People like him
Journalist and commentator David Brook has an essay in the Atlantic magazine People Like Us, this month, that left me non-plussed the first time I read it. Mostly I know of Brooks from his appearances on the Newshour with Jim Leher. From that I am mostly well disposed towards him, he seems like an reasonable and intelligent sort of person. At the same time I don't follow the writing he does for the alternate reality that is the Weekly Standard. The article had a thick dense air of a mono culture hothouse to it, ironical in light of its ostensive theme. I set it aside intending to look at it again later. I noted that it popped into blogdex and stayed there over several days. When I did get around to rereading it, it didn't seem any better. The tag-line of the piece is: We all pay lip service to the melting pot, but we really prefer the congealing pot . Initially this strikes one as a succinct clear-eyed observation on a hypocritical drift in modern culture. Benjamin Barbour invited to give a talk at our library on multi-culturalism two years ago came in and said precisely that (I recalled this in a post in April). Scanning the essay quickly leaves the impression that Brook is saying this, and offering a caution that we need to do more and to get beyond ourselves. Take the penultimate paragraph: a summary look might leave one thinking he advocates an institutional common work experience for citizens of all backgrounds.
...Human beings, if they are to live well, will have to move through a series of institutions and environments, which may be individually homogeneous but, taken together, will offer diverse experiences. It might also be a good idea to make national service a rite of passage for young people in this country: it would take them out of their narrow neighborhood segment and thrust them in with people unlike themselves.
but he continues
Finally, it's probably important for adults to get out of their own familiar circles. If you live in a coastal, socially liberal neighborhood, maybe you should take out a subscription to The Door, the evangelical humor magazine; or maybe you should visit Branson, Missouri. Maybe you should stop in at a megachurch. Sure, it would be superficial familiarity, but it beats the iron curtains that now separate the nation's various cultural zones.
He's actually saying something different. He's saying liberals would lose their smug cosmopolitan elitism if they flocked beyond the coasts and got in touch with the true diversity of the silent and moral majority of the interior. Here I briefly recall that portion of my Navy years attached to a unit stationed in the south and largely made up of the sons of the south. I recall a man reduced to tears of nostalgic mirth over memories of only a year or so earlier - memories of cruising the streets, and waterways of Tampa/St Pete leaning out the window of his car waving a baseball bat. Why would someone do that? Well, there was a reason of course, to smack n****** off bridges . An aberration Mr. Brooks might demur, insisting on his vision of a wise compassionate conservative heartland. Let me make one thing very clear to Mr. Brooks, the aberration lay with those who did not see this as hilarious and rightful fun. The Navy and military in general were institutions considerably more diverse and institutionally committed to diversity than my hometowns in Massachusetts - I grew up in Plymouth and Holliston. Towns tainted by sea salt in the air and an unhealthy proximity to Boston, Holliston even named after the man who gave Harvard its library. Has there ever been a greater crime in history than that? The people; however, who came to this institution - the military - were not committed to diversity, they were disciplined, sourly, to it.
Unlike the straw men and women of his essay; I cannot speak to what $750,000 house I might prefer in Great Falls over Bethesda. I live in an apartment in Silver Spring by Adelphi and am the sole anglophone in my neighborhood. But I have listened to the small talk here and there, and would agree there is difference across the Potomac.
Mr. Brook points to how well firms like the market research company Claritas are able to distinguish and identify predictable us (his us being mainly middle class conclavists). Yet he fails to consider the role of such exacting measurement and determination of this fine grained segmentation - and attendant product creation, sales targeting, and market positioning - to the creation of these branded identities. You are what you eat what you wear, what you drive. If you do not believe this; they will explain it all to you again, and again and again. Mr Brook can ignore these machinations for his purposes. I note only that those who do this work, for theirs, don't.
His example of elitist clustering from the book the Bell Curve is an indicatively odd example. He expects his readers to feel the rising warmth of embarrassed incorrectness when they recognize themselves as far outliers in the american melting pot population with their post-graduate degrees and circle of friends with degrees. I don't see myself in his example, experience no twinge of guilt. I look at what he is saying here and see it in a different light. He is going to great lengths to point to something like class stratification without identifying it as such or taking responsibility for what that might mean. He faults Universities for not being diverse in their work force (never mind that in their total work force they likely are quite diverse). He supposes that the average tenured Brown Phd might harbor a psychological block against bringing in an NRA member or evangelical Christian into the department. Further he hints this active prejudice is what keeps Conservatives from being hired:
Republicans and evangelical Christians have sensed that they are not welcome at places like Brown, so they don't even consider working there. In fact, any registered Republican who contemplates a career in academia these days is both a hero and a fool.
Maybe it is their inability to be truly and rigorously intellectually honest that might have more to do with it. There is more to education than the term 'return to education' buys you. More results from continued education than a particular and higher arc of a lifetime earnings curve. If brainy people with conservative mores flow elsewhere -- to the business world - entering business and management vocational programs well within their undergraduate years. It must be acknowledged that this world: modern American capitalism asks little, if anything, from its practitioners childlike mores. Leaves them unexamined, unawakened , in a silk crucible untested. Advanced education will put one through changes - if you learn - you learn to see things. See from broader and different perspectives. With more information to guide you as to what you are seeing , a heightened experience, combining with reflection and critical re-examination. It is not true that the learned man is no different from the ignorant except for a higher pile of facts by their side. Many studies have traced the course of education on a persons outlook. What is being called here liberalism an increasing tendency to share values with the population of those belonging to (for instance) the democratic party increases in correlation with additional years of education. And it tends to remain stable even when removed from the socializing blackbox of academia. Brooks it seems would have us believe that it is not learning and critical thinking that makes academia liberal, but merely the result of some game of capture-the-flag.
In a further column that Mr. Brooks has written in the past few days
Bred for Power. He compares George W Bush with Howard B Dean. Acknowledging that George
Bush could not have gotten where he is, having lived the way he did, without being a member of a a certain establishment. One that supports wayward individuals with a firm hand on elbow and shoulders and continues, as long as the feet move, to open doors and propel him through. This is not to say that GW is without his charm, far from it. As the song goes 'Brooklyn knows the charmer in me'. The curious side of this piece by Brooks is that he finishes it by damning Howard Dean for more fully exemplifying the New England Establishment which he declares dead and being shook into the dustbin of history.
Republicans walk a dangerous path, similar in many respects to a path the left walked for much of the former century. On one hand they will speak in carefully coded language about school choice, affirmative action, and culture. They will talk competiveness, against the commons - any commons. Into their other hand they talk about the hypocrisy of a "coastal socially liberal" for eschewing the value system of the midwest, that they have packaged and declare. This is a closed dialog, a conversation by the a conservative elite to a know-nothing voting base they desire to create. It is the politics of resentment. It is fire.
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