Fascism and Other Matters

It's amazing how much Republicans (I don't mean people who "identify" as Republicans, I mean party cadres, the activists who do the work and enjoy the rewards, ideological and material, because that's the kind of party the GOP is now) despise their voters.

While both sides have been criticized for misleading fundraising tactics, “[t]he Republican fundraising machine has been subject to more than 800 complaints to the Federal Trade Commission since 2022 — nearly seven times more than the number of complaints lodged against the other side,” they report.

One sad example: “One 82-year-old woman, who wore pajamas with holes in them because she didn’t want to spend money on new ones, didn’t realize she had given Republicans more than $350,000 while living in a 1,000 square-foot Baltimore condo since 2020.”

"I love the poorly educated," said Trump, but I think his understanding of "love" is a relationship where he gets a lot more out of it than he puts in, if you know what I mean.

***

This is so embarrassing on CNN's part:

Plagiarism

There's something else worth talking about, that Subotic sort of points at here but doesn't come out and say: that while we weren't looking the job of identifying plagiarism has been turned over to an AI device that matches the words in the text with all the previously published words it knows about—it's been automated, meaning it finds a lot more stuff than anybody ever found before, much more than your professors could find when they had to rely on Google to search it out for them, and almost infinitely more than in the millennia before Google existed (the term was invented by the Latin epigrammatist Martial, annoyed with a fellow Roman who was in the habit of reciting his, Martial's, poems in public with the claim that he'd written them himself—Martial liked to think of his published poems as slaves that he had set free, and called the impostor a plagiarius, a slave-kidnapper).

Robots shouldn't be tagging plagiarism for the same reason they shouldn't be tagging pornography, really; because unlike Justice Stewart, they don't and can't "know it when I see it." They don't know anything. They can be furnished with an algorithm that labels pictures as "porn" and "not-porn" by the criteria the algorithm supplies, and that's it, and you already know how well that works:

David Brooks Plagiarism Watch

 

New Substack post:

David Brooks Plagiarism Watch: On Trolls

Troll by Nicola Robinson, 2014, seen as a personification of change in midlife,

Not a lot of obviously objectionable material in today's David Brooks ("When Trolls and Crybullies Rule the Earth"), bringing together the ghost of a pretty interesting idea on the cultural consequences of the shift from privately consumed print media to group-absorbed online media with the observation that there are a lot of unnecessarily mean guys on the Internet, which is true.

The interesting idea is from a theologian called L.M. Sacasas writing at an online journal called The New Atlantis riffing off a famous idea from the late Walter Ong, S.J., in his 1982 book Orality and Literacy, about the Renaissance-era universalizing shift from oral to print culture:

In oral cultures, communication happens almost exclusively in the presence of others. The speaker’s audience is always before the speaker; indeed, it is literally an audience, a gathering of those near enough to hear. This physical presence means, as Ong noted, that oral cultures were more agonistic than literate cultures. Mutual understanding and the search for knowledge are labors of face-to-face interaction, and labors that may arouse the passions. “By keeping knowledge embedded in the human lifeworld, orality situates knowledge within a context of struggle.”

Writing, on the other hand, “fosters abstractions that disengage knowledge from the arena where human beings struggle with one another.” Writing also abstracts the speaker from the audience, which therefore ceases to be literally an audience. The two are no longer present before one another. Communication tends to lose the heat of the moment.

The Internet, Sacasas suggests, restores something like the ancient presentness to communication:

When we type out our statuses, link to articles, post memes or images, we do so as if we were members of literate but pre-digital societies, for we are not present before all those who will encounter our messages. Yet, given the immediacy with which the messages arrive, we are in an important way now much closer to one another. We might say that we have an “audience” whose immediate presence is constituted in time rather than space.

Brooks, of course, begins by pretending to have gotten the Ong material out of his own reading, in paragraphs 1-3—

Befriend your interior life!

Blackfoot nation camp ca. 1900, photo by Edward Curtis via Steven Draper's Pinterest.

When David F. Brooks says he's been doing something "recently" ("There Should Be More Rituals!")—

Recently I’ve been playing a game in my head called “There should be a ritual for. …” For example, there should be a ritual for when a felon has finished his sentence and is welcomed back whole into the community. There should be a ritual for when a family moves onto a street and the whole block throws a barbecue of welcome and membership.

