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

Ben Sasse, who is dying of pancreatic cancer, recently wrote an essay for the Wall Street Journal on AI and character development. He concluded with this reflection:  “Character, whether of an individual or of a nation, is molded by habits and by time. This republic requires men and women to do long-form deliberation, serious thinking, honest humility and daily striving. What good is it to gain the whole world if we forfeit the souls that we’re supposed to form? We can’t expect to remain free without being virtuous, we can’t be bold without being rooted, we can’t be great without aiming first to be good. To stave off [Aldous] Huxley’s dystopia [in Brave New World], we must deliberately shape our children’s souls so that they can be creators, doers and thinkers embracing the next frontier.”

First, Sasse’s comment about a nation’s character is of interest to me. In that spirit I was drawn to another essay by David Brooks, who recently left the New York Times after 22 years.  His reflections on our nation are worth consideration.  [A few years ago, Brooks became a Christian and his comments reflect that faith commitment.] “In reality, I’ve long believed that there is a weird market failure in American culture. There are a lot of shows on politics, business and technology, but there are not enough on the fundamental questions of life that get addressed as part of a great liberal arts education: How do you become a better person? How do you find meaning in retirement? Does America still have a unifying national narrative? How do great nations recover from tyranny?”

“The post-Cold War world has been a disappointment. The Iraq war shattered America’s confidence in its own power. The financial crisis shattered Americans’ faith that capitalism when left alone would produce broad and stable prosperity. The internet did not usher in an era of deep connection but rather an era of growing depression, enmity and loneliness. Collapsing levels of social trust revealed a comprehensive loss of faith in our neighbors. The rise of China and everything about Donald Trump shattered our serene assumptions about America’s role in the world. We have become a sadder, meaner and more pessimistic country. One recent historical study of American newspapers finds that public discourse is more negative now than at any other time since the 1850s. Large majorities say our country is in decline, that experts are not to be trusted, that elites don’t care about regular people. Only 13 percent of young adults believe America is heading in the right direction. Sixty-nine percent of Americans say they do not believe in the American dream. Loss of faith produces a belief in nothing. Trump is nihilism personified, with his assumption that morality is for suckers, that life is about power, force, bullying and cruelty. Global populists seek to create a world in which only the ruthless can thrive. America is becoming the rabid wolf of nations.”  He continues with these key points:

• “Nihilism is the mind-set that says that whatever is lower is more real. Selfishness, egoism and the lust for power drive human affairs. Altruism, generosity, honor, integrity and hospitality are mirages. Ideals are shams that the selfish use to mask their greed. Disillusioned by life, the cynic gives himself permission to embrace brutality, saying: We won’t get fooled again. It’s dog eat dog. If we’re going to survive, we need to elect bullies to high places. In 2024, 77 million American voters looked at Trump and saw nothing morally disqualifying about the man.”
• “[T]he shredding of values from the top was preceded by a decades-long collapse of values from within. Four decades of hyperindividualism expanded individual choice but weakened the bonds between people. 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.”
• “The most grievous cultural wound has been the loss of a shared moral order. We told multiple generations to come up with their own individual values. This privatization of morality burdened people with a task they could not possibly do, leaving them morally inarticulate and unformed. It created a naked public square where there was no broad agreement about what was true, beautiful and good. Without shared standards of right and wrong, it’s impossible to settle disputes; it’s impossible to maintain social cohesion and trust. Every healthy society rests on some shared conception of the sacred — sacred heroes, sacred texts, sacred ideals — and when that goes away, anxiety, atomization and a slow descent toward barbarism are the natural results. It shouldn’t surprise us that, according to one Harvard survey, 58 percent of college students say they experienced no sense of “purpose or meaning” in their life in the month before being polled. It shouldn’t surprise us that people are so distrusting and demoralized.”

Brooks concludes: “Maybe it’s time the country matured, and combined youthful energy with the kind of humility and wisdom that Reinhold Niebuhr packed into one of his most famous passages:

Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness.”

Second, a nation’s character is reflected in its leaders.  In April, Representative Eric Swalwell (D., Calif.) removed himself from the race for governor and from his seat in the U.S. House, to which he was elected in 2012. Barton Swaim of the Wall Street Journal comments that “Capitol Hill gossips, including journalists from whom one might have hoped to hear something before now, evidently knew about Mr. Swalwell’s behavior for years. A passel of female former staffers accusing him of undue advances, assault and rape—whether speaking at the behest of a rival campaign or otherwise—made the case of Mr. Swalwell no longer ignorable even by a press that would prefer not to hear about it. Mr. Swalwell has denied the accusations of rape. In a social-media post suspending his campaign, he wrote: ‘I am deeply sorry for mistakes in judgment,” adding, “I will fight the serious, false allegations.’”

