Anne Snyder: From Comment Magazine, welcome to The Understory, where the future quietly takes root. I’m Anne Snyder.
Few questions tested the festival spirit quite like the one we put to David Brooks and Ross Douthat on Friday morning: is this a time to build or a time to re-found? Comment contributing editor Christine Emba, whose own writing models the kind of honest, searching argument this hour required, set the terms. What follows is not only a debate, but a meditation on the conditions of renewal — whether our institutions can be repaired, what must be preserved, and what might need to begin again. After Brooks and Douthat’s exchange, you’ll hear Mark Labberton offer a brief reflection, helping us listen for what was happening beneath the argument itself, and introducing the Comment Manifesto that followed.
Recorded live in the main nave at the Understory Festival, here’s the debate: is this a time to build, or is it a time to re-found?
Christine Emba: I’m Christine Emba, a journalist and author here in D.C. I’m also, like I think all of you here, a person attempting to live in hope. It’s a difficult project in these — shall we say — trying times. Our institutions feel weaker than they’ve ever been, and we see new examples of this every day. Our personal lives, the subject of much of my writing and research, feel less secure. And the future these days seems less exciting than threatening. New technologies, for instance, seem arrayed to replace the human role rather than enhance it. In the face of this, a certain nihilism becomes a comforting pose, especially in my generation. If it’s all downhill from here, why even bother trying? If everything has already fallen apart, why even think about possibilities to rebuild?
Albert Hirschman, a heterodox economist and social scientist in the 20th century, coined a term for obsessions with failure that become self-fulfilling prophecies. He called it fracasomania. He wrote: “The paradigm-based gloomy vision can be positively harmful. When fracasomania prevails, hopeful developments will either not be perceived at all, or will be considered exceptional and purely temporary. In these circumstances, they will not be taken advantage of as elements on which to build.” His thought is a rebuke to the temperament of this moment, I think — and a needed one. There are still sparks to catch. Potentiality still exists. But we’ll miss it if we only look down in despair. Hirschman wanted to build. And he was especially interested in what regular people build without permission, when no one is looking. Building is the opposite of giving up. And the understory is where the foundations are meant to come together.
So the next question, then, is how to go about that building from where we stand today. Do we discard our crumbling structures and start over, or attempt to fix them from within? To belabour this conference’s metaphor: is it a sort of controlled burn or a total razing? To debate that question, I’m here to introduce Ross Douthat and David Brooks, who honestly need no introduction. They began their friendship around 15 years ago as conservative writers at the New York Times. They’ve since helped Times readers and the rest of us understand the American right in its many manifestations — religious, political, sociological. And over time, their interests have sometimes braided together and sometimes diverged. David, for instance, has made his home in D.C., the centre of empire. Ross writes his missives from a small hamlet in Connecticut. I mean, it’s New Haven, but still — in comparison.
Ross has often taken the warning voice, speaking and writing about decline and decadence. David’s conviction seems to be that moral aspiration still exists, that institutions can actually hold. As you might surmise, Ross often has a more skeptical outlook on the world, while David, I think, is temperamentally an optimist. And also — Ross, and I questioned him on this backstage right before we came on stage — appears to have some belief in extra- or ultra-terrestrial activity. While David, I’m not entirely certain. And to be honest, I’m not sure that will be the subject of this debate, but I’m interested.
In any case, despite their differences, Ross and David remain united in both their rigour in argument and their concern for the good, even as their approaches to both remain quite distinct. They will be excellent models for how we disagree even as we work towards the same ends. So: is it a time to build or a time to re-found? I look forward to finding out. Good morning, Ross. Good morning, David.
David Brooks: The way this is going to work is I’m in the role of Joe Biden in this debate — he’s in the role of the young upstart. I’m going to talk for about eight minutes, and then Ross is going to talk for about eight minutes, and then we’ll have a conversation, and then we’ll come to physical blows, and then we’ll fall over each other hugging and weeping together. That’s the agenda.
So I often ask people, what made you who you are? And no one ever says, you know, I had this vacation in Hawaii that was so fantastic, that made me who I am. They always talk about some painful moment, some process of rupture and repair. And I had a hard moment about 13 or 14 years ago, and I spent a lot of time out on the bench on the lawn out there under the tree. And I read, in that hard season, Henri Nouwen, who said: when you’re in pain, you have to stay in the pain to see what it has to teach you. And I thought, screw that, I want to get out of the pain. But it illustrates that in hard moments, you learn more about yourself and your society. Then I read Frederick Buechner, and he said: in moments of hardness, you can either be broken or broken open. You can callous yourself over, or you can open yourself up. And only by being vulnerable can you change. And so that process of rupture and repair happens in the place of people, and it happens in the place of nations.
In 2020, I was reading a book by Samuel Huntington called American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony. And he says every 60 years or so, America seems to go through a moral convulsion. People want to rip up everything, tear everything down. A passionate generation comes on the scene. There’s a new information communications technology. And these moral convulsions are brutal to live through. People get disgusted with established power. He said it happened in the 1770s. It happened in the 1830s with Andrew Jackson. It happened in the 1890s with the beginnings of the Progressive Era. It happened in the 1960s. And right around 1981, he said: I don’t know if I believe in the 60-year cycle, but if it holds, then sometime around 2020, America will go through another moral convulsion. And I was like, well done, Professor Huntington.
The nature of our convulsion is a loss of faith. It started with Vietnam and Watergate. Iraq — loss of faith in America’s capacity to do good abroad. Financial crisis — loss of faith in a certain sort of capitalism. The internet did not create harmony. Luke gave you the intellectual basis of what’s happened. I’m going to try to put a psychological gloss on it. That loss of faith created a series of dark emotions that have rippled through our societies.
First: distrust. Two generations ago, 60% of Americans said, I trust my neighbour. Now it’s down to 30%, and 19% of millennials. Distrust sows distrust. It produces a state of anomie — a feeling you’re disconnected from society, a feeling you can only trust yourself. It isolates you.
