" Our political system is based on the idea that persuasion and deliberation lead to compromise and toward truth"
Wow...such boy-scout talk or naivety! Do you actually believe that? Such fairy-tale thinking should have been abandoned in junior high. Lefties spout such ideas to Republicans to lead them into a trap which many, such as you, fall into far to often.
5
I think it's a mistake for David Brooks to play the race and gender game however well-intentioned
6
You do realize, many if not most in your Republican Party don't consider People Like You as completely White, Mr. Brooks, don't you?
5
Re: War and Peace
2
I really wanted to share this column on facebook for all of my facebook friends to read. I had a beautiful little introductory paragraph of my own that explained why they should all read it. It had a couple of choice quotes from this column. And guess what? I even posted it. I posted this column along with my introduction. But then I immediately took it down and deleted my own post. And the reason is simple: Even though the title of the column is great and witty, I knew that some facebook friend of mine would just glance at the title and perhaps misunderstand what the column was about. The catchy attention-grabbing headline could come across as something offensive to somebody not-in-the-know. Someone who is younger or in their teens might misunderstand the headline and then be upset with me for posting some sort of biased and racist article. So, I couldn't post this. And as a result, the facebook friends of mine who actually wouldn't have been confused are the ones who suffered. If only the New York Times was sensitive to the sensitive culture that they have (for better and for worse) helped to create... then everyone could read and enjoy David Brooks' work. Instead, the editor who chose this title just deprived Mr. Brooks of an audience. And I figured that this fact should be made known -- that for every extra click the title got -- that maybe, just maybe, some shares were lost. Please let this be noted before future editorial decisions of this nature are made.
15
It’s refreshing to have a white man doing more ‘man-asking’ than mansplaining for a change.
25
Here's some critical thinking for you Mr brooks. Of course we are individuals but we are also members of groups. It's not black and white as much as you try to reduce it so
5
Identitarian thinking ("As a queer woman of color, I say") and intersectional whining (putting grievances together to sound more important) is destroying our society. No one can present an argument. And all this stuff is basically racist. Because race/class/sex is at the core of it. It's racist thinking, and I won't listen to it.
11
What a hodge podge! I am a scientist and I know that there are objective facts and these often tell us what will work and will not work. This column suggests that one's background dictates the values that the person holds and the policies that person will support. But what is the point of supporting a policy that does not achieve its goal?
I remember the communist era and the passion that many communists had for the Marxist ideal "From each according to his ability and to each according to his needs". This ran in conflict with human nature and eventually it was replaced by the working class axiom "We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us." The downfall of communism soon followed.
This shows that even the most hardened of systems eventually has to yield to facts and necessity to do things that work. In the U.S. we have politicians and their supporters who, like the white queen in Alice through the looking glass, insist on believing "six impossible things before breakfast"
In the face of the lunacy, what do you do? My advice is to stick to your guns and point out fallacies of our politicians as you see them. Make fun of the idiots. They don't deserve our respect.
5
Please read or quote if you are familiar with their views on which comes first: beliefs and then reason or reason and then beliefs; Jonathan Haidt and Daniel Kanheman. Both completely agree on the former..
4
White males may be the most impressed by the seeming shift to an emphasis on identity but its only because they are perhaps finally recognizing that their point of view is grounded in their origin as white and men.
That the white male experience isn’t synonymous with ‘experience’ isn’t news to anyone except white men. Welcome to the party !!
18
I'm not surprised at all you are confused.
When a person believes: "Our whole education system is based on the idea that we train individuals to be critical thinkers," then I know they don't have a clue.
13
Learning must involve testing assumptions.
4
Personally, I'm not sure. Let me go check with my group and see what they say.
9
The GOP in Congress may be suffering from Easter Island syndrome. Certainly, factions of it are. As for the long-standing American creation myth that is still being fed to school children (the Pilgrims, Plymouth Rock, the Mayflower Compact, John Winthrop's "city on a hill" and so forth) it has been tempered in many groups by the violence and intimidation of the White, Protestant power elites until recent decades. Moneyed elites used scare tactics to turn working class people against each other by race, ethnicity, precinct, and religion. In contrast, many people ignored these scare tactics and worked cooperatively together - and still do - to the benefit of all in a community. They try to get along with their neighbors. Evidence of this is real and powerful during times of emergency such as tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, and other natural disasters and, more recently, at times of mass shootings in schools, night clubs, churches, and concert fields.
Certain political organizations try to instill in us fear of the other. The KKK promoted racial hatred through violence and intimidation. The NRA promotes tribalism through its Second Amendment campaign. Most members of racial and ethnic minorities strive to get along with non-members. Most gun owners aren't members of the NRA and know how to keep and use firearms.
Our president prefers to stir up discord and deny attempts by foreign groups to do the same in different communities. He prides himself on using chaos.
7
"For example, in the 1990s, African-Americans strongly supported tougher criminal justice laws.".
References please. I don't think most African Americans bought the super predator nonsense or the crime bill. I don't have references. Just saying.
1
There is an image widely circulated on the web in which a room full of old white men are gathered to discuss women's health issues. If Mr. Brooks is having difficulty understanding what the problem is I suggest that he looks at that picture.
28
Speaking as an mixed heritage, predominantly Asian female, with an MBA, raised in a poor Irish, Hawaiian family in a depressed area of Western Massachusetts and now living in San Francisco ...
15
I am reminded of the saying, "when one is accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression."
Group thinking isn't new; but new groups are claiming some of the spotlight - sadly, the spotlight hasn't been accompanied by power.
The GOP is currently in power through race-baiting, hate-mongering, divisiveness, Fox propaganda and, as we just learned, through political thought-manipulation - like the psy-ops the military uses on enemies - all enabled by dark, dirty money, largely courtesy of the "conservative" wing of the SCOTUS which richly repaid the folks who put them on the Court with the disgusting, democracy-killing "Citizens United."
The GOP harnessed so-called "Christian" pastors' greed for Earthly power, receiving "Christian" votes in return for promises from lying, cheating, unethical Congressmen who openly break every commandment, knowing if they pay lip service to guns, God and pro-life dogma their sins will be ignored.
Add the rants to disappointed White men, told to blame their failure to achieve on women, Blacks and immigrants rather than on GOP union busting, rip-off tax cuts, gifts to the 1% and warmongers.
Group-thinking isn't new, but the GOP has weaponized it, using fake news, Russian hackers, stolen FaceBook data and money, money, money to keep groups distracted and fighting each other while they destroy our democracy, our nation and our future.
Power corrupts. The Trump/Pence cabal and its morally bankrupt GOP enablers are evidence.
14
When I open my mouth, it sounds like a white male speaking. I’ve noticed that recently.
But I still have to study, think, read and re-read, reflect. Because my mouth seems like it will go on speaking..
3
I enjoy reading David Brooks, but being a American (black) in his mid sixties. l was never in agreement with three strike judicial system created in nineties. An no person of Color that I knew was in agreement with the policy either. This is not a 2018 after thought. I had my stated belief in the nineties. So did many other Americans (black).
4
America was founded on a set of principles mostly embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. No matter how far we are from attaining a society that deeply and broadly functions on those principles, we measure our legitimacy and success as a nation by our current relationship to those principles.
Most countries are defined by historical ethnic homogeneity. For them, the modern push toward citizenship not predicated on majoritarian membership is a major challenge. For most of the people in those countries, a Jewish Pole, a Muslim Indian, a Hindu Sri Lankan, a Christian Saudi Arabian are all simply oxymorons.
Living in a world of globalized everything, from internet culture to finance to religious violence, people are looking for a smaller, more rooted identity, from political purity to ethnic purity, wherein the emphasis is on the divisive adjectives of "purity", not the collective identity, in our case, American.
Our problem as a society is that we do not have a sense of who we are, what it means to be American. We all in one way or another are hyphenated Americans: Black-Americans, 2nd Amendment-Americans, gay or lesbian-Americans, anti-Abortion-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, female-Americans, whatever-Americans, of necessity fated from day one to travel a collective path with other hyphenated Americans. Nonetheless, we are in a crisis where most people's primary identity is on the adjective before the hyphen, not on the collective noun, American.
9
There should be a tension between who you are and what you think. When there is not enough tension you become an automaton. There's also some avoidance in this particular column. It seems to me that Brooks is pretending that the fact that trump is president doesn't change the basic equation of our political culture. That is, that even though the guy who is president just a few years ago was insisting that the last president was born in Kenya and was a secret Muslim, that the dynamics are the same. Except for the incapacitated everybody has the wherewithal to tell basic right from basic wrong.It's not a question of perspective. It's known that in 1960 debates those who watched on tv saw Kennedy as the winner and the radio listeners thought Nixon. That's not what's at play here. In the campaign trump was an obvious transgressor and obvioulsly bad and he got elected. That indicates a profound change in our political culture. Why would a country knowingly elect a horrible person to be president? The stuff about how who you are effects what you think is not pertinent. trump did not pretend to be good. We wanted bad. That's where the rubber meets the road. Brooks needs to get on the road and see what's happening with the people. The ivory tower pov is currently irrelevant.
1
"How much are you in control of your own opinions? I ask this sincerely because, as you’ll see, I’m trying to think this through and I’m not sure how."
David, when I started reading your column, I thought you were going in a completely different direction. Due to the recent revelations about Cambridge Analytics and the Mercers criminal appropriation of personal data of millions of Facebook users, I assumed you were going to delve into philosophical questions of whether and how we can even trust our own beliefs, knowing that we have been marinating in propaganda and, wittingly or not, have participated in spreading that propaganda to friends and family.
I would have enjoyed that article ... and I can already see the comments, filled with "smart" people, naturally impervious to marketing, insisting this was just a problem among low-information voters.
5
Brooks expresses himself well when he writes:
If it’s just group against group, deliberation is a sham, beliefs are just masks groups use to preserve power structures, and democracy is a fraud.
The real question that people are loath to ask is: Does democracy itself make sense in a world as complex as the one we live in?
We live not in one America, but in a dozen America's and they are not communicating. Opinions are too strident. Group identity crowds out anything else.
I could be self-critical about this. My own group identity is the reason I voted for Trump. I am a white male like David Brooks. I voted for Bernie Sanders in the primaries but simply could not vote for Hillary Clinton.
The reason is that Hillary saw herself as a feminist who DESERVED to be president because of her identity. Thet might not have been so bad, but she surrounded herself with radical feminists like Gloria Allred.
And I couldn't forget my own identity. I needed protection.
And Gloria Allred argued most forcefully that 60 women accusing Bill Cosby could not be wrong. That questioning them was sexist.
And I realized that I live in a world not of black and white but in various shades of gray. I realized that 60 cases of sexual harassment, when the definition is not terribly clear are 60 very gray cases. And 60 gray cases might mean no cases in which Cosby was guilty.
It was indeed possible that all 60 women were wrong. Because I believe in due process I could not support Hillary.
1
There are people who have switched their views--typically from one end of the spectrum to the other. Eugene Genovese abandoned Marxism and became a devout Catholic. Stalin attended a seminary during his youth. He then became a radical atheist.
Identity politics is bad where ever it rears its head, right or left. Too bad both parties have adopted it so completely.
2
"On the one hand, the drive to bring in formerly marginalized groups has obviously been one of the great achievements of our era."
What? Privatization of the prison system has marginalized the Blacks and Hispanic. Privatizing requires more products and the prison system needs more inmates to be more profitable. Very demoralizing and not at all inclusive except for black and brown. And who is the lobbyists that write the new criminal code.
However, we are all being marginalized with the greed and no regulations on capitalism.
Thanks, Brook's
As an Earthling, and at an early age, I was taught to take people one at a time, not prejudge them based on their group. That advice has served me well, as I have met people from all walks of life who don't fit their "stereotypes", in behavior or opinion.
But now we have TV, radio and social media geared to feed you information that fits your assumed tribe, leaving out alternative viewpoints. Thus people are increasingly furious when they hear you utter an alien, "incorrect" opinion. Open-mindedness is a sin; you are the enemy. Sad.
www.newyorkgritty.net
3
March 23, 2018
Ah, the naked truth does set us free to live and think independently: but then we have our inheritance and cultural inclinations, inculcation and we become speaking dressed to serve the wardrobe of necessity. Generic speaking is sort of and idealization for the polemics unaffiliated and here is lies it is all about what is the truth of our audience to engage in the seduction of being understood insemination and the clan of power identity to publish and to experience choices of whatever is momentary on the stage of falsehood.
1
You are overthinking this. People act as individuals, but their experiences are colored by other peoples' perceptions of them as members of a group. So, black men are treated differently than white men (as a group) and that impacts how they act (individually). As a white man, you will never know what it's like to live as a black man--the complexities are myriad and often minute, but they add up to enormous differences. Of course, as a white man you can *realize* that and try to change your perspective of "black men" (the group) and how you approach individual black men you meet (individually). More importantly, you can advocate for change at the institutional level that will, hopefully, change the differences between how whites and blacks are treated.
7
As a member of one group observing the workings of another group, we too often end up stereotyping those in the other group without sufficient basis. The only way to break this is to dig deeper and consider people, as best as possible, by their individual character--that is by their own separate identity. Maybe naive but I side with the intellectuals of the 1950s.
Offering a case study, a couple of weeks ago, Paul Krugman, a favorite writer, published an article under the heading, "A Ranting Old Guy With Nukes"--obviously referring toTrump. Krugman's theatrical setting starts with: "Imagine that you're listening to some garrulous old guy in a diner, telling you what's wrong with the world--which mainly involves how we're being victimized and taken advantage of by foreigners." Later, Krugman comments that the old guy's "opinions seem a bit, well, factually challenged."
Krugman's careless generalization is the rub. Why put this in the context of an old guy? An old guy may also go to a local diner or coffee shop, bring or then buy a well written newspaper, magazine or book or, alternatively, go online for carefully considered information. Policy wonk? Probably not. But well informed. Yes. Krugman accurately describes Trump. So attack him directly rather than using a stereotype.
Each person whether young, middle-aged or old, carries his or her own separate identity. Please don't gray anyone, individually or by group, out of existence with shallow, flippant images.
1
This column seems fairly disingenuous. It doesn't take more than a minute or two of thinking to realize that if you want to judge people on the quality of their ideas, then ignore whatever prologue they give and focus only on the ideas.
However, sometimes it's helpful to know someone's background, to give context to what they are saying. Do you ever rely on your years of experience as a journalist to get to an informed opinion? Well, others rely on their experience as well.
Not that hard to understand, if you try.
1
How often have you heard someone say, “as a gay man, these are my views on German-American relations.”? Never, right? However, my experience as a older woman now married to another woman, having been married to a man for 27 years, does inform my views on, say, the wedding cake controversy. I might well preface my opinion on that with “As a gay married woman...”. Of course my identity and experiences pertain, and are relevant to, my opinion on certain matters. However, I would not preface my opinion on German-American relations with that information as it is irrelevant.
