David Brooks signed off from The New York Times in January 2026 after 22 years as a columnist. He penned a thought-provoking, final piece on the “shredding of values” he has witnessed in America.
A deep source of regret for Brooks is the way education has become just another arm of the economy. “Multiple generations of students and their parents fled from the humanities and the liberal arts, driven by the belief that the prime purpose of education is to learn how to make money.” He cited recent Harvard research showing 58 per cent of college students say they experienced no sense of “purpose or meaning” in their life in the month before being polled.
“Loss of faith produces a belief in nothing,” Brooks writes. “I’m haunted by an observation that Albert Camus made about his Continent 75 years ago: The men of Europe ‘no longer believe in the things that exist in the world and in living man; the secret of Europe is that it no longer loves life’.”
Picking up on the theme, I wrote this piece for The Irish Times, arguing for a national conversation on values, or better still a national conversation on the meaning of life. Why are we here? Is there a purpose to our lives? In Ireland we’ll talk about anything except the most fundamental question of existence.
For all the faults of the Catholic Church, it at least attempts to provide an answer. Much of Irish society is too incurious, or too prejudiced against religion, to even enter the discussion.
My own submission is that we’re here to be human – and that means erring on the side of humanity. On hard cases, I humbly suggest we should lean into kindness.
Call it an article of faith. But some kind of faith may be necessary. As theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote: “Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith.”
Full article here…
Joe Humphreys 