David Brooks

And so we've rendered generations left, right, and center morally inarticulate.

And so they just don't have the language to process why electing a guy like Trump, why that might be wrong, why that might be a foolish thing to do, or even to process their own moral formation.

If you don't have words like sin, redemption, grace, it's really hard to understand your own inner environment.

And it's very hard to make moral judgments about others.

And so I think there's been a loss of moral knowledge.

And that explains why people look at Trump and think, eh, whatever.

Well, our founding fathers took a look at human beings and said, these people are kind of amazing and wonderful, but they're really selfish assholes a lot of the time.

And if we're going to build a democracy out of these people, we have to do moral formation.

And moral formation is a fancy word for a scene I once saw in the first season of Ted Lasso.

He's asked, what's your goal for your football team, FC Richmond?

And he says, I don't need to win champions.

I just want to help these young people become better versions of themselves on and off the field.

That's a good definition of moral formation.

And it used to be every school, including public high schools, colleges, they thought our primary job is to turn out morally foreign people.

I read about a schoolmaster who said, our job is to turn out graduates who are acceptable at a dance, invaluable at a shipwreck.

The kind of people you can count on when times are done.

And one of my heroes was a woman named Frances Perkins.

It was Mount Holyoke class of 1905.

And her worst subject was biology.

So they made her major in biology.