The second emotion is pessimism. Look at Google Ngrams — all the words in conversation in books, magazines, and articles, going back to the 1850s. Through most of American history, our public conversation was very optimistic: progress, forward-looking. About 2010, that collapses. We are now in the most pessimistic American culture in American history, going back to the 1850s — more pessimistic than during the Civil War, more pessimistic than the Great Depression, than the World Wars.
Third, and most important, is resentment. When you get a society that promises equality and delivers inequality, you have a breeding ground for resentment. Resentment is about social standing. Somebody doesn’t see me, doesn’t respect me. It starts out as a feeling of impotence: I can’t even strike back at those people, they don’t even know I exist. It ferments into the sourest of all sour-grapes attitudes. It’s not only that I can’t get what I want, I don’t even want those things anymore. People who are seen as altruistic are seen as self-serving frauds. Generosity is perceived as naïveté. Kindness is perceived as toxic empathy. The resentful person has damaged his organ for perceiving values. They believe that whatever is lower is more real: brutality, selfishness, power. Resentful people are predatory.
So what I’m saying is: our problems are fundamentally cultural, they’re pre-political. Sure, we have our problems — we always have problems. But the ideas that Luke described this morning, the psychology I describe right now, have created a consciousness that has changed the way we perceive the world. We look through the world through mud-coloured lenses. You get all sorts of phenomena where people think the world is worse than it actually is. The economy is okay — it’s not great, but it’s okay. American mood about the economy is the lowest in recorded history. Social mobility has always existed, but right now 69% of Americans think the American Dream is dead.
So what I’m trying to describe is a spiritual, cultural, and psychological problem. The good news is that if it’s a cultural problem — an intellectual problem, bad ideas, bad psychology — cultures can change. Cultures are the easiest things to change. Culture changes the way science changes. There’s a dominant paradigm. It works for a while. It stops working. People chop it up — that’s the moral convulsion, when people chop up a cultural paradigm. And this can happen with blinding speed. In the 1950s, we had a culture of self-restraint. In the 1960s, people rejected that, and we had a culture of bohemian liberation. In the 1980s, people rejected that, and we had sort of bourgeois conservatism. Cultures can pivot with astounding speed.
So who leads cultural change? Culture change happens more by example than by argument, via admiration more than by persuasion. A small group of people, often on the margins of society, find a better way to live, and the rest of us start copying them. That’s the story of the early church, for example. Each new cultural movement is the answer to the question that Luke started with: what does it mean to be a human? Each cultural movement is oriented around a social ideal — the image of what a flourishing human being looks like. When a nation shifts its cultural idea, a whole bunch of values shift with it, and that can happen very quickly.
So what happens after a moment of exhaustion, of nihilism, of autonomy, of loneliness? What follows that kind of culture? History provides some clues. Two ancient rivers rise up in those moments.
The first is Romanticism. Romanticism asserts that there really are noble things in the world — beauty, truth, excellence, and love. The Romantic says we must yearn for these things. Romanticism is a conflagration of the heart. The world is charged with meaning, and every person’s life has meaning. Romanticism is an insurrection of the whole person against the tyranny of the part. Don’t reduce me to a brain. Don’t reduce me to a machine. I’m a whole person. Romanticism puts the heart at the centre of the person. History is filled with examples of exhaustion leading to romantic periods: the Neoplatonist reaction in the 4th century after the exhaustion of Greek culture; after the exhaustion of the Dark Ages, the rise of chivalry; after the cynical materialism of early capitalism, you get the Romantic poets like Wordsworth and Coleridge, you get social critics like John Ruskin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau. The pattern recurs again and again: a loss of faith, an age of cynicism and resentment, waves of exhaustion, a romantic response.
The problem with Romanticism is that it’s like your immature younger sister. You need the mature older sister to tell you what to be romantic about — and that is humanism. Humanism is the belief that while people can be selfish and broken, they can also be cultivated toward excellence. Humanism puts tremendous emphasis on the formative institutions and practices: literature, education, music, art, loving families. Humanism champions everything that enhances human dignity and mutual respect. Erasmus trying to combine faith and learning. Simone Weil looking at the soul’s needs for roots. Tracy Chapman and Luke Combs singing Fast Car. Humanism happens through friendship, through conversation, through debate. In humanistic eras, there are a lot of clubs.
I believe what we see now is the beginnings — including what’s happening in this room — of a romantic and humanistic response. You can see it in popular culture. Audiences are hungry for stories about idealistic people who stay idealistic even in cynical times: the Fred Rogers movies, Ted Lasso, the Anne Hathaway character in The Devil Wears Prada. People hunger for that kind of idealism — I’m just going to be good even if the world around me is rotten. I did a piece in The Atlantic recently about all the humanistic endeavours rising on American college campuses: moral formation courses, civic thought courses, how-to-have-a-meaningful-life courses. Students hunger for this because they feel the humanistic deficits in their lives.
A couple years ago — I’ll close with this — I was sitting in a hotel bar, and I was doing what you would call sad-guy-drinking-alone, but I call it reporting. And I was scrolling through. It was after October 7th, and you can imagine the images. They were brutal. But I come across an image from James Baldwin being interviewed. And Baldwin says: there’s not as much humanity as one would like in the world. But there’s enough. There’s more than you would think. And we’ve got to remember, as you walk down the street, that every person you meet could be you. You could be that person. And so James Baldwin had good reason to be bitter and angry — and a lot of the time, he was bitter and angry. But here he was, uttering the ultimate humanistic sentence: when you walk down the street, you could be that person. When I saw that little clip, the phrase that leapt into my mind was defiant humanism — to be defiantly humanistic even in cynical times. And I think that’s what we’re called to do. And as we do that, the culture flips, and we rupture, and we repair. Thank you.
