Pinker grew up in the same ultraConservative Quebec I grew up in. I still live in Quebec in an area where diversity was unknown in the fifties and sixties and conversations across the boundaries were unknown. Pinker has every reason to be optimistic. I am equally optimistic but not for Pinker's adopted country.
I know American history and I know of the enlightenment and a country whose political, economic and social doctrine rests in the distortion and perversion of history will not countenance dialogue.
I know America and the dialogue at Harvard and the UofC is not the dialogue of Michigan or Wisconsin. For those of us that speak both the language of the University of Chicago and the language of America's suburbs and rural enclaves see what Orwell warned us about in the his essays in the late 1940s.
The right wing and the media that should inform have made dialogue impossible.
How do you explain the second amendment says nothing about guns. How do you explain the Scalia Amendment to the second amendment is about guns.
https://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2013/10/antonin-scalia-and-lang...
Cynicism is too deeply ingrained in the American psyche and no amount of dialogue can cure America. I love both Americas but know there will never again be a United States of America. Too many lies have destroyed the ties that bind. America ended in 1980 but a civil war is unthinkable but a civilized divorce might be achievable.
8
What is poverty really? How, given the jobs situation, should we be defining it? See http://worksnewage.blogspot.com/2015/09/what-does-poverty-really-mean-an....
1
Tribalism was strong in the 50s and 60s, we even had government-enforced de jure segregation. You can't get more tribal than that. Republican McCarthyism was brutally tribal. There was bipartisanship in Congress of sorts, but it was the bipartisanship of white, Christian, male dominance. Women and blacks were marginalized and Jews were blackballed from country clubs and social organizations. Major colleges had Jewish quotas. Everything from the operation of federal housing/mortgage agencies, to realtors and banks and zoning created an almost apartheid-level of segregation of minorities. Anti-miscegenation laws were enforced, as were anti-sodomy laws against gays. Divorce was minimal, because it was legally difficult to impossible. That did not make marriages any better than they are today. This diminution of whole groups of citizens is nothing less than government-enforced tribalism to benefit the dominant white, Christian, male tribe. An almost exclusively mature, white, Christian, male, well-to-do congressional membership got along together more congenially than today's Congress, based upon all belonging to that tribe. The legal over-turning of de-jure segregation, from Ike onward, resulted in a lot of tribal violence, including murder and official oppression. Opposition to the Vietnam war was tribal, although the dominant tribe of both parties supported it.
Mr. Brooks can look at the world of 1950-64 and not see tribalism, because his tribe dominated.
16
Here's my hero: Robert Mueller III
18
So, David Brooks, you think that in the 1950s there was "social trust", good "family life", less "polarization of national life", fewer "tribal mentalities", more "social capital", better "citizenship and neighborliness"!? A time when colored people couldn't use the same bathroom as white ones? Is that your preferred social fabric, Mr. Brooks? When women couldn't open a bank account without their husband's permission, and beating children was the main educational method? Is that your favored family life, Mr. Brooks? When McCarthy's witch hunts raged? Is that your favorite social capital, or trust, or less polarization?? The amount of delusion conservatives can muster about the past is ever again stunning.
25
you have to ask: Where does all the tribal emotions that have been aroused, all the existential fears that rain down, narcissistic impulses that have been given free rein, spiritual longings that have nowhere healthy to go, social trust that has been devastated, and all the unconscious networks that make up 99 percent of our thinking that are aflame and disordered? Probably not among those who practice the kind of rationalism that Pinker espouses. its exactly the non-rational, belief oriented, religulous (especially the fundamentalists) that all the social decay resides.
3
I'm Sorry, there's no way 50% of all earners end up in the top 10% at some point. No way whatsoever . Either huge bulks of the population have been left out, or someone is simply analyzing data. No possibility. Scares me that you would even think that could be true.
Also clearly false, though slightly less so : that 30% of Americans reach the upper middle class as defined as from 100k- 250k????
Are you kidding
It's one thing if you said household income- but that would still be false
All you need to do is open up job ads - even professional job ads to know how ludicrous that is
Then find out how many of those jobs are open
Very very few
Extremely so
13
Might I suggest skipping all the self involved hand wringing and find The Virtue of Radical Honesty and true Enlightenment within the teachings of Buddha?
4
Give each of two lab monkeys a cucumber to eat and they are happy. Now give one of the two a tasty banana. The one left with a cucumber, which was fine 30 seconds ago, is incensed. That simple experiment explains exactly why Pinker's statistical view of life doesn't work in with the irrational brains we actually live with. You can tell every "average" American that they are better off than the average American of the 1950's (that their cucumber is bigger and better now), but all they're gonna see is the Kardashians cavorting with all the money (bananas) that they don't have.
Inequality is an enemy precisely because it engages this primal irrationality. And, as those at the top use their power to successfully insulate and grow their wealth, it only increases the sense of those left with cucumbers that they will never get a banana, making them even more angry - until they decide to break the system by electing a self-serving clown.
9
Rigorous honesty requires we must admit there is no such thing as a free lunch. The FRAM Oil Filter ad got it right: pay me now or pay me later. Gains have been made since life was nasty, brutish, and short. But progress isn't free. The environment is in terrible shape. Yes, much is better. But at a price not yet paid.
The Talking Heads also got it right. Honesty would not narcissistically separate us from our forebears It would require we admit that life is the same as it ever was. People still fall in love, make mistakes, pick themselves up, do their best on some days, on others, not so much.
And honesty requires we admit that luck is everything. Who got this right? John Rawls. Close your eyes and consider any change you’d make to the world were you in charge. Before opening your eyes, the change you would propose will be applied immediately to you. But not to you as you are; instead to you as you will be when you awaken and and no longer quite so privileged as before. Maybe you come back as a serf in 1840s Russia. Maybe as a spotted owl in 1965 in Oregon.
Jimmy Carter was spot on. “We've got to stop crying and start sweating, stop talking and start walking, stop cursing and start praying.” Half measures will avail us nothing.
David Brooks did us a great favor with this piece, reminding us, at the very least, to look a bit beyond the current, narrow, fearful narrative taking hold among the chatterers.
2
An "emotionally healthy polity" would make it "completely easy" to pass sensible gun restrictions? That's right up there with Trump's post-Charlottesville statement that he was sure there were "Fine people on both sides".
By and large, elected Republicans, NOT Democrats, are beholden to the NRA. The Republicans will never make it "completely easy" to pass sensible gun restrictions.
Our president is emotionally sick, and making the nation emotionally sicker.
5
My Heroes: Steve P. Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, George Lucas, my mom, my dad.
3
Your claim that 30% of Americans earned between $100k and $350k in 2014 is surely way off.
From this Quora page: https://www.quora.com/What-percent-of-Americans-make-more-than-100-000
"According to the 2010 US census, 7% of persons and 17% of "households" earned over $100k in 2010.
(See Wikipedia's article on Household income in the United States)
According to the end-of-2013 CPS ASEC, which is kind of an annual mini-census sample, 5% of the roughly 252k people surveyed earned over $100k in 2013. If restricted to the subset of people who "worked" in 2013--and I'm not sure exactly how that's defined--about 8% of 158k surveyed earned over $100k.
(See the "Both sexes" table from PINC-10 - U.S Census Bureau"
I'm a fan of Pinker myself, so I assume the error is yours. I'm shocked you'd type 30% without double-checking, and that NYT's proofreaders would let it pass. If I'm wrong, please provide some backup.
8
Ironically, Brooks’ special/irrational kinship toward Pinker (based on their blood relation) is just the kind of thing that Brooks seems to want less of - tribalism.
7
Here we go, David.
Aristotle posited a "Golden Mean", an average that fell between two opposites.
I have now figured out your Golden Mean.
(No, it is not that you will be "comfortable" if you have one foot in a pail of ice and the other foot in a pail of glowing embers. That's just plain-old irrational!)
It is that on one side of your family tree you have Steven Pinker -
And on the other side of your tree, you have ME!
I'm certain that we are related ! I'm your "glass half empty", to Steve's "glass half full".
I'm the complement to your White Sheep/Black Sheep/Sheeples!
Steven and I will let you be the "Sheeple" - but I ho'sie the Black!
Ah, welcome home, Bro!
Family dinner at your place on Sunday, right?
2
Pinker is correct, we are living in a golden age in many ways. Health and basic welfare is better than ever and most people have luxuries: cell phones, reliable autos, roomy homes with indoor plumbing and heat, plentiful cheap food, and health care that only a generation ago would have seemed shocking. Progressive attitudes have freed many people from constant bullying, at least in blue state / metro areas / places of enlightenment: minorities, immigrants, people of color, LGTBQ+. Schools have been working on combating bullying.
Before I go further, let's recall that Trump and the GOP rallied the pessimists to overturn the government and threaten the social safety net.
Does anyone over the age of say 50 really recall a world where there was social trust, great family life, unanimity of political opinion, no tribal mentality, no narcissism, plentiful social capital. Possibly there was more belief in institutions, more citizenship (among some in-groups), and neighborliness.
Without Facebook, Archie Bunker could rage about whoever, friends, family and neighbors could be civil and still hate or feel superior to you. The KKK rallies got less news coverage than some idiotic or Russian troll post.
You could stay unhappily married, engage in domestic violence, have your kids be molested in church, and be spanked at school for wearing pants. Women took Valium. Hippie protest and Nixon.
This is actually true.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tucY7Jhhs4
3
I I read your column faithfully and look forward all week to the Friday night Newshour. So I feel I can take issue with what you said on that program tonight and to the fact that you were not corrected right away by the host or the other guest. You said the students at the CNN Town-hall cheered when Marco Rubio said “In that case we would have to ban all guns.” What he said was that we would have to ban all assault rifles—a big difference.
7
Reading all the comments here, in addition to reading Brook's essay, I'm stunned at the lack of conversation about global warming. We can argue stats on poverty, inequality, poor people being better off now than in the past, et al., as long as we like. But as the things that literally keep us alive - clean, accessible water, fertile land, clean air - become diminished, and when coastal cities around the world that are the homes of 10s of million of people sink under the rising sea... THEN we'll see how rational we arrogantly named homo sapiens are. I would love to be an optimist. But history tells me a different story. No matter the better angels of our nature, humans tend to be stupid, greedy, and violent. Nothing will be better as long as we suck up the earth's resources and pretend that there is no price to pay for our parasitical behavior.
8
I'm reminded of the kid who found his Christmas full of horse droppings, and ran around screaming, "I got a pony! I got a pony!"
Pessimists are never disappointed.
3
Of course Pinker can kick back from his professor's chair at Harvard and tell everyone how much better they have it than before. That sells books and gets him on the talk show circuit. All you have to do is look at his mane of hair to know you're being sold a bill of goods.
Speaking of selling, "There’s a fair bit of social mobility. Half of all Americans wind up in the top 10 percent of earners at at least one point in their career. One in nine spend some time in the top 1 percent."
If anyone actually believes that I've got a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. Or a used car. Or my Stratocaster, which would you believe Jimi Hendrix played at Woodstock? The median wage in this country is 50 grand, yet we're to believe that at some point half the country earned as much as the top 10 percent. Sure, whatever. Like those 3 million teachers won the lottery once. Or all the folks working for near minimum wage at fast food restaurants and Walmart ran a drug ring supplying opioids in Ohio.
One in nine folks were members of the 1% at one point? What happened, did the police put them in handcuffs? They forgot how to make money? Or as the old saying goes, "statistics, damn statistics, and lies." Or, it's amazing how a psychology professor is such an expert in what one would think would be the domain of sociologists and economists. But whatever, there's a reason conservatives like David Brooks would love quoting his numbers. And the hair, get some tips from him David!
8
Spending isn't progress.
Consumption isn't wealth.
Pinker is either powerfully confused, or intellectually dishonest. And to call such a one-eyed view Carteisan rationalism is incompetent.
Wilful blindness, more like.
There's nothing a priori about inequality. The empirical evidence of its existence and its consequences abound.
Evidently, university students are now so intellectually stunted they are cannot reach these obvious conclusions themselves. That's not encouraging.
Nor is Brooks' deliberate evasion of the main explanation for all of this: the deliberate interpolation of "liberal" values and corporate hegemony, to the point that globalisation's victims - an entire American middle class - remain persuaded either that globalisation is a force for good, or that it's inevitable. Neither are true.
Globalisation is the most destructive force ever to hit the West. Academic integrity was one of its first victims, quite intentionally.
It is not racist to point out that uncontrolled immigration exists solely to lower unit labour costs, just as it's not wrong to point out that consumerism is no route to health or wealth - or that progress, real progress, is rooted in an abiding commitment to intellectual honesty and a sound understanding of and appreciation for the human condition.
Thanks to Brooks for reminding us yet again just how far we have fallen.
Yet more relentless repetition of all these tired intellectual distortions directed at pushing the sheeple off a cliff.
5
Let's see, one student mentioned Pinker, and another Haidt. Who else did the students select or were you looking specifically for people who said the glass was half full instead of half empty? So in 30 years the percentage of poor Americans dropped 4%. Glad you think that is progress especially when many still make under $8.00 an hour. And what about the fact that this so call increase is a result of these same people killing themselves as two or more jobs? And what type of jobs are we talking about? Are those jobs helping poor Americans to actually move into better neighborhoods and to better schools? Numbers don't tell the whole story.
3
Brooks claims that Pinker Pinker "doesn’t spend much time on the decline of social trust, the breakdown of family life, the polarization of national life, the spread of tribal mentalities, the rise of narcissism, the decline of social capital, the rising alienation from institutions or the decline of citizenship and neighborliness." In reality Pinker does address almost all of these topics and convincingly shows that, over the broad sweep of history, the trends in these areas and almost every other aspect of human wellbeing are strongly positive. He also ably explains why cultural pessimists like Brooks are perpetually unable or unwilling to acknowledge this progress.
2
Perhaps there is a survivor bias in Pinker's viewpoint. 15000 people a year die from gun violence. 60000 people die a year from the opioid epidemic. Cancer kills how many people each year? Heart attacks kill how many people each year? While fortunately we have not had major wars, aside from Viet Nam, you can't look at the data without remembering that it is slanted towards those who are alive.
3
Believe it or not, this is not true, even among progressives, radicals, and liberals:
"There is a mood across America, but especially on campus, that in order to show how aware of social injustice you are, you have to go around in a perpetual state of indignation, negativity and righteous rage. "
So much for radical honesty. Also, Pinker? Not one of my heroes.
3
It indeed is a pleasure to endlessly see these virtue articles from Mr. Brooks, who spent the last twenty years defending a party that little by little got rid of any it ever faked having. Why would they have faked it, the republicans? Because there is no virtue in la carte individualism, or in corporate hegemony at the risk of public health, in environmental degradation in the name of next quarter's profits, in babbling of populist bonfires from elitist feathered nests, in wall street wares over main street fairs, in electoral wins for their own sake, or in stoking hatred and division and then gaslighting it all away. Preach only to your choir, oh pastor, for they are playing out of tune.
4
I think we're, sub-consciously, evolving from a scientific, Cartesian, rationalism to an new age of Romanticism. Aroused tribal emotions, existential fears raining down, narcissistic impulses having free-reign, spiritual longings having nowhere healthy to go and social trust devastated are signs of the beginning of this new age. Unlike any time in the history of mankind, we have had more information available to us and we've had an unprecedented opportunity to read other's thoughts and express our own, in writing, where we can recall and literally reassess and refine those captured thoughts. These unprecedented opportunities are allowing us to gain a deeper understanding of ourselves and each other. As a society and a humanity, we're new to this depth of sub-conscious thought and it is causing what seems like an existential war between our insight and greater intuition. We've somewhat unwittingly tapped into feelings we've never had before thus this new sense of separation from each other across many philosophical and ideological fronts. With this new, ever evolving, introspection, my belief is that today's enflamed, disordered, thinking will settle into a, lower entropy, common understanding about who we are and what we are for while on earth. So, I feel, we must let ourselves and others go through this confusing new age of Romanticism as each see fit patiently believing that, in the end, today's fears, impulses, mistrust and unmet longings are only of our memories.
1
You have to read Pinker's new book along with "Fantasyland". The problem with Brooks' criticism is that social media has created an unprecedented (sorry Niall, it is unprecedented) environment. Brooks' issues are not with Pinker's "optimism" nor with any variation on the Enlightenment, but with a tech and science tsunami that utterly buries his desperate clinging to his fantasy revisionism. The world must and will move past his mysticism. His instant fondness for his cousin proves rather than obfuscates this.
2
Steven Pinker is one of my favorite writers: always insightful, always lucid.
1
Steven Pinker and his enlightenment optimism concerning human progress?
I can tell you one thing about progress: That to this day even the best people in society when speaking of progressing say either "WE are progressing or WE are not progressing", which is to say when speaking of progress it's always put in general form when anyone with any brain can see that even obvious evidence of progress still means many are not in fact progressing, that for them in fact there was no such thing as human progress--their lives were just so much detritus.
One of the best things about religious ages of humanity is that they promised progress to all, that progress in general was possible and not just progress in the particular, that some would progress and others not. Religions such as Christianity for example regularly promised everybody could be saved, that Christ would resurrect the living and the dead. But with the decline of religion and birth of secular society not to mention atheism it's flat out lying to declare that even if society is progressing that WE are progressing when obviously it's not WE but that SOME are doing well and others just had their lives shattered, wasted, thrown away like trash.
This in fact is one of the big problems of secular society, atheism: Progress can only be in the particular, that some and not all will do well. And of course with atheism, progress to where? And how long can we progress? What is progress in a Godless universe? Think on "Progress".
1
"One in nine [Americans] will spend some time in the top one percent" of earners at one point in their careers? Come again? How is career defined in order to produce that statistic -- CEOs of Fortune 500 companies?
3
I suppose we could resolve our differences by agreeing to stop worrying and accept human damnation as a foregone conclusion. Conservatives will say it was God's will, liberals will say it was fossil fuels. What difference does it really make anyway if it all ends the same. You could call it strange love or how I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb.
1
To my mind, Pinker's optimism is one and the same as pessimism once one looks at the details.
As David says, poverty has been transformed by falling prices and government support. The Trump Republicans plan to decimate government support.
As David notes, our health care spending is the second highest among the OECD states. Who cares about how much we spend, when our results are so poor? When this administration is sabotaging the ACA which has helped so many?
3
Dear Mr. Brooks,
If wealth and progress and science and statistics were what was needed for the good and the true and the beautiful, well then, we wouldn't have a leader as the poster boy for six of the seven deadly sins leading a nation mostly wallowing in all seven.
Meanwhile, Quick! Name someone who exemplifies Justice, Courage, Temperance, and Charity.
What modernity represents most of all is that we can get absolutely everything we could ever want without ever coming close to enlightenment or just plain old civility.
Cordially,
S.A. Traina
4
Yes, at "third of American children lived in poverty" in the 50s - due to Jim Crow and the absence of any welfare system, which says nothing about economic conditions but a lot about racism.
Ditto for his claim about senior poverty - there was no Medicare or Social Security then.
Those systems exist now (except for welfare, which both parties destroyed) and still there is wide spread economic malaise and poverty which spread to the same middle class that was created in the 1950s.
As Dean Baker pointed out in a review of Brook's article:
"Should we celebrate this reduction in poverty rates over the last 33 years? Well, the poverty rate had fallen from 27.3 percent in 1959 (the first year for this data series) to 14.0 percent in 1969. That’s a drop of 13.3 percentage points in just ten years. The net direction in the last 47 years has been upward."
"A larger share of the population is earning over $100,000 a year. This is due to some growth in hourly wages, but also due to more work per family. A much larger share of women are working today than 50 years ago, and a larger share of the women working are working full-time. If family income had continued growing at its pace from 1967 to 1973 (the last years of the Golden Age), median family income would be almost $150,000 today."
Brooks and Pinker's thesis is not only supported by the facts - it is refuted.
https://fair.org/home/the-radical-dishonesty-of-david-brooks/
2
Mr. Brooks argues for radical honesty while neglecting to notice that the eight or nine gun laws he thinks should be passed by a reasonable polity are absolutely opposed by the conservative GOP!
1
No, America does not have a very big safety net.
1
Was this supposed to be a discussion of Pinker, slightly innovative intellectualism, college students' heroes, comparative economic strata between 1950 and now, or Descartes schism? (I can only imagine the composition teachers writhing in frustration as they read this...)
And please explain the relevance of the title to any of these possibilities.
1
I'd like to know how it could be that all of the advances Pinker rightly cites have coincided with a breakdown in relationships among individuals. It seems wholly counterintuitive that that could happen.
Dear David, The amount we spend on health care is irrelevant. We spend too much to cover too few. It is a broken system that regards medical care as a product instead of a human right. Our current system is a sort of extortion. If you can pay you can live. Pretty Hobbesian in it's brutality. That we spend so much for such a poor result is shameful. David is lost in his poorly constructed intellectual conceit. Pinker is looking at the sinking Titanic and saying how great it is that band is playing overtime and the drinks are free.
4
As a good scientist, I suspect Pinker would tell you that your newfound "special affection for him" is a function of kin selection. It may not be rational, but there's a scientific explanation for it.
We have a conservative person issue with the inability to pass gun restrictions. It is not all of us, but only the GOP that are obstructing this.
1
I became suspicious reading Pinker's self-proclaimed status of "Enlightenment" that in itself is crowned with a great deal of ego and just another manner of separating one's self from others so I'm cautious of anyone that sees themselves as that. Even those whom I'd consider spiritually Enlightened do not claim such!
In addition, defining what he means by the use of the term would be contextually helpful. Yes, a Harvard professor and all the side effects of that position can place a distorted perception of the common man.
His vision is perhaps realistic but dry missing a certain humanity and compassion.
Dr. Pinker may be somewhat evolved; however...
“The tests reveal that Pinker and I are third cousins. Learning of this kinship tie, I now feel special affection for him. Why? There’s no rational, scientific reason. I just do.“
Tribalism
3
We need to redefine what family is. In our society we care about our family and everyone else can go pound sand. Our cold, coarse, self centered society is a direct result of this attitude. Our President is a reflection of our society's attitude: We care about ourselves, our family and no one else.
When we can see that everyone is family, when we can treat the people we meet with caring, compassion and respect, then gun control will not be necessary. No one would ever think of solving a problem with violence.
How do we get there? We get there by changing how we deal with people in our own lives. We treat the people we meet with caring, compassion and respect. In short it begins with us. There is no one else.
2
"The tests reveal that Pinker and I are third cousins. Learning of this kinship tie, I now feel special affection for him. Why? There’s no rational, scientific reason. I just do."
Brooks blithely asserts that there's no rational or scientific reason for his newly found affection for Pinker, when of course there is. This is a matter of simple in-group evolutionary biology/psychology. In his attempt to distinguish his own point of view from Pinker's, Brooks' (apparently unknowingly) falls directly into the arms of his opponent, with his trademark hubris on full display.
Steven Pinker is not a Cartesian rationalist. One of his books is an attack on the Cartesian idea of the blank slate. His favored sources are almost all American or British empiricist historians of various types. He also presents as an angry person (a person with righteous indignation), whether on radio, in pictures, or in his books, although this is of little significance. I have found few people I disagree with more within the sphere of honest and serious thinkers, linguists, and historians, but his works are of genuine merit, nonetheless, because they searchingly test popular and academic consensus with a great deal of evidence and careful argumentation.
1
This is another article focusing on cherry picked statistics to paint a rosy picture. It is easy to find some statistics that are improving. However, the fact that the median income has not grown significantly over the last 30 years, despite a lot of economic growth and productivity grown tells a different story. It says that for working people in the lower half of the economy, wages are stagnant, even as those in the upper half of the economy see significant growth in wages. David Brook's "Radical Honesty" involves a set of facts that are used to lie about how the country as a whole is doing.
2
The past that Mr. Brooks nostalgically refers to so frequently was really really great for men like David Brooks. For just about everyone else . . .actually not so much.
And, since the David Brooks' of the world have always been a tiny (but very appreciated!) minority of the population he may not b in the best position to extrapolate from his own past and present to generalize about how existentially anxious most people are. Most people are just rolling along through life in my view almost comatose. And they're cool with that so who am I to judge. Most people are not experiencing unconscious networks that are aflame and disordered in their own minds. Maybe in Mr. Brooks mind?
I am super pessimistic about this world but I notice that most people I interact with are not only not pessimistic about it but they don't think about it at all. They think about food, entertaining themselves, sports, fashion, celebrity gossip, political celebrity gossip.They think about consuming. They're not the least bit interested in sitting around comparing the good old days to the bad days today. I'm thinking this is an activity for old people. Young people don't even know who John Kennedy was so they're not sweating the failure of Camelot like some of us older folks. They want to live on Mars and have robots do everything for them so they can thumb through twitter ALL the time. It's like that, really. I find it tragic for humankind but they don't. Who is right?
1
No doubt that things are generally better today than they were in the past. President Obama acknowledged as much in his quote about choosing this time to be alive and Pinker argues that as well (with respect to violence) in Our Better Angels.
I would also suggest reading Pinker's past books How the Mind Works and especially, The Blank Slate.
It’s hard to contemplate how skewed Brooks’ critical thinking skills can get. Let me just take two examples:
A.) France gives way more medical care than the US because its prices are held down to the realm of the real.
B.) Our nation isn’t emotionally sick because it can’t outlaw assault weapons. It is politically sick. It is bought and paid for by political interests which are bent on dismantling anything that looks like government. It is a misreading of the intent of democracy, and no one has found a way to disabuse us of this political corruption. So don’t palm off this political scandal onto vague emotional something or other, Mr. Brooks. That’s just another way of refusing to identify a very logical problem.
1
If you grew up poor but never knew it, never felt real want except as compared to peers, it was because of your parents.
We struggle with our ability to address distinct timespans. Those who focus on the near-term are frustrated, angry and see challenges. Challenges with immigration, racism, income inequality, mass shootings. Those with longer time horizons see good news -- fewer poor, less violent crime, less inequality. Both are right from their perspectives. Both should acknowledge the perspectives of the others.
Pinker is a fact picker - he picks those facts that fit the hypothesis of his latest book. He is a popularizer and bends the arguments to entertain and sell books. Lots of fun, but certainly not serous research - and certainly not honest.
But great hair.
1
Your comment about social mobility is miles off. People may move up in to the top 1% temporarily if they sell a house or something, but that isn't the social mobility most people are thinking of. The rate of people moving up to another social class long term is practically zero.
5
David, I look around me and don't recognize the world you describe. My children, their spouses and friends, some of whom now live in Louisiana and South Carolina, tend to be politically and socially progressive. They worry about climate change, wealth inequality and the inadequate social safety net. But they are not embittered and their actions do not contribute to polarizing. Rather, they have a deeply positive approach: they are active in their local communities, are board members of nonprofit organizations that seek to strengthen child literacy and improve the marketable skills of young people, and are responsible and caring neighbors.
1
Dean Baker comments: The question is not whether we are better off today than we were sixty years ago. It would be incredible if we were not better off. The question is by how much. In the fifties, wages and incomes for ordinary families were rising at a rate of close to two percent annually. In the last forty-five years, they have barely risen at all.
There are a whole a range of other measures which leave real enlightenment-types appalled by the state of the country today. The homeownership rate is roughly the same as it was sixty years ago. Life expectancy for those in the bottom 40 percent of the income distribution has barely budged in the last forty years.
In short, a serious analysis of data shows that most people have good grounds for complaints about their situation today since they have not shared to any significant extent in the economic growth of the last four decades. But apparently, there is a big market for the sort of dog and pony show that Brooks and Pinker present trying to argue the opposite.
http://cepr.net/blogs/beat-the-press/david-brooks-radical-dishonesty
5
"Learning of this kinship tie, I now feel special affection for him. Why? There’s no rational, scientific reason. I just do."
But there is in fact a rational scientific reason, because the brain chemicals that produce that sense of kinship pleasure are not produced by magic. That feeling is produced by neurobiology and our brains evolved to do that. Our brains evolved to have positive feelings about kin because kinship ties were and still are very important to survival of individuals and communities.
There is no magic in the world. No magic powers, no supernatural anything. Emotions are physical phenomena that do have scientific explanations.
One does not employ emotional reasoning in the scientific analysis of data, but it is not outside of science to consider the role of human emotions in the fields of political, social and economic science, because anywhere you have people, you will have emotions playing a role in their decisions and actions.
2
Brooks describes a social deficit unaddressed by Pinker's work. He is right but lacks perspective. A general war would reverse most of those things, as would other forms of collective challenge, such as being attacked or a real depression. Fortunately such are not the only ways to bring us together. Positive challenges such as the Apollo mission to land an American on the moon will also work.
Our biggest problem in coming together, though, is that the ordinary tendency to cherry-pick information to support one's existing beliefs is explosively and malignantly magnified by the internet. Conservatives hang on every word of Limbaugh, Jones, and Trump, entertainers all, for whom a lie is just a line. Meanwhile liberals forget that "American" is the appropriate collective noun, instead insisting that modifiers such as Black, gay, Hispanic, female, white, etc. are the primary identity.
One needs to consider the possibility that there may be an inverse relationship between the progress Pinker notes and the social deficiencies Brooks notes. Perhaps the new baseline of expectation has simply increased so markedly that any variation from it feels like a personal attack. While Pinker's graphs are not a sufficient condition for national happiness, understanding their reality is necessary to roll back the increasing polarization in this country. If we can't agree on the facts about where we are, we can't have a discussion on their meaning or where to go from here and how to get there.
3
" . . . so much of our health care spending is funneled through employers, but when you add this private social spending to state social spending, America has the second-highest level of such spending of the 35 nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, after France."