3
Yes, what identity do we have if we're mixed race? atheist? can't one just be an individual? But I think it's the class fragmentation of society that has pushed us all into camps and corners. Sort of like what happens before a revolution or civil war.
David Brooks says:
"Our whole education system is based on the idea that we train individuals to be critical thinkers."
But is it? I'm a teacher, and I do my damnedest to get kids to think critically, but the overall trend in education today favors canned programs over creative teachers and kids who compliantly fill in bubbles rather than think for
themselves.
I'm not sure which schools Mr. Brooks has been to.
2
David,
I'm normally a fan of your columns but you're missing the point here.
Posit with me that people have a limited number of cognitive points available to them--let's say 100. These points represent how they manage their cognitive load as they experience the world.
Privilege is about the fact that if you are white, male, straight, you do not need to spend your 100 points thinking about your race, your gender, your sexual orientation when navigating the world. The reality is that ethnic minorities, women, and LGBT people do spend a considerable amount of their points managing the prejudices that other people have about them and constantly trying to get others to recognize their individuality. Straight white male privilege is the freedom to be yourself.
I encourage you to spend a week shadowing a friend from an ethnic/sexual orientation/gender minority group. Ask them for the kindness to be with them throughout their day. Observe how they must constantly tiptoe around others feelings, perceptions, and preconceptions of them.
I'd be eager to see you revisit this topic once you've done so.
Grad Student at Penn
11
I grew up believing that America could do no wrong. I no longer do. Mr. Brooks, more privileged, has yet to get there.
1
Mr. Brooks, white people engage in identity politics themselves, just because they are the majority, the norm, doesn't change the fact that they do. Then we have Christian identity politics, the evangelicals and other religious extremists of the majority religions of Christianity, are guilty of group think of their own which include blocking the rights of people who do not agree with them. Same with many, many non-queer folk. We all engage in identity politics. However, it seems that only majority groups or groups considered proper such as "Christians" who want their beliefs enshrined in our laws and the rights of others constrained.
It is only minority groups, save women who make up 51% of the US population, that are called out for identity politics. We deserve to have our voices heard just as much as people who are straight and white as well as white males. And we deserve to have our say on politics, laws, civil rights, civil liberties, wonen's healthcare, especially reproductive rights, and more.
When we are loud and insistent it's because that is the only way we are heard.
3
The creation of separate groups and classes is perfectly exemplified in our Constitution. Black slaves became three fifths of a person. Women and non land owning people were disenfranchised. Our Supreme Court said it was OK to put Japanese Americans into concentration camps. And now through Citizens United our highest court has said that those who have the most money have the most influence on our elections.
I am a single individual who has studied these things as many commenters here have done. That I have come to agree with them does not make the ideas of this individual less important, but as I join with others to find what ever truth there is power to influence things comes about. The question of individual vs. group becomes not important. Individuals can spur groups to action and groups with an open perspective can lead hopefully to Individuals becoming more thoughtful and independent.
I think you can agree with Hannah Arendt and Irving Howe and still come to the conclusion that many people fall short of transcending their own background and render independent and objective judgments about society. To take one example, in a world in which most people truly thought independently, would it be the case that people brought up in a particular faith remain in that faith? Does Mr. Brooks honestly believe that the millions of any religion came to embrace it independently? How about political dynasties? Would George W. Bush have been a Republican had he not been the son and grandson of prominent Republicans? Would he even have been a politician for that matter.
To transcend one's background, one has to acknowledge the extent that your background can impact your life without even realizing it.
We also have to acknowledge the extent to which the thinking of those around us shapes our own beliefs as well. Many people, especially the most sociable among us, will consciously or subconsciously be drawn to what seems to be the most popular belief. It's a rare person who is truly uninfluenced by the beliefs of their communities.
4
You ask, "Under what circumstances should we embrace the idea that collective identity shapes our thinking? Under what circumstances should we resist collective identity and insist on the primacy of individual discretion, and our common humanity?"
Collective identity shapes our thinking when we are insecure and worried. Individual discretion is stronger when we are more confident and secure. Right now anxiety and fear are rampant, so we are in a moment when we must recognize collective identity as shaping our thoughts. This doesn't mean that we should stop pressuring for a change of viewpoint.
2
I echo David Brooks's feelings of confusion, and, at age 70 (much older than Brooks), am exasperated by group-think, by the LACK of critical thinking. But maybe that means I am frozen in a time warp when one was supposed to "think for oneself"--as thought that were possible. Thanks to all who wrote comments; they are enlightening. We need to come together and keep our democracy alive.
4
As I have grown older, I have come to believe that it is best to comfort the afflicted even when it means afflicting the comfortable. I hold this view even though I think I am rather well off. I understand that there is a substantial number of people who believe that if we simply supply the comfortable with sufficient comfort, they will take care of things. That's a point of view I doubt I shall ever accept. I admit that I tend to be attracted towards those who share my views.
So I suppose my view of the world is more likely to affect my group affiliation rather than the other way around.
2
I think part of the confusion is in considering these identities as “group identities.” My identity as a woman is personal even though 50+% of the world’s population also identifies as women. Just because the identity covers a group of people, it does not mean the person identifies WITH that group as a monolithic entity. My experience as a woman is specific to me, just as with any other identifier I may fit: just as being a conservative white male may describe Mr. Brooks, it does not define him or make him representative. Still, these identities do influence our experiences and outlooks, and can very much influence the ways we are treated by others. They shape our INDIVIDUAL selves, but identitfying with a group does not take away our individuality.
2
Intersectionality has defined me before I ever heard this word, but we still function in treating most marginalized groups as monoliths. I am an American citizen (by birth for those who care), but will always be AFRICAN American. There is some validity in categorizing people, but we also need to realize ONE (socially constructed) adjective does not fully define any one person. But the collective majority of us are well aware of our Other American status, especially when in "mixed" company. I have never been more aware of my skin until starting Physician Assistant school, and am reminded of this daily. Not from bigoted test questions or faculty, but from the looks of relief on the faces of many Black patients when I greet them. Being told "I'm so proud of you" by strangers because we share a common social construct I never expected. For us Other Americans, because whether we want to or not, we will ALWAYS be "speaking as." I don't have an answer for this either, and that seems to be the point. If we started with teaching unbiased history, that would be a step towards thinking critically about today's society. We'd also realize that the Bill of Rights was drafted almost immediately after the Constitution to serve as a conspicuous "rule" that our laws MUST change over time along with society. It's not that we are in a state of radical change, we are pushing against radical stagnation. This piece isn't perfect, but I find that brilliant.
6
We can adopt a stance outside of ideological influences. It requires discipline in thought and attention and behavior. Just because your experience leads you to identify wiith an ideology doesn't mean you have to surrender your humanity in taking sides.
3
The deconstructionists and Sapir Whorfian type have nothing on people who manage to have some real multi-cultural experience early on.
I used to have a colleague who thought French is a dead language. In a way, he is like some French of yesteryears who would pretend not to speak English when they were approached by tourists for information in France. Ethnocentricity is a tough nut to crack.
People like Foucault and Derrida help to show how we are our own jailer. To transcend that, the ability to put yourself in other people's shoes may be an antidote. So you don't have to be able to speak French to experience different culture or to distinguish 12 kinds of snow like the Eskimo to appreciate one's environment cannot be an tyrant of oneself. By a simple thought experiment, or exchange, you cannot appreciate other people's fear and hope, phobia and addiction. Such is the power of empathy
1
Individual rational agency was central to the European Enlightenment. But colonialism and racism also were. As Europe encountered the rest of the world through the very technological leaps that rationality made possible (see Columbus...), the “Enlightenment” created Manifest Destiny and the White Man's Burden. The Enlightenment was not universal, but a project of white European identity, which created other identities in opposition to itself, like “black.”
As we recognize how much social conditions affect people's viewpoints, skills, and material conditions, universalisms like "the basis of human dignity is our capacity to make up our own minds" falter. Does an infant or a person with dementia have no human dignity? Or people so abused or oppressed (or misled) that it's meaningless to assert?
The best identity politics holds both the truth of difference: that individuals are unique results of their conditions; and of affinity: groups form in response to oppression.
So there’s no neutral position, no way to not be a representative of your identity groups. But that doesn’t mean that deliberation and democracy are shams. It means that more listening is necessary to others’ experiences, and less universalizing. And more education about one’s own position and conditioning, especially by privileged folks like you (Mr. Brooks) and me. Group identity is a long-coming arising of agency among the oppressed, and rightly challenges the epistemological foundations of [our] system.
3
Someone who denies the influence that their "group" has on them would be foolish, but anyone who has ever engaged in what feels like independent thought is well aware of a "me-ness". I think it is folly to claim that we are only puppets on the strings of our social identities. Those who have attempted to examine their lives (as in Socrates: the unexamined life is not worth living) have a sense of existential choice that feels as if it transcends whatever stereotypes in which others may choose to see us. It may not be much, and I may be covered with blind spots, but it's all I've got. It was good enough for Socrates.
I think that Mr. Brooks is quite aware of his own sense of me-ness and is being unduly deferential to the social theorists. We make our choices and live with them. I am not going to let someone else tell me who I am based on some demographics. Nor will I attempt to visit this on anyone else. People are not always who they seem-- they have lives of their own.
1
There is a very real danger in increasingly adopting stances suggesting that immutable aspects of our identities will determine not merely what arguments we will find persuasive, but what we identify as true. Of course it is the case that our experiences come to shape our views of the world. However, if we cynically dismiss what a culture professes to be true as merely an effort of elites to monopolize power, we are led inevitable conclusion that the pursuit of truth, and efforts to persuade, are merely exercises in oppression, and very likely, white supremacy, with all the connotations and that term carries. It also follows that our interests will best be represented and protected, and our experience understood, only by people who share our ethnic, gender, or religious background, and that anyone making an attempt to appeal to interests that seem more universal are merely doing so to exploit us. Under these circumstances, why even both to make an effort towards a classical liberal democracy? Along similar lines, why even bother to be open to an argument posed by someone who does not look like us? What Brooks highlights here is that taken to their logical conclusions, the distillation of Foucalt-esque reasoning becomes a justification for choosing our political and other affiliations based on immutable things like race. It follows from this that no challenges or dissent should ever be permitted by anyone who looks different. Can you imagine anything more divisive?
In the voice of a straight white senior male whose livelihood does NOT depend on composing thoughtful insights of wide interest, "this doesn't matter much".
Any dogma is eventually rendered successfully into antique smithereens by its authors, heirs, or critics, but not replaced by universal verities.
You can still speak for yourself any time, just not for anybody else.
1
There are two people types in terms of their thinking-ness. Those that do think and those that don’t so much. Those that do less of the thinky stuff adopt their groups (ethno socio) defined prevailing cultural political ideology ..such as it is discerned by them. Those that do think, do similarly with the exception that right wing ideology is adopted by thinkers as a strategic position ...enabling a status quo in socio- political -cultural matters. And left wing ideologies are adopted by thinkers because it is reasonable or likely to be reasonable given the source of the ideology. Which is to say there is little reason - little logic, in current right wing ideology - other than that seen in their strategic over arching effect that they ... the ideology, effectively exists to support the status quo and so further enable US business and imperial war mongering. Giving us then right wing non thinking pawns and left wing non thinking subjugatees, cynical right wing thinkers and left wing thinkers hand ringing over everything liberal because it’s complicated . Haha well I say that’s no less cogent than brooks’ column.
1
I join the commenters who point out that identifying one's perspective is not necessarily a claim of special authority. It can be disclosure of one's frame of reference. I perceived own my frame of reference much more clearly after experiences working and living in settings where I was the minority. I began to understand how little I understood, despite my education in critical thinking (which was very like Mr. Brooks'.)
For people who do not get to experience true immersion in another's frame of reference, aging may be a useful comparator because being old is so different from being young. How does a person of 60 persuasively convey to a 10- or 20-year-old the complexity of things young people do not experience? It takes much more than critical thinking and discourse. Often it cannot be done at all. Still, we try.
3
"... after experiences working and living in settings where I was the minority."
Your "experiences" would be more informative if you actually told us what you learned when you were in "the minority".
"I began to understand how little I understood, despite my education in critical thinking ..."
Likewise for your "education in critical thinking". Didn't you ever read a book or see a movie about someone who is in "the minority"?
"It takes much more than critical thinking and discourse."
You seem to have a narrow interpretation of the term "critical thinking". For a broader perspective, see:
"Critical Thinking Skills For Dummies" by Martin Cohen.
Some things defy conventional definition--maybe we expect too much? The articulation of value pluralism ( https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/value-pluralism/#Con ) might be relatively recent (mid-20th century), but it has been around a long time.
When, at least since the Renaissance (and since the printing press), has our "epistemological foundation" not been in flux?
Is our existing educational system predicated on training critical thinkers? Not necessarily--circumstances can vary widely.
Is the basis of human dignity based on the capacity to make up our own minds? Or is tolerance more important to dignity?
I question the foundational nature of several of Mr. Brooks questions--albeit I come up short on any definitive answers.
1
People are complex. I think of 'identity' as a series of concentric circles, like a target. The center is our core and the people who are closest to us. The next ring can be our race or religion or neighborhood. Then maybe our profession or State or political party, or a hobby we identify with, etc. The content of each person's rings will be different, but for everyone, the closer the ring to the center, the stronger our emotional attachment to that part of our identity and the stronger our beliefs about anything attached to it. That is why the whole new way of receiving information has been so effective. Whether it is Facebook or our favorite news station or website, we are fed large amounts of information that can attach to different parts of our identity. We may have a strong opinion about something in an outer ring that doesn't actually affect us that much, but it becomes an automatic response because that is how we show our 'membership' in that group. This is especially true for hot button issues like abortion. Most people rarely or ever deal with this, yet it may determine how they vote on many issues because that is how their group votes. However, a family member may be considering an abortion for a variety of reasons. Since our primary emotional allegiance is to their well being, we will develop reasoning that justifies having this particular abortion. Identity is not just one box, or ring, it is many.
1
"I think of 'identity' as a series of concentric circles, like a target."
That's a good start, but you would do better to think also of intersecting circles. Thus, Milo Yiannopoulos is gay and conservative. There are also people who are neither and people who are one or the other, but not both.
Google "Venn diagram" for illustrations of the possibilities.
Further, people can *change* "identity" over the course of their lives. Malcolm X transformed himself several times. See "The Autobiography of Malcolm X".
2
Good points--but, yuck, even more complexity!
All belief is conditioned, not only in ways we understand (parenting, e.g.), but also in ways we do not understand. The error of identity politics advocates is that they think they understand conditioning in some unique and special way, giving them license to lecture and silence everyone else.