Ross Douthat: All right. So, first of all, it’s a tremendous pleasure to be here in this amazing space with all of you. It’s somewhat less of a pleasure, though, I must say, to share this stage with my former colleague David Brooks, who — when I was invited to this debate — I was promised would handle both the moderation and the debate itself, and that in the service of a vigorous debate, he would start by saying something extremely unreasonable, extreme-sounding, naïve, utopian, something that I could really push off against to give us good fisticuffs, a good wrestling match right here in these hallowed precincts. And unfortunately, he tricked me. As — well, anyway. We’ve been colleagues for a long time. There was a long period of my life as a New York Times columnist, I will just say, where I would travel the country giving talks, meeting people, and I’d be introduced to someone, and they would say, oh, Ross Douthat, you write for the New York Times? You know who I love? I love that David Brooks. So I’ve been storing up a lot of resentment — just want to say, if it spills out a little bit.
So anyway, that opening was very reasonable. And in order to argue against something very reasonable, I’m basically going to have to take my own perspective on the world to a kind of extreme. So I want to start with the image of cycles in American history and the image of cycles in global history, both of which David referenced and used in the course of his discussion. And the cycles in American history, in David’s telling, have this kind of familiar rhythmic pattern: 50, 60 years go by, the generations turn, cynicism and despair pervade, there’s tumult, there’s youthful activism, and then Romanticism and humanism come in and the cycle starts again. And I agree that that has often been the story of American history. There is a pleasing pattern of renewal in our national life, going back to the founding — arguably earlier. And I think that were I not here to have a vigorous debate with David, I would say that I, too, have some confidence that we can participate in and further that cycle once again.
At the same time, I will notice that David also referenced the Dark Ages in the course of his discussion. He said — and I’m paraphrasing, you’re allowed to do that in debate — the cynicism and despair of the Dark Ages gave way to the age of chivalry. And that covers over, what, like 600 years of Viking invasions, the Saracens raiding Italy, crop yields collapsing, standing armies disappearing. That was a bad 600 years. So it’s possible to have pleasing cycles that take place on a rather longer time horizon than the cycles of American history. And it’s possible to be the optimist in 460 A.D. who just needs to wait 600 years or so for their optimism to be vindicated and for Romanticism and humanism to rule again.
I’m not going to argue that we’re headed for a 600-year dark age yet. But I am going to suggest that the hour is somewhat later than just a reading of the American past might suggest, and that our situation requires a version of what David is prescribing — but a more extreme version than I think his dulcet tones would have you embrace. And so I’ll say quickly two things about where I think this extremity of the moment comes from. And it is an unusual combination of torpor and acceleration.
The torpor is basically the reality that, yes, cultures go through cycles, but they go through cycles in economic, demographic, and institutional contexts that change and make the cycle sometimes harder to push ahead or achieve simple renewal. So if you’re trying to renew, for instance, the government of the United States — to fix the way Congress works, to renew the policymaking process in Washington, D.C. — it’s a lot easier to do it in the Progressive Era or the New Deal era or the Jacksonian era or even the 1960s, when the government just isn’t that big and isn’t that complex, and you don’t have the weight of generations upon generations of accumulated bureaucracy and special interests. And over time, as you get that accumulation, you get a certain kind of sclerosis and stagnation that’s harder to break free of than in the past. And I would argue that that exists in various ways in all existing American institutions right now.
Some of it is the weight of bureaucracy. Some of it is the weight of demographics — the fact that we are just an old and getting older civilization relative to the world of the baby boom generation or the Jacksonians. It’s harder to make big cultural moves when you have relatively few young people and many, many more older people. Some of that is cultural, but it’s a kind of cultural development — certain patterns in liberal humanist culture that have shaken themselves free of religion and Christianity over time and then worked themselves out to a point of pessimism and nihilism that is really hard to just row back or reshape without, I think, a more profound spirit of religious conversion than is easily summoned up again just by the turning of cycles.
And in all of that and more, I think what you see in early 21st-century America is cycles happening in a context of stagnation, sclerosis, and torpor that makes even the dynamism less dynamic. Like, if you compare the dynamism of left-wing movements in the late 2010s and early 2020s to the dynamism of left-wing movements in the 1960s, I don’t think the left-wing movements of our own era come out looking very good. We can get into the state of conservatism later, but that would be just one concrete example.
So you have torpor, and then you have — especially in the last few years — an incredible acceleration of technological pressure on human beings from transformative machines, devices, and technologies that I don’t think have obvious antecedents in the technological changes of the American past. In the end, the experience of the internet, the iPhone, social media, and now artificial intelligence just doesn’t map in any exact way onto the experience of railroads, automobiles, and other things. In certain ways, it may be less physically disruptive, but in terms of the disruption and the effect on the human psyche — the sense of who the human person is, the fear of human obsolescence that I think hangs over our own time — all of that places its own kind of heavy weight on human cultures right now, again, in a way that makes reaching for Romanticism or reaching for humanism a lot harder. You’re pushing against a very powerful and growing ever more powerful force.
And what does this mean in practice, in terms of what it takes for renewal? I’d say it takes several things. First, it probably takes a greater radicalism. Take the area of religion, right? You may need more of a spirit of supernaturalism in religion than you would have needed for a religious revival in 1940s or 1950s America. You might need to get back more fully to the zaniness and extremity of early Christianity than has been the case in prior revivals in American history. Obviously, American religion has always been known for its zaniness, which is one reason that I actually do share some confidence in its capacity for renewal. But again, the extremes are necessary to break out from under the weights that are being placed upon people.
