Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness dribbling out of their ears

Herbert Brenon, Peter Pan, 1924

OK, so I'm getting a little concerned about David Brooks, who seems to have started worrying about whether he's great or not, and if not, why not? ("Do You Have to Be a Jerk to Be Great?").

Is it because of his lack of insanely single-minded commitment to a single goal? He's been looking at another book (You Must Change Your Life: The Story of Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin by Rachel Corbett, 2016) about Great Men, and the "total dedication" that enabled them to produce their awesome works:

Rilke had the same solitary focus. With the bohemian revelry of turn-of-the-century Paris all around him, Rilke was alone writing in his room. He didn’t drink or dance. He celebrated love, but as a general outlook and not as something you gave to any one person or place.

Both men produced masterworks that millions have treasured. But readers finish Corbett’s book feeling that both men had misspent their lives.

They were both horrid to their wives and children. Rodin grew pathetically creepy, needy and lonely. Rilke didn’t go back home as his father was dying, nor allow his wife and child to be with him as he died. Both men lived most of their lives without intimate care.

I mean, do you know of any famous people alive now who have been horrid to the wife and kids and may not now be getting the "intimate care" they were envisaging when they married somebody 25 or 30 years younger than they are?


And Brooks isn't even a monomaniac, is he? He's a sensible guy who likes to think about having many different interests, some day when he has a little more free time.

Then again maybe you don't have to be a monomaniac to be great, according to Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein:

The people who achieve excellence tend to have one foot outside their main world. “Compared to other scientists, Nobel laureates are at least 22 times more likely to partake as an amateur actor, dancer, magician or other type of performer,” Epstein writes.

He shows the same pattern in domain after domain: People who specialize in one thing succeed early, but then they slide back to mediocrity as their minds rigidify.

Maybe Brooks could try being a little less like Rilke and a little more like a Nobel Prize winner. Nothing as exposing of the vulnerabilities as amateur theatricals, but he's absolutely a performer, discussing current events on the TV and presenting homilies at graduation exercises. Does that count?

A tech entrepreneur who is 50 is twice as likely to start a superstar company than one who is 30, because he or she has a broader range of experience. A survey of the fastest-growing tech start-ups found that the average age of the founder was 45.

Take that, little Miss Know-It-All.

Brooks could be great in a more modern way, split five ways.

A better definition of success is living within the tension of multiple commitments and trying to make them mutually enhancing. The shape of this success is a pentagram — the five-pointed star. You have your five big passions in life — say, family, vocation, friends, community, faith — and live flexibly within the gravitational pull of each.

That sounds more fun than being Rilke. And more unique, since nobody else has so many interests nowadays; most people are more hermetically sealed, like Kierkegaard or Rodin:

Over the past month, while reading these books, I attended four conferences. Two were very progressive, with almost no conservatives. The other two were very conservative, with almost no progressives. Each of the worlds was so hermetically sealed I found that I couldn’t even describe one world to members of the other. It would have been like trying to describe bicycles to a fish.

I wonder which the Heterodox Academy was, which he attended on 20-21 June:

In order to address society’s most intractable problems, learners must weave together the best ideas from a range of perspectives. The HxA Annual Conference and Awards will convene over 300 HxA members, community leaders, administrators, philanthropists, and students to discuss key issues to the core of HxA’s mission: open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement in the academy. 

Carol Jonas-Morrison seemed to think it was scary liberal

I was surprised at how many times the names “Donald Trump” and “Milo Yiannopoulis” were evoked – always pejoratively.  I think I can see why:  Donald Trump has very bad hair while Milo has simply fantastic (apparently jealousy-inducing) hair. 

Joking aside, I found myself wondering “why intone these names?”  The mere mention of these individuals produced the expected liturgical response from the audience, with titters of laughter or knowing nods of approval. Perhaps, I thought, this is a way to signal in-group membership? Maybe this is a way of saying “I am here advocating for heterodox thought, but I am still a righteous liberal person?” Conceivably these are normal things to say to bond groups together in New York City or Ivy League circles

But adds,

it was a glittering event featuring intellectual supernovas, like Jonathan Haidt and Steven Pinker. David Brooks, of the New York Times and the Aspen Institute gave a wonderful and inspiring defense of universities. Coleman Hughes, a Columbia student [and anti-reparations Correspondent of Color for Quillette], fresh from delivering his testimony to Congress on reparations, was also in attendance. The conference was beautifully managed; everything just worked. It featured Ivy League intellectuals and important people of all stripes.

Very Progressive or Very Conservative?

I know Pinker still counts as a liberal in some circles, and Brooks too. What was the schedule at the Aspen Ideas Festival, where he showed up on 23 June to serve on a panel with Jeffrey Goldberg, Darren Walker (President of the Ford Foundation), Dan Porterfield (President of the Aspen Institute), Laurence Fink (chairman and CEO of BlackRock), John Micklethwait (editor-in-chief of Bloomberg), Richard Blanco (Obama's inaugural poet), George Smith (CEO of Legacy Libations, which seems to produce North Carolina whiskey), Agnes McKeen (founder of Just Talk Suicide Prevention), LaToya Thomas (founder and principal of Brick & Story, a consultancy using intentional engagement and communication strategies to foster stronger communities and tell stories of the built environment in creative, authentic ways, and an affiliate of Brooks's Weave franchise), and Francisco Arguelles (executive director of Living Hope Wheelchair Association, an organization of migrants with spinal cord injuries)? Very Conservative or Very Progressive?

Dr. Google can't actually find any conferences Brooks was at in July (he did give a talk at the Chatauqua Institute on 5 July, but that wasn't a conference, unless he was there as five different people, some very progressive and some very conservative and all unable to communicate with each other), so I'm constrained to conclude that all four of the conferences Brooks discusses today took place in the Applebees Salad Bar, if you know what I mean.

Maybe that's how David Brooks will achieve greatness, as a Great Fabricator of factoids so trivial and pallid that nobody can bring themselves to care. Fabricating has a lot in common with Weaving, at least etymologically. Young Mrs. Brooks may not be impressed, but maybe he can find a girlfriend in Canada.