David Brooks on Discovering Value

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: On the other side, of course, your book is full of really incredible quotes and thoughts. And you are a leading conservative thinker in the United States. So, you do actually hold a very important position. And I’m sure that you’re going to tell me that, you know, conservatism that you — you know, you follow is very different to the one that’s being practiced now. This is your first book under the Trump administration and you have said, and you partly — you paraphrase T.S. Eliot, you know, writing about the chief illusion of modern politics being the belief that you can build a system so perfect that the people in it do not have to be good. I was really struck by that, because obviously, America is built on this idea of exceptionalism. And some say that that may have been why there was this slowness to react to this enemy coronavirus. That, oh, we were so exceptional that somehow, miraculously, we would beat it. But just build on that. That people don’t have to be good, despite, you know, the system.

DAVID BROOKS, COLUMNIST, THE NEW YORK TIMES: I think one of the things we’ve done terribly is pass down a moral vocabulary from one generation to another of what is grace, what is sin, what is good, what is evil. And I do think — one of the things I try to tell people, whether they’re believers or not believers, that I don’t ask you to believe in God or not, that’s not my department, but I ask you to believe that you have a soul. That there’s some piece of you that has no shape, size, color or weight but gives you infinite value and dignity. And that slavery is wrong because it’s an attempt to try to obliterate a soul. Sexual assault is wrong, it’s an insult to a human soul. And once you lose the concept of the soul, you lose the concept of the dignity of each human being. And in any moral situation, if you treat the other person as if you have an infinite soul, you’ll probably treat them well. And one reason that I could never sign up for Donald Trump is because I don’t think he sees other people. I think he only sees them as they regard him and whether they’re good for him or bad for him. And so he’s capable of these contemptible behaviors. He just accused Joe Scarborough, friends of ours, of some possible shady murder, with no evidence, torturing the family of a young woman who died 19 years ago. And so, to me, morality is upstream from politics. So, whatever policies Trump supports or do not support should be immaterial, because character is just more important. And I think we see the unveiling of that every day. And the conservatism that I grew up with was the conservative of Edmund Burke and Alexander Hamilton and people like that, but, as you anticipate, it’s not what I see called conservatism these days.