Yes, exactly - and this is the point made by many that our health care spending is enormous compared to our health care outcomes . . . money spent filling the coffers of the health care industry does not equal a robust social safety net . . .
13
Very good comments can be found here, as usual. Most of them are thought-provoking and sound valid, but they disagree with one another, at least somewhat. You get the views of scientists, rationalists, and the instinctive or intuitionists. Which group is correct? They all, I suppose, are in touch with some part of the elephant.
Regarding this apparently eternal and pressing dilemma, my mind is drawn and quartered. But I'm sure -- okay, pretty sure -- of one thing: Until we accurately assess and determine our current situation, we cannot discover effective solutions and take appropriate action. Where and how do we build a stairway to heaven? Can one even be built? Maybe this is as good as it gets. I not only don't have good answers, I probably don't even have the right questions.
Who knew society, civilization, and politics could be so complicated?
4
We don't have dictums and models about how to disagree and maintain relationships. I was fortunate when in college I observed fierce arguments but throughout and afterwards, regard by all for one another. This powerfully illustrated the dictum of Elton Trueblood, now deceased, but then professor religion and philosophy at Quaker Earlham College: "Be strong about issues but tender/respectful of others."
6
It's good to know these statistics, about how far we have come, economically speaking. But the framers did not define a moment as success. They, instead, gave us the tools to seek "a more perfect union." Wherever we are, at any moment, there is further to go.
8
Of course it is true that, on a whole, people are better off statistically than they used to be, in most industrialized countries, there does seem to be a growing polarization between people. I know people who live in less developed countries in both Africa and Asia, and if these places aren't plagued by political unrest of some kind,(such as in Somalia), there appears to be a greater sense of happiness and community. Friends of mine who live in Ghana and Thailand respectively report how much contented those citizens are in contrast to folks here at home. We are more concerned with material things, the distinctions there are between people. A healthy society, even if it didn't have a large GDP, has a healthy spirituality and regard for others even if they're different.
4
Steven Pinker is seeing a half filled glass of water as half full. Which is always having a positive sense of self and life. But in the current I cannot find myself with my acknowledgement of self and life in any way positive. All the relative factors that Steven Pinker alludes to and wants me to look through rose tinted glasses leaves me feeling mocked because reality for me is so different. And no I am not depressed but I feel oppressed. I don't see a silver lining when the larger grey cloud is in my face.
6
While in full disagreement with the marxist solutions I find it useful to use
marxist analysis in dealing with the optimism of the article.
Without looking into the social disaster impending on future
generations due to the Robotisation of the productive processes
one cannot help but noticing that the globalized free market economy
blooming until about 20 years ago has hit a dead end. Its dynamics
can no longer satisfy the middle classes which is the back bone of any ordered society. These are the facts which can not be 'psychologized' away.
9
Were these students in the Institute of Politics? I wonder how students in the divinity school or journalism or medicine or art history might have answered. What might we have learned from them?
8
Mr. Brooks suggests that in this moment when "tribal emotions have been aroused" and there are "two raging warring camps" on Twitter regarding gun control, we don't need conscious reason or scientific rationalism. He is wrong. When tribal emotions are aroused, that is precisely when conscious reason and scientific rationalism have their most important role to play. They keep our primitive impulses checked. That was the great insight of the Enlightenment and is why so much emphasis has been placed on those approaches to the world since that time. Those principles and the world that results from them is the main reason that life for the average person -- in terms of happiness, freedom from material want, the freedom to pursue one's own spiritual satisfaction in one's own way, life expectancy and a host of other important measures -- has generally followed an upward trend line since that time, albeit with some exceptions.
2
Abraham Lincoln was having a splendid night at the theater—until that whole assassination thing happened. "Intelligent" used to mean "far-seeing." Now experts like Pinker blind themselves with a dust cloud of irrelevant facts. I think it takes courage to be intelligent—the courage to face up to the reckoning were heading for for our past mistakes, and the courage not to succumb to the cowardice of going along with the rascals who will be in charge for the indefinite future.
13
david, the Jewish ( and familial )heritage you share with Prof. Pinker while nice, is hardly germaine to the rest of your otherwise interesting article today,
i find significant that, FINALLY, it was said :
"our nation is emotionally sick".
and i'd dare to add : psychologically sick as well.
now, to be sure, these unflattering designations will escape the likes of Wayne Lapierre and his ilk ( where ever they are ), or could even prompt them to consider the obvious ramifications of such designations.( that's where your recent writing about "national tribalism" becomes so much apropos).
but more to the point: unlike Pinker, when i watched trump sitting there as the kids poured their hearts out about the horrifics at their school ( never mind his response to them !), and when Senator
Rubio responded with the utmost chutzpah ( utter contempt, really !) to fred Guttenberg, who has just lost his daughter at the hands of the Fl. killer - i, like millions of Americans, i'm sure are filled with passimism. with rage. and worse.
there is a palpable sense of despair at a system which offers no other remedy to the automatic weapons of war epidemic = CATASTROPHE- then the dismissive : " change it at the voting booth". the Australian common sense solution to their version of American - style killings apparently isn't even a suggestion by any of our elected officials SWAREN to protect and defend us !? and of course there are many other such effective solutions elsewheere.
3
I would be impressed by pessimists if they ever did anything.
Pinker is a highly skilled sophist. He lacks the courage and the Wisdom to look at Concepts of Principles, like Justice, Equality, Compassion, Truth, Beauty let alone comprehend them.
Not surprised that David Brooks would be infatuated with him.
3
.
Steven Pinker is a clear and well-ordered voice of reason; he bases his positions on facts and evidence.
Nonetheless he will be attacked by the left for painting too rosy a picture of America. The left needs there to be a general crisis –a failing of the patriarchal order –so that the matriarchy can come to the rescue. Pinker’s thesis runs counter to their catastrophe narrative.
Somewhere between – or maybe above – the old dualities of patriarchy v. matriarchy, left v. right, Republican v. Democrat there are enlightened responses/solutions to the problems we all face. Enlightenment Now!
2
David, you write, "Learning of this kinship tie, I now feel special affection for him. Why? There’s no rational, scientific reason. I just do."
Adopted persons and their birth families (all those mothers, fathers, siblings, grand parents, aunts, uncles and cousins) know, exactly, the affection you've referenced with respect to kinship. Yet, most state governments maintain a seal on adoptees' original birth certificates. Less than 15 of 50 states act on the very human need for adoptees to know birth origins, Maine being among the enlightened. Birth kinships are most often undervalued in the framing of adoption statutes, absent of value for a 'virtue of radical honesty'.
Martha W. Hulbert
President, Truth In Adoption Maine
"Pinker doesn’t spend much time on the decline of social trust, the breakdown of family life, the polarization of national life, the spread of tribal mentalities, ..."
David Brooks, check out the book "The Better Angels of Our Nature", by Steven Pinker. A good read.
Brooks writes:" If we had an emotionally healthy polity, it would be completely easy to pass eight or 10 sensible restrictions to at least make it harder for lonely attention-seekers to get guns."
"Lonely attention seekers" does not seem to describe the problem here. Nor does "completely easy" describe our landscape. Wistful thinking about ugly realities.
1
I wonder if the Christians have any positive ideas. They are the other 85 % of the country. America was so prosperous in the '50s that most wives did not work. Brother Brooks does not mentioned that.
3
Mr. Pinker apparently keeps plugs in his ears so he won't hear the noise of the AR-15s shootings.
9
Our nation is emotionally sick, mostly, because of Republican leadership. Face it, governance from that party is insensitive and frankly cruel to our weakest, most vulnerable citizens. And now, with the a mean and vindictive leader, we will continue on this path until democrats regain power. We cannot celebrate our achievements while we we currently demolishing them.
13
"Radical honesty" does not mean that one's opinions are not completely false. Even Brooks should know that. It is a simple category error, confusing logical or empirically verifiable truth with what one "believes" or (shudder) "feels" to be true. One can be radically honest and completely ignorant and/or stupid at the same time.
2
As per usual, Brooks does so much cherry picking, he might as well be tending bar.
8
I question that in 2014 30 percent of the nation earned a household income between 110K and 350K and that the number of people in the "upper middle class has ballooned. US census data says about 20 percent of the nation earned in that range in '14. This is before taxes and exclude gov't subsidies. People with this much money do get a lot of gov't and private subsidies, such as mortgage write-offs and subsidized health care, but the subsidies aren't so high that the percentage would increase by half. His figure of 13 percent is right for 1979 though, so there has been an increase, but not the astronomical one cited in this piece.
2
Furthermore, the figures you cite are for household income, i.e., it includes two earner households, not individuals making over $100,000 per year. A much smaller number of individual members of the working population make over $100,000 per year.
And lest we forget, the cost of housing, health care, child care and college education have skyrocketed during this period of time. Merely citing raw numbers for gross household income doesn't reflect the reality that even households with a combined income of $100,000 can barely make ends meet in 21st century America. And if you look at the abysmal statistics for household savings, it becomes clear that much of America is living one slip of the banana peel away from poverty, walking a tightrope without a net. An accident, chronic illness, or simply retirement comes along and the bottom falls out for the overwhelming majority.
Anyone who asserts that the basic standard of living and quality of life for those below the top 5% or so of the income distribution has improved since the Reagan administration is completely out of touch with the reality experienced by 95% of the folks out here in the real world.
9
Yes Chambolle (nice name), only about 10 percent of adults who had an income in 2014 made 100K or more which certainly only weakens Pinker's argument, at least as related by Mr. Brooks. Things are precarious for many, many Americans. That said, having grown up somewhat economically disadvantaged and living in a commensurate neighborhood, I can say from experience that even attaining the lower realm of the petite bourgeois life and all of its accoutrements has been sweet for me. I'm more worried about those I've left behind in the old neighborhood than my new neighbors and myself. Life there is just one accident and trip wire after another, and with all of the safety nets being pulled up there will soon be no where to go but down.
2
Someone in a cult often feels like it is a family, and they have social trust. Tribal emotions are aroused and fear rains down from the fallacies of the right. The epitome of this negativity is seen in your exalted orange leader. Your scad make life miserable so that people are driven to relief in phantasms of ignorant hope. Hiding in a make believe world because of fear of the other and similarly invented nightmares. Join the cult and your ignorance will be bliss. I guess that is one way to deal with the cruelty of the GOP and right wing.
5
Voltaire is laughing at your modern-day Dr. Pangloss.
3
"America has a pretty big safety net."
Have you been paying attention, Mr. Brooks? The stated goal of the very conservatives you have lauded and enabled is to undo EVERY possible strand of America's "safety net" as woven by the New Deal, the Fair Deal and the Great Society.
17
Facts and thinking are in short supply. All emotion, no brains.
1
But emotions make us human. Do we want to be a society of Mr. Spocks?
I’m sorry but the title of this article has nothing to do with the body.
2
Dickens and Shakespeare on the tendency that we have to think we are at the peak or abyss of history. For the Dead White Male Trifecta, this is a version of the Copernican Fallacy.
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only."
And then Shakespeare:
HAMLET
...Guildenstern? Ah, Rosencrantz! Good lads, how do ye both?
ROSENCRANTZ
As the indifferent children of the earth.
GUILDENSTERN
Happy, in that we are not over-happy;
On fortune's cap we are not the very button.
HAMLET
Nor the soles of her shoe?
ROSENCRANTZ
Neither, my lord.
HAMLET
Then you live about her waist, or in the middle of
her favours?
GUILDENSTERN
'Faith, her privates we.
HAMLET
In the secret parts of fortune? O, most true; she
is a strumpet. What's the news?
ROSENCRANTZ
None, my lord, but that the world's grown honest.
HAMLET
Then is doomsday near: but your news is not true....
5
"Enlightenment man,...really a scientific rationalist...emphasis on the value of individual reason....progress is information...sin...is randomness...or faith — dogma clouding reason."
Sins are vices and their crimes. Randomness is no one's fault.
But faith as unreasonable dogmatic belief regardless of evidence, as though infallible is a sin of marketing--a con--most often spinning faith in god story myth as a virtue, instead of a mental disorder; but also a sin of political marketing, as in Capitalism/USA and Communism/USSR.
There's some truth to both--the sin was/is selling them as Perfection--Heaven on Earth--dissidence as treason or insanity..
The Enlightenment was the fruition of the Renaissance--Classicism born again from the Dark Ages--Christendom (Divine Right) authorizing Feudalism (Agrarian Capitalism--Rule by "Nobles" inheriting great capital/wealth).
Democracy was supposed to be polities as Commonwealths--but it has relapsed into feudalism and dogmatism.
Classicism's trinity was Socrates-Plato-Aristotle: teacher-student-teacher-student. Yes "reverence" but hardly disciple-dogma.
Socrates said: Virtue is Knowledge; Vice is ignorance--evil/sin is involuntary.
Plato said: Besides knowledge, Virtue needs self control( will power)--to resist temptations of belief and appetite--wishful thinking and blind craving.
Aristotle said: we also need good habits--products of good practice/education--the chief duty of a good polity. The USA--when it was great.
2
Notwithstanding carefully selected statistics, when less than half of voters elect a person like Donald Trump, a vulgar, bigoted, narcissistic bully, it is absolutely clear that the nation is seriously ill.
7
I do my best to ignore anything David Brooks says. He is an alt right conservative posing as a liberal
4
I am almost 70 and have spent 15 of those years around McGll and University of Chicago. It seems only yesterday I was listening to Kinky sing. "A Redneck nerd in a bowling shirt was guzzling Lone Star beer , talking religion and politics for all the world to hear.".
I know little of Pinker but I know Brooks and it is time to leave campus. The America you believe in does not exist. The only thing Republicans think about is how to avoid thinking and the only thing conservative think tanks think about is what they are supposed to say to help their fellows and their electorate avoid thinking.
The ghetto walls still exist and the McGill ghetto is as real as it ever was and Hyde Park is still as unwelcoming to its surrounding neighbours as it ever.
They are still making Jews like Jesus and the voices of would be Messiahs is still as welcome as they were in the first century BCE.
I am still fearful for grandchildren in Washington, Chicago and NYC. They have not known the other America where the Ryans, McConnells, Cottons, Roy Moores, Ted Cruzs and General Kellys live. It is their country and they do not like either truth or thinking about truth. I will be 70 in three weeks and have lived in their America. I cannot compete with the Republican hate machine.
There are none so blind than those that will not see and none so deaf than those who will not hear.
I know Jesus and Socrates and the GOP has the Hemlock at the ready.
3
Mr. Brooks, you say your "Twitter feed was aflame, with two raging warring camps." I suggest you consider shutting down your Twitter Feed. Even the name "Twitter" sounds vacuous and silly.
5
So predictable.... The chicken coup is aflame and little Davy Sunshine tell us we'll have baked drumsticks for dinner.
Is there a bias toward cowardice here.... a rationale for inaction?
When walking the gangplank, shouting 'not wet yet' is an assurance you soon will be.
Curly locks or no, my money is on those clear-eyed 'Enlightened' folks who see danger and make the call...
Enlightened? In his own mind....
6
Compare the thoughts expressed in this article in what are attributed to Pinker to those of the US Immigration Service who now denies that US is a nation of immigrants:
"There is a mood across America, but especially on campus, that in order to show how aware of social injustice you are, you have to go around in a perpetual state of indignation, negativity and righteous rage. Pinker refuses to do this. In his new book, “Enlightenment Now,” he argues that this pose is dishonest toward the facts."
Where "Mr. Cissna did not mention in his letter that he had removed the phrase “nation of immigrants,” which was popularized by a book by President John F. Kennedy and is frequently used to convey America’s multiculturalism."
Where else where in the NY Times another author presents another half baked view where the alleged intellects of America and the USA present views that regularly selectively recall their own words not to mentions others.
In their daily updates from "The Ministry of Truth" (1984 George Orwell) Where they selective quote Orwell JFK LBJ Reagan as they also did.
Where selectively they forget "1874, in an editorial published in The Daily State Journal of Alexandria, which praised a bill passed by the Virginia Senate appropriating $15,000 to encourage European immigration. “We are a nation of immigrants and immigrants’ children,” it said."
LOSING ALL INTEGRITY One day to the next "Is America a ‘Nation of Immigrants’? Immigration Agency Says No"
AMERICA=BABYLON
1
Well, I guess Pinker would've said there is a rational, scientific reason for your special affection. We just don't know it yet.
1
Dave please read Pinker again, you seemed to have missed the entire point and fit the declinist intellectual profile to a T.
1
Oops. You appear to have jumped from one scientific rationalist camp (Pinker) to another, with your revelation of sympathies with “the selfish gene,” the camp of Richard Dawkins, who would claim that it’s quite rational to feel greater affinity with a third cousin. I don’t call myself a religious man, but, frankly, I prefer your religious side. I hope you haven’t been charmed by that inflated Harvard pout.
You’re a bookish guy. Me, too. Try Marilynn Robinson. She runs circles around both Pinker and Dawkins.
1
Of course there is a rational scientific reason for your feelings towards Pinker now that you know you are third cousins. You just haven't explored the feeling deep enough yet. Try exploring it deeper and you will find the reason.
David Brooks ethnic sectarian supremacist tribal tendencies can not hide behind his conservative socioeconomic political historical educational agenda. Mr. Brooks does not know science.
When did being humble humane empathetic and objective become confused and conflated with a straw man simply sinful evil aka "radical honesty"? When did telling your truth become radical?
2
Thank you! I feel so much better about living in a society that confuses narcissism with individualism, self-righteousness with righteousness, lies with truth, and shameless greed with community service. How wonderful to being a citizen of a country whose leaders are self-serving cowards, traitors to democracy, delicate snowflakes who have abandoned the nation's children in order to protect their little fiefdoms. I raise my fist in triumph that the president of the United States is a draft dodger, a compulsive liar, an adulterer, a man with no manners and no moral backbone who also might be a traitor. Yipppeeee!
6
Wrapping up with the family tie, that is the same narcissism Brooks rejects.
1
If everything is so good, why do I feel we are on the verge of becoming a fascist state?
4
Maybe you forgot to take your medication?
I'm all for radical honesty. Are you, Mr. Brooks? Stop hiding behind your book reports and obscure " truth tellers ". Step up, and speak out. Stop ignoring the huuuuge elephant in the room. You know his name, admit your complicity and excuse mongering, or just give up. Personally, I'll respect you more. Just saying.
7
Enlightenment is like humility! If you have to say you have it, then you don't.
Jerry W N. E. Kingdom VT
2
The NRA is the poison coursing through our social/political veins.
1
Heroes that are cushy professors, really?
1
Our problems are relational, yes.
There's no way the forces of division and elimination of other can be (ultimately) successful. They have no root foundation of isolated alienation each from each.
We are interrelated.
That reality has deep and abiding roots.
Those who opt for the delusion of separate class, separate heaven/hell, separate self-aggrandizement will (ultimately) collapse into the open ground where illusions go to become failed political, social, and psychological manure for trusting, hopeful, and compassionate growth of community.
1
Brooks says Pinker’s philosophical lens prevents Pinker from seeing the social?
And the Times publishes Brooks. Why?
Pray tell what is this philosophical lens and where is it defined as something other than gobbledygook?
Perhaps Mr. Philosophical Lens Brooks is also related to Pinker’s wife? What with ZbrookdBrooks knowing all about philosophical lenses and all.
2
Pompous comes to mind.
6
Almost. It's your Republican Party that is sick.
3
Brooks' message in a nutshell (NOT talking about trumps' brain!):
Keep smiling and don't say a bad word about your stinking lot in your stinking life.
Because repubs just don't want to acknowledge your pain and real problems.
Don't bring those up because those negative things just spoil David's day, don't cha' know.
4
Mother Harvard has taught me this, no matter how long you sit in the garage, you will never be a car.
4
I'm afraid Steven Pinker fails to account enough for the shallow stupidity which has consumed so much our nation, from which arises so much of the negativity embraced by conservatives.
It is this encroaching stupidity, and religious and paranoid tribalisms created which make me pessimistic.
2
"Pinker is a paragon of exactly the kind of intellectual honesty and courage we need to restore conversation and community, and the students are right to revere him."
Good Lord.
I can see a cartoon in my head, a two elitists in Brooks Brothers suits shaking hands. "Well done, chap. We showed them, didn't we." In the background, the sons and daughters of beneficiaries to the current new tax scam applaud enthusiastically.
Please hand me my airsickness bag now.
4
"Our nation is emotionally sick..."
YEAH, BECAUSE THE REPUBLICAN PARTY HAS BECOME A PARTY OF MONSTERS, RACISTS, BIGOTS, LIARS, TRAITORS AND FOOLS.
That's what's sick.
6
“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."
Benjamin Disraeli
‘Average’ gains by a population could be paid for by the extreme suffering of a smaller subset.
Are you be willing to sacrifice the well being of one grandchild so the others live a little better? How would you pick which is the unlucky one?
2
Pinker's major flaw can be summed up in the Disraeli quote: "There are lies, there are damned lies, and there are statistics." The data may show extreme poverty in the U.S. has declined, and that there is a fair amount of social mobility. But in relation to other OECD nations the U.S. has regressed in every measure of education, human development and social welfare.
In addition, within the U.S. itself the data mask the human suffering represented by the obscene Wealth Gap: Suffering, not simply because the gap is increasing but because the lower earners have to work harder for their relatively declining wages while the rich and super-rich increase their wealth through a few clicks on the computer or with the assistance of an array of accountants and financial advisers who hide the earnings offshore or manipulate tax loopholes in ways unavailable to the masses.
How many members of the middle class can see their wealth increase while they knock back martinis at midday?
And what of the mental suffering caused by the knowledge that their nation has not only lost every war this century, against asymmetrically trained opponents who have bogged them down in Afghanistan and elsewhere for 17 years, but that their politicians (not just the GOP) have the backbone of jellyfish and moral integrity of rattlesnakes? They are driven not by the needs of the nation but by the demands and legalized bribes of the military-industrial complex and numerous lobbies.
So much for statistics.
5
With Trump, as with no other President in our history (besides James Buchanan) our nation is on the path to anarchy. The country is divided between those who believe in the usefulness of government and those who want to blow it up, just for the sheer hell of it. There are those who believe in the concept of the social fabric, and those who prefer unlimited personal freedom over any other value.
We've not confronted this divide since the years leading to the Civil War. But today, the warning clouds are on the horizon: If the GOP loses control of Congress in the fall, Trump and his enablers will launch campaign arguing that the results were "faked", further eroding public confidence in the electoral process. Look what happened in 2016 and the lingering mistrust that election engendered).
If Trump runs for re-election in 2020 and loses, there could be an existential crisis of enormous proportions unless he bows out gracefully. We are not ready for it, but those who prefer anarchy are preparing the ground for it.
No rationalism construct can deal with this possibility.
1
Just to point out one of the many factually misleading statements in this column, the sheer amount of money spent on healthcare in this country is not correlated to the health of the population because in our profit-driven system that money is sucked out in vast quantities for the enrichment of corporations. Out health outcomes are terrible across the board regardless of whether you are talking about infant mortality or healthy old folks. So to present that spending as a good rather than a wasteful travesty it is absurd.
4
It’s a Rorschach test: Imagine a large urban/suburban area where people sit each morning in bumper to bumper traffic that stretches as far as one can see, on highways with four and five lanes in each direction, inching their way to a job that may give them a few weeks of vacation time to be used to escape from what they do the rest of the year. The cars they sit in are vastly more comfortable, reliable, efficient and safer than those of just twenty years ago. The homes are roomier, with perfect climate control and appliances that make meal prep and cleaning a breeze. Young families fill the parks and playgrounds with children playing on relatively safe equipment and being wheeled in sturdy strollers from where they can see where they are going and not risk being tossed overboard from a rickety pram. But maybe that isn’t mom with the stroller, but a nanny, because to afford the house, the car, and the stroller both parents have to work. The jobs may be fulfilling or boring, stressful or mundane, socially and psychologically rewarding and prestigious, or demeaning and a reminder of personal failings. Is this utopia or hell? It’s not about the place and the stuff and the security. It’s all about how you look at it and what you want and who you are. If we look outside ourselves for enlightenment, we’ll never find it. But then maybe enlightenment is just too boring for us mere mortals.
2
If it's all a Rorschach test, then is your comment just your take on reality, American society, or humanity in general? Is there no objective truth? If so, what is that? Opinions are like elbows: Almost everyone has at least two on opposite sides; but that, too, is just my opinion. What is truth? Kierkegaard opines that it's subjectivity. The deeper you go, the darker it gets. (Where's a deus ex machina when you need one, eh?)
Great transformative movements occur when people are unhappy. If we either fear that change or bask in the benevolence of our own small world, we will agree with Pinker, while a great movement sweeps over us. Applying the elite's definition of rationalism to climate change, inequality, etc. only perpetuates the slow roasting in hell. Their idea of the Enlightenment is the problem, not the solution. Read Adorno and Horkheimer. The rational age gave us our consumer culture, a dying ocean, and moves the nuclear warfare clock to midnight. We are obligated to our children to be angry.
2
Er, the rational age also gave us penicillin, the Salk vaccine, and effective inoculations against TB, measles, diphtheria, small pox, lockjaw, rabies, shingles, etc. The list of benefits is long and impressive: electricity, rapid public and personal transportation, computers, refrigerators, clean food and water, sewage treatment plants, etc. Did it solve all our problems? No, but it made life longer, more comfortable, interesting, and rewarding.
Without rationality, we are but animals living and dying quickly, red in tooth and claw.
1
David, I also like your cousin. His writing hallmark is his very honest approach to reality. And I add that his restating the progress our species has made can be attributed to the development of technologies that allowed us to use the enormous quantities of fossil energy. I think he will agree that by all measures our standard of living and life expectancy can be credited to fossil energy.
So, the reality that concerns me is the continued combustion of fossil fuels has the potential to trigger a runaway release of global warming gasses into the atmosphere with the potential of destroying life as we know it -- the so-called 6th Extinction and our food supply.
I am also concerned that should warming slow by some miracle without the need for terminating the fuels that have brought us prosperity, we will eventually be confronted by the reality that fossil fuels are finite, and all hell will break loose over the competition for the remaining fuel.
The good news is: necessity is the mother of invention and some of our inventors are well on their way to developing efficient non-fossil energy sources -- like space solar that can generate very cheap electricity for the whole world. With this cheap electricity, we can power transportation and the millions of industrial and household devices that are powered by electricity -- plus we already know how to desalinate ocean water, and make jet fuel from air and water, with very cheap electricity.
We simply need to face reality.
2
I've read that the Canadian tar sands have an inexhaustible amount of oil in them. Yes, it's more expensive to separate out the oil, but supply is not a problem. And yet its mass use is choking us.
Pinker's stats may be relevant up to this point. But we now have leaders who are explicitly trying to reverse the trend. The future does not look very bright, and the future is where we should focus. Perhaps he is overlooking the disregard that our leaders have for laws? Overlooking the regard our leaders have for the American citizens? Optimism is not the most realistic choice right now, as our government devolves into pay for play, ethics be damned.
2
I just finished watching The Dark Knight on TV, and Heath Ledger as the Joker says at one point 'people are only as good as their situation allows them to be.' Growing up, I always believed that America and Americans were genuine idealists, that they truly believed in democratic principles and wanted to share those principles with the world, and were willing to pay a price for their convictions. In other words, they were beacons. It's what made them great. Now, it looks as though it was all a sham - the situation doesn't 'allow it' so to hell with principles.
2
This column is embarrassing, seriously lacking in incisiveness and maximizing fluff.
3
The idea that poverty is better defined by consumption is just silly. It is the "why do poor people have cell phones?" attack. Brooks and Pinker ignore how society has changed. Yes, some things are better, but the middle class is shrinking. Flat screen TV's are available for damn little, but by measures of health care effectiveness, the US lags most 1st world countries. Even poor people have Medicare and Social Security to look forward too...oh...wait.
To claim things are just fine is not optimism, it's being disconnected from reality. I have to think that neither Brooks nor Pinker have much - or even any interaction with the bottom quartile. Harvard is not a microcosm of America. I suspect neither has much experience with food insecurity. I doubt that they have any concept of living paycheck to paycheck.
Besides, others have it worse, so people should just be happy, don't worry.
4
What David Brooks and Steven Pinker fail to grasp are the following:
1. All the progressive changes we have benefitted from cited by Brooks and Pinker were initiated by people like Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King among many others. These people were persecuted and in some cases lost everything even their lives.
2. All of the oppressors, corrupt officials, generals, etc. made a lot of money, set-up their families for generations and generally profited from their behavior . 2008 financial scandal is an excellent example.
3. Would Brooks and Pinker risk everything for their principles - probably not. In all fairness not many of us would.
3
I suspect Pinker would say that many of the entirely valid relational sicknesses to which you allude would be susceptible to mitigation precisely by a more determined effort to dispel ignorance and push back against disinformation. Perhaps that's Pollyanna thinking, but what else would you suggest? I would imagine you might suggest a Renaissance of a more wholesome and genuine faith tradition. That's fine, though it seems no less Pollyanna, but more fundamentally it will achieve the desired result only to the extent it calms the animal spirits you listed to the point where people are again capable of calm, critical, rational thought and consideration of the sorts of reality Pinker is promoting. God gave is the ability to think critically and rationally - it seems the height of disrespect to the Almighty to refuse to exercise that facility.
1
Ah, nostalgia . . .
I wonder what sort of polling was done in the 1950's to come to the conclusions that on an emotional/spiritual/community, etc. level things were better.". Today with Big data continuously monitoring our every move and people like Pinker who dine off this information can we really trust what we are hearing? In my town they polled all the village employees and -- guess what -- they all hated their jobs. Why? Well, they were being polled by their employer so . . .