There should be a ritual for the kids in modern blended families, when they move in and join their lives together. There should be a ritual for when you move out of your house and everybody shares memories from the different rooms there.

—it's a safe bet he's trying to suggest he thought independently of the thing he actually bumped into in the book he'll reference in paragraph 6, in this case Creating Rituals: A New Way to Healing for Everyday Life by Rev. Jim Clarke, Ph.D. (also the author of Soul-Centered: Spirituality for People on the Go),  2011.

The Gentlemanly Spirit

British troops in France, 1917,  George Grantham Bain collection/Library of Congress, via Britannica.

Brooks's commemoration of the centenary of the 1918 Armistice ("The Struggle to Stay Human Amid the Fight") seems to have been written mostly by Brainy Quotes, but it does take a surprising angle, while everybody else is praising the sacrifice of the troops in the conventional way people do, Brooks is complaining about the cultural effects of the Great War, which is that it created an atmosphere of distrust in institutions and spoiled everybody's gentlemanly, sporting spirit.

Disillusionment was the classic challenge for the generation that fought and watched that war. Before 1914, there was an assumed faith in progress, a general trust in the institutions and certainties of Western civilization. People, especially in the educated classes, approached life with a gentlemanly, sporting spirit.

As Paul Fussell pointed out in “The Great War and Modern Memory,” the upper classes used genteel words in place of plain ones: slumber for sleep, the heavens for the sky, conquer for win, legion for army.

Paul Fussell did not point out that the British upper classes used genteel words for plain ones before the war. Winston Churchill did not ask Mrs. Churchill if she had a nice slumber, or take his steed out for a canter. Fussell is talking about writing: the awful, disembodied, euphemism-soaked literary language of the Edwardians and Georgians, particularly in poetry (p. 21?):

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:

The New York Times Welcomes Brett Kavanaugh

Welcoming committee at the Baroque city of Karlskrona in southeast Sweden, via Cruise Baltic,

David Brooks getting first in line for the New York Times parade of greetings on the Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh ("It Took a Village to Raise Kavanaugh") is really adorable, in the way you can figure out how he proceeded to write it: knowing somebody was going to get named yesterday, he wrote one of his book report columns with blanks in the first two paragraphs—

In the weeks ahead, we’re going to spend a lot of time going over _______ _______’s biography — where he’s from and what he’s written. But that’s not the most important way to understand the guy.

_______ is the product of a community. He is the product of a conservative legal infrastructure that develops ideas, recruits talent, links rising stars, nurtures genius, molds and launches judicial nominees. It almost doesn’t matter which Republican is president. The conservative legal infrastructure is the entity driving the whole project. It almost doesn’t even matter if _______ is confirmed or shot down; there are dozens more who can fill the vacancy, just as smart and just as conservative.

—and then, when the announcement came out last night, filled in the blanks with Kavanaugh's name and filed the piece. It works, in its way, because "the best way to understand the guy" is to realize that it doesn't matter who it is; it will turn out to be is a product of the same cookie cutter created in the 1980s, as described by Steven Teles in The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement: The Battle for Control of the Law (2009), which is the subject of Brooks's book report for today.

For the record: Self-plagiarism

This is so priceless, if I do say so myself.

I know how! You could recycle huge chunks of texts from one book into another book and sell them all over again, one book for the price of two, as Christine Kelly puts it in her review of a couple of books by, ah, Dinesh D'Souza.

Says one of the most notorious self-plagiarists in the world https://t.co/oBO5jSE5Hb pic.twitter.com/0JmUSX1xQy

— Yas We Can (@Yastreblyansky) November 30, 2017

Nobody Expects the Spanish Disquisition

Chiron giving young Achilles his lyre lesson. Roman fresco from Herculaneum, 1st c. C.E., in the National Archaeological Museum of Naples, via Wikimedia Commons.

David Brooks ("The Essential John McCain") would like us to believe he is on intimate terms with a book by the Spanish philosopher Javier Gomá Lanzón, La Ejemplaridad Pública, 2009, of which no English translation has yet been published, and Gomá's thoughts on the topic of paideia, the ancient Athenian idea of education for citizenship:

Lord of the Inner Rings

Snoots are also tubes used by photographers to control the direction and dimension of a light beam as in this stargazer fish, shot by Ryo Minemizu at Osezaki, Shizuoka, Japan.

