Conservative columnist David Brooks had an interesting column in today’s New York Times, interesting in that it was cram-packed with good news. Usually conservative columnists are full of doom and gloom about how society is going to hell in a bucket because of what the liberals did to it. But Brooks says that things are getting better; Americans are now living more virtuously, and he has the statistics to prove it. Crime is down, violence is down, drunken driving is down, drug abuse is down, divorce is down, teenage pregnancy is down, abortions are down, volunteerism is up, parents spend more time with their kids, etc. And I agree with Brooks that all of that is good news.

And yet, for all the goodness going on out there, there doesn’t seem to be much joy about it. Brooks says “I always thought it would be dramatic to live through a moral revival. Great leaders would emerge. There would be important books, speeches, marches and crusades.” But in fact, there’s little drama to be found out there: no great leaders, no great books, no rousing speeches, no big marches, and no crusades (thank goodness).

The one thing that there does seem to be a lot of these days is fear. Fear of terrorism, fear of losing one’s job because of some decision made in India or China, fear of being sued, fear of getting sick and going broke because of lousy health insurance, fear of having one’s pension taken away. I can’t help but wonder if all of this good behavior is inspired not by a revival of the human spirit caused by modern progress, but by the many threats and uncertainties associated with our modern dystopia.

Hey, I’m not saying that it’s bad that we’re all acting better. But unfortunately, it appears to be more of a reaction or a side-effect to some other bad things. As Brooks indicates, it’s a paradox that we’re not living in happy, Kennedy-esque times. We’re a long way from Camelot, even if we are behaving a little better these days.

(I certainly don’t see this better behavior filtering down to daily life, however. One example: people seem to drive faster and more aggressively wherever I go, rich neighborhoods or poor. Patience with one another at a crowded Dunkin Donuts check-out line or on a delayed airline flight seems in shorter supply than ever. Back to coffee, manners are even worse amidst the fashionable crowd at Starbucks.)

KIDS TODAY: A side note to Mr. Brooks’s “moral revival” theory regards America’s youth. Mr. Brooks cites statistics from the US Department of Justice indicating that teenage violence went way down over the past decade. I’ve also read that alcohol, drugs and cigarettes aren’t as popular with kids these days either. But are kids really living better lives? We hear a lot more about teenage depression these days, and the problem of bullying seems to get more and more attention. Many kids are overweight, which you wouldn’t expect if they were living healthy, balanced lives. SAT scores don’t seem to be trending upward. And the number of wacko crimes that affluent kids commit is rather scary.

Sure, we always heard about kids from the slums and barrios getting into trouble, but when I was growing up I don’t recall any shockers from the suburbs. OK, the Colombine High School situation was sensationalized by the press and is still fairly rare. However, the Jeremy Wade Dell stuff really isn’t. We just had some teenagers from an average family in northern NJ decide to kill an unpopular girl just for the heck of it, then hack her body apart and attempt to dump it in a river (just a half mile from where I grew up). And then there was a local crime in ritzy Upper Montclair last week (where a lot of people actually take David Brooks seriously); somebody trashed a garden full of historic, one-of-a-kind iris bulbs. There’s a local debate going on about whether it was the work of some bored, nasty rich kids (and there are a lot of them in Upper Montclair, I can tell you; they didn’t seem as bad 10 years ago), or some adult vendetta going on. If you want to check out the local debate about the state of Upper Montclair’s youth, here’s the townie blog coverage.

Virtue . . . still a tough sell, David Brooks notwithstanding.