David Brooks

That's just the way things are.

And along came a group called the Clapham sect, who were basically evangelicals.

And they said, no, that is not going to be acceptable behavior anymore.

So they reset the norms of what acceptable behavior was going to be.

They're sort of the beginnings of Victorian morality.

And as part of that, they said, we have such respect for human dignity.

We're going to campaign against the slave trade.

And so what Himmelfarb describes is a period of moral improvement for a whole society.

The whole society, we all live on the cultural capital of centuries gone by.

And if we tear away at that capital, then we're lost in the world Stephen Miller talked about last week, which is a war of all against all, where force is the only thing that matters.

A shared morality does not matter.

And so I think they give us the tools to think about how do we reconstruct a social order so we can trust one another once again and so we can treat each other decently once again.

Yeah, you're really cheering me up.

So glad I came on the podcast.

No, I'm kidding.

So you and I got out of school at about the same time and entered our business at the same time.

And at that time, I was working at National Review in the mid 80s, and another group of people came out of school at the same time.

And I came out of the University of Chicago, you came out of a fancier school back east, but there were a group of students from Dartmouth.

I think you meant easier school, but you're being polite.

Easier, yeah.