Poor Old Blighty. Once again a Yank (really Canadian born) “is over-hyped, overpaid and over here.” David Brooks is the darling of what passes for the British political smart set; his new book is so hot that both David Cameron and Ed Miliband are meeting him this week. Steve Hilton, Cameron’s top strategist, has invited him to hold a seminar at No 10 on Friday.
Other Brits across the political and social firmament are tripping over themselves to apply Brooksian thought to everything from clogged drains to dry skin. At last, America has revenge for the Arctic Monkeys.
Why the adulation? Like Gertrude Himmelfarb, wife of Irving Kristol and mother of Willie, Brooks’ book seeks to reinterpret the Enlightenment so as to turn it inside out as it were. Rather than a period of ascending rationality, both Himmelfarb and Brooks focus on certain British thinkers of the era who urged the supremacy of the irrational, emotive essence of mankind. Brooks approvingly quotes Hume “Reason is and ought to be the slave of the passions.”
“When we invaded Iraq we were blind to the social problems that would be involved. We didn’t realise they didn’t trust us.” Hold on – didn’t he write a New York Times column urging invasion? “I did. I was so blind about it. In that column I wondered what Michael Oakeshott [the British conservative political philosopher] would have said. He would have said: this society is very complicated and you should be circumspect in thinking about what you can achieve, and that invading to install democracy without trust is doomed. And then I wrote: ‘Having said that, I think we should invade.'”
Brooks apparently thinks the problem with Iraq was that America was insufficiently irrational with ‘street smarts’ and too rational. And his message to the UK is add some irrationality and street smarts to the government along with vague communal spirits. Don’t the Brits realize they can get all this penetrating insight for free weekly on PBS? In mercifully short 10 minute doses, too.
Perhaps we are too dismissive. Forbes doesn’t think so. There, Will Wilkerson eviscerates “The Social Animal: A Story of Love, Character, and Achievement.”
It’s easy to see the appeal of a spoonful of human interest to make the medicine of science go down. And it would be easy to forgive Brooks the insipidity of his characters and the tedium of his tale if he really delivered on his promised synthesis of the paradigm-busting sciences of the mind, but he delivers only a muddle.
Brooks detects in the scattered findings of the psychological and brain sciences a “revolutionary” picture of human decision-making that emphasizes the role of the unconscious. This research, Brooks argues, establishes “the relative importance of emotion over pure reason, social connection over individual choice, character over IQ, … and the idea that we have multiple selves over the idea that we have a single self.” In the course of The Social Animal, Brooks alights briefly on the work of an astonishing number of important researchers and theorists, making the book a convenient point of entry for readers looking to dip a toe into new-ish thinking about the mind and brain. Yet, he rarely makes more than superficial contact with any body of research long enough to really draw out its implications, and nothing resembling an integrated synthesis of science ever emerges.
The story of Harold and Erica does not really illustrate a new, coherent, science-based theory of human nature. It is a bowl hammered from Brooks’ philosophic predilections into which a jumbled stew of scientific anecdotes is poured. And it is not good stew. Brooks withholds necessary ingredients and fails to detect that some of his great tastes don’t taste great together.
Americans in a way can be excused for tolerating Brooksian nonsense for so long. According to Stewart and Bennet (1991):
By defining people according to achievement, Americans can fragment their own personalities or those of other people. They do not have to accept others in their totality [ . . .]; they may disapprove of the politics, hobbies, or personal life of associates and yet still work with them effectively. It is this trait of seeing others as fragmented, combined with the desire to achieve, that provides Americans with the motivation to cooperate.
Brits don’t have this excuse. Perhaps they’re just excited someone at the New York Times remembers Britain had a history. Oh to be a fly on the wall at 10 Downing Street to savor compliments extended to thou celestial, smooth-faced nose-herb.
DrLeoStrauss says
David Brooks joins the Simpleton parade calling Grover the ‘Zelig’ of Republican catastrophe. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/19/opinion/19brooks.html?_r=1&hp Not a bad line, actually. Too bad it’s not close to true.
First things first. Brooks, Grover in late 2002-2003 did something you never had the balls to do, which was to use his Wednesday Meeting to allow anti-war proponents make the case against strategic catastrophe. Recall, Brooks, you urged invasion.
And say what one will of 2011 CPAC’s disintegration into farce, Grover at great personal cost and risk not only included GOProud in earlier CPACs but eventually joined the board. The personal vitriol he absorbed from Values Voter minions extraordinary. Grover has championed tolerance towards American Muslims as well – again receiving Neocon napalm.
Where were you, Brooks? What did you actually spend in personal capital? You were pro-wars. What did you actually do personally to combat discrimination? Against Muslims? Against non-radical Christian-defined lifestyles?
As for Zelig, those claiming that role in and around D.C. are legion. 1994? Sure Grover was there, and he later pushed ‘Rock The House’ in Japan (we were in a contingent that included him in Tokyo). K Street Project? Sure, but Grover did not drive that really.
House leadership and staff primarily pushed it. (Seriously petty. We once were told by DeLay et al. that a fairly major piece of national security legislation might not make it because one metal bender hired a Democrat for its D.C. office years ago. We scrambled to bundle, ameliorate and otherwise placate. The vindictiveness was all DeLay. Grover never once came up).
We’re still not sure how Grover escaped indictment re Jack A. except to say (a) Jack A. was guilty of what every lobbyist dreamed pulling off; (b) McCain was so thoroughly hated by Republicans and D.C. so tribal that Grover’s enemies gave him teflon; and (c) Grover is, regardless of one’s point of view on ideology, bright, More so than Reed, Jack A et al. He surely protected himself.
Brooks is wrong to to link Grover with the Unified Movement Government’s reckless spending (Bush made LBJ look like Ryan). But our simplistic political discourse requires a bad guy.
So how bizarre to see a Tweety re-run with Grover. Absurdly combative but sycophantic. Priceless.
We don’t claim to ‘know’ Grover. Our D.C. ‘friends’ know him very well. We’re distant casual acquaintances, more familiar with some of his ex senior staff.
We can say Grover believes in ideological warfare. He knows what he wants. He believes in winning. He wants Democrats to lose. He will roll va banque for the highest stakes knowing that Democrats long ago lost their ideology or means of effective AgitProp. He’ll take a tactical hit to achieve a strategic objective.
Telling that Democrats don’t have one. Or the means of neutralizing him. It’s not like Grover hasn’t been around since the 1980s.
Alex says
As you know, blogging regulations require that any mention of David Brooks be paired with the information that he just makes any old shite up.
Dr Leo Strauss says
Well put. Woody Allen was maybe only partially correct – for some people, 98% of it is simply showing up.
DBake says
I’m amazed that anyone forced to attend college could step away from a paragraph of Brooks and think that they’d encontered an intellectual. Weren’t they ever forced to read? It’s not that he’s stupid, but he’s so incredibly, and obviously, shallow. Even if he were correct about everything, how could anyone walk away from his books feeling like a problem had been solved? You see people’s reactions, and it brings to mind the line from Zoolander: “I feel like I’m taking crazy pills.”