Everyone goes to conferences

Photo by Julochka, December 2013.

Verbatim David Brooks, "Skills in Flux", March 17 2015:

For example, in today’s loosely networked world, people with social courage have amazing value. Everyone goes to conferences and meets people, but some people invite six people to lunch afterward and follow up with four carefully tended friendships forevermore. Then they spend their lives connecting people across networks.

Or maybe social courage is the quality of a person (not quite nice, in the opinion of mannerly David Brooks)

who has the guts to tell idiots what he really thinks. (January 2013)

or the very useful property of a "dualist"

These peoples [sic] have done at least one Deeply Unfashionable Thing. Such people have intrinsic motivation, native curiosity and social courage. (April 2014)

I just thought it was funny that he should be so fond of this expression and yet unable to decide what he wants it to mean. The definition of social courage in today's column seems likely to be derived from the youthful webpreneur Scott H. Young, whose strange and possibly malign influence on Brooks we have noted before, and who has written, in one of his over 700 articles devoted to the subject of How to Get More from Life ("Social Courage: How to Meet New People"),

Anxieties, social politeness and an unwillingness to get rejected all keep you from taking the first step. Sometimes this manifests as an unpleasant feeling when surrounded by strangers. But usually, thanks to some social guidelines, it just becomes excuses or rules for why you should stay inside your head.... Meeting new people requires that you test out your old rules. Break some of your old rules and building up social courage. This process isn’t always easy, but here are some suggestions I’ve found helpful...

Heh.

Brooks starts off today with his reading of a pretty good article in The Guardian about studies of the subtle and brilliant things good teachers do that don't show up on their evaluations.

Somebody with an interest in public policy would probably want to follow up on that by asking whether we could start doing a better job of evaluating teachers, instead of making the evaluations ever more dependent on a restricted series of possibly fraudulent test scores.

Brooks, on the other hand, hasn't had any real interest in public policy in years, if ever. Today he's in his "what if I gave up pandritry altogether and became one of those career advice hacks?" mood. Maybe he should really go for this. He could be the Scott H. Young of his generation. Though it's too bad Timothy Ferriss has already written The Four-Hour Work Week: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich. I mean Brooks has totally mastered that shit.

So he wants to talk about how you could apply the lessons of that article on teaching to improve yourself, in that world where everyone goes to conferences, as the economy hurtles out of the tracks we thought it was running in. Herding cats, as a good teacher does, is a skill you'll want to have in that connection, and so is social courage in Scott H. Young's conception.

You should also be able to describe a cloud as a cloud rather than trying to reduce it to a clock, as proposed by the great philosopher Karl Popper, in an analogy first reported by Brooks in a column of March 2011 and subsequently deployed in his book The Social Animal (2012).

Karl Popper observed that there are clock problems and cloud problems. Clock problems can be divided into parts, but cloud problems are indivisible emergent systems.

Interestingly, this appears to have been the only thing Popper ever said in his illustrious career, or at least the only thing of which Brooks has been able to learn anything (no disrespect to Popper, whom I revere).

Another person famous for having made just one single remark is F. Scott Fitzgerald, who became one of America's two or three most important authors when he wrote that "the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function."

For some reason I am continually running across people who believe this is the ability their employees and bosses need right now.

Today is only the second time, as far as I know, that Brooks has quoted it—the first time being in July 2012, when he used it to describe the Summer Olympics: apparently the Olympics has a first-rate intelligence.

(Actually he mentioned The Great Gatsby once too, noting that it was "written in the same tone" as All the King's Men and Brideshead Revisited, suggesting he may have been watching them on television instead of reading them. Is there a nostalgic, foggily photographed BBC Masterpiece Theatre production of All the King's Men? Or that he confuses tone with narrative framework—man recalls events of his youth in which the protagonists were of a higher social status than his own and ironies abound, but neither Willie Stark nor Sebastian Flyte can really be said to share a tone with Jay Gatsby, let alone with each other.)

As far as I know, he has never previously quoted the Scottish Holiness Movement evangelist Oswald Chambers (1874-1917),

“The author who benefits you most is not the one who tells you something you did not know before, but the one who gives expression to the truth that has been dumbly struggling in you for utterance.”

But everybody else has.

And so on. Look, that's just how it goes. Sometimes you take your metal detector to the beach and there's nothing there. Except water, you know, which is not a bad thing. You can't bring it home, but you can swim in it. Or as Scott H. Young writes ("Are you Living Life or just Planning your Biography?"),

“Life is a journey, not a destination” is a cliché, but it’s still true. That’s one of the reasons I’m a fan of the lifestyle design concept. Because it turns around the typical accomplishment-oriented ambitions many people have towards one that focuses on how you actually live all the moments in-between.

Driftglass believes that not everybody goes to conferences, so you know how seriously you should take him. Tsk tsk.