here. So I would focus on that one and spend more time in pubs.

ATTENDEE:

So I sent around reading by Louis Kim that we shouldn’t fear the disintegration of societies, that all societies do disintegrate. And I couldn’t even finish reading it. It was so disturbing. But I wondered what what you would think about that.

DAVID BROOKS
DAVID BROOKS:

Yeah, I Lewis Carroll is just making stuff up there. He was good at it. No, I’m terrified of disintegration of societies like you. Um, you think living in a poisonous culture society, you try living with anarchy? Uh, and and so and even moral anarchy. And, you know, I do think, you know, I wrote a book called The Social Animal. I think we’re formed in society. Uh, we’re not primarily individuals. We’re primarily nodes of relationships were formed by relationships come first, individuals emerge out of relationships, and you take people who are really isolated. Uh, you know, I mean, even the little example of the Romanian orphanages, where they were raised really without society. And, you know, a third of the kids died by age three because without the loving touch of their mom or anybody, the neurons didn’t connect. And and so I do think it’s the thing to be feared most is the dissolution of society.

JAMES DAVISON HUNTER
JAMES DAVISON HUNTER:

Yeah, I think that’s a big in a way, the story I tell in Democracy and Solidarity is a story about the disintegration of the of the cultural infrastructure, um, that makes that kind of healthy cohesion possible. And because I’m looking at what I call the deep structures of culture, not just the surface, it’s going to take a while. It’s nothing’s inevitable here. Um, there’s always a fight to be had. And, um, and, and the question is knowing how to be strategic about that fight. To know what to fight for, what’s possible. As we rebuild the fabric, I think this, this metaphor of, of weaving and weaving is, is a really beautiful but also very apt metaphor for the long, hard work. But I always say that, and I say this as a historical and cultural sociologist, that if we’re not looking out a hundred years, we’re not serious. The idea that we can fix this in five years or in the next election cycle is just naive. These are civilizational issues, but they can be addressed and addressed constructively.

ATTENDEE:

I was curious to hear about your storyline vis a vis the information deluge. There’s sort of so much information flowing around you touched on sort of the the overwhelming aspect to it, but it seems like the pace, the natural business model of the, the media to subdivide, etcetera, etcetera, and to fragment our narratives. There’s all these sorts of forces against cultural cohesion that I’d like to both understand how a individual sort of sort of bares up under that, where the the mass of information is bigger and bigger, as well as sort of any sort of revolution or progress given that situation. Thank you.

JAMES DAVISON HUNTER
JAMES DAVISON HUNTER:

Well, I’m hoping that David will answer this in a much more hopeful way than I will. I’m I’m pretty melancholy about, um, about that. We are in the middle of a new information revolution, and, um, most of these, um, major changes in transformations are double edged. Um, there’s a positive side. I’m very glad that I can be in touch with, um, my kids or grandkids in a case of an emergency just by texting them. I just I love that, um, there’s so many other things that I really don’t love about social media and about the new information technologies. Um, again, I think what we are seeing is a kind of, uh, informational anarchy. And, um, and we’re we don’t have the capacity to make up public ethics along the way. Again, we’re dealing with a technological, technological change that is moving faster than our capacity to think ethically about it. And so it feels just deeply confusing. And, you know, in every civilization there are weak institutions and strong institutions. And of course, in the Middle Ages, the church was a very strong institution. Now it’s a very weak institution. Family is a weak institution. And against the onslaught of these new information technologies, which are very powerful, um, institutions, individual families, individuals themselves, um, really do struggle. And I think they find it as confusing as, as I do. And, um, and anyway, so I again, I think this is a place where, um, leadership could make a very important difference. But But where do you begin with that? David, please.

