WTF

Is up with David Brooks? Is there such a thing as truth serum?

Oh How He Envies the Poor

As near as I can make out this column by David Brooks valorizes the joys of poverty by  insisting that when he spent money in "simple" camps the help treated him and his well and there were no barriers betwixt the other paying guests. On the other hand, when he spent money on the "relatively luxurious" camps there was a sterility of wealth and individualism that stymied the joy of communal poverty.  That's right, we ought not pity the "simples" their poverty but rather embrace their cheeriness and communality. For Brooks its an experience worth paying for.

But of course, it's not possible that the "simple" camps were haimish because imbeciles like Brooks want to buy an experience rather than create thus transforming an ineffable quality of any decent civilization into a commodity available to those wealthy enough to go on safari.

As to the notion that the employees of simple camps peddling haimishness were authentically haimish, I'll leave you with former slave John Little's description of joyful slaves:

They say slaves are happy because they laugh and are merry. I myself, and three or four others, have received 200 lashes in the day, and had our feet in fetters; yet at night, we would sing and dance, and make others laugh at the rattling of our chains. Happy men we must have been! We did it to keep down trouble, and to keep our hearts from being completely broken; that is as true as the gospel! Just look at it—must not we have been very happy? Yet I have done it myself—I have cut capers in chains.

Not that the cash nexus and the peddling of experience under the threat of no food is like slavery just that even slaves pretend despite a lack of pay.


UPDATE:
Matthew Ygelsias on David Brooks commending the commodification of experience:

I completely endorse this:

This being Brooks and, Ygelsias adds, that

the reality is that at the margin, Americans should invest more in vacations and less in big houses.

Because, of course, it's all about those with too much investing in "experiences" not things and really not at all about seeing to that everyone has a place to stay and decently paying job. It's the haves' world, the rest of us are just living in it.

Sentence I Wish I'd Written

From the Balloon Juice collective:

Over at his blog, Bobo continues to fling links to random bits of other people’s sociological research in the vain hope that people will assume “The Social Animal” also contains actual science-like stuff, rather than being 350 pages of David whimpering about how Gail Collins won’t sleep with him.

David Brooks Uses Words As Weapons

Against reality and meaning, that is. Here is a paragraph from his op-ed thingy today:

Here in Britain, Prime Minister David Cameron’s government is trying to foster that sort of society. Until Cameron, Britain — like the U.S. — had one party that spoke on behalf of the market (the Conservatives) and one party that spoke on behalf of the state (Labour). But Cameron is initiating a series of policies, under the rubric “Big Society,” that seek to nurture community bonds, civic activism and social capital.

Labour spoke for, you know, laboring men and women and tried to use the state to overcome the unfair advantaged enjoyed by the monied classes and their dependents, like Brooks.  The "Big Society" seeks to privatize and individualize all positive state functions, positive in the sense of making life better for working men and women and the various kiddiewinks and seniors. So, in other words, after Blair the UK, like the US, has two parties dedicated to market fundamentalism with a basic disagreement about how much the state ought to protect its citizens from the rapacity and cupidity of capitalists.

David Brooks

I was going to mention that David Brooks' column from today was bullshit, in the Frankfurtian sense of bullshit, when I stumbled on a London Review of Books post on the "Ten Weirdest Sentences" in Brooks' latest opus. My personal favorite:

Imagine a man who buys a chicken from the grocery store, manages to bring himself to orgasm by penetrating it, then cooks and eats the chicken.

I really do think that sums up Brook's utter thingness, where thingness stands for idiocy.

David Brooks is an Annoying Such And So

An aside from his recent op-ed:

The purpose of the meeting was to see which regions were doing a good job of getting the veterans treatment and housing vouchers, and which weren’t. (Democrats seem to feel comfortable using vouchers to address housing problems but not education and health care problems.)

Because providing housing is different from providing education and health care. Consequently, people who prefer to get things done right rather than mindless follow some failed ideology do different things to resolve the problems.

Also, too: "seem to feel comfortable"? How about: concluded after looking at the evidence?

