Humility Lessons

Harold Lloyd in Hal Roach's Haunted Spooks, 1920, via.

David Brooks, 21 May

Aside from a few protesters and a depraved president, most of us have understood we need to suspend the old individualistic American creed. In the midst of a complex epidemiological disaster, to be anti-authority is to be ignorant. In the midst of a contagion, to act as if you are self-sufficient is just selfish.

David Brooks, 28 May

But it’s too easy to offload all blame on Trump. Trump’s problem is not only that he’s emotionally damaged; it is that he is unlettered. He has no literary, spiritual or historical resources to draw upon in a crisis.

David Brooks, 25 June

There are five gigantic changes happening in America right now. The first is that we are losing the fight against Covid-19. Our behavior doesn’t have anything to do with the reality around us. We just got tired so we’re giving up.

David Brooks, 3 July ("The National Humiliation We Need")

It wasn’t Trump who went out to bars in Tempe, 

Austin and Los Angeles in June. 

It wasn’t Trump who put on hospital gowns 

and told the American people you could suspend 

the lockdown if your cause was just. Once 

you told people they could suspend the lockdown 

for one thing, they were going to suspend it for others.

Does anybody know what that is about the hospital gowns? It's in the position where Brooks would normally put a bothsides antinomy, so I suppose to counterbalance the Republican individualist bargoers he's referring to some group of Social Justice Warriors going out undistanced, but why would they be wearing hospital gowns, especially when PPE supplies could still be precarious? Dr. Google is baffled; he finds some Wisconsin family planning advocates in hospital gowns picketing Scott Walker in 2015 over abortion law, and a bunch of Darrel Issa's San Diego constituents in hospital gowns in 2017 protesting Issa's vote against Obamacare, but in 2020 it's just nurses protesting the lack of PPE, and they obviously couldn't have been wearing gowns because they couldn't spare any.

David Brooks Urges Us to Tighten Up

Ah, what's up, Brooksie ("The First Invasion of America")?

I was an American history major in college, back in the 1980s.

I’ll be honest with you. I thrilled to the way the American story was told back then. To immigrate to America was to join the luckiest and greatest nation in history. “Nothing in all history had ever succeeded like America, and every American knew it,” Henry Steele Commager wrote in his 1950 book, “The American Mind.”

He was an undergraduate and his bibliography was already 30 years out of date.

Because the practice of American historiography utterly changed in the two decades after David Brooks's birth, as Jonathan Wiener explained at the 1983 meeting of the Organization of American Historians (published in 1989, putting both Eric Foner and Sean Wilentz, Marxish and un-Marxish, at the head of the acknowledgment footnote):

The Fool on Prof. Hill

Anonymous image from The Abraham Lincoln Blog.

David F. Brooks dropped his humility lectures at Yale a while back when he unexpectedly learned he wasn't very interested in humility, but he continues on the part-time celebrity faculty as a participant in Yale's Grand Strategy seminar, in the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy at the John W. and Susan G. Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. He's not involved in the fall semester, when they study contemporary issues, but in spring he helps actual political scientist Bryan Garsten out with Machiavelli in week 4, early February, and actual historian John Lewis Gaddis with Lincoln in week 8 in March.

That's two classes per year (each presented twice, because Yale has too many young members of the "next generation of leaders" to fit into the classroom) to which he offers what exactly? Punctuating the solemnity of his partners' lectures the way he does the PBS broadcasts with self-deprecatory wisecracks and expressions of pious alarm? He can't presumably use the joke about "I only teach at schools I couldn't get into" more than once a year.

He also sits in on somebody else's classes once in a while, to expand his perspective, as we learn from "The Enlightenment Project" in today's Times:

Carry On Continentals

David Brooks is off today, so we're kind of on our own.

The late Sid James as (I'm pretty sure) highwayman Dick Turpin in Carry on Dick (1974). Via My Ear-Trumpet Has Been Struck by Lightning.

David Brooks writes ("The Declaration Dilemma", New-York Times, July 3 1776):

All eyes seem to be fixed on the so-called Continental Congress, which has been hunkered down in Philadelphia for a little over a year now, ever since last year's unfortunate disturbances in Massachusetts, where rebel rioters managed to force the royal peacekeeping troops to pull back to Boston from Lexington and Concord.

Yesterday the Congress voted to declare that all the crown colonies south of the Canadas are independent countries, so that they can start negotiating with the French for financial support. A committee chaired by Dr. Benjamin Franklin is said to be drafting a document explaining this weird theory, and it could be published as early as tomorrow.

