The trouble with kids these days, writes New York Times columnist David Brooks, is that they convert "moral... questions about how to be" into "analytic questions about what to do." Their mistake is to think that if "you are doing the sort of work that Bono celebrates, then you must be a good person." They're content to become utilitarians, pragmatists, problem-solvers; they're going into community service, fighting poverty and ending disease as if those were answers to figuring out, "Around what ultimate purpose should your life revolve?" But, says Brooks, "You can devote your life to community service and be a schmuck."
It's not just kids. "Many people today," he sighs, "have not been given vocabularies to talk about what virtue is, what character consists of, and in which way excellence lies." We're unprepared to address moral questions in moral terms. Knowing how to "structure your soul" to contend with "greed, frustration and failure," Brooks concludes a recent column called "The Service Patch," "requires fewer Excel spreadsheets, more Dostoyevsky and the Book of Job."
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