Do you share David Brooks’s concern that Americans are becoming more individualistic and less committed to morals that sustain community?

Columnist David Brooks (2013) asserts that since the 1960s, American culture has become more individualistic and less morally aware. To support this assertion, Brooks describes searches on a Google database that allows users to see how frequently particular words and phrases have been used in published works between 1500 and 2008 (Twenge, Campbell, & Freeman, 2012; Twenge, Campbell, & Gentile, 2012). Since 1960, individualist terms such as self and I come first are used more frequently than collective terms such as community, share, united, and common good. Other researchers (Kesebir & Kesebir, 2012) found that moral terms such as virtue, bravery, fortitude, modesty, and kindness were decreasingly used over the past 50 years. Such changes in our language lead Brooks to wonder whether “we write less about community bonds and obligations because they’re less central to our lives” (p. A21).