The mission of Issues in Perspective is to provide thoughtful, historical and biblically-centered perspectives on current ethical and cultural issues.

In his quest for meaning and purpose in life, King Solomon used his God-given wisdom and extensive experience to find purpose.  In Ecclesiastes 2:12-23, he pursued wealth and material abundance as the keys to meaning and purpose.  Solomon tested the two extremes of the human condition—wisdom on the one end and foolishness on the other.  It was obvious that wisdom was better than folly.  The wise man sees the dangers and avoids them, whereas the fool does not.  But this begs the question, why be wise, because both die?  What sense does that make?  Perhaps it really was better to eat drink and be merry, because tomorrow we die, he reasoned.  Was it not in fact “wiser” to be a fool?  For both the wise and the fool, everyone will forget them.  “I hated life,” he declared.  There seemed to be no reason to work hard, to be wise—it was ultimately, in light of death, meaningless!

Solomon then offered an eternal perspective about the fruits of all his work “under the sun.”  There was no permanence to his wealth; besides, he must leave it all to his heirs.  He was not certain whether his heirs would be foolish or wise with his wealth.   In short, he would “have no control over anything” after he died.  He seemed to be saying that he had been wise with his time and his resources.  He has worked hard and had gained wealth.  (We would say that he had worked hard, invested wisely and had a large nest egg—a well-balanced portfolio.)   But now death stared him in the face and he asked, “Why have I worked so hard?  I am about to die and pass it all on to my heirs and I cannot control what they will do.”  They do not appreciate how hard he had worked for his wealth or how wise he had been. This is meaningless!  “Wisdom, knowledge and skill” characterized his “toil” but now he must leave it to those who did not use “wisdom, knowledge or skill.”   They just “inherit” his wealth.  This was meaningless and “a great misfortune.”

Solomon’s insights are helpful in evaluating American culture’s view of wealth and economic wellbeing.  David Brooks reports that “Last May a study came out suggesting that merely giving people money doesn’t do much to lift them out of poverty. Families with at least one child received $333 a month. They had more money to spend, which is a good thing, but the children fared no better than similar children who didn’t get the cash. They were no more likely to develop language skills or demonstrate cognitive development. They were no more likely to avoid behavioral problems or developmental delays.  These results shouldn’t have been a big surprise. As Kelsey Piper noted in an essay for The Argument, a different study published last year gave families $500 a month for two years and found no big effects on the adult recipients’ psychological well-being and financial security. A study that gave $1,000 a month did not produce better health, career, education or sleep outcomes or even more time with their children.”

He adds: “Way back in 1997, Susan E. Mayer, a University of Chicago sociologist and behavioral economist, published What Money Can’t Buy.’ She began her research believing that cash transfers would make a big difference in people’s lives but was persuaded by the evidence that even if you doubled a family’s income, it would have a limited effect on their children’s dropout and teenage pregnancy rates or other outcomes. She stated her findings clearly: ‘The results in this book imply that once children’s basic material needs are met, characteristics of their parents become more important to how they turn out than anything additional money can buy.’  She added, ‘Parental income is not as important to children’s outcomes as many social scientists have thought.” Rising out of poverty also requires the nonmaterial qualities we now call human capital, such as skills, diligence, honesty, good health and reliability. Mayer concludes, “Children of parents with these attributes do well even when their parents do not have much income.’”

American culture, indeed all of Western Civilization, has been good at transferring money to the poor.  Brooks calls this “the materialist bent of progressive thought: the assumption that material conditions drive history, not cultural or moral ones. A couple of decades ago, Thomas Frank published ‘What’s the Matter With Kansas?’ based on befuddlement that Kansans were apparently voting against their economic self-interest. Doesn’t economics drive voting behavior? Progressives have often argued that improving schools is mostly about spending more money, that crime is mostly the product of material deprivation.  Conservatism, as you know, is a complete mess in America right now. But reading conservative authors like Edmund Burke, Samuel Johnson, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Gertrude Himmelfarb and James Q. Wilson does give you an adequate appreciation for the power of nonmaterial forces — culture, moral norms, traditions, religious ideals, personal responsibility and community cohesion. That body of work teaches you, as Burke wrote, that manners and morals are more important than laws. You should have limited expectations about politics because not everything can be solved with a policy.”  Brooks adds the following insights:

