A conversation with David Brooks about sin and beauty
“We live differently than we say we live. There’s moral judgment all around.”
David Brooks is a columnist for the New York Times and a commentator on PBS NewsHour. He has worked as a senior editor at the Weekly Standard and as a reporter and editor at the Wall Street Journal. His books include Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There and The Road to Character.
You’re known as a political columnist, but you’ve said that politics is no longer your primary meaning-maker. How did you reach that conclusion?
I’m a big believer in Samuel Johnson’s couplet: “How small, of all that human hearts endure, that part which laws or kings can cause or cure.” Most of the things that make our lives worthwhile and meaningful do not have to do with politics. They have to do with relationships or beliefs or virtues. Yes, politics can touch us catastrophically when the system completely breaks down. We’re fortunate enough to live in a country where, even with a change in administration as dramatic as the current one, there are certain checks and balances on what politics can touch and what it can do.