Dukes of Moral Hazard

On a bright day you can hardly see those stars and bars on the roof, and it's always sunny in Hazzardelphia.  But why can't you call it, say, the General Beauregard?

David Brooks writes ("The Robert E. Lee Problem", June 26 2015):

The debate about what I'll call the Charleston Bible study shooting, because even at this date if you assume it has something to do with race that could only hurt people's feelings, and I have this reputation for courtesy I have to keep up, has oddly transformed itself into a debate about the former Confederate States of America and their battle flag, which is not a trivial matter, because a flag is made of woven material and racism is a part of what it is woven from, though whether weft or warp is beyond my expertise.

Cheap shots and radiant inner light

Image by J.Scott Applewhite/AP.

Jeb! to Declare Presidential Run, Playing Down His Surname

By MICHAEL BARBARO and JONATHAN MARTIN JUNE 15, 2015

MIAMI — Jeb! (who uses only one name), a son and brother of presidents, formally entered the race for the White House on Monday by portraying himself as the most accomplished leader in the 2016 field, declaring war on Washington’s political culture and insisting that his former family name of Bush gave him no unique claim to the Oval Office.

As his mother, Barbara, a former first lady, looked on, Mr. Jeb! directly confronted the central doubt looming over his candidacy: that he presents the latest incarnation of a tired dynasty and thinks himself entitled to the Republican nomination.

“Not a one of us deserves the job by right of résumé, party, seniority, family or family narrative,” he told a crowd of 3,000 supporters in a community college’s gymnasium. “It’s nobody’s turn. It’s everybody’s test.”

Mr. Jeb!, whose tenure as governor of Florida was marked by the privatization of traditional state services, vowed to “take Washington — the static capital of this dynamic country — out of the business of causing problems.”

Nah, just for fun.

NYTimes commenter AR:

The book he didn't write

Tom Sawyer curates Aunt Polly's board fence. Via.

David "I guess I wrote this book to save my own soul" Brooks appears to be developing into a kind of corporate person, theroadtocharacter.com, and he's awfully busy, so instead of writing a column today he curated one, a little exhibit of pieces from the crowd-sourced part of the website, where ordinary folks write in to share how they have gone about finding meaning or purpose in life.

So it would be kind of mean-spirited to criticize these volunteers, who seem like pretty nice and thoughtful persons (humble enough to admire Brooks a lot more than he deserves and assume his sincerity). Though it wouldn't have hurt to have an editor check the singular-plural issue of the contributor who described "an amazingly consistent phenomena". In fact Brooks has engineered himself the startling feat of using the adverb "amazingly" twice in one brief essay—it's possible, of course, that he hasn't read today's column at all.

They have a message worth attending to, that you don't have to be St. Augustine or Bayard Rustin or Frances Perkins to have a meaningful life: you might just cultivate your garden, like 85-year-old Hans Pitsch, who writes,

Cheap shots: Double Take

John Barrymore in Sam Taylor's Tempest (1928).

I abhor, of course, all kinds of cheap and prurient gossip, even in the realm of Brooksiana, but I feel I have to say something about this opening graf of the Acknowledgments to The Road to Character:

People who seem icky and situations that are distasteful

Dove and snake in Canterbury Cathedral. Probably not intended as a representation of the ideal politician's mind.

World famous political scientist David Brooks is intrigued by the data:

There was an interesting poll result about Hillary Clinton last week. According to a Quinnipiac poll, 60 percent of independent voters believe that she has strong leadership qualities. But when these same voters were asked if she is honest and trustworthy, the evaluations flipped. Sixty-one percent said she is not honest and trustworthy. Apparently there are a lot of Americans who believe that Hillary Clinton is dishonest and untrustworthy but also a strong leader.

I'd say it's rather more interesting that only 51% of the independents had an unfavorable opinion of HRC (43% favorable, 3% don't know). This pattern is rather stronger over the sample as a whole (Democrats, Republicans, and independents), where she scores 46% to 47% on favorability, and an appalling 38% to 54% on honesty. Thus there would seem to be a lot more Americans who feel that she is dishonest but don't see that as a reason to have an unfavorable opinion. "Sure she's dishonest, but does that make her a bad person?"

Build a better secularist and the world will beat a--Wait, they build themselves? Really?

There are tons of secular communities; you just can't tell because they let everybody in. Sydney Cityscape by Dion Archibald, 2006.