"Under what circumstances should we embrace the idea that collective identity shapes our thinking?"
Answering this question was much easier during the Cold War; explains why national consensus has grown thinner and divisiveness thicker after 1991. Are we so mindless that we still need an external enemy to bind us? Perhaps.
"Under what circumstances should we resist collective identity and insist on the primacy of individual discretion, and our common humanity?"
Answering this question was much easier when one ethnic group held sway over the nation. Does this mean that the "epistemological foundation of our system" will remain in "surprising radical flux" this century given the changing demographics and ethnic changes? Perhaps.
We just need more columns like these. Good piece.
1
I have spent a career studying small particles suspended in the air, aerosols. This is a somewhat arcane science that involved devising instruments and making measurements. When I started, the Clean Air Act was in the works and we were defining air quality. Then I got involved in airborne measurements. To me U-2 is a plane. The questions at altitude involved ozone depletion, volcanic aerosols, aircraft emissions and finally aerosol-cloud interactions, important in climate change.
I have seen all kinds of denial as interested parties tried to protect their economic privilege from the truth and regulations. Trump has resurrected and empowered con men who are claiming that air pollution does not kill; that the damage of lead is exaggerated; that ozone depletion and climate change are fictions.
Pruitt wants to impose impossible regulations on research and to discard all previous knowledge that fails to meet their ridiculous rules. They call releasing confidential patient information transparency. The real objective is to put health effects behind a curtain of patient privacy.
Scientific methods, results and data are all published and are available to the public. The raw data make no sense to anyone but the researcher. Pruitt wants the raw data so that he can lie about more things and he knows that the public will not be able to follow his fabrications. He will occupy scientists with clerical tasks and impede actual science.
In this war on science, your kids will die.
5
The strategy to "divide and conquer" comes in many forms and works so well because the people who embrace it seldom recognize it for what it is. We are all more powerful together, but that might mean giving up a custom-made spotlight just for me, and in the age of ME starring ME, how many are willing to do that? Social media scripts, lighting, setting, and audience mean the public persona is all and the celebrity experience is the only goal, while those simply acting for the greater good labor in obscurity and are soon shuffled off the stage.
1
I think your interpretation of Foucault is off, and it might help your conundrum to reconsider his stance in "post-structuralism", and recognize that his theory of power is bottom-up, not top-down.
Finally, throw off the Cartesian definitions of ontology and the human being, and take Nietzsche's stance more seriously. You're not the first to encounter this old dilemma, and any viewer of Rick and Morty can tell you aren't alone for feeling confused.
2
I don't know where Brooks hangs out, but it's fairly rare in my world to hear anyone say, "As a...," and when they do, it's often greeted with groans and/or eye-rolls. And I do diversity and inclusion work fer Pete's sake, and when a client does it, I coach them to not do it.
Meanwhile, those of us not stuck somewhere in the 80's understand that the integration and synthesis of the perspectives and experiences divined from our cultural, family, regional, faith, and other contexts on the one hand, and our learning and rationality on the other, is what leads to more robust understanding, better collaboration, and precise decision-making and idea-generation.
"How does being a Latina influence how you read a black writer like St. Augustine?" Hmmm, probably any number of ways, even more ways if you are a Black Latina, an actual thing Brooks clearly did not consider. Because of the evolution that's actually allowed more expansive and integrative thinking, a good educational system would enable a White Latina for instance to examine if there's anything additionally of note to her. It would also compel her to interrogate what she might NOT be able to access or connect to because she's White, or female, or not North African, or not 1700 years old.
As ever, Brooks navel-gazes about some personal pet peeve, imagines it to be a universal truth, and pens an Op-Ed based on that imagining. And this time, he becomes exactly the morsel that apparently sticks in his own craw.
12
Speaking as a career journalist, what I miss most are the columnists like Mike Royko and Jimmy Breslin who got out of the office and into the streets and spoke to everyday people and came up with points of view nobody of any race or gender would ever consider. I wish every op-ed page would have a few columnists like this -- they could be a variety of races and genders -- who would be allowed to get out of the office and into the streets, hospital ERs, police stations, churches and soup kitchens of their communities, to find stories that can make all of us think twice about any and every issue. In these days of short attention spans and social media addiction, who knows if any such columnists would still garner any readers. I would definitely be one.
10
Amen.
We need another Studs Terkel.
1
A simple answer is : our opinions are born of complicated factors.
We are neither as free as we thought, nor as bound as we think.
8
Our basic human instinct is to join groups, out of need or fear, whether to grow into a herd of peaceful cows or hoses, or to join a large and fierce wolf pack with a stricter hierarchy. You may recall how important it was to be in the right group in high-school. That urge persists in college, work, neighborhoods, religion, and many other groups, but the possible development in later life is to explore whether we can express our differences in a group and still be accepted, or if that is verboten. The big countervailing force is whether as the size of the group grows the leadership feels threatened and out of fear of wants individuals to be quiet, moving toward the wolf pack. Then they want stricter rules---individuals are punished or fired. Good leaders are comfortable with questions, criticisms, and look for the ways that differences can value to the group. We look for the "right" group but when anxious flash back to identity politics, red-lining, discrimination, and assume that "the Others" are wolves. Democracy offers the tantalizing ideal that each of is equally valued, but that's awfully hard work. How can it work with our primitive emotions? Mr. Brooks asks: Should society focus on groups or on individuals? There is no one set line. Both are important, and a wise human would weave back and forth, seeing groups while under pressure, then withdrawing to reflect, then stepping out to speak of the dilemmas we all face.
1
This is what is so transparently dishonest about this essay: when Brooks cannot understand, or agree with, the paradigms or epistemological positions of others, he retreats to a notion of the 'individual' thinker: an abstract notion of some kind of individual who is free of social and political conditioning. The rub is that this abstract 'individual' thinker thinks in a way that is remarkably similar (if not identical) to a white male (in contemporary American middle class society).
In other words, Brooks wants to perpetuate the fiction that there is some kind of perfect, unadulterated kind of consciousness or point of view that is not affected by all the messiness of 'identity politics'-- and that point of view is identical to what Brooks learned from white male thinkers, from Edmund Burke to Samuel Huntington.
This is the same tired lament of white males in power that we have heard from decades: when other groups assert that their experiences and points of view are equally important, thinkers like Brooks drag out the figure of the 'individual thinker' who always looks exactly like themselves.
I think (or at least hope) that people are fooled by this clumsy and insincere ploy less and less.
10
David Brooks illustrates how his perspective as a white male is not limited by his race by name checking 5 white males.
6
St. Augustine was a Berber.
1
"Why are people’s views ...... strongly determined by political label?"
You have been trying for some time avoid the core of the problem: there are forces in the society that aggressively try to control people's minds and prevent them to think independently. It is called propaganda. It is very effective. There three kinds of propaganda in this country that contributed to divisions we have now.
1. Religious propaganda where churches use their cloud to shape people's political views.
2. Right wing propaganda that has ideological goals, and influence comes with significant profiting. That makes this effort simply self-financing.
3. Plutocratic (corporate) propaganda where money is the only goal and influence over democratic process is the means. NRA and many other organizations belong to this group.
What has been new last 40 years is that all three types of conservative propaganda work together for the common goal: Money and Power.
Do liberals have similar groups supporting their ideological goals? Not even close! And there are many reasons for that. Liberals are more diverse, more independent and energy is more grassroots-oriented, whereas core conservative constituency can be easily whipped up at any midterms. The liberal energy surfaces in a unified form only occasionally. Last time it was the anger about Iraq fiasco and financial meltdown (2006-2008), this time it is the anger about Trump's freak show.
5
Mr. Brooks is coming to grips with the reality that a lot of personally very important propositions are subjective. It's hard for white guys to see this b/c the world is set up so that their personal preferences/beliefs/outlooks are the nominals defaults. The fall of this hegemony upsets the situation and provokes such epistemological questions. Deal with it, David. The rest of us, who never fit so neatly into the pleasant valley Sunday, had to a long time ago.
56
Where do you come up with this stuff? You are a white male, and you think and behave within the confines of white males. Just look at the authors you read, the ones you cite. I suspect almost all of your friends, and certainly your closest ones, are white males. When you respond to any stimulus you respond like a white male. This column for instance. What has happened in the last 40-50 years is that others who aren't white males have forced you to realize that not everyone has white male experiences and a white male mind and to think about what non-whites and non-males might be thinking. Ever wonder why no one decries "identity politics" except white folks and especially white males?
11
I think you may be a latent Buddhist Mr. Brooks. What you are really seeking is enlightenment. What is stopping you is that from before the time of your birth, your perceptions have been influenced by everything you have experienced in you life. Buddhists call this the veils of perception - that in front of our eyes are many veils that prevent us from perceiving reality as it truly is. The solution is meditation, starting with emptying your mind. That's probably pretty hard for intellectuals like you who make their living by thinking, but it is absolutely necessary if you really want to identify with reality. And one of the tenets enlightened Buddhists come to understand is that your own identity is itself an illusion- that there is nothing fundamental that separates I from other. We are all one. I know it sounds crazy but that may be because our entire lives, we have been trained to think think the opposite. To apply this to our politics, we can conclude that the identity politics that conservative tend to dislike is ultimately about the identity of all of us.
3
One answer may be to look at the work of Kahneman and Tversky on judgment and the idea that we seek out opinions that confirms our biases. This may be more how we are wired than due to cultural influences although the content of the bias may be more social-cultural. The way out is to maintain as best you can your critical thinking about assumptions and explain them, point them out and then come to your conclusion which is a critical role of the op-ed columnist.
2
"But other times, group identity seems irrelevant to many issues. How does being gay shape your view of U.S.-German relations or breaking up big tech? How does being Latina influence how you read a black writer like St. Augustine?"
As a professor at the University of Chicago, from where Mr. Brooks earned his bachelor's degree and where he recently gave a speech at graduation, I can say that class, gender, sexual identity, and racial identity have a tremendous amount to do with how one experiences and understands these things, and many more. The books explaining how are out there, the statistics demonstrating how are out there, and the intellectuals willing to engage with Mr. Brooks are out there, and Mr. Brooks is fully aware of this-- he simply doesn't care to listen.
Thus this 'confusion' is nothing more than a refusal to engage with or even take seriously political, academic, and intellectual discourses which have been around for decades-- the very discourses that Brooks dismisses in this piece. Worse, it is a refusal to take seriously the experiences of others, and acknowledge that they can be radically different from one's own, through the agency of forces outside the individual's control. It is, at its heart, a lack of empathy, and a refusal to extend epistemological respect to others.
Enough of this whining about 'the individual'. For Mr. Brooks, that individual is clearly always 'a white male' -- that is what he "cannot understand."
6
Mr. Brooks. Once more, you have outdone yourself. This is simply magnificent. Thank you. As you point out, we are literally sawing off the branch on which we are perched by undermining the key philosophical assumptions on which our beliefs in human dignity, freedom, and democracy rest.
For Mr Brooks to not realize that his thoughts, education and opinions did not just take form in a vacuum but in the crucible of his upbringing, “group culture” privilege and life experience, majority of which was determined more by fate than by his choice, shows surprising lack of insight, for a middle aged white man! Yes individual thought exists and no one person fits stereotypes, but no one person exists as an island.
3
I'm a transgender woman and it definitely colors how I interact with life.
I think of it this way, I went from being a white male with all that priviledge to being a transgender white female who never sees anyone like me anywhere organically and is shunned by society as either a delusional crazy person by the many on the left or a malevolent child molester by the majority on the right.
When I unpack my handbag, I see more similarities to other minority groups than white people. I never see anyone like me ever. I don't see people like me in power. I can't expect to be protected by anyone on the street.
The only way I can survive is to find all the other transgender queer people like me and be friends. I have strength through a tribe of people just like me, but for most of my day I am a stranger in a land of otherness.
Identity shapes peoples opinions more than they could ever expect. To transcend that identity should be the goal, but at this moment in time one must embrace our identities to survive. A majority of Americans think I'm insane or evil, and for me the only people that actually understand are other transgender people. It doesn't matter the race, I have more in common with my black transgender friends then with any white woman.
I am impressed when my fellow community members stand up for me, but I've also been sexually harassed by a community member. My tribe has never hurt me. In today's America, there is no community. Only tribes.
2
We are in a period in which guilt by association has become part of our cultural and political dialogue. The flip side is that pride of association is also part of the same dialogue. The president plays both sides of this cultural coin. He condemns those he finds guilty of violating his standards of behavior and praises those (Putin) he admires for their ability to defy social and cultural norms. He hates norms unless he dictates them.
Brooks's column reminds me of Franz Kafka's "The Trial" and the way in which K. is treated by anonymous officials and accused of a crime they will not and do not define. Guilt by association. Our president often defies the myth of guilt, judgment, and atonement that forms much of the moral basis of Christianity and Judaism. Yet, he is very willing to pass judgment on others (Hillary - lock her up) and to single out minority groups for special denunciation (the Central Park Five). He is easily angered when someone comments on his "sins" (especially with regard to women).
In our long history, we Americans have struggled through generations to accommodate the beliefs, ethnicity, race, cultural heritage, and gender of many different groups that comprise our society in all of hits diversity. Obviously, some people do not like diversity unless they are in the dominant group. Even then, diversity is a threat to many of them (see mass incarceration of African American men). The more things seem to change, the more they don't.
Gross simplification of Nietzsche and Foucault. I can't believe anyone who has actually read them would write what Brooks does. And I do not know anyone who suggests group membership determines all opinion. Has Brooks ever heard of intersectionality? The topic of this essay is worth think about but please we need justice to be done to the issue. Not, a bunch of silly simplifications .
2
We have all sorts of identities. I am Tom first, then I am a guy, next a member of my family, then a Christian. I am an American, of Irish descent I might add, a New Yorker, from the Bronx, a veteran, and straight. Now straight modifies guy just as Irish modifies American. But these are important parts of my identity. There are neither here nor there but they are me. And to some extent they inform my views. But not exclusively. I read books, have all sorts of friends, travel. My opinions come from here, there, and everywhere. Theoretically I am part of the patriarchy. The white, male, heterosexual, aging, patriarchy. But I never get invited to the meetings. They sent me to Vietnam, didn't even ask. I have some kind of white privilege, just can't get seem a handle on it. The silliness would be amusing, if it wasn't so damn negative.
55
"you put together a panel discussion or a work team, even on a subject like oncology, you don’t want to have a bunch of white males sitting up there."
To tell you the truth, if I am lying on an operating table, or am a passenger on an airplane (or subjected to anything that matters), I do not care if it is "a bunch of white males" (or a bunch of black males) who are running the show - just as long as they are all there for their skill and not for the purpose of "lending a different voice" because of their color or background.
