Columnist Emeritus.

Like a professor nearing his final days of direct contact with students, David Brooks writes about concepts, theories and his reading now, and rarely mentions the American people in his work, except to reference shadowy vague concepts of sociology he is exploring.

In their 2007 book, “Intellectual Virtues,” Robert C. Roberts of Baylor University and W. Jay Wood of Wheaton College list some of the cerebral virtues. We can all grade ourselves on how good we are at each of them.

First, there is love of learning. Some people are just more ardently curious than others, either by cultivation or by nature.
Second, there is courage...
Third, there is firmness...
Fourth, there is humility...
Fifth, there is autonomy...
Finally, there is generosity...

Montaigne once wrote that “We can be knowledgeable with other men’s knowledge, but we can’t be wise with other men’s wisdom.” That’s because wisdom isn’t a body of information. It’s the moral quality of knowing how to handle your own limitations. Warren Buffett made a similar point in his own sphere, “Investing is not a game where the guy with the 160 I.Q. beats the guy with the 130 I.Q. Once you have ordinary intelligence, what you need is the temperament to control the urges that get other people into trouble.”

Character tests are pervasive even in modern everyday life. It’s possible to be heroic if you’re just sitting alone in your office. It just doesn’t make for a good movie.

His writing is just so isolated, so disembodied from the current events and the issues affecting people's lives today. It's all conceptual to him, not real. No faces or names, or real people stories to apply his academic research to... It's like he is writing from a closed room somewhere. An academic with no students directly before him.

I'd salute David Brooks' work, and put him on a long-term assignment, assessing the character and values of Americans since out latest killing wars, say. Do we devalue life more now? Give real world examples, like all the folks of late "forgetting" their young charges left in a hot car. Give him some project to turn his hand to, in the book-writing style that seems to so attract him now.

Then,
you could free up a slot on columnist row for a fresh writer, with an easy turn of the phrase, who has been more active and participatory in the issues facing Americans. Real live humans. Brooks has blissfully retreated now, and between him, Krugman, Kristol, Douthat, and Cohen, there sure is an awful heavy representation of white men on that masthead...

When will it be time for something fresh?
Some hard-news women writers? Some younger voices?
Some ethnics, or people who are familiar with economic and social issue that confront the working-class black and white communities?

The Times is pouring millions into video, charts and graphs, and its efforts to make the leap to digital news, but they don't write much about regular people anymore. Did they ever? Or were there just more affluent white people once upon a time to draw from as readers?

Personally, I'd start thinking beyond the David Brooks era already: what comes next?

Who is situated to best deliver the news of the American people? Not reporting from the top down off press releases, but ask honest questions and know where to dig to get them answered? We're awash in numbers and statistics, as it that were the fairy-magic place the news is taking us: numbers!, but we're forgetting the people, and the divisions in our society are showing.

People who know people... real people
non-wealthy, non-white, non-known people...
why they're the luckiest people in the biz today.

(Personally, I don't think Brooks' political reporting has gone anywhere since his contact and friend Rahm Emmanuel moved back to Chicago to assume the mayor's mantle. The dangers of relying solely on your contacts from up high...)