And as well:

Unlike some political appointees, Donovan and Gould are deeply involved in the intricacies and are powerfully driving policy.

Name the rapscallions, you passive aggressive such like. The whole thing is a master class is insinuation, faulty logic, and unsupported conclusion. It is, in other words, Brookstastic.

David Brooks: Fibber Magee

In today's NYT Book Review's Inside the List sidebar there is a description of David Brooks blather about his book on some tv talk show or another. He told the story of watching some social scientist's experiment in which waiting to eat something led to getting twice as much. Brooks insisted that in watching the video in which Oreo cookies were the food of choice, one of the children open the cookie and ate the filling in the hopes of fooling the scientists.  That boy, Brooks claimed, is now a senator.  That story, I now claim, is bullshit, in the Frankfurtian sense of bullshit.

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.

Missing Word? Box Wine? Too Dumb to Punditificate?

David Brooks' new blog promises to be a hot bed of highlarryatee:

They found that the number of searchers for pornography was much higher right after the 2010 election (a big G.O.P. year) than after 2006 (a big Democratic year). Conversely, people in blue states searched for porn at much higher rates after 2006 than after 2010. One explanation is this: After winning a vicarious status competition, people (predominantly men, I guess) tend to seek out pornography.

Which colored state isn't mentioned? Error? False reading? Or other?

Oh God

David Brooks has a blog and it's going to suck:

In my book, “The Social Animal,” I try to harvest and celebrate a lot of their work. But the knowledge just keeps on flowing. So I’m going to use this space to publicize, discuss and evaluate new work in the study of human nature. I hope to describe some odd or interesting piece of research or thinking. This blog won’t be about how to vote in the next election. It’ll be about who you are and why you do what you do.

I read the short version of from The New Yorker and PZ Meyers read the whole thing and characterizes it thusly:

So what is this book about? It's a bizarre chimera, an unholy grafting together of a novel, the story of Harold's and Erica's lives, and an ideological, psychological, neurological and pseudo-scientific collection of materialist explanations for their happy situation. Every chapter whipsaws the reader between a fictional narrative about some exemplary event in their history -- birth, education, being attractive and popular, careers, relationships, corporate revenues, morality, European vacations and other such universal concerns -- and a pedagogical and often facile digression into the supposed neural substrates that drive and reward decisions that will make these two happy and fulfilled. Neither part stands alone, and together ... I'm sure there were delusions of a soaring synergy that would drive deep insights, but instead it's a battle between two clashing fairy tales to see which one would bore us or infuriate us first.

Nothing good can come of Brooks' blog unless, of course, he is forced to quit making stuff up.

Two Points

David Brooks makes some up a bunch of people and concludes that the reason there is so little economic growth, which isn't true, is that

[d]uring these years, commencement speakers have urged students to seek meaning and not money. Many people, it turns out, were listening.

That's right the millions un- and underemployed are seeking millions while the fewer and richer whose riches are derived from greater productivity, which is another way of saying fewer workers working harder abetted by robots, are the result of a post-materialist society not an insane system of wealth distribution.

What's the solution? It ain't fairy tales about low hanging fruit, that's for sure.



video via

Here at The New Yorker

As might be expected, Jill Lepore's essay on the Constitution and its interpretation is real gem of a thing. Well written, insightful, analytically sound, and, in general, designed and implemented to illuminate a fundamentally important set of issues.  Yeah "The New Yorker."

On the other hand, in the same issue, for reasons that remain unclear, David Brooks perfects the art of making up stuff and writing at an undergraduate level. In this case the construct is

the Composure Class rose once again. Its members didn’t make their money through hedge-fund wizardry or by some big financial score. Theirs was a statelier ascent. They got good grades in school, established solid social connections, joined fine companies, medical practices, and law firms. Wealth settled down upon them gradually, like a gentle snow.

