Communitarians to journalists: The world is so bad, let's fix it by touching each other

Comment published on New York Times online blog, in response to opinion essay by David Brooks, ”The big story you don’t read about,” May 17, 2019, available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/16/opinion/media-weave-community.html#commentsContainer&permid=100529719:100529719:

If you say how bad things are, with no idea of solution, the result is that morality replaces politics.  People moralize when there is a problem lacking a solution, that they think will go away if those who are guilty stop.  This is negative thinking that results from seeing good as absence of evil; if we obey the laws and don't do what we should not, life (perfect to begin with) will be good.  In negative models of ethical thought, good is either absence of evil or war against it: a republic of innocence or one of terror and policing.  All this is implicit in describing how bad things are, if that is all.  Thus, Prophetic progressivism has something in common with the social order vs. crime model that bad news media often engage in.  Political authoritarianism, such as we have so much of, is doubtless encouraged thereby.  

So what is to be done?  Brooks preaches a faith in community and people loving their neighbors.  Perhaps he thinks that news itself, and maybe works of elaborated thought, is insufficient because distanced (as written language).  But if people come together, touching and being affected, sharing and feeling, will move and motivate.  

But so can ideas.  Sometimes they change the world, more than one person at a time.  Opinion columns like Brooks's can change things via minds.  Interpretations rule facts, and theories are real and matter.  The biggest problem today may be the need for a clear theory picturing the shift to a better society.