Reasonably Emotional

David Brooks, in his endless pursuit of saying nothing pompously, tells us that because of a blinkered view of human nature that pits reason against emotion schools fail and bankers rob us blind. He also argues that

This has created a distortion in our culture. We emphasize things that are rational and conscious and are inarticulate about the processes down below. We are really good at talking about material things but bad at talking about emotion.

It's not clear, to me in any event, how talking about these inarticulate processes will aid us in making new policies. Even if it is the case that we come to our desired policies through some deep emotion driven process the policies work or don't or fall somewhere in between, which is why we think about outcomes as opposed to ideologically driven policy preferences.

I would also like to say  that this paragraph seems filled with inaccuracies:

When we raise our kids, we focus on the traits measured by grades and SAT scores. But when it comes to the most important things like character and how to build relationships, we often have nothing to say. Many of our public policies are proposed by experts who are comfortable only with correlations that can be measured, appropriated and quantified, and ignore everything else.

On the one hand, he runs together two or three separate things and on the other, at least in my experience, he ignores the fact that many, if not all, parent actually do try to induce their kiddiewinks into having better characters and so forth without considerations of SAT scores and grades. And, outside of robots and computers, lots of these kind of conversations deal with emotions in a fairly straightforward way.

As to the last sentence, yes it's true, for example, that lots of people worried about, say, global climate change and its attendant problems do want to use science to solve the problems using reason, fact, argument, and experiment instead of thinking about how it is that they came to value a discipline that relies on facts to improve predictability and control over nature. 

It might be that DB has fallen in love with the allegedly hidden emoticons of decision making because lots of his Conservative and Glibertarian friends would like to invoke the feeling and emotions of one hundred percent Americanism when dealing with any issue, including what kind of coffee to drink.

I'd also point out that his division and definition of the French and English enlightenments are total bullshit, in Frankfurterian sense of bullshit.