If these people exist as such an obvious class that he ought to be able to develop some verifiable statistical categories that show who, how many, what import, etc.  He can't, of course, because that would take work and rely on facts and Brooks hates facts like Ebert hated social revolution. So he makes stuff up:

You can see a paragon of the Composure Class having an al-fresco lunch at some bistro in Aspen or Jackson Hole. He’s just back from China and stopping by for a corporate board meeting on his way to a five-hundred-mile bike-a-thon to support the fight against lactose intolerance. He is asexually handsome, with a little less body fat than Michelangelo’s David. As he crosses his legs, you observe that they are immeasurably long and slender. He doesn’t really have thighs. Each leg is just one elegant calf on top of another. His voice is so calm and measured that he makes Barack Obama sound like Sam Kinison. He met his wife at the Clinton Global Initiative, where they happened to be wearing the same Doctors Without Borders support bracelets. They are a wonderfully matched pair; the only tension between them involves their workout routines. For some reason, today’s high-status men do a lot of running and biking and so only really work on the muscles in the lower half of their bodies. High-status women, on the other hand, pay ferocious attention to their torsos, biceps, and forearms so they can wear sleeveless dresses all summer and crush rocks with their bare hands.

Ha, Ha, see if he can make stuff up he can make fun of the stuff he makes up and then his investigation of a non-existent, so far as he can show, "class," and I think he mean sociological category in stead of class, becomes comic sociology.  As by the way a cyclists thighs:

So having made up and mocked a "class" of people and having misstated the effects of riding a bicycle, Brooks offers a brief and more or less useless discussion of modern notions of the conscious and unconscious mind, and he concludes that

[t]he cognitive revolution of the past thirty years provides a different perspective on our lives, one that emphasizes the relative importance of emotion over pure reason, social connections over individual choice, moral intuition over abstract logic, perceptiveness over I.Q. It allows us to tell a different sort of success story, an inner story to go along with the conventional surface one.

As by way of further illumination, Brooks makes up a member of the class he made up and discusses how nature and nurture played a role in creating him, making up all the influences and effects along the way.  It's just great.  If you take an series of abstractions, contentment class, cognitive revolutions concerning nature and nurture, and then apply them to a further abstraction, Harold the imaginary member of the made up class, you can prove nearly anything you'd like.

Not content with making stuff up and then applying it to made up situations and people, Brooks offers such stunning insights resulting from his discussion of nature and nurture as this:

Harold insisted that he was a tiger who had been born on the sun. His parents tried to get him to concede that he was a little boy born in a hospital, but he would become grave and refuse. This formulation, “I’m a tiger,” may seem like an easy thing, but no computer could blend the complicated concept “I” with the complicated concept “tiger” into a single entity.

Computers, get this, aren't people.  Whoda thunkit.

He offers this brilliant apercue on what American culture is all about insisting that

[t]here’s a debate in our culture about what really makes us happy, which is summarized by, on the one hand, the book “On the Road” and, on the other, the movie “It’s a Wonderful Life.” The former celebrates the life of freedom and adventure. The latter celebrates roots and connections.

Yes, Keroac is all about freedom and adventure and has nothing to do with connections like the comradeship of the road or building communities between and amongst those left who either voluntarily or because of social prejudice are excluded from the dominate connected community.  This is another in a series of examples of Brooks' inability to read and think critically.

One of his better bits of magical, just-so-stories way of thinking, if thinking it can be called:

Erica was impressed by him: women everywhere tend to prefer men who have symmetrical features and are slightly older, taller, and stronger than they are. But she was more guarded and slower to trust than Harold was. That’s in part because, while Pleistocene men could pick their mates on the basis of fertility cues discernible at a glance, Pleistocene women faced a more vexing problem. Human babies require years to become self-sufficient, and a single woman in that environment could not gather enough calories to provide for a family.

Yes exactly, the two made-up people behave exactly the way a bowdlerized version of evolutionary psychology says they would because they are made up people from a made up class in a made up world where David Brooks' understanding of the cognitive revolution determines behaviors and attitudes. No woman on meeting a man for the first time might be "guarded and slower to trust" because of the possibility of, say, sexual assault, could she? Not when the more obvious explanation is what may or may not have happened in dimmest of pasts.