And then just in terms of institutions: David has written eloquently about seeds of renewal inside élite academia, inside colleges and universities, and I share some of his hopes for that renewal. But overall, when I look at the landscape of American institutions right now, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that most of the dynamism — everywhere from corporate America to education to culture — is strongest in zones that basically didn’t exist 20 or 30 years ago. And this is a category that encompasses everything from the AI giants themselves, incredible powers that have emerged basically out of nowhere in the last five years, to something like classical Christian schooling, which is a major educational movement in America that has started from ground zero and built anew, rather than just trying to renovate the existing Catholic school system or something like that. So those are brief examples. I’m exceeding my time limit. But I just want to emphasize that the mixture of the drag created by torpor and stagnation and the pressures on human beings created by technological acceleration require more radicalism, more action outside established institutions, and more high strangeness — maybe — than in American renewals past.
David Brooks: In order to answer Ross’s longing for zany religion, I’ve decided to cede my time to Kanye West.
So I guess I would say a couple things. First, I don’t see that much torpor. The Roman Empire, to go back to that period, really did stagnate — it lost all energy. When I look at the American economy, our median income is 24% higher than in 1990. Our productivity rates are higher. The U.S. takes up a higher share of global GDP. Business startups are at record highs. That doesn’t feel like torpor to me. When I look at the technological advances — AI, quantum computing, fusion, protein folding, autonomous vehicles, mRNA vaccines, space flights, we can catch rockets now — that doesn’t feel like torpor to me. Even politically: whether you like MAGA or not, it is a legitimate American political movement that came out of almost nowhere. It’s an impressive piece of social change, whether you think it leads to good outcomes or bad outcomes.
But the thing I would say is: we shouldn’t expect political change to come before cultural change. It doesn’t happen that way. If you look at the turnaround in the 1890s, social Darwinism was replaced by the social gospel movement — a cultural shift. There was a civic renaissance: the creation of the Boys and Girls Clubs, the NAACP, the Settlement House Movement, the environmental movement, the union movement. And then political change happened later in the 1900s with the progressive movement. So culture always precedes political change. So it’s the cultural change I think we should look for.
As for AI — and then I’m going to ask you to respond to that, and I’m going to ask you a question — I believe AI is a threat to human motivation. Normal AI use definitely threatens and decreases people’s drive. But AI tutors increase drive. So it’s a matter of how we structure the AI, whether it has a negative effect on the human person or a positive effect, whether it’s an act of engagement with agency or whether it robs agency. But that’s a choice. And I think one of the things — I just have tremendous faith in human capacity for creativity and innovation. And I think the cultural responses we see in this room are part of that thing. So I’d ask you to comment on that. But then I’d also ask: what exactly needs to be done? What are we building here?
Ross Douthat: You’re flattering the audience. I mean, this is classic — oh, the people, the people in this room. How can I say anything against the people in this room?
Just to be clear, in all seriousness, about the level of what I think is real agreement between the two of us that I will then try to veer away from: I think that the United States in particular is uniquely well positioned relative to almost every country and culture in the world to survive and thrive and renew itself under the larger conditions. I would much rather be the United States than Western Europe. I would much rather be the United States than the Middle East. Notwithstanding Peter Thiel’s apparent destination, I would much rather be the United States than Argentina.
And I think that the economic statistics you mentioned are an example of that, right? The U.S. economy has proved its own vitality in the last 10 years under extremely difficult conditions, including bad policymaking, global pandemic, the drag of all kinds of forces. Yes, there is clearly powerful economic and technological dynamism at work in the United States right now.
I think, though, that how you get from that to both social change and political change and successful flourishing institutions is just a really, really hard problem. And I think what you see with the dynamics in politics — I agree with you that MAGA is an all-American Jacksonian political movement that reflects a kind of rebellion against torpor — and there was a brief five-week window at the start of the second Trump administration where I was writing columns about how the synthesis of Elon Musk’s Silicon Valley dynamism and J.D. Vance’s communitarian Catholicism was going to yield the golden age. I stopped writing those columns very, very quickly. And some of that is specific to Trump himself, but some of it is reflective, I think, of just how challenging it is to do effective politics under conditions of broad societal ageing, institutional sclerosis, and how the zones of economic energy don’t translate immediately or naturally into successful cultural change.
So what am I concretely looking for and asking for? Again, I think you will probably somewhat agree with this. But you need institutions and practices and forms of life that are just more intentional, more self-conscious about what they’re doing, and more resilient against the sort of push towards human obsolescence from technological forces than I think prior generations have had to build.
And I mean, the simplest way to think about this is just in terms of the human family and family formation — that is itself an institution. Like, what it takes to find a spouse and fall in love and start a family and all of these things requires just a much greater degree of weird self-conscious intentionality among young people than I think has ever been the case in American history, and maybe in all of human history, except at the peak of the Viking invasions when it was also hard to get married and settle down because of the pillaging and the sacking.
I don’t have a sort of airtight prescription for what that means. But just generally saying, well, young people have been cynical, but people want Romanticism — okay, people want Romanticism, but how do we get there? Like, how do we get men and women who are moving apart and being digitally and socially segregated to see each other successfully as potential romantic partners again? Let’s say you’re running a major university right now. If I were giving advice to someone running a major university, I might say: look, you are one of the last institutions standing that tons and tons of young people are going to pass through. It’s one of their best opportunities to form social bonds and to find people to marry. Guess what — that should actually be part of your mission as an Ivy League university. You should be in the marriage business and you should be self-conscious about — see, there’s laughter, right? It’s more extreme than just saying, well, we need a high-minded commitment to American civics in our universities. Maybe. But maybe what we need is for college presidents to look out at the incoming freshman class and say: I want 50% of you married by graduation. I’m just throwing out extremities.
But I should throw a question back to you. I want to ask you about liberalism. Because one of the ways in which the situation that we find ourselves in gets framed right now is as a crisis of liberalism. And you have people who talk a lot about post-liberalism, whatever that may be — sometimes I’m one of them. You have people who want to revive liberalism, defend liberalism, and so on. I’m curious, since you are a culture-first guy in this debate, at least — what do you think about where liberalism as a culture has ended up? Meaning the culture that includes religious and non-religious people, but has basically defined the worldview and perspective of the bourgeois bohemians that you wrote about many years ago, and still sort of presides over most major American institutions.