“Meanwhile, another congressman, Tony Gonzales (R., Texas), resigned because the female staffer by whom he satisfied himself died by setting herself ablaze. Mr. Gonzales admitted to the affair with the staffer but says he had nothing to do with her suicide. Whether Mr. Gonzales’s behavior was serial, as Mr. Swalwell’s appears to have been, remains unknown.”

Revelations of “insatiate male behavior no longer shock us!“

• “The “MeToo” moment came and went—some 200 resignations and firings of prominent and influential men who thought the ’60s revolution gave them license to act on their urges.
• Bill Cosby’s name re-emerged last month when a jury ordered him to pay $59 million for an alleged sexual assault his accuser says happened in 1972. Mr. Cosby—accused by scores of women of drug-assisted sexual assault and battery, rape and other crimes—claims all such encounters involved consent.
• I have often wondered, throughout the long, sad tale of Jeffrey Epstein’s life and demise, if the story of a serial violator of young girls proved too ordinary, too boring, for an American public accustomed to the predations of our post-revolutionary age.”

Swaim reminds us of Carl Trueman, a professor of religion at Grove City College, who published a bold and incisive critique of modern sexual ethics, “The Desecration of Man.” The book’s fourth chapter, “Endless Sex,” chronicles the ways in which the sexual revolution aimed to liberate humans from the old moral strictures but tragically reduced them to objects of animal desire . . . Trueman contends that the loss of belief in man’s sacredness, depending as it did on a belief in God, occasioned the descent into confusion we constantly regret, without knowing quite why. If recent reports of a return to God signify a rejection of the moral anarchy into which the sexual revolution cast us, may those reports multiply.”

Finally, Molly Worthen, professor of history at the University of North Carolina, makes this insightful comment about American public education: “This has been the greatest blunder in the past decade of K-12 education: the decision to give every child a personal computer and to gamify everything from standardized test preparation to recess. Mistaken ideas about the nature of learning have combined with a hefty dose of Big Tech propaganda to distort our picture of what school is for. Technology must return to its proper place in the classroom — as a supplemental tool, rather than the source and summit of education. The logic for bringing more technology into K-12 classrooms seemed intuitive, even before the Covid-19 pandemic pushed school onto screens. If adults were using the latest personal devices and software to do their jobs more efficiently, then surely using them in the classroom would make learning more efficient, too, and prepare students for the modern workplace.”

Every step in this argument is wrong, she argues: “Researchers have begun to correlate falling test scores in wealthy countries around the world with aggressive adoption of devices in schools (88 percent of American public schools now follow what’s known as the 1-to-1 policy, providing one laptop or tablet for every student). In the United States, math and reading scores among 13-year-olds peaked in 2012 and have declined since. The analogy between the workplace and the classroom ignores the fact that young people learn differently from adults: They need far more direction and exposure to a variety of sensory activities.”

• “Perhaps the most insidious aspect of ed tech’s invasion is the widespread adoption of video-game-style apps to teach, assess and entertain students. These apps feed a broader ethos of gamification that encourages students to fixate on points, badges and other digital dopamine hits — and shy away from the experimentation, frustration and struggle that real learning demands. The problem is not games themselves. Good teachers have always used games to motivate students and connect them with classmates. But over the past 15 years or so, the hubbub of active, analog games has given way to far quieter classrooms where students spend significant blocks of time in headphones, swiping and scrolling through onscreen activities.”
• “Schools should drop the 1-to-1 policy that has encouraged students to see their laptops and tablets as extensions of themselves. Digital games can be effective tools—as long as they emphasize collaboration, creativity and risk-taking rather than lonely scrolling for the next dopamine hit . . . Laptops become tools for in-person collaboration, rather than private gaming consoles (if—and it’s a big “if”—players resist the temptations of the internet). At the end of a mission, students and teachers evaluate both the outcome and the process.”
• “To call the right shots, however, teachers, administrators and families need a clear vision of what education is for. It’s no accident that American schools fell hard and fast for ed tech while the old consensus about what it means to be ‘college and career ready’ was unraveling . . . But no technology is philosophically neutral. The apps and games that provide a simulacrum of educational progress also encourage students to absorb a certain worldview, an idea of what they should strive for. They end up with the impression that learning is a matter of box ticking, pattern recognition, completing discrete tasks and ‘leveling up’ . . . Serious intellectual work and moral reasoning cannot be gamified.”

See Ben Sasse in the Wall Street Journal (9-10 May 2026); David Brooks in the New York Times (1 February 2026); Barton Swaim in the Wall Street Journal (15 April 2026); and Molly Worthen in the New York Times (19 April 2026).