And so on and so forth. Why, I ask plaintively and with a strong feeling of betrayal, did "The New Yorker" see fit to publish this stuff and nonsense.  It's not like Brooks doesn't have a bi-weekly gig with the NYTimes and weekly gabfest in which his content free bloviations about the world as it isn't compete with the reliably flabby views of his competitor that guy from somewhere on the East Coast no one ever pays attention to.

Serious Sensible Man.

The title is one third correct, David Brooks is a man.  Today he writes some bizarre piece in which the maniacs of the Right turn out to be sober serious men and women, like the guy who declared the federal government unconstitutional, the decision to slash budgets without debate, or the guy who thinks Obama ought to man up and go to battlefield, or the decision to let business write their own regulations, whose primary interest will be governance. 

It's simply odd that a man this dedicated to saying and writing dumb things collects a check.

WTF is David Brooks on About?

As near as I can figure in his column today David Brooks thinks that the less people know about what their representatives think and do the better are the chances that their representatives can continue to lie about what is really going on and, therefore, the better the quality of the conversation between and among the people's representatives. After all if the average citizen of wherever the heck found out that Wikileaks shows

Israeli and Arab diplomats . . . reacting sympathetically and realistically toward one another. The Americans in the cables are generally savvy and honest. Iran’s neighbors are properly alarmed and reaching out.

Nothing good could come of that, now could it.

WTF is David Brooks on About?

Is there a point to David Brooks' column today? Does he have a copy editor? Is this the loopiest sentence ever written:

There were many consistencies running through Tolstoy’s life, but there were also two phases: first, the novelist; then, the crusader. And each of these activities called forth its own way of seeing.

It couldn't be that Tolstoy changed his "way of seeing," whatever that might be, and consequently adjusted his activity, could it?

And what are we to make of this conclusion:

But public spirited, he also wanted to heal the world directly. Tolstoy devoted himself to activism and spiritual improvement — and paid the mental price. After all, most historical leaders write pallid memoirs not because they are hiding the truth but because they’ve been engaged in an activity that makes it impossible for them to see it clearly. Activism is admirable, necessary and self-undermining — the more passionate, the more self-blinding.

Tolstoy, it would seem, lobotomized himself when he tried to fix the world through spiritual renewal and George Bush wrote a mendacious book on non-existent "Decision Points" because his desire to rescue his reputation from the gutter led him to lie repeatedly about his own and others' actions. Consequently, working to improve the world as it is is proof of blindness and stupidity.

Hear that boys and girls if you are trying to make things better you have blinded yourself to the reality that the world as it is is the best of all possible worlds particularly if you're David Brooks, a man with no discernible skills, and people pay you ridiculous sums of money to make "arguments" both convoluted and empty of content.

Newspapers

In the New York Times this am, David Brooks writes something that is either a fact free sociological discussion of Harvard's student body or a his attempt to use the Times' op-ed space to audition for role of the world's most pompous movie reviewer.

Meanwhile at the Washington Post, Dinesh D'Souza gets to reprise his assault on reality.

What is the point?

David Brooks Wronger Than I Thought

Via we learn that David Brooks knows as much about literary criticism as anything else, which is to say nothing

Brooks manages to pack nine material misstatements about the book’s plot into a mere 73 words:

There’s almost no religion.(1) There’s very little about the world of work(2) and enterprise.(3) There’s an absence of ethnic heritage(4), military service(5), technical innovation(6), scientific research(7) or anything else potentially lofty and ennobling.
Richard is an artist, but we don’t really see the artist’s commitment to his craft(8). Patty is an athlete, but we don’t really see the team camaraderie(9) that is the best of sport.

Now, what is truly brilliant about the above is that every single one of those things is either a dominant theme or a conspicuous subtext of Freedom (and you can scroll down to see my detailed annotations if you really care.)

He's Serious, Damn It.

In his column today David Brooks writes

But surely this is Franzen’s point. At a few major moments, he compares his characters to the ones in “War and Peace.” Franzen is obviously trying to make us see the tremendous difference in scope between the two sets of characters.


