NYT columnist discusses civics, joy, the future
New York Times columnist and author David Brooks spoke to a virtual crowd of 4,500 people Tuesday night about the importance of joy, community and commitments.
Brooks, who was featured as part of the University of Colorado Boulder’s Leo Hill Leadership Speaker Series, talked about some of the biggest commitments students will make over the next 10 years — like choosing a vocation and getting married — and answered questions from Chancellor Phil Distefano and from students.
The wide-ranging conversation touched on finding joy in life, the impor tance of civic organizations and the need for moral leadership in the United States.
Distefano asked Brooks for his thoughts on finding joy in life, and Brooks emphasized the distinction between happiness and joy.
“Happiness happens when you feel good about yourself, joy is when you forget about yourself,” he said. “My advice is to sometimes shoot for happiness, but shoot for joy because joy is better. It’s those moments when you’re not thinking about yourself, you’re lost in your work or lost in your friendship or so dedicated to your community that it’s not about you anymore.”
Brooks has written about the rise of hyper-individualism since the 1960s and on Tuesday he linked the rise in societal problems to the decline of participation in
civic organizations like the Rotary Club, the National Association Advancement of Colored People and labor unions.
“I think it’s up to this generation to build things, to build organizations,” he said. “We need a revolution of social entrepreneurship. It’s nice to have relationships, but institutions last. When you build an institution, it goes down through the decades.”
Distefano asked Brooks to describe what the obligations are of people who are followers or par tners in relation to people who are leaders. The key, Brooks said, is to know what kind of institution you’re ser ving.
“We used to think of institutions as formative,” Brooks said. “’I’m going to tr y to become what the institution admires’, but now we don’t see institutions as formative, we see them as per formative.”
An example, Brooks said, is politics — how politicians used to seek office to serve the institution, but now do so to get on TV.
If there’s a lack of moral leadership, Distefano asked, how do we get it back?
Brooks noted that most of the politicians he’s known have three things in common: no respect for personal space, an incapability of pulling off conspiracy theories and, for the most part, being good people stuck in a bad system.
“The quality of the people in Congress is as good as it’s ever been. There are very few scoundrels,” he said.
What there are is people who feel stuck in their jobs and tied down by the need to fundraise, he said. Their need to get re-elected makes them afraid of speaking up and getting challenged in primar y elections.
“What we need is people who are not afraid to lose their jobs,” Brooks said.