You know that picture of the "Descent of Man", of the march of human evolution as a literal march of ever more erect and hairless male hominids? The concept of David Brooks writing about the "cultural contradictions of capitalism" as he does in
today's column calls to mind one of those "Descent of Man" parodies that invert it into a picture of degeneration, from heroic ancestors to wretched present, where such is the bathos of the penultimate phase, the bent-over Cubicle Man, that there's nothing for it but to revert at the end to the knuckle-dragging chimp: muscular Marx, spiritual Weber, anxiety-ridden Daniel Bell, and Bedtime-for-Bonzo Brooks:
