In his latest column expounding the themes of his new book, David Brooks reflects on how naked our public square has become. “As late as 50 years ago,” he writes, “Americans could consult lofty authority figures to help them answer” the timeless questions of right and wrong, good and evil. But “all of that went away over the past generation or two”; today, “intellectuals are given less authority and are more specialized. They write more for each other and are less likely to volley moral systems onto the public stage.”
To exemplify what we’ve lost, Brooks invokes first and foremost the last century’s most famous public theologian: “Reinhold Niebuhr was on the cover of Time magazine.”
Brooks only hints at where the fault for the narrowing of political discourse lies. Perhaps we should blame public intellectuals themselves, for eschewing questions of morality. Or perhaps should blame the public, for not demanding more theological content in their weekly issue of Time
But some fault must also lie with mainstream publications, which seem all too uninterested in pursuing such thinkers and themes in our newspapers and magazines.
Time‘s cover story on Niebuhr didn’t write itself, after all. It was written by Whittaker Chambers, just months before he was first called to testify before the House Committee to investigate Un-American Activities. (Testimony which in turn set into motion the course of events that would ultimately make him famous but cost him his career at Time.)
Indeed, Chambers’s acts as a witness against Communism today overshadow his luminous writings at Time, where he often turned to matters of life and faith. Memorializing Chambers years after his death, William Buckley called attention to Chambers’s peerless prose:
Buckley was quoting Chambers’s essay, “In Egypt Land,” published in 1946 in Time (and republished in Terry Teachout’s invaluable collection of Chambers’s journalism, Ghosts on the Roof). But Chambers’s piece on Niehbuhr, titled “Faith for a Lenten Age,” is at least as significant.
Indeed, Chambers’s “Faith for a Lenten Age” is at least as relevant today, speaking directly to the concerns that Brooks speaks to today:
… Under the bland influence of the idea of progress, man, supposing himself more & more to be the measure of all things, achieved a singularly easy conscience and an almost hermetically smug optimism. The idea that man is sinful and needs redemption was subtly changed into the idea that man is by nature good and hence capable of indefinite perfectibility. This perfectibility is being achieved through technology, science, politics, social reform, education. Man is essentially good, says 20th Century liberalism, because he is rational, and his rationality is (if the speaker happens to be a liberal Protestant) divine, or (if he happens to be religiously unattached) at least benign. Thus the reason-defying paradoxes of Christian faith are happily bypassed.
… Against the easy conscience, Dr. Niebuhr asserted: man is by the nature of his creation sinful; at the height of man’s perfection there is always the possibility of evil. Against easy optimism, he asserted that life is inevitably tragic. Says Niebuhr: “Mankind is living in a Lenten age.”
… Reinhold Niebuhr’s new orthodoxy is the oldtime religion put through the intellectual wringer. It is a re-examination of orthodoxy for an age dominated by such trends as rationalism, liberalism, Marxism, fascism, idealism and the idea of progress.
No mainstream journalist writes like this anymore. But who in the mainstream press even writes about these thinkers or thoughts anymore — other than perhaps Brooks (who knows his Chambers) and his colleague Ross Douthat?
Maybe the mainstream press’s interest in morality and moral thinkers has been subsumed within the center-left’s implicitly moralistic approach to social issues, as Jody Bottum suggests.
But whatever their reason, mainstream journalists have simply lost the ability to speak in these terms. Instead, they prize a language of fact over a language of values, even when the task of converting a debate of values into a debate of “facts” leads them to beclown themselves in the process.
Chambers, like Niebuhr, understood that not every policy debate can be reduced to a question of “science” or “fact.” At a time when technocratic policymakers work ever more aggressively to unilaterally decide so many matters for us, it is a shame that we lack Niehburs to expose the moral questions underlying those policies. And it is a shame the mainstream press lacks the Chambers to bring such a thinkers and thoughts to our attention.