4
Mr Brooks,
You express your dilemma as an "either/or" but it is really a "both". One's background, inclusive of group status, provides the context in which one determine's one's own beliefs.
For example, I'm an atheist, and unusual for my generation, raised that way. I find religion fascinating, I even took a minor in it in college. I understand a great many things about religious practice, about comparative studies of different faiths, even about the psychological effects of being a believer.
But I don't get it. I've tried to imagine what it's like to believe, truly, in a god. I find that I can't; I don't understand how one holds such a belief in the face of what I see as a complete lack of any reason to believe.
I can, however, decide what to think of people who are religious, and what the best way is to interact with that fact. Many atheists get pretty...intense...about disagreeing with the religious and end up demonizing (as it were). I choose not to. People have all sorts of beliefs, and who am I to start a fight about the literature on which someone decides to base their values?
So, could Shakespeare capture the experience of being a woman? It depends what you mean. Could he understand the perspectives of women with whom he spoke, and represent those perspectives in his work? Probably. Could he, from independent observation, generate representative expressions of female experience? I doubt it.
"beliefs are just masks groups use to preserve power structures, and democracy is a fraud."
Democracy isn't a fraud. It is a highly organized method of choosing representative leadership. It has no inherent capability to affect the quality of election outcomes, that's a function of the groups.
I think the big difference between the left groups and the right groups is that the left strives for a more egalitarian community and the right strives to structure the community to the advantage of the prosperous. Egalitarian outcomes may be a byproduct, but not a necessary one.
As far as critical thinking is concerned, the modern media sound bite is designed to dampen such activity. Too much critical thinking creates fault lines in the mantra
The political influence, enabled by unabated monetary investment, talk radio and opinionated news channels has so effectively divided our society that growing numbers feel the need to fall in line along party lines. Many subscribe to political parties regardless of whether policies counter their own interests. This represents mental laziness and some cases, social needs to relate to those deemed important to impress or just fit in with. Sadly, we may be a generation or more away from individual critical thinking rising to the popularity realized in the 1950's.
There is a well-developed theme among conservatives that Brooks gives voice to here. It consists of perceiving the voices of others--when cast as Others--as part of a dissolution of what is good about America. Whether characterized as identity politics, tribalism, or group-think, it is always about Them: They are going to ruin America.
Never mind that you already need to have in your head a notion that They are a Them rather than a part of Us to even perceive these situations as conservatives have. It all amounts, then, to conservatives complaining about historically marginalized groups' failure to become just like them. How could they? No one would let them, because conservatives were already practicing an identity politics which demanded utter conformity to their ideals.
In reality, people who have been demonized and marginalized by being placed in categories often not of their own choosing now feel more free to speak out without abandoning ties of kin and community, or honesty to self. They don't have to mindlessly conform to a conservative model as was demanded of all of us back in the 1950s.
Brooks' fears are overwrought. The large identity categories he mentions are just that: categories, not groups with cohesive cultures. Brooks would do well to read some of the anthropology and sociology describing the differences between identity, culture, and social group. Popular perception lumps these under one label, but they truly are not. Don't panic, Brooks.
3
Yes, David, democracy is a fraud. What's your problem? You have stood, do stand, will continue to stand with the capitalist model. "You are what you eat."
1
Ugh. Of course there is a spectrum depending on the subject. It doesn't much matter one's cultural group on opinions like "when will the sun set near us?" [evening] or "when is high tide?" [roughly 6 hours after low tide]. At the other end are the interpersonal and religious where cultural background colors everything.
For someone who has practiced journalism for a long time, one would think Mr. Brooks would have long ascertained that the idea of objectivity in journalism is impossible. A journalist brings his/her values into investigating and reporting news, just as a historian does interpreting history, and an archivist appraising archival material. Cognizance of this is a better safeguard against bias than any make believe " objectivity".
1
What has happened, speaking as a 62 year old white male, is that society has become more, and more susceptible to "group think" due to the importance of media and then social media as forces shaping opinions. When I was a teenager people worried about the force of television and the media in general as a cultural influence. Before the rise of the media opinions were a matter of what "individuals" thought. As the mass media grew in ubiquity people saw that others had the same opinions as they did and thus suddenly saw themselves as a member of a group having the same opinion as others did rather than as Uncle Harry or Aunt Mabel living in isolation who held opinions not knowing or caring if anyone agreed with them. The growth of internet base social media poured gasoline on this trend and previously marginalized opinions such as "white power" and "neo-nazism" exploded with the number of people identifying with each group. The Democrats also fueled this trend by their embrace of identity politics on the left. Donald Trump is the first President to be elected based on manipulation of public opinion through psychoactive micro-targeting which is only possible through the ubiquity of internet based social media. This is the classic paradigm of "mass society" which provided the basis for authoritarian regimes in Europe after World War II. Whether our current situation leads to authoritarianism remains to be seen.
There is an obesity epidemic in this country (40%) that may be a corollary. Just like people eat junk food and are too lazy to exercise, people ingest junk culture and are too lazy to exercise their minds.
4
Basic Buddhist concept: don't think so much.
3
So do you think the path of belief in the biggest belief of all is taking us and the rest of a believing world past the graveyard?
From the moment of birth we and many people throughout our world are taught to worship and follow the dictates of a non existent being.
Think we have a chance to make up our own minds? To think critically?
Think again,
"If you want to learn about a culture, listen to the stories.
If you want to change the culture, change the stories."
-Michael Margolis
3
I think a major change is the fact that our political system has been kidnapped by the political parties so that you are assured that one group or another controls your voting districts (Gerrymandering). This means that you no longer need to represent those with other ideas, your job is to confirm the ideas of your "tribe" or party. So now "group" thinking is now political actions which effects us all.
We need a system that allows various ideas to be represented so that compromise, debate and fairness is part of our law , making. If a politician recognizes they have large numbers of people with different ideas they need for election they will be a different type then the ones we have now.
2
The thing with the kind of deep, careful thinking Mr. Brooks expects individuals to engage in is that it is difficult, time-consuming, and requires a fairly high level of education. In today's world, everything is speeding up, and slow deliberation is very definitely out of fashion. We want our answers like we want our consumer goods -- right now. People raised in a sound-bite world, thinking in 140 characters, cannot engage in that kind of deliberation. They will get lost if they try. Our education system does not teach this kind of thinking to any but the most privileged, and even they feel the pressure to move faster, do more, be more productive, keep up with the latest. Who then, has time to really think and question?
1
David Brooks knows from many, many columns that "speaking as a Jew" means something. His narrative of the American story being the Exodus story was enthusiastically adopted by American Jews of both genders and all income levels. Choosing to belong to the American Jewish community provides a set of values and a history that people can speak out of and which have been defined clearly. Brooks is really asking whether being born one thing and not another provides those values and that history or whether it should. Being born one thing and not another certainly provides the experience of being defined as an outsider that can cause you to question what you are told by mainstream culture/institutions. The central experience of your life can be how much you wish to join the mainstream culture/institutions so speaking from that experience can be especially meaningful.
This is not rocket science. Few would deny that our experiences shape our perceptions but somehow this is translated negatively into "identity" poltics. Substitute experience for identity and it all seems less toxic.
2
We are both. Both individuals, and members of a group.
In fact, we are not both, we are many, as we are members of several groups.
So we have both group thinking and individual thinking.
And, as such, we are full of contradictions.
We have all 'identities' within us, and one other thing,
which is not identified with anything at all.
Which leads us to the idea of an independent faculty within us,
which has the ability to step back from and reflect on our own thinking.
That is, we are sometimes, or can be sometimes, objective.
It is not either objective or subjective, but both.
3
The answer is so simple even an op-ed columnist can understand it.
There is nothing wrong with a columnist being biased. In fact, if he or she were not biased I would question their sincerity.
More important than bias is neutrality. If you believe, say, deficits are a bad thing then you should believe that regardless of which party is in control of government.
If you believe drug users should serve hard time you should believe that regardless of the drug in question or if it is used in Compton, CA., or Hollow Flats, WV.
Huh? Speaking as someone not too impressed by:
1. Our half-witted media lugging around Easy Bake theories about everything, particularly the utterly obsolete, facile, Nietzsche,
2. Some idiotic/misanthropic idea that subjective vs objective has a leg to stand on,
3. The instant division of people in to coffin-like, instantly dismissive categories,
...May I say that the idea that these endlessly twisted debates reflects anything but a total lack of comprehension as practiced by lazy spin artists simply follows the generalizations to where they usually go, i.e., nowhere.
The ongoing polarization of anything and everything cannot be considered debate, a form of knowledge, or anything but polarization. It can't be considered rational, or good for the health of society, either. Who the hell needs these infantile, backward "This is what you think" insults?
Read Breitbart, or any other Rabies As Media outlet, and you'll find the exact opposite. They spend a lot of time telling you what OTHER groups think, or want to do. This level of distortion and falsification is simply dishonest, not based on fact. It relies on ignorance to be credible.
This is a synthetic debate method, created purely to express views and denigrate others. It doesn't deserve any kind of traction. Views are attributed, not determined by ANY other consideration.
Speaking as a white male, may I advise these turgid theorists to objectively get lost and take their excuses with them, preferably ASAP?
Only a prosperous white Christian male would ask this question. As the default culture, Mr. Brooks is oblivious to the fact that he himself belongs to a group, and speaks from the viewpoint of that group. As a woman, an immigrant, a non Christian, I have had experiences he has not. These experiences have made me feel like an outsider until fairly recently, when other women, immigrants, and non Christians began to speak from their unique point of view. When I speak from the point of view of a woman, I am not precluding things I have in common with Mr. Brooks, simply giving a different point of view from my perspective. Does being a woman affect my view on German trade relations? Probably not. However, one of the fascinating insights gained from the #Me Too movement was how clueless men were that we exist in a parallel world of harassment, put downs, and discrimination that they never noticed was going on. Outsider voices must be heard for our society to achieve equality, justice, and democracy.
4
"Under what circumstances should we resist collective identity and insist on the primacy of individual discretion, and our common humanity?" There are none. "Common humanity" is secondary as well. It is the only way to even approach objective truth.
David is right to be confused and brave to admit it. Part of the problem is the inherent difficult merging of three very different ways of knowing, along with too much certainty by practitioners and loyalists of each individual one. They're all correct, at times, and sometimes--in degrees, at the same time. It also varies, as he helpfully shows, by issue. Sorting through this is hampered by the common poor understanding that emotions are integrated with thought, and not just in negative ways; as well as the now-prevalent distrust of where those with different political opinions are coming from. That makes it difficult to hear them.
I think we have to get used to the idea of being part right on most issues, and maybe largely right on just a few of them. Then we might become more open to those with a complementary part of the overall truth, as well as the different epistemologies that got them there.
I hope David stays with this; listens to all the comments he's getting, including but not just those that say he needs to be more reflective of where he, himself, is coming from, for better and worse. Then he should let us know where this takes him. If he is successful, this journey with readers through the fundamentals of knowing could inform us in a range of difficult issues with which we struggle, and for which there don't seem to be a lot of creative and widely shared answers.
I know it sounds trite, but both Mr. Brooks and a vast majority of the commentators here are right. At least in part. Dichotomies are a useful tool for beginning an exploration of a behavior field (whether it be politics, economics or any other field attempting to explain the behavior of a large population). They are not useful as the foundation for a grand unified theory of behavior. Yes, some have the detachment and dispassion to be pure reasoners, but most also rely on personal experience, racial, religious, educational, locality or otherwise, to inform their thinking. And yes, the debate in the public sphere has become more complicated as we have, rightly, encouraged new voices previously sidelined or minimized by practice or prejudice. Neuroscience has also had a lot to share recently in demonstrating how much less flexible humans are naturally in their thinking than we all feel we are.
We come on our fellow citizens as they are, a complex population influenced by a great number of things. It feels that Mr. Brooks is looking for the unified theorem of public rhetoric that would allow intellectuals like him to speak persuasively to the whole population. I fear that this is a bridge to far. Lets settle for working on a reawakening of the fundamental principles of our democratic republic, that is that we all have something to contribute to the debate, and while you may be dead wrong, you are not evil for having a different opinion than I do.
1
So the question is about human identity and formation and, occasional evolution, of the ego, the "I" we mean when we say the word "me", from the material at hand, usually a very tribal milleau.
Why we don't wonder more seriously about how that I comes to be, how it gets encrusted with the detritus of the past, the tribal stories we inherit and the enforcement by parentsn extended family and peers of a very narrow, skeletal image of what we are is perplexing.
But at least Mr. Brooks is wondering, raising the question in his usual convoluted way.
Maybe if observed our thoughts for a while we would see that they occur like the weather, unbidden and as if from a void. Maybe we wouldn't take them as seriously and identify with them quite so strongly. Maybe we'd see that what we are is the knowing, not the known.
Worth a look. Identification of the egon mistaking I for what we think, is our biggest problem.
I found Ken Wilber’s book, Trump and a Post-Truth World, highly illuminating on this subject.
One way, I believe, to establish the way we individually view our condition in a collective society is to look to how we accept change. If one were to ask D. Brooks: "would you give up your white male privilege in exchange for another category outside those parameters?" When faced with that decision, we are confronted with all the elements of our condition. It doesn't matter what the label or identity or judgement or perspective or opinion or anything except your own personal view of your place in society.
Knowing your children might no longer gain a social or economic standing they currently possess. Knowing you may not achieve your own dreams. It all plays and all counts.
"Our whole education system is based on the idea that we train individuals to be critical thinkers." In what decade are you living, Mr. Brooks?
1
He is so often out of touch.
So seduced is David Brooks by categories that he labels St. Augustine "a black writer". It would be more accurate to call him a Catholic writer and a Roman – those are categories we can understand in their historical contexts.
The Roman empire melded many peoples; it's quite a stretch to project today's American racial categories onto the Roman Empire. Also, Augustine's ancestral background is not clear. His mother is often believed to have been a Berber – a north African, not a sub-Saharan African.
See, for example,
http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/commentandblogs/2017/08/07/was-st-august...
1
“radical flux” is good...a fitting cap on the unclothed emperor...not to day that everything you say is without its truths, but the alarm was sounded as far back as 1948 by clark gable in “the hucksters” out suseptibility to manipulation by, at the time, advertising, later refinec in “a face in the crowd” by a peddler or worthless pills who was counting on television “the greatest tool for persuasion to sell them to the entire country and coupled with as has been mentioned in today’s comments, our caability for critical thinking, you have the whole nut in its shell.
David, Enough of this soul-searching mumbo jumbo. Your identity was as a Republican. Now it is plain for all who are willing to see that this party isn't and hasn't stood for honest debate and search for fact to guide good policy. It has obstructed and undermined every effort to bring truth to light if that truth interfered with ideology or conflicted with donor interests.