"The breakdown of the family" . . .maybe the family is not "broken down". Maybe people don't value and prioritize family like in the golden old days. But if society didn't see families as "broken" or continue to promote these myths that there must be a man in the house or children just don't know what do to we may not see families as "broken" but rather as various types. Also, elephant in the room -- if women got the pay they deserve and the opportunities they deserve they would be better off raising the children themselves when the big man of the family skips out or never existed.
1
Cannot share optimism about social mobility in America. Last week I accompanied my grandson on campus visits to three universities where he has applied: Columbia, Princeton and Yale. Each tour saw about a hundred applicants and family. What was not seen among these hopeful young people were African-Ameticans. No more than two or three in several hundreds. This experience with feet on the ground (bless Columbia for its relative compactness) bore out data I have read — that the most selective schools in America enroll only abput 3% of their students from the bottom 25% Quartrale of family income. Long way to go.
4
Quick reminder--psychology is not pure science ... it's social science. That said, there are so many facts touted without one single reference to the data that supports the suppositions. In an era of "fake news," it's imperative that we reference hard data when making claims about how prosperous our nation is, and that we are only seeing the glass half full when I live in Seattle, and I see legions moving here to our homeless camps simply to live off the small percentage of wealthy locals and a generous municipal support system.
Case in point. Yesterday I read a NYT article that pointed out that we have lost 7% of American jobs since 2001 to two things: inexpensive Chinese imports, and robots. Wealth and prosperity are not that enlightening when you do a deep dive on data.
Steve Pinker is neither a scientist, an economist and surely not an Enlightenment Man. Those people can be found in Tibet. The rest of us are trying to find our tribes, and hunker down.
3
I'm not a college student any longer, however I continue to take college courses at the local JC. The question of' "Who are you hero's"? I do have an answer for that, and it might surprise people. My particular hero was a teacher who devoted her life to the education of young children. She loved children always took time for them, taught them through Love, play and simple rules 1. Take care of yourself. 2. Take care of each other. 3. Take care of this place. Her special emphasis was children from 2-4 years old, and she taught for 35 years before she became too sick to continue. Then her focus became helping other women with cancer, of all kinds. She became a guidance counsellor to women going through chemo, surgeries, and the sickness that accompanies cancer. She gave all of her life of herself and her time, and was a great example for anyone man or woman on how to live. She was my hero, she was my wife, the mother of my children her name was Debra S. King, no scandal ever touched her, no abuse claims ever sullied her reputation. She was the greatest person I have even known. She passed from this earth on Sept 19, 2017 the world is a better place for her having lived here. I loved her and many other people loved her. I think she qualifies as a hero!
8
A jumble of data factoids without any real unifying theme unless one is to glow about the present state of the world and of its self-proclaimed leading country. In the 1950's, if Pinker could get a job at Harvard (they didn't hire Paul Samuelson: guess why) he would be getting the sort of salaries that the U paid at that time, not the inflated nonsense doled out now thanks to the growth in the endowment fund and for endowed professorships - not, of course, to scholarships for the poor.
Maybe if Brooks paid more attention to Haidt (The Righteous Mind) he would understand his own beliefs better, especially the "special affection" he feels for Pinker. Quite possibly, it isn't the distant blood ties, but the mushy affinity successful people have for themselves, a mutual affirmation of their sense of superiority despite their basic ordinariness.
1
Sorry, David, but Stephen Pinker is not what we need right now. After watching his interview with Paul Solman last night I came away with the feeling that he more of a shill than anything else. Why else would he have been at the Davos summit earlier this year. and why else was prominence given to a list of his books. Even Paul Solman wasn't convinced, as his expressions during the interview proved.
1
You can say anything you want with statistics; there are a lot of ways to slice and dice the evidence. A better, safer world? Maybe, if you’re a tenured Harvard professor with a best-selling book. The rest of us have to live in the real world, where slicing and dicing the numbers can’t cover up the truth of our existence.
Yes, I too lament the loss of community, but things like safe schools, affordable medical care, and a living wage (with less income inequality) would go a long way to making many of us feel better; and I’ll bet they would be a boost to community, too.
1
So David, I’m very glad to see you finally admit that President Johnson’s Great Society, war on poverty, actually worked; and worked exceedingly well!
2
Here is the key quote:
“When poverty is defined in terms of what people consume rather than what they earn, we find that American poverty rate has declined by 90 percent since 1960,” Pinker writes.
Debt drives the society that Pinker describes. Let’s do a fair comparison of how much debt fuels consumption and we might get a more accurate view of poverty in this country.
2
Only half the population had any savings in the bank at all.
Sadly, Mr. Brooks seems clueless that the savings rate is much lower today. So, yes, some nostalgia is indeed more positive for certain classes of people, like white working class people.
2
As I read your article I thought about all the things that brought me to join the First Unitarian Church in Boston. In this church I found Jews, Muslims, Catholics, Protestants and many an atheists. I found we all had something in common, a deep need to belong, and live a practice spiritualism. I was a king at isolating, I felt I deserved it after standing for 38 years in high end hair salon as a stylist/colorist. I had a wonderful diverse and intelligent clientele that allowed me to make a great living. But a year into my retirement I found something was missing, that sense of belonging.
In joining this UU environment I was surrounded with intellectuals artisans, but most of all I found that these people were goodhearted. This church is involved gun control, black lives matter, helping solve student loans and much more. I signed up for something called Women for Women. I pledged money each month to help one woman get her business up and running. I became a little candle in an unfathomable dark country. This is what's called paying it forward, for all the good women did for me and making a successful career. I believe this is what is called opening one's heart, and what we are all longing for to live in a peaceful and honest mind.
Flag
71
Oh, so David Brooks is pushing relationships these days, while as a supporter of Republicanism, his party is doing everything to destroy the family and the relationally I find in the functional families of those on the right and the left. It's a cheap shot by Brooks to criticize Pinker for not focusing on the relational.
Reading John Metz Clark's post you see all the relationships he and others here are embedded in.
The fact that a headline could be written that in any was poses honesty as "radical" says much about Brooks, but even more about the US.
Looking at a country with a person like Trump as its leader, if one isn't outraged by that fact, in and of itself that is a problem. Which means it's not a problem of "campus orthodoxy," nor a problem of perception.
The right's call for "balance" gives a "free speech" umbrella for all manner of drivel, including flat-out, naked racism, all the while conveniently stomping on the small matter of truth. Truth exists, and it's at least partially knowable. The fact that the March for Science had such a large collective turnout says more about the epistemological and ideological problems than Brooks will allow into his writing. As for Pinker, he's worth reading. But Jefferson was also an "Enlightenment man." Jefferson not only owned slaves, he refused to free them, repeatedly. The Enlightenment was not the end of human development. To be stuck in time may make one enlightened to a degree, for instance, compared to being a religious fundamentalist, but that's not a high bar to clear.
David,
Your criticism of Cartesian rationality ("Cogito ergo sum") reminds me of the Three Stooges bit with Curly slapping himself on the forehead saying, "I'm thinking, but nothing is happening."
Pinker accurately describes Homo sapien's advancing civilization over the past 200,000 years; you accurately describe a current state of human interpersonal relationships.
Perhaps a better measure of the quality of our human relationships today can be seen on a developmental scale of self-actualization (fulfilling one's own potential) and of self-transcendence (literally transcending the self). We strive to know and become ourselves; then we strive to know and become ourselves in others.
Technology and human cooperation have brought us an advancing human civilization. Seeing ourselves in all others will bring us the peak experiences of human enlightenment.
2
Generally, I see little good in so-called "social" media. However, it could become the foundation of a revolution more powerful than any before it.
To attain this revolution, we first have to build upon this insight of Mr. Brooks.
We need to shove aside the yardstick by which our society measures national well-being -- the Gross National Product. The fools who are so exclusively guided by this measure can continue to genuflect to it, but we need to supplement it with the "Well-Being National Product". Thanks to the Internet and people's strange but possibly useful willingness to report everything about them to the world at large, we could measure the well-being of our nation, one person at a time, by systematic reporting by our citizens.
More importantly, Society -- both as individuals and as Government -- could actually take significant, effective measures to improve the well-being of those who most need help.
Is it not realistic that the combination of government and well-meaning individual citizens could help improve the well-being of those individuals whose well-being has nose-dived, for whatever reason. Poverty? Loss of a job? Social isolation? Poor health? Romantic setbacks? Loneliness? Family setbacks? Loss of a beloved dog? Could not individuals and government work together to help during a desperate period for one individual, connected via the Internet to Society? And if so for one, why not for all? Here's a job for Millenials, who claim that they care for all!
An elite ethicist. That's what I think of when I think of David Brooks. In his writings which often categorize his simple answers to what's wrong with our society he frequently mentions narcissism. Aside from the fact that it requires a fair amount of overt self regard to pontificate on our ills, it also calls for a pose of looking down on so many of us. And his tone makes us feel like we should crawl into his comfortable aura of pronouncements and be freed.
I don't see for a simple second how Mr. Brook's analyses will improve on our present predicaments. His intellectual fuzziness belongs in ethereal think tanks and mythical/religious cultures where gazing on one's navel brings self congratulatory plaudits.
71
David Brooks said our nation is emotionally sick. I think he is right-- and that's why those Russian clowns had such any easy time messing with our heads.
1
Not sure where to put your final paragraph into your argument about our social fragmentation. So you feel connected to another person because you share a common genetic makeup and religious and cultural heritage? Isn't "tribalism" a big part of our problem? That Jewish "tribe", as well as the WASP, Chinese and other "tribes" in our diverse society, also promotes the upward mobility of its members first by teaching and modelling certain values in the family, then by favoring members of their tribe in elite higher education, business and professions where the money is. Individual merit is certainly the primary factor in what we call "success" in America, but the preference for people "like us" remains a strong determining factor in who gets the opportunities to develop and use their talents, whose ideas and opinions are considered important, whose inventions and business ideas are worth investing in, who we loan money to, who we trust to tell the truth, and so on. That's why we had to make laws guaranteeing equal opportunity and education regardless of race, creed, color, sex, age and national origin.
1
Excellent. If reason alone worked Lincoln's First Inaugural would have argued the South out of war. Sugar-coated fake ideas had decayed trust.
The American government spends as much per captia to cover part of the population as other countries do to cover ALL of their population. This is because we have a for-profit healthcare system and end up paying more for the same or worse care. Calling this a "big safety net" is pretty dishonest maybe even radically dishonest.
1
Silly article. So to avoid reality I should read a scientific rationalist with god like curls who is a relative of a fantasist? Someone save the United Statesians!
1
David, Both you and your “cousin” Steven Pinker are fools, plain and simple. It wouldn’t be so bad if you both weren’t so smug and self-aggrandizing on top of it all. Maybe the two of you could get out of your comfy academic environs and visit some other places. Maybe start with Chicago’s West side (instead of Hyde Park) and Appalachia. Then you can both write about how much better things are and share your optimism.
5
David Brooks opinion about decline are NOT DATA DRIVEN. Typical curmudgeon view of an older person that things are not as good as when he was young.
2
But what about his perm? Wasn’t it Laurens van der Post who so incisively noted, “You can’t step in the same perm twice”? Incredible! Of course you have to trust a thinker with a self-consciously weird and ugly perm who fancies himself an “Enlightenment Man.” This has got to be joke, right? Who is this monumentally no-brow, creepy doofus and why would anybody listen to him?
I just don't get this piece.
1
Only in NY Times world is a family earning 350,000 middle class.
3
How long is............................eventually...because heroes?
Mr. Brooks, your country is burning. And when a black Democrat was President, and times were better and improving, your voice was heavily doom-laden. Soft racism. Hard, hard partisanship. Under the skin.
6
Brooks describes students at U. of Chicago who named Pinker and Haidt as their "heroes"?
Unbelievably sad.
2
Ah, David, so comforting to be you. “We” are sick. “Our nation” has broken down. We have two apparently equally bad “tribes.” You are always proposing, as a solution, a return to some Shining Conservatism on the Hill that never existed— where people took care of one another out of sheer enlightenment, I guess.
I guess if you ever told the truth, that it isn’t “tribalism” or a breakdown in the nobility of yore but rather the rotten-to-the-core-since-Reagan REPUBLICAN PARTY that is the problem— well, you might just lose your job and we can’t have that!
3
Your writings are interesting but you are dishonest yourself. You and other conservatives are the king of false equivalency when it comes to comparing republican party and democratic party. Your republican party is empty and immoral. 35% of your party who are religious conservatives who have no problem voting for a child molester or somebody like Trump because of supreme court judges. Then you guys create false equivalency when one side commits murder and the other side steals a candy. To an average audience, this comes as "oh they are both bad". No They are not both bad. Your party is treasonous at best and it divides America.
4
After reading Charles Murray's depressing book, The Coming Apart of White America, I need to read Pinker's book just to get out of bed in the morning.
As long as the ignorant loutish buffoon is President and his equally vile Republican enablers control Congress I see no reason not to be pessimistic about our nation’s future. My heroes are anyone who will save our country from this despicable gang of traitors.
8
Interesting that most of those Brooks extols in his columns are white male intellectuals. I'd be interested in reading about women and people of color. There are some, right?
2
Who were these "students"? A self selected set of smug smarties? And I don't buy your rosy scenario statistical averages.
And if families are failing.......all the more reason for better public schools filled with very well paid teachers (isn't this how you attract talent).
Education, not wishful thinking.
2
Brooks mentions "the spread of tribal mentalities" and then finishes the piece with his own use of one.
2
Brooks here seems to be agreeing with Roy Moore’s claim that America “was great at the time when families were united — even though we had slavery.”
2
"my Twitter feed was aflame" So, turn off Twitter. Stop watching CNN and Fox. Keep visiting campuses. Internet and Cable based media are not helping. Visiting places where people are, helps.
1
If America has such 'beautiful' social mobility, why are rednecks so angry? I'm being honest here. Why?
These angry people are almost always lower-middle income or top 1%. Right-wingers learned long ago to exploit lower-middle class resentments and they do so brilliantly.
America is mediocre.
2
David Brooks come to Burning Man!! You'll see a whole society that (for one week at least) is non tribal, inclusive, creative and a vision of how things can be even without money, status and power struggles. It's bowling leagues, church and book clubs taken to the Nth degree.
3
Why should most American want a fair share of the rewards of our economy when they all have air conditioning now which they didn't have in the 1950's? What a disgusting argument.
We all know what trickles down. It's yellow.
2
If your students can’t think of better heroes than Pinker and Haidt, then you’re not teaching them enough.
3
I am delighted to finally have the opportunity to nominate Professor Pinker as candidate for the Intellectual Scoundrel Award. His sophism is covered by an affection for Groucho Marx jokes and a patina of progressivism that hides his reactionary tropes.
1
I don't confuse "rational" or "irrational" with "reason" or "reasonable".
"Rational" and "irrational" are linear.
Rational: A to B to C, etc.
Irrational: A to B to Hippy VW's, etc.
Reason and reasonable are circular. Facts are gathered in and there is no hierarchy of direction.
Yes, I love mathematics, but, let's be "honest": Life has limited application if one only considers linear mathematics, but, here, there's the whiff of numerology in your choice of numbers... and, frankly, those numbers, any of them, will have no validity if a child or old woman is hungry, starving.
The most useless statement you made here was "...we find that the American poverty rate has declined by 90 percent since 1960."
Is that statement true?
Truth? Shall I be "honest"?
I don't buy it.
I think you are cherry-picking.
I think that statement is as valid as "...declined by 99% since 1776."
I think your love of linearity gets in your way of common sense, David.
I think you have forgotten that Plato's "Republic" which was largely based on Pythagorean linearity, "Number is all", was ACTUALLY based on all of those slaves that occupied that lower level, that those who occupy "Ivory Towers" never want to discuss.
Reason was why the Ancient World did NOT beat a path to Plato's "Academy".
They had far more sense than to join an ascetic cult where all persons would be ruled by a priesthood that commanded all of their labor and all of their wealth and told them when they could have sex....
Oh, wait....
3
David Brooks,
Who are YOUR heroes?
I suspect any person who wanted to belittle your lack of critical thinking skills could easily explain why your need to call that person a "hero" demonstrates your psychological weaknesses.
Many of admire our own parents or teachers efforts, while understanding that the nature of "heroism" and putting humans on a pedestal is absurd.
That's why the students hesitated before answering your question. The students seem more aware of the world than you are. As that CNN town hall, demonstrated, they lack the gullibility of their elders when hearing right wing platitudes that mean nothing.
The students were too polite to tell you that the presumptions of your childish question demonstrated the lack of critical thinking skills that you wrongly -- and egotistically -- believe you possess.
1
Brutal honesty and conversation...from Academia no less...read (or better to listen to) Jordan Peterson
This analysis is a great exaggeration: " Pinker doesn’t spend much time on decline of social trust, the breakdown of family life, the polarization of national life, the spread of tribal mentalities, the rise of narcissism, the decline of social capital, the rising alienation from institutions or the decline of citizenship and neighborliness. It’s simply impossible to tell any good-news story when looking at the data from these moral, social and emotional spheres." Most people in this country live their lives pretty satisfyingly . They do not work as columnists for the NYT, all of whom are relentlessly negative, relentlessly focused on Washington DC, relentlessly focused on the US Presidency and the US congress, and relentlessly focused on talking to each other about these issues exclusively. I guess the NYT will obsess on Don Trump for the next 3 years. I guess that view sells to a certain segment of the population. But there are millions of things going great in this country. The NYT columnists are getting extremely repetitive. There actually isn't much reason to read them. We all know what they contain already.
"..it would be completely easy to pass 8 or 10 sensible restrictions to at least make it harder for lonely attention-seekers to to get guns. But our nation is emotionally sick."
Lonely attention-seekers? Sounds like someone's drunk Trump/NRA Kool Aid that gun massacres are committed by lonely "crazies"/ "monsters"/"socialist leftists" watching "violent tv" & playing "violent video games."
What's it going to take for sensible people like Brooks to admit the problem w/ gun massacres isn't 'lonely attention-seekers' but millions of assault weapons in private hands - some people like Las Vegas shooter multimillionaire real estate tycoon Stephen Paddock, 65, a quiet man with no criminal history, not aligned with hate groups, who'd made no threats & left no reason for his massacre of 58 people. He once had a traffic citation.
Nobody could have 'profiled' Paddock & caught him beforehand. The idea we can surveil friends, neighbors & co-workers & tell the F.B.I. who'll commit a mass shooting is false. Many mass killers provide no suspicious advance trail.
All Brooks talk about 'aroused tribal emotions,' 'existential fears' &
'narcissistic impulses' actually sound like Trump voters to me.
"Who are your heroes?"
Me?
Barack Obama, Robert Mueller, Sally Yates, Maggie Haberman, Ashley Parker, Jane Mayer, Steve Schmidt.
Most of all, Emma Gonzalez.
Emma Gonzalez is my tribe.
2
“we should not be nostalgic for the economy of the 1950s, when jobs were plentiful and unions strong.”
Here, I fixed some of your bias for you: “we should not be nostalgic for the economy of the 1950s, when jobs were plentiful and racism was strong.”
2
Regarding your affection for Steven Pinker. There is actually a "rational, scientific reason" for your special affection for him. The feeling flows naturally from the deepest parts of your brain because evolution built it that way. That surely makes it intellectually understandable.
1
Evolution didn't build anything. Things or beings evolved because they were better suited to survive or thrive in their environment.
Wait, is this the same David Brooks who just a few short months ago was pledging to devote his time & columns to...MODERATION. Try talking to those in Community colleges or vocational schools rather than elite academic schools, or maybe even take a trip to Florida & speak to survivors & doctors who treated Pulse or now Parkland students & get out of the land of those who spend their time in the theoretical philosophical so that your next book review looks even remotely like real life
I miss Ike.
Heck, I even miss Harry.
2
Interesting that the last paragraph, Mr Brooks, you go tribal! yea team!
Mr Brooks all is not lost with this miasmal swamp we find ourselves in! This by Edward Abbey another enlightened man like Pinker who is simply saying Stop! And take stock, all is not as it seems! The good news is with out miasmic swamps the light cannot be defined.
“Benedicto: May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you -- beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.”
1
Here you go again, cherry-picking your statistics, which are unburdened by citations. Realism, schmealism.
2
I found this article to be truly disgusting. As always with David Brooks, the article is nothing more than someone promoting his kin in the upper classes. All you need to do is to try to live for a day or two with one of those beggars populating the streets of New York, Chicago or Los Angeles to realize the tyrany imposed by those cherry-picked statistics quoted in the article. Such editorials help no one. They only cover-up the mess we are living in.
1
Mr. Brooks could add his colleagues Nicholas Kristof and Frank Bruni to those who can honestly see both the good and the bad:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/01/opinion/nicholas-kristof-the-most-impo...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/21/opinion/sunday/why-2017-may-be-the-be...
http://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/31/opinion/michael-bloomberg-philanthropi...
Good to know you don't go to bed hungry every night. And that you have familial ties and resist tribal identities that make you bitter and are not driven by a toxic narcissism. Are modest to a fault yet quietly confident. And have social safety net in place to make sure the bottom will never fall out from under you.
2
I admit this comment is nothing more than a quibble about Style, but I cannot get an answer from anyone at the Times, so let's see if any of David Brooks's readers can answer. David writes:
"Between 1979 and 2014 ... the percentage of poor Americans dropped to 20 % from 24 %." Now, a normal person would say
"... dropped from 24% to 20%." But in the NY Times (and nowhere else) they always write it backward, talking like Yoda.
***Why do they do that?***
I thought it would be justified in the NY Times Style Guide, but as it turns out, it is not prescribed or justified there. On the contrary, the guide says "the rule of common sense will prevail." So what is it? Some kind of compulsive need to "avoid burying the lede" as if different rules apply to newspapers?
My point is that you detract from your credibility when your language attracts attention to itself. Is there a justification for this stylistic quirk? And if, so, why don't other well-written journals do it also?
3
I had to re-read the stat over a few times, myself.
Felt like obfuscation to me.
Purposefully misleading the reader.
It is this kind of writing that allows Trump to drive a Mack truck through modern media outlets and create the confusion he relies on for his reality to prevail.
I am wearier of Mr. Brooks. I grew weary of him back when he was was doing his Edmund Burke schtick. Lately he flits to this, that and the other obscure modern thinker... "and the students are right to revere him." One does not have to scratch to hard to realize Brooks is the "elitist" that everybody disdains. Perhaps he should spend some real time among people in poor communities of color, say, in the Mississippi delta or a res in South Dakota before he decides whether this is the type of writing that these times need. Then again, I guess he's not really a journalist of the people (think Studs Terkel), but rather a "thinker" who dreams of himself leading discussions or symposia where "the students are right to revere him."
If it weren't for Gail Collins (thankfully no putting on "airs" for her) I might be more strongly inclined to divorce myself from the Times.
1
I'd be willing to bet that at least 90% of Americans, including students, have no idea who Steven Pinker is -- never mind acknowledging him as a hero. As usual, Brooks lives in his own little bubble and has little insight to offer. Whatever the NYT pays him is far too much.
David Brook is precisely the kind of shallow-minded rationalist he loves to loathe. His problem is that he can't see through to see himself. He's an educated "liberal" who hates liberalism, a Jew who is self-loathing; a conservative who denies (or at best ignores) the truths of climate change and modern science; a secular-minded figure by nature who pines for an elusive religious reality. I can picture the nervous sweat beads on his forehead as he hankders for moderation in an immoderate world. He is forever dislocated, but I suppose that is okay because most of the rest of us are too. I just wish we didn't have to listen to his stew of nostalgia, blind optimism, and smug right wing nonsense so often on all the major media.
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"our nation is emotionally sick"
Well, perhaps, mr. Brooks if you took another look at your 2/14 column you would understand that you are part of the problem. Asking that we set aside the safety of children in schools until blue's show some respect for gun owners is probably the vilest thing you have authored.
If you want to agitate for respect I suggest you start with our President and follow up with any one of the many GOP legislators who have publicly denigrated their opponents. Having a different opinion is not a sign of treason. Calling it so is not a sign of respect.
3
Why does the piece conclude with a mention of genetic kinship? Let's stick to philosophy, not... what is the word... race?
1
Right. So you and your third cousin must be deliriously excited about this.
“The Trump administration is considering an offer from Republican mega-donor Sheldon Adelson to pay for at least part of a new U.S. embassy in Jerusalem, four U.S. officials told The Associated Press.”
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I'll never stop reading the Times as long as gemli, hen3ry, Socrates, Christine, Walter Rhett and a number of others are posting in the comments. They leave people like David Brooks in the dust.
I usually don't waste my time reading David Brooks' columns, but I had to read this one because I think Steven Pinker is a fraud, and I agree with Brooks' criticism of him here.
Pinker's advocacy for angels and, more recently, for the enlightenment we are supposed to be experiencing betrays only too well the place he is speaking from – Harvard's Ivory Halls – and his targeted audience: people like himself who feel pretty good and don't get out much.
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You share some great genes, David, but what happened with the hair?
This opinion piece is so completely white male — typical of Mr. Brooks — that it reads like something out of the 19th century. David should relax a bit and give over a few columns to female heroes, authors, philosophers. In a national atmosphere where “the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun,” the plain and simple answer is that we need less guys, entirely.
How 'bout that vaunted neighborliness... neighborhood associations that wouldn't sell homes to black families. Banks that systematically wouldn't lend us money. Automatic denial of benefits for people of color. Let's not forget defacto school segregation! Including throwing rocks at black kids. Oh, the good ole' days.
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I think that when we start thinking on the time scale of 200,000 years (homo erectus, ..., homo sapiens) we ought to be pretty optimistic. In the beginning, even before we appeared on the scene, the only path forward for life(?) was by trying all the alternatives and may the fittest survive.
I think that now, we are a LITTLE bit more discerning. After all, all the business about finding "professionals" to go and emote to so as to fix ourselves is a bit better than it used to be. Also we are innately aware that indeed everybody should be equal.
We are delving into our 99% mysterious unconscious networks. We will never determine everything because, if so, that would mean that we are nothing else but robots.
There will always be relational problems but we will become better at mapping the terrain, smartly decide a better strategy. We just need to improve our coefficient of diplomacy. That would be like trying to change the viscosity index of a fluid. Since we are not robots there is always a path forward.
But, not being robots definitely means that we will run into idiots from time and also that we will ourselves act as idiots as well.
One big thing to learn is the value of an apology. Hard to put all of this in action when we have an idiot at the top but things will improve (eventually).
There will always be a non-existent box that we will always think outside of.
The difficulty is that we have to improve the spaceship while flying it.
1
Brooks longs for "social trust," "relationships between individuals" and "spirituality," but there is an obvious elephant in the room. My personal memory only goes back to Clinton (very hazy), but whatever the failings of his predecessors, Trump is the only president I have ever considered to be purposefully malicious. Please understand that I DO NOT mean "unpolished" or "blunt." I mean he enjoys having the power to cause conflict for its own sake.
Accounts of the Civil War talk of North versus South, but ALSO fathers versus sons. In the same sense, Trump does not merely exacerbate the ideological battles between Republicans and Democrats; liberals and conservatives. He also sows discord within and between all camps. The two major parties are fighting within their own ranks. Meanwhile, there is conflict within the Executive Branch as law enforcement/intelligence agencies are attacked... often by their own party or the very administration that appointed their leadership. Zooming in further, the Trump White House is in conflict with itself; not just in terms of "messaging," but in terms of the president and staffers backstabbing each other at every opportunity.
As above, so it is below. Trump was ostensibly sent to be a bull in a china shop and, as a result, there's a lot of nice things are being broken (such as basic civility). The discord of us mortals on the ground is a pale reflection of thundering from above. Such is the state of our union right now.
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Pinker reads like Pangloss. Is it all bad? Of course not and that point should be made to the doomsayers. It ain't all good either.
I love the way Brooks likes to hang out on his privilege-pedistal and wax philosophical while bullets are flying in our high schools and the country is being led by an incompetent imbecile. He has a penchant for avoiding the world the rest of us live in, a place where people are not being paid enough for their labor, where the safety net (contrary to Brooks' claim) could be far more robust and where our fundamental values of community are being dismantled by a class of compassion-less oligarchs.
Yesterday I started watching the Baltimore documentary "Baltimore rising." You know, where cops threw Freddie Gray into the van, and then turned it into a washing machine and killed him. Today I'm reading about Steven Pinker and that "to go around in a perpetual state of indignation, negativity and righteous rage"...is dishonest to the facts. Sure, I just wanted to state a point of fact of what happened to a man present day in relation to this story. Just being honest. I'm fine with Steven walking around the beautiful Harvard campus retaining his enlightenment. Most of us live out here, with issues like that. Millions more of us just dropped our kids at school....and I guess, hoped? What's the truth of that? Denial? I'm sure Steve can enlighten us. College is good, and necessary...but sometimes....bleh.
1
I find it highly ironic that a best-selling author and professor of psychology at Harvard, Stephen Pinker, and Pinker’s buddy, the multi-billionaire who lives in a sixty-six thousand square foot house in Seattle and says “Enlightenment Now” is the best book he has ever read, Bill Gates, are telling me that life is much better than I think it is and I should be more optimistic for the data prove it. I am proudly a pessimist.
I see gloom nearly everywhere I look. I am preoccupied with future failure, using this preoccupation to prevent error. It is pessimists like me who raise the dark questions of human existence, questions that can only be exposed through dark thought, questions that later can be taken up by bright-sided thinkers and doers like Pinker and Gates.
I’m not sorry for picking up my enlightenment from Camus’ “The Myth of Sisyphus,” Kafka’s “The Castle” and Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment.” They’ve helped me see the actions of Homo sapiens as they are performed on life’s real stage, in our heads and imaginations, and not through the blinders of some dry as gravel scientists’ logic, as if the scientists knew what they were doing and where our species is heading.
