I like David Brooks, the moderately conservative columnist for the New York Times, but he’s missed the point in this week’s column on ‘The New Humanism.’ In that column, he writes:
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.
I disagree. In a world in which Barack Obama is talking one moment about the need for civil political dialog when he perceives his party under attack from the right but sides with Micheal Moore; current Poet Laureate of Wisconsin, Bruce Dethlefsen; and the rabble rousing left when their side is on attacked from the right. Dethlefsen’s call to the crowd bespeaks an anti-rational bias that should be corrected, not bought into:
“Fifty-thousand strong
we stand up and scream to save
sitting down to talk.”
That is not the way to have a civil conversation ‘that heals rather than wounds.’ In my view, the role of reasonable middle ground is under attack. It will not do us any good to explore more of the root emotions of the emotional crowd. Instead, we would do well to ask about the lopsidedness of the left’s response. This is the work of reason, not of an elusive base of vaguely-defined emotional response.
Left and Right in the Absence of a Middle
Regular readers of my blog will recognize (I hope) that I share the left’s concern over their loss of what they perceive of as their rights. But I also believe that the left has lost sight of their reason on account of their having won so great a victory in the 60s and 70s. They have been coasting ever since on the new ground that they have conquered previously unconquered ground . Unfortunately, as Frank Rizzo knew, the right consists of former liberals ‘who got mugged the night before.’ This puts both parties on the same side of the argument. The war is a war for ownership of the common ground.
In the war between liberals and conservatives, people like Rush Limbaugh and Joni Mitchell are fighting over the ‘natural’ inheritance, Limbaugh for the ‘natural’ law given to mankind by God, Joni searching after the ‘natural’ world which has been abused by corporations who would pave paradise to put up parking lots. Both sides have points, but they make their points as if ‘the other side’ of the argument is so stupid that those of ‘the right side’ of the argument don’t even have to listen to those on the ‘wrong side.’ (look here for my post of the fate of the Iranian singer Googoosh for my thoughts on why the Enlightenment ‘us versus them’ argument falls to the ground)
The Historical Legacy of David Brook’s Thought
Brooks’ thought is infected by his having bought into the Enlightenment model of civilization in much the same way as Neil Postman had in his Amusing Ourselves to Death. Both think that the ‘natural’ reason, which they have in abundance, has been taken over in others (it’s always the others, isn’t it) by a concentration of falsehoods and lies. This, I believe, is the product of an Enlightenment education but not the product of Brooks’ (of Limbaugh’s or Moore’s) contact with the actual ‘truth.’
This was the experience of people like Herder and Goethe, who got tired of hearing about how people like Kant and Voltaire were using Cartesian reason to order everything. They exploded out of the by-then-constricting bounds of reason for a brighter future based in symbol. Only now, in the later stages of aesthetic thought spurned on by Herder and Goethe (and others), people on the cutting edge of symbolic criticism
In America, we have retreated from reason to our individual selves, which we still think hold water after our boat of reason has been poked through with holes. But I’m not sure that emotional beings who forgo the organizational power of reason for a vaguely-defined emotional argument are correct in their estimation of their true situation. It seems to me that in their configuration of the universe that they are willing to exchange their specialized and granular knowledge of their situation for a more vague assessment of their situation in the same way that I felt Jon Stewart was discounting Jim Cramer’s expertise for his more certain moral position in my post on Cramer v Stewart.
In grasping onto the unknown without deciding to defend his position, David Brooks has joined Limbaugh and Joni Mitchell in their (misconstrued) positions as defenders of the true, the just, the fair, etc. Sure, Brooks has a bunch of terms which he attaches to these ‘deeper levels’ of emotions, words like attunement, equipoise, metis, sympathy, and limerence (presumably the ability to make limericks out of our experience). But these words are intended to illuminate through reason the formerly dark world of emotional experience, bringing them to light for the first time ever. This was the same thing that Descartes was doing 350 years ago when he founded modern philosophy and the Enlightenment project of subordinating all disciplines to reason.
This configuration ot ‘the truth’ satisfies him.
My Answer to the Brooks Problem
It does not satisfy me. As I say in the blog introduction to my latest book, this is the fault of a diminution of reason in assessing the role of imagination in our lives. Between ‘the truth,’ which Limbaugh on the right, Moore on the left, and Brooks in the middle, affect to be telling us, comes an inexorable imagination which both Limbaugh, Moore, and Brooks believe they have overcome. They are both wrong. ‘The truth’ comes to us mediated through our ability to imagine ourselves in a universe of unknowns (I made this point on my blog this last week; search for ‘atoms’) without being able to touch the unknown as it actually is.
It seems to me that Brooks is grasping after the unknown because this is the human condition. But his metaphors are tortured, and what he ‘knows’ is too hard to explain through simple reason. In this, Brooks is a bit too muck like the dilettantes he anatomizes so well in his Bobos In Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There
In his declaration that he’s ‘come to believe that these failures spring from a single failure: reliance on an overly simplistic view of human nature,’ David Brooks is not, in fact, anatomizing ‘an overly simplistic view of human nature.’ He is in fact anatomizing the limits of his own mind’s ability to organize the larger experience of a larger world based on his too narrow view of human reason. He should embrace reason, not flee from it.