What if you don't *have* a village?

Emma Stone in Easy A (Will Gluck, 2010).

Verbatim David Brooks, "The Cost of Relativism", New York Times, March 10 2015:

People sometimes wonder why I’ve taken this column in a spiritual and moral direction of late. It’s in part because we won’t have social repair unless we are more morally articulate, unless we have clearer definitions of how we should be behaving at all levels.

History is full of examples of moral revival, when social chaos was reversed, when behavior was tightened and norms reasserted. It happened in England in the 1830s and in the U.S. amid economic stress in the 1930s. It happens through organic communal effort, with voices from everywhere saying gently: This we praise. This we don’t.

I've never spent much time wondering why, because the answer seems to me obvious. It's mainly because there are two things you can do about the problems of the United States, you can repair them or you can talk about the bad people who are to blame, and repairing them costs money, as we learned "in the US amid economic stress in the 1930s", whereas complaining is free. And for the opinionist it's pretty much the same thing: finding out what needs to be done is a lot of work, whereas if it's simply the bad qualities of poor people, for example, that make them poor, you can whip out that column almost effortlessly, leaving plenty of time for your many important TV appearances, university gigs, and other events where you can deploy your improvisational skills and not have to prepare at all.

As to England in the 1830s, I can't be sure what he thinks he's talking about, but here is how one not entirely Marxist website summarizes the effects of the Poor Law reform of 1834:

Outdoor relief - the financial support formerly given to the able-bodied - was no longer to be available to them so as to compel them to work. Outside assistance was widely available to the sick and elderly. But in many areas assistance was only given within the confines of the workhouse where the regime was deliberately harsh and often cruel.

The new Act was pioneering in introducing a role for central government in the care of the poor, and remained in force throughout the Victorian age. But, as social commentators remarked, the treatment of genuine hardship caused by economic circumstances beyond the control of the individual had been ignored. By the 1880s, greater understanding of poverty and its complex links with economic conditions (such as low pay and unemployment) slowly began to change opinion in Parliament.

The good side, and the aspect of the reform that has gone on for nearly two centuries, was the expanded role of government in helping people cope with economic distress. The bad side was that it was harsh, judgmental, and stingy, based on a refusal to understand that poverty was not a consequence of reprehensible individuals refusing to work but of the wider economic situation punishing them for not belonging to a higher class, digging a hole it would take the society half a century to start climbing out of.

One of those social commentators was the great novelist Charles Dickens, whose books Brooks proudly says he's unable to read, who made his career from Oliver Twist (published 1837-39 as an explicit attack on the 1834 act) until his death in 1870 in a devastating critique of England's failure to deal with its social problems in the 1830s and 1840s. Thanks to Dickens, almost everybody knows that the Poor Law reform was a ghastly failure, even though conservatives (and occasionally their enablers like President Bill Clinton at the end of the 1990s) keep bringing up the same poor-bashing, tax-cutting proposals under different names.

Brooks's reading difficulties play a more direct role in today's column, drawing its material from Robert Putnam's new book, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis, which organizes its argument around the differences between the graduating class of 1959 and the present day in his home town of Port Clinton, Ohio. Brooks confines his reading to the anecdotes, focusing on three unhappy modern kids, notes that they are brought up by single mothers, and concludes that their families' immorality is the cause of their poverty, adding that "we"—the Times readers who rule the world?—are also responsible. Because we don't help? No, because we aren't judgmental enough.

These norms weren’t destroyed because of people with bad values. They were destroyed by a plague of nonjudgmentalism, which refused to assert that one way of behaving was better than another. People got out of the habit of setting standards or understanding how they were set.

If he'd taken a look at the hard bits, with numbers in them, he'd have seen that Putnam offers some serious analysis of the causes of poverty—and unmarried momhood—in Port Clinton: it comes from the economic collapse of the region in the age of Reaganomics.

Yes, social norms eroded, but it wasn't because people weren't criticizing the single mothers enough. It was because the bottom was taken out from under them, and there was nobody left in a position to help them lift themselves up. Men in Port Clinton couldn't afford to be decent fathers because they couldn't find work; if they were lucky they escaped out of town and managed to send home child support checks. (From what I remember of the 1970s, where I thankfully managed to avoid impregnating anybody I wasn't married to, I think, it seems to me the anti-abortion movement also played a role in the spread of single parenthood, telling girls Jesus would prefer them to have that baby instead of going to college, but it was certainly happening among the unchurched hippies as well; their kids were brought up pretty attentively, though.) Inequality is the cause of increasing inequality in a dangerous feedback loop.

Communitarian as he is (his best-known book is the 2000 lament Bowling Alone), Putnam doesn't just think of remedies to be administered by government, but asks that something be done to rebuild the lost network of mentorship and counsel that existed in 1959—which doesn't mean scolding the poor for not going to church, but rather asking church to be there for them, and concerned individuals outside the churches, and a school system that needs to be oriented to repairing the social structure, not punishing students and their teachers for lousy test scores: see the excellent commentary in Education Week:

The wealthiest quarter of students were two to three times more likely than students from the poorest 25 percent of families to have an adult mentor outside of the family. Mr. Putnam argued these informal relationships with adults—particularly adults outside the students' economic class—are crucial to helping students find jobs, navigate the college application process, and create a support network.

Brooks doesn't say shit about volunteering, he's all about "gently" withholding praise.

Putnam titles his book Our Kids, referring obliquely back to Hillary Clinton from when she used to be a liberal (you can always try that again, Hillary!) and It Takes a Village, to remind us that poor children are everybody's children, and the responsibility of the community as a whole. If you don't have a village, you've got to build one!

Brooks misappropriates this large and important work to announce the separation between us good people and those bad ones and advise us to cluck our tongues "gently" in disgust at their apparent inability to delay gratification and control their lusts—to basically kick them out of the community, with those scarlet letters on their chests.

And he does it in the name of asserting his claim that he's no longer just another political hack but now a "spiritual and moral" authority. It's really shameful. I can't even joke about him today.

Updates

Great note by Kilgore on Putnam's book agrees with my views on self-perpetuating inequality and on our daily Brooks (except he dismisses Brooks in one sentence, which is probably a bit more than it deserves in the great scheme of things). Edroso took an inspiring turn and introduced a wondrous Jules Feiffer bit. Driftglass collects some drunk tweets in Brooksy's honor by self-denominated truthtellers like Niall Ferguson and Laura Ingraham, sort of welcoming him back because they were afraid he wasn't really conservative any more. Drifty is having a bad time employmentwise; you could think about making a donation.

Thursday 3/12:
Apparently one of his most offensive pieces ever out continues to reverberate in the wider world of people who professionally engage in these issues, as it is taken up by Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig at the New Republic and thence to Professor Krugman himself (though unless you clicked his link, as Lemieux did, you'd never know Brooks had anything to do with it).