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There is always a fly in the ointment, and a chariot in the sky. In the 50's there were the flies of the communist menace, the possibility of a nuclear holocaust at any minute, entrenched racism, the poor, etc. etc. Today it is the social polarization and isolation that new communication technologies seem to have engendered, the new techno-ideological cyber war that they also seem to have enabled, our politician's seeming paralysis in the face of these new challenges, the poor, etc. etc.
So far, the flies have not yet caught us, and neither have we yet caught up with the chariots.
Mr. Brooks writes:
"The tests reveal that Pinker and I are third cousins. Learning of this kinship tie, I now feel special affection for him. Why? There’s no rational, scientific reason. I just do."
But isn't this an example of the "tribal emotions" that Mr. Brooks has been on the warpath against in recent columns?
Mr. Brook, as to you "special affection" for your third cousin for "no, rational, scientific reason", well, there is one: your genes (see theory of evolution).
You bemoan Mr. Pinker's rationalistic worldview (i.e., data-driven worldview) because it keeps him from seeing the relational problems, like the decline of social trust, breakdown of the family and neighborliness, etc. As I am sure Mr. Pinker would ask you: What is your data for this?
Clearly you FEEL this way but you may have a tough time proving it. How would you explain the ability of social media to mobilize movements like we have seen with high school students across the country in the wake of the Parkland massacre? Where is the social breakdown in that? Would that have happened in the 50s and 60s when relationships were stronger (i.e., when blacks had their own water fountains)?
Where is God in all of our discussions of what the good life is? Let's measure the quality of life by how many people see a loving, benevolent God as the prime mover of the universe; and let's measure progress by how many people have handed over their sinful, self-centered ways to a God of love Who commands us to love our neighbors as we love ourselves. Then the improvements in life will be measured correctly, and the improvements that we find in such a measure will reflect a true human goodness that is tempered by humility. God wants us to improve the world; of course, He does; but He wants our progress towards the good life to reflect His plan for humanity, a plan that includes Him and that sets up His Kingdom, not ours. Let me share from God's word what He has to say about our efforts to create a good world of sound improvements backed by statistical data. God says, "If Lord Jehovah does not build the house, its builders labor uselessly, and if Lord Jehovah does not keep the city, its keepers wake up uselessly"(Aramaic Bible in Plain English, Psalm 127:1). When the God of love reigns on this Earth, then we will have truly improved our living conditions. Until then, we have much work to do, and we should look to the Bible to find the seed from which the Kingdom of God grows; that seed is Jesus Christ Who gave His life in love so that we all may live abundantly. If the world is improving at all, it is doing so according to God's plan of love and redemption for mankind.
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"Pinkers rationalism is not the total cure." Please tell me what is?
You say “our nation is emotionally sick.” You appear to deem yourself, however, immune to that sickness. As evidence, you offer the “raging warring camps” on your Twitter feed, debating the latest massacre of students in a school. You thus suggest an equivalence, between the grief and rage and frustration and terror of the surviving teenagers and their sympathizers, on the one hand, and on the other, the 4Chan trolls who smeared them as “crisis actors,” or Wayne LaPierre of the NRA, who denounced them as “haters of freedom.”
On second thought, Mr. Brooks, I doubt that you have 4Chan trolls on your twitter feed. Maybe you should give them a try. It might lead you to reconsider your claim that the most important thing above all in response to another bloody slaughter is to stay cool and rational and polite, because such conduct alone promises to make it “completely easy” to reach a “sensible” solution.
What does it take to get you angry, if the vicious public smearing and political denunciation of the teenaged survivors of a school massacre doesn’t get you a bit angry? Passionate advocacy is not, because of its passion alone, an evil. It depends on what’s being advocated. Here you calmly and indiscriminately scold the passionate, which amounts to advocating—nothing. I won’t call you what you’ve called me, as a citizen of the nation: “sick.” It is, though, frustrating that you have the public podium that you do. You do so little with it.
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Brooks is Charles Murray without the stench.
Brooks makes no mention of Trump, the personification of all that ails us. That would require Brooks to challenge his beloved GOP Party and its nefarious agenda.
Any reasons for optimism emanate from Democratic government and enlightened leadership over the 70 years. Any reasons for pessimism emanate from Nixon, Bush and Trump.
Our democratic institutions have always served to remind us of a greater purpose and a greater good. The Republicans seek "the deconstruction of the administrative state" and offer a laws of the jungle libertarianism as an alternative.
Brooks is an intellectual coward touting his privileged fantasies while democracy burns.
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I guess you can say Professor Pinker sees the world through rose colored glasses.
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I wouldn't consider myself a pessimist, more a skeptic. Especially in this day and age, when we are deluged daily with a tsunami of propaganda gushing over the transom. Too much information our brains, still stuck in prehistoric mode, can handle. It takes time to process information, synthesize it, then attempt at best to form an opinion, which in the final analysis, may be proved incorrect.
Mister Brooks, you like to ask students who their heroes are. Personally, I have never been too comfortable with that question. The only immediate heroes that come to mind for me are my parents, who I am remain endearingly grateful. Because, after all, as the old saw goes, without them...there would be no me. But to look beyond a personal level, when it comes to these abstract heroes you ask about, sure, one can cite people throughout history we admire. But, beyond their noted historical accomplishments, what do we really know about them? Is it not the totality of the person, their character, how they interacted with their fellow Man, one must also take into account?
Devout supporters of Trump will cite accomplishments according to what FOX "news" tells them they are. But say, what if Trump really did a lot his first year. Would we accord him the similar admiration as those who admired Hitler and Mussolini because the economy surged and the trains ran on time? What price glory, Mr. Brooks.
DD
Manhattan
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Mr. Brooks, could you write an article with the 8 to 10 sensible restrictions you heard? Maybe we could use those as starting places for conversations with one another. Thanks! Carl
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“The tests reveal that Pinker and I are third cousins. Learning of this kinship tie, I now feel special affection for him. Why?”
Obviously it’s because the selfish gene strikes again. Or is it because you belong to the same tribe? =-)
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Is there any surprise that Pinker was offered to Brooks. Conservatives seeking refuge in the claimed sanctuary of the enlightenment. Please spare us. After thirty five years of hearing about conservatives taking the high ground back from out of control liberals we have arrived at the “happy” terminus of the racist autocrat Mr. Trump. Enough with the apologia for the rear guard action of alleged followers of French rationalism. More focus on the connection fields that create the revanchist forces of today’s white nationalism.
"Conscious reason can get you only so far when tribal emotions have been aroused..."
True, and even more so when one party deliberately manipulates and encourages those emotions, with great success, too. Republicans have regard for our system of checks and balances, they work to destroy the system for the power of the Party. After the success of "lock her up" can "two legs bad, four legs good" be far behind.
I buy the tone of this but question what is cited as fact. Half of us have lived in the top 10%? Did we win the lottery? Find a bundle of cash in the woods? An unknown relative's will?
Do leased vehicles, large screen TVs and overdrawn credit cards count as prosperity? I don't know Mr Pinker or Harvard for that matter but I do know a bunch of people, not one of whom has shared the presumed pleasures available to those of wealth.
I haven't a clue as to where Mr Brooks lives but it isn't in my Philadelphia hood where so called tribal emotions are thought by some to thrive. I also haven't a clue how he comes to write this tripe. Perhaps thanks to "general nodding around the table."
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>
"For optimists, human life never needs justification, no matter how much hurt piles up, because they can always tell themselves that things will get better."
T. Ligotti
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Let us see, like your third cousin you too have divorced and currently are on wife number 2. Pinker and trump have one thing in common, they do not believe in remaining faithful to one wife.
“Pinker married Nancy Etcoff in 1980 and they divorced in 1992; he married Ilavenil Subbiah in 1995 and they too divorced. His third wife, whom he married in 2007, is the novelist and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein. He has two stepdaughters: the novelist Yael Goldstein Love and the poet Danielle Blau.”
So much for optimism.
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Optimism, yes. Lifelong fidelity, no.
Does marital experience belong in the article? I'm not seeing any extra enlightenment from this comment.
Margo, here, be enlightened! "That is to say, Pinker doesn’t spend much time on the decline of social trust, the breakdown of family life, the polarization of national life, the spread of tribal mentalities, the rise of narcissism, the decline of social capital, the rising alienation from institutions or the decline of citizenship and neighborliness. It’s simply impossible to tell any good-news story when looking at the data from these moral, social and emotional spheres."
Good Lord! Would someone please just give David Brooks that hug he is screaming for so he can move on and participate in a rational discussion about the ills and shortcomings of our economy and society.
Complete honesty? Please!
David Brooks can’t even acknowledge his own active complicity in creating the monster that is today’s Republican Party. For that matter, he can’t even acknowledge that it’s the monster of today’s Republican Party that threatens our democracy and our communities.
Instead, we get these pseudo-philosophical musings, whistling past the graveyard.
Brooks' last three paragraphs are completely misguided. "Conscious reason can get you only so far when tribal emotions have been aroused" Hello? Does he have any better ideas than curing this with some sort of rational humanism?
Nobody is going around putting acid into swimming pools just because the people in the pool are a different color. People are not jeering a little girl going into school. I'd say that is an improvement. I think for Brooks, the only criteria for anything good is people going to church and listening to palaver.
In the 1950s and 1960s, life in America for a young white middle class male was pretty good. White females were not far behind. On the other hand, if you were black or just “foreign” opportunities were rare.
Fast forward to 2018. There are far more opportunities for people who are not white.
It seems to me that there are some commenters who can’t wait to bash Mr. Brooks whenever he writes a column which is at odds with their utopian agenda.
Another psychobabble article by Mr. Brooks. Our country is in crisis as he quotes some egghead living in his own fantasy world.
The facts are these; our country continues to fail dismally in so many categories, whether it's healthcare, education, equality ,gun control, the environment, compared to other industrialized nations, that we should be morally outraged . Why anyone would think we should be optimistic is a sick joke, perpetuated by the shameful republican party and the wealthy.
Honesty is radical only when by spreading it one puts his or hers life (or life’s very quality) on the line – the rest either honest teaching and/or professional philosophizing. Seventy five years ago, the young members of the White Rose, a small German anti-Nazi radical truth-spreading group, were executed – and their flickering light keep touching hearts and minds, if not all over the world than in places where it may matter in the probable case that global dark times will come again.
True optimism is not constituted by a strong (superficially evidentiary) believe in historical progress and the advancement of human betterment (two not necessarily complementary moral-historical process), but by courageously opposing evil in the worst of circumstances convinced in the noble mission of elevating the good. I wonder if Prof. Pinker ever had to face such a radical test in his life.
Nice comment at the end! Pinker presumably does not, if he’s true to his principles, feel any such special affection for you.
"Our nation is emotionally sick"? I suspect Mr. Brooks means "I feel sick."
The reason, Mr. Brooks, that you have 'affection' for your 3rd cousin, can be explained by scientific rationalism. It's call 'kin selection'.
For Pinker, “the glass is half full; every day in every way things are getting better.”
But what about the perm? You can get all intellectual about this guy but what about the perm? It’s crucial that you take into account both his preposterous vanity and his ugly perm. He makes himself look hideous and weird — doesn’t this say anything about his thinking? How can you separate a person’s world view from the way the person decides to present himself to the world? This guy is beyond vain and, my god, the perm! This is only ad hominem, by the way, if you believe a person’s comportment can be separated from his being in the world. Einstein, for example was a frizzy, fuzzy bear who was wise, unfussy, and who embraced peace (besides being the seminal 20th century physics genius). You could believe him. But beware the earnest self-promoting permed academic “Enlightenment Man.” He’s a shadow.
"But our nation is emotionally sick." Somewhat less than half right.
I believe there is a rational reason you feel this kinship with him. It's called Ingroup Bias.
We we define teachers wearing guns as a solution, we've pretty much hit bottom.
Because I am a flaming liberal, it is my responsibility to empathize and understand what you are writing here David. Ooooohhhh. I am really feeling your vibe.
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Was it rational thinking that propelled Trump into office?
I know the "rational, scientific reason" you "feel special affection for" Pinker. It is "that Pinker and I are third cousins." Ego is a slippery slope, Mr. Brooks. Let me ask you: Does Pinker agree with your false equivalencies, with your insistence that "two raging warring camps" are equally founded in "the unconscious networks that make up 99% of our thinking" and "are aflame and disordered?"
Guns kill people. That is a fact.
No American non-combatant has the right to any assault or military-style weapon. That is also a fact.
There is no middle ground with facts, sir.
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Allow me to respond to "would be completely easy to pass eight or 10 sensible restrictions to at least make it harder for lonely attention-seekers to get guns" - if there are no guns to get, then the lonely attention seeker's access doesn't have to be regulated. It's about the guns. For me, the inclusion of this language indicates your willingness to see the problem from a lens of regulating access not reducing the actual production and sale of guns. How about a piece of legislation immediately to stop sales of bump stocks. Start with that one simple piece of legislation that has no extra stuff added to it. When something like 70% of the people in this country want more than just regulations relative to access, time to go deeply into the actual weapons and ammunition manufacturing. I do not have any hope when I hear Trump talk about "hardening" schools and ignoring the importance of drills.
I've got to admit it's getting better (Better)
A little better all the time (It can't get more worse). Lennon–McCartney
One of the problems in this country is that we don't seem to be able to talk about opposing points of view. We either don't talk at all, or just scream at the 'other' side.
We have made no progress in closing the achievement gap in the past thirty years. The only progress has been Asians now far outpacing whites in all areas of education - and nobody on the left wants to talk about how that was possible.
How can we address the issue without one side constantly screaming racism, and the other talking only about missing fathers? Missing fathers are not an big issue in the Hispanic community, and Asians have suffered from incredible racism.
https://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/data-mine/2016/01/13/achievement-gap-b...
Maybe we've always screamed at the other side. Civil War, McCarthyism, Viet Nam War . . .
David, always comes down to the primacy of of affect over cognition.
I'd be interested to know which corporations underwrite Pinker's work. I'd also like to see the sources and methodology for the Pinker statistics that have Brooks in such a swoon... Good news, all you poor people! You're not really poor!
The "stats" seem seriously tweaked, twisted and cherry-picked. Seems like radical honesty, corporate style, to me.
Here's some honesty for you: as with almost all columns written by David Brooks (and Maureen Dowd), the comments section is a lot more interesting and honest than the columns themselves. Thanks, I guess, for at least provoking that from your ivory towers.
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Like anything to do with attitudes alone, one can cherry pick the data. Of course one can find evidence that we are now in the Golden Era, and Mr. Pinker seems to have done so. But only the intentionally myopic can deny that one could just as easily pick evidence that we are approaching the end times. The world's great forests, especially the Amazon, are on the verge of collapse. The atmosphere may have passed the point of no return in terms of climate disaster (and I think the word disaster is more accurate than merely speaking of change). The nuclear clock pushes towards midnight as our madman President has his tiny finger on the trigger, together with his hair-line trigger for anger and spite. Mr. Pinker can mount an argument that we are in the Golden Era, but most of us can mount an argument that he's missing the point. No surprise, though, about which bandwagon the head-in-the-clouds Mr. Brooks would mount. He tends toward the status quo.
An obese and diabetic cancer patient can be optimistic and enthused about a recent weight loss, I suppose, regardless of the reasons for the weight loss. Attitudes have a tentative relation to evidence. Interpretation is capricious. Neither science nor philosophy has provided decent rules concerning what attitude to take and which evidence to take seriously.
By the way, I suspect that anyone who refers to themselves as "enlightened" has a suspect attitude a priori, but I'm getting this impression only through Mr. Brooks.
1
Amongst my heroes are spiritual teachers, research psychologists, neuroscientists and trauma specialists: The Dalai Lama, A.H.Almaas, Cynthia Bourgeault, Dan Siegel, Bessel van der Kolk, Jack Kornfield, Ray Castillino... I could go on. These people spread conscious awareness, loving kindness, and the kinds of parenting skills and trauma treatments that will help stop us from creating the next mass shooter or unstable leader. All acts against God or humanity or the planet stem from insecure attachment and unresolved trauma. This is where we move beyond rationalism to land centrally in our hearts, while using the best science has to offer to do it.
The link you feel with Pinker is more than genetic Sir, you are intellectual giants both. I respectfully disagree when you long for good old social bonds. How about our African American brothers in the 60's and before that? I agree that we all long for spirituality. I am an atheist and I feel it too. But looking around I see tribalism from various protestant sects, raging conflicts between Sunnis and Shias, even Buddhists against Muslims. And I'm not going to forget, all of the above and then some against the Jews! To paraphrase Dr. King, is it not time to avoid the quick sands of pre-enlightenment superstitions and dig all the way to the bed rock of brotherhood? Tikkun Olam.
Money is not the measure of all things.
1
Yes, our nation is emotionally sick. Our gun policy is sick. We are having an utterly dysfunctional conversation on sexual harassment, which fails to acknowledge that we have a sexual predator in the White House, who is somehow immune from the repercussions of his behavior. We have a system of mass incarceration for people of color.
I admire too a good deal of what Stephen Pinker says, and even what David Brooks says. But this is expensive talk, when we are in the middle of a national crisis, whose consequences, I daresay, do not touch either of these men, yet.
One additional note about the "breakdown of the family." Those wonderful families were too often prisons for women. Changing the definition of family may be a step forward, rather than a symptom of our failures.
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Perhaps tomorrow Mr Brooks will profile Jonathan Haidt, who was mentioned but not further featured. I have been seldom so depressed as when reading his seminal book. He studied and learned, in my estimation, that Americans are hateful, resentful, and none too smart. Well before Trump he profiled the white Trump voter exquisitely well.
Even when David tries to be non-political, he can’t. That DNA he shares with Pinker can only do so much until the knee-jerk reflexes kick in and bias shows.
“If we had an emotionally healthy polity, it would be completely easy to pass eight or 10 sensible restrictions to at least make it harder for lonely attention-seekers harder for to get guns. But our nation is emotionally sick.”
No, it’s not our nation that’s emotionally sick. In fact, the majority of our nation wants just what you suggested: a ban on assault weapons and strict background checks. Place the blame for conscious inaction where it belongs—on the Republican Party that is tied by money to the NRA. How many more massacres do we have to endure before the GOP can act honorably?
"If we had an emotionally healthy polity, it would be completely easy to pass eight or 10 sensible restrictions to at least make it harder for lonely attention-seekers to get guns. But our nation is emotionally sick." Nope. The Republicans and conservatives that Brooks nominally represents are sick (and have been for quite some time), and he needs to find a way to address that sickness without blaming the entire country. If saying so makes me a tribalist in his eyes, so be it; but my allegiance is to truth, justice, and morality, not family and faith.
1
David:
You say:
"But today’s situation reminds us of the weakness of the sort Cartesian rationalism Pinker champions and represents. Conscious reason can get you only so far when tribal emotions have been aroused, when existential fears rain down, when narcissistic impulses have been given free rein, when spiritual longings have nowhere healthy to go, when social trust has been devastated, when all the unconscious networks that make up 99 percent of our thinking are aflame and disordered."
What you are ignoring is that the tribes today are defined by "dog whistles" from vested interests that steer the flock.
Dog whistles are messages crafted with emotionally manipulative metadata concealing a payload of false, incomplete or distorted information that represents the interests of the sender, not reality.
It is precisely the use of individual reason based on our efforts to make ourselves better informed that allows us to be free from being influenced by dog whistles.
What Pinker is saying is don't outsource your brain and your personal responsibility for learning to the likes of Fox News or Breitbart.
Once upon a time Christian religion called gay people evil and in fact many Christians still do and desire to be free to continue to persecute them.
Rational enlightened people just love and respect LGBTQ people as the precious human beings they are.
Where did the religious sin of gay persecution originate ?
A dog whistle grounded in ignorance.
"Our problems are relational. I don’t know about yours, but after the CNN Town Hall Wednesday night, my Twitter feed was aflame, with two raging warring camps. If we had an emotionally healthy polity, it would be completely easy to pass eight or 10 sensible restrictions to at least make it harder for lonely attention-seekers to get guns. But our nation is emotionally sick."
Your "both sideism" is getting old David. The partisan loggerhead you constantly blame for the collapse of social civility and social capital in the US is really due to the clash between reason and religion. Witness the soon to be lying in wait of a religious figure under the capitol dome. We are a country dedicated to an idea of equality that has become instead a nation ruled by oligarchs using religion to deepen what is already the most unequal of modern economies in the world. And what's your remedy? More religion.
Pinker’s problem, which he shares with Mr. Brooks, is that he takes no notice of the Republican Party’s 40-your campaign to delegitimize the very idea of representative government. Neither Brooks nor Pinker pays much attention to the fact that our elections look to be increasingly filled with fraud committed by that party, that the rest of the industrialized world has made much more social progress than we have (it’s scary when social mobility is greater in England that it is here), and that in the most crucial area of all, education, we have fallen behind the rest of the world. Our public education system is a wreck from lack of money. Our university system, public and private, has closed its doors to millions of Americans, including two generations of immigrants, for whom they were open 50 years ago, while at the same time western Europe has made a university education available to all as a right, not a privilege. That’s a lot to ignore — but not, actually, if you live in the privileged bubbles of Mr. Pinker and Mr. Brooks.
It’s very cute that Brooks and Pinker share some Ashkenazi genes. I probably have some of the same genes but that doesn’t make me like either of them.
Now we find out what one is allowed to say about Mr. Brooks — sacred cow of the Times. If we don’t use words like intellectually dishonest, morally bankrupt, or self-aggrandizing, can we get a word in edgewise?
“'When poverty is defined in terms of what people consume rather than what they earn, we find that the American poverty rate has declined by 90 percent since 1960,' Pinker writes." What an astonishingly disingenuous observation! Consumption rates are high among lower-income individuals and families because they must spend every dollar they have just to get by. If a bunch of millionaires go a year without buying anything, I guess that puts them in the poverty category? Absurd!
1
“For the sceptical reader the whole strategy of the book looks like this. Take a highly selective, historically contentious and anachronistic view of the Enlightenment. Don't be too scrupulous in surveying the range of positions held by Enlightenment thinkers - just attribute your own views to them all. Find a great many things that happened after the Enlightenment that you really like. Illustrate these with graphs. Repeat. Attribute all these good things your version of the Enlightenment. Conclude that we should emulate this Enlightenment if we want the trend lines to keep heading in the right direction. If challenged at any point, do not mount a counter-argument that appeals to actual history, but choose one of the following labels for your critic: religious reactionary, delusional romantic, relativist, postmodernist, paid up member of the Foucault fan club.” - Peter Harrison
David, there is a rational, scientific reason that you feel increased affection for Pinker, now that you know he is family. The reason is explained in a science called Evolutionary Psychology.
The Republican tax plan gives the average tax payer $1,000.
But it just bumped up the deficit from $600 Billion to $1 Trillion.
That is $3,200 per taxpayer.
So for the $1,000 I get, they just added $3,200 on my credit card. That is in addition to the debt that is already on my credit card.
And eventually, my $1,000 will go away but the $3,200 each year will stay.
Worse, it will go up.
They said they will add at least $1 Trillion to the deficit. That will and additional be $8,000 on my credit card each year.
And if they add $1.5 Trillion to the deficit as they put in the law, that will be $12,000 on my credit card each year.
That is each tax payer, not each household. Two working parents, you can double those numbers.
No person deserves reverence.
1
Man is not a rational animal but an emotional being. News organizations make billions and politicians gather votes based on this fact.
Man cannot explain his universe on facts alone since it is impossible to have all the facts, emotions fills that void.
Very thoughtful, David. As usual. Thank you!
I, too, would like to thank these regular commentators': gemli,Socrates, Bruce R., Christine McM, Matt C., and soxared. Without your intelligent, sane, written thoughts, sprinkled with humor and the humanity that we share, this past year would have plunged me into a deep depression. Just knowing that you're out there gives me hope. If, however, our representative democracy does not survive, then what? Should we buy a boat and set sail?
Brooks's or Pinker's philosophical babble is worthless when confronted with the following statement:
"If we had an emotionally healthy polity, it would be completely easy to pass eight or 10 sensible restrictions to at least make it harder for lonely attention-seekers to get guns. But our nation is emotionally sick."
Let's examine that statement. Why haven't we been able to pass any of those sensible restrictions, when in fact a sizeable majority of Americans support at least a few of them?
The answer isn't that our nation as a whole is emotionally sick. Rather, only a minority of our nation (about 35%, the Republican base of Deplorables) is sick; but they've been allowed to poison the rest of us!
Why has that been allowed to happen? Because another 10-13% (the rest of the Republicans) have abdicated their personal ethics and socio-moral responsibility, and have given the minority too much power. Why have they done this? For a variety of reasons:
- Because they've let tribalistic instincts (i.e. partisanship) overcome their own rational thinking.
- They know that they can capitalize on the irrationality of the Deplorables, and manipulate it for their own selfish greed (for money and/or power-ego).
- They're afraid that if they break from the Deplorables now, it will expose their previous lapses in judgment; they're too cowardly to admit they've been wrong.
Neither Pinker's rationalism nor Brooks's mishpucha is willing to acknowledge and confront these truths.
I know a woman working two part-time minimum wage jobs with no healthcare.
When she needs extra money for a doctor's visit or car repair, she sells blood.
You won't find that in Denmark or Australia or Japan, or Norway, etc.
We are the richest industrial country on the planet GDP / capita.
We should be ashamed.
The fact that you and Pinker did not know your were third cousins, not such a distant relationship, seems to suport the idea that extended families are not as close today as they were say a hundred years ago. In a Jewish family at that time, you probably would have known you were related.
I disagree that "That our nation is emotionally sick." You might get that impression from extreme twitter trolls, mass shootings, and unwillingness for congress to act - all the stuff in the news. And this stuff is sick. But the decline in airline accidents and car accidents (disregarding the smart phone spike) alleviates the numbers - if not the heartbreak. I look around and dont see much emotional sickness at this local level. You dont see it in NY either, with the city thriving, crime down and sidewalks full of people.
Somehow we let extreme economic and violent events happen. That is the sickness - its not everyday problems.
The best thing we all can do to restore sanity to our national dialogue as well a myriad of other areas, is to get off social media and stop watching cable news.
Get a subscription to the New York Times and/or the Washington Post and be done with it.
And read a book, go for a walk, go the theatre, go see live music.
1
Interesting to see a concept from thermodynamics, entropy, used by a political commentator. Mr. Brooks calls it ” the randomness that is built into any system”. To flesh it out a bit, Scientists use the word entropy to describe the amount of freedom or randomness in a system. ... That increase in freedom that corresponds to an increase in disorder is entropy
Thirty percent of Americans surely do not earn $100,000 to $350,000 per year.
After reading Bill Gates rave review of Pinker’s two most recent books (Angels & Enlightenment) I purchased and read them. David adds an interesting second dimension to my thinking about Enlightenment and I particularly like how he ends this piece
David, ya gotta be kidding me...
First, much of that apparent prosperity has been driven by the transition from one-earner to two-earner households...
Second, back in the 60's, a STEM bachelor's degree led to an entry-level job whose salary was more than 4X tuition/room/board at a private technical college...Today, beyond the few lottery winners in AI, the starting salaries are less than 1.5X the college cost...Student debt and sub-prime auto loans are noticeable drags on the US economy...
Third, we're now beyond $20T in national debt - and diving in more than $1T more each year (yes, Dubya started it...I ranted about it back then, in Krugman's comments)
Fourth, a lot of jobs have been make-work around structural inefficiency...
http://fortune.com/2017/01/31/obamacare-repeal-job-losses/
...and please stop conflating coverage of pre-existing conditions with a massive justified increase in health-care employment...Much of it is paperwork jockeying...Further, our next planned wave of like prosperity is around putting opioid recovery centers on every corner...
Fifth, China is leaving us in the dust...
.................
If there is redemption, it is in the private sector...
NASA went to the moon almost a half-century ago - but can't get there again for less than $100B, they say...
Luckily, some guy named Elon - in figuring out how to get his junker off the front lawn after his neighbors complained - may just show us the way...
However unequal...
1
Yet more false equivalence: "If we had an emotionally healthy polity, it would be completely easy to pass eight or 10 sensible restrictions to at least make it harder for lonely attention-seekers to get guns. But our nation is emotionally sick."
Let me re-write that for you Mr Brooks:
"If we had an emotionally healthy Republican Party, it would be completely easy to pass eight or 10 sensible restrictions to at least make it harder for lonely attention-seekers to get guns. But our Republicans are emotionally sick."
Democrats support prudent gun controls with much higher frequency, according the Pew Center. Republican politicians are utterly hopeless, perhaps because 95% of NRA campaign contributions are going to them.
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/06/23/bipartisan-support-for-s...
"But our nation is emotionally sick." I think this sums up everything going on right now. Before we can fix it, we must face it. So this is a start.
Usually, people who have "made it" espouse conscious reason but people who are left behind cannot. For them life is short, nasty and brutish. Conscious reasoning will not find them an escape. Drinking will.
Your piece completely ignores the Russian assault on our democracy. Disinformation, hacking, and other techniques continue to influence political discourse. You cite CNN’s Town Hall meeting and wonder if “emotionally healthy polity” would make it “easy” to pass gun restrictions. How do we get there when minutes after the Florida shooting, Russian trolls and bots were flooding social media with conspiracy theories, and advancing pro-gun positions including seeding the suggestion that teachers should carry concealed weapons. Arming teachers to prevent school massacres is now the official White House position. Trump refuses to get to the bottom of this attack on our democracy presumably to protect himself and his family. Until he does “Enlightenment Now” will need to sit it out for a bit.