David F. Brooks ("The Art of Thinking Well") is off on this year's Nobel Prize for Economics, awarded to Richard Thaler for his work in behavioral economics, a completely justified critique of economics proper and its reliance on the fiction of a Homo economicus whose behavior is always governed by rational self-interest.

Not for me to second-guess the Nobel committee, even on as whimsical a science as economics, but I've complained about Thaler before (also in the context of a Brooks column, as it happens), on the way that essential insight—people's behavior is not governed by rational self-interest, but is in fact emotional, often poorly informed, and frequently nuts—never gets plowed back into theory for the construction of less utopian models of the economic behavior of real humans. Instead behavioral economists find themselves working on techniques whereby you and I can overcome our irrationality and outsmart our neighbors; on the broad scale methods of tricking the public into acting in their own self-interest, as in Thaler's and Sunstein's celebrated Nudge, but in the hands of lesser thinkers than Thaler into the territory of the economic self-help book, as in Gary Belsky's and Thomas Gilovich's Why Smart People Make Big Money Mistakes And How To Correct Them: Lessons From The New Science Of Behavioral Economics (1999), the kind of economics that David F. Brooks can really sink his teeth into.

Brooks, indeed, starts out kvetching that Thaler's work isn't self-helpy enough:

Brooks Looks at Li'l Don

Doesn't always take a conspiracy theory to connect the dots. Via openclipart.

Heredity or environment? Where does sociopathy come from? David Brooks ("Moral Vacuum in the House of Trump") lays out the case from Friedrich Drumpf the Rheinland draft-dodger and British Columbia brothelkeeper to Donald Trump, Jr., enthusing over an illegal in-kind campaign contribution from foreign nationals connected to an iffy government the way you might about a trip to the mountains—"I love it especially later in the summer"—and pictures it as a kind of evolutionary development in the moral tone:

I repeat this history because I don’t think moral obliviousness is built in a day. It takes generations to hammer ethical considerations out of a person’s mind and to replace them entirely with the ruthless logic of winning and losing; to take the normal human yearning to be good and replace it with a single-minded desire for material conquest; to take the normal human instinct for kindness and replace it with a law-of-the-jungle mentality.

It took a few generations of the House of Trump, in other words, to produce Donald Jr.

That's ridiculous, really. You'll never convince me that Li'l Donnie is in some sense more evil than old Fred, Woody Guthrie's "Old Man Trump" sucking up government money and profiteering off the blood and sacrifice of World War II veterans to create exploitative housing, whites only, in Queens:

Alienation of affectations

Of course four-star sheriff Clarke, with his Soviet-style chestful of fake medals and  murderous record as a jail manager, is literally a worse person than Brooks in most ways. Image via Wonkette.

BREAKING: We have a David Brooks Plagiarism Watch situation ("The Alienated Mind"), where former New York Times columnist David Brooks appears, not for the first time, to be committing the same infraction Milwaukee sheriff David Clarke just got busted for.

Paragraph 4:

Alienation, the sociologist Robert Nisbet wrote, is a “state of mind that can find a social order remote, incomprehensible or fraudulent; beyond real hope or desire; inviting apathy, boredom, or even hostility.”

Paragraph 6:

As Yuval Levin argues in a brilliant essay in Modern Age, “Alienation can sometimes make for a powerful organizing principle for an electoral coalition. … But it does not make for a natural organizing principle for a governing coalition.”

Yuval Levin, "Conservatism in an Age of Alienation"

“Alienated” need not be a putrid, Marxist designation. The great twentieth-century sociologist Robert Nisbet defined ­alienation as “the state of mind that can find a social order remote, incomprehensible, or fraudulent; beyond real hope or desire; inviting apathy, boredom, or even hostility.” This is precisely how Trump and many of his most vocal supporters frequently spoke about America over the past year.

