Brooks Gets a Big Thing

Photo via CafeMom.

Ladies, rejoice! David F. Brooks ("Two Cheers for Feminism") thinks you're OK! I mean, not on the unpleasant issues like demanding equal pay, or impeaching Brett Kavanaugh, but:

I disagree with academic feminism a lot — with those vague oppressor stories about the patriarchy, with the strange unwillingness to admit inherited-gender differences and with the tone of faculty lounge militancy. But academic feminism is right about the big thing.

Which turns out to be—uh, what? What does the hedgehog of academic feminism know that the rest of us foxes are missing?

The big thing is that for thousands of years social thinking has been dominated by men — usually alpha men — who saw life as a place where warriors and traders went out and competed for wealth and power.

What? The big thing is that academic feminists have spent millennia in the wilderness? I don't want to quibble here, but that sounds more like a big meta-thing, not about the findings but about the methodology, and it also sounds like a vague oppressor story about the patriarchy.

So not exactly: there's a big thing about the big thing, which is that the academic masculists have been missing something important:

Brooxplaining

Eugène Ionesco, Rhinoceros, from a 2014 production by the Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium of Philadelphia.

A funny thing happened to David Brooks on his voyage last month into the heart of Millenniality: he sapped himself with a blackjack, stole all his money, and left himself for dead in a gutter ("Understanding Student Mobbists").

Or, putting it another way, when he went on his

little tour in which I gather millennials for interviews and ask them what they have faith in and how they are going to lead us in the years ahead

he apparently forgot to ask them the stuff he really wanted to know, or was too shy, and decided that the best expedient was to make up his own answers. He literally admits to this fabrication:

They could also give up St. Barth's...

This is priceless, from Florida Republican Representative Cliff Stearns:

 we don’t need more national parks in this country, we need to actually sell off some of our national parks, and try and do what a normal family would do is — they wouldn’t ask Uncle Joe for a loan, they would sell their Cadillac, or they would take their kids out of private schools and put them into public schools to save to money instead of asking for their credit card to increase their debt ceiling. 

I'll leave it to others to evaluate the idea of selling off the national parks—what I want to note is Stearns's idea of what constitutes a normal family in the US: people who don't need a "safety net" because in a pinch they could do without the expensive car and the private schools, and in a real crisis there's always Uncle Joe.

These Republicans-in-the-hierarchy really can't understand that most people don't have those things, they can't imagine how it is that people get to be poor. Qu'ils mangent de la brioche!

Brioche tasting, from Le Figaro.

They could also give up St. Barth's, and take their vacation in a nice... parking lot, where Yellowstone used to be.

Failure of imagination, imagination of failure

I'm listening to the NPR staff racking their brains over the question of why the Afghan population isn't as a whole more upset over the ghastly massacre in Kandahar province than they were over the Qur'an burnings of last month—like, have the years of war just made them place less of a value on human life than we do? Are they just clinging to their Qur'ans and guns?

It seems pretty obvious to me that NATO forces are to blame for the massacre insofar as if they hadn't been there it wouldn't have happened, but not guilty beyond that; the soldier was plainly not following orders, he was out of his mind, amok. The Qur'ans, on the other hand, were coolly and deliberately detroyed by order—it was NATO's intention to burn them, and why was that? Why wouldn't the Afghans think it was meant maliciously? It's an occupying army, isn't it?

The conceptual error from NPR and the commentariat is their starting by thinking "Why are these people different from us?" Whereas you can come up with an answer by starting with the assumption that they aren't different; what's different is the point of view from which they are interpreting what they see—the point of view of a people under occupation.

It's a failure of empathy that goes right up the chain of command (past those generals who think Muslims are idolators to those who hold doctorates), and it causes a lot of problems. Of course if they started thinking that way they might start thinking the whole operation was doomed to failure no matter what they did, and I guess that wouldn't be very cool.

Mohammad Sabir Khedri, fourth from left, displays the biggest Quran in the world to Afghan officials at the Hakim Nasir Khosrow Balkhi library in Kabul, 17 January 2012. Photo by Reuters.

The unconscious of a conservative

The 1967 Poor People's Campaign, from Ecumenical Women at the United Nations

I've already amused myself more than could be considered strictly necessary, or even entirely sane, with Arizona's attorney general, Tom Horne, who believes that the Tucson high schools' Mexican-American Studies Program was teaching students that they were "oppressed by white people" and therefore "just like the old South, and it's long past time that we prohibited it." But I'm not really over it. Anyway, it's Dr. King's birthday...

So what I want to know is: What exactly is it about rightishness [jump]

Snake on a plain

Vervet monkeys call out when they see a member of an enemy species, with different calls for different predators, so that their friends know what to do--for a leopard, get as high up a tree as you can; for an eagle, dive for cover. It is an instinctive response, however, not something the monkey learns to do, a language that can be changed from generation to generation.

Chimpanzees, on the other hand, our very close relatives, apparently think about it before making an alarm call--think about what it is they've seen and who needs to know, according to this report in the Guardian of a field experiment conducted in the Budongo forest, Uganda.