Here is David Brooks using a football metaphor as a counterargument to the notion that the ideal society functions "like a military unit." He thinks society should be more like a rain forest. I think society should be more like a vacuum, personally, or an exoplanet maybe, but if wishes were horses . . . what was I saying? Ok, look, Brooks is a dummy, and lord only knows he's made the plural of anecdote into a sort of holy writ, but I am actually on his side here, sort of. The progressive view of society is martial and mechanistic--expert-driven, kid-tested, mother-approved, market-researched, etc. Though it admits the humanity of gals and gays and the African diaspora more readily than the supposedly countervailing conservativism whose atavistic yearnings are for a non-existent era of greater cultural homogeneity in which chacun avait son rôle à jouer or whathaveyou, liberalism's own future Utopia is decidedly grim, sterile, and selfsame: a rationally run central bank . . . increasing the monetary supply . . . to stimulate growth . . . forever. So, you know, obviously I'd rather live in an Amazon than a biodome, and for all the errors of emphasis, Brooks has almost sortakinda got a point. Which is why the goddamn football thing is so extremely jarring; the entire sport is a military metaphor; the whole game is a symbolic enactment of warfare.
Anyway, I've read enough to suspect that somewhere deep in Brook's middlebrow mindfile, a program that actually believes in a non-mechanistic humanity hums away, but it is always and forever overruled by a random received-wisdom generator that says things like:
The essential truth about poverty is that we will never fully understand what causes it.Well, you could say it was caused by a lack of money. But we'll stick with him. It isn't an unreasonable point, even if it's uttered with the gaseous phffft of truism. It's complicated, see? And you can't address it from a, you know, policy perspective by crafting some kind of monomaniacal good-management program; you can't regulate it away. I'm with you, David, so far. Then he concocts Sh'tangwéa from da Hood--he doesn't name her as such, but I grew up in Dave's own demographic, and I know exactly what pops into his mind's eye when he imagines
there is a 14-year-old girl who, for perfectly understandable reasons, wants to experience the love and sense of purpose that go with motherhood, rather than stay in school in the hopes of someday earning a middle-class wage.She's not named Madison and she ain't brunette, lemme put it to you that way. And fuck it, let's even grant that she wants to experience the joie et souffrance of motherhood--she isn't seeking the approbation of male peers; she isn't just horny, god forbid; she wants to be a mommy.
So how do you prevent this? Well, first of all, why do you want to? Because of poverty? But you just said that poverty is a complex ecosystem of technocrats, or something. So it isn't exactly because teenage parents generally remain poor; it's more about morality: namely, it's that teenage pregnancy is inherently morally dubious. So you "surround her"--uh, flood the zone; how many military metaphors do we need to make this point?--with faith groups. They make people want to serve! They don't ascribe to contemporary norms and mores, i.e., that Tashondanette can have as many babes as she wants, and whenever, because welfare. In any event, the argument becomes that since you cannot craft a simple social policy to alleviate poverty, you must instead construct a monumentally complex one. Brooks is not making a libertarian argument here; he isn't arguing that some sort of market of social philanthropy will fill in the blanks where no government agency exists. He wants an explicit federal policy to promote churchketeers in the ghetto. Vouchers and programs and subsidy and so on. These things are somehow supposed to be the opposite of technocratic liberal overreach, when in fact they are of precisely the same order. Everyone wants to avail themselves of the same government to achieve their peculiar ends; no one laments the bureaucracy, merely the particular drawers.
29 comments:
Hilarious. A "conservative" who wants the government to "flood the zone". Brooks truly is the best conservative that money can buy. But I kid. He cares naught for petty green; it is status he wants. The craving for the Ring never leaves its owner, then you wait a few years, and poof -- ringwraith. Progressive. The funny thing is that Brooks will never get any status so long as he is conservative -- and so, as this article obviously shows -- he isn't.
The ideological differences between Krugman ang Brooks merely reflects --- oh fuck it let's go bowling
Brooks is to conservative as Romney is to conservative.
In any case, if you want to increase participation in the (proper) Church among the low time orientation crowd, you could pass a law legalizing weed for use in Christian religious ceremonies. Hell, I'll join the choir and burn my Hitchens books if that happens.
IOZ, the progressive view of society is mechanistic, but not martial. Progressives insist on human equality; did not Jesus say "all men are brothers"?* Any command hierarchy is therefore unacceptable. Military, corporate, husband/wife, parent/child, you name it. All must be abolished.
