it is not like walter lippman, a mid-20th-century and he was the oracle, the grave voice telling yout to think. we are down in the playpen a little more. we are not people of great stature. but i do think conversations get started and when you hit the column at the right time you hear about it for a week. brian lamb: some people might have heard about how you became a conservative. i want to run that and have you follow up. david brooks: i am a native new yorker, i grew up here. my family was somewhat left-wing. they were hippies in the 60's and they sent me to central park to a place called the be in where hippies would go to be. they took out their wallets and set them on fire to demonstrate how little they cared about materialism. i reached into the fire and grabbed a five dollar bill and ran away and that was my first step to the right. [laughter] brian lamb: how much did your parents care about money? david brooks: they did not care particularly about money. i should say that was the redeemer church. at first they violently object when i say they were hippies. brian lamb: are th

walter lippman 1914. he says we can no longer treat life as something that will trickle down to us. we have to deal with it deliberately, devise its social organization formulate its methods, educate and control it. a classic progressive era approach. chain atoms. our friend jane adams. she writes, life in the suburbs above all it has been called the extraordinary pliability of human nature. a phrase she probably got from john stuart mill. and it seems impossible to set bounds to any ideal deal that might unfold from educational and civic institutions. the point that we have been following all semester is that within progressivism there was this strong sense that in in industrialized united states, large problems needed to be addressed but that also with the development or the discovery of new knowledge, new ways of understanding, that these problems could be addressed, and that's a big deal right? reforms could be enacted in society, in the lives of those living in the united states to make better, happier, more for fault -- more fulfilled. that in a nutshell is what we have been d