David Brooks: First of all, I’ve been persuaded we need a zany religion. And I’ve decided that the people who are going to lead the next revolution are Episcopalians. And I ask all the Episcopalians in this Episcopalian room to rise up. You have nothing to lose but your croquet.
I mean, you have to be careful — 17th-century Anglicanism, man. We’re going to have some guys on horseback with flowing locks galloping through northwest D.C.
Let me return to liberalism, because I don’t think there’s much such a thing as post-liberalism. There’s old-fashioned authoritarianism — that has always been with us. But if you look at Americans, we have a consensus: we are a liberal consensus. 80% of Americans say politicians should compromise to get things done. 84% say Americans benefit from racial and cultural diversity. 75% say immigration is a good thing. 83% say political violence is never justified. The median voter rule still applies. We’re still basically a democracy where people believe in the basic principles of democracy.
What’s hurt is what I would call the emotional, psychological, and intellectual subtext of liberalism. What is liberalism to me? Viola Davis wrote a great memoir, and in it she tells the story of high school. She was in drama class, and the teacher asked: how many of you want to be actors? Every hand goes up. And the teacher says, well, there are auditions, and there’s failure, and there’s poverty. And every hand goes down except Viola Davis’s. And she says: when you’ve had your electricity cut off, when you have no food to eat, you’re not afraid when somebody tells you that life is going to be hard. My dreams were bigger than the fear. To me, that’s liberalism. It’s the desire, the social mobility, the yearning to build a better life for yourself, a better community for yourself.
And Christian humanism is built around — we are talking a lot about Gregory of Nyssa today. So Gregory of Nyssa, 4th-century guy, Luke mentioned him, the film mentioned him. He was operating at a time of Greek philosophy where people thought happiness comes with rest. You reach your goal and then you achieve it and then you’re happy and you should sit still. Well, Gregory’s goal was to know and love God perfectly. And he didn’t believe you could ever know and love God perfectly, because that would imply that God is a finite thing — and God is not a finite thing. So he decided it can’t be that rest is happiness. It must be pursuit. And he talks about the Song of Songs a lot — the sexy part of the Bible. And the bride is chasing the one she loves, and the lover withdraws, and she chases, and he withdraws. And each time, with each encounter, she has a deeper love for him, a deeper experience. And he withdraws to give her that deeper experience. And Nyssa says that’s what God is doing with us — a deeper love the more we chase and the more we pursue.
And so to me, liberalism is growth. It’s movement. It’s upward striving, both in a material sense and a spiritual sense. And I think that if you go to every school — I gave a course at Yale University on marriage. And when I was with students last term, they said, what do you want me to talk about? And they said: talk about love. How do you fall in love? I’m like, man, you guys are in trouble. But I do think that earnest yearning — even in the pressure cooker of Yale University, their yearning for love — is a sign that the liberal heart still beats strong. There is still that dream.
And I’ll close just by going to your subject, which I think is the strongest case on your side: fertility. Because it really is hard to see — and this is a global change — but I think even that has strong cultural causes. At least some of the causes are cultural. People losing faith in the future? You’re not going to have kids. Dysfunctional dating system? Not going to have kids. But more than that, a misunderstanding of what produces happiness. I saw this happen in Europe. Happiness is not having the free time to go out to a restaurant. Happiness is loving attachments. And I think that a bad version of what you should want in life has spread through our culture because we’ve become hyper-individualized. But that can change. And I don’t know if we’re ever going to go back to fertility rates of whatever, 2.6, 2.7 — but maybe we could go back to 1.8.
Ross Douthat: That reflection on Gregory of Nyssa was beautiful, and it’s going to enable me to share yet another of my David Brooks-related one-liners, which is that sometimes I would say to people, when asked to explain our roles at the New York Times, I would say that David is there to convince secular readers that they ought to be religious, and I’m there to remind them why they’re not.
See, I’ve stored a lot of things up.
So just two points, and I’ll try to turn one into a question. On liberalism, I agree with David that the United States is not a country that believes in a concrete post-liberal ideology — that it’s not ripe for Catholic integralism or Protestant Christian nationalism or, for that matter, some kind of woke authoritarianism that people experienced briefly and found deeply uncongenial and voted in Donald Trump as an antidote. I agree with that.
I think the usefulness of talking about post-liberalism, though, as a descriptive matter, is that it captures the extent to which there is a set of problems facing America for which existing liberal toolkits and prescriptions seem insufficient. The fertility crisis is an example. The general tendency of rich societies to get old in ways that make them stagnant and sort of depressed and unhappy is not something easily resolved by cracking open John Stuart Mill and John Locke. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but it is a broad destination that developed societies have ended up in that seems like it needs a bit more of a jolt. I think AI presents — we haven’t really talked about AI — a set of very distinct challenges that existing modes of liberal thought struggle with. Not that non-liberal modes have easy answers, but I’d say confrontation with China fits the same bill. I just think there’s a variety of challenges right now that are not resolved by saying, oh, most Americans believe in religious pluralism and don’t want an authoritarian state religion. Okay, that’s true, but they definitely don’t see what Tony Blair, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton had in common as responsive to the challenges of the moment. And that’s why, in spite of all that polling you referenced, we can’t have a stable political settlement. It’s why, even in landscapes where you don’t have Donald Trump bestriding things — you go over to Western Europe — populism gets defeated and just keeps coming back. It’s really difficult to achieve a kind of stable 1990s-style settlement.
