David Brooks on "The Strange Persistence of Guilt"

David Brooks

I've decided to accept New York Times columnist David Brooks as my prime spiritual guru these days (second only, that is, to Pope Francis). Of all the op-ed contributors that I habitually read in The Times and The Washington Post, he's the one who most consistently hits the nail on the head when it comes to relating our current political, economic, and cultural woes to flaws in our moral and spiritual outlooks.

A case in point is his recent column "The Strange Persistence of Guilt." If we live, as we say we do, in a post-religion, post-sin, post-guilt world today, he asks why our behavior betrays the lingering presence of so much guilt in our minds and lives. Brooks writes:

... society has become a free-form demolition derby of moral confrontation: the cold-eyed fanaticism of students at Middlebury College and other campuses nationwide; the rage of the alt-right; holy wars over transgender bathrooms; the furious intensity at every town-hall meeting on every subject.

How can this be, he wonders, if our adverted cultural posture today is this:

With no common criteria by which to judge moral action [we've] all become blandly nonjudgmental — sort of chill, pluralistic versions of Snoop Dogg: You do you and I’ll do me and we’ll all be cool about it. Whatever feels right.

And his explanation for this conundrum is:

... we’re still driven by an inextinguishable need to feel morally justified. Our thinking is still vestigially shaped by religious categories.

I agree, even if my thinking parts company slightly with Brooks when he writes:

We have words and emotional instincts about what feels right and wrong, but no settled criteria to help us think, argue and decide. ...  we have no clear framework or set of rituals to guide us in our quest for goodness. Worse, people have a sense of guilt and sin, but no longer a sense that they live in a loving universe marked by divine mercy, grace and forgiveness. There is sin but no formula for redemption.

Not precisely true, I'd maintain. As a Catholic, every time I go to church I am reminded of a "formula for redemption" that many of us humans have believed in for 2,000 years. I don't deny that this formula has been called into doubt over the course of the last several centuries of human history. I do realize that German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in the nineteenth century that God is dead. But, as the Wilfred McClay essay "The Strange Persistence of Guilt" in the Hedgehog Review — a paper which David Brooks draws his title and inspiration from — says, "With God dead, all would indeed be permitted." That permissiveness was a welcome thing, in Nietzsche's view.

Yet today, per Brooks, all is not permitted. Instead, we're still seeking moral justifications in our lives and culture. Accordingly:

The only reliable way to feel morally justified in [our] culture is to assume the role of victim. ... this move takes all moral striving and it politicizes it. Instead of seeing moral struggle as something between you and God (the religious version) or as something that happens between the good and evil within yourself (the classical version), moral struggle now happens primarily between groups. 

We see events through the lens of moral Marxism, as a class or ethnic struggle between the evil oppressor and the supposedly innocent oppressed. The moral narrative of colonialism is applied to every situation. The concept of inherited sin is back in common currency, only these days we call it “privilege.”

When the students at Middlebury lashed out against political scientist Charles Murray, they were professing empathy with those of their fellow humans who'd long suffered victimhood, I'd say. Murray is one of the authors of a controversial book, The Bell Curve, that claims that African Americans have lower I.Q.'s than other racial groups. So the Middlebury students, many of them white, were, in the mode of understanding of David Brooks, offloading some of their own (perhaps unacknowledged) cultural guilt.

Students at Middlebury College protested
the appearance of Charles Murray.

While Brooks says we have "no settled criteria" to help us think, argue and decide matters of morality and guilt, I'd say we actually have too many sets of moral criteria rattling around in our culture today. Some come from the various faiths and religious denominations that have historically formed threads of the fabric of our culture. One of these religious threads is my own Roman Catholicism. But many of the threads today come out of the realm of secularism that has been on the ascendant in the West at least since the time of Nietzsche.

These various sets of moral criteria are, not surprisingly, in agreement about any number of things — such as, for example, the immorality of murder. But they disagree, often violently, about the validity of other moral prescriptions — such as, for example, about whether abortion is murder.

Disagreements among religions and even among secularists over moral prescriptions is one reason why, I believe, recent polls show that around 20 percent of American adults are "nones," claiming no identification with any particular religion.

Many of the "nones" self-identify, nonetheless, as "spiritual." Even though I may feel the need to grit my teeth as I say this — since I am a member of an organized religion, the Catholic Church — I'd like to think this is a hopeful sign that a spiritual renaissance is possible in America today. Not only is there, as David Brooks points out, an ongoing presence of a sense of guilt in our lives, there is also an abiding presence of spirit. We need that spiritual presence if we are to stop making a hash of our political, economic, social, cultural, and moral lives today.