Brooks Sees America Saving Itself

David Brooks wonders why things are getting better. He writes:

The decline in family violence is part of a whole web of positive, mutually reinforcing social trends. To put it in old-fashioned terms, America is becoming more virtuous. Americans today hurt each other less than they did 13 years ago. They are more likely to resist selfish and shortsighted impulses. They are leading more responsible, more organized lives. A result is an improvement in social order across a range of behaviors.... [M]any of the indicators of social breakdown, which shot upward in the late 1960's and 1970's, and which plateaued at high levels in the 1980's, have been declining since the early 1990's.
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I always thought it would be dramatic to live through a moral revival. Great leaders would emerge. There would be important books, speeches, marches and crusades. We're in the middle of a moral revival now, and there has been very little of that. This revival has been a bottom-up, prosaic, un-self-conscious one, led by normal parents, normal neighbors and normal community activists.

The first thing that has happened is that people have stopped believing in stupid ideas: that the traditional family is obsolete, that drugs are liberating, that it is every adolescent's social duty to be a rebel.

The second thing that has happened is that many Americans have become better parents. Time diary studies reveal that parents now spend more time actively engaged with kids, even though both parents are more likely to work outside the home.

Third, many people in the younger generation, under age 30 or so, are reacting against the culture of divorce. They are trying to lead lives that are more stable than the ones their parents led. Post-boomers behave better than the baby boomers did.

Fourth, over the past few decades, neighborhood and charitable groups have emerged to help people lead more organized lives, even in the absence of cohesive families.
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You want to know what a society looks like when it is in the middle of moral self-repair? Look around.

Read the whole thing here.

This is the story that needs to be understood but is nearly drowned out by the incessant caterwauling of the doom-mongers. I think, however, that in their hearts most Americans understand that over time and in incremental ways their lives are getting better, and that understanding, more than anything else, is why we have seen over the past few decades a national shift away from reforms on a Social Democratic model toward a reaffirmation of the vast, informal network of traditional institutions and associations that have long organized our culture. "Repair," not reform is the order of the time.