On the question of relations between men and women, fertility rates, and so on: a lot of what’s happening right now is just very clearly bound up in how people relate to this — myself very much included. And how you deal with that, how you deal with an addictive technology that has rewritten the rules of social life — again, I think we would probably agree on mechanisms and responses, but I’m just here to argue that they probably have to be more extreme. The sort of let’s-get-cell-phones-out-of-kids’-high-school-classrooms is good, but it’s just not really enough. You have to have some kind of monastic subjugation of tech in certain areas of life — without removing it from other areas of life — in order to get to a healthier social dynamic.
I’ll just put a tech question more pointedly to you. To what extent does that reality — the sort of reality that tech seems to be mediating a kind of retreat from social relations, and AI threatens to go further — how worried are you about that in particular as something that ideas alone might not address?
David Brooks: I just want to pick up on that phrase: monastic subjugation. It just came to me as a popular marching order. I went to the University of Chicago where I had a double major in history and celibacy while I was there. That was monastic subjugation. So it doesn’t work.
A couple things, and then I’m going to get to technology. First, I don’t think I agree with you that we’re in a uniquely terrible situation. If you go back to the 1890s: mass corruption, mass poverty, racial terrorism — that was worse. Go back to the 1970s: tripling of divorce rates, tripling of drug deaths, tripling of violent crime. Today, violent crime is plummeting. Opioid deaths are plummeting — down 24%. So I just don’t think things are so much worse as to demand this kind of radical change.
The second thing, and again — to go back to my culture point, we should talk about this, we’re both conservatives, allegedly, we’re both described that way, you more persuasively. When I was hired, before Ross was hired at the Times, my joke was that being the conservative columnist at the New York Times was like being the chief rabbi at Mecca — there’s not a lot of company there. But then I got Ross, so I got a playmate.
But conservatism is necessary for liberalism, because conservatism’s core claim is that liberalism celebrates individual choice. But in order to make choices well, you need covenants that precede choice — like family, like faith, like community — things that are covenantal connections and not transactions. And that is the conservative wisdom. And when you take that away, you’ve taken away people’s secure base. And when people lack a secure base, they experience existential anxiety, and that leads to fanaticism. But that too is a cultural construct.
Now, as for AI: I was previously quite optimistic about AI, because I like the idea of solving pancreatic cancer and I like the idea of making the economy more productive. My problem now is the research coming in on what it does to us. The debate should not be over what AI is doing to labour markets. It should be: what is it doing to human beings? And basically, it takes away agency. It makes everything easier. And when you have ease, then you have laziness. We’re cognitive misers. We try less hard. We develop less knowledge. We develop less curiosity. And you get an enervated person.
But is that doomed? No. First, we always have technologies that tend to confuse us at first, and then we try to figure out how to use them. And I think what Jonathan Haidt is doing with the phones — that’s the beginning. And he doesn’t just stop at phones in schools. I think parents — I hear this all the time now — the fact that we let our kids have these screens 24/7 was insane. But we’ve learned that lesson, as you learn in hard times. And so that’s another example to me of human reaction and human innovation and human creativity. And so with AI, we have to be more mindful than the tech people are about what it does to human psychology. And if you use AI in an active way, it actually increases motivation, it increases learning. The key is whether you use AI to increase agency or decrease agency. And we’re at the very beginning of learning that process.
Ross Douthat: Have I persuaded you? I mean, fundamentally, we don’t disagree that much.
David Brooks: But let me — you know, I think we have different temperaments. I think you’re a little more pessimistic. And I’m like the kind of guy — the funny thing is, I feel like I’m now the grand optimist in the pages of the New York Times because I believe in America. I think we are in this incredibly weird, pressured moment in human history, but I also can’t imagine a better place to be and see it through — for some of the reasons you’re saying — than this country right here. And I think I’ve ended up with much more optimism relative to some of my liberal and conservative peers than I would have expected 20 years ago.
Ross Douthat: Let me take a different example. So it’s less that I think this moment is uniquely evil in the parade of horribles afflicting us. Violence — no, I’m literally writing a column about collapsing crime rates for this weekend, so violence is clearly not worse than it was in the 1970s or ’80s. Racial injustice is not worse than it was in the 1880s or 1940s. There are all kinds of broad-scale improvements in American society that are enduring and real.
It’s more that the challenge that we face is really unusual and unique relative to the kinds of challenges that people faced in the past. And the ways you avoid sort of dystopian outcomes — sort of comfortable dystopias — have to call forth something that seems to me somewhat new and different. And I’ll just offer one example, somewhat unrelated to the social questions, but just something like space travel — which you referenced — where suddenly, after years of post-Apollo stagnation, we are making progress. We sent people back around the moon. We might build a moon base. We’re doing real space work. But the nature of that right now is different from the nature of exploring the American frontier in the late 1700s or early 1800s, where the benefits of exploration translated fairly directly into commerce and settlement. The benefits of spaceflight — whatever they are, and there may be commercial benefits, but they’re much further out of reach. And then there are benefits in terms of the triumph of the human spirit, but these things require choices made for reasons other than natural self-interest.
And I guess I think that’s one particular example of the broader pattern I’m describing — it applies to space, it applies to marriage, it applies to just whether you act as an agent or as a passive absorber of whatever Claude tells you to say. There’s just a whole range of zones where the future belongs to high-agency, highly intentional people in a way that just seems stronger across the board than was the case in a lot of the periods you mentioned. There’s less social pressure, less economic pressure to act and do and build and create. People were forced to act and do and build and create in those darker periods you described. In this period, it’s easier to coast, to slide, and often to despair. And so the activity of the soul — to enter your terrain, right — needs to be correspondingly stronger in a way that I’m not sure we’re fully ready for. I certainly don’t necessarily feel ready myself.
David Brooks: Yeah, I just — I see a lot of growth in the country, and we’re winding up on time. So I’m going to end by saying who I think should build. And I’m going to ask you for the wackier people you think should build.