"when all the unconscious networks that make up 99 percent of our thinking are aflame and disordered"... sounds like progress to me.
Pangloss, Polyanna, and Alfred E. Neumann --- recent postings by Brooks seem to have much in common with characters from a fiction universe. I became politically aware during the 1960 presidential campaign, so as one of "Kennedy's children," I feel ashamed and sad that America's formative youth must search out political heroes who have been relegated to the back bench of our political system.
1
I think Mr. Brooks feels special affection for Pinker because as an educated person who appreciates evidence, he knows that Pinker is on to something. The modern conservative in Mr. Brooks wants to make decisions based on emotion and fear, but rationally, the modern Democrat in Mr. Brooks likes Pinker because the evidence he brings forth does not lie.
David,
You neglect to point out that Steven Pinker is a Canadian. It is, perhaps, easier to look at the USA from a foreign perspective with less emotion than can those whose Country is in jeopardy.
Yes, he is a genius.
1
When was our country ever emotionally healthy? All the regional hatred that fermented under the rug is out in the open...the shooting hasnt started, or maybe it has, but either way, this is a civil war.
1
David is right, we are a terribly fractured society and their are elements that have decided to take advantage of that and impose their policies over us.
The most glaring example that comes to mind is our now 16th year of undeclared war.
Al Qaeda has been eliminated from Afghanistan and there never were any WMD's in Iraq. Bin Laden was assassinated and yet we keep fighting these wars. Honest reporters now know that Gaddafi wasn't about to massacre thousands of civilians and now Libya is a failed state and Syria is about to follow.
We have NATO on the boarder of Russia from the Arctic circle to the Black Sea and we have 400 bases covering the entire eastern coast of China. Two thirds of our navy, including our nuclear forces are now in the Pacific.
But as divided and fractured as we are, I sincerely believe that the vast majority of American's want an end to these endless wars and a stand down from these looming confrontations in the world that are heading us toward a nuclear holocaust for all humanity.
We may not agree on many things, but I think we agree that peace is better than war and that most of these so called threats are simply a new version of the same lies we were fed in 2003.
1
I propose an alternative title for your article:
"Respect first for the 1%, then ask for a wage increase"
1
An optimistic op-ed piece, followed by the usual downers' comments . Thank you, Mr. Brooks.
1
Which cliché would be best to apply to Mr. Pinker ? A man with his head in the sand might do. Mr. Brooks, we liberals don't go around in a constant state of depression.
We see many reasons to be optimistic. We saw 17-18 year olds telling Republicans to grow up and grow a spine.Republicans haven't killed Robert Mueller....yet. Brave Americans of all ages are calling out the corruption and moral decay of all three branches. We even know how to poke fun at ourselves, something you'll never see a Republican do.
And here's the biggest reason we feel optimistic- the mid term elections are coming up. So yes, America still does work in some ways as long as today's conservatives don't find another way to kill the vote.
2
There's a silver lining in every tin foil hat, and you and Pinker seem to be wearing one when it comes to income inequality.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, "in 2014, median weekly earnings for full-time wage and salary workers age 16 and older were $791. In 1979, median weekly earnings in 2014 dollars were $733. So what we call “real” or inflation-adjusted median weekly earnings increased by about 8 percent." Not bad, right?
"Over that same period, real earnings for the highest paid 10 percent of
workers—those whose earnings were at or above the 90th percentile—increased from a minimum of $1,422 per week in 1979 to $1,898 per week in 2014, a gain of 33 percent." Uh huh.
46
Mr. Brooks directly addresses your logic with the following in the article:
'Poverty has been transformed by falling prices and government support. “When poverty is defined in terms of what people consume rather than what they earn, we find that the American poverty rate has declined by 90 percent since 1960,” Pinker writes.'
All this despite rising income inequality.
1
Generally I agree with the points made here but I have to say that things have gotten much worse since trump was electected. Congress is behaving like a drunken soldier, the Republicans unable, and unwilling to do anything that solves the real problems we have: inequity in wages, the attempt to destroy the Affordable Health Care, food benefits for children, and the constant threats to the freedom of the press, freedom of religion, public schools underfunded; mass incarceration of Blacks; immigration system being reformed to please white americans. These are the things that keep me awake at night.
Our nation is not only emotionally sick, it is spiritually lost, intellectually deprived, physically unfit, morally and socially corrupt---under a sham of a President who is all of these things.
Brooks' best paragraphs are 12 and 13. Those are where both Pinker and his students ought to be camping.
Yikes! "Tribal emotions are aroused, existential fears rain down, narcissistic impulses are given free rein, spiritual longings have nowhere healthy to go and social trust has been devastated," sounds more like Nero's Rome or Syria than America. In the Alternative Facts universe we've stumbled into, we need fewer Chicken Littles and as many "paragons of radical honesty" as we can get.
Brooks has fallen in love with the sound of his own rational and sometimes, irrational musings.......
This is a moment when our country cannot afford the luxury of philosophical adventures..We need solution oriented talk to ponder....
I am very tired of being preached at when I need a plumber, electrician, or a well trained police officer in my daily life...
Mr. Brooks needs to listen more and perhaps, speak less. We climb over the bodies of our kids while he ponders the talk of college professors......Sad for him, sadder for his readers.
1
David! Put down that bong and have a coffee.
The status quo is not heroic.
Firemen are heroes, policemen are heroes, blind people are heroes but pondering is not heroic. I ponder all the time. Like the comic Maria Bamford "I'm not depressed, I'm paralyzed by Hope".
I imagine Pinker would argue that the decline in the social, emotion, relational sphere is due at least in part to a decline in reason. People believe trolls and bots, and hide in their tribes unwilling to engage with new ideas.
2
Wait a second . . . Half of all Americans will for some part of their careers be in the top 10% of earners? I’d like to see some data to support that. It doesn’t seem possible. Or, perhaps it means that even in the top 10%, earnings are just barely above median. In that case, it hardly makes a case for optimism.
4
I do not think any of the commentators, and perhaps Brooks himself, have actually read Pinker's book.
Pinker is very careful to point out that he is making aggregate claims, that there is certainly variance, and fluctuations in various forms of welfare are inevitable.
He also consistently advocates humanitarianism in the form of compassion, renegotiating discriminatory norms in favor of more inclusive ones, abstraction from one's own point of view and iin general for open mindedness, toleration and the embracing of others. This is hardly "Cartesian rationalism".
It is true that Pinker does not spend time on the list of topics Brooks mentions (he is concerned with more fundamental forms of human flourishing), but if he did I would bet that he - as would I - disagree with the all the "decline", "devastated" and "breakdown" rhetoric on the basis of data. Pace Brooks, it is an empirical question and there are no doubt relevant studies available.
Brooks may be succumbing to one of the very cognitive biases Pinker identifies as central to so much catstrophizing and pessimistic thought: the Availability heuristic. That coupled with the fact that adverse events register more strongly than felicitous events, produces a tendency to exaggerate how bad things are, etc.
The book may ultimately be overly optimistic: a lot depends on the quality of all the studies used to amass all the data and numbers. The gist however, tis surely correct.
Our healthcare is overpriced and does not produce health outcomes as good as what other countries achieve with much lower expenditures, so it is misleading to compare our "social spending" to that of other OECD nations and rank us as second. It is not what we spend, but what results we achieve that should be the measure of how we do compared to other nations.
3
David Brooks, I admire your thinking and bringing Professor Pinker's optimism to our attention. However, I feel strongly that the current interrelationship problems you identify primarily come from the oval office. I am hopeful these problems will be reduced in November 2018 and 2020. In other word that they are temporary.
1
Isn't it easy to find stats that support your philosophy? I think people know more now (and they know a lot more nonsense too, hello echo chambers) but anyone who tells me the USA has anything to show the world about social policy around poverty or public health needs to see a psychologist, maybe a Canadian or Scandinavian one. Many academics, like a lot of upper class folk, live in bubbles of cyncism or glibness. Of course the glass is always half empty or half full, but heroes engage the societal contradictions and get their hands dirty.
Hope. An ode to hope from David Brooks. I like it. I like it because I am so often challenged these days to look for it, to see it, to know it. And from the unlikely corners of our lives does it emerge -- suddennly and unannounced. This past week I, at long last and after much struggle and imaginative wrangling, had an actual visit from a human telecommunications company repairman. Remember those? As he worked his technological wizardry, we talked. He stated his belief that Trump and his ilk are among the best things to happen to us; he has awakened us and put us on notice -- on high alert -- to what detestable and treacherous things can happen in a democracy, and they have lit the charge that calls us to fix it at the ballot box. That sound and enlightened piece of wisdom has lit me from within with fresh hope and determination. And my internet service is now working flawlessly, to boot.
2
So, Pinker sees his cup as half-full.
Thanks for the insight!
2
I laughed a sad laugh when I saw that Brooks was lauding Pinker. As an atheist myself, I ought to like Pinker but I don't. His "Better Angels" book, for example, is fundamentally *dishonest* about the savagery of pre-historic people because it, like his current book appears to do, shoehorns history in the service of his "ever-better" view of history. Brooks is notorious for his skewed view of society marked be glaring omissions that readers point out every week. Brooks and Pinker are quite similar that way.
1
I would argue that what we consume is not the best indicator of wealth since the 1980's much of that consumerism was and continues to be fueled by credit cards and debit, not earnings.
It is exactly the kind of rationalism that Steven Pinker espouses that got us to the point where even the poor in this country have more than almost everyone in the rest of the world. And it is exactly relying on arguments of emotion and religion that have resulted in the divided rhetoric of our politics. I think some application of the former to personal lives are far more likely to improve the state of our society than application of the latter are likely to improve the state of our physical wellbeing.
29
Recently, statistical parallels have been drawn between conditions of the poor in America and those in countries like India, which we usually associate with poverty. Philip Alston's report to the UN High Commissioner on Human Rights is a good read on this.
1
"...the decline of social trust, the breakdown of family life, the polarization of national life.." Etc., etc.
WHO IS HE REFERRING TO?
Mr. Brooks likes to refer to these various social plagues, but where is the evidence? Since most of us know only tiny groups of people really well, and since we don't ask them to do extensive interviews with trained researchers who then help us analyze the answers of friends and family, where do we get such giant generalizations?
SHAKEY SOURCES OF EVIDENCE
My answer would be:
1. Generalizations made by the few people we know well;
2. The various media.
Mr. Brooks' social network may include dozens of experts in all kinds of fields, but so far I have not seen any hard evidence from any of them backing up his statements concerning the "decline of social trust" or "decline of citizenship" or other sweeping generalizations.
WHAT DO HIS "BREAKDOWNS" AND "DECLINES" EVEN MEAN?
What does "decline of citizenship," for example, even mean? How could I tell if "citizenship" has "declined" in my neighborhood? Well, no one has read this far, but I've said my piece and can go back to something more productive... : ]
2
I grew up in a very relatively affluent, neighborly Chicago suburb. I now live in Marin County - a relatively wealthy, unneighborly enclave north of San Francisco. Even here in the American version of paradise, the residents are unfriendly. People here don't seem 'happy.' Ironic, given the beauty all around, incredible food quality, and climate. Even on the hiking trails, I find I need to initiate greetings with my fellow nature lovers. People are overwhelmed on many levels - even here. California in general has a massive 'community' problem. L.A. is even worse. Back in Chicago, when Mayor Daly asked us to shovel the sidewalks of our elderly neighbors, we did it without hesitation. California has a lot to learn about neighborliness, citizenship, and community.
2
Does the dropping percentage of poor Americans include the falsely-entitled "wealthy" -- like Jared Kushner, for example -- who clearly AREN'T even solvent? Regardless, maybe instead of constantly stigmatizing one side of the fence, the money can be greener for BOTH if, for another example, true accountability was indeed true. For fiscal referents to be "radically honest," how about some radical Reparations for the descendants of the very people whose free labor enabled profitable IPOs to the French w/o whom our "enlightened" conception would've been stillborn, if not altogether aborted?
1
As Pinker reported on the PBS Newshour tonight, the negatives quoted by Mr. Brooks are goads to further future improvement.
Let's hope that he is correct.
1
While Pinker is factually correct, he ignores basic morality (yes, relations between people). The important set of facts is comparing what is to what could be. While better off than a brutal past we are not close to being enlightened. Worker wages and social health have decreased relative to productivity and economic growth. Wealth and income inequality are at their highest in the US since the 1920s. Fewer people are dying in political violence than in the early-1990s. Extreme poverty has been halved globally since 1990 but most people have moved to low income. "Deaths of despair" has increased the mortality rate in the US--- unthinkable but true for a wealthy society. There is little sense of the commons or the common good. Private affluence-- limited to a few-- and public squalor is the state of the world, particularly the US.
We live in a world where everyone could have a decent standard of living with no hunger and malnourishment (least of all over 20,000 people dying of hunger daily). We could all have clean water (and thousands of babies and children would not die daily). But, Pinker says be optimistic. We are no longer in the "Dark Ages" why compare ourselves to them. I find it hard to believe the world, let alone Pinker, is "enlightened." His book is a new age "opiate of the masses."
1
I think David Brooks misses Dr. Pinker's point. His view is that much of the social discord and lack of institutional trust is precisely because this story of progress isn't told. Instead, we have corrupt political leadership cherry picking short-term data to intentionally divide the American electorate so they can maintain power.
If people had the perspective of how far we've come, they may gain the judgment to elect leadership that does the nuts-and-bolts problem solving that keeps us moving forward, instead of the nihilistic, sycophantic, "my way or no way" ideologues we have now.
Humans are capable of "heroic" actions within many contexts. However, being heroic has very limiting meaning to me if the hero's cause is NOT heroic, or if the situation which inspired the heroism was self-inflicted.
E.g., the Vietnam War, like any school shooting, not only was NOT heroic. It was a self-inflicted massive wound to the soul of the nation that WE chose to inflict upon ourselves in one of our continual fits of madness.
Heroes usually fight against power. For this reason, almost no politicians of either party can be a hero, because politics is about the movement of power, from one power group to a different power group.
Heroes usually defend the underdog. Politicians may occasionally speak up for the underdog. But when push comes to shove, most politicians will bow down to power.
Heroes usually take actions that put THEM at risk. And I don't mean by sexually accosting other, or sending pics via email. That's not the risk I am talking about. Heroes takes risks that could bring the hero's defeat, and even annihilation.
Today, there are very few people who meet MY criteria for heroism. Martin Luther King Jr. was a hero. Nelson Mandela was a hero. Jimmy Carter and Malala Youzsafai are heroes.
Being an optimist is nice. The optimist will keep trying, even when the desired end result of her/his optimism slips out of view, liking a sinking ship upon the ocean. Except like praying for the victims of mass shooting, optimism alone doesn't accomplish anything.
1
Here we go again: Mr. Brooks' propensity to moralize like my grandmother. She was fond of saying things are bad nowadays because people don't treat each other with the same politeness and honesty they exhibited in her youth during the 1910s and '20s. That civilization in general and America's specifically had been in a state of moral decline ever since. I did not disagree with her, more out of respect that anything else. But I actually believe there has not been a decrease in our moral behavior as much as an increase in honesty in our actions and words towards each other.
My reading of our history and other literature has led me to conclude that for a long time Americans aped their British cousins in hiding or masking their immorality through pretension and hypocrisy that began in the highest levels of the upper classes and filtered down to the lowest of the lower classes. Gradually, over time and thanks to literary and political attacks on against upper classes by rationalists like Twain, Shaw and Mencken, phony rectitude and hypocrisy gave way to honesty, eventually even of a brutal and obscene nature. We cannot go back to the moralizers of the 18th and 19th Centuries any more than we can return to the horse and buggy as the main method of transportation. As much as we'd wish for the days of handshakes instead of 30-page contracts to seal deals, they are gone. The sooner we end our wistful nostalgia and accept modern reality, the more useful we can be in today's world.
1
I would argue that one reason students are so pessimistic is that the speedy flow of information, and more importantly, opinion, gives people a constant slamming of negativity.
'' ... is a paragon of exactly the kind of intellectual honesty and courage we need to restore conversation and community. ''
In any given day, as we go about our lives in our community, we ALL put on our blinders to cope with the travesty, blight, poverty, crime, dishonesty, corruption, racism, misogyny and an abundance of ills of and from society.
I always use the example that if you were walking down the street and found someone in dire distress that they would perish if you did not help, then you most likely would. In fact, it is the law for you to do so. It is the same premise if people show up at the emergency room. The hospital will stabilize you to the point that your life is no longer in danger.
People all around us are in that predicament, but in slow motion. As long as it is not at that moment and obvious, then we trick ourselves and rationalize it that it is ok and we put on our blinders. We even smile and make light, or put a positive spin on the situation.
That is not honest.
That is not courageous.
This is what we have become and pundits make up columns to rationalize.
3
Why is it conservatives and other Radicals always insert a superfluous adjective that takes away all meaning from a phrase in an attempt to make the thing seem and mean more than it actually or possibly can?
Who are your heroes?
My all time hero is the Tank Man of Tiananmen Square.
If anyone can name a more courageous act in the face of a brutal dictatorship, I have yet to see it or hear of it.
The rest of the story is that the world sided with the Chinese Dictatorship and forgot the slaughter of innocents in China- all for cheaply made stuff.
Khrushchev used to brag that if he were put out a contract for a rope to hang the west with that the capitalist businessmen would try to outbid each other to gain the contract. He was right, but the country doing the buying was China- not the Soviet Union.
The saddest part is that not only did China miss it's chance at Democracy, but after we sold our souls for cheap goods from China, the West has become more repressive and less democratic.
History will not be kind to us for many things from Global Warming to Income Inequality, but siding with a Military Dictatorship against unarmed students wanting a democracy will smell the worst. The US cannot wash this from it's hands.
3
That's right Mr Brooks stick your head in the sand and all the problems will disappear. Please don't complain about student unrest. They represent the moral, uncolored energy that might just prevent further decay of our culture. We have the likes of Trump and the rampant fear he and the GOP use to manipulating their uninformed followers because our public schools have failed so many. Those youngster on CNN represent the best of that system.
1
No David Brooks,
Our nation is not emotionally sick. It is the minority that clings to power through undemocratic means that is emotionally sick. This country got out of balance with the raging hateful trying to set a lunatic course of this country for all of us. We are out of normalcy by a long shot.
Trying to understand the divisions through partisan lens is not going to be productive if one side is hopelessly wrong. But that's where we are, unfortunately, after decades of insane right wing propaganda convincing people that white is black and black is white. If we set the realistic banchmarks for our debates, if the factual world, with all its laws of physics accounted for, is properly related to, then the in most burning issues democrats are on the rational side.
Take gun issue as an example. Second Amendment could be interpreted in many ways, particularly if the right to safe life of all citizens (safe schools, safe hospitals, safe streets, etc) is taken into account. One can't blindly apply 2nd when it starts to tread on the wellbeing on majority of Americans. "Don't tread on me" should be a democratic motto. Don't force me to live in a world where my children in schools are not safe, period!
It seems to me that the toxic right wing propaganda has successfully forced the perimeters of the debate in such lunatic terms that any solution, other than quite extensive restrictions on the access to guns, will not change ANYTHING. The debate is way out of balance.
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This is a bit beside the point but I watched a program on the use of genomics to predict health outcomes a while back. Steven Pinker was on it because he decided to be a guinea pig for the program. The tests showed that he had a 70% chance of being bald.......no wonder he's optimistic......
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It's rather obvious David Brooks hasn't read Pinker's work (or almost anyone in the comments) as he addresses specifically what Brooks says he doesn't, including showing the statistics for how much more time parents spend with their children nowadays as opposed to in the past (including accounting for stay at home mom's). If you're going to criticize someone's work, at least read it.
Mr. Brooks writes
"I now feel special affection for him. Why? There’s no rational, scientific reason. I just do."
Not so fast. There is a perfectly rational scientific reason. You ought to read up on group benefits. A good start would be "The selfish Gene"
A more scientific one would be "The cultural evolution of emergent
group-level traits" Paul Smaldino, BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (2014) 37, 243–295
College kids have a right to be angry. The rest of us do too!
You don't get to say if we have a good safety net. Go ask a homeless person, or interview a hundred. Shouldn't be hard to find them, or their children. Also, do your poverty statistics include the incarcerated, because there are a ton of them, and they aren't usually included, apparently because a drug addict, never again exists after he's been sentenced.
Ask a homeless person if his problem is relational. He'll likely say yeah, there's those with mercy and those without, who predominate in our culture. Ask him what narcissistic tribe he's got membership within, but maybe wear a boxing helmet.
I'm pretty sure he'll say something far more interesting about spirituality than you. When someone falls down like that they get a philosophical education that should qualify them to testify anywhere people want to study reality.
The children in Florida and across the country this week aren't interested in a bunch of ideas. Generously, so generously, they want their horror, their pain, to shield the rest of us, from what they've been through. I feel no compunction to do anything but to cheer and get out of their way, because they are truthful, and that's something I can recognize. I don't need to listen to an academic hero, I don't need to stroke my chin, and I don't need to say anything smart.
Try for simplicity and for making sense.
I often hear in the media the "educated" elite being derided - this seeming contempt for anyone who is educated has even been spouted at times by you, David.
It may serve us all well to start celebrating the uncommon brain trust in a society so apoplectic to facts and the "elite".
David's twitter feed may indeed have been divided into two raging camps, but based on the polls the vast majority of people in the country want common sense gun regulation. Perhaps someday it will happen.
The news that "[h]alf of all Americans wind up in the top 10 percent of earners at at least one point in their career" is one of those can't-be-true assertions that cry out to be checked, which I presume the Times has done? I'm unconvinced.
A quick search reveals that earning $150K or more per year grants a household entry to the top 8% of earners. To qualify as a merely middle-income earner requires the household to pull in between $42K and $125K, so the gap between what we would call middle-class wage and a top-tenner is quite narrow. That sounds good for Brook's (or maybe it's Pinker's) factoid. One can imagine a lot of scenarios in which a middling successful X -
writer, car salesman, hot dog vendor - has a single glorious year, catapulting him or her temporarily into the sky suite section of the ballpark.
But half of all Americans? Come on.
Bear in mind, too, that these statistics are per household, a decent fraction of which are composed of two-earner families. So let's check in on some of these individual workers.
The best-paid ten percent of high school teachers earn about $93K. Even with the president's proposed bonuses for carrying a firearm to work, those folks are never going to taste the bubbly.
So who are these 50% of Americans? David needs to explain his numbers better, or risk losing the faith of his readers.
The CIA World Factbook 2017 on page 904 states "Since 1975, practically all the gains in household income have gone to the top 20% of households. Since 1996, dividends and capital gains have grown faster than wages or any other category of after-tax income."
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In the spirit of "Radical Honesty", David, your book synopses detailing the thoughts of others are wearing thin. Many of us have a good reason for "existential fears" and if what most disturbs you about the Parkland Massacre is Twitter ire, you are most definitely missing the point.
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and for those who bemoan these terrible times in which we live - he has written an inspiring account of how much better life is for us than our forebears -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Nature
Spot on. If things are so much better, why do people seem unhappier?
Rationally, with disease, poverty, corruption, outright crime, war and cultural dysfunction, weighing down individuals and society, it is astonishing that we have moved the marker forward at all.
I confess to not having read this particular work by Steven Pinker, but I do get a sense--from other things he has written--that he is guilty of intellectual overreach. There are serious critics of his particular take on enlightenment: https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2018/02/unenlightened-thinkin... ("Unenlightened thinking: Steven Pinker’s embarrassing new book is a feeble sermon for rattled liberals").
I am a little uncomfortable, being a liberal (usually), with the title of Mr. Gray's book review. But Gray knows more than a bit about the subject. I was going to quote one of his stinging paragraphs here, but there were too many, and it would be best to read the entire review.
I am perhaps subject to rebuke for not having read Pinker's book first, but maybe one should read Gray's review first, and consider the context. I would like to read a point-counterpoint between these two men.
These pseudo-academic pieces by Mr. Brooks are more and more irrelevant as our country continues to fall apart. We are faced now with life and death issues that require real world compassion and solutions , not intellectual posturing. I’m a refugee from academia. I almost went to U. Chicago for grad school, but I was really put off by its oasis-like nature in a sea of poverty and racism that is Chicago. I bemoan and condemn the anti-intellectual trends in this country, but at 62, I’m more interested in what Mr. Pinker and his acolytes do in their real lives than what they say in the seminar room. The students hold Pinker and Haida to be heroes, but what are these students doing to be heroes in their own communities? Are they kind? Do they help others? Or do they just spew out jargon-laden papers that will earn them tenure somewhere? Call me cynical, but this kind of essay is not helpful.
I get pretty exasperated when Steven Pinker starts in on reducing the arts to brain science, but I agree--his optimism, based as it is on noticing actual historical realities, is pretty nice to see.
And I also often wonder about this nostalgia for times like the Depression, when apparently every family was just like the one in "A Christmas Story," there were no Okies, and the German-American Bund didn't exist.
Or take the 1950s: Korea, open-air bomb testing, savage repression of black folks, gay people resolutely stuffed in closets, few if any vaccines, Roy Cohn running around loose...why was that better?
Personally, I think a lot of white guys miss the Good Old Days that never really existed. And I think a lot of others have pretty much no clue about American history.
Actually there *is* a rational, scientifically understood reason why you feel affection for your kin. Ask E.O. Wilson.
If we redefine poverty, poverty dropped!
If we redefine safety net, we have a great safety net!
And this is what David Brooks calls intellectual honesty?
I don't regard optimism as a useful tool for surviving the Age of Trump. Besides being dishonest, it keeps your mind off the country's central objective which must always be getting rid of him.
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The view from Mr. Brook's Ivory Tower must be quite different from that of many of us with our two feet planted firmly on the ground. Climb down and have a look once in a while.
Mr. Brooks, your failings lie in not (quite) understanding what dogma is! A Conservative is a dogmatic person, by definition, and trying to move him/her from that position is rather difficult - hence a Conservative!
I appreciate another great rationalist who is also an optimist, Noam Chomsky, who, when asked why he is optimist he responded by citing Antonio Gramsci: "skepticism of the mind, optimism of the will". The rest, as Hillel would have it, is study!
When people are honest about the the past and present, they may have a chance about correctly assessing the future. I tell the troth because it never fails me, I live the truth so I can tell it. It's a small world with all the technology, so my greatest asset is my good name
"Learning of this kinship tie, I now feel special affection for him. Why? There’s no rational, scientific reason. I just do."
If you are closely related, then there is a very scientific, rational explanation for your affection for Pinker, Mr. Brooks. Your close relatives carry your genes, so there are selective pressures to favor them over non-relatives. It's called "kin selection", a well studied topic in evolution biology.
That may not be the only explanation, of course.
"America has a pretty big safety net." Who are we kidding? America has a truly pathetic safety net. Every other developed country has universal medicare, not the US. Life expectancy is dropping, not rising. Inequality is a huge problem, not only because of its consequences: lowered opportunity, lower social mobility, under education, abysmal health care, growing distrust of government on all levels, and political apathy. Also, and even more important, the rich are taking over the political system in order to prevent greater equality. This is a recipe for revolution or fascism - take your pick. Pinker needs to wake up. Never mind enlightenment.
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I like to look at the glass as half full, from the 20-30's when most of the wealth was in a few family hands and politics were in your face corrupt to today when wealth is spread, strides in medicine and the enjoyment of living longer. I like to see the movement of the 60's when the hippies preaching love not war raised thoughtful objective and smart children and those children raised children without any rancor that their daughters could be anything they wanted and their children could love whoever they wanted and who could be any sex. I believe so many thoughts today must have an answer and like all thoughts there is data to back it up. What we are seeing the next turning of the blue ball
Only a con man could slip in such a shoddy, insulting premise and hope to get away with it: that people’s “indignation, negativity and righteous rage” are merely a pose: if we all just took a deep breath and thought clearly - and ignored that man behind the curtain - we’d realize that we had brains, heart and courage all along. In the face of what’s actually happening on the ground, Mr. Brooks’ weekly call to, Just Calm Down Kids, makes me even angrier. I’m sorry, there I go again, posing.
' But our nation is emotionally sick.' Agree, but it is your party, The Republican Party that has deliberately created this division and malaise to realize their objectives of Guns for All, tax cuts for the wealthy and the destruction of basic safety nets for the less fortunate.
"There’s a fair bit of social mobility. Half of all Americans wind up in the top 10 percent of earners at least one point in their career. One in nine spend some time in the top 1 percent."
One in nine spend some time in the top 1 percent? I couldn't find any reference on-line to support this. To be in the top 1 percent, you need to make a minimum of $450,000 per year. 1 in 9 earners do that at least once? When I see questionable statistics like this, it makes me question them all.
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Does Mr. Brooks really think that past or earlier generations had an emotionally healthier polity? In what point in history, was life better both socially and economically (on average) for all human beings than the present? I think Mr. Pinker has the better case here.
It couldn't be more clear that Pinker is a scientist and Brooks is not when Brooks asserts "That is to say, Pinker doesn’t spend much time on the decline of social trust, the breakdown of family life, the polarization of national life, the spread of tribal mentalities, the rise of narcissism, the decline of social capital, the rising alienation from institutions or the decline of citizenship and neighborliness. It’s simply impossible to tell any good-news story when looking at the data from these moral, social and emotional spheres." These are assertions without evidence. Is there evidence that family life has broken down? Divorce is more common but are all intact families close (or even safe) families? The loss of neighborliness? Where's the evidence for this? Part of the problem on both sides of the political spectrum are these vapid assertions without evidence.
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And what becomes of the value of human intellect if everything is required to be scientifically?