David Brooks writes (Building Better Secularists, New York Times, February 3 2015):

In recent years, the number of unchurched, unbelieving, or unaffiliated infidels appears to have been increasing quite rapidly, in 2012 up to 20% from 15% in 2007 among U.S. adults and 32% among the 18-to-29 group, and their increasingly assertive spokespersons have been going around making the paradoxical claim that there could be something positive in all this startling negativity and that faithlessness might be regarded as a kind of faith.

I'm not sure whether I've met anybody like this—I mean, you wouldn't expect me to ask, I'm only a journalist, for Pete's sake—but I've been learning about them from the fluid and pleasurable prose of Phil Zuckerman (I haven't used the word "fluid" in months—nice to see you, old pal!), a sociology professor, in his new book "Living the Secular Life: New Answers to Old Questions", which wandered into my Kindle in January.*

Beyond humility

Shorter David Brooks, "Saving the System", New York Times, April 29, 2012:

I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but I do this grand strategy thing at Yale with a bunch of guys that you probably never heard of because it's, shall we say, kind of exclusive. Not Humility Studies, if you know what I mean. We were just emailing each other the other day about the state of the world, too, and how difficult it is for America to make all the other countries do what we want any more, and how stupid and petty-minded voters are, and I mentioned this article I saw in Foreign Affairs, and I can tell you we are very concerned.

Image from OceanWisher.

Studies in Grand Strategy is a full-year postgraduate class led by Professors John Lewis Gaddis, Charles Hill, and Paul Kennedy running from January to December,

Somewhere, over the cost curve...

Shorter David Brooks, "Capitalism for the Masses", February 21 2014:

In my favorite opera, "The Barber of Barcelona", the wealthy young economist Count Brooks (no relation) must disguise himself as an impoverished hornist (with the orchestra of the Gran Teatre del Liceu) in order to gain access to the shuttered home of his enamorada. If this story were true, and who's to say it isn't, the Count might end up later in life as the head of a prestigious conservative think tank like the American Enterprise Institute, and what he'd be telling us all, I'm sure, is, "Don't follow your head, follow your heart. And stop arguing for capitalism on economic grounds, because in addition to all those ghastly formulas and tables it just doesn't make any sense. Instead, argue for capitalism on moral grounds: so what if it doesn't make us all rich, it's the right thing to do!"

Via SweetComments.net.

And if you want some actual analysis of the silly thing, go check out Steve M., who nailed it much more cleanly than I would have done.

Fullers' soap

Revised for intelligibility 2/16/2014

Image by Cherie Goodpasture.

In the flush of excitement yesterday I missed noting that David Brooks had written yet another column, this one in his "Look what I just found in the Kindle" vein, on a new opus by Count Mikhail Georg'evič Ignat'ev, Fire to Ashes: How a Simple Nobleman Singlehandedly Destroyed an Entire Canadian Political Party (September 2013).

I really meant to let it go by—there's more to life than Brooks, you know—because I couldn't imagine how I could have any especially interesting opinions about Michael Ignatieff or Canadian politics, but then Driftglass happened by complaining about an angle of the column whose deep comedy had escaped me, his drawing a contrast between ideas of the pure-hearted, cozy refinement of the life academic and the frighteningly violent vulgarity of the life political, both taken entirely from fiction, as if Brooks had no personal experience of either:

Faith and begorrah

Shorter David Brooks, "Alone, Yet Not Alone", New York Times, January 27, 2014:

Have I told you about my religious ecstasy side? Well, I haven't actually tried it out yet, but I read a book about it. Kind of like Rabbi Heschel, only humble. Think some of that weary white Christian contemporary piano pop.

Gianlorenzo Bernini, L'Estasi di Santa Teresa, ca. 1652, via.

Bonus: Look first upon this picture, then on this:

Generation of diapers

Via The Queen of Myself: Meaning, Moxie, and Majesty for Midlife Women.

Shorter David Brooks, "It Takes a Generation", New York Times, January 24, 2014:

It goes without saying that the problem with poor people isn't the fact that they don't have enough money. It's that they can't control their impulses, can't form attachments, don't possess resilience, and lack social and emotional skills. Even people who can afford to live in $300-per-night hotels while they recover from a divorce can suffer from these issues, which shows that they're more important than what's in your bank account. [jump]

Of the aching of Brooks there is no end

Henri Vidal, 1896. From Wikipedia, "Facepalm".