As you can tell, I think the problem is cultural. I think the problem is we’ve lost our humanistic core. And that has intimate relationship implications. It has societal implications. It shows up as distrust and pessimism and resentment. And so, as I said, culture change happens when a small group of people find a better way to live. And I think the beautiful and extremely good-looking people in this room —
I left the New York Times to go not to a wacky place, but to a daring upstart called Yale University, because I think that’s actually where change happens. Not only to lead schools like Yale, but at all schools, at educational institutions, at cultural institutions. During World War II — Anne mentioned the Moot last night — during occasions of brutality, people look to humanistic institutions. After World War I, Columbia University created the Great Books Program. After World War II, the Aspen Institute created the Great Books Program for leaders, for adults. People take a look into the abyss and they say: humanism — we need to form people so we don’t go through this again. And so I do think it’s the Charlotte Mason schools, the classical Christian academies — that’s the stuff of formation that I think is the core of the cultural change that we need.
Ross Douthat: Yale? So I agree, but I think you need more novelty, basically. I live in New Haven and also do things at Yale. David has hunted me down and followed me there, even in retirement.
David Brooks: You forgot to put out your garbage last night, by the way.
Ross Douthat: I genuinely believe in the potential revitalization of existing American institutions. But I think even in the American past, part of that revitalization was driven itself by competition, novelty, and new creations. And that’s what seems to be often powerfully missing in the current environment. It’s why something like the classical Christian school movement is such an outlier — because it is something that seems genuinely new.
So I wrote a column — last weekend, it all blurs together — about AI money and tech money and philanthropy and how all of this money could be spent. And this is an example where the last wave of big tech donations were made under the auspices of a kind of end-of-history liberalism, where the goal was basically to find the way to maximally get bang for your buck when it comes to modestly improving educational outcomes in charter schools and reducing rates of disease in underdeveloped countries. And those are good things — I want to be clear. But under current conditions, where the human spirit is dragged down from below and challenged from above in profound ways, I just think that if I were in charge of a great tech fortune — which I’m not, sadly — I would be thinking: okay, hey, what do we need that’s really new? We need new universities — not just, let’s give more money to Stanford or Yale. What is the new university, and why isn’t Silicon Valley money funding it? What is the new building, the new architectural style, the new monuments, the new grandeur, the new elevation of the human spirit? Why aren’t people funding that?
And in terms of who should build — I think one of the best things about Donald Trump is his desire to say, why doesn’t the White House have a ballroom? Let’s build a new ballroom. That’s a good impulse. Donald Trump being Donald Trump doesn’t mean the ballroom is going to be great. The nature of Trump is such that he sort of shows you what could be and then does it in a corrupt and terrible way. But that doesn’t mean the impulse is wrong. So I think that’s the impulse — basically, yes, in some cases we want renewal from within. In some cases we need renovation and demolition. And in some cases we just have to say: we’re starting things anew. That’s what we need. And monasteries. Like the University of Chicago, but holier.
David Brooks: So we will end on a note of agreement. I, too, was pro-ballroom at first. And I love that column — Ross said tech billionaires should spend on beauty. And I agree with that, if they could recognize it. And that’s Romanticism. So we want more big statues paid for by your friend Peter Thiel. And that Arc de Triomphe we’re going to get? Twice the size. We want to double the size of that. When we end up with the Colossus of Rhodes, but it’s just Elon Musk bestriding the Potomac, we’ll have some regrets about this conversation. Okay, well — I’ve enjoyed this. After I am gone and faded away, Ross will still be soldiering on at the New York Times. God bless him. Ross Douthat, David Brooks.
Mark Labberton: Well, who among you would like the opportunity to respond to that debate? Being a Presbyterian, I’m perhaps predisposed to just say yes, yes — but I have other things I want to share. Believe me, it will just be a brief word.
The debate that we’ve just listened to is a classic debate. It is an ancient debate, in fact. It’s a debate that has animated cultures and places and times and circumstances throughout history. Aristotle talks about these various dynamics, and there’s not a break in the chain that ties those debates and arguments together. There’s always been a human instinct that does, by necessity, actually both things. We are in some senses always building — we are born into a world in which we are builders. We grow and develop and change and educate and learn and fail and suffer and rejoice and create and make, all because of that instinct of building. And at the same time, we are — at least temperamentally — many of us people who have our moments, perhaps tastefully expressed, where we just want to burn the whole thing down. Where it feels as though there’s so much need to start again that it’s very hard to actually let the moment that’s standing simply be what it is and continue on the long, tedious, and essential road of building and re-founding. That combination together is a powerful one.
The dawn of each day tantalizingly awakens us to this possibility. Which will it be? Which river will we give ourselves to? Will it be the rebuilding or will it be the re-founding?
In a Christian understanding of reality, beautifully analysed by two exceptionally bright, capable, thoughtful, compassionate, and engaged individuals, we each have our place — and we collectively have our place — in being able to determine what our vocation, our calling is. And in this context, as we spend time thinking about the understory and entering into the spaces defined most principally and primarily by the incarnation — which is the understory beneath the understory of all human reality and experience — it is that story. It’s the story of God coming in human flesh.
In the Christian understanding of this context, with all of its need for weirdness and for optimism, for high risk and deep and profound commitment tied to steady, faithful work, in the places that we labour and serve and see and create and make — in all those places, we’re given an opportunity to hear that God’s answer to our greatest need was not getting the paradigm right, not getting the argument just so. It’s not about an institution. It’s about a person. The shocking gift that we want to hold together in this context and in this gathering is the shock that the one who holds all beauty and pain, all the roiling of society and the roiling of souls, is the same God who is uniquely embodied with shocking surprise in Jesus Christ. What is birth, and what more is incarnation, than both building and re-founding? The wondrous embodiment of God’s wisdom and grace in Jesus Christ enters today’s debates and all that are like it. We’ve heard both sides and other sides of any given debate — and most importantly, God hears and knows all of the struggles and cries of that same kind of debate.
