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This highly thought-provoking essay by David Brooks asks some pretty tough questions about where we go from here in the wake of a precipitous decline in interpersonal (and institutional) trust.<\/p>\n
Can we create a civic renaissance and a legislative revolution? I\u2019m not so sure. If you think we\u2019re going back to the America that used to be\u2014with a single cohesive mainstream culture; with an agile, trusted central government; with a few mainstream media voices that police a coherent national conversation; with an interconnected, respected leadership class; with a set of dominant moral values based on mainline Protestantism or some other single ethic\u2014then you\u2019re not being realistic. I see no scenario in which we return to being the nation we were in 1965, with a cohesive national ethos, a clear national establishment, trusted central institutions, and a pop-culture landscape in which people overwhelmingly watch the same shows and talked about the same things. We\u2019re too beaten up for that. The age of distrust has smashed the converging America and the converging globe\u2014that great dream of the 1990s\u2014and has left us with the reality that our only plausible future is decentralized pluralism.<\/p>\n
A model for that can be found in, of all places, Houston, Texas, one of the most diverse cities in America. At least 145 languages are spoken in the metro area. It has no real central downtown district, but, rather, a wide diversity of scattered downtowns and scattered economic and cultural hubs. As you drive across town you feel like you\u2019re successively in Lagos, Hanoi, Mumbai, White Plains, Beverly Hills, Des Moines, and Mexico City. In each of these cultural zones, these islands of trust, there is a sense of vibrant activity and experimentation\u2014and across the whole city there is an atmosphere of openness, and goodwill, and the American tendency to act and organize that Hofstadter discussed in The Age of Reform.<\/p>\n
Not every place can or would want to be Houston\u2014its cityscape is ugly, and I\u2019m not a fan of its too-libertarian zoning policies\u2014but in that rambling, scattershot city I see an image of how a hyper-diverse, and more trusting, American future might work.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n