David Brooks is Vice Principal Strickland, only even less truthful

This is what fact-checking looks like, in practice: “The facts vs. David Brooks: Startling inaccuracies raise questions about his latest book.”

David Zweig takes a single claim from Brooks’ latest best-selling book, The Road to Character, and goes after it like a terrier. It’s a startling statistic that Brooks and his publicists have repeated over and over because it so perfectly captures the central point of Brooks’ argument about what’s wrong with Kids These Days.

Zweig initially sought to confirm this fact because he wanted to cite it himself in support of his own, somewhat similar argument. Initially, in other words, Zweig was hoping the claim would be true and that he’d be able to document it and repeat it with greater authority than a second-hand quote.

But the claim wasn’t true. The “fact” was not, in fact, a fact.

As it turns out, this “fact” was little more than a lazy regurgitation of the same crap that older people have been saying about younger people forever. Brooks wasn’t citing a real statistic, he was simply recycling an old rant about What’s Wrong With Generation X and retrofitting it into a new rant about What’s Wrong With Millennials.

Here was the version of the claim Brooks made in a lecture at the 2011 Aspen Ideas Festival:

In 1950 the Gallup Organization asked high school seniors “Are you a very important person?” And in 1950, 12 percent of high school seniors said yes. They asked the same question again in 2006; this time it wasn’t 12 percent, it was 80 percent.

Brooks intends this to be a damning indictment of spoiled, irresponsible youth and their generation’s arrogant sense of entitlement. But nothing about that is true. Nothing.

Zweig tenaciously tracks down the tiny nugget of reality out of which Brooks spun this tapestry of bullshit. Some academics collected some data from Minnesota ninth-graders in 1948 and 1954. Later, in 1989, some other academics did a slightly larger study of 14-to-16-year-olds, and asked them that same question, “Are you a very important person?”

This part of the 1989 study was trying to gauge “Ego inflation” among young people — roughly the same attitude of entitlement Brooks is harrumphing against. The overall study suggested little change in such “Ego inflation” between 1948 and 1989. The only such measure that changed significantly was how young people responded to this one question: “Are you a very important person?”

The researchers thus speculate that what’s really going on here is a change in how young people hear and understand that question:

The words “I am an important person” may have been interpreted differently in the ’40s and ’50s, than in 1989. [Researcher Robert] Archer said that the early sample may have interpreted the item as meaning “more important than others” whereas the ’80s sample may have read it to mean “I believe I am a valuable person.”

Ah, there it is. The question is ambiguous — offering two equally valid interpretations.

“Are you a very important person?” could, possibly, mean something like “Do you think you’re more important than everyone else?” And that’s likely what it sounded like to Minnesota Lutheran kids in 1954. But it can also be understood to mean something like, “Do you believe that every human being has intrinsic value and dignity?” or, in other words, “Do you think you’re just as important as everyone else?” And that’s likely how it sounded to most kids in 1989.

For all his indignant talk about humility, I suspect the latter formulation is also how David Brooks hears and understands that question. He seized on this small study, embellished and inflated it, and then inverted the meaning of its conclusions in order to use it as ammunition against the unacceptable arrogance of Millennial upstarts.

But Brooks isn’t upset that Kids These Days think they’re more important than everyone else. He knows that’s not what this study showed. What upsets him is that Kids These Days think they’re just as important as everyone else — including him.

David Brooks, in other words, is angry that Kids These Days lack the proper humility that would require them to acknowledge that he is more valuable than they are.

The problem Zweig identifies here is not just a factual error or sloppy research that resulted in Brooks getting “nearly every detail of this [claim] wrong.” Brooks doesn’t just get the facts and the details wrong, he’s making a theological claim.

And that theological claim is garbage.

Here’s the thing: You are, in fact, a very important person. You are precious. You are of infinite, inestimable value. You are a child of God and a bearer of the divine image. You are special.

And that is also true, of course, of every other person you will ever meet. (This is part of why “sin is when you treat people as things.”)

That flows directly from the greatest commandment and from the second which is like unto it.

I learned both parts of that from my parents, and from my church, and from Fred Rogers, and from the Rev. Jesse Jackson.

And both parts are equally necessary and important. You’re no more valuable than anyone else, and no one else is more valuable than you. If you believe that you are of infinite, inestimable value, but you fail to recognize that’s true of everyone else, too, then you’re headed to runaway ego inflation and the sin of treating people as things. If you recognize that others are of infinite, inestimable value, but you fail to recognize that’s also true of you, then you’re headed for misery and the sin of mistaking yourself for a thing.

Brooks — whether from ignorance or from pretense — is claiming that Kids These Days have over-inflated egos. They think they’re special.

If that’s the problem, then the solution ought to be to remind such supposedly entitled young people that everyone else is special too. But that is not Brooks’ project. He intends, instead, to correct these arrogant youngsters by telling them they’re not special, they’re not valuable, they’re not important.

And that, again, is theological garbage. It is a denial of the doctrines of creation, incarnation, redemption and resurrection.

It’s also boring. It’s the same old same old from the same old olds. “You’re a slacker, McFly,” Vice Principal Strickland said in 1955 and 1985 and 2015. And slackers, of course, are worthless, because they fail to accept the superior worth of the Stricklands and the Brookses and the rest of their ego-inflated, entitled, spoiled elders.

Update: Headline fixed because there’s no such thing as a “Vince Principal”