The rage for equality is why progressives believe in mechanism: obviously, "public policy" must be made. But for any man to actually make it, would mean that man has the power to make it. And if one man has power, all others do not. This is unequal. Therefore, no man can make policy. We are all equal.
But nonetheless, public policy must be made. How then? Democratically! Everyone, with equal power, will sit together at a round table of love. The best experts will give their options. Everyone, together, will decide (probably unanimously) to do the best thing. Democracy is used for those rare decisions where it is not obvious what is best. Everyone is bound to accept the vote by John Rawls. Thus, decisions are made without any man or even any group making them, except everyone altogether. "Yes, I'm only a bill. And I'm sitting here on Capitol Hill."
*No really, I know. Won't stop you though, will it?
That is the 'progressive' view of the world insofar as the 'progressive' view sits firmly within the tradition of liberalism arising from Smith, et al. I do, however, believe that one can dilineate a non-mechanistic version of social order while still maintaining the crowning achievement of modernity, namely, the 'I'. And further, one can do this without falling into rightist nostalgia for a pure past.
There are hints of it in Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Foucault - even French feminism. It was also largely my project when still in academe & it centered on a radical re-reading of the pre-Socratics [who Heidegger almost ruined with his idiocies].
I might start on this project again. Last fall, during occupy I started thinking about trying to map out an anarchist epitemology, bginning with the question of whether knowledge itself can ever be understood as non-hierarchical... Maybe I'll start blogging that when I have the time.
I started thinking about trying to map out an anarchist epistemology
Can I humbly point out your first mistake?
Poverty >>> Rain Forest <<< Savages
Brooks' wants to sequester poverty within a web of interpersonal relationships that require such effort and attention to maintain and decode that one simply doesn't have time to reflect on poverty. Or sex. Or a political economy that uses mass incarceration to extract value from the poor.
I wonder how Brooks would feel if the churches in question were organizing the poor to make revolution against their oppressors.
I think it is a fascinating question. Is a non-hierarchical epistemology possible? If so, what does it look like?
For me not only are those questions ripe for a rigorous look at the underlying and sometimes hidden tenets of other epistemologies, but can expose the basics suppositions we have about knowledge and how those relate to the social order. I have long been of the belief that our view of knowledge both creates and reifies social order.
I have long been of the belief that our view of knowledge both creates and reifies social order.
And yeah, this is true, but ...
Also, what you bring up as a first 'mistake' itself becomes an important question for me. Does the very act of 'mapping' require hierarchy? If so, why? Is the very notion of objectivation fundamentally hierarchical? Are there ways of obtaining and communicating knowledge which don't require the presumed unequal relationship that obtains within the notion of objectivity? Do we need to change our metaphors?
I think these 'mistakes' transform into interesting questions.
When someone mentions “role models” my eyes glaze over, my attention wanders, I wish I were somewhere else preferably the greatest distance possible. And what the heck is a “thick ecosystem”? Have you hugged your thick ecosystem today? And heaven forbid that we should teach people to mistrust government. What an awful mistake that would be. Brooks’ anal retentive mode of composition can be boiled down to a mistaken assumption filled in with nebulous phrases such as the aforementioned thick ecosystem. Then he fills more gaps with words like promulgates which is meant to convince us of his superior intellect. Yes, why certainly my good man, tis a mystery why some people are poor and others are wealthy. And no, there are not a million reasons for poverty and they don’t interact in a zillion ways and neither are they infinite. So if we only take yer horny teenager (what teens aren’t horny?) and remove her from bad people (blacks) and put her in with good people (whites) then she won’t have sex, maybe cease to breath. And a shortage of low-skill entry-level jobs is the cause of poverty? If David lived in reality he would know that all that’s left are low-skill entry-level jobs but perhaps he is too hyphenated to realize this. Of course David likely never worked a day in his life so this ignorance is to be expected. David Brooks has had nothing but the best role models, all wealthy like Brooks which is why he is such a nice boy, so pleasant to be around.
Lucid, go Foucault yourself. Or stab me in the eye with a rusty coat hanger in a back alley before subjecting me to your anarchist epistemology.
Excellent post, as far as it goes. Part of me thinks this is just a dog whistle to those crazy anti-abortion people, making sure they remember the state is the fetus' only hope.
