Aflame and Disordered

From the Moment Magazine Great DNA Experiment of 2012, which tested the DNA of 15 prominent Jewish-American writers and found that they were literally within zero degrees of separation from one another, i.e. that not only were David Brooks and Steven Pinker third cousins, unbeknownst to each other, but also directly related to NPR's Robert Siegel, freakonomist Stephen Dubner, Esquire's A.J. Jacobs. neuroscientist and actress Miriam Bialik, law professor Alan Dershowitz, and more. I'm probably related myself to Pinker, whose ancestors seem to have hailed, like the Yastreblyanskys, from Kishinev/Chişinau.

Shorter David Brooks, "The Virtue of Radical Honesty", February 22 2018:

The virtue of radical honesty is that it is exemplified in the the new book (Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress)  by psychologist Steven Pinker, who is radically honest and also optimistic, in defiance of those who feel that, especially on campus, you should go around in a perpetual state of indignation, negativity, and righteous rage. After all, tremendous economic progress has taken place in the world and in the United States since the 1950s, when jobs were plentiful and unions strong and a third of American children lived in poverty. However he is wrong, because he's lying when he refers to himself as an Enlightenment man rather than as a scientific rationalist, and he only cites data that support his progressive hypothesis, refusing to look at where the real problems lie, which is in the decline of social trust, the breakdown of family life, the polarization of national life, the spread of tribal mentalities, the rise of narcissism, the decline of social capital, the rising alienation from institutions, or the decline of citizenship and neighborliness. It’s simply impossible to tell any good-news story when looking at the data from these moral, social and emotional spheres. Still, I'm glad I said he was radically honest, because apparently we're related.

Brooks feels that you should go around in a perpetual state of indignation, negativity, and righteous sniffing. He's opposed to rage, though. On the relationship, see the illustration above.

The peculiar thing Brooks has been doing with his book report format is getting increasingly irritating, like a tic. As you might represent it with a general Shorter:

I've become aware of this idea that you'd expect me to disapprove of because it's marginally more liberal or more conservative than I am, and yet I'm going to praise it to the skies to show you how broadminded and intellectually curious I am, before explaining that I still disagree with it because it conflicts with my well-known opinions, demonstrating that I'm not just broadminded and intellectually curious but also quirky and original.

I have no brief for Pinker, as readers know—I deeply dislike his popular writing on psycholinguistics from the 1990s trying to make a case that Chomskyan linguistic theory is compatible with the theory of evolution, which it isn't, and am unimpressed by the current teleological Pinker singing about how it's getting better all the time as if progress doesn't require any work—and could almost say Brooks would be right if he'd try to make it a methodological point, that people in Pinker's school of thought make a continual error in discussing only the atom of the individual, never the molecule of the social network. But to Brooks it's a moral issue: Pinker's fault is not addressing Brooks's unhappiness:

But today’s situation reminds us of the weakness of the sort ["of" is missing, copy editor out for breakfast] Cartesian rationalism Pinker champions and represents. Conscious reason can get you only so far when tribal emotions have been aroused, when existential fears rain down, when narcissistic impulses have been given free rein, when spiritual longings have nowhere healthy to go, when social trust has been devastated, when all the unconscious networks that make up 99 percent of our thinking are aflame and disordered.

Some powerful bad writing in that paragraph, for a guy who's so deeply opposed to indignation, negativity, and righteous rage.

There's something I have to protest against in the material Brooks agrees with Pinker on, our regularly scheduled argument that inequality isn't a problem, and one bit of the data brought to bear:

Between 1979 and 2014, meanwhile, the percentage of poor Americans dropped to 20 percent from 24 percent. The percentage of lower-middle-class Americans dropped to 17 from 24. The percentage of Americans who were upper middle class (earning $100,000 to $350,000) shot upward to 30 percent from 13 percent.

It's not too hard to find out where these bizarre numbers come from: an Urban Institute study of 2016 by Stephen J. Rose, The Growing Size and Income of the Upper Middle Class, which does some really funky things: takes the three-person family as a norm, pushes the definition of the middle class up almost all the way through the 99th percentile (just 0.1% of the population earned $350,000 or more in 2014 dollars in 1979; 1.8% in 2014, meaning the upper class has increased by 1800%), and basing his inflation calculations on the personal consumption expenditure (PCE) price deflator instead of the normal Consumer Price Index on the grounds that some statement by the CBO for some study in 2016 used the PCE (probably on instructions from a Republican committee chairman) and so does Scott Winship in a Forbes Magazine article. If you use a normal CPI, the increases in the "upper middle class" are much less dramatic (up from 17.5% in 1979) and the decreases in poverty almost nonexistent:

A normal picture, based on the simple and empirical division into real households rather than abstracted into imaginary three-member families, and using income quintiles instead of a weird constructed concept of income-based classes, you can see that the income class structure has remained essentially the same, except that one of those classes has had a very different fate from the rest; Rose's "upper middle class" plus "rich" are a single group, just 20% of households now and 20% of the population in 1979, which has gotten fabulously rich while the others are marking time:

Via Russell Sage Foundation, 2010 dollars.

Rose's numbers, which Pinker uses without showing any understanding of where they're coming from, are a complex manipulation to make the "growing upper middle class" phenomenon look like a thing. I'm not going to look at any of the other statistics cited, but there's no reason to treat this as an argument for anything.

Driftglass thinks "radical honest" sounds awfully funny on the lips of David F. Brooks, and reminds us of one of the best reasons why.