STABILITY, DAVID BROOKS, AND PERMANENT VALUES

 

On 3/15/16, David Brooks wrote in the NYT about the social pressures governing life on American college campuses:

• When a moral crusade spreads across campus, many students feel compelled to post in support of it on Facebook within minutes. If they do not post, they will be noticed and condemned.

Brooks wrote that social pressures increase when the standards are always shifting:

• Everybody is perpetually insecure in a moral system based on inclusion and exclusion. There are no permanent standards, just the shifting judgment of the crowd. It is a culture of oversensitivity, overreaction and frequent moral panics, during which everybody feels compelled to go along.

Brooks believes that the college student can find a greater measure of stability by basing their identity on values that are permanent:

• If we’re going to avoid a constant state of anxiety, people’s identities have to be based on standards of justice and virtue that are deeper and more permanent than the shifting fancy of the crowd. In an era of omnipresent social media, it’s probably doubly important to discover and name your own personal True North, vision of an ultimate good, which is worth defending even at the cost of unpopularity and exclusion.

Only unchanging objective values can enable us to stand against these pressures, but they must be supported by an enduring and authoritative Source—an all-wise and loving God who knows what’s best for us. And Jesus proved His love to us by dying for us in the most humiliating and painful way:

• God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God. For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life. (Romans 5:8-10)