One item today. A long piece from David Brooks, trying to understand how we got here, given history.
The Atlantic, David Books, 8 Jul 2025: Why Do So Many People Think That Trump Is Good?, subtitled “The work of the moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre helps illuminate some central questions of our time.” [gift link]
He begins:
There’s a question that’s been bugging me for nearly a decade. How is it that half of America looks at Donald Trump and doesn’t find him morally repellent? He lies, cheats, steals, betrays, and behaves cruelly and corruptly, and more than 70 million Americans find him, at the very least, morally acceptable. Some even see him as heroic, admirable, and wonderful. What has brought us to this state of moral numbness?
I’m going to tell you a story that represents my best explanation for how America has fallen into this depressing condition. It’s a story that draws heavily on the thinking of Alasdair MacIntyre, the great moral philosopher, who died in May at age 94. It’s a story that tries to explain how Western culture evolved to the point where millions of us—and not just Republicans and Trump supporters—have been left unable to make basic moral judgments.
As usual I’m blogging this as I read it. So I’ll pause here to recall the points of my own provisional theory of everything: Humanity, and human nature, evolved over millions of years of tribal life; it evolved to survive, not to accurately understand the real world; as humanity has expanded around the globe, it developed new methods of society and government to deal with larger and larger groups; the pinnacles of these new methods were products of the Enlightenment, including the US Constitution, which were specifically designed to circumvent the worst tendencies of tribal human nature.
But — that human nature hasn’t basically changed, not in the few thousand years that civilization has expanded. So we are left with many people, especially the uneducated or who have no education beyond religion, who live by tribal instincts, the certainty that other tribes or races are evil or even subhuman, and the distrust of other people telling them what to do that would controvert their instincts; and on the other hand, a minority perhaps approaching half of people who understand, partly through altruistic instinct but also through education and experience of the world outside their local communities, how to get along with people different from themselves, and the necessity of cooperation among large groups of people to solve problems that cannot be solved by each tribe, community, state, or nation.
Now, of course, the US is being dominated by the former of those groups, people who demonize people who are non-white or non-Christian, people who deny that complex problems exist, people who deny that scientific investigation and methods can solve such problems.
With this in mind, let’s see where Brooks goes.
The story begins a long time ago. Go back to some ancient city—say, Athens in the age of Aristotle. In that city, the question “How do you define the purpose of your life?” would make no sense. Finding your life’s purpose was not an individual choice. Rather, people grew up within a dense network of family, tribe, city, and nation. They inherited from these entities a variety of duties, responsibilities, and obligations. They also inherited a social role, serving the people around them as soldiers, farmers, merchants, mothers, teachers.
OK, I’ll grant this. My notion of ‘tribe’ precedes this, but it was probably true throughout most of human history that people grew up in a certain social setting that they could not escape. Rather, people had obligations to carry out their social roles, as best they could. And until just the past century, people did not travel much, or encounter other cultures (or races).
Long piece, but I will quote this central observation, which I’m not sure I entirely agree with.
Fast-forward from ancient Athens a thousand-plus years to the Middle Ages. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam changed the standards for what constituted human excellence, placing more value on compassion and humility, but people still shared a few of the old assumptions. Individuals didn’t choose their own morality—there was an essential moral order to the universe. Neither did they choose their individual life’s purpose. That, too, was woven into the good of their community—to serve society in some role, to pass down their way of life, to obey divine law.
Then came the 17th-century wars of religion, and the rivers of blood they produced. Revulsion toward all that contributed to the Enlightenment, with its disenchantment with religion and the valorization of reason. Enlightenment thinkers said: We can’t keep killing one another over whose morality is right. Let’s privatize morality. People can come up with their own values, and we will learn to live with that diversity.
Crudely put, the Enlightenment took away the primacy of the community and replaced it with the primacy of the autonomous individual. It created neutral public systems such as democracy, law, and free speech to give individuals a spacious civil order within which they could figure their own life. Common morality, if it existed at all, was based on reason, not religious dogmatism, and devotion to that common order was voluntary. Utilitarianism was one such attempt at creating this kind of rational moral system—do the thing that will give people pleasure; don’t do the thing that will cause others pain.
Um, no… the problem was that all these communities around the world had different ideas about morality, and fought wars over them. The Enlightenment offered a way to perceive a common ground in reality. If that set intuitive human morality adrift, so be it, but that’s not the problem Brooks is addressing.
Skipping to the very end:
Recovering from the moral scourge of Trumpism means restoring the vocabulary that people can use to talk coherently about their moral lives, and distinguish a person with character from a person without it.
We don’t need to entirely reject the Enlightenment project, but we probably need to recalibrate the culture so that people are more willing to sacrifice some freedom of autonomy for the sake of the larger community. We need to offer the coming generations an education in morals as rigorous as their technical and career education. As the ancients understood, this involves the formation of the heart and the will as much as the formation of the rational mind.
As with much by Brooks, I find this wiffly-waffly. He realizes there’s a problem, in a sense, and has some vague ideas about a solution. But he has no insight from science to help him. He has no evolutionary perspective. At the same time, I don’t have a solution either except: education about the reality of the world. Which is an impossible task, for everyone on the globe.
