To the Editor:
Re “How to Survive the Trump Years With Your Spirit Intact,” by David Brooks (column, Could 2):
Mr. Brooks’s column attracts a stark ethical distinction between “paganism” and the Judeo-Christian custom, equating the previous with cruelty, narcissism and authoritarianism. Whereas his critique of dehumanizing political forces is well timed and vital, his framing of “paganism” as a wholesale ethical failure is each traditionally reductive and spiritually unfair.
Many historic and trendy pagan traditions, removed from glorifying domination, emphasize reverence for nature, communal rituals, humility and the interdependence of all life. To equate all paganism with conquest and egoism is to miss the variety of worldviews that fall exterior the Abrahamic fold, together with Indigenous and animist traditions which have lengthy honored compassion, stewardship and steadiness.
Mr. Brooks’s binary framing displays a broader drawback in our tradition: the tendency to scale back complicated ethical landscapes into us versus them narratives. In an period marked by polarization, we must always resist the pull of inflexible ethical opposites and domesticate a larger respect for ethical plurality.
The challenges of our time — environmental degradation, social fragmentation, rising authoritarianism — require not only a return to anybody custom, but additionally a deeper engagement with numerous sources of knowledge. Compassion, humility and justice aren’t the only real inheritance of anybody religion.
Kevin Wegner
Washington
To the Editor:
I used to be shocked at David Brooks’s reductive binary between pagans and Judeo-Christians. He depicts the Romans in a simplistic caricature. Sure, they’re well-known for the horrific violence of their gladiatorial video games, civil wars and imperial growth. That’s their attraction in right-wing memes.
However their republic additionally offered a mannequin of a blended structure, which balanced the powers of the Senate and the Roman individuals, to our founding fathers. I might encourage Mr. Brooks to to learn the Roman playwright Terence, who wrote, “I’m human; nothing human is alien to me,” or Virgil, who expressed empathy for individuals who suffered below struggle and militarism and whom the theologian Tertullian referred to as a “naturally Christian soul.”