What Clarke was busted for being, as you'll recall, that he'd lifted 47 passages from other writers without crediting them (in his 2013 master's thesis for the Naval Postgraduate School), even though he did credit the authors for other passages cited elsewhere in the thesis, which he seemed to think made it all OK: "only someone with a political agenda would say this is plagiarism," he told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, but it seems unlikely that the Naval Postgraduate School ethics guidelines were composed with a political agenda). This is precisely what Brooks does when he presents the Nisbet quote early in the column as if he'd picked it up directly out of Nisbet's 1953 The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics of Order and Freedom and then, a bit later, cites the source he actually got it from, as if turning spontaneously from the Nisbet book to Levin's article. We've seen Brooks doing this before.

Brooks on Civic Religion: The Eighth Grader Appears

José Clemente Orozco, 1926, Cortés and La Malinche. Via WikiArt.

A paragraph by David Brooks:

When Europeans first settled this continent they had two big thoughts. The first was that God had called them to create a good and just society on this continent. The second was that they were screwing it up.

"You know what, Malinchita?" said Cortés to his Aztec beauty, his special favorite of the 20 women he'd kidnapped from the town of Tabasco after conquering it in 1519, "I just had a big thought: God called me to create a good and just society on this continent."

"So how are you doing?" asked La Malinche.

"I think I'm screwing it up."

"You're certainly screwing me up, you racist pig-eater."

Or was it Jacques Cartier reaching Newfoundland in the spring of 1534? Nope, he was supposed to "discover certain islands and lands where it is said that a great quantity of gold and other precious things are to be found". And the Northwest Passage. Or maybe I'm thinking of Captain Smith and the Virginia Company in 1607? Uh-uh, their charter said they were in it mostly for the same thing, and 20% for His Majesty: "to have and enjoy the goulde, silver and copper to be gotten there of to the use and behoofe of the same Colonies and the plantacions thereof; yeilding therefore yerelie to us, our heires and successors, the fifte parte onelie of all the same goulde and silver and the fifteenth parte of all the same copper soe to be gotten or had, as is aforesaid, and without anie other manner of profitt or accompte to be given or yeilded to us, our heires or successors, for or in respecte of the same").

Actually the first big thought seems to have been stolen from Washington Archbishop Donald Wuerl, and his homily at St. Matthew's Cathedral before the first Obama inauguration, January 18 2009:

Brooks tackles Frederick Douglass, Supermodel

From a daguerreotype of 1847, National Portrait Gallery, from Wikimedia Commons.

It's David Brooks, the world-famous photography critic —"How Artists Change the World", apparently not by going to Philadelphia this summer.

As usual, there were a ton of artists and musicians at the political conventions this year.

What, they only had two thousand pounds of artists and musicians? Somewhere between ten and twenty individuals, depending on the gender mix? At both of them put together? That seems low. (I realize Brooks, being a literary man, is using some fancy rhetorical technique here, probably the figure of litotes, or understatement, and what he actually means is "rather a lot".)

And that raises some questions. How much should artists get involved in politics? How can artists best promote social change?

Why, Grandmother, what big margins you have!

The better to short you with, my dear!

New York Times Sunday Review, July 24 2016.

What that un-Timesly moat of white represents, of course—vast spaces for meditating—is the column inches meant to be occupied in the spread by the 800-some words of the David Brooks column entitled "The Dark Knight", until some bright spark noticed, sometime Friday morning, that that piece was about 50% plagiarized from the David Brooks column entitled "The Death of the Republican Party", which had appeared that morning in the usual spot.

Or perhaps "The Death of the Republican Party" was plagiarized from "The Dark Knight", it's not easy to say. I'm guessing the assistant who wrote "Trump is Even Trumpier", which appeared in Brooks's spot on Tuesday, also wrote "The Death of the Republican Party", and Brooks himself produced "The Dark Knight", and they didn't so much plagiarize one from the other as they worked from duplicate sets of Brooskian Duplo blocks, each turning the embryonic paragraphs to a somewhat different use. You can check out the evidence at my previous post on this fascinating question, if you have not already done so.

The editors decided to split the difference, deleting "The Death of the Republican Party" from the online edition and "The Dark Knight" from the paper one, and that, with its traces in those margins on the Op-Ed spread, is the whole story, I suppose.