DAVID BROOKS
DAVID BROOKS:

I’m going to cheer you up. We’re going to go home and suck on the gas pipe and it’ll be over. So there was a, um. So a Substack essay. It was about the evolution of culture or the deterioration of culture. And he had a little fish, which was culture and cultures, things like, you know, Bach Cathedral, Mozart, early Taylor Swift. Uh, and and so that’s one fish. And then a bigger fish comes along to eat it called entertainment. And that’s TV. And then behind that comes another fish that’s bigger called distraction. And that’s what TikTok is. It’s not an experience. It’s a distraction. And then another even bigger fish comes along. And that’s called addiction. And TikTok is addictive. And so we’re basically going the wrong way down the dopamine cycle. And so everything is like a quick dopamine hit instead of a long sort of sense of understanding. But again, here’s where I turn on the, the, uh, who was that little child star, the, um, Shirley Temple, um, like the Shirley Temple of the New York Times. Uh, uh, and so I think we’re learning to control. I think, you know, every two technology takes us a little while. And so I’ve been pretty impressed by the reaction to Jonathan Heights book, The Anxious Generation. A million copies sold already. I hate the guy. But it was seized on because people know we have a problem, right? And he named it. Yeah, he named it. And he gave you concrete things. No phones in schools, like concrete. And then. But so, like earlier, before, uh, Jonathan’s book came out, a friend of a lot of hours, Andy Crouch’s book came out, tech wise, family and others. And Andy has some basic rules, like he doesn’t look at a screen until he goes outside in the morning and looks at the sky. No screens on in these rooms, some screens in those rooms. Tech Sabbath like an hour, a day, a week, a month, a year. And that’s a way of controlling. And Andy’s a little happier than the rest of us these days. And so, you know, in my view, a culture is a collective response to the problem of the moment and people figure stuff out. You got to have faith in human innovation to figure stuff out. And to me, culture changes when a small group of people find a better way to live. And the rest of us copy. That’s the story of the early church. And so, in my view, when I see Andy, I think he’s happier than I am. I’ll get off Twitter, at least for an hour a day. But I do think the adaptation of a society, what you write, the civic infrastructure is not there, but the energy is there. Like, we’re a very energetic people.

JAMES DAVISON HUNTER
JAMES DAVISON HUNTER:

Especially in, I would say, the middle classes that are cognizant of this. I, I think those resources are lacking, uh, in poorer communities. And it seems to me that’s, again, one of the places where churches. Can intervene in very constructive ways.

CHERIE HARDER
CHERIE HARDER:

James, David, thank you so much. We are going to give you a last word in just a second. But first, I wanted to share with each of you an invitation, which is to join the Trinity Forum society or or support the work of the Trinity Forum as well. We are a you wouldn’t know it to look here, but we are a teeny tiny nonprofit with 70% of our funding coming from friends like you, all individuals with a huge mission. We are trying to set the table for the most important conversations. That the ones that draw on all aspects of our personhood heart, mind, soul and strength to basically kind of provide the place for the renewed imagination, the renewed humanism that James talk about and to invite other people in and to do all this when the culture pushes us in very different ways towards towards distraction, towards disorientation, towards a deep nihilism. So much of giving is driven by fear, loathing and urgency, and we would encourage you to invest in something very different, which is a broader, deeper moral and spiritual imagination over the long haul. For those of you who become members of the Trinity Forum society, there are a whole variety of benefits as well. You get a subscription to our quarterly Trinity Forum readings, our daily what we’re reading list of curated reading recommendations, and we will also, as a special benefit, give you a signed copy of James Davis and Hunter’s book, Democracy and Solidarity. So you can do all of that just outside at the table right where you registered. And we hope that we’ll be able to welcome you into the Trinity Forum Society. That book is also, I should mention, available not only with your new membership, but with any gift of $100 or more. As we wrap up, it is always appropriate to end with thanks. And as you might imagine, there were many people whose involvement helped make tonight possible. So I just want to thank our sponsors once again. Thank all the folks who helped make this happen. Our excellent photographer Clay Blackmore, my colleagues Tom Walsh, Campbell Vogel, Brian Bascom, Marianne Morris, our new office manager McCrae Henke, as well as Heidi Little. Our volunteers for tonight, which includes three of our excellent interns, Robyn Dixon, John Austin De Geer, Noah Ounty, as well as volunteers Mercedes Candies and Griffin O’Neill. Finally, as promised, we’re going to end with a last word from each of our speakers. So, David, let’s start with you.

