Reintroducing norms will require, first, a moral vocabulary. These norms weren’t destroyed because of people with bad values. They were destroyed by a plague of nonjudgmentalism, which refused to assert that one way of behaving was better than another. People got out of the habit of setting standards or understanding how they were set.
Next it will require holding people responsible. People born into the most chaotic situations can still be asked the same questions: Are you living for short-term pleasure or long-term good? Are you living for yourself or for your children? Do you have the freedom of self-control or are you in bondage to your desires?
Next it will require holding everybody responsible. America is obviously not a country in which the less educated are behaving irresponsibly and the more educated are beacons of virtue. America is a country in which privileged people suffer from their own characteristic forms of self-indulgence: the tendency to self-segregate, the comprehensive failures of leadership in government and industry. Social norms need repair up and down the scale, universally, together and all at once.Cool speech, bro, but I liked it better when Jules Feiffer first wrote it in Little Murders:
What’s left? What’s there left? I’m a reasonable man. Just explain to me… what have I left to believe in? I swear to God, the tide is rising. Two hundred and fifty dollars. Gimme, gimme. We need honest cops! People just aren’t being protected anymore. We need a revival of honor and trust. We need the army! We need a giant fence around every block in the city. An electronically-charged fence! And anyone who wants to leave the block has to get a pass. And a haircut. And can’t talk with a filthy mouth. We need respect for a man’s reputation. TV cameras. That’s what we need, in every building lobby, in every elevator, in every apartment, in every room. Public servants who are public servants. And if they catch you doing anything funny -- to yourself -- or anybody -- they break the door down and beat the living -- A return to common sense. We have to have lobotomies for anyone who earns less than $10,000 a year. I don’t like it, but it’s an emergency. Our side needs weapons too. Is it fair that they should have all the weapons? We've got to train ourselves. And steel ourselves. It’s freedom I’m talking about! There’s a fox loose in the chicken coop. Kill him! I want my freedom!Carol Newquist's prescription differs in some particulars from Brooks', but then Newquist didn't have an editor. Also Newquist was operating in late-60s New York, a situation of genuine danger, not Cleveland Park in an era of steadily-falling crime rates. Finally, Newquist is a character in a play, and the author had the opportunity to show us what had driven him crazy. With Brooks we can only guess.
UPDATE. I should have foreseen that Brooks' rightful owner, Charles P. Pierce, would have more and better to say on the subject. Sample: "Brooks reaches these completely unsurprising conclusions by quoting a few horror stories from whatever book is on his nightstand these days." His close is killer.