Go read “Bowling Alone” by Robert Putnam or “Coming Apart” by Charles Murray, and then see if you agree with what you just wrote
As David Brook's has pointed out before, there was more than one Enlightenment. While the French focused on the supremacy of Descartes’ rational method, the English and Scottish Enlightenments stressed its limits. For the British the essence of human nature was a natural empathy for others. For them reason meant reasonableness, not rationality. These different perspectives have lead to radically different understandings of change in social systems, exemplified by the clash between the conservative Edmund Burke (1729-1797) and the radical Thomas Paine (1737-1809) and their differing views on the French Revolution. Burke saw it as an unmitigated disaster: Paine cheered it to the echo. American politicians have never quite figured out which branch of the Enlightenment they belong to. Jefferson and Hamilton took opposite sides and, despite his conservative views, even Ronald Reagan was fond of quoting Paine’s aphorism that “We have it in our power to make the world over again”. The divisions continue to this day. Conservatives, like Burke, are aghast at the thought of intellectuals trying to design and build what can only be grown, while the followers of Paine espouse progressive agendas to make the world anew.
It's time to get above this intellectual confusion to recognize that our fundamentally divided nature is the essence of our humanity. The practical weaving together of apparent opposites is the very warp and woof of our existence.
It’s both…and, not either/or.
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"He calls himself an Enlightenment man, but he’s really a scientific rationalist. He puts tremendous emphasis on the value of individual reason. The key to progress is information — making ourselves better informed. The key sin in the world is a result either of entropy, the randomness that is built into any system, or faith — dogma clouding reason." This man is the hero of these college students? This "scientific rationalism" makes me shiver. "The key to progress" is information? We're drowning in information - much of it we would do better without. I find no key to optimism here.
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When I saw Prof. Pinker on the News Hour recently, I knew something was wrong with his then-and-now optimistic analysis. Thank you, David Brooks, for clarifying the flaws in Pinker's Panglossian views.
The genetic link that you share makes sense because you both come across as kind and sensible men.
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After listening to Pinker's earlier book on tape during a time of long commutes, I think he avoids optimism or pessimism and looks at objective evidence. He is quite detailed and explores the best critiques of his ideas and explains why he reached and stands by his conclusions. I wouldn't criticize him too much before reading/listening to a whole book. His work is helpful because it refutes the general social and media narrative that the world is going to hell by using comparisons to the past. For example, when it comes to war or chid abuse, he doesn't say todays situation is acceptable, only that it has been much worse historically. He then gives exhaustive metrics, quotes other scholars and authorities, and examines counter arguments to justify his conclusions.
Feeling optimistic about the fact that the US has the highest maternal mortality rate AND the highest infant mortality rate in the developed world. If so, then why? Consider the following:
December 2017 UN report on Poverty notes that 41 million Americans are living in poverty - way more than 10% of total population of 340 million.
US children are 9 times more likely to die from gun shots than in any other developed country.
US is 4% of world's population yet has 48% of world gun ownership.
"Pollyanna Pinker" - has a certain ring to it ...
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Every so often I might make $5,000 from a sale. For that one hour I am 'temporarily' in the top 1%.
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When you give statistics, you should be careful to note where you start from. Brooks tries to make it seem as if the Great Prosperity of 1946 to 1973 wasn't so hot, and that things were better afterwards. Notice that he doesn't give results for how his figures changed from 1946 to 1973, but he does for 1979 to 2014. I happen to know one off of the top of my head.
Real median household income INCREASED 74% from 1946 to 1973.
I don't have real median household income for 1979 to 2014, but if you look at real hourly wages starting in the 3rd quarter of 1979 compared to the end of 2014, they were essentially flat--actually they went down a dollar.
Oh wait, here is some data on real median household income. http://www.politifact.com/virginia/statements/2015/feb/09/don-beyer/beye...
From the start of 1979 to the end of 2013, real median household income increased only 5.5% total, and if you look closely, a good part of that was in 1979.
So I do not think we have to give up our belief that that things were better better for the average family in the 1946 to 1973, but they haven't been doing so hot since then.
Could this have anything to do with the destruction of unions (with more to come), much lower tax rates on the Rich, a loosing of regulations on financial speculation (even after Dodd-Frank), and the rise of money in politics & the rise of the Republican party?
Just askin'.
7
In the interest of completeness, I should report that there is another set of figures for real median household income from 1979 to 2011 in the PolitiFact article.. The ones I gave above were from the BLS and agree with those from Census. CBO has a different set which includes government benefits such as Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, Food Stamps, etc. These say that real median household income rose 47% or 1.3% each year.
This is interesting because it is reminiscent of the conservative criticism leveled at Piketty for using the figures without benefits in his book. One of his rejoinders was that this was a book a book Capitalism, not about politics, so the figures that told what capitalism contributed were the correct ones.
To me these is just another example of the hypocrisy of conservatives since these benefits that they want us to count are precisely what most of them are striving valiantly to reduce if not eliminate.
Prof. Pinker does not cover all the data from economics. He draws some positive conclusions from small data changes, while ignoring other trends.
The data show that, since Reaganomics, middle and low income groups have stagnated or barely improved while, due to technology, there has been a large growth in productivity; the benefit from that growth has been scooped up by a few; the vast bulk in income and asset growth has gone to the top.
The 2015 Nobel Prize in Economics went to Angus Deaton’s study of widespread growth of despair. Deaton revealed not a rational despair arrived at by reading the news. He revealed a lived despair demonstrated by the growth in “deaths of despair.”
Also, David Brooks’ column today acknowledges the dangerous growth in alienation and extreme ideology. There are many in the Republican Party today who hold beliefs typical of only a small minority, not in power, nihilistic right wing extreme like the JBS that I recall from growing up in the 1950s and 60s. Nixon helped lead the extreme, but older generations of Republicans participated in the legitimate politics of negotiation and compromise and could not be elected in today’s GOP.
Today’s GOP long ago ceased to be the Party of Lincoln. That was not an act the Dems took. That was not an act “we” took. That was an act that Republicans took. Dems were surprised when Republicans they had worked with were tossed out by their own party and shown disrespect by extremist such as Rick Scott of Florida.
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Socrates was the last hero. Turning modern men whose flaws are so readily apparent into such revered figures is facile.
Steven Pinker offers a valuable perspective. But his is just one drop in an ocean. The rising mortality rates among white, middle-aged Americans is the sort of thing which HE does not like to talk about.
And that is why he is not worthy of reverence. He is thoughtful, but still ruled by his ideology and the whole package of prejudices that it comes with: contrary evidence, inconvenient truths, and the truth of lived experience.
The progress of recent decades and the moral relativism of Stephen Pinker are no comfort to the homeless man in danger of losing his own teeth because he has no access to treatment (or even basic supplies).
Mr. Brooks, you say "If we had an emotionally healthy polity, it would be completely easy to pass eight or 10 sensible restrictions to at least make it harder for lonely attention-seekers to get guns." We also need good health policy ensuring that all Americans can readily access mental health services at a reasonable price (or free!), with excellent insurance coverage. Why hasn't this been part of the week's debate?
No, David Brooks, when it comes to passing "eight or 10 sensible restrictions" on guns, our primary problems are NOT "relational". Our primary problems are the gun fundamentalists led by the N.R.A. and their politician enablers. Sure there are gun control maximalists who would like to confiscate guns, but they are greatly outnumbered both by liberal and moderate citizens and politicians who are eager to pass ANY incremental gun control measures. Knowing from past bitter experience about the power of the gun lobby they'll take anything they can get at least as first steps.
No, it is the extremist, manifestly deficient in empathy for even the young victims of an epidemic of gun violence that ARE THE PROBLEM AND HAVE BEEN THE PROBLEM for many years and after many horrific gun massacres in passing any sort of reasonable and meaningful gun control laws.
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"..the decline of social trust, the breakdown of family life, the polarization of national life, the spread of tribal mentalities, the rise of narcissism, the decline of social capital, the rising alienation from institutions or the decline of citizenship and neighborliness..."
We all nod our head in agreement, but is it a true reflection of life? Have families broken down or merely changed into new forms including of same-sex households and co-housing?. National life seems polarized, but most of us grew up in a period after World War II which conferred an unusual national unity that lasted 2 generations.
Is neighborliness in decline, or changed by social media that has moved closeness and community attachment from being defined by proximity?
Alienation from institutions, from my view, is a mostly Conservative problem. Liberalism from the 30's to the 70's expanded and broadened social institutions dramatically, only to be rejected with the domination of Reagan Conservatism that proclaimed loudly that "government [social institutions] IS the problem!"
Citizenship as defined by voting has declined, but the recent hurricanes showed masses of humanity that swung into gear to help any and all strangers when disaster struck.
The rise of narcissism, exemplified by Trump, HAS spurred a rise in tribalism, which may be evidenced by the recent significant rise in citizen engagement and eloquent children demanding change.
The pendulum is swinging back.
2
Pinker's optimism leaves out the looming global environmental devastation caused by pollution, over-fishing, rainforest destruction, factory farming, nuclear waste, massive construction, rampant consumerism, mining, war, and the consequent development of ocean acidification, sea rise, super storms, species loss, resource depletion and drought and desertification. All this and the Republicans are calling for fewer regulations, off-shore drilling, and the privatization and exploitation of national monuments, parks and waterways, not to mention climate change and science denial. I'd feel more optimistic if we got money out of politics and elected leaders dedicated to the common good.
1
I often investigate the thinking of Stephen Pinker, Yuval Noah Harari, Sam Harris, Michael Shermer, along with others who invest their time in deliberate analysis of the human condition, looking to increase clarity and rationality in my own thought processes.
The long process in study, analysis and investigation to achieve bits of knowledge of humanities condition and place in the universe is often overshadowed and delayed by subjective ignorance. Ignorance in modern life's ever developing complexities fosters fear, frustration and anger leading to irrational behavior.
Pinker's collection of data that points to humanities progress is to be respected and congratulated, but as in google map, when one comes down to street level, it all takes on another perspective, where ignorance, fear and anger grows like unwanted weeds.
It seems to me both David Brooks and Paul Krugman are referring to the fact that we are each "created related"- born at a particular time and place and into a particular family, with a unique history, genes, etc. This is basic to human nature. Yes, the goal is to raise healthy and mature individuals, but that cannot happen in the absence of positive relationships and social support. When we do not acknowledge the fact that everyone needs connections in order to be healthy and mature, then society too suffers. It's not - and never was - about "just me," it's always been about "us."
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I am not so sure that dissolution, alienation, and mistrust are as rampant as this. Families still care for each other, people strive to be happy in their lives, parents try the best for their children. To focus so much on the Big Picture in DC and the rest is to miss what is going on in daily life for people in this country and everywhere. The deep human needs for connection and warmth still exist.
1
Reason's power is more than what Descarte thought it to be. It is not the case that reason is unable to allow rationality in the face of severe emotional disturbances; the issue is to find reason's deeper nature which transcends our common sense understanding of it. Reason can discriminate between what is real and unreal, and is not just an analytical tool to make decisions. It can show you that what you fear is not real, and can let Love replace your fears. You cannot learn in a state of fear. Fear must first be put down by reason, so Love can guide your actions and understanding. Spiritually, heart is where reason resides, first letting you be fearless, and then wise. Scientific rationalism is quite unaware of these qualities of reason; reason is in a league of it's own, and available to anyone, right now, if they be willing to no longer be afraid.
David Brooks says that "Pinker doesn't spend much time on the decline of social trust, the breakdown of family life . . . ." Maybe David didn't get to the last chapter on Humanism, which addresses all those issues including "dogma clouding reason," which, as Brooks points out, is produced by "entropy," "randomness" and/or "faith."
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"One in nine spend some time in the top 1 percent."
That's especially misleading. I've read about some of these people. Through various good fortunes (like Austin Rogers the Jeopardy winner), they may have a year where their income is $300,000 - $400,000. He's still working as a bartender. Still living in the same small apartment.
1
I was in college in the early 1970's. In group discussions the majority of my peers believed personal experience for many proved to be more reliable than reason and faith. I saw Steven Pinker interviewed on the PBS Newshour. I found myself wondering about people who have different experiences than what the statistics indicate. Since 2009, more people were finding work and employment numbers grew year after year. Yet many communities throughout Appalachia and the Midwest, their experience contradicted the statistics. The Tax Reform and Jobs Act gets praised by Republicans for increasing incomes, lowering taxes for individuals and corporations, and ending the ACA mandate. NYT recently noted older persons in assisted living facilities are being moved to homeless shelters because of reduced healthcare coverage. Numbers may say America has a big safety net, but the indigent and infirm in a homeless shelter tell a different story. Crime statistics indicate violent crime has gone down, but the victims of an AR-15 over the past 19 years are not convinced this is so. David, you write that America is emotionally sick. Perhaps my examples prove your point. But I wonder if this reality is the result of a warped sports mentality of winners and losers and the winners gather up the statistics to show how and why they are the winners and the losers just have to go home and accept their loss. What happened to the democratic ideal of commonwealth?
Mr. Brooks is invited to review measures of central tendency before pontificating any further on matters of quantitative social science. He may be enlightened to understand the difference between the mean and median, as well as how the shapes of distributions change what may be determined to be "average." Overly sanguine pictures of our moldering society are given a more accurate cast when you understand how neoliberalism distributes good fortune.
I'll buy Pinker's assertion that the l(material) lot of humans is improving.
Now, how about other species? Numerous populations of non-humans are declining, some precipitously. Species extinction is a regular occurrence, and the rate is going exponential. (Please show me I'm wrong.)
If we cannot allow our animal (and plant) 'brothers' to flourish, then we don't deserve to either.
2
Honesty with facts is a wonderful thing. Unfortunately, many people think more with their emotions than with hard logic. In this vein, it doesn't matter if we have objectively better standards of living due to better housing construction and better medicine and better food; if we don't feel we're doing well, the facts will not win out over the feelings.
We always hope that our leaders will lead in the best way, both in business and in politics, but the corrosive nature of our current polity means that too many of them lead in the worst ways. Leadership with an eye toward community instead of leading with an eye to lining one's own pockets is what we need.
Unfortunately, we seem to be losing it by the decade. I have hopes that the current liberal activism might bring some change to this, but I have no certainty. Nor does my family, or my community.
It is very hard to make wise choices when your world is constantly trying to scare you.
1
Radical honesty does not overlook the least among US and the very real difficulties they face. Why are there still communities in the United States where people have to camp out to be the first in line when the traveling health care organization comes to town to give free health exams, including eye exams and dental care?
Homelessness and food insecurity still exist in one of the richest nations on the planet. Far too many people are dying everyday because of gun violence in the United States when other countries do not have this problem.
Honestly, let US solve these problems.
As a child I attended a segregated school. And I have voted for both a Black man and a woman for President.
My parents grew up getting the worst of the Great Depression. After WWII, as a Vet, he obtained a Ph.D, and had a wonderful career, although because of the Depression he refused to eat oatmeal for the rest of his life.
My wife and I have different family physicians--both women.
My daughter is a college professor, my wife a retired police officer. I have attended about a dozen weddings of gay individuals.
Homes are safer, cars are safer, our life spans are longer.
At no time in the history of humans, anywhere on the planet, have things ever been better. The lack of gratitude I see in our country for that fact is appalling. Yes we can still move forward, but just because someone else has something I don't have doesn't make me into a victim.
Today I plan on enjoying my life and on appreciating all that I have.
I am 70, and when I die will have lived in the best of times.
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I could describe my family and personal experience in much the same way, but looking around me at the lives of most people whose family and personal stories do not align with being among the most educated and most financially successful, I cannot presume to say that they too have lived in the best of times. Yes, there have been material improvements in how most people live compared to their grandparents or great-grandparents, but many people are more socially isolated and lonely and lack a sense of meaning in their lives.
To think about it, we had a very good economy and 20 millions more Americans with health insurance at the end of Obama presidency. Yet the anger and dissatisfaction of a significant portion of the country was palpable.
With aggressive propaganda one can turn any acceptable situation into a disaster. Just need to repeat 100x a day that things are terrible and a lot of Americans would believe. And that's exactly what they did.
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You list all the good stuff, but where's the bad? No terrible car wrecks? No angry divorces? No psychological illnesses? No severe money problems? Etc.
If none, great. But my 69 years, I suppose on a cosmic level, balanced yours out. You hogged all the good karma, leaving the rest of us dodging bullets in Vietnam, suffering in hospitals with mental or physical problems, and being psychologically tortured at home and work. And then after death, we're hell-bound.
I'm with Nietzsche: It's better to have never been born. Jes keepin' it real.
Certainly Pinker does not focus on things that are not his focus, such as interpersonal relationships and social/political/cultural responsibility. But it is the height of wild generalization for Brooks to say "But our nation is emotionally sick". This may be how people feel, but Pinker points out over and over how data does not often support how we "feel' about the condition of things. That taking a wider, rationalistic view presents us with a vastly different view. That it is exactly upon reason that we should base our outlook.
No, Mr. Brooks. It's quite possibly to be realistic about what ails our world and our society and not be a grump. It's possible to hear that the oceans are acidifying so quickly that baby oysters cannot spawn, but still feel profoundly grateful for the beauty of the seas. It's possible to know the sparrow population of London -once the most successful urban bird species - has crashed, and remain enchanted by their doings on our sidewalks and forests in the US. It's sad to hear that the Orangutans of Borneo are in steep decline, and its still a joy to watch their subtle grace and human-like features. You misrepresent realists when you describe them as so many Scrooges.
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Thank you, David. Now let me proceed to how readers will pick apart your words, based probably on "the side" of the political fence they believe you stand. This has become our go-to lens to view the world - at least this country - for far too many of us.
Fair enough. I've never been one to walk down nostalgia lane with rose tinted glasses.
However, to dump in America's near 18% GDP spend on health care and use it to declare safety net victory is incredibly dubious and dishonest. Health care spending crowds out other much needed priorities for both governments and businesses alike. I'm 42 and I've bounced around the income ladder as he's described. I save and invest like a mad man. Is it because I'm responsible? Maybe. Is it also because I know America has a razor thin safety net and the message of the last 40 years is "you're on your own?"
Most definitely.
Pinker calls himself an Enlightenment man. The Enlightenment movement of the 18th century believed all problems could be solved by reason. They were unaware of or ignored the unconscious, which began to be explored by novelists and psychologists of the 19th century. The terrors that sprang from the unconscious, tribalism, nationalism, bigotry and hatred were unleashed in the two savage World Wars of the 20th centruy that showed that reason was only a very limited answer.
Brooks says Pinker doesn't address this: "the polarization of national life, the spread of tribal mentalities, the rise of narcissism, the decline of social capital, the rising alienation from institutions or the decline of citizenship..."
But to what extent can it be said that these dysfunctions arise partly from the false views of the American society and economy that he does address? Those would be the pessimistic and hostile views encouraged by the "liberal" party and its advocates in the mainstream media, essentially ignoring the truths Pinker presents.
Money, health, longevity -- the metrics Pinker leans on -- are all very nice, but not necessarily the ultimate measure of the welfare of a culture or society.
Why are we so eager to protect the last few remaining "primitive" tribal societies that inhabit the Amazon with their high infant mortality rates and "impoverished" way of life? I would suggest that those folks are essentially better off than we are.
Indeed, Mr. Pinker's criteria may represent all that is wrong with the modern world.
In the "Readers' Picks" category of comments, the big winners mostly contradict Pinker and point out the rottenest elements of this moment in time. Still the long term trend is toward Better. At this moment we have a looney President, society is in various degrees of turmoil, etc. But the trend is up. The trend killers with real power to turn the curve downward are overpopulation, climate change and nuclear weapons. Fix those and the sky's the limit for humanity.
To paraphrase only very slightly that uber-rationalist, Aristotle: "Anyone who doesn't get angry for the right reason, in the right way, toward the right people, and at the right time, is a fool." A sharp distinction between reason and emotion obscures this crucial instruction, and prevents us from chuckling over the pride [it's an emotion, after all] some people take in "not being emotional." It also prevents us from appreciating, in so many of the brave students in Parkland, the connection between their justified anger at the people and institutions that have so cruelly let them down and their sustained, highly rational actions to address that failure. Aristotle's claim lives on in the familiar bumper sticker: "If you are not outraged you are not paying attention" -- and perhaps are being paid not to.
One huge difference over the decades is the increased ability of the have-mores to extract resources from fellow citizens as they disguise what they are doing.
Control of the media by the have-mores have brought us the most unequal society in almost 100 years, have led to economic crash after economic crash (and never do the banksters go jail -- instead they become political donors and further rig the system), we have been lied into wars and have been told time and again that these military adventures are necessary and our actions are praiseworthy (while the military-industrial-congressional lobby strips money from the future of our children and country), etc.
The media distracts us from critically important issues while it enriches those who dumb us down (remember CBS head Les Moonves who laughingly excused CBS's role in empowering Trump in the election because, as Moonves said, "We're making SO MUCH MONEY!" ) and dissolves our social safety net by alienating us by nurturing distrust of others, by dismissing the responsibility we have to care for each other (the have-mores and their enablers don't want to pay their fair share of taxes and so screech loudly when in come inequality is even hinted at).
Pinker and Haidt are well-respected researchers but they seem to underestimate the hopelessness and anxiety felt by so many Americans, with personal debt (including school debt and credit card debt) increasing while the rich continue to rig the game.
Nobody, as far as I am aware, has honestly redefined poverty, or for that matter ANY of the income levels, nor their places on the income latter. Using stats form years ago just doesn't cut it. We do know all about the top 1%, and the top 10% who are doing just great, at the expense of the rest of us. David Brooks has no concept of the idea of "radical honesty," nor does he take any measures to provide it.
David Brooks likes to bemoan the recent loss of social trust, which certainly seems remarkably epidemic if you watch political TV. But I recall walking into a bar in rural Nevada, back in the 1960s, with my hair making Professor Pinker's look downright tidy, and my buddy's hair down to his waist. Upon seeing us, the bartender pointed and yelled "You, out!" When we pleaded we just wanted to use his payphone, he acquiesced, as long as we left immediately thereafter. My point is that social trust has long been problematic in this very diverse country, but you could still make that phone call. So maybe Pinker's analyses are even more important: if social distrust has hardly changed, but material safety has progressed, we really are ahead, even though distrust continues.
Today companies want and secure to much data and order to perform our current society's algorithms. Everything today is now being collected on everything. It has become the norm since the late 1990's thru today. Yesterday another satellite from Elon Musk to encourage more data collection and move closer to the 5G network and spread the internet where there is none today. And these folks will then be caught up to par with the rest of us in the data gathering process and in time will become a manipulation of all societies. Is this a bad thing for society? Yes and No. Will it effect our relations? Yes.
This is another view on society's relations to and with itself. With all this data collection thru all electronic means and algorithms, what will society's 'philosophy' on future relations of the people's, particularly with the manipulation of this data in how the people should be as a society? It just may disregard your philosophies of today of how people should and do interact, and just tell us what to do, be, and think. Have we left the information era and now entering the mass manipulation era? We are going somewhere...what will/is the philosophy behind this new era regarding society and it's people?
Well done Mr. Brooks. The relational problems we have are multilayered and connected to a scarcity narrative and glorification of violence in entertainment. Even though we are an individualistic culture it seems that many citiznes, if not most, have limited awareness and understanding of themselves - let alone awareness and understanding of others. Our supposed Christian nation is unable to "love thy neighbor" as commanded because they haven't mastered the other part of the command which is "as thyself". (let's not get started on the hypocrisy of the church except to say that the person they all claim to follow was the most intensely relational figure) . So much of "entertainment" that our country is immersed in is focused on humiliation through "reality" shows, as well as violence, degradation, even torture, through a large proportion of movies/shows/games. A small percentage of our entertainment is focused on enrichment or relationship-building. Further, we've been scared into accepting a narrative of "scarcity" instead of "plenty" so we feel we have to protect our resources from "others" - when in reality there's more than enough for everyone.
We are emotionally sick - yet most of the "leaders" (as well as the "consumers") on both sides of the aisle perpetuate this sad state.
I don't think that Pinker is radically honest--he's known to play fast and loose with the facts, something no serious scholar should do. His optimism is likely founded on cherry-picking facts rather than careful dissection of them, and his popularity seems to be a product mainly of charisma (nothing wrong with that if he were a thorough scholar).
His new book appears to be a case in point: Evidently he made elemental errors and omissions that seriously subvert the points he's trying to make (see http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2018/02/20/4806696.htm). Young students probably won't know that yet and are prone to select "heroes" emotionally not rationally, so they may be the wrong audience to poll as Brooks has done here.
I'm tired of hearing about the breakdown of the family. Although I do live in the Brooks desired family structure, there are other viable structures including single people who live fulfilling lives, one parent households where children are loved, same sex parents that dote on their children and people in childless marriages or relationships that are happy. It is when we promote rules about how other people should live that we promote polarization and tribal mentalities.
Good column. We all need to do some soul searching to bridge the gaps that separate us. We can start by changing our viewpoint toward each other by making an effort to care more about our neighbor than caring about one's self. Easy to try; harder to do. But it is a start toward greater community and social cohesion. It is also the teaching of almost all religions. You can't love God and hate your neighbor at the same time.
I have always admired your writing. Not only because I see you as a very wise man, but also because your writing often provokes thought on my part. Today's editorial reminds me of the process of my healing after a breakdown caused by a childhood trauma. A number of years into my healing process, I "knew" that psychiatry and meds alone would not bring me complete healing. I needed to also deepen my faith. The two together - analysis and deepening faith resulted in my rare complete healing after a 26 year journey. We need both in equal intensity to heal from the dysfunctional state we're currently in. It's an inner journey that few are taking, I'm afraid. I'm hopeful that the process of bringing the two into balance has already begun, however. Please keep writing!
Is considering gun violence a public health problem an enlightened view? Or should we just rely on the NRA's positions about our 2nd Amendment Rights to own military grade hardware? While we're trying to be radically honest let's consider the different sizes of bullet wounds. For example did you know that the exit wound from a semi-automatic assault rifle leaves a wound the size of an apple? Should we consider this fact when, or if, we get around to regulating such weapons? Or are we being overly rational?
Hard to tell if a glass is half empty or half full when one looks at it through a glass darkly...
So, the nostalgia for the good old days where wealth and paternalism and racism ruled and people knew their places was misplaced? So much for the GoP's good old days.
But what are we to make of today? The worsening of the income distribution? The obscene arrogation of wealth in the hands of the 10% or !%? The statistics that show the best place to find the American dream is in Europe where the poor can prosper with hard work?
And Pinker is right, so many things are better. But this could and should have been done without making so much worse. Almost half of America disdained religious and American values to vote for a fraud. The GoP voted en masse to deprive 22 million Americans of health care to pay for bogus tax reform that benefits big Corporations and the wealthy while promising shrinking government services for the rest. The religious forsake their moral and humanitarian values to vote against the LGBT community. The environment sinks. Hate, polarization, untruths and ignorance flourish.
Yes, optimism is in order --because we have have learned how to address our problems. And because we are understanding how to do this without wrecking America's economy, morals and integrity. Optimism because in 2018 and beyond we can reverse the evil and embrace the good with a unit of purpose that transcends Trump's and the GoP's bankrupt agenda.
Sorry Mr. Brooks, I stand with Steven Pinker. The problems you site - "decline of social trust, the breakdown of family life, the polarization of national life, the spread of tribal mentalities, the rise of narcissism, the decline of social capital, the rising alienation from institutions or the decline of citizenship and neighborliness" - are really a function of information/education and reasoning/critical thinking.
To illustrate my point take tribalism as an example. Tribalism as defined in your context is just another word for prejudice. Tribalism/prejudice falls in the face of information and reasoning/critical thinking.
In addition, you can't solve the problems you listed without information and reasoning. In other words, the issues you say Steven Pinker doesn't address can't be solved unless you use his approach.
David I suggest you cancel your Twitter account. I've never had one and I'm going to cancel my FB account. My blood pressure thanks me. And I'm working on getting Google out of my life. Media/tech industries have one aim - to make as much money as possible. They don't care about truth. The NYT had an article this week on FB's continuing failure in this area.
It's interesting that you have chosen to report on this Harvard professor and his world view. Yes, in many ways we are better off than in the 1950s. But the big piece of the landscape that you fail to discuss is how the BIG money in this country is used to manipulate the system, and consequently the national discourse. Take firearms. Our legislators are in thrall to the NRA and the gun manufacturers who do everything they can to slant information in their favor, or to use their influence to just plain lie. And they have managed to prevent actual gun death data from coming out by legislatively forbidding the CDC to do and publish the research.
And our healthcare/social safety net is under siege by those same legislators. Trump's proposed budget targets Medicare with drastic cuts. I'm sure the insurance companies who are about to profit greatly from Ryan/Trump care are salivating at what the increase will be to their bottom line when that happens. Not to mention the drastic increase in black lung disease and the failure of mining companies and the government who is supposed to regulate them.
Follow the money.
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"There is a mood across America, but especially on campus, that in order to show how aware of social injustice you are, you have to go around in a perpetual state of indignation, negativity and righteous rage." I think that "rebel without a cause" mimicry got Trump elected. And whoa, now have we really got a glut of gloom.
So why do some many students admire Pinker and his scientific rationalism?
Perhaps because he offers a quantitative happiness as a balancing influence against the drop in qualitative happiness. While it is precarious to assign causes behind the changes in our culture, we can at least make note of them. As a child of the late 1960s and early 1970s, I vividly recall the rise of the hippy and the accompanying use of psychedelic drugs, and the 'back to nature' movement. Then a few years later there was a reversal of sorts, or at least an abrupt change to disco, cocaine, BMW's and $300 suits. From this early exposure to our 'culture', I began to abhor the 'Trendy', equating it with the 'Vapid'. Pinker represents this same 'Trendiness' with all its 'Vapidity'. My apologies for being so rude.
