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David Brooks is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard, a contributing editor at Newsweek and The Atlantic Monthly and writes an opinion column for The New York Times. He is a regular commentator on National Public Radio and the PBS News Hour with Jim Lehrer. His book, Bobos in Paradise, looked at the bourgeois Bohemians of upscale America. His newest book, On Paradise Drive, looks at Americans' spiritual drive to create paradise on earth. Brooks spoke recently at Seattle Pacific University's Greater Seattle Community Breakfast. We thank the University for the opportunity to speak to Brooks.

You have this phrase, "We used to talk about knowing thyself, now it's over-rating thyself," and that is only possible in isolation.

We're all the lords of self-esteem. We talk about diversity a lot, but our own lives, I think we all don't honor them too much. Human beings are really good at finding people like themselves and moving into neighborhoods. When people find there are people like themselves moving into a place, they move in there.

We live in little clustered worlds. And we can reinforce that by getting in little media clusters where everything we hear or watch or read reinforces our basic view of the world.

You also talk about a town that had a parade but no place to hold it because there was no center of the town.

All through our history, human history, we've lived around a center, or a harbor, or a port, or a factory. In New England villages there's always a town square. But you drive through much of American suburbia, there's no center. Everybody has their own centers. They go to their own school, their own church, their own soccer field. But there's no one place where the whole community can go together.

The one common theme that you find in all of your analysis of America is the energy. There is this great drive that fuels everything about us. What is it that makes America this kind of place?

Sometimes you look at this country and you think, well, we're the country of competitive cheerleading and sugar-frosted Cocoa Puffs and, you know, message T-shirts and bumper stickers. And you think, can we really be as shallow as we look? But we can't be because we wouldn't move around so much. Forty-three million Americans move. We work harder than any other people on the face of the earth. What on earth are we looking for? And I think the answer is that we're looking for heaven. We're looking for paradise.

We think that just over the next hill some happiness is possible. We're always reaching out and striving for it. We have a vision of the future, sort of a paradise spell that pulls us forward.

I think that's what marks us. We're divided, we're segmented, we disagree about this or that, but we all have a mentality in common. None of us was formed outside of the culture that we've inherited. For hundreds of years there have been Americans with this paradise spell, and we all have it.

What's interesting about the paradise spell is that we are not introspective. You say we're born with this spell.

Look back at the people who have written about this country. In 1830, Alexis De Tocqueville, it still fits. We are born into a culture. And we raise our kids that way. And we raise our kids different than the way kids are raised anywhere else on earth. They are raised like little achievement machines. We've revolutionized—especially in the last 25 years—the way children are living. They spend a lot less time just hanging around outside, a lot more time with adult-structured, supervised activities, getting ready for the great big future that's out there.

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May (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48