NY Times hack David Brooks is shocked and saddened by a new study showing that young adults don’t really understand the concept of morality.

During the summer of 2008, the eminent Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith led a research team that conducted in-depth interviews with 230 young adults from across America. The interviews were part of a larger study that Smith, Kari Christoffersen, Hilary Davidson, Patricia Snell Herzog and others have been conducting on the state of America’s youth.

Smith and company asked about the young people’s moral lives, and the results are depressing.

It’s not so much that these young Americans are living lives of sin and debauchery, at least no more than you’d expect from 18- to 23-year-olds. What’s disheartening is how bad they are at thinking and talking about moral issues.

The interviewers asked open-ended questions about right and wrong, moral dilemmas and the meaning of life. In the rambling answers, which Smith and company recount in a new book, “Lost in Transition,” you see the young people groping to say anything sensible on these matters. But they just don’t have the categories or vocabulary to do so.

When asked to describe a moral dilemma they had faced, two-thirds of the young people either couldn’t answer the question or described problems that are not moral at all, like whether they could afford to rent a certain apartment or whether they had enough quarters to feed the meter at a parking spot.

This is certainly no surprise, but here’s the key part:

Many were quick to talk about their moral feelings but hesitant to link these feelings to any broader thinking about a shared moral framework or obligation. As one put it, “I mean, I guess what makes something right is how I feel about it. But different people feel different ways, so I couldn’t speak on behalf of anyone else as to what’s right and wrong.”

Smith and company found an atmosphere of extreme moral individualism — of relativism and nonjudgmentalism. Again, this doesn’t mean that America’s young people are immoral. Far from it. But, Smith and company emphasize, they have not been given the resources — by schools, institutions and families — to cultivate their moral intuitions, to think more broadly about moral obligations, to check behaviors that may be degrading. In this way, the study says more about adult America than youthful America.

I can’t imagine why anyone in academia would be surprised by any of this. Moral relativism is a hallmark of higher education. Not making judgements about any kind of behavior is how you increase “diversity” and create an atmosphere of “tolerance.” Young people can’t describe a moral dilemma because they have been taught that moral dilemma’s don’t exist. There’s no good or evil, right or wrong, it’s all just a matter of opinion.

NY Slimes Times columnist David Brooks is the very embodiment of what’s wrong with the GOP. He’s a pompous jackass who gets weak in the knees around other ivy league asshats like him.

In his latest column, Brooks waxes poetic about the current plight of the “educated class” in America. By “educated class” he’s of course referring to ivy league a-holes who talk like he and the president do.

Brooks and his hideous elitism make me want to vomit. It’s the so-called “intellectual class” that has brought this country to its f*cking knees.

What this country needs is a president and a party that relies on common sense rather than phony intellectualism.

Just because you went to Harvard or Princeton doesn’t mean you know dick about running the country. All it proves is that you’re good at going to school. Show me what you’ve done in the real world.

I’ll take a self-educated businessman who creates something from nothing over some jerk with a bunch of fancy degrees any day of the week.

-Chris Jones

This is hilarious. Joe Kernan really nails it. The only place David Brooks is considered “conservative” is on the pages of the NY Slimes NY Times. The man voted for Barack Obama — he’s no conservative. David Brooks is a phony, elitist hack masquerading as a conservative.

(hat tip Chickaboomer)

NY Times columnist and token conservative David Brooks was one of the biggest cheerleaders in the run up to the presidential election. Liberals loved to cite Brooks as the proof that even republicans supported Obama. The reality is that Brooks doesn’t speak for anyone in the republican party. He’s a “conservative” elitist who can barely contain his contempt for regular folks or for candidates like Sarah Palin who didn’t go to Harvard. Nothing makes David Brooks swoon like an Ivy League education.

He waxed poetic in his columns during the campaign about how Barack was really an undercover moderate who would govern from the center. Regardless of his socialist rhetoric, once in office Obama will temper his rhetoric and become a truly great president. He went on to describe Sarah Palin as a “cancer in the republican party” which even looking back remains an incredibly ugly and uncalled for remark. His most recent act of treason was to attack Bobby Jindal’s speech the other night.

But now six weeks into Obama’s presidency, Mr. Brooks is having second thoughts:

Those of us who consider ourselves moderates — moderate-conservative, in my case — are forced to confront the reality that Barack Obama is not who we thought he was. His words are responsible; his character is inspiring. But his actions betray a transformational liberalism that should put every centrist on notice. As Clive Crook, an Obama admirer, wrote in The Financial Times, the Obama budget “contains no trace of compromise. It makes no gesture, however small, however costless to its larger agenda, of a bipartisan approach to the great questions it addresses. It is a liberal’s dream of a new New Deal.”

Maybe Brooks should take a break from the NYC cocktail circuit and listen to what us little people have to say one in a while. We all knew Obama meant what he said. He promised “Change” and said it would be socialist change (only he worded it more delicately). With a total lock on every branch of government the left is still pinching itself, because it cannot believe it has truly unchecked power. Every big spending, liberal policy dreamed up over the last 30 years is going to become reality and people like David Brooks can certainly share in the blame.

Obama is such a committed leftist that he’s willing to sacrifice his potential re-election for the sake of transforming America into a socialist nanny state. All the cries from democrats over the last eight years about the cost of Iraq ring stunningly hollow in the wake of the unprecedented spending by the new administration. We’re going through trillions the way we used to go through millions. The war in Iraq was pocket change compared what has been spent just in the last 6 weeks, and we’re just warming up.

-Chris Jones