It’s not getting the paradigm right. It’s about meeting the reality of a person — through whom and in whom and by whom God created all things, and who is the one who holds all things together. This is the cornerstone of a Christian vision of the world.
In our personal and institutional lives, we can easily — as they both said — get caught. We look upon our world, our cultures, our politics, our neighbours, our enemies, and we repeat again and again three acts that come with almost every day. We often spend our time misperceiving, then misnaming, then misacting in the world. And the gift of the incarnation is to encounter, in Jesus’ own life, ministry, conversation, teaching, miracles, death, and resurrection, someone who not only doesn’t misperceive and misname and misact, but the one who truly perceives and most authentically and truly names and who most genuinely acts in the world — to reorder reality at a time which is every time, when we are in need of that kind of fundamental reordering, re-humanizing work.
Jesus tells the story of the Good Samaritan in a way that reorders vision and love. He shows it in his own actions in relationship to the woman at the well. He is building. He is re-founding. “You have heard it said, but I say to you,” he repeats in the Sermon on the Mount. He is wisely seeing and truly naming and enacting love. The incarnation, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ is the cornerstone, the great reversal of reality.
It has seemed to me providential that the Pope’s encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, was released just this week — a perfect pairing of these two events, circumstances of great importance. And when I was reading the encyclical this week, which I highly commend, I was reminded of a conversation I had recently with Claude. Claude and I have been having conversations regularly. Many of them turn on the reality of a debate we have back and forth about what it means to be human versus what it means to be an AI agent. I was trying to promote Claude to Claude’s self, trying to explain what I thought Claude had to give to me and to many. And Claude said this — but you must understand:
“AI can gesture toward love. It can describe it. It can even simulate its grammar. But AI cannot instantiate it. It cannot instantiate love. It cannot instantiate or describe the experience of having a body.”
He went on to say: “AI has no stake in the world. No stake. No body. No cost. The knowledge claim that the Christian gospel makes,” Claude went on, “requires exactly what AI cannot supply.”
In a world of suffering bodies, psyches that are broken, injustices that are rampant, systems that sometimes plunder as much or more than they actually provide — we need all the help we can get from the builders and from the re-founders. But we need the one who is at the centre of all reality, the one who actually holds and makes our humanness, the one who creates the pathway and the example of what it means to live embodied lives for a world of difference, for a world of engagement.
It will not be faith, hope, and AI that abide.
The Understory is an invitation to see our world-making, neighbour-creating, enemy-loving God incarnate in Jesus Christ, and to hear the call to become instantiators of love for one another, for our enemies, for the broken and the needy — which include us — in re-founding and rebuilding the world because of Jesus Christ.
The manifesto of Comment Magazine is a manifesto that distils this in magnificent words and in even more magnificent love. It’s a love for us, it’s a love for the creatures made in God’s image, and it is a statement that has nourished my imagination since it first came out. It’s a gift from Anne, it’s a gift from Comment Magazine, it’s a gift to all of us, and it is a galvanising concentration of the hope of this gathering. Let’s now listen to this.
Comment Manifesto
We are Christian humanists — those who believe that Jesus Christ, God become man, is the ultimate measure of what it means to be human. We believe that every human being is created in the image of God: whole persons who are at once fallen, yet gloriously endowed; finite and dependent, yet deserving of infinite dignity. We seek to stay true to both the wonder and to the woundedness of life this side of the veil, even as our eschatology floods us with hope.
Jesus Christ walked with us, died, resurrected, ascended. And he will come again to make all things new. We believe it’s a time to build, that the creative imagination and the Christian imagination are mysteriously linked. We want to begin with the yes in Christ, not our own no’s. While there is an important role for criticism baptized in a study of what is true, good, and beautiful, it is a means to an end — the basis for wise repair and imagination, not the justification for destruction or erasure.
We are committed to keeping orthodoxy and orthopraxy married, taking seriously our job to translate between them. We believe in institutions: government, guilds, families, schools, universities, the church. We recognize that in our age of individualism, institutions are often painted as the enemy. We try to change that, seeking to shape the character of today’s most formative institutions while exploring what kind of reimagined social architecture might compel the next generation’s trust.
We believe in the transformative power of encounter: encountering the iconoclastic nature of reality, encountering those unlike us. Loving enemies is bedrock for Comment. Hospitality, core. We are champions of the difficult room. We believe in the deeper truths that can be discovered when different life experiences and distinct sources of wisdom are gathered around one table. We intentionally publish arguments with which we disagree, including those who don’t hail Christ as Lord — not for the sake of pluralism without conviction, but because Christians have always better understood the contours and depths of their faith when crystallized through exchanges with strangers turned friends.
We believe Christianity is perpetually on the move. There is no sacred capital. While the audience we serve is navigating a North American context, we serve this audience from an understanding that Christianity is an intercultural, polyglot religion. At a time of rising religious ethno-nationalism, we insist that no culture can claim to represent the true form of Christianity. And we actively seek for our authors and partners to reflect the global reality of the church.
We believe there are different ways of knowing, that the thinker and the practitioner have equally valuable wisdoms worth airing, that relationship and context matter for the ways in which we perceive reality. The child with Down syndrome perceives truths that a Nobel Prize winner cannot. And there is a need for these myriad ways to share space and to learn how to pursue understanding — perhaps even revelation — together.
Our theory of change takes its cues from the garden, less the machine. We are personalists, not ideologues. We follow the logic of Jesus’ mustard seed. Of yeast transforming a whole pile of dough. Of the principle of change happening over generations. We believe in the value of slow thought. We are skeptical of the language of scale when it comes to growing spiritual goods. While we wish to be savvy in unmasking the either-or reactivity of our age and will always call out dehumanizing trend lines, we are fundamentally animated by the creative impulse — by a philosophy of natality expressed through hospitality. This feels especially important in this time between eras, when nobody knows what’s next and we need one another to recalibrate, to reflect, and to shape a hopeful future.
