Morality and Brisk

In an article by R. Shalom Carmy cited in the previous two posts, he quotes a former student who wrote to him the following:

But in the halakhic world of Brisk does a voice cry out, saying "An Arab too is a gavra, a person"? Do all of these glib distinctions between subject and object teach their discoverers that the God who created one man cannot allow any men to be objects?

Reb Yudel suggests, in the comments sections to the preceding post, that we try to give our answers to this question. My answer is the same as that to the question of how the original Briskers could be opposed to mussar. We simply rarely see today true yiras shamayim. This, I believe, is the biggest of our communities' problems. If we could somehow solve this then all of the other problems would disappear in short order.

R. Hayim Soloveitchik and R. Barukh Ber Lebowitz were legendary for their hessed and tzidkus. They truly fulfilled the maxim that "reishis chochmah yiras Hashem." They did not need to sit in a "mussar house" and repeat passages over and over in a sing-song in order to instill in themselves yiras shamayim. They had it before becoming talmidei hakhamim and only grew in it through their studies. They felt no need to teach their students something that a true yerei shamayim knows intuitively, whether it be interpersonal mitzvos or the basic kavod that every human being deserves.

However, the generations decreased rapidly and even some of R. Hayim's students became proponents of mussar, most notably his top pupil R. Isser Zalman Meltzer and the latter's brother-in-law R. Moshe Mordekhai Epstein. Mussar proponents do, indeed, teach about kevod ha-beriyos but the true Briskers resist all such attempts, assuming that talmidei hakhamim already know these basic premises and have already achieved a profound yiras shamayim. Would that only be so.