You must accept that you have, perhaps unknowingly, aided and abetted these efforts. But now you know.
It is time to stop trying to hide behind weird, esoteric, navel gazing opinion pieces. If you're going to write for the Times, then use your voice help undo the damage. Find your voice and be bold.
2
I'm offended and high skeptical and suspicious of anyone who says, "As a member of the X... or as a/an..." and everyone else should be, too. What's your algorithm, so to speak? How arrogant, ignorant and false our culture has become to assume there are finite definitions and expectations and cultures of people based on random and trendy groupings.
"How many times have we all heard somebody rise up in conversation and say, “Speaking as a Latina. …” or “Speaking as a queer person. …” or “Speaking as a Jew. …”?"
In sixty-plus years, I've never heard that.
The problem is the reverse: Clueless outsiders asking someone to opine as if that person were an official envoy from a minority community, speaking for all its members
45
If I were among gay friends, in a discussion I might say, "Speaking as a straight person", not because I represent all straight people, but to acknowledge that my perspective may be limited.
6
It can take a very long time for a New York Times writer to come to a conclusion that seems elementary to many of us. Perhaps it has something to do with being surrounded by a cocoon of New York liberals who think alike. It is gratifying to hear that David Brooks has finally recognized the cancer to our politics represented by Identity Politics. Now, if he would only transmit this insight to his colleagues at the paper...
1
Being confused is a conclusion.
Groups are necessary to advance the position of marginalized people. Identity politics were created by the people doing the marginalizing - Africans confined to slavery; women unable to vote or buy property; LGBTQ people forced to live false lives; the diasporas, crusades, inquisition, and the holocaust...
Without the group, we wouldn't have had Civil Rights, Gay Rights, Women's Lib & #MeToo, etc. We would still be silenced and on the fringes of civic engagement. Once people are on more equal footing or a movement is more dormant (after achieving some measurable advancement), I think people are more likely to see the world as an individual - with all of the complexities and contradictions. After all, aren't more people politically 'Independent' than ever before? Seeing the world as an individual is kind of a luxury.
Identity politics defined by information bubbles is a far scarier concept than identity politics defined by a sociological or genetic experience. The latter can be a galvanizing tool; the former is just incredibly corrosive.
2
"Thirteen hardened Democrats . . ."
1
As David Hume observed, much of human thinking is based on custom and habit, and as George Bernard Shaw observed, our theater and entertainment set the tone and the vocabulary of our everyday conversation.
I think that if critical thinking and careful analysis of our own thinking became a custom or a fashion again, we'd all be better off.
These days, sloganeering, 144 character polemics, and identity are the fashion, it seems. Easy stereotypes have come back through social media as click bait.
Sure, we rationalize our situations and so much of our conversation is formulaic that a robot could to it (hello Alexa), but that doesn't have to be the case. I think Mr. Brooks is describing a fashion where we're a bit lazy about our own points of view, and where we don't challenge ourselves enough. Those fashions change.
2
There is no evidence Augustine of Hippo was black. How do you make such a basic error?
David seems a bit adrift here. I would counter that many of us do know which way is up. We know we expand our own capacity through accommodation and active listening. We speed ourselves toward obsolescence when we reduce to best practice too soon or for too long.
Children know what is to be born into disorder and chaos. It doesn't matter who we are...what race, ethnic group or life circumstance we are born into. Everyone has to figure out how to assert ourselves in our own body. That task of self discover is the main occupation for our first year of life. We are quite good at it. Sure, we pick up language, behavioral, and social cues; but learning to roll, walk, and move our head on command is a deeply personal journey.
It's only when we are schooled that we are gifted with "truth" and "best" practice. We are confronted with relentless, constraining, over-specialized coaching that ignores our predispositions and instead cuts us out as cookies just so.
We tightly control the expression of children. We reduce their avenues of agency and creativity. We tightly isolate their psychomotor skill sets...at times to just the muscles that they need to sit still and write. Then we wonder why there is so much pervasive anxiety in the schools and in society. Where did our abilities to perceiver go? Well, we buried them.
Infants assert themselves very well in face of disorder. Adults fall apart at the seams.
Life isn't simple but fear not. We are born fit to handle complex.
"Our whole education system is based on the idea that we train individuals to be critical thinkers. Our political system is based on the idea that persuasion and deliberation lead to compromise and toward truth. "
Please do not give up the ship to these forms of tribalism. Trump be damned. Your original assumptions as a journalist work to enhance our common humanity. Please.
1
Yes, David, the ability and willingness to do critical thinking ought to be the fundamental purpose of education. Why does it only rarely happen? Please, please read the 125 pages of "The Drama of the Gifted Child - The Search for the True Self" by Alice Miller. The shades will lift, I assure you. And then, via your OP-ED access to the majority of Congress, you might then be able to raise the shades for them! The world desperately needs your help on this.
2
"Why are people’s views of global warming, genetically modified foods and other scientific issues strongly determined by political label?"
Part of this might be because most of us don't have either the scientific understanding or the inclination to do the research for ourselves on every issue. It's easier to accept the opinion of someone you trust, whether that's a scientist, a politician, a newspaper...
"Now we are at a place where it is commonly assumed that your perceptions are something that come to you through your group, through your demographic identity."
Nobody exists in a vacuum. I'm a product of my genetic predispositions, my environment, and my experiences. Of course my demographic identity is going to affect my perceptions and opinions.
While I can imagine an issue from another person's perspective, I can't imagine it from every perspective - there are too many things I don't know about the wide variety of people's experiences. The more people share those perspectives *and where they're coming from,* the better able I will be to imagine different perspectives in the future.
1
Patrick Winston, an MIT professor and one if the fathers of Artificial Intelligence says in its free course (ocw.mit.edu):
“One you label something, you gain power over it”
Labeling is a key tool for simplifying and controlling. Labeling allows you to inherit the properties of your “group”, enhancing your ability to function. For example: “I’m a football player” automatically signals to the world my stance on the sport, without the need to know me.
The advertising industry pioneered labeling applied to people. This has now percolated into our political arena, partly driven by high-tech segmentation techniques (e.g. gerrymandering)
So, NO Labels! We are one!
Dear David, Why in the world are you epistemologically trying to put a label on our system? Should I choose to be part of your system of our or not? Two choices sounds like a coin flip to me. I choose the best 3 out of 5, 5 of 7, 7 come 11. Clueless in Oregon. RAW
Its time to talk about the Christian/Republican Party, the Churches of the Republican Way, and militantly nationalistic religion that has been created in the wake of the Cold War.
Without Christians constantly voting for war, environmental destruction, and an economic policy that blames the poor for their poverty, the Republican Party would not be the force it is.
As an ex-Christian, Vietnam Vet, I've realized for decades already that what we are experiencing is not so much a political divide as a sickness in the heart of our nations cultural religion.
It is a nationalist Christianity that Billy Graham promoted to be fallowed by all the TV evangelists. These Christians are confused about what master they serve. They claim to be "Pro-Life" but are seeming unaware of how poverty and war increases abortions. They are, apparently, unconcerned about the part they themselves are playing in Earth's 4th Global Mass Extinction Event.
I appreciate Brock's efforts to pacify the Republican Right. I really wonder, though, if anything will change without people exercising real free speech and taking it to the Christians. Will anyone raise their voice to let these "poor of spirit" know what they are doing?
1
David, when people say: "Speaking as a Latina" or "speaking as a Jew", they almost always follow this with a "but"....showing that their group identity onlyh takes them that far. This is the light here.
David,
I suggest you reread E.O. Wilson's " Meaning of Human Existence".
And then there's Cambridge Analytica, which seems to have a mission to manipulate our opinions.
In what alternate universe was there no group think in 1950's America? If Brooks keeps on with his pattern of ignoring reality in favor of right-wing memes, only right-wing group thinkers will believe anything he says.
2
The author misses the point that you cannot avoid making judgments based on how you fit into society. You don't have to be queer to detest Mr Pence -- but it helps. You can't say gay people aren't being "objective" when they worry Pence might do things that harm them.
That said... I can be objective when I want to be. I know what I think, and why, and can rationally defend my points of view. I also know what my biases are. The important thing is not so much what you believe, but whether you make an honest effort to understand why the world is the way it is.
2
Often times the false equivalency is in the posing of a question when the answer isn't either/or but both, David.
1
When you put together a panel discussion or a work team, even on a subject like oncology, you don’t want to have a bunch of white males sitting up there. We know that something valuable will be lost.
Couldn't help himself. Even as he's making a good point he had to toss a bribe to the diversity police. Oncology panels should be comprised of those best versed in the subject.
1
I believe that if I began my comment with “Speaking as a Fill in the Blank” the doors of the minds of some readers will open just as others will close, so I will not do so.
But I do not see why anybody would have a problem with someone who introduces an opinion in that manner - as long as the person who introduces an opinion in that manner would not have a problem with the response, “You are saying that because you are a Fill in the Blank”
1
“Then came Michel Foucault ...and the argument that society is structured by elites to preserve their privilege.”
Thomas More said the same 500 years ago, and wasn’t the first. Brooks, as usual, is superficial and concerned with only fads.
As for Augustine being black, nobody knows what he looked like or how we would categorize him today. He was from Carthage, in Africa...
Brooks also grossly oversimplifies Foucault, who argued that the indomitable power structures that uphold the privileged status of elites are not constructed and certainly not maintained through intentional machinations of individuals or elite groups, but rather realized and codified through the constant reiterative hierarchy of discursive positions based on status conferred by dominant structures. That the socioeconomic and cultural status of elites is quite well preserved is not the result of some elite master plan, as Brooks's reduction would make it seem, but rather the ubiquitous establishment of and, crucially, deference to (among virtually all members of society, not just elites), discursive power structures. This reinforcement of social incumbency is not only prolifically manifest in, but also profoundly manifest through the mundane discursive habits of our daily lives.
2
Why does David feel these two perspectives are in conflict? There is strange kind of zero-sum thinking in David's pieces that reminds me of SAT essays like: "write for or against: the pen is mightier than the sword." It is as if David sees ideas and gets stuck in either-or logic. Perhaps this essay is a stab at becoming unstuck and asking what he values in both perspectives. But then shouldn't he go the distance and share a better thought through perspective?
3
Dear David :
Have you examined all of your own writings to date & assessed how they have been influenced by your own group identity ? Also, your assessment of your own writings may or may not agree with another's assessment of your writings, depending on her/his group identity !!!
3
Sometimes group indentity is forced upon you. When African-Americans and Latinos are profiled by cops as potential criminals or when a presidential candidate labels Mexicans as rapists and drug dealers then what is one to do? How do I respond when even if I have an advanced degree I am treated like a second class citizen? We of course are asked not to judge all white males as racists and mass murderers. But imagine what happens if the shooter is non-white? The entire non-white community would pay the price. Fox News would be sure to round up a bunch of racist commentators calling for more police sweeps and deportations. So if you want less identity politics then you need more inclusion and fairness. Going back in our nation's history we see that the white male power structure ginned up racial classification to justify slavery and the oppression of Africans and American Indians. They wouldn't even let their own women vote. So sometimes we need to apply critical thinking to protect ourselves from people like Trump who use us to generate fear and loathing in white working class males even while they are economically and politically in the same boat as us. Sadly there are no current leaders who can bring us together. The southern strategy of division still wins lots of elections. For Trump, McConnell and Ryan national unity is not in their interest. They profit from keeping us divided.
1
The mind, the body and the spirit need training. We train the mind by exposing it to classical and modern thinkers, by trying to master the fundamentals of mathematics, physics, chemistry, dead and modern languages, law, politics, economics and so on. We train the body by developing strength, power, fitness, resilience, flexibilty, skill. We train the spirit by exposing ourselves to music, painting, poetry, sculpture, dance, to contemplation of our mortality, to the suffering of each member of our species and of all living things.
1
Where is your source, that Augustine was black? Augustine was born in Berber North Africa, and considered himself, not black, but a Christian Roman. According to what I have read, there is no definitive scholarship to suggest Augustine's ethnicity, beyond the place of his birth. In the context of his times, ethnicity did not matter if one were a Roman citizen. This concept supports your point; then you create a non sequitur, by suggesting Augustine was black.
1
But isn't that how democracy is supposed to work in the first place? People of various backgrounds are supposed to have representation. Tribes form because there are groups of people that have a common background that feel they need representation or that justice as been subverted. Isn't it up to the system to parse that out with voting and legislation? Encouraging critical thinking skills have allowed people to examine and analyze how, specifically, they are being represented or not represented.
1
A good piece, one that needs a lot more analysis then this section allows, a couple of thoughts:
1)While intellectuals promoted the idea of individual thought in the 1950's, and while collumnists didn't label themselves, like many things back then the bias was hidden, for a variety of reasons. if you read collumns by Walter Winchell or Walter Lippman, they had a point of view based in a political viewpoint, and Drew Peason had his own political agenda. Later on William F Buckley and George Will might have not said outright they were republican, but you knew where they stood.
2)Also, back then the country was large majority white and Christian, to some degree, and most whites didn't even realize they were part of a group, they thought the way they thought was how everyboody thought and was. What happened was we no longer have a dominant majority, and it is telling in what we see. Trump nation, the white working class, suddenly realized they were a minority and their fury of "MAGA" is about bringing back when they ruled; and when they speak on anything de facto it is as "a real american" as they see themselves.
3)I agree totally about the stupid side of identity politics. Talking about civil rights speaking as a gay woman is one thing; speaking of tariffs or taxes "as a gay woman" makes no sense because it has no relevance to it. Saying "As a transgender woman I think that the X treaty with Germany is a mistake" is silly, pure and simple.
1
This piece is overly reductive. The determinist views Brooks cites are largely philosophical, and deal with how to live your life. There's no right answers to those questions, and thus, your experiences and membership in groups largely color your perspective.
However, on matters of public policy like criminal justice reform, immigration, or whether to raise interest rates, there are right answers regarding what is the best policy for the country as a whole. Your world view is not necessarily determined by your background, and critical thinking is still important. However, inclusion brings more information to the table, which enables the group to make better decisions. For example, having experts with diverse backgrounds on an immigration discussion panel helps bring more information and experiences to the table. That doesn't necessarily mean that a Hispanic member of the panel will automatically have certain beliefs about immigration. Instead, it means bringing someone to the table who has been racially profiled or personally affected by immigration policies will produce different information and world views which the group as a whole can use in making policy decisions. I reject Brooks' overly deterministic argument because there are still "right answers," and it is important to include affected groups in high level decision-making to generate better policy outcomes. This is why Trump's mostly white male cabinet is a real problem.
2
Thank you, NYTimes, for being so reliable and ensuring our white men have a platform on which to speak and be heard. It's about time!
