Science and Culture, and a Tale of Two Cities

New York Times columnist David Brooks is getting to be more and more interesting. In a column on Tuesday ("The Cost of Relativism") he acknowledged that his writing of late has been increasingly focused on spiritual and moral matters. In the article, he worries about evidence of a pervasive relativism that is wreaking havoc on a segment of the culture identifiable by several key social markers, including their chaotic family and sexual lives.

This segment, he observes, mostly never made it p...