Flailing to Byzantium

Albrecht Dürer, 1514, St. Jerome in his Studio, via Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Verbatim David Brooks, "How to Roll Back Fanaticism", New York Times, August 15 2017:

Donald Trump is the perfect snake oil salesman for this moment. He lacks inwardness and therefore is terrified by the possibility of anxiety. He has been escaping self-scrutiny his whole life and has become a genius at the self-exculpating rationalization. He took a nation beset by uncertainty and he gave it a series of “explanations” that were simple, crude, affirming and wrong.

Question to Radio Yerevan: Is it true that Donald Trump's lack of inwardness causes him to be terrified by the possibility of anxiety? Or putting it another way, if you have more inwardness, does that make you less anxious that you might get anxious? Or does inwardness make you more anxious so that you realize anxiety isn't that frightening? I can see how an embrace of self-scrutiny can lead you to inculpate yourself if you have stuff to feel guilty about, but I don't quite get how fleeing from self-scrutiny would make you "become a genius" at explaining why you're not guilty and in any case Trump doesn't really do self-exculpation—he just denies. If he's a genius, it's at gratuitous lying. You could say he started off as a genius in avoiding self-scrutiny, which enables him to be unaware whether he has or hasn't done anything at all, and just assume that if anything is nice he's responsible for it and if anything's not nice it's somebody else's fault, or they're lying about it. David F. Brooks may have "become a genius" in avoiding self-scrutiny in the columns he wrote in summer 2014 on the subject of how it's narcissistic to examine oneself, at the same time as Brooks himself was publicly pretending he hadn't just smashed up his 30-year marriage by having an affair with his 25-years-younger research assistant, but let that pass. Another and much more important classic example, involving Iraq, comes from Driftglass, vintage 2010.


Or maybe I'm reading this all wrong. Maybe I should be seeing the piece in terms of the reference it opens with, to W.H. Auden and his long alliterative poem "The Age of Anxiety"—

For the others, like me, there is only the flash
Of negative knowledge, the night when, drunk, one
Staggers to the bathroom and stares in the glass
To meet one’s madness, when what mother said seems
Such darling rubbish and the decent advice
Of the liberal weeklies as lost an art
As peasant pottery, for plainly it is not. 

Brooks's column too falls into long splayed lines with frequent alliteration, though these are not systematic. Maybe we should see it as a kind of Auden hommage, stop analyzing it so much in a search for meaning, and just let it roll its emotion over us:

An Age of Anxiety

by

David F. Brooks 

We’re living in an age of anxiety.
The country is being transformed by complex forces
like changing demographics and technological disruption.
Many people live within a bewildering freedom, without institutions to trust,
unattached to compelling religions and sources of meaning, uncertain
about their own lives. Anxiety is not so much
a fear of a specific thing but^a a fear of everything,
an unnamable dread^b about the future. People will do anything^c to escape it.

Donald Trump is the perfect snake oil salesman for this moment.
He lacks inwardness and therefore is terrified by the possibility
of anxiety. He has been escaping self-scrutiny his whole life
and has become a genius at the self-exculpating rationalization.
He took a nation beset by uncertainty and he gave it
a series of “explanations” that were simple, crude, affirming and wrong.

Trump gave people a quick pass out of anxiety.
Everything could be blamed on foreigners, the idiotic elites.
The problems are clear, and the answers are easy. He has loosed^d
a certain style of thinking. The true link between the Trump
administration and those pathetic loons in Charlottesville
is not just bigotry, but also conspiracy mongering.....

The age of anxiety inevitably leads to an age
of fanaticism, as people seek crude palliatives
for the dizziness of freedom. I’m beginning to think
the whole depressing spectacle of this moment —
the Trump presidency and beyond — is caused by a breakdown
of intellectual virtue^e, a breakdown in America’s ability
to face evidence objectively, to pay due respect to reality, to deal
with complex and unpleasant truths. The intellectual virtues
may seem elitist, but once a country tolerates dishonesty,
incuriosity and intellectual laziness, then everything else falls apart.^f

^a "But" instead of the conventional "as" is an interesting touch.

^b It seems odd to call it unnamable when he's just named it.

^c Anything?

^d The rare verb, which seems superficially out of place, belongs to Auden's own great model W.B. Yeats.

^e See Wikipedia on this Aristotelian ethical concept.

^f The same Yeats source as "loosed".

The cure, of course, the way we will roll back fanaticism and cease to tolerate dishonesty, incuriosity, and intellectual laziness, will come out of the good old Burkean/Brooksian tradition (via Russell Kirk) of modesty.

In fact, the most powerful answer to fanaticism is modesty. Modesty is an epistemology directly opposed to the conspiracy mongering mind-set.

I hope it starts (he's promising to write "several columns on why modesty and moderation are superior", because nothing says modest like an advance announcement of your superiority and assertion that you're the "most powerful") with a modest, self-scrutinizing examination of why some thinkers have referred to David F. Brooks as dishonest, incurious, or intellectually lazy. Just to lay his modest cards on the table.

Update: David Brooks plagiarism alert from Comrade Boswood:

Original is "War is a force that gives us meaning." (2002)

— Boswood (@Bosengood) August 15, 2017

Driftglass thinks the algorithm that writes these things is starting to fail.