"If sex is repressed, that is, condemned to
prohibition, nonexistence, and silence, then the mere fact
that one is speaking about it has the appearance of a deliberate
transgression. A person who holds forth in such language
places himself to a certain extent outside the reach of power;
he upsets established law; he somehow anticipates the coming
freedom."
is that what you mean gabe?
"coming freedom"
*snigger*
if it's anticipated, does that mean premature?
I thought the mistake was spelling it "epitemology."
But this is one Classics scholar who agrees that Heiddeger seems to willfully mis-translate the pre-socratics.
Juno.
Looks like Gandhi (though not Ghandi) did say that all men are brothers. But as someone once said, if all men were brothers, would you want one to marry your sister?
I was brought up short, though, by "there is a 14-year-old girl who, for perfectly understandable reasons, wants to experience the love and sense of purpose that go with motherhood, rather than stay in school in the hopes of someday earning a middle-class wage." I thought that that was exactly what a fourteen-year-old girl was supposed to want, if she hadn't been brainwashed by the feminazis and all. And that's leaving aside the not so minor matter that a high school education won't get her a middle-class wage, or even a living wage. Neither, most likely, will a Bachelor's degree.
Interesting stuff, lucid. Remind me of Deleuze and his opposition between tree-like structure and rhizomes. Sadly though, this guy's ideas have been overused and recuperated in the form of wishy-washy Information Age rhetoric by the likes of business schools or military lecturers.
There's something to be said against systems of thought that can be so readily adapted by the enemy.
"[T]here is no single magic lever to pull to significantly reduce poverty."
Bullshit. There is, in fact, the Single Tax.
Come over to my house and show me how to use this technics thing
Mathmos - indeed. I did go to undergrad toward the beginning of the critical theory craze & I went to The New School to study with Derrida. I turned on him though, within a year. I figured out it was recycled Heideggarian crap. It took me a bit to really grasp the latent Platonism slathering beneath a lot of post-structuralism.
Deleuze is a bit different though [Foucault as well] because he was primarily influenced by Nietzsche and Spinoza - both of which have much more of the pre-socratic humanism at the heart of their approach - horizontal cosmogonies and such. Deleuze gets co-opted mainly because he kind of 'sounds like the internet'. Of course, because the internet is all the rage, he puts a sexy face on it. In reality, Deleuze is more like the darknet, or, at the very least, wikileaks.
for megametaphors, let's go to mr zimmerman -
sometimes i think that this whole world
is one big prison yard
some of us are prisoners
and some of us are guards
[and some of us are major stockholders and/or extravagantly paid executives of the military industrial congressional corporate prison complex]
Well, I actually read the article, and I have to say, it isn't nearly as statist as you portray it. Pretty funny, ham-handed, condescending, faux folksy, but I don't see the call for the USG to do these things. In fact, the only thing asked is that it not do some things. Whether that not doing amounts to much is a fair question, but at least Mr. Brooks seems to be learning something.
Why would you want to limit Sh'tangwéa? Wouldn't that be as heinous as limiting the iPhone? Not to reignite the acrimony of previous posts, but the view that teen motherhood is not ideal is not limited to nostalgic reactionaries and neo-liberal progressives. The primary reason I subscribe to that view is that teen fatherhood doesn't often enter the picture.
Well, shit, in case anyone was not aware, my reading comprehension is not good. Someone else commented on the same article, and there it was the prescription, hidden in plain sight: GOVERNMENT SOCIAL WORKERs
Dr. Wilhelm, you have to plug it in first. Give the technics at least 5 minutes to warm up before you turn on the culture (this is a very common issue). If you're still having problems, contact your local service department & a social worker will come round to assist you.
Football metaphor?
http://www.businessinsider.com/these-pictures-of-the-xm-210-sniper-rifle-2012-2
Mathmos, lucid -
"Nomadology" was almost readable, in English translation. Enjoyed the juxtaposition of nomad and royal science, too.
And at least Deleuze isn't/wasn't Hardt/Negri.
Glad to see the shout-out for the Single Tax. I can't recall hearing many good arguments against it, mostly because nobody talks about it.
Charles Murray's book explicitly restricts itself to talking about differences within the white american population, because the couple chapters of the Bell Curve that went beyond that caused a shitstorm. So the unwed teen mom is likely as not a brunette, though her name may be Lurlene or whatever the hell else they name girls out in the sticks (all I could come up with the is name of Cletus' wife/sister on the Simpsons).
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