I don't think Pinker is trying to solve the world's problems. He provides measures of where we've been and where we are now. Useful measures. Brooks provides others. Useful measures. Why set this up as a conflict. It isn't.
I started reading Pinker's "Enlightenment Now" book this week. At first I loved it. But the more I read, the stranger his disconnect from reality seemed to be. Sure, there is such a thing as entropy. Things fall apart. And it's great that we don't burn people at the stake any more. Progress! But his optimism seems a bit blinkered. Progress up until now does not guarantee progress in the future. Societies collapse; it's a regular thing. Ours seems to be in the process of falling apart completely, due to the intransigence of the old white men who are building their bunkers to hedge against the disasters they (correctly) see coming. They are hoping the rest of us will quietly disappear. We are not going quietly, though.
History shows that the "two raging warring camps" eventually will disappear.
"When President Truman decided to fire Douglas MacArthur in 1951, McCarthy declared that the decision had been made by Truman while he was drunk from Bourbon and Benedictine." At that time it was the kindest comment Truman received from his political rivals.
McCarthyism? Who remembers that today? Then came the Vietnam War, and so on.
Strictly speaking polarization means that 50% of the people think different than the other half. However regarding gun control, immigration, the dreamers, global warming and many other issues, there is a overwhelming support from a majority of the population to find definitive solutions. Gerrymandering eventually will disappear one day.
Thanks for your wise comments we appreciate them a lot.
Patriarchy was always going to come to this...always. So as disturbing as the surrounding chaos is, perhaps the collapse of all of these patriarchal institutions has to happen for humans of both genders to create new, more humane institutions that work more equitably for everyone.
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Having read Mr. Brooks columns over time, radical honesty is not a trait I would describe to him.
One would be motivated reasoning.
A second would be feel-good columns like this one.
Instead of admitting how Trump is more evolution than revolution for the party of the Southern Strategy and welfare queens and that Mr. Brooks has done his part over the years to get us where we are today.
Mr. Brooks, help us fix real problems.
Help us ban assault rifles.
Help us roll back the tax cuts for the billionaires with their huge deficits that our children will be paying for.
Help us fix healthcare so that we aren't paying twice as much as other countries without universal care and with some populations in the US with infant mortality rates worse than Botswana.
Help us reduce poverty and get people educated and working and paying taxes instead of paying for welfare and prison.
Help us end Gerrymandering.
Help us end voter restrictions.
Help us get money out of politics so that our politicians stop working for their donors instead of working for us.
The list goes on.
Brooks makes at least one (serious) factual mistake. The level of American spending on social welfare that he celebrates is largely driven by inefficiencies in the health care sector, which mean that we spend far more per capita on health care than any other nation. This money does not buy us longer lives or measurably better health. Brooks is actually celebrating waste.
"Decline of social trust, the breakdown of family life, the polarization of national life, tribal mentalities, the rise of narcissism ...."
We expect government to solve our problems, but government can do nothing about any of the above issues.
An older gentleman once told me how, as a child, he rode the city bus with his rifle to go hunting on the outskirts of town. We didn't seem to have problems with children and guns way back then. What has changed?
I've been watching the "Gun Fight" now going on in this country. One of things I see is the fun-house mirror quality of it all.
"Why should my actual safety be sacrificed so that you can have the illusion of safety?"
This is the refrain I hear on both sides, and each side appears to sincerely believe that the other side is irrational and deluded. To some people it is obvious from the body count that a country awash in guns is genuinely dangerous and cannot be ignored. Other people see guns as their only security against harm from criminals and oppression from tyrants and consider any effort to restrict them to be a clear and present danger.
Where do you go from there?
Interesting that most of the discussion is focused on political and social arguments, when the underlying driver is the failure of capitalism (as it is currently practiced) to provide human needs for people outside the top 20%, and where inequality is a feature, not a bug. David needs to get beyond Pinker (and maybe check out Pink, Daniel, https://smile.amazon.com/Drive-Surprising-Truth-About-Motivates-ebook/dp....
When you are ever the optimist like David Brooks. you also become a person in denial of some of the nasty realities of life - like unemployment, lost jobs to overseas. seniors who may lose their only safety net in Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security, depending on what happens with Trump's disgraceful budget proposals, unaffordable college debt for young families and other unfortunate situations from our rocky financial situation.
Wake up David Brooks, and ask a more diverse set of ordinary citizens who their heroes are or aren't. You may be surprised that Pinker isn't one of them.
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Worst sample bias ever. Mr. Brooks' sample of twenty year-olds who can afford to pay the median US household income for school would provide a skewed data set indeed.
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edmele,
You worry about the things no one should have to worry about. While Finland is a little over a year into its guaranteed annual income and countries like Canada already know we are productive enough to have everybody taken care of, we refuse to acknowledge that all we are lacking is the courage to face reality in 2018.
Nothing says fear more than a President who will never look in the mirror while celebrating and exploiting the flaws in his fellow human beings.
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If you read Brooks's column again, you will realize that he does not agree with Pinker's rational, statistical benchmarks for quality of life, but instead argues that such statistics cannot capture how people feel about their relationships with other people around them, and that such feelings have become more problematic during the same decades that Pinker claims show material improvements in people's lives. Brooks does not address at all the question of who people other than his own college students would name as heroes. That could and might some day be the subject for another column!
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David, you're better than this.
You title your column "Radical Honesty", and then present us with a textbook example of lying with statistics and insufficient evidence.
One example, your quote from Pinker that the American poverty rate has declined by 90% since 1960.
Why would he choose 1960 as his comparator, and how on earth did he arrive at the claim of 90% reduction?
If I wanted a big number, I would choose 1960, too. Because then I could take credit for a one-time, massive reduction in poverty rate wrought by the 1964 Great Society initiative. Since then rates have varied by just a few percentage points.
Even if I grant you your assertion that a third of children lived in poverty in the 1950s, you fail to mention that social conditions then moderated effect of cash on quality of life, that measures of poverty have varied wildly since then.
Even granted all your assertions, how can you accept that 20% of children in the richest country ever to exist living in poverty (literally living out their lives in poverty, because we have cut the bootstraps by which they are supposed to pull themselves up) is in some bizarre way something to celebrate.
That's your point? That if two out every ten American children lives a substandard life for lack of money, that's just fine with you?
In the 1950s American education was the wonder of the world. Your party has wrecked that system in ways that mean it will likely never recover. That alone makes the picture darker.
We live in an oligarchy and pretend it is a democracy. No wonder people are angry, confused, and isolated. Every possible "difference" between people is exploited--religious, class, gender, race and ethnicity, age, rural vs urban, on and on. Politicians are forced to be empty suits in the service of their wealthy donors. Decent pols are driven out of office. It is the perfect environment to give birth to a demagogue--and we got one.
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Pinker's popularity isn't hard to understand. Scientific rationalism has always been the antidote for rampant emotional hysteria. And right now, both sides are at battle in what has been a protracted fight since Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and the Republican Party chose fear and loathing as a political strategy.
I enjoy reading articles by Mr. Brooks, generally insightful and articulate. And Professor Pinker, with whom I'm not familiar, seems like a breath of fresh air. Bravo to the students who admire him.
The modern group think of the Left, constant righteous indignation without a clear understanding of the economic facts of life, is tiresome and boring. I don't blame young impressionable students; but older so-called Progressives should know better, especially well-educated Progressives. American capitalism has been a huge success story, for most of the people most of the time. Please don't allow emotion to cloud out this obvious truth.
Pinker is a very smart man but has never been one to take much of a philosophical outlook on anything.
He's basically just a sociological data cruncher.
Oh good. Here I thought we had a climate problem. To use the cautious IPCC's words, What part of "severe, pervasive, irreversible" harm needs explaining, Mr Brooks? Radical honesty? This is somewhere between Pollyanna and Orwell.
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'' ... is a paragon of exactly the kind of intellectual honesty and courage we need to restore conversation and community. ''
In any given day, as we go about our lives in our community, we ALL put on our blinders to cope with the travesty, blight, poverty, crime, dishonesty, corruption, racism, misogyny and an abundance of ills of and from society.
I always use the example that if you were walking down the street and found someone in dire distress that they would perish if you did not help, then you most likely would. In fact, it is the law for you to do so. It is the same premise if people show up at the emergency room. The hospital will stabilize you to the point that your life is no longer in danger.
People all around us are in that predicament, but in slow motion. As long as it is not at that moment and obvious, then we trick ourselves and rationalize it that it is ok and we put on our blinders. We even smile and make light, or put a positive spin on the situation.
That is not honest.
That is not courageous.
This is what we have become and pundits make up columns to rationalize.
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After reading Robert Sapolsky's book 'Behave' it is impossible to credit Pinker with anything but some type of pathological optimism, perhaps not unlike the Black Knight in 'The Holy Grail'. In that book Sapolsky neatly refutes Pinker's assertion that violence is much reduced in the world from times past. Sapolsky is also a bit optimistic, but he gives hundreds of pages to making, in great detail, the same point Brooks makes here - humans are simply too erratic,acting with the total self-assurance that we can grasp what the world is doing.
Besides that, if Pinker thinks that environmental issues are anything to be optimistic about he must be using some very selective data, or again ignoring reality.
David Brooks brings up our failure to pass gun control and finds the root problem is our nation being "emotionally sick". Can he really not think of ANY other reason there's no progress on this issue?
As always, he does his best to divide the blame evenly between "two raging warring camps", presumably the Democrats, who want to solve the problem with the common sense solutions he endorses, and the Republicans, who deny them. If only there was some way to determine which of these two groups he should support! Until then, it's best to simply condemn both evenly.
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Cherry picking your statistics..you got to be kidding us ..discrimination,automation pushed minorities out of the south into cities where discrimination continued and families were torn apart. Legislation fought discrimination and improved working opportunities but as we entered the new century, democracy in the workplace was crushed by shareholders and the gutless in Washington.Look at the statistics on who is getting the money now when we have all the data at our fingertips.4% of the population live only on food stamps while the loyalist to corporate greed cut them for the next ten years. Consumerism is feed by personal debt cads today because wages are so low and prices so high.We didn't have credit cards on the fifties,did we?
David says: “Pinker’s philosophical lens prevents him from seeing where the real problems lie.”
That is not so. Pinker’s not a blind optimist.
As he pointed out in an interview on NPR when our difficulties today were listed by Paul Simon, one has to see these issues to ensure they are dealt with, but the long view supports optimism that we can build on our successes so far and overcome these adversities.
We’ve done it so far. We have done it and we know what tools work - none in use by the Trump Administration, nor by the GOP.
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Sorry; the NPR interview with Pinker was in a segment called Making Sen$e with Paul Solman.
Paul Solman, the business and economics correspondent for the PBS NewsHour, not Paul Simon.
"That is to say, Pinker doesn’t spend much time on the decline of social trust, the breakdown of family life, the polarization of national life, the spread of tribal mentalities, the rise of narcissism, the decline of social capital, the rising alienation from institutions or the decline of citizenship and neighborliness."
And that is the problem. Happiness and success are not, or at least should not be, measured by how much stuff we have. "But our nation is emotionally sick." That is the most important statement in the column.
If you pick your stats it's easy to see that all's for the best in this best of all possible worlds. So comforting. So glib.
Voltaire already did the work of revealing how shallow analysis and hand-picked facts can pave the way for easy optimism.
"America has a pretty big safety net."
Said no one, ever.
Brooks himself illustrates why there isn't a better hold of the rational in our behavior. He is aware that our nation is emotionally sick, but his allegiance to the GOP makes it impossible for him to understand that the sickness is in large part created and sedulously fed by the GOP.
Why would they do that? It's an electioneering strategy. Fanning the flames has worked to win elections. Once in power, they can carry out their true agenda - raiding the cookie jar and paying off the billionaires who fund them.
Polarization is a feature of US politics by design, not by accident. Ordinary differences are sharpened and enflamed. The GOP may be corrupt and greedy but they are also smart and skillful. They've been playing this game for a long time and they aren't going to stop so long as it works.
The only answer is to vote them out. There will be no kumbaya moments of togetherness with this kleptocratic enterprise.
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A few thoughts:
1. There is a proliferation of media outlets vying for our attention. Bad news sells so that is what we see to a large extent. Many of us are socially more isolated and depend on the internet that is overflowing with negativity. It is much easier to foster pessimistic views of the world with constant negativity and isolation.
2. The above biases against short tern balance not withstanding, our history and political progress have tended to encourage the view that life is perfectable (for our species) and that we should expect continuous economic growth and increaased satisfaction. The realities of evolutiond (cares not about your satisfaction) and ecology (biogeochemical cycles limit the trajectory of continous expansion) mitigate against these notions. Pinker apparently does emphasize these aspects of our human journey.
2.
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"If we had an emotionally healthy polity, it would be completely easy to pass eight or 10 sensible restrictions to at least make it harder for lonely attention-seekers to get guns. But our nation is emotionally sick."
In column after column, the ailments Mr. Brooks ascribes to "the nation" are exclusively of the GOP.
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Pinker's "Cartesian rationalism" is exactly what we need to overcome the very problems that Mr. Brooks cites as Pinker's blind spot. Reason and rational thinking is what has allowed modern generations to live in a comfort and safety that their grandparents couldn't have imagined.
Mr. Brooks blithely accepts that, for many, the powers of narcissism, tribalism and existential angst are more powerful than their abilities of conscious reason. How can he simply accept these irrational and atavistic impulses as normal and not something to be overcome? This is equivalent to saying "Telling men not to sexually harass women will get you only so far when they're drunk, or horny, or lonely..."
The list of relational challenges we face stem largely from an irrational and unfounded belief that other groups of people are different / incomprehensible. The rational view is that all people, whatever their ideology or opinion, are trying to meet the same basic needs we all feel and are not nearly so different as our "tribal impulses" lead us to believe.
We need more Pinker, not less.
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Steven Pinker and David Brooks?
From what little I have read of the two, and going primarily by intuition, instinct, they seem to me roughly the intellectualized conservative (Brooks) and progressive (Pinker) response to a deep human predicament today: The problem of what occurs with respect to morality when religion is lost, when morality has no foundation in supernatural creator, when humans are tasked with deciding for themselves how to think and act.
Brooks, the conservative, tries to stuff humanity back in the box of religion. Pinker embodying the trend of science and socialism is all about behavior modification, education, psychology/psychiatry,--any number of techniques to get humans to "act and think right". But of course, needless to say, the premise of each is that humans are deeply flawed and must be fixed.
And both of course are totalitarian type thinkers, they each have their plan for fixing human beings which cuts deeply into individual differences between people. I would not last a New York minute prosecuted by the moral law firm of Brooks and Pinker. Or is it Pinker and Brooks? Doesn't work either way does it? The both stand as two censoring type mentalities, and you can get some idea of their future by their choices of writers.
But they are not to blame--they just embody generality of response to the major problem of how to get humans to be better, smarter, more responsible than they are. A pity that they betray a quite constricted human future.
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And you are right, David, to feel special affection for Pinker. Thoughtful and careful thinker and writer. Need more like him to engage us in the discussion. While I'm inclined to agree that our nation is emotionally sick, I hesitate to proclaim it thus thanks, in part, to the young people leading the response to the recent Florida school shooting. They give me great hope, as to their parents. Relationships are the answer. How to create them, broaden them, and nurture them in a healthy and mature way, ah, now there's the rub.
Gee David, I thought your friend Paul Ryan said all those New Deal and Great Society programs had not worked, were failures, and needed to be abolished because poverty still existed today? Further, Bryan Kaplan and other libertarians of the right believe that taxing them to provide benefits, including food and medical care, and now education for others is "immoral." Either Pinker is right, or Ryan and Kaplan are right, so please make up your mind. By the way, it is not the "suffocating Left" that wants to abolish SNAP, Social Security Disability, Social Security, ACA, Medicaid, and Medicare.
Also, the most significant problem with "poverty" is housing, a price whether in rent or buying has rising faster than inflation the last 40 years. https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ZIuAUDJICNA/WnCZTjvStII/AAAAAAAAtsQ/wHMqQBbe7...
I know this is pointless to argue with you, but you can't face the truth about the Conservative Movement to which you devoted your life, e.g. that its animating force is racism and greed, which particularly come together on the issue of guns.
Finally, you and Pinker constantly raise strawmen arguments to congratulate yourselves on your "courage" (I note that you both appear to have life time jobs and great wealth) to pound on college kids and minorities. I refer all to this Medium article for a proper take down: https://medium.com/@joftius/steven-pinkers-radical-centrism-and-the-alt-...
Any common sense proponent of a "radical honesty" would wholeheartedly embrace the obvious fact that a growing income inequality in American society, selfishly and aggressively promoted doctrinally and legislatively by the Republican-now Trumpian Party, is inexorably destroying the social fabric of this nation. A shared community, with well recognized and accepted human rights and responsibilities, is not the membership of a gated residence or a country club.
As long as access to the ballot is vigorously protected and widened, optimism in a future for America is a realistic position to take. We can vote scoundrels out of office. Disturbingly, voter access has been, and is, targeted by the Party of Democratic Exclusion. I feel "special affection" for the true "heroes", many unknown, in the trenches fighting back daily against these corrupt forces of darkness.
Sorry, spending on health care does not equate to better access or affordability or (ta-da!) health. We're fatter than ever, eating greater amounts of junk, and as a nation, spending 18% of GDP on health care -- 33% going to hospitals, and more than 10% to drug companies. This is not healthy.
I dont believe that Mr. Pinker is polyanish. He would acknowledge problems still exist in the areas that you highlight however even within the aforementioned social strata their have been improvements. Yes we are a polarized society but considerably less so than during the violent civil protests regarding racial inequality of misguided war efforts. Do we still have problems of racism. Of course but compare it to the 1960's prior to legislative mandates. Your proclaimed decline of social trust stands in contrast to blind obedience to social order that enabled issues of inequality that were far more entrenched than what exists today. As a society we are not where we should be but were further ahead than where we were a generatiion ago.
Lord Brooks (thanks Socrates), here is some data for you and Pinker to contemplate:
Take a hard look at where we stand in the GINI Index. It's not pretty.
At age 21, I might have been impressed with Pinker, but as a senior citizen I certainly agree that he does not recognize the defects in our socio-political system. There are many and to my mind, he is a wordsmith.
He doesn't recognize how time changes context. A newly arrived immigrant might depart a plane or surreptitiously cross a border with a cell phone and other goodies our grandparents couldn't conceive of when they exited a steamship at Ellis Island. But they think of themselves, poor and beaten down compared to most American citizens.
Many Americans are now feeling that they are slipping back or that there children have nothing to look forward to. He seems to offer an opioid of philosophical blabber to those who see life from that perspective. No need for fixing the system?????
Possibly, I might also be a cousin.
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Pinker's use of data and historical evidence is often extremely sloppy. But more generally, pointing out how much worse off you would have been in the past is not really a fruitful response to current problems. The implication seems to be that we should stop fighting because in the past we would have been slaves, or unable to vote, or dying in the street... This is of no use to people who are now suffering discrimination, bankrupt from medical expenses, assaulted by their employers, and so on. So we've made some progress? Ok. Let's keep making more.
I'm not going to take on all of David Brooks' column, but I'd like to note that while Americans spend a lot on medical care, they don't spend a lot on poor people's medical care. Which is why Americans live less long (mostly poor Americans live less long), and that lifespan for poor Americans is getting shorter.
It may be true as Pinker says that overall, the world for humans is getting better. I'm not sure that's true for poor Americans--of various races.
"Half of all Americans wind up in the top 10 percent of earners at at least one point in their career"
This is dreadfully misleading in two ways. First, it suggests that out of a random sample of Americans half will have been in the 90th percentile of income, this is untrue. It needs to be qualified by saying that the well employed Americans end up in the top 10 percent at least once. That cuts the sample size considerably. Additionally, there is meaningful difference between people who are in the top 5-10 percent year over year for enough time to build a savings account, retirement, and investments, and people (construction, oil workers, etc) who boom and bust, never able to increase in total wealth but for whom a $140,000 salary happened when their average is more like $60,000.
It is also misleading to suggest that as a result of those metrics people are doing better than they did 35 years ago. In some ways we are (being a responsible adult is a lot less of a PITA now than ever before) but in measurable ways we aren't. Our higher incomes are matched by higher costs across the board from education to housing to healthcare plus far less secure retirement options. We suicide more and we are less happy.
I am all the way down with radical honesty though, sight discomfort up front alleviates the guy wrenching sting of disillusionment.
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Another psychologist with piercing intellectual honesty but not a Cartesian rationalist is University of Toronto's Jordan Peterson, who has concentrated most prominently on religion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan_Peterson Peterson has recently been drawn into the identity politics wars, as evidenced by his viral interview with Cathy Newman last month. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMcjxSThD54 People want to make Peterson out to be some kind of a radical, but another view is that people like Brooks don't want to hear what he is saying, as it calls into question their own motivations in identity politics. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/01/putting-monsterpain...
" I now feel special affection for him. Why? There’s no rational, scientific reason. I just do" But there is a rational, scientific reason, and Pinker would surely point it out. It's called Kin Selection.
If you factor in inflation (remember especially the late Carter/early Reagan years) it is truly a meaningless statistic to say that the percentage of Americans earning from $100k to $350k "shot upward" from 13% to 30% between 1979 and 2014. As the saying goes, figures never lie, but liars can figure.
It is really hard to accept that someone is arguing in good faith when they start their argument with baloney like There is a mood across America, but especially on campus, that in order to show how aware of social injustice you are, you have to go around in a perpetual state of indignation, negativity and righteous rage
Mr. Brooks's oh so fair and thoughtful and mild mannered posturing seems to involve a fair bit hyperventilating about strawmen.
I’m a 62 year-old retired white guy who walks to the country club almost daily. My heroes are FDR, MLK and LBJ. Go figure.
Pinker is a Pollyanna and a mediocre public intellectual. He has little understanding of the Enlightenment, which was a more complicated era than one characterized by optimism and rationality. Its most famous philosopher, David Hume, argued that reason is the slave of passions.
David Brooks tells us how much he admires Pinker,but then spends a good part of his article telling us how bad our society has become. Suicide rates are rising, thousands of young people are dying from opioid addiction and gun shot wounds. Our politics are more divided than at any time since the 1850s. Indeed, some issues such as gun rights and abortion are beyond the limits of politics.
This is an age of academic specialization. Pinker used to be an expert in the psychology of language in the tradition of Noam Chomsky and Roger Brown.
If he wants to be a useful public intellectual, he should leave academia and become a columnist for the New York Times or Washington Post.
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"Mediocre" and "Useful" are not synonyms. He is certainly not mediocre - just look at his publication record and intellectual influence. He may be more "useful" whatever that means as a journalist but that is at best unproven.
In the meantime the catstrophizing of your 2nd paragraph is exactly what he spends several hundred pages debunking.
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Do you think, Econ, that I am hyping the incidence of suicide, opioid addiction, gun deaths, and the divisions in our politics that make political solutions to conflicts over abortion and gun rights impossible?
>Conscious reason can get you only so far when tribal emotions have been aroused
Unfortunately, the passive voice obscures at least part of the problem: tribal emotions have been aroused and weaponized by cynical groups and media, who tell their followers to disregard mainstream news reporting as well as contrary voices, as they disparage their opponents in hyperbolic terms.
Ad Hominem. I once listened to Pinker talk.He was sitting on a stage and I couldn't take my eyes off the beautiful cowboy boots he wore. His curly hair, beautiful clothes told me how little I was in his class. I wore old shoes, worn
corduroy pants and a shirt whose collar was wearing through. Could he possibly know my problems----83 and worried about healthcare bills
Things are so great that the American people installed trump as president because they are grateful for what they have and a happy lot?
Pinker, like Brooks, lives in an Ivory Tower. I highly doubt they interact with or know much about the dark reality of Trump supporters, violent street life, or bare bones existence. They both speak and write like sociologists. Without passion or existential truth.
Attitude is aptitude and attitude is a decision. David's new attitude of affection toward Pinker, upon the discovery of a tribal link is not tribal, it's a decision based on information. Progress is clear. Relationships have never been in worse shape, in part because in the age of the Internet and the Smartphone we've no idea what direct relationships even tribal ones are, anymore. David says he feels a tribal bond but is that a radically honest stance? First he feels he ought to feel a tribal bond, then, he decides to be obedient to that pressure. What he feels may be a pseudo, virtual feeling or nostalgia for a feeling he never has, directly. David is not a writer who researches from life, directly. He digests previously reported and previously analyzed opinions and then writes a kind of digest of them. There is very little evidience of a direct and authentic person. A person who would feel a tribal bond with someone he'd never met on the basis of genetic tests seems like a very shallow person who is removed from, not connected to himself or to others. Polished, expert rhetorician, logical, well-read, fancy credentials, but shallow. And perhaps that's what is attractive about him, in print. We want to be dazzled and seduced like David was, at the idea that he has got a tribal bond with Pinker. David is so good at convincing himself of anything he puts into words that he's hard to resist. But that doesn't make him honest.
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Does Mr. Pinker refuse to be pessimistic about us having Trump for a so-called president as well?
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Pinker's courage and intellectual honesty is as far as it goes. But I do not read any evidence of emotional intelligence in what he teaches and writes about
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" If we had an emotionally healthy polity, it would be completely easy to pass eight or 10 sensible restrictions to at least make it harder for lonely attention-seekers to get guns."
Define "sensible".
What is sensible to you is extreme or weak to another.
Exactly.
Fact checkers have found two thousand lies told by so-called President Trump.
How's that for rationality? And yet the once Grand Old Party still supports him out of emotional loyalty and tribalism.
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Radical honesty is, among other things, telling the truth about what 399 years of, in chronological order, chattel slavery, segregation, and denial -- all to preserve, protect, and defend this nation's monstrous racial inheritance -- has done to our polity.
Brooks is reduced to the traditional emotive argument: Campuses are 'inhibited' by 'smothering' orthodoxy. In other words, with rationally-determined opinions that he doesn't like. Odd how no such 'orthodoxy' exists at, say, Bob Jones University, or at Hillsdale College, or at Brigham Young University, or at Ole Miss. Or, for that matter, at the University of Chicago.
To quote the great Barney Frank: You don't like what I'm saying, so I don't get to say it?
The fifties were hardly a paradise. In my graduate school at the time, there was only one black student. My children went to school in the fifties and sixties, and never had to fear that a deranged person armed with a rapid firing weapon could commit a mass murder. What changed? In those days the NRA was an organization of guys who hunted pheasants and deer. In recent decades the NRA has become an anarchistic organization, whose rise to political prominence directly correlates with the mass slaughter in our schools, in churches, nite clubs, music festivals etc. all committed with rapid fire weaponry. Until the NRA is defeated politically the murders will continue. How did Pinker miss this phenomenon?
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All very good, David, but here is some radical honesty:
The US congress has made it illegal for certain entities to study gun violence. (!!)
There is only one conclusion: the gun industry, their lobbyists, and their shills in Congress don't want that truth to get out.
David - call this out, with your "radical honesty": We can have differences of opinion based upon facts, but if we use "alternative facts" or deliberately hide the facts, we have checkmated the powers - and the virtues - of normal democracy.
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I think it's a sad state of affairs when the grotesque increase in consumption is considered a sign of improvement.
Debates are fine. But when our government has policy written by non-elected fanatics like Mr. LaPierre and the gun industry controls medical knowledge and lies to the public and that will not acknowledge that Americans want sensible law about guns, the wheels are off. They are derailing Democracy in the name of a special interest. That is as much a cancer on our system as any foreign interference. The will of the people literally can not be done. Not OK.
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Wasn't LBJ who was famous for saying, "You never had it so good"? It's still true.
Sometimes I read your column and wonder the frequency with which you engage people who are not heterosexual white men. I completely agree that we shouldn't want to go back to the 1950s, which is one of the many reasons I reject the #MAGA ethos. But it has more to do with the fact that the majority of the country would have significantly worse civil rights. Many of us see some of the political fights as fights for for our basic humanity. I think you have to understand that if you are going to understand why we are so unwilling to compromise. How can you keep asking people to be complicit in their own dehumanization?
"Pinker’s rationalism is not the total cure"
Huge understatement. Making observations and quoting statistics is a cure for nothing. Has the guy ever solved one problem in his whole life?
People I know who have emigrated from difficult places in the Third World look at America's current gun culture as a sign of disabling and dysfunctional addiction - a parallel to the opioid crisis.
Gee, optimism as an approach - so radical. Yet effective.
The best history book is called Tragedy and Hope. At any given moment in history, both exist. This includes the present time.
It is overdue that we give some breathing space to Hope. The media thrive on tragedy. It is time for a course correction.
Mr. Brooks frequently drops a thought that, alone, is worthy of a dissertion.
America has the second-highest level of social spending after France. So, why are there so many millions of poor, neglected Americans?
Because our social spending is inefficiently and ineffectively applied, of course. It is scattered among private, federal, and state organizations, and worst of all, joint federal/state programs. Bureaucracy, waste, cheating, price-gouging, and greed leave little real social safety net.
Shouldn't we try to rationalize, organize, and coordinate social spending? When can we start? Are we doomed to bounce forever between mass shoutings and Republican outrages without ever sttempting to relieve the stress of everyday life in America?
The biggest problem with Pinker is he is not bright enough to know what he doesn't know. He is plagued by the simple minded univariate view of the world typical of psychologists. But Pinker proferring Pollyanna populist pablum provides attention he would never get for doing real insightful research. He is happy not to rise above a TED talk. Pinker will fatten his retirement accounts on the speaking circuit providing solace to swindlers and oppressors the same way ministers did in a pre-scientific time.
