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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)
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