But for one thing I don't think the assistant is supposed to be writing the column, no matter how busy Brooks is with his TV appearances. And all that white space has to be embarrassing. If I were Andrew Rosenthal, I think I'd have to conclude this was a firing offense. But hey, I've said that before.

Brooks and the Ukpöñ: When you're Jung at heart

Leopard at the Avalon Zoo, Rizal, Philippines. Photo by Husayn.

There Is a Part of Each of Our Souls

a poem

by David Brooks

There is a part of each of our souls
that is like a reclusive leopard.^a
This is the part that doesn’t care
about money or status or Facebook^b
or any of The Everyday Things.^c

The leopard is the part of us that feeds
off transcendence^d, that seeks an awareness
of one’s place in the cosmic order,
a feeling of connection to unconditional
love, truth, justice, beauty^e and home^f.

A back in his Crick

Ossi Oswalda in Ernst Lubitsch's Die Puppe (The Doll), 1919. Via Fritzi.

David Brooks was feeling awful when he was typing his title last night, "The Governing Cancer of our Time", but luckily he'd forgotten about it by the time he got his index cards lined up, and the unpleasant metaphor had wandered away. I wonder, though, what the cancer was going to be a metaphor for?

We live in a big, diverse society. There are essentially two ways to maintain order and get things done in such a society — politics or some form of dictatorship. Either through compromise or brute force.

Bigness, or diversity? It's clear that he regards these as problems in need of a solution in American public life, things that have to be dealt with, perhaps by unpalatable expedients. Need to lose weight? Chop off your legs or go on a diet, the choice is yours. Need to do something about that uncontrollable diversity? I'm afraid you'll have to get some politics. It's a slightly scary procedure, but less invasive than a dictatorship, and most patients survive.

I prefer to think of diversity and politics as positive goods, and interdependent, as the great English democratic socialist political thinker Bernard Crick suggested, in his 1962 essay In Defence of Politics:

Still more good news for John McCain!

Hobart Bosworth in Rowland V. Lee's The Sea Lion (1921). Via Fritzi.

Shorter David Brooks, "Donald Trump Isn't Real", New York Times, February 2 2016:

1. Donald Trump draws his political style from the theatrics of World Wrestling Entertainment, in which what matters isn't whether you win or lose or whether you are good or evil but how aggressive you show yourself to be, so if he wins it won't be real, right, Dad? But it's real if he loses?

2. Marco Rubio's surge in Iowa is amazing.

(That's Brooks's 140th career use of "amazing/amazingly" in his Times column since September 2003, for the record, maintaining a steady rate of just over once a month.)

The only way to stop a bad guy with a religion

Al Jolson and May McAvoy in Alan Crosland's and Gordon Hollingshead's The Jazz Singer (1927),. Image via Alchetron.

1. Theodemography

So the good news is, according to David Brooks, "Finding Peace Within the Holy Texts", that secularization is over, and a process of desecularization is under way, because this always happens. In part, it's just simple arithmetic, because the unsecular have more babies.

Research by the German theodemographer Michael Blume shows that every nonreligious population in human history, going back to ancient India and Greece, has fallen into decline, while the world population on the whole continues to expand, indicating that the Old Order Amish and the followers of the Lubavitcher Rebbe are swiftly taking over the planet, which will not surprise you if you've ever been in the Williamsburg Greenmarket, or maybe it will (I go to Manhattan greenmarkets myself, actually, where you sometimes see a lot of Amish pretzel salespersons, which is what made me think of it, so I don't really know, but the online pictures suggest that there's nobody there from either group.)

The sociobiological theory behind this, by the way, apparently taken up from the thinking of the economist Friedrich von Hayek, is possibly not known to David Brooks, and it's that religiosity is an adaptive evolutionary trait; females of the species tend to gravitate toward males who go to church, or whatever, as a sign that they are more likely to be solid family guys who will take an affectionate interest in their offspring's survival, thus boosting the replication chances of their girls' genes as well as their own. Thus when Faust is seducing Gretchen she asks him "Sag, wie hast du's mit der Religion?" (Tell me, how do you feel about religion?), showing what kind of mate she's particularly seeking (pay no attention to the facts that Faust evades the question and she sleeps with him anyway, and that she ends up going mad and drowning her baby and thus fails entirely to transmit his and her genes to the next generation).