The anecdote of the 1950s illustrates his simplicity; the state of affairs should be conditioned (at a minimum) on the fact the US was coming out of the greatest economic dislocation in history AND the largest world wide war in history. Little wonder these anodyne tidbits seem worthwhile to an intellectual heavy-weight (kidding) like Brooks.
Hmm. While there is much to like about the Enlightenment it is not universally admirable. Jefferson too thought he was an Enlightenment man -- and he owned slaves. We can suppose that his dalliances with his women (ie the 'his' meant he owned them) were somewhat more compelling in form that a certain movie producer. And yet, of course, this man is honoured by almost all in the USA.
I am not suggesting at all that Pinker is like that. I think the closest resemblance to Pinker is with another historical, if fictional figure, that of Dr Pangloss-- from Voltaire’s Candide (and based upon the philosopher Leibniz). Pangloss said “All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds”
That just about sums up Pinker. As the Pythons sang in the Life of Brian, Always look on the Bright Side of Life:
https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=always+look+on+the+bright+side+of+l...
If we had an emotionally healthy polity, David writes, we could easily pass 8-10 'restrictions' making it harder for "attention seekers" to get guns.
Tell the truth, David, and tell it straight. If the Republican party hadn't forced the assault rifle ban to die after Bill Clinton saw it through, we wouldn't need 9 more laws.
We have a problem, but it's name is not " healthy polity". It is called the gun lobby and the Republican politicians who are toadies to it. I am happy to read good commentary from anyone - but does your essay meet that goal?. Your piece was long on lengthy padding, and very short on cogent clarity. Sweet are the uses of brevity.
I wonder what Pinker thinks about the Doomsday clock, which has the planet closer to annihilation than at any time in human history. It's easy to be optimistic when you're ensconsed in the comfy, clubby world of Harvard Square. The rest of the planet looks pretty bleak.
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Interesting column today Mr Brooks. But countering Pinker's 'scientific' rationalism grounded in his idea of a contemporary 'Enlightenment' with a call for an emotionally grounded-polity seems to neglect any consideration of the role played by economy =(market capitalist/post-industrial /globalisation qua invisble hands in the ethernet). Whether it is rational individualism or tribal emotionalism (read Isaiah Berlin's _Bent Twig_ essay for historical perspective on where emotions lead polities)-- if you don't consider the role of capital -- your analysis seems to miss an important historical consideration of where emotions and kinship ties might lead contemporary polity and society.
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First, the factor Mr. Pinker are considering are measurable; the factors Mr. Brooks brings into play are not. By my (admittedly rationalist) definitions, if you cannot measure it it isn't science, it's feel good time.
Second, if I am getting richer then, apart from jealousy, I see no reason to resent the fact that my neighbor is experiencing a greater increase than I am. I am still better off than I was, after all.
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You don't understand scientific research very well. Abstract things can, in fact, be measured; it just requires careful conceptual and operationalization of variables. The social variables that Brooks cites can indeed, and mostly have, been measured in various ways. What he says is not really empirically controversial.
What is the unit of measure of alienation?
The statistics used in this piece are a mess. It doesn't seem like any of them are adjusted for inflation. He changes the time period that he is talking about from one paragraph to the next. He speaks about relative income brackets (upper middle class) in terms of absolute incomes (100,000 to 350,000) seemingly without adjusting for inflation. His stats on social mobility are only concerned with people in the top 30%. His talk about social spending looks at only total spending and not the distribution of that spending.
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Pinker recently wrote an op-ed article for either the Times or the WSJ, I can't recall which one, and my reaction was the same as yours. His facts are interesting and provide a sense of optimism, but all around us we see the growing social and emotional barriers, call it tribalism if you like, that tear apart the Pinker rational argument.
At a recent dinner gathering of 60 year friends, I was struck by the degree of separation that had developed on political issues compared to our history of friendly debate, I specifically recall the Kennedy-Nixon election debate we all had in 1960. Not now. I felt some of the recent group left angry, something would not have happened 50-60 years ago.
Let's hope readers took to heart your embrace of Better Angels from a column a few days ago. We really have to try and mend the social fabric of America.
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Optimism and pessimism are both traps that often lead us to wrong conclusions and wrong actions. Should we be optimistic or pessimistic about robotics, artificial intelligence, the ease of gene manipulation in the creation of designer organisms to accomplish certain tasks, the substitution of drones and other assorted robots for direct human involvement in warfare, the massive accumulation of national debt as a result of continual federal deficit spending in order to produce a short-term stimulus to the economy, etc.? There are so many imponderables in the future of humanity that it's almost impossible to adopt either an optimistic or pessimistic stance. I believe the best solution is the 'middle way' of realism. Play it as it lays.
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Very well put--thank you. A well-thought-out balance of optimism and pessimism provides the clearest view of the world.
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I happen to be a fan of Stephen Pinker as well. We're not related by blood, but we certainly are by scientific rationalism.
Once again, though, I'm left scratching my head wondering why those at the very top of the economic heap, who have vastly increased their incomes and wealth while the rest of us have seen stagnant wages over the past 30 or so years, continue to want more and more, at the expense of those most in need? As Buddy says to Gordon Gecko in the 1987 movie, "Wall Street:"
"Where does it all end? How many yachts can you water ski behind?"
David, perhaps sometime in the future you can interview a few of your wealthy friends and associates and write a column about this aspect of inequality. Personally, I think it extends from a profound paucity of human spirit and community--exactly the things you focus on and write about that are so fundamental to civil society.
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The short answer to your question may be, the more you have, the greater the fear that you may lose it all. And life's foibles and worries do not stop when you seem to have it made or a lock on the good life. Plus, even if you a fortune worth billions, there always seems to be someone else who has more. Breaking that cycle will be hard because being perennially dissatisfied with your lot is fundamental to human nature.
My guess is it from our animal instincts.
We are a group animal and some people have a very strong drive to be the number 1.
They will never spend all their wealth but that's not the point.
Their wealth is a number that they measure themselves against others by.
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Data is very important, but as Brooks correctly points out the intangibles driving today's partisanship and differences deserves a lot of consideration as well. For example, yes private social spending in the form of healthcare is high, but paying more for something doesn't necessarily equate with receiving a better product. We lose our true north when we try to simplify things down to dollars and statistics.
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The trouble with numbers is - out of myriad out there you can choose which ones you'll use. And when the story we wish to tell comes before the facts, than the natural tendency is to use the numbers that support the story.
If I wanted to tell you about the US decline, there are plenty of numbers to support that narrative too: infant mortality, life expectancy, wealth and income inequality, cost of health and education, condition of infrastructure, homelessness, gun deaths - compare any of the above with the rest of the developed world, and you'll see a different painting of America than Prof. Pinker is trying to present.
And if you look at the trend for any of the above, it is actually getting worse, not better. Yes, societal bonds are breaking too, Brooks is right about that, but sad truth is that it is coming from the top, caused by the commercialization, corporatization and privatization of civic life, not by the introduction of a non-traditional family.
Now, excuse me while I go and have my lunch alone....
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"America has the second-highest level of such spending of the 35 nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, after France."
Mr. Brooks, this statistic needs to be adjusted to account for the fact that the US spends about twice as much (17% of GDP) on health care as any other country on this list--with either equal or worse health outcomes.
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And without universal healthcare.
And there are segments of the US with infant mortality rates worse than Botswana.
We should be ashamed.
Tribalism existed in the segregated neighborhoods of the 50s and 60s in America. I grew up then and it wasn't till I began to travel internationally that I realized not everyone does or thinks the way "we" do. I learned two foreign languages which allowed me to unyoke my thoughts from the strictures of one language. I began the lifelong journey of reviewing my entrenched biases in an objective manner. Working at the University it was most heartening to see researchers from different disciplines come together to solve problems and advance our knowledge as a global community.
People who grow up in insular communities should be encouraged to travel more, and not on cruise ships.
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It is always uplifting in the presence of optimists. But it is important to be a realist and factual in approaching a problem.
First may I agree that cost of goods in relation to income has improved from the 50's. An example in 1954 a can of peas was $.10 today it is $1.00, a ratio of 10 to 1. Minimum in 1954 was $.50/ hr today it is $7.25/hr almost 15 times better. This creates the illusion that the poor are better off today.
It is an illusion because the need for goods are greater e.g. you didn't need a cell phone to survive in 1954. Continue the progression to clothing availability, transportation, health care, variety of food availability and education.
In 1954 I didn't think I was poor until I was told I was by a former teacher. Today, you know you are poor without someone having to have someone tell you that.
The USA has a poverty rate that is among the highest in the western world.
So let us remain optimistic, but work for improving the lot of those not as fortunate.
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I expected this column to segue to Jonathan Haidt, a hero of mine, who balances Pinker's optimism. Haidt's work is on the difficulties we have making truly rational decisions. I'd love to see a follow-up column devoted to his work.
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Why haven't we heard more about society's leaders who refuse to be pessimistic? Because it is rarely judged newsworthy by television and print media. As I have traveled I have turned on the local news in many countries; and, even without translation I know the lead stories are about war, disasters and scandals. This phenomenon is world wide and history shows that the minute an underdeveloped country acquires a broadcasting system their population will be bombarded with depressing news. Pessimism sells, hope does not, but you do not have to buy the negative storyline.
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The good news is the majority of our civilization is behaving better. The bad news is some of us are behaving worse. This is nothing new. Its been this way forever. In my lifetime every decade Amercian society appears to take a few steps forward. While every 60 days or so one of us picks up a gun and tries to take us a few steps back. Yes, the Amercian big picture gets better while getting worse. In America, you can have it all.
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"Pinker doesn’t spend much time on the decline of social trust, the breakdown of family life, the polarization of national life, the spread of tribal mentalities."
If he did spend time on these issues, Pinker would have to acknowledge that there is a common factor to all of these issues--namely, income inequality. Richard Wilkinson has done very interesting and important work in this area.
Wilkinson shows the close correlation between income inequality and social dysfunction. He compares wealthy developed countries across a large number of dimensions-- trust, life expectancy, math and literacy, infant mortality, homicides, imprisonments, teenage births, obesity, mental illness, social mobility, high school dropout rates, rates of child well-being.
It turns out there is an almost perfect correlation here--the more social inequality in a country, the worse it does on every single one of these factors (and far, far worse: for example, the U.S. has 3 times the rate of mental illness than Japan and 10 times the rate of homicides as Canada). And despite the happy statistics that Brooks pulls out, the fact is that among the US is near the top in terms of its rate of inequality.
The Republican party--Mr. Brooks' party--is dedicated to increasing social inequality. Rather than distracting us with philosophical ideas like "Cartesian rationalism" which cannot be addressed in the political sphere, why doesn't Brooks address the real cause of our social dysfunction?
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It may be true that the percentage of poor Americans have dropped but I would like to see a reference cited. Most of David's statistics don't appear to be radically honest to me. For example, "One in nine spend time in the top 1%"? The top 1% of income starts at $465,626. The only time anyone in my extended family was even close to that was when my parents sold the farm they had spent 55 years building. But selling off a lifetime of assets doesn't really put you in the 1%.
My observation is that people are working longer and longer to make
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Perhaps Pinker and Brooks are entitled to a holiday like the fortunate among us, leaving beside facts and figures.
Dr. Pinker might enjoy visiting a splendid valley in Wales, where if he listens carefully he might hear the whispers of a watcher's last words: 'The silence is unbroken. Listen'.
These lines may appeal to him: 'And they took the Philosopher from his prison, even the Intellect of Man they took from the hands of doctors and lawyers, from the sly priests, from the professors whose mouths are gorged with sawdust, and the merchants who sell blades of grass - the awful people of the Formor...and then they returned again, dancing and singing, to the country of gods' - (James Stephens)
For Mr. Brooks, an author wrote gallantly of an elderly Polish man now living in Paris in the 70s. He writes at a table in a cafe, to an old friend from home, one who he will never see again: 'I am sorry about the radio talk and its effect on some low people. There are destroyed minds here, too_you would not believe what goes on. Someone said, "Hitler lives!", at a meeting-so I am told. I suppose the police can't be everywhere...I wish I had more to tell you, but my life is like the purring of a cat. If I were to describe it, it would put you to sleep. In the meantime, I send you God's favor'.
A holiday for Mr. Brooks to the Isle of Corfu with 'My Family and Other Animals' by Gerald Durrell, when he was a young boy and enjoyed Mother Nature.
The belief in progress is just that. Things change, but they don't always progress. For instance, a simple example: the internal combustion engine has allowed us to travel farther and faster, but the costs to our environment are grave and life threatening. We have a plethora of new technological toys (think Alexa as one of the more recent ones), but it isn't at all clear that it has made our lives better or made it easier for us to be happier, create a better society, etc.
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Pinker's problem, in addition to those noted by Brooks, is that he pays scant attention to variation within the nation--the question of inequality in its multiple forms. The trend line may slope upward over time, but there is still an astonishingly large downside for such a wealthy country as the US--as ion the case of health care. His argument depends on finding historical starting points low enough to guarantee a picture of progress. Pinker likes to downplay the exceptions--witness his unpersuasive treatment of World War II in his "Better Angels" book. Robert Gordon's book on economic growth is a far more sophisticated and persuasive argument of a similar kind, particularly in its identification of starting points and inflection points. Pinkerism is the new Coueism--for those old enough to know what Coueism is.
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When I worry about my children and grandchildren, it's not because social or economic issues are worsening. The national polarity of political perspective that led to the Civil War persists to this day and only lessens around perceived security threats that briefly unify the country. We still have happy and unhappy families, just not under wraps and with more openness to differences. Women have opportunities only dreamed of in the 50s. And social capital has always been the exception, not the rule.
When I worry about the generations who will inherit our country and the world, it's because climate change, population growth and the manipulation of information are creating structural changes from which there is seemingly no retreat. How does Pinker filter these concerns through his lens of optimism?
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Brooks describes a social deficit unaddressed by Pinker's work. He is right but lacks perspective. A general war would reverse most of those things, as would other forms of collective challenge, such as being attacked or a real depression. Fortunately such are not the only ways to bring us together. Positive challenges such as the Apollo mission to land an American on the moon will also work.
Our biggest problem in coming together, though, is that the ordinary tendency to cherry-pick information to support one's existing beliefs is explosively and malignantly magnified by the internet. Conservatives hang on every word of Limbaugh, Jones, and Trump, entertainers all, for whom a lie is just a line. Meanwhile liberals forget that "American" is the appropriate collective noun, instead insisting that modifiers such as Black, gay, Hispanic, female, white, etc. are the primary identity.
One needs to consider the possibility that there may be an inverse relationship between the progress Pinker notes and the social deficiencies Brooks notes. Perhaps the new baseline of expectation has simply increased so markedly that any variation from it feels like a personal attack. While Pinker's graphs are not a sufficient condition for national happiness, understanding their reality is necessary to roll back the increasing polarization in this country. If we can't agree on the facts about where we are, we can't have a discussion on their meaning or where to go from here and how to get there.
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Ordinarily, optimism is probably preferable to pessimism, but in these days of Trump that hardly seems possible. In a recent book by two professors of government at Harvard, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, “How Democracies Die,” many questions are raised about the possibility of a slow slide to the demise of our democracy. Considering the lack of civility between different partisan groups, there is a great danger of a catastrophic end to it all.
Taking into account the virtually endless wars in South Asia and the Middle East, I see no especially compelling reason for optimism.
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Mr. Davies, I agree with you with one exception; when the popular vote fails to win an election we lose the right to call ourselves a democracy.
"Decline of social trust, the breakdown of family life, the polarization of national life, tribal mentalities, the rise of narcissism ...."
Steven Pinker's book doesn't focus on these areas because they are all subjective issues, related to how individuals feel. "My feelings" people are the products of decades of prosperity and progress. And sadly, they don't know they cannot get everything they want.
Moreover, these new "problems" aren't necessarily bad.
"the breakdown of family life" Family was built on different roles for husband and wife, it reduced women to quasi-servants of the family. Today there's more equality. And more equal individuals are in a family, less they are inclined to boss around or obey others' wishes. In this light, the breakdown isn't that bad if you want more individual freedoms.
The same applies to the oher "problems" David Brooks enumerates. Widespread narcissism is a symptom that there's something wrong with the society's values, not with prosperity. Rightly, Pinker doesn't give a fig about them.
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Actually, people who have spent a significant time in and around public education understand that Brooks' comments you spotlight have everything to do with statistics. Your inability to have bigger worldview that extends outside of )New York? Connecticut?) is one reason you and others may very well be surprised at another Republican victory this fall. No, I don't want this either, but when family members can't carry on a civil conversation, and children in single-parent households show up to public schools without breakfast, and with little to no attention to personal hygiene because they have not been instructed about this, these are walking statistics. Yes, many of these children get two free meals and live in subsidized housing projects, but is it okay for these children to lack opportunities for one day securing good jobs and a better life - because you and others don't understand this world exists?
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Feelings are subjective, but that misses Brook's point: not all feelings are appropriate in relation to just any matters. What we take pleasure in may not always be appropriate. Essentially, ignoring the kind of passions people develop in relation to what things runs the risk of saying there is no difference between virtue and vice. The idea of that there is no difference is the logical extension of pure democracy: tolerate everything, do not suppose any pursuit is better than any other. Hogwash. I direct you to books 9 and 10 of Plato's Republic. The notion, if it is the notion you are implying, that we ought to ignore value so long as prosperity is increasing suggests that material and bodily goods are better than soul goods. A misranking of the goods.
I have no emotional rationalization for either Pinker or Brooks--even though they maybe distant cousins of mine. All I really have to say is that in the most postive economic U.S., that we only 20% poor?
Tribalism, narcissism, and social alienation. Three terms that can easily explain current trends in our society. These do not complete the picture, but merely point to the results of the abandonment of personal responsibility.
Far to frequently people fall victim to being a victim. Once someone places themselves in this position the world view changes. When i see myself as a victim I see the world as my attacker.
Change can come about through our legislative process, but real change can only occur from within. Once we decide that we are no longer a victim change will begin. Once we decide that forgiveness is the path to peace then change will happen in a way that affects everyone.
Stop being a victim, and become a forgiver of oneself.
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I totally agree, but
Stop?
In my view this requires scknowledging and working through unconscious childhood emotional assaults and traumas.
If you pay attention to conservative rhetoric, you mostly hear about rage against perceived enemies, whio are responsible for the victim’s suffering.
Actually there is an excellent rational, scientific reason to feel special affection for your third cousin. Evolution favors those who have warm feeling, and therefore provide aid, protection, and encouragement to procreate, to those who share their genes. This is exactly why humans feel a need for social networks, trust and connection with others. Pinker's problem is not that he is too rationalist, but that his rationalism is too narrow and fails to include an evolutionary understanding of human nature.
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Nice thoughts. But if Pinker wants to carry out his philosophical travails in a mostly rational space, he is missing on the emotional problems affecting us, where the trust in each other has fallen to pieces. Although in general, life seems better, compared to even the fifties (last century), if we could harness greed of the few (many of the so called 'rich and powerful) and the promise (false) that if you work hard enough you could get there too, there is a climate of chronic stress and even despair in a somewhat tribal attitude...exploited by fraudsters and demagogues 'a la Trump', not reflective of reality and the facts, nor conducive to the 'golden rule'. Even our culture is faltering (who reads thought-provoking books anymore, visits real art instead of gross and 'cheap' imitations, attends to classic music, participates in lively discussions in philosophy and the social sciences? You mentioned the profusion of 'information' via the Internet, Social Media, TV, but it may have a deleterious effect, given all the malevolous or propaganda-type of 'news, far from helping knowledge, let alone understanding, from taking root. And speaking of poverty, I know we live in a capitalistic system where capital will always trump labor, but why is it we still have pockets of poverty in a land of plenty? If solidarity has any meaning to us, then the phrase 'a chain is only as strong as it's weakest link' may cause some impact in our psyche...and find remedy if we have the will.
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Another name for this could be denial. Actually, when Bush was president, this is exactly how I looked at things. I didn't like most of his policies, but they were not extreme. With this administration, pessimism is unavoidable. What they have already done (especially in the realms of environmental protection, mature conservation, protection of public lands, civil rights) is horrific. The destruction of the presidency, the venality and lack of qualifications of most of the people in the administration, the absolute disregard for the well-being of anyone but the wealthy...RESIST. That's the only optimism I have these days. RESIST AND LITIGATE. Who ever would have thought that lawyers would emerge as the heroes of our country?
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It must be nice to live in Brooks' Fantasyland. Unfortunately in the real world, modern GOP "Conservative" leaders such as McConnell, Ryan, Cotton, et.al., and their voters, don't care about rationalism and science, never mind simple honesty.
The pernicious influence of the GOP and their donor class has taken the American Republic down a dark road for nearly 40 years. It's hard to be optimistic after watching the worst elements among us sabotage the American Dream, turning it into a National Nightmare.
We are watching America become a nation of oligarchs amassing more and more wealth. Economic inequality is worsened by tax laws with the highest rates levied on those who earn wages or salaries differently than those who "earn" dividends, "carried interest", or inherit their wealth. Meanwhile "American" businesses, multinational corporations, and individuals shirk their taxes through offshore havens, tax abatements, and other financial legerdemain.
"Google" a statistical abstract for 1956 and note the share of federal tax revenue paid by business and the wealthy, then compare it to current levels. Killing the Middle Class is the death of the goose that lays the golden eggs.
This is not the America we grew up in. I want that Nation and its social contract, as well as the realization that we are all in this together, instead of tribalism and identity politics currently practiced.
7
Things would go so much better if we did not have a president and controlling political party fanning the flames of division, seeking to undermine the existing social safety net, working to disenfranchise the poor, and taking monies away from education and science. Trump wants to make America great again. Using Pinker's analysis, tell me when "again" was?
4
Lacking a twitter feed, thus shielded, if only a little bit, from our national emotional sickness. But did watch CNN town hall, and was heartened by savvy and lack of jaded learned helplessness on part of several questioners. I believe it is much too soon, and will always be too soon, to talk about armed teachers in schools. (And I say this as a U of Chicago alum who also taught in a South Side high school for four years--trust me that the very idea is perverse). Let's start with the obvious first, i.e. re-up on a comprehensive semiautomatic weapons ban. We know it saved lives in the ten years it was on the books. We know it worked in Australia, and it might not stop all our Mad Maxes but it would slow them down. Can't we all agree that the Constitution is not a suicide pact with respect to terroristic violence, whatever the terrorizers look like and wherever they grew up? Can't we all agree that DC v. Heller is the law of the land for now, whether we agree with it or not, and also that it does not provide an unlimited personal right to own or carry an unlimited number of weapons anywhere? More "respect" yes, but no more willingness to accept (h/t Josh Marshall) "mutually assured massacre."
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I agree that things were not as rosy in the past as many believe. I remember all too well the segregation and discrimination against African Americans. In fact my small town in Appalachian Ohio also discriminated against Catholics who were never hired to teach on our schools even when they were clearly the most qualified applicants. This did not change until the seventies. The dire poverty that some of our rural families lived in then has also disappeared as a result of government programs in spite of the fact that there are fewer jobs there these days.
However the change that has poisoned our culture was the explicit adoption by corporate America and their Republican puppets of the belief that the only goal and responsibility of businesses is profit. In the fifties it was held that corporations had an obligation to their customers, their workers, their shareholders and their communities. Organizations like the Bsiness Roundtable and business schools explicitly advocated that. Sadly the influence of Ayn Rand and University of Chicago economist Milton Freidman had changed that by the eighties. Reagan sold the greed is good philosophy to the public and Harvard Business School spread the gospel to our top corporate leaders.
The worship of money and the power it brings is corrupting the trust in our society.
http://www.newsweek.com/2017/04/14/harvard-business-school-financial-cri...
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The worst part is that many people who have grown up since Reagan have adopted this idea as a fundamental foundation of their world view.
Pinker is right that life on earth keeps getting better for a higher proportion of folks. By global standards Americans mostly have it pretty good (though we could do much much better to help the less fortunate among us). What this points to is actually a gratitude problem with Americans.
It was unfortunate (maybe fortunate actually) that Brooks wove the current gun debate into this piece, because it really point to how untenable his political framework is these days. The President that he rightly can't stand has enormous support among David's most cherished Americans, the victimized Republicans. When David says that WE can't pass sensible gun legislation because WE'RE emotionally sick, he really misses the mark. You better believe that most Democratic voters are completely for sensible gun legislation and that most Republicans are not......
4
Bang on the money Andrew. The point Mr Brooks misses is that the GOP, and now the USA under a unified GOP congress and President is held hostage by Grover Norquist, the NRA, Big Money the military industrial complex and the bigoted Christian Right. The unifying theme in all these institutions is autocracy.
It is not the lack of morals or neighbors or family values that has gotten us here and into this malaise - it is the abuse of accumulated power.
it is the hopelessness of a situation where the game of Monopoly, that we refer to and revere as a free market capitalist economy is coming to maturity. the losers have being forced to drop out whilst the big boys fight it out for winner takes all.
Who has dropped out? The Unions, the poor, the impartiality of the judiciary, fair (ungerrymandered) elections etc.
As for Steven Pinker - well some nice ideas - but as my youngest son tells me, a libertarian is just a republican that smokes pot.
While I appreciate a positive outlook, one must look closer at the misleadingly cheerful economic statistics cited as the basis for that optimism. In comparative dollars, homes, cars and health care were more affordable in the 1950s than they are today. It takes two incomes per household to equal the earning power of one fifty years ago. Americans and our government have accumulated much more debt. As for one in nine being in the top one percent at some point? Sorry, not buying that for a second.
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A really good article. But life truly is messy. Emotions tend to get in the way. Plus, half the world always consists of young, inexperienced people. Jesus understands how immature humans tend to be which is why he is so patient with our mistakes.
Still, if all children were all given a good start in life with basic needs met, encouragement, and real goals to strive for, the rational view might be a good enough measurement.
In this order I am sublimely indifferent to the opinions of the following groups : 1. Students. 2. Academics. 3. Twitter. Policy opinions unencumbered by real world experience or job insecurity are of import to pollsters and the media, but shouldn't dictate how our society is governed. These are all emotional mobs of a sort.
1
Students (to a certain extent) and academics represent the more educated and open-minded among us. And saying that academics have job security is just plain wrong, since they are on the cutting edge of the gig economy, often lacking the most basic of benefits, including and especially health insurance and job security. But go on being “sublimely indifferent,” until the plutocrats come for your safety, security and peace of mind. It won’t be long.
"Who are your heroes?"
This was Allan Bloom's favorite question, and precisely for that reason we should be deeply suspicious of it.
Bloom acted as though students' inability to answer that question was some deep sign of societal decline.
On the contrary. The "heroic outlook" is both childish and repressive.
It is a sign of the maturity and rationality of our students that they no longer think in terms of "heroes".
Thinking in terms of "heroes" puts one in the passive attitude of waiting for messiahs, instead of doing something yourself.
And it gives a distorted view of history. It makes one think that e.g. Martin Luther King was the cause of the Civil Rights Movement, instead of riding a wave of many non-heroes whose names we will never know.
Our young students see that there are real problems in the world, like the environment and the shift of the US toward authoritarianism.
So I am glad they are not sitting around fantasizing about heroes.
Heroes solve problems only in stories. In the real world we need the coordinated activity of ordinary people, like you and me.
13
As I read your article I thought about all the things that brought me to join the First Unitarian Church in Boston. In this church I found Jews, Muslims, Catholics, Protestants and many atheists. I found we all had something in common, a deep need to belong, and live a practice spiritualism. I was a king at isolating, I felt I deserved it after standing for 38 years in high end hair salon as a stylist/colorist. I had a wonderful diverse and intelligent clientele that allowed me to make a great living. But a year into my retirement I found something was missing, that sense of belonging.
In joining this UU environment I was surrounded with intellectuals artisans, but most of all I found that these people were goodhearted. This church is involved gun control, black lives matter, helping solve student loans and much more. I signed up for something called Women for Women. I pledged money each month to help one woman get her business up and running. I became a little candle in an unfathomable dark country. This is what's called paying it forward, for all the good women did for me and making a successful career. I believe this is what is called opening one's heart, and what we are all longing for to live in a peaceful mind.
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" The key sin in the world is a result either of entropy, the randomness that is built into any system, or faith — dogma clouding reason.". Entropy is related to multiplicity, not randomness (or disorder). Brooks, and other non-scientists, should avoid using scientific terms that they do not understand. as mark twain said "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt."
Perhaps Pinker sees "the decline of social trust, the breakdown of family life, the polarization of national life, the spread of tribal mentalities, the rise of narcissism, the decline of social capital, the rising alienation from institutions or the decline of citizenship and neighborliness" as Saṃsāra and is ignoring what is not real or cannot be changed.
Also interesting that you name as "rational" the idea that he ignores the spheres which you identify as very important.
I was a university professor for over 30 years. Most of my students would never have heard of Steven PInker, much less have read a book by him unless it was assigned in a class. What students are you talking to?
1
Actually, David, there is a scientifically rational reason that you would feel affinity for your third cousin. It's called tribalism, and I am sure you could find an optimistic and rational scientist to explain to you why it makes evolutionary sense to identify with someone with whom you share genetic heritage, even if you don't know it.
Pinker (and you) belong to the optimist tribe. Good for you. Some of us do not belong to that tribe, and worry that evidence-based optimism, or sentimental yearning for the ties that bind overlooks the real and present danger of our material conditions. I think my tribe is more rational than yours, but I guess that's tribalism for you.
2