David Brooks, Spiritual Stripper

Lon Chaney as Alonzo the Armless and Joan Crawford as the object of his affections in Todd Browning's The Unknown (1927). Via The Last Drive-In.

Shorter David Brooks, What is your purpose?", New York Times, May 5 2015:

Once upon a time, on or about 50 years ago, if you were a reflective person wondering what was your purpose in life, or where to get a moral compass enabling you to aim yourself at virtuous North and avoid all those deviant directions such as South, East, Southeast, South by Southeast, and so on, or what was a good way to go about feeling fulfillment and deep joy, a swift and inexpensive remedy was easily available; all you had to do was consult one of those lofty authority figures such as John Dewey, who had only been dead for 13 years at the time. Now these resources have become extinct in the ongoing crisis of the moral ecology. Public debate is undermoralized. Intellectual prestige has drifted away from theologians. Many feel overwhelmed by a hunger to live meaningfully. What are the right questions to ask, the right vocabulary to use, the right place to look? Are there even any answers at all? Asking for a friend.

Then Sartre fell under the baleful influence of Charles Marx.

One of the poignant things about today's column is how all the philosophers and theologians who used to be able to tell you the meaning of life back in the day are liberals and left radicals, just like most of the purposeful people Brooksy examined on the road to Character (an island in the Dodecanese noted for its fragrant, thyme-and-lavender goat meat and vigorous dancing): Frances Perkins, Dorothy Day, George Eliot, A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin (even his token generals, Marshall and Eisenhower, were hardly conservatives). Harry Emerson Fosdick, Dr. Martin Luther King's favorite preacher, was a ferocious liberal, the scourge of the fundamentalists of his time. Rabbi Heschel, with his deep commitment to interfaith dialogue, is often accused of being nothing but a relativist. The conservative voices he'd like to hear are all on about maximizing profits. The only object in their moral horizon is a fetus, and Brooks doesn't care about that any more than you or I do.

I suppose the most powerful moral voices of our time, from John Rawls to Francis I (Obama too, on the rare occasions when he's in form) and William Barber (thanks for reminding me, Drifty), are more explicitly collectivist, always addressing the congregation rather than the single member, because it takes a whole society to lend a meaning to the individual, and that's why poor Brooks can't hear them. He's perking his little ears up for a word from the kind Fosdickian daddy who notices how special he is, to drive away the fearsome angry Augustinian, or Johnsonian, or Burkean daddy who haunts his dreams.

But the idea that succor for the soul just belongs to an earlier era, like the Automat, something that you used to be able to find by putting in your nickel and that now no longer exists, is too goofy. It was always work. Read your Augustine! Oh, wait.

I don't see any reason, as you see, to doubt the reality of his spiritual distress. He's not boasting about it, he's trying to hide it behind his usual third person curtain. It's funny how he ends up with a plea for column prompts, asking others to unveil their struggles while he continues to keep his own under wraps:

I thought I’d do my part by asking readers to send me their answers to the following questions: Do you think you have found the purpose to your life, professional or otherwise? If so, how did you find it? Was there a person, experience or book or sermon that decisively helped you get there?

If you have answers to these questions, go the website for my book, “The Road to Character,” click on First Steps and send in your response. We’ll share as many as we can on the site’s blog called The Conversation, and I’ll write a column or two reporting on what I’ve learned about how people find purpose these days.

Brooks has been doing a kind of spiritual striptease for the past ten or fifteen years, and so far he's barely loosened the fingers on one elbow-length glove. I'm guessing the goodies underneath are just not that hot.