I am retired, doing some part-time consulting projects. Consequently, I am reading a lot – my RSS feeds (via Feedly), my curated content on Flipboard, The Washington Post and, occasionally, The New York Times. Throw in The Week magazine and random internet surfing and I think it’s fair to say I am reasonably well read and current. I recently ran into Chris Lehmann’s latest Opinion piece in The Nation excoriating David Brooks recent essays in The New York Times and The Atlantic.Since I am not nearly as erudite nor as articulate as the above two gentlemen (I am, however, just as opinionated), let me reduce their arguments to my level.
David Brooks: Character and morality count. Without those, disaffected people (for whatever reason, including income inequality and political disagreement) can become despondent or mean and that leads to societal breakdown.
Chris Lehmann: It is our American capitalist system that is at fault and is driving societal discord and dysfunction. In rebutting Brooks’s argument he accuses Brooks of “never once name[ing] the atomizing, divisive, and solidarity-leaching logic of our capitalist political economy as the force that unleashes and strategically enforces this wide array of morality-shunning character deformations.” He deprecates Brooks and other academic commentators/ researchers’ (like Jonathan Haidt) positions on what is causing political discord and societal upset for similar reasons.
I have been following David Brooks for years. In the beginning, I might have agreed with a quarter of his opinion pieces at best. Today, it is over half. Yes, Brooks is a conservative, but he has evolved from an apologist more often than not to a keen observer of the human condition without much politicizing. If you can forget some of his past, his message is, yes, character counts and what creates character is important and requires support and nurturing.
Chris Lehmann is new to me. The piece referenced above is the first I have read by him. After some research, it is clear that his message is that capitalism and its attendant “possessive individualism” are at fault and that Brooks willfully disregards this. Lehmann has authored multiple books and articles on his thesis that capitalism is the root of all of our problems.
The irony here – that Lehmann misses and Brooks did not comment upon – is that that they can both be right in describing what is causing a lot of our societal disruption and discord.
Brooks is certain right when he opines that “In a healthy society a web of institutions—families, schools, religious groups, community organizations, and workplaces—helps form people into kind and responsible citizens, the sort of people who show up for one another. Brooks concludes that we live in a society that’s terrible at moral formation.
Lehmann is certain right when he opines that “It’s also true that a therapeutic ethic of self-fulfillment at all costs—together with the trauma-driven rhetoric that often accompanies it—produces no end of frustratingly involuted public discourse and institutional enclosures of our emotional life.” Rampant pursuit of profit and/or individual liberty at the expense of others is indeed quite harmful to the society.
These two views are compatible. In fact, they are, unfortunately for our society, complementary. They feed on each other. Together, they explain a lot.
However, Brooks’ and Lehmann’s basic political and world views are incompatible. Lehmann is an unrepentant, left-wing progressive and Brooks is an unrepentant, moderate conservative. And that, folks, is why we have horse races, political parties, opinion writers, and pundits.
Let me throw another writer on the pile. John Stossel just wrote an opinion in Reason Magazine arguing that it is the “government’s” fault that college education is so expensive it no longer makes sense to go to college, and in fact, it is a scam. Add in Stossel’s vehement negative reaction to any kind of debt relief and the picture of his position is complete.
First, no surprise, John Stossel is a Libertarian. Thus, again no surprise, anything the government does is harmful. Second, and more importantly, Stossel arrives at a good conclusion (e.g., not everyone should go to, or will benefit from, a college education) based on an invalid assumption (e.g., the government is to blame). No mention that teachers are educated to believe in and promote college education to their students, parents want their children to be college educated, and college financial aid departments are rewarded for enabling students to attend as opposed to helping the admissions department figure out who would actually benefit from a college education. Other factors include a negative societal attitude to those who work with their hands, cutbacks in vocational education in high-school and post-secondary education, and a whole bunch of institutions that refused to recognize and counsel their students and prospective students that degrees in graphic design, Medieval Literature, and dead language majors from third-tier institutions are going to struggle to pay off $80,000 worth of school loans, and finally, those for-profit colleges that were mainly loan facilitators rather than education institutions focused on getting students to learn and graduate.
I agreed wholeheartedly with Stossel’s conclusion, that not everyone should go to college. But that ain’t the government’s fault based on the evidence presented (i.e., none). Government reacts, it only occasionally leads. Government funding of college was in reaction to a societal demand, not invented by the government.
And, yes, finally, the noted conservative, former editor of The National Review, and currently active pundit appearing in The Dispatch (which he founded), Jonah Goldberg, in one of his myriad musings said the following: “contrary to a lot of folks on the New Right these days, and virtually all of the left, I think a lot of the New Deal was bad not just economically but legally and philosophically.” Yes, he definitely thinks this – the problem being that thinking it does not make it true or even remotely factual.
Philosophically, one can easily see why the New Deal, i.e., putting the unemployed to work, providing a safety net for those past their working year (paid for by workers), bank deposit insurance (paid for by the banks), and separating commercial banking from investment banking (repealed in 1999, what a great idea!) makes Jonah the Conservative squirm. The very nerve of the government funding programs to help people by helping the economy. Perish the thought. As to the legality, the Supreme Court did all it could to cut back and declare unconstitutional all sorts of New Deal proposals. What happened in the New Deal was not without extensive legal scrutiny. Think all you want, Jonah, but those pesky facts keep rearing their ugly head.
In reality, the fact that 90+ years after the New Deal we still have conservatives blathering about its “horrors” should actually tell us how damn effective the New Deal was in making the lives of millions of Americans better.
There are a few things to think about here.
Where you stand depends on where you sit. In each case, one’s political orientation drove the perspective. In all of these cases, it is the cause of the perspective. Let me hazard a guess that that is a truism.
It is terribly important not to dismiss good thoughts or good ideas delivered with suspect assumptions. It is worth noting this reality when getting into the discussions, arguments, and debates that occur in our lives. Our (my) desire to be heard and be right often overwhelms our (my) ability to hear.
Opinions, however, are not facts nor necessarily reality. One is completely entitled to one’s opinion (regardless of how wrong or misguided), but, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, “you are not entitled to your own facts.” It is also worth noting that some opinions are complete nonsense.Another interesting point made poignant by current events: the writers mentioned in this rant (Brooks, Haidt, Stossel, etc.) are Jewish or have a Jewish background (I am not 100% sure about Chris Lehmann, but willing to bet), including the author (true, this might be self-selection). But never-the-less, the point is that anyone who wants to talk about “the Jews” as a monolithic group who think alike and act alike are sadly and hugely mistaken. That is true of most groups like religions, political parties, neighborhoods, professions, etc. Mass generalizations lead to stereotyping which is wrong and almost always dangerous.
A few additional thoughts. First, I never would have predicted that I would miss William F. Buckley. Agreed with him rarely, but never doubted his logic, research or integrity. I cannot say that of many of the current pundits on both (or any) side these days. Second, as I found out many times in my previous career, the variability within a “group” is typically much greater than the variability between groups. This might be true within our political parties as well. Third, and lastly, we (me included) need to modify our approach to demonization. It is never “all the Republicans” or “all the Democrats” or “all the African Americans” or “all the Jews” or “all the Evangelicals.” At best, and probably rarely, it might be “most of,” but more likely is simply “many” and probably often times just “some.” Worth remembering in the heat of battle, and I often forget. I clearly have more work to do.
Adult Language Is Possible 