What a delight to see John Gray demolish David Brooks so thoroughly. He writes an extended review of The Social Animal - National Interest. John Gray juxtaposes Brook’s book to Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life:
“When Carpa’s film was released in 1946, America was rebuilding itself (and much of the world) after a global conflict in which the United States had acted decisively to defeat an unprecedented threat to civilization. Certainly the postwar scene was showing signs of major problems—an emerging cold war, for one—but having triumphed over Nazism, America had every reason to feel confident of its strength. The world’s preeminent power, it could be sure that when it spoke, other countries would listen. Today, the United States is undergoing an irreversible shift in its international position—from being the only hegemonic actor to being one among a number of great powers. The “Arab Spring” may prove to be significant not so much for the changes it brings to the Middle East and North Africa—changes that are still far from clear—but for marking the time when American power began unmistakably to retreat and U.S. economic primacy passed into history. No longer the most successful economy—Germany’s boom shows how a quite different version of market capitalism has adapted better to globalization, while China’s experiment in turbocharged state capitalism has produced over thirty years of fast growth—Americans cannot claim to enjoy the highest living standards. Worse, U.S. decline is not only relative but also absolute. Stagnant for decades, the incomes of the American majority are now falling, or else are maintained only by taking on multiple jobs in a depressed and insecure labor market. Worse yet, there is no prospect of this process ending anytime soon. How the United States can fix its federal-debt overhang remains obscure; quite possibly it will not be resolved by any act of Washington, but instead by a write-down of U.S. credit and the dollar in global markets. However that drama plays out, there can be no realistic basis for the hope that the American majority will be better off in the near or medium term than it is today.”
It’s always instructive to read the British take on the imperial declines, they have been at it, literally over a couple of centuries. But the time moves faster now. John Gray doesn’t attempt my main complain about David Brooks, namely that he is a derivative hack, void of his own ideas, a resolute cataloger at best. But Gray is spot-on detecting the general direction of Brook’s (Tom Friedman is another example) aggregations:
“The unstoppable momentum of decline is but one reason for the appeal of Brooks’s book, laden as it is with optimism for the future. Nowadays the very idea of decline has ceased to be legitimate—as soon as any sign of such a thing emerges, we are told, action can be taken to reverse the process.”
What, “education, innovation, infrastructure”, etc.? When Brooks speaks about the knowledge and the science there is the utopian assumption that as we add more of it, we gain the magical powers to overcome our current predicament. This might be the legacy that denies the subtractive essence (even its “The Tree of Knowledge” version). Gray writes:
“The dangers that come with this increased knowledge are captured in the story of Genesis, which used to be one of the West’s guiding myths. Now this biblical story has lost its power, and another—the Socratic myth that says knowledge and virtue go together—has replaced it. Even among those who profess to be religious, the idea that advancing knowledge can deliver us from moral and political conflict has a powerful allure. Brooks’s book is testimony to this faith in science. To be sure, his grip on the new sciences of human behavior is shaky, and he exaggerates what we can learn from them. A great deal in cognitive science and evolutionary psychology remains speculative and controversial. Where they seem reasonably well established, the findings of these new sciences do not always support Brooks’s conception of virtue. Recent inquiry—as well as centuries of literature—may suggest that we should favor “the idea that we have multiple selves over the idea that we have a single self”; but it is hard to square this plural view of selfhood with old-fashioned notions of character. Advancing knowledge may undermine simpleminded rationalism, but it also undercuts traditional morality. As to the overall impact that science may have on human values, no one knows.”
John Gray points to the obvious. As an uber influential pundit of the global media, David Brooks functionally performs his role and carries the banner of the staggering noise generation, turbocharged by the Internet. The main function of the words edifice remains the distraction from the real problems and challenges. It picks up where the religions left off:
“This appealing emptiness will not ensure the book’s longevity, however. Soon enough, Brooks’s manual of positive thinking will be consumed and discarded. History will move on and yesterday’s gurus will be remaindered and forgotten. But if Brooks’s book will hardly be remembered, the reverence with which it has been received tells us something important about how we have come to be ruled. The Social Animal is an exemplar of political discourse as we know it today; the chief function is to distract attention from intractable realities, which governments and those they govern prefer not to think about.”
The Phantasm of Individuality
by Ben Atlas on 07.20.2011.8:52am · 2 comments
One of my aphorisms: An artist lives to express his dreams, a businessman hopes to express the dreams of his customers. Like with everything else there is a degree. To what degree are you prepared suppress yourself? If any social entity is a set of mental formulas and people seek to sooth their confirmation bias, you must listen to the “customers”. Most people talk themselves into the illusion that they can have the cake and eat it too. I don’t believe it.
This is why the advertising economy sucks more than the communism. Your survival depends of pandering to the collective on a much deeper level than the top down communism ever imagined. The central flaw of the Internet is that following Google it adopted the advertising model where worshiping of the confirmation bias covers the WWW like the snow cover Antarctica. The decimation of the creative class inevitably follows. It’s a massive fake-out, instead of the libertarian promise there is the sea of conformity, the global party-think, “plus” the phantom of individuality.
This idol worshiping is something I was never good at and I now must deal with the consequences. My first act was to cut all the “salesmen” around me like the toxic gluten. So far it has been a massive personal failure. This includes my ramblings on this website. Brooks might be an idiot and his book is undoubtedly shallow but his publishing handlers write a pretty good copy, indeed we are a “social animal”. Some of it is internal and some objective. But if the words don’t convert, they don’t exist. And there is only one form of conversion, as long as people discovered the verbal magic. The words must turn into the tangible “assets”. As you know I reject the quantitative approach to this formula. It’s stupid to count the readers or the “hits”. But one must face the complete blackout and the implications.