Catherine Woodiwiss, associate Web editor for Soujourners: Faith in Action for Social Justice, writing last August:

events this year — from the Supreme Court gutting the Voting Rights Act to the House eliminating funding for food stamps to the Trayvon Martin trial — are posing serious challenges to our national progress towards true equality for all....

Brooks of the Week in Review

Tuesday saw Brooksie writing a really peculiar column about hotels, of all things: the great hotels of the Gilded Age, the colorless, functional hotels of Modernism, and the quirky boutique hotels of our own period, as represented by Chip Conley, founder of Joie de Vivre Hospitality, a hotel chain inspired by Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and author of a book that has slithered into Brooks's Kindle, Peak: How Great Companies Get their Mojo from Maslow.

He seems to be making some gentle Bobos in Paradise fun of Conley and his customers:

Painfully hip boutique hotels...  are, on one level, kind of ridiculous. They are almost invariably too dark throughout, making it hard to read. The bed is often too low. The bathroom door is sometimes a flimsy sliding shutter, sacrificing privacy for style.

The (rather inexpensive) Hotel des Arts, San Francisco, via Alkemie.

Weed rather you didn't

Shorter David Brooks: "Weed: Been There. Done That", New York Times, January 3, 2014.

In my youth my friends and I experimented a lot with marijuana, generally leading most of us to act silly when we should have been preparing for our future coherent, integrated, and responsible lives as bond traders, government officials, and composers of 800-word essays. This is why marijuana should be illegal, not for health or safety but for moral reasons. You don't really have to try it for yourself since I've already done it for you; if you need to get silly you can just read my columns.

Marijuana - Comments and Glitter Graphics!

Most importantly, while pot prohibition may have caused some inconveniences for some individuals, it has never caused any problems for David Brooks.

David Brooks's secret message

Protest marcher. Prophet Amos, from Pueblo de Dios Lutheran Church.

The Yale Professor of Humility, with that uncanny ability he has to root out little-known facts, has learned that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was a well-regarded Christian theologian. And not only that:

It’s also worth remembering that while today we take marches and protests for granted, the tactics of the civil rights movement had deep philosophical and religious roots.

Moreover, King and A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin were not liberals.

The leaders rejected the soft meliorism of more secular activists, the idea that significant progress could be made through consciousness-raising and education campaigns, through consensus and gradual reform. As Rustin put it, African-American leaders like him looked upon “the middle-class idea of long-term educational and cultural changes with fear and mistrust.”

The conclusion is obvious: indeed, so obvious that Brooks leaves it unstated, with his usual sophistication (also known as chronic dishonesty): King was a conservative!

Just like Tolstoy and Gandhi. And St. Francis. And the prophet Amos.

Or maybe just old Mr. Buckley, who had such a high regard for Dr. King, and set the standard for explaining his thinking by distorting what he said.

Playing at the positives

Cute Finnish girl Pilar O'Flaherty and her equally adorable mom Baroness Olga von Augenstein from Ghana.

Watched by Mr. Pierce, so I don't have to:

DAVID BROOKS: Well, let me play at the positives, because I want to ask you something Congressman Labrador just said. We are still an amazingly talented country. You go to schools, you've got kids named Juan Hernandez Goldberg floating around there, mixtures of all these different ethnicities. We're really tolerant compared to other countries. And we still have these fantastic stories. I just had lunch with a woman named Katie who was from a not great family, she's homeless, spends part her time homeless, decides she's going to enlist in the navy, the enlistment officer says, "No, you shouldn't enlist in the navy, you should go to Annapolis." She graduates this year number one academically in her class, she gets a Rhodes Scholarship, she runs track, she's a Marine. You run across these stories all the time and they still are endemic to the way we live.

Jan van Eyck, Ghent Altarpiece:
 Angel musicians with positive organ, 15th
century. Wikimedia Commons.

Wow! Like my zayde used to say, only in America could a Jew be mayor of Dublin! Or could you become a track-star Marine at Annapolis (this turns out to be real—I had no idea the Marines didn't have their own academy—but why don't they, are they too working class?).

Only in America could The New York Times find an Italian named Jonathan Wajskol, a Brazilian named Carla Greeb, a Colombian called Alain de Beaufort, and a German called Xiaoning Wang who all decline to become US citizens because permanent residency is enough (though a couple of subjects relented so they could vote for Obama, sorry Brooksy).

It's because we're so tolerant, of the not-great and the part-time homeless. And that kind of thing is endemic, if not quite epidemic yet. What did Congressman Labrador just say? I have a banana in my ear.