• “Many years ago, I came across a study that neatly illustrated the power of culture. The researcher Nima Sanandaji calculated the poverty rate of Americans with Swedish ancestry. It was 6.7 percent. They also looked at the poverty rate in Sweden, using the American standard of poverty, and it was also 6.7 percent. Different political systems, same outcome.”
• “Neoconservatism came along and took conservative insights and applied them to policymaking. . . . Thinkers like Irving Kristol and Nathan Glazer had been poor immigrant kids. They were willing to spend money to fight poverty, but they wanted the programs to nurture the values that they had seen firsthand help people rise: hard work, family and community cohesion, reliability, a passionate commitment to education. These values tend to inhere in communities before they are transmitted to individuals.”
• “Progressives, by contrast, are quick to talk about money but slow to talk about the values side of the equation. They don’t want to blame the victims or contribute to the canard that people are poor because they are lazy.  But there’s something deeper. Progressivism emerges from a different lineage. Karl Marx influenced many people who are not Marxist, and he saw the world through a material-determinism lens—people’s consciousnesses are shaped by their material conditions.”
• “Today the social sciences are the narrow doorway all of human knowledge has to pass through if it’s going to influence policymaking . . . But when overly quantitative, they can misrepresent reality. They see only what can be quantified. They see only masses of people whose data can be tabulated, not unique individuals. As Christian Smith, a Notre Dame sociologist, has been arguing for decades, the social scientists obliterate the subjective experiences of the people they study. Human agency disappears if research subjects are reduced to a bunch of variables that can be correlated. People who overly rely on social science knowledge are going to tend to focus on money because it can be counted more easily than culture. People who rely on government to solve problems will tend to overemphasize the power of money because that’s the thing government most easily controls.”

As Solomon observed 3,000 years ago, most of our problems are moral, relational and spiritual more than they are economic. And, in light of the collapse of social trust, the loss of faith in institutions, and the destruction of moral norms, the richest society in history will not solve its social problems with more money.

So, is American culture facing the reality of a failed progressive solution that throws money at social problems?  In another article, Brooks makes this stunning observation:  “But there’s another, even more radical reaction to progressive cultural dominance: nihilism. You start with the premise that progressive ideas are false and then conclude that all ideas are false . . . One version of nihilism holds that the structures of civilization must be destroyed, even if we don’t have anything to replace them with.”  Brooks alludes to a staggering conversation he had had:  “A few months ago, I had lunch with a young lady who said, ‘The difference is that in your generation you had something to believe in, but in ours we have nothing.’ She didn’t say it bitterly, just as a straightforward acknowledgment of her worldview.”

Faith in God has been on the decline for decades; so has social trust, faith in one another; so has faith in a dependable career path. “A recent Gallup poll showed that faith in major American institutions is now near its lowest point in the 46 years Gallup has been measuring these things. But the core of nihilism is even more acidic; it is the loss of faith in the values your culture tells you to believe in . . .  I was reminded of an essay the great University of Virginia sociologist James Davison Hunter wrote last year for The Hedgehog Review. He, too, identified nihilism as the central feature of contemporary culture: ‘A nihilistic culture is defined by the drive to destroy, by the will to power. And that definition now describes the American nation.’  He pointed to our culture’s pervasive demonization and fearmongering, with leaders feeling no need to negotiate with the other side, just decimate it. Nihilists, he continued, often suffer from wounded attachments—to people, community, the truth. They can’t give up their own sense of marginalization and woundedness because it would mean giving up their very identity. The only way to feel halfway decent is to smash things or at least talk about smashing them. They long for chaos.”

This may be where history is leading. Smothering progressivism produced a populist reaction that eventually descended into a nihilist surge. Nihilism is a cultural river that leads nowhere good. “Russian writers like Turgenev and Dostoyevsky wrote about rising nihilism in the 19th century, a trend that eventually contributed to the turmoil of the Russian Revolution.   One spot of good news is the fact that more young people, and especially young men, are returning to church . . .  Among Gen Z, more young men now go to church than young women. In Britain, according to one study, only 4 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds went to church in 2018, but by 2024 it was 16 percent . . . They don’t believe in what the establishment tells them to believe in. They live in a world in which many believe in nothing. But still, somewhere deep inside, that hunger is there. They want to have faith in something.”  May Gen Z find that faith in Jesus Christ.

See David Brooks in the New York Times (5 September 2025) and (21 August 2025).