DAVID BROOKS
DAVID BROOKS:

Well, you should subscribe to Trinity Forum. I am a gigantic fan of the daily what we’re reading, so I read that every single day. A great agglomeration of on these subjects. So I guess I agree with James. It’s a long 100 year proposition, but it begins, in my view, with conversation like becoming just really good at conversation. And so in Washington, we’re we’re not good at it. I was on the phone with a friend of mine during the Obama years. He was in the white House and we were talking and after the phone, the call dropped. So I thought, oh, he’ll call me back. It’ll take a minute. He’ll realize the call is dropped. So I wait two minutes and then four minutes, and then six minutes, and then eight minutes. And I finally call his office and I say, can I speak to so-and-so? And his assistant says, oh, he can’t talk. He’s on the phone. And so I say, no, he’s on the phone with me. He does not realize. He’s been bloviating for ten minutes. So to me, it’s just the very act of conversation. And just practically, I’ll give two pieces of practical advice. I was at Chicago with a buddy of mine named Nick Epley, who’s a psychologist at the business school there, and we’re having a procession like this. And he says to the group, okay, we’re going to interrupt this conversation for the next ten minutes. I’d like you to find a stranger and tell them the high point of your life, the low point of your life, and the turning point of your life. And everybody groaned. And he said, how many of you don’t want to do this? And 80% of the hands went up, and he says, go. And they started doing it. After ten minutes, we couldn’t get them back. After 20 minutes, we still couldn’t get them back. Finally we got them back and he said to the group, how many of you really enjoyed that? 80% of the hands went up and had the basis of researchers that we missed. We underestimate how much we’re going to enjoy talking to each other. We underestimate how much we’re going to enjoy going deep. And so it’s that active of conversation is to me, the is that weaving activity. And then finally, the the quality of your conversations is dependent on the quality of your questions. And I come to conclude, only about 30% of humanity or question asked. Is there just not curious about other people the rest. And the sad part is you were we were all once great question answers because we were all formally four year olds. And I’ll tell one quick story. I have a friend who named Nairobi Way who teaches seventh grade boys how to be a journalist, how to ask questions. And the first time she did this, she stood in front of the classroom and she said, shoot questions at me. I’ll answer it honestly. And the first boy said, are you married? And she said, no. And the second boy said, are you divorced? And she said, yes. And the third boy said, do you still love him? She was like, whoa. And she started crying. And she said yes. And the next question was, does he know? And then the next question was, do your kids know? Like just boom. So on your way in the elevator, ask uncomfortable questions.

JAMES DAVISON HUNTER
JAMES DAVISON HUNTER:

I know I have a reputation, at least among my my colleagues, um, that no one does pessimism better than me. Uh, I did write a book called The Death of Character and Cultural Words. And so on. Um, yeah. And the story I tell is that it is a dark story. Um, and I work really hard to to tell the truth. It’s carefully researched and, um. Um, but I want you to know that, um, I may appear pessimistic, but I am full of hope. You know, I teach social classical social theory. And of course, you all know the line from the Communist Manifesto that all history is the history. Heretofore, history is the history of class conflict. Well, I have a colleague who started a different book, his own book, with a version of that line, which I think is exactly right. He said, in fact, all history is the history of human longing. And though we live, I think, in dark times, and there are forces over which we have very little control that are at play in and in our moment in history. Um, I know for a certainty that people are yearning. They are longing for something better. And, um. And and our task, I think, is in in speaking to that. We are we are yearning to flourish. And in some ways, some of us are flourishing, at least in material ways, but in spiritual ways, um, and emotional ways. We are just dying inside. And, and here is a place where, again, I wouldn’t say that, that Christianity has the only answer to this. I think that that but but it’s certainly, um, a religious tradition that offers really powerful, important answers to those questions. And in a pluralistic society, wouldn’t expect, um, Christianity to to be the answer to for everyone, at least empirically speaking. But the Christian faith provides cultural resources and long centuries of practice that speak to these yearnings. There’s a dark side to that as well as we all know. But the final word is that those resources point to hope.

CHERIE HARDER
CHERIE HARDER:

David James, thank you. Thank you to all of you for joining us. We have so appreciated your presence and attention here tonight. Have a great evening.

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