A Better Question is - What is His Purpose?

This writer is responding to David Brooks' column in the New York Times entitled, "What is Your Purpose?"

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An excerpt -

The Times columnist says moral debate is dying. He must not be paying attention to #BlackLivesMatter.

There is no absence of public morality. For everyone who reads a newspaper, or who browses the web, or who watches a morning news show, our regular conversations these days are fundamentally about moral questions. And in our conversations we are guided by the extraordinary public writing of Charles Blow, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Jelani Cobb, Brittney Cooper, Jamil Smith, Teju Cole, and many, many others.  

Why, one wonders, don’t these writers—all of them gifted prose stylists with muscular analytics—count as “lofty  authority figures”? Why doesn’t their body of work count as a contribution to a public conversation about moral purpose?  

And another - 

Reading Brooks's column, one can't help but detect anxiety that he's the past of public debate—that he yearns for the old days because he wants to be one of those "gray-haired sages." Instead of turning back the clock, Brooks ought to join the fray. The moral concerns of the day are everywhere around us—bleeding on screen, dying right in front of our eyes—and the compass to guide us is readily available, even sometimes in the New York Times. The day Brooks's essay appeared, the front page of the print edition featured a story on President Barack Obama’s recent speech on race, on the “Jihad” shooting in Texas, and on the use of force by the police. The day Brooks asked, “What is Your Purpose?,” was also the day that Jelani Cobb was awarded a Hillman Prize for “excellence in journalism in the service of the common good.” Cobb’s acceptance speech began with an enumeration of black death, a plain-spoken listing of those who’ve been killed by police. 

Ignore the front page, Brooks assures his readers; I’ve got the real issues right here, he suggests, and points toward his own book, toward a safer, sanitized, colorless set of questions and answers on his website. Coming from the self-appointed critic of the “me” generation, this is an extraordinary hustle.

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/121740/what-david-brookss-purpose