Economic stratification and the widening divide between the haves and the have-nots trumps racial, religious, political or any other "identity." After all, more money equates more social power, regardless of your skin color or religion. For too many men, the lack of money and eroding hope that they EVER will achieve that "pinnacle of male success" makes them search for another way to anchor their identifies to give themselves some modicum of power that they feel they are entitled to. Have you ever heard a rich white male identify bother to utter the words, "speaking as a white male?" Me, neither.
1
"Then came Michel Foucault and critical race theorists and the rest, and the argument that society is structured by elites to preserve their privilege. Beliefs and culture are part of the structure elites use to preserve that inequality."
This is the truest statement in the piece.. the rest is people trying to make sense of an extremely warped human experience.
Look - just because people tend to congregate with and be attracted to others who share some commonality with their views and beliefs doesn't mean it's the end of the world as we know it, for pete's sake! And face reality here, there is no way, no how. everybody in any group is ALWAYS going to agree with everybody else all the time. I don't know, seriously, what Mr. Brooks is so worried about. Hasn't it always been the Great American Middle that ultimately drives politics in our country? And what else is that except an artificial construct of essentially "shared" ideas and beliefs?
Under the Trump Regime, it has stirred itself out of its lethargy. Watch the worm turn, Mr. Brooks, that is my advice to you.
David Brooks powerfully describes the decline of rationalism and the rise and domination of "perspectivism" in political discourse. He expresses confusion about the apparent clash between individual identity and group identity. Probably this is because the perspectivism that infects his outlook is a nihilistic dead end.
The contemporary political discourse Mr. Brooks describes is fundamentally ideological. It is a-scientific, and perhaps anti-scientifiic. It doesn't jibe with empirical observation: simply consider the wide diversity of individuals who fall within any of today's favorite social classifications.
Reasoning on the basis of classifications can be powerful, but it can also produce the kind of confusion and intellectual tunnel vision that Mr. Brooks inadvertently portrays.
A possible way out of Mr. Brooks's (and much of our society's) confusion is to embrace a more nearly scientific empiricism, an empiricism that humbly recognizes that advances of knowledge may require periodic adjustments and revisions in people's understanding of human nature and politics. What may appear to be certainties today may require re-imagining in light of fuller knowledge and understanding tomorrow. Classifications must be seen as merely helpful approximations to messier, more complex realities.
The revealing thing about this article is that this is who conservatives are (Mr. Brooks included). When you peel back all of the pretty words, it's about empathy and a sense of fairness toward your fellow man, something today's conservatives have become all to comfortable ignoring. Cluelessness can be overcome - a lack of caring and empathy, not so much.
I will be 80 this year. In my lifetime, I have seen black people change from "lesser beings" to president of the United States. Women in my town were not "permitted" to become professionals. Now women work in all disciplines, at all levels. Young babies were considered "tabula rasa," incapable of feeling pain or joy and without the capacity to respond to the environment meaningfully. Today we recognize them as fully sentient beings. My doctor father assured me that animals "don't feel pain the way we do. They cannot experience joy or hope any more than they can use tools." All these things have changed, like a dawn breaking on our minds, and we continue to recognize ever more "others" as equals in this life to ourselves. Because you can kill something does not mean that something is without deep value. Until recently, the guiding lights in all our walks of life were -- white males. The hierarchy was from elite down to blue collar, rich to poor, but in each enclave, the white male ruled. Well, the goop is out of the tube now, and President Trump's efforts to the contrary notwithstanding, we will not get it back in. Our society has changed irrevocably. How that change will shape our world I cannot say. We live in dangerous times. And our new freedoms contribute to those dangers even as they open vast possibilities for good.
1
The idea that anyone can presume to speak for an ethnic or religious group is patently false. No group is monolithic. For example, When someone says "Speaking as a Latino,. . ." the presumption is that they are liberal, pro-open immigration, and a Democrat voter. But how does one explain that a majority of Latino voters in Texas voted to re-elect John Cornyn, a Republican conservative, as US Senator?
Identity politics is the shallow end of the pool.
This business of 'group identity', particularly when, as Mr Brooks notes, it requires one to subscribe by default to a table d'hote of political-philosophical stances that aren't necessarily related, has long nettled me.
Name a 'black political figure'? (Ben Carson.) An 'intellectual of colour'? (Dinesh D'Souza.) A 'gay activist'? (Milo Yiannopoulos.) Et cetera. You may call my examples atypical of the group, but only if you insist on the validity of the group identity - which is what I reject.
I insist on my right to be atypical. It's called 'individuality' ... the freedom to be unexpected ... and it was what we Boomers supposedly were united in fighting for.
1
The answer to your query is all of the above. Our thinking and thus opinions are always rooted in context whether in the near past or current tending toward near future. The opinions in turn shift the future thinking until it becomes current context and the cycle begins all over again. At least that is my simplistic view of why you are a shift in the way that opinions are rendered be it individual, group or the types of environment in which they are rendered.
As for your statement ".... I am confused .." Yes that has been my general takeaway whenever I read your columns.
"speaking as a white male" back in the 1950's was actually implied, since back then the voices of intellectuals and elites you mention were almost 100% white men, voices that were non white, women, were just not among the people you are talking about. They may not have said "speaking as a white male" , but that is exactly what they were doing. The difference was back then when an intellectual or an elite spoke, they assumed they were speaking for everyone, that because of their intellect and analysis they were speaking for everyone, not just as a white male. It didn't dawn on them because this was the common assumption of their world, because they had no view into things that would make them think differently, when everyone is like yourself you don't think about those not like yourself or their views.
It reminds me of the debate over same sex marriage, where opponents would say things like "why do gays have to flaunt their sexuality? Straights don't do that", meaning why do they have to be married, be accepted as married...meanwhile, they didn't see as a straight person the various ways straights 'celebrate' their sexuality, pictures of spouses and kids, wedding rings, kissing their spouse in public, talking about 'their husband' or "their wife", talking about family vacations, and yep, men and women talking to office workers (of the same sex) about sexual things as well..they didn't see those things because they were so ordinary it didn't stand out.
Mr. Brooks -
Had you omitted the final two paragraphs here, you'd have composed a really sincere piece that acknowledges a lack of understanding and asks your readers to share their understanding. Not only would this have been quite refreshing, but based on about 300 or so of these comments, it would also have been quite productive. But I'm disappointed in your insistence - perhaps out of habit - on answering your own question in the last two paragraphs.
You asked a good question, and you asked a public whose diversity and thoughtfulness could - as demonstrated in these comments - have done a far better job than you of answering it. Why not leave it there?
It seems arrogant to me to imagine that any human brain is capable of the conception of the whole of things. Every system that we have is merely a snippet of the whole system of the universe. Every person sits within the context of their life, their history, their family, their culture and every culture sits in the circle of cultures observing from their own context, their own language and its context and their on morés and morals and systems. Each of us has a unique view of the center and each view is uniquely limited to our limitations as a species. The work of George Miller and John N. Warfield has documented this scientifically.
On the other hand, the concept of contextual relativity is a part of what every young musician learns simply as a part of technically being able to differentiate cultural styles in music. Russian pianists play differently from Chinese and French and America etc. pianists, even the same music. and we glory in the diversity and elevation of general knowledge through each version. That is the message of Art as a process (verb) of development and learning as opposed to an Object or noun. Wars have been fought over nouns and verbs.
Cultural sophistication is essential in International situations. Linguistic sophistication is essential to observation. Humility or the knowledge of one's limitations is essential the discovery of higher truths through cooperation.
REH: NYCity Performing Arts Teacher
1
Groupthink has been strongly encouraged by what I call The Diversity Machine, the government-sponsored machinery that labels people by race and gender for allegedly "temporary" affirmative action programs (to make up for past discrimination against blacks and women) and then into permanent "diversity" policies to achieve proportional representation of blacks, women, and a growing list of immigrant minorities throughout all American institutions. Diversity within these groups (by class, religion, age) is, of course, ignored.
"One of the things I’ve learned in a lifetime in journalism is that people are always more unpredictable than their categories."
You don't say, Mr. Brooks. One of the things I've learned from a near lifetime of reading you is that the public agonizing you project always seems to lead to the same predictably conservative conclusions, conclusions curiously devoid of the critical thought you so purport to value.
Yes, Mr. Brooks "group think" is dangerous for society. So is "political correctness," which, ironically (because PC is a form of group think) your piece demonstrates. It is very PC to insist that an oncology team be diverse - when it should be purely merit (medical merit, that is) based. It is PC to pronounce as settled fact that the skin color of the theologian/ philosopher St. Augustine of Hippo was "black." It's fair to say, I think, that St. Augustine's writings do not become more interesting by considering his race. Race is not in the least bit relevant to this writer - one of the pillars of Western thought. At least I don't believe his pronouncements in "The City of God" or in his book "Confessions," on the nature of evil and of Original Sin, relate in the slightest to skin color. So why bring St. Augustine's skin color into your argument about group-think? It seems to me you are an exponent (if not a proponent) of the very culture that has produced a form of group-think called "political correctness." And political correctness is truly one of the scourges of our time. It makes the issue of "difference" and "identity" central when it should not have any bearing in debate. Yes, throughout history, discrimination has silenced key voices. PC, however, is not that answer to this injustice. It taints critical reasoning / epistemological integrity with an animus akin to group or identity-think.
1
I think the point to take away is that one single person can never be sure they've grasped all the important aspects of ANY question. You say "even oncology," as if that were obviously immune to bias. But women get more of certain cancers than men (and not just the obvious kinds) while men get more of others; African-Americans have different risks and different responses to medication than whites, apparently -- you just can never know everything, all by yourself. That's why you have to let other people into the discussion, and let their perspectives into your head.
I won't say that "only a white male would assume they know it all," but ... why are you even asking?
So:
"Busy fighting communism and fascism, people back then emphasized individual reason and were deeply allergic to groupthink."
Is this why Senator McCarthy was able to run rampant; deride the President and government, ruin the reputation of the innocent and fuel an atmosphere of condemnation and capital punishment?
This period was fully its own incarnation of xenophobia and suspicion, like eras previous, and like many aspects of our current one.
David,
Where was all that independent American thinking in the '50s? Certainly the consensus about this country, the Cold War, capitalism didn't imply independent thinking. Where was all the reports about the CIA and other U.S. agencies overthrowing governments in Iran, Guatemala, and a little later, Chile, which later proved true? Not in the Times. Conformity in many ways, including point of view, was the mainstay of the 50s, stifling thought and behavior until the '60s cracked us open.
Of course there were differences about tactics, about whether so and so was horrible or really horrible, but while intellectuals may praise independent thinking, there was much less of it than there is now.
Yes, group think is bad when it puts blinders on people. But the only difference between then and now is that now we have a multiplicity of views, shaped by different experiences. True, people want to fit in, so they tend to believe what their group thinks, starting with what your parents think, but that is a problem of human nature going back to our beginnings.
And finally, maybe some of the thinking you don't like is there because it is true, even if it strays from your beloved center. There is still the factual question. As a progressive, I believe in that general viewpoint not only because Trump is terrible, but because you guys in the so-called center have brought us expanding inequality, terrible health care, etc. It's not group think- it's real.
1
Foucault and "critical race theorists and the rest" sure sounds dismissive--yet you seem to come around at the end to say that "subjugated knowledge" actually is a thing and that the Enlightenment's thrill of daring to think is gone. You are forgiven for struggling to come up with a conclusion, but why not come back next time with the same beginning, but strike out "and the rest," engage with recently translated Foucault lectures from the early 1980s where his take on Socrates's parrhesia and on Kant's "What is Enlightenment?" might surprise you. Not to mention Plato's Republic, in which you can read a hermeneutics of suspicion about elites long before "Foucault and critical race theorists and the rest." Or did you mean that Thrasymachus, Glaucon et al. are merely part of "the rest"?
Speaking as an octogenarian I'll give you a quote from Immanuel Kant, "From such crooked wood as that which man is made of, nothing straight can be fashioned." David, you will have to muddle through like the rest of us. :)
3
"Under what circumstances should we embrace the idea that collective identity shapes our thinking?" In my humble opinion, I don't believe that collective identity should shape our thinking under ANY circumstances, as I for one am totally opposed to the idea of collective or group identity. For my entire life I've had to live in a world that, for the most part, sees me as a "black man" and whatever their definition of that identity is. For the most part, I can say without question, the majority of those definitions have been negative. Over the course of my life, I have become an educated professional, I've achieved high level positions with prestigious global organizations, I've raised two children and educated them to the highest levels, I've conducted myself ethically, I've used sound moral judgment, I am a law-abiding citizen, I am respectful to people of all walks of life, I am an advocate of volunteerism and mentoring, I am respectful to our planet and our environment, etc., etc. and so on. Despite all this, the world still sees me as "black man" first, and their definition of that word typically comes with a tremendous amount of baggage that does not apply to me. And I know that that also applies to all collective groups. And I don't think its fair to individuals in those groups either. Including white men.
I am now despondent that even a free thinker like Brooks accepts the notion that when a panel is entirely white male there is something wrong. Forget the awful history that is on display in the comments, the op-ed columns, and now the articles in this once respectable outlet. It is the pervasiveness of ordinary racism and sexism, not the quality of the person's ideas, or the content of their character: only their identity matters. We are doomed, aren't we?
2
Acknowledging that we all perceive reality from a particular perspective does not necessarily entail denying that there is any objective reality.
Brooke's dilemma is artificial, and the solutions simpler than he presents it. Openness to and empathy for others' perspectives leads to a better shared understanding, and a much better understanding of objective reality.
Humans have always been inclined to favor group identity over individuality. It’s baked into our DNA, letting us succeed as a species, given that we weren’t the biggest or the strongest or had the sharpest claws and teeth. We developed big brains by birthing our babies before they were developed enough to survive in the wild. Those babies needed support to grow to maturity. As a result, we learned how to live together in groups. Our babies survived because of our social skills, our finely tuned ability to live successfully in a community.
What’s changed today is that our societies have grown so complex and specialized that we have forced substantial portions of our communities to the margins. A small, local community used to be able to include those who were different somehow. Perhaps their sense of gender did not fit a binary definition, or perhaps they inexplicably felt an attraction to someone of their own gender. A small community could find a way to work through those unique situations and find a way to include differences.
Modern cultures, however, have grown so complex and specialized that we feel less pressure to find a niche for each individual, because individuality morphs quickly into the “other” that causes so much fear. Those who are different must either bond with similar individuals and form a subgroup, become isolated, or live with a denial of self.
This isolation creates the false sense of us versus them. One size never fits all.
1
Maybe valuing inquiry over assertion. We move through our evolution regardless of what posture we take. The difference between asking and knowing is that one posits the external as primary, while the other posits the self. In both cases, the flaws in process are eventually revealed through practice. In the former, those flaws are sought and welcomed. In the latter, rejected until they are unavoidable.
