Berkley Center

Passionate responses to David Brook’s op-ed "If It Feels Right..." flooded the blogosphere almost immediately after its online appearance. Some negated his premises out right, challenging Smith’s work and Brooks’ application directly, while others took a more nuanced critique of his melancholy approach. Still others joined Brooks in decrying the lost morality of a generation. Yet for the great diversity of response, is anything of this new? Has the post-modernism movement and its tendency toward individualism and relativism fundamentally changed the way this particular generation understands morality? For some the answer is definitively, yes. Young Americans operate within new social structures and are grounded in new norms, especially a propensity for relativism.

Millennials, regardless of their faith tradition or lack thereof, wrestle with the authority of traditional external sources of morality. As seen in the response to Brooks, the answer for many is the rejection of broad moral frameworks, not in exchange for immorality, but personal morality. In their eyes, this alternative is not moral decay, but progress.

On September 15th the New York Times published a small collection of Letters to the Editors, responding to Brooks. Among them was Valarie Kaur, director of Groundswell, a social action initiative of Auburn Seminary. She contends that the “the researchers got it wrong. It’s not that we don’t have a shared vocabulary to address moral issues — we just don’t have theirs.” She continues to suggest that the absolutism of our forefathers has done unspeakable damage to society and that this generation has made significant social progress. For men and women like Kaur, moral individualism, which she refers to as open mindedness, is something to be aspired to in a natural moral progression. What David Brooks has called depressing, she sees as a positive advancement, and she is not alone.

Dr David Nowell, blogging for Psychology Today, calls himself an “advocate for the wisdom of the body,” citing that when people make moral choices in line with their social structures, but against their body, they are bound for frustration. According to Nowell, personal happiness plays an important role in moral decision-making. He claims that man is programmed in body and neurology for prosocial behavior, that the body is not purely hedonistic but seeks meaning and relationships. The trend Brooks terms as “emotivism” may be a societal recognition of the value of the body as a moral guide. He sees young people as leading a charge for a change in the way the world understands human intuition. Nonetheless, Nowell does not go as far as to suggest that in listening to our bodies, we should reject all forms of collective moral authority. The human experience is rich and wisdom comes from many places. It is natural to crave community-based input.

In the University of North Carolina’s student newspaper The Tar Heal, Vera Parra challenges Brook’s conclusion that as more young people turn from traditional religious institutions, they must forgo a collective experience in working out their ethical code. In essence, moral individualism need not be constructed in isolation; Parra advocates for the creation of secular communities for moral processing. The defining factor of such a moral system is respect for a person's right and ability to develop a personal moral intuition in whatever way he or she chooses.

In asserting the value of moral individualism, these Millennials are in collective agreement with David White of Ethics and Economics who contends that “morality doesn’t have to come from society in order to focus on society.” They argue passionately against Brooks that this new way of producing morality will not only not led to the decay of American society, but promote its flourishing in a way absolutism never could.