Tolstoy’s characters are spiritually ambitious — ferociously seeking some universal truth that can withstand the tough scrutiny of their own intelligence. Franzen’s modern characters are distracted and semi-helpless. It’s easy to admire Pierre and Prince Andrei. It’s impossible to look upon Walter and Richard with admiration, though it is possible to feel empathy for them.

In the first instance, I'm most likely not going to read Franzen because I didn't like The Corrections, or whatever it was called.  In the second instance, a large number of Tolstoy's characters weren't particularly spiritually ambitious. Why?  At least in part because Tolstoy wasn't David Brooks, which is to say not an idiot.  Lots of people in the world as it actually exists aren't spiritually ambitious. Some of them are horrid little men and women who might think they are spiritually ambitious, Tolstoy argues, but they are, in fact, horrid little men and women. Others, Tolstoy suggests, are just ordinary men and women with no particular claims on spiritual ambitiousness and who aren't horrid but who might be superior to both the horrid little men and women who assume a mantle of spiritual ambition and those who are invested in the search for authentic spiritual fulfillment.  All of them, Tolstoy points out, are part of the actually existing world. This is why the world would be a better place if we all read Tolstoy, or -- for that matter -- Trollope, and paid less attention to Mad Men, David Brooks, Ross Douthat, Ygelsias, etc.

If it is the case that some of Tolstoy's characters aren't as Brooks insists all of them are, and if it is the case that Franzen wants us to compare and contrast the present to Tolstoy's past in way that makes the present look as crappy as David Brooks thinks  it is, then isn't it the case that both Brooks and Franzen are dunderheads?  Or is the more likely explanation that Brooks is, once again, just plain wrong because he is a dunderhead or a liar?  And if he is a dunderhead or a liar, as I think we must all admit that he is one or the other, than isn't the more interesting question why is a dunderhead or a liar is blathering about things he only just barely understands when he could be studying hand dancing and really adding some value to the world.

David Brooks: Inmates and the Asylum

As near as I can make out, David Brooks today argues that just because the inmates have taken over the asylum it doesn't mean that the inmates have taken over the asylum.  Why?  Because their rise hinges not on their popular appeal but rather because the last Republican administration and its supporter destroyed the economy. And, despite all evidence to the contrary, they have yet to inject their crazy virus into the Republican Party.  Reading it is sort of like watching a worm wriggling on hook; only in this case the worm has impaled itself.

UPDATE:
 Murkoski's write in campaign is not evidence of a civil war inside of the Republican Party, and Karl Rove's recanting his claim about O'Donnell's unfitness for office is not evidence that the inmates have taken over the asylum.

What an Odd Thing to Say.

In today's column David Brooks' argues that Republicans are "surging" toward victory because of their narrative of the danger that our Muslim in chief poses for all that it is good and pure about America.  In the course of recounting the ins and outs of this narrative he mentions Paul Ryan and  Arthur Brooks who insisted

in The Wall Street Journal on Monday, “The road to serfdom in America does not involve a knock in the night or a jack-booted thug. It starts with smooth-talking politicians offering seemingly innocuous compromises, and an opportunistic leadership that chooses not to stand up for America’s enduring principles of freedom and entrepreneurship.”

He loves them; he adores them; they're smart, articulate, and kinda of hunky. They

are two of the most important conservative thinkers today. Ryan is the leading Republican policy entrepreneur in the House. Brooks is president of the highly influential American Enterprise Institute and a much-cited author. My admiration for both is unbounded.

  However there is a bit of a downside because

the story Republicans are telling each other, which Ryan and Brooks have reinforced, is an oversimplified version of American history, with dangerous implications.

Leaving aside Brooks' own tendency to oversimplify history in the service of bad policies, is it possible to find   a duo of smart sexy beast of a thinkers smart and sexy despite finding their overly-simplified narrative dangerous your country's political, economic, and social life?  Wouldn't the responsible, intellectually honest, and serious thing to do here be excoriate them and the Tea Party Patriot nut cases who represent the surgers in the Republican's surge?  The answer is yes, of course it would be.  And that means that Brooks' isn't a responsible, intellectually honest, and serious person.  He a flying monkey.