My high school said they wanted you to form your own opinion (circa mid 1970s, Midwest small college/blue collar town) and share it but when you acted on it differently than the group for personal growth, not harming others, it was not welcomed. If you didn't want to take the recommended classes in favor of others, graduate early, enjoy most social activities outside of the school etc. The best thing about Clinton's administration? He surrounded himself with the brightest and most diverse minds of his time regardless of whether they "agreed" with him. I wish the same could be said today.
1
Its a confounding time. And it's a problem that labels determine opinions. Its a fox news v msbc thing, a freedom v equality thing. I like to think of myself as largely outside the fray, as a critical thinker looking from a hilltop down on the battlefield seeing two front lines squaring off and waiting for orders, reasons to fight, not having known on their own why they are there. Critical thinkers are surprisingly, depressingly, rare to find.
The maintenence of culture and society as the elite controlling their privilege definately rings true in the era of koch and murdoch, super pacs and fake news.
People think that gatorade is healthy, donald trump in on their side, that higher minimum wage equals greater prosperity for all.
Most people just listen, they dont think. Of course they listen to the people most like them, other blacks, other jews, other factory workers, with whom else do they share more? There is no surprise that identity factors most heavily into one's beliefs. But we're (Womankind that is) not as tribal as we have been, we are integrated in part, so maybe we are in process to thinking outside ourselves and our groups. That's the optimistic view.
1
It is not always easy to express an opinion if you live in a very conservative or liberal city. You are often outnumbered by those with opposing views and so you remain silent. You do not want to alienate someone so you just sit and listen. This is unfair but reality.
As a conservative in very liberal New York City, I often find myself gritting my teeth when someone says something that is the political opposite as to what I believe. I know if I say something that is counter to their point of view, it will cause derision. This was not always the case. Freedom of speech is not tolerated in certain social or work situations. This is too bad because all opinions should be respected.
We have become a very divided nation since this last presidential election and it does not seem to be lessening. I hope for the sake of our country that this is just a temporary situation. It will not benefit our society in the long run. We must find some common ground and not continue down this destructive path.
2
This is why I often end my (usually left-leaning) online comments with, "and I'm a gun-owning veteran" because people are so quick to pigeon-hole each other based on a few tidbits. Our opinions and beliefs are a product of ALL our influences: gender, ethnic group, religious training (or rebellion against it) and the extent of experiences and knowledge acquired to that point in our lives. Plus whatever empathy and imagination we have to project what another's experience might be like. It's increasingly clear too many Americans lack sufficient wherewithal to make reasoned opinions. That's why demagogues are so dangerous.
1
While I will concur that there are problems with exalting group thinking, and how the individual has been taken out of history and philosophy, I don't think you're actually addressing that here. No, this piece reads as a lament, highlighting that in terms of political philosophy, one can now speak of conservatism in the past tense.
Trump's victory in 2016 presents liberals with a crisis, insofar as they should seriously reflect on what they've endorsed recently and why. Even so, the modern world gives liberals something over which to introspect. In contrast, what do conservatives have to reflect upon today? However much conservatives try to disavow themselves from Trump on grounds that he is a populist, not a true conservative, hasn't said ideology morphed into angry populism?
One cannot speak of a crisis of conservatism, because conservatism itself is essentially dead. Trump doesn't stand for limited govt, because he doesn't think his job is to govern America. Trump doesn't view himself as the President of the USA, because he doesn't think he should represent ALL Americans. Rather than deal with the modern world, Trump and contemporary conservatives only express animosity toward it.
Admit it David, the sole thing conservatism can offer one today is a distorted, nostalgic view of the past, in which one attempts to resurrect a utopia which never really existed.
3
Any of us undertaking a quest similar to yours have three fundamental problems not of our personal making: 1.Intended or not, "inclusion" has become synonymous with including some by excluding others and at the expense of equality for all. 2. The concept of "group" is often interpreted as color, sex, or ethnicity and as the determinate of what we think and who we are. In this context, "white" or "male" always denotes privilege, and other groups are always virtuous unless proven otherwise. 3.It is something much wished for, but nevertheless rare, that we engage in critical thinking. Most of us rarely do so except when done consciously and at leisure, and rarely under stress or when bombarded by opinions and voices of others. It is not right, it is self-destructive, and it keeps us divided, but that is where we are and with apologies to Charles Dickens, "How We Live Now". I sincerely wish you luck, for the sake of us all.
1
My experience is that people make snap d4cisions, often without any data an no thinking, and then spend time trying to find anecdotes, true or false, to support their views. Most of my friends made the decision on political persuasion sometime in their early 30’s and have spent all the time since looking to justify that decision. Over time they find a circle of friends that support that political view and thus become more certain,as defending their group becomes more important than defending their own view.
Is there truly no truth? Perhaps, but that sounds like a cop out to me. But I do believe there is no human search for truth. The search is simply to find what supports our gut instincts, our intuition
Try changing someone’s mind a political fraud issue—affirmative action, or welfare, or is social security going bankrupt or is it in fact welfare, or climate change, or Islam, or whatever. No amount of data can change a mind once made up. And minds generally get made in an instant
Must make Brook’s job highly disappointing. But easy to see how once he identifies himself as a Republican no amount of data will convince us he is open minded nor seeking truth
As a mixed-race baby boom lawyer, I think there are certain topics for which identity enhances validity. My identity gives me no special vision with respect to nuclear arms control, but it might give me some insight into the social pressures mixed-race people must deal with. I am, however, offended by the notion that anyone can speak for me because they share some aspect of my demography.
I'm perfectly happy, BTW, with an all-white panel of oncologists, so long as I'm convinced that they were the best available and were not chosen for the panel because of their ethnicity. If all of the panels are all white, I become suspicious.
5
Critical thinking should, in theory, be able to separate fact from fiction. The human problem is that we are almost completely ruled by our emotions. When arguments are designed to deliver the maximum emotional response, critical thinking is next to impossible. In the Post-Freudian age, we have become so adept at crafting reason-destroying arguments that our ID's are running the entire game.
I've been wondering how many re-Tweets, likes and other affirmations it takes to take an emotion-inducing lie into a truth. Sadly, fewer than we would think because the message doesn't promote thought, it promotes an emotional response that strangely feels good.
I think Mr. Brooks is struggling with the era of over-specialization. In addition to developing a skill set that "is my job" the specialist develops an awareness of things that are "not my job". Group inaction in the face of malfeasance is left to others, as there surely must be someone responsible for acting in this or that
crisis. When such specialists exist, we will tolerate severe and loathsome defects in their other life compartments (think Quint, the shark hunter in Jaws or Donald Trump in the American "President" if they can deliver us from this present threat.
What Mr Brooks longs for is the time when a shared core of decency and common regard for the well-being of the group was in evidence.
So do I.
Steven Pinker in one of his books I will not take time now to accurately quote him, stated something to the effect, if you know someone's stance on abortion you would pretty much know their stand on climate change.
Because we follow opinion leaders.
From my memory, I agree with the account of our migration from independent voters, through politics as identity politics and cult of personality in choosing presidents.
But we need Brooks et. al. to keep hammering away on ideas, rationality and evidence. Because I have a perspective or bias does not mean my perceptions are equal in accuracy to someone who has put in thought and effort. There are erroneous belief, and we need help in sorting them out.
So don't quit Mr. Brooks. Although I am much more liberal in my political social and interpersonal beliefs, I listen to you when you write. I notice Fox news, and I see excitement to anger there. I see your writing as thought provoking.
5
Again I agree with David Brooks's conclusion.
Very often I see his thoughtful views slammed by left leaning readers, even when what he is saying makes good sense and is a big departure from the current Republican line.
I identify as progressive on many issue, most actually, but not without some qualifications. We need opposition views that are thoughtful and reasoned. I've always appreciated people who disagree with me and can rationally explain their viewpoint.
In this worldwide disturbing time of change, humans are getting tribal; forming us versus them groups. It's very dangerous.
Even 10 years ago it wouldn't have been considered "treasonous" to have a wife who belonged to the opposite political party. This was the main reason Andrew McCabe was fired. His wife was a Democrat, therefore he couldn't be trusted.
1
It's evident that Mr Brooks has either never read or completely misunderstood Foucault.
2
This touches on the conundrum of individual vs group interests. We play both sides depending on the circumstances. We adapt.
Individual self-interest as a culture is running rampant now more than ever. We think for ourselves. But groups influence how we think for ourselves LOL.
Brooks, in my opinion, is a great writer and think. Amazing he is stumped y his own question. We humans are complex
Listen to those with primary experience if you are experientially challenged and make an informed opinion based on that, or better yet, just keep an open mind. The rest of us have had to listen (and are still listening) to mostly older white men and it’s frankly exhausting. Please, all of you retire from your jobs and stop talking and trying to usher us in your direction. Other people need their turn to build a world where you don’t interrupt them and mansplain “how things are” over and over and over. You have like 10-15 years left! Go golf or whatever it is that you do to take your mind off “running the world”.
2
Your comment so perfectly encapsulates what people find offensive about identity politics I'm inclined to think you wrote it as satire. You think there is nothing about music you could learn from Paul McCartney, about politics from Bill Clinton, about science from Steven Weinberg, or about writing from Philip Roth, because they are all old white males? Well this liberal, who just finished reading a novel by a black male, a book of political theory by an Indian-American male, and a history written by a white female will never accept that kind of dismissive close-mindedness as liberalism.
1
Who lives in a bubble? Sad.
Mr. Brooks, your brain is a chemical computer that grows as you age embodying your experiences and the transferred experiences of others with whom you interact during your life. Their is no such thing as "collective thinking". There is only thinking built upon your brains ever growing architecture. I fear your "spirituality" prevents you from analyzing reality in any meaningful way. Hence, you will remain confused.
In this current day, with the rise of the alt-right, there are many people who would not consider you not belong to the "white male" group because you are Jewish. Perhaps you have been fortunate like one commenter who states that he has never been discriminated against despite being black. But how much of your thinking is influenced by being light complected and male and how much by being Jewish? How much by being wealthy and having travelled to many parts of the world? I don't think any of us totally avoid influence from whatever groups we could be subdivided into. For me, elderly, white female with four college degrees and two daughters, who was born in the deep South but raised in many different cities and states. Lots of other life experiences influence how I think and act.
1
I recommend Brooks (and others) listen to John Biewan's excellent podcast, "Being White"from Scene Radio.
It is not, speaking as a "fill in the blanks" person. Think of it as placing yourself in the "other" person's shoes. Just as an example: a colored person who is force to use a "non-white" back of the bus seat. How would that make (a white person) feel if you were that colored person? Another example: A gay person who is a totally nice person being told that he is a sinner and a bad person by evangelical christians. Yet that gay person has done nothing wrong. As a "wise" person once said: do onto others as you would have them do onto you. Boy if we all followed that simple rule, wouldn't this be a wonderful place?
"How many times have we all heard somebody rise up in conversation and say, “Speaking as a Latina. …” or “Speaking as a queer person. …” or “Speaking as a Jew. …”?"
It's easy. Just substitute the word "victim" for "Latina," "queer," "Jew," "Christian," whatever. That's all you need to know. Because victims always have a special perspective and are always right.
2
When I hear someone preface a statement by “Speaking as a Latina. …” or “Speaking as a queer person. …” or “Speaking as a Jew. …”, I don't think of it as explaining the derivation of their opinion. I hear it as a presentation of credentials, usually to imply that their opinion is worth more than mine because of who they happen to be.
5
Fascinating - however two flawed points, revealing precisely the kind of "group-think" Mr. Brooks excoriates. The first: "something valuable will be lost" if an oncology work team consists only "of a bunch of white males." Really? It depends. If you composed the team thus thinking only white males could lead it to oncological breakthroughs, you would be a racist fool. On the other hand, if, for political-correctness you add a person of color simply because you want racial diversity, you may be lowering team effectiveness. The second point, which I think Mr. Brooks might consider reviewing, is his "de facto" declaration that St. Augustine was black. How can the skin color of this great theologian matter? While Augustine was indeed from Algeria (North Africa), his skin color is by no means a settled matter. If it was black, great, wonderful…I don't care one jot. I realize Mr. Brooks was addressing whether "being Latina [could] influence how you read a black writer like St. Augustine"... and perhaps his point is that the entire proposition is absurd. But I object to Brooks' formulation here - as if it could or should POSSIBLY matter what Augustine's skin color was, regardless of the socio-economic or racial background a person considering this theologian might be. To even pose the question this way, presupposes a racist, totally anachronistic way of looking at St. Augustine. Key point: identity-based, group-think (i.e. non-critical thinking) is dangerous to society. Agreed.
I am surprised Mr. Brooks didn't mention Tocqueville. Didn't he say something like, "put two Americans together and they will form an association"? He referred to many associations, frequently local. Maybe that trend has broadened and generalized. For some people, its a comfort and relief to cling to a label and not have to articulate an identity. To others it's a curse, having spent years developing an individual (say) musical style or art, and hear critics immediately attach a common label (blue grass, impressionist). It seems as though the problem may have progressed from finding your own concrete and local identity to feelings of anomie (ala Durkheim?) about being lost in some huge, generalized crowd (Riesman). Then comes anger and search for an external cause. We point to politics, education, journalists, etc. We're arguing over the external causes of our frustration. Cambridge Analytics just names our favorite villain. Remember Pogo?
2
Speaking as a pretty logical person what critical thinkers do is analyze the data presented to them on any subject. Truth is a collection of proven facts and not something that can be shape-shifted at will like those balloons at parties that can be made to look like dachshunds, bunnies are whatever.
So is it David Brooks, the Op Ed writer going through existential angst, or David Brooks sans this identity questioning his beliefs because Americans are living in a world that Trump, his cabal, and Putin are trying to destroy as we know it? How I see the world and how I reach my conclusions on it are based on my life experience, my empirical knowledge on any subject, and my 'Spiritual Guide' known as my moral compass. I do celebrate my gender and ancestors too as that forms the foundation of who I am.
Your observations are quite insightful and valuable, Mr. Brooks. Critical thinking skills are indeed being replaced by tribal group think, and this is dangerous. A current example is the gun issue. Try to discuss gun control with a pro-gun person--there's no common ground and facts don't matter. Guns are a minor religion to so many people and any attempt to control them must be opposed. Thus critical thinking has been replaced with tribalism.
So true, Mr. Jaynes. For fairness sake, let's turn it around: try talking about the virtues of guns with a gun control advocate. You will be in for a rough go.
"Our whole education system is based on the idea that we train individuals to be critical thinkers." This is obviously nonsense. Our education system is really based on training people for jobs, most of which are disappearing, and to abhor critical thinking. The Foxification of the United States is the result.
A nation gets the government it deserves and the United States as we knew it no longer exists.
