Today I’m going to try something new: a hot take! An off-the-dome, quick-and-dirty response to something I just read this morning! This is partly because mid-August is no time to Maintain an Arc, and partly because…

David Brooks!!!

He doesn’t know it, but David Brooks and I are frenemies. I’ve been reading him on and off all my adult life, though his writing nearly always incenses me. I think I keep trying because I think I believe he’s sincere. (That sentence tells you all you need to know about the inside of my brain.)

And I admire the chutzpah of his formula (in the New York Times, in The Atlantic, in his many books): notice a problem — tut about the problem — 'splain why the problem is definitely not systemic — mildly claim a shade of ownership for the problem — conclude that the problem is a function of personal moral (ir)responsibility. Rinse and repeat!

But I find the substance of his arguments to be, almost without exception, vacuous and harmful. (When I first typed David Brooks’s name this morning, my computer autocorrected it to all-caps. Turns out I have written about him before, with what my three-year-old friend called EMOTIONAL FEELINGS.)

Perhaps Brooks’s most infamous column, in which he wrote of mortadella anxiety, is called “How We Are Ruining America.” Proving that he’s definitely got a vibe, his latest is a 6,000-word piece in The Atlantic called “How America Got Mean”—as of this writing, I'm sorry to say, the site’s most popular article.

Here, I’ll summarize it for you, kinda like Brooks would: Americans aren’t despairing and angry because of wealth inequality or injustice or social media or major demographic and technological shifts or climate change. It’s because we lack morality, and we neglect to teach it to our children.

That’s! All!

To wit: “The most important story about why Americans have become sad and alienated and rude, I believe, is also the simplest: We inhabit a society in which people are no longer trained in how to treat others with kindness and consideration. Our society has become one in which people feel licensed to give their selfishness free rein. The story I’m going to tell is about morals.”

(Spoiler: it was always going to be “about morals.” It’s always “about morals.”)

After noting that in the gauzy past “a farmer could earn dignity as readily as a banker,” that in the 50s “people decided that moral reasoning was not really relevant” (??????), and that the Girl Scouts have replaced their “founding ethos of service” with navel-gazing, Brooks recommends...“mandatory social-skills courses.” (And, to be fair, other things. But the "social-skills courses" are by far the most actionable.)

The essay is stuffed with false dichotomies, weird non sequiturs, scholarly misappropriation, dubious history, and naked respectability politics (not to mention throwing shade at the Girl Scouts). This man has seats on the world’s most influential media platforms, and he genuinely doesn't say anything more helpful than Americans should be better, like Fred Rogers and Ted Lasso.

I shouldn’t be surprised; this is, as previously noted, Brooks’s M.O. But those of us who take moral formation seriously (like me, like you) need and deserve better than this from our loudest, most influential thinkers.

I’d guess that Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and Mark Zuckerberg—people with unprecedented power over societal interaction—aren’t reading this essay in droves. We are: we who are already scrambling to shore up the emotional, mental, and moral health of our miserable kids and neighbors. Teachers who supplement academics with lessons on collaboration and respect. Childcare workers who guide four-year-olds in sharing and self-control. Therapists who help trans teenagers treat themselves and others with dignity when very few others do. Parents explaining to our sons why grabbing women by the pussy might make you powerful but doesn’t make you right.

* * *

Several years ago my book club read a guide to using technology well in families. It was written by a man who, bless his heart, suggested that instead of parking toddlers in front of Sesame Street or whatever for thirty minutes while you make dinner and breathe, you should LET THE TODDLERS FINGER-PAINT. Unattended in the other room. While you cook things, with your hands, which means those hands are far from the toddlers, who are, let's recall, FINGER-PAINTING.

On the night we discussed the book, each of us—parents one and all—barreled through the door and bellowed “HE LOST ME AT THE FINGER-PAINTING.”

Listen. We muscled through that book because we sincerely wanted thoughtful guidance. I assume Brooks’s piece is getting attention for the same reason. Everyone I know is constantly seeking new insights for both being and raising people who prioritize robust goodness and kindness and generosity.

You know, morality.

A lot of us are extremely susceptible to any social commentary whose conclusion is “we’re all being bad and should try harder to be good.” In my case, it scratches the itches of both of my fundamentalisms: the conservative evangelical (we’re bad) and the progressive liberal (we should try harder). It feels right because it hurts, feels like “tough love,” whatever the hell that is. It reminds me of my depravity, suggests—as though it’s something I may not have considered before!!!—that if I just cared more and parented better, everything would be fine.

This is exhausting. We need help: not in the form of “social-skills classes” or Ted Lasso platitudes, and definitely not in fairy tales about how moral America was in the 30s. We need powerful people to be good and do good and publicly reward goodness.

So! As the new school year starts, and all of us teachers and parents and counselors and youth leaders gear up for another round of Moral Formation in Donald Trump’s America, let’s—you and I—not entertain David Brooks’s finger-painting recommendations. Let’s assume that the people he’s lecturing about large-scale cultural morality are the ones…with power to enforce large-scale cultural morality.

And then let’s hold him, and them, accountable to do just that.