Connect with your emotional side, columnist urges UTC audience

Policymakers need to get in touch with their emotional side, according to New York Times columnist David Brooks, who spoke to UTC students and community members Tuesday night.

Economic policies will not solve the country’s dilemmas, he said. Only a cultural change, rooted in families and communities, can have a true effect on crime, the recession and graduation rates, he said.

“Economics is the gateway to policymaking, but that is not the most important way to think,” he said.

Mr. Brooks, a conservative columnist and popular political commentator, has written for The Wall Street Journal, the New Yorker, Newsweek and the Atlantic Monthly. He is a frequent commentator on National Public Radio and the “NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.”

His speech, held in the Roland Hayes Concert Hall on the UTC campus, was part of the 2009 George T. Hunter Lecture Series and was hosted by the Benwood Foundation, the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, the Ochs Center for Metropolitan Studies and CreateHere. Hundreds of people packed the concert hall to hear his lecture.

Students said they were impressed with his knowledge and politically moderate approach to issues.

“I think it is astounding how he focused on culture as the basis for policy,” said Jacob King, a UTC junior. “There is too much focus on policy and not enough on how we live.”

Mr. Brooks called for people to engage their sympathies and solve problems using the “soft side” of their brains.

Students drop out of college and high school because they aren’t connected to their teachers or they aren’t engaged with their campuses, he said.

“What really matters is teachers,” said Mr. Brooks. “The schools who do well have students who can say who their favorite teacher is.”

The country’s financial crisis has been exacerbated by a culture of careless spending, and children and young adults are not being taught to delay gratification, he said.

“We are transferring private debt to public debt,” he said.

Communities are disintegrating because people are losing their connections with one another as more and more people choose to live with others who look, act and talk just like them, said Mr. Brooks.

And radical segmentation is damaging people’s development significantly, he said.

Mr. Brooks said liberal intellectuals all live together, and the conservative, cost-conscious families cluster in the suburbs. The poor are sectioned off, he said.

In these communities people mimic one another, teaching one another their eating habits, spending habits and political attitudes. Rarely are people challenged, he said.

“The home you’re born into has a big deal with how you’ll do in life,” Mr. Brooks said. “In all the movement what we lose are the bonds of community, problems we are having trouble dealing with.”