1
Shaped forever by one background, while having chosen to live by other rules, I can say: You can't escape your identity, but you can make your life your own.
Who in this era can successfully separate identity from experience, on any kind of scale, besides white men?
2
David, you are a very complicated man. On the one hand you've been
nurtured by arch-conservative Buckley and his ilk, and by the Hoover Institute.
On the other, you seem to be leaning towards centrism, with emphasis on 'seem'.
However, I remember the many times listening to your political analyses
on the Newshour with Brooks and Shields, to your constant Republican partisan views.
Your headline "Speaking as a White Male..." will not cut it. You are
an op-ed political columnist who, to me, is still very much a Republican, insinuating party partisan views. The Republican party has changed considerably from your nostalgic days to what it has insidiously become now.
Prove me wrong, David. We cannot think in terms of ideals anymore, we
must take your party as it is now. Until the day I read that you've renounced your party I cannot but identify you as "Speaking as a Republican White Male".
Derek Black came to my mind while reading this piece, Mr Brooks. He is the son of a white supremacist who was home schooled and travelled to white supremacist gatherings with his father. He was meant to lead the movement when he grew up. But he enrolled in a liberal college where he met people with very different ideas. Instead of ostracizing him, they invited him to join them in discussions and his views were dramatically changed. He has left the White nationalist movement and continues his studies. I glean two things from Black's story: first education can shape our lives as much as collective identity' which may be one reason republicans seem to be hell bent on destroying our public education system; and two, we all need to listen and be prepared to respond to others who are willing to listen
1
You’re only as free to assert your ideas and beliefs if you have been made free by your parents to do so. By the time you’re 10 or 12 they’ve been cemented for almost all of us. That’s why most atheists grow out of households where they were allowed to make up their own minds as children.
This introspection is a bit jejune. Our "opinions" are almost all, if not entirely, normative. We never begin at ground zero- the only one I know who tried was Hegel in his logical derivation of true concepts in "The Science of Logic".
So we always start from some set of presuppositions when we formulate our personal ideas on any topic. The "group identity" problem is really a false trail. As an instance- a young woman will more likely have certain beliefs about gun control if she has a role as a mother than if she doesn't and in this respect she is a part of a common interest group of mothers. It would be hard for her to escape that emotional and normative position even if she wanted.
The real issue plaguing us is whether we, as citizens of a nation, can see a way clear to accept other peoples' (groups') points of view and acknowledge interests that diverge from our own and to find a road to compromise. The failure to do that thing that I would call a test of citizenship I lay at the feet of "conservatives" who on issues like guns and abortion will not ever compromise. To them everything is a zero sum game.
Since when?..."When you read discussions of op-ed writers you see that we’re often not thought of as individual thinkers, but as spokesmen who are here to represent a point of view." Since Fox News!
1
This whole column is kind of silly. Of course group identity and your life experience as privileged white male has an influence on your opinions. Of course those things don't fully determine your opinions. Why is that difficult to understand and deal with?
David--
You're such a hypocrite, and should really take a stroll out of your own head. Maybe even "put yourself in other people's shoes" for a few minutes. You love all those heady philosophical ideas, but you've been "speaking as a white male" for YEARS.
Time to own up to your responsibility in this, Our National Mess, before Time's Up pulls your covers, bro...
The ever-rising tide of hostility toward Mr. Brooks is a metric of some kind... a measure of how intolerant the left has become of any commentary that doesn’t fit their preferred narrative. When the last person to heed their own counsel leaves, please turn out the light.
Mr Brooks - reading your argument, it seems we have to find the line between “emotional” and “intellectual” responses to an issue at hand. They are often conflated and confused by our discourse, but they should be viewed as separate.
Our “emotional” responses are a part of our emotional identities/ identification with the issue at hand. Those identities are linked to our “group identities” and are based on our biological/ evolutionary history. Yes, race/ ethnicity, religion, education and economic class matter - but indirectly.
Our “intellectual” responses are more directly linked to our race/ ethnicity, religion, education and economic class. There is where our life experiences and lessons learnt matter directly. Same situation may get two completely different emotional response from two people based on “identity”, but will get similar intellectual responses across identity.
Problem is, most of us are subsumed by our emotional responses and mistake them for our “intellectual” response. We conflate the two - and the targeted advertisement driven modern “media” is partly to blame. Cambridge Analytica is a case in point ...
Through exposure, I think we all have become adept at using spin, talking points, words carefully selected to trigger emotions, ridicule, the "big lie", and the pivot technique to "win" an argument. I rarely see people seriously considering the pros & cons of any issue. Lately, I've found how a person has come to take a certain position more interesting than the position itself. We share many similarities while traveling the path, even though we eventually make different guesses about what would be the best next step to lead us to a better future.
I believe one of the great tragedies (yes, tragedy) of the human condition is that we only comprehend language in terms of our own experience. Time after time, I hear and see fellow humans not comprehending, second guessing, discounting what they are told because it doesn't fit what they have experienced. Even more problematic are the moments when even direct experience is internally translated into something that 'fits' their expectations.
I have a friend who came home from work one day to find a peacock in his backyard. He's recounted this story many times: "All I could think of was 'what is a chicken doing in my backyard?!'" He literally saw a chicken because that fit his experience. It was only later that he realized the peacock. I was also with him on a walk by a river when we saw an otter. He pointed to it and said something about 'that cat'. He's not dislexic. He's highly educated and professional. You see, if this is what the best of us do spontaneously, "nuance" in political debates is nearly hopeless.
"He literally saw a chicken because that fit his experience."
No. He "literally" said the word "chicken".
"It was only later that he realized the peacock."
You didn't say HOW he later "realized" that the object was a peacock.
One purpose of individual thinking is to decide which groups to join or ally with. A bunch of individuals are powerless until they act together to promote their views or a candidate or party.
It is ridiculous that our views on global warming seem to collate with political affiliation. The views of nonexperts should collate with a consensus of experts if it exists, and on giving the experts the resources they need to achieve a consensus if none exist. One party's views do this, and one party's views dont; the problem is not the lack of consensus but the fact that one party is not interested in discovering the truth and the other one is guided by a search for the truth and those who have devoted their lives to it. Believers in global warming are perfectly capable of discounting the nuts and fanatics in their midst even while learning what they can from them. This is difficult when being sniped on by the other side, however.
People really do not change much since we are born with innate behavior patterns to an extent. Find a culture where all the people are the same color , religion and live in a distinct group and you will still find many members of that group who have different views and opinions. I have found that if we can sit down and have a discussion in peace it becomes apparent that most people are not much different. I may not believe in global warming but I support reducing emissions for other reasons. Having panels where the members are from different races or religions or gender does not always mean better. Most people David Brooks sits on a panel with are not mainstream, how many people get to be on a panel on public broadcasting or a times round table, elites mostly. People also change depending on circumstances,if I do not have a car I am not that concerned with auto insurance but if I have a car that changes. We look for absolutes to explain people and events but absolutes only exist in a vodka bottle.
Your problems all arise from the quick dismissal of Objective Truth. Let's agree there is at least an underlying reality. Beliefs that more closely approach this reality are truer than things that don't. We have tools (Science is one) that can point us toward this underlying reality thereby letting us sort out which of conflicting beliefs are most likely truer.
Our problem is we have allowed the relativism of the left and the political cynicism of the right to devalue and dismiss Science's essential role in pointing toward truth.
My veterans group is a collective of Korean War, Viet Nam War, Middleeastern Wars, vets with one giant thing in common that unites us. War changed our lives and changed them forever. We are different from each other as the day is to night. Our bound is best described as humanistic soulmates.
Very interesting column Mr. Brooks
Speaking as an individual who feels like he has spent most of his life in these United States trying to overcome the labels and expectations of those who don't see me but see a category, Mr. Brooks, I think you have a point.
3
David, I think you can relax in your confusion. I this nation
individual intellectuals are lonely individuals. We may have
people we agree with and who agree with us on most counts,
but our instincts are really to think and feel as individuals.
The loneliness comes not so much from perspective as from
doubt, though perspective can create a sense of isolated
confidence. Welcome to the "lonely people." Telling the truth
as you see it is the best you can do, knowing your mind might
change as events garner. How else deal with Trump, and now Bolton. One can hope the collective thought and discipline
of Congress might control the White House. But that thought
makes me lonelier.
1
Simple enough. You're thinking in binary terms; you expect it to be one way or the other, when in fact it's both/and, or all of the above. I'm female, and I've definitely experienced sexism in ways that give me cause to align with other women around feminist values; but I can easily understand that my experience as a woman isn't the same as every other woman, that there is vast variation within that gendered experience of life. I might start a conversation by saying, "as a woman" to provide context for my observations and experiences of life, but that does not preclude my ability to read widely, research, and strive for understanding beyond what filters through my gender perspective. There are certainly polemicists that over identify with some aspect of their experience, and that isn't just on the side of gender queer or "racial" identity, it's also the purportedly oppressed white male evangelical claiming a need for religious freedom to exclude part of the mass of humanity from collective life. I think in this as many of the social issues you analyze, you're pitting one theory against another when there are aspects of each that resonate broadly enough to be "true."
3
I'm a 72-year-old, straight, white, Anglo-Saxon male. What do you think I believe?
I have a Ph.D. My godparents were lesbians. I sent in my draft card, marched for civil rights, was ostracized as a professor for not crossing the T.A. union's picket line, was arrested for inciting to riot, founded the first university student organization to advocate gay rights. I could go on. Now what do you think I believe?
I spent a good part of my life apologizing for my origins.
I have certainly benefited from privilege, but I have done much to negate that. I am downwardly mobile. I am not rich because being rich is not the most important thing. By global standards, most of us are rich.
I don't want your approval, but I would like to keep my job.
Claiming to be blind to differences can be said to be denying the effect of differences. Claiming to be aware of differences can be said to be claiming knowledge you can't really have. We would do better with an emphasis on similarities than on differences.
The world is divided into two groups of people, those who divide the world into two groups of people, and those who don't.
Everybody has to have empathy. Victims are not exempt.
3
If you've apologized for who you are, you don't really deserve your job.
1
Even if we accept the notion that group membership influences opinion, we do not have to accept the notion that it completely corrupts it. Some groups, after all, may be better observers than others or at the very least, better at observing certain things than others. It's only those who believe, wrongly, that ideas can be completely reduced to their group origin, who lead this charge, and they do so for reasons relating to the acquisition of power, not for reasons having something to do with the nature of belief.
Groups can encourage best standards and methods, and then debate them. The best ideas may not always win just like the best baseball team doesn't always win, but no system is perfect. And, let's face it, critical thinking and use of evidence, has been bery bery good, to humanity. The solution to bias can only be better critical thinking.
1
Group identity is alluring because it fosters a sense of solidarity, meaning, and purpose. And it relieves one of the need to think for oneself. So it is natural that people will fall into racism, tribalism, or nationalism. People view this positively as cultural pride, piety, and patriotism.
It is only education and wisdom that removes these fetters. Facts and reason are indifferent to what team one belongs on. And morality requires that we view everyone--in group or out group--as an end in themselves, not as a means to an end. These are the hard-fought lessons of western civilization--and the foundation stones of our country.
It will take more than Donald Trump or Mitch McConnell to eradicate these basic notions of fairness and rationality. We all have the medicine to cure what ails our democracy: the vote. We just need to use it.
I was raised as a devout Catholic by Republican parents who valued critical thinking, as did the nuns who taught in my all-girls' high school. Those formative influences prioritized reason, intellectual rigor and ethical honesty above affiliation - and prepared me to become a liberally-educated, non-religious, mainly-Democratic-voting adult with a challenging, rewarding career.
Along the way, significant awakenings included Vietnam, Watergate, the Church's reactionary hardliners post-Vatican II, and my parents' political party no longer inspired by Lincoln and Eisenhower but instead devoted to consolidating wealth while pandering to the litmus tests of evangelicals and the NRA.
Rather than my background hard-wiring me to simply replicate it, it strengthened and freed me to continually explore, assess and grow.
4
Cultural identity is not fixed. It shifts with context and with need.
I taught at an international school in Europe for a number of years. Students came to us from particular countries and supposed particular cultural identities- they were Dutch or Korean or Indian or German- but these cultural identities were not fixed- as students moved from one cultural context to another within the school community they would adopt the language and attitudes of others that allowed them to better get along. More importantly their work to make sense of other cultures made them smarter, more adept at forming productive relationships, and set them up to be leaders in a world full of shifting cultural contexts.
The current identity politics in our country relies too heavily on the notion that someone is what a particular culture has made them and that somehow this in immutable. A fixed cultural mindset gets us in trouble when we assume that we cannot appreciate or even take on aspects of other cultures that might improve our lives and allow us to better get along with each other.
3
The answer is simple, Mr. Brooks. Women - over half the population of the world - have been socially repressed since the inception of "modern HIStory', basically written - and enforced - by catholic and islamist men.
The world is out of balance. Men are much more inclined than Socially Conscious women to say, "That's the way it is" instead of taking action to change things.
Nature is full of evidence of "group think". Ants. Lemmings, who collectively race off cliffs to their deaths. Fish who go back to their origin to spawn. Male lions that sit around and let the females do the heavy lifting.
However, human beings were given the ability to think. Evil, power hungry people use the ability to try to manipulate others. Socially Conscious women and men use the ability to help create a better world.
The real problem with "group think" today is that it has been monetized to the extreme - like everything else.
Those of us who have the ability to think for ourselves must constantly challenge the brain-washed group thinkers - unless we want their kind of mindless world.
5
The most important sentence in this essay: "Our whole education system is based on the idea that we train individuals to be critical thinkers." If that were true, then looking at the world from viewpoints not dictated by our individual identities--racial, ethnic, sexual, economic, whatever--might be possible. But for decades, Republicans have systematically cut funding for education so severely that most high-school graduates today know little about history, geography, foreign languages, and even simple math, let alone thinking critically. And the proof of our national failure to teach critical thinking? He sits today in the Oval Office.
6
I almost hate to say this, but Mr. Brooks' assertion that his various group affiliations doesn't inform his opinions may be his white male privilege talking. Yes, the basis of human dignity is our capacity to make up our own minds, and, yes, our educational system is geared toward giving individuals the power of critical thinking. But part of critical thinking is understanding where thoughts originate, what factors influenced the thoughts we're reading and hearing. So, of course, your political affiliation could be a significant factor in your views on climate change or engineered foods; a person who seems business as a powerful, positive force in the world will be more tolerant of industry-supporting viewpoints than another who sees business as inherently dangerous to the common citizen's welfare. All of our viewpoints are subject to the understandings and norms of the cultures we exist in--I will always work with and against the assumptions that I learned growing up as a suburban white male in a conservative family in middle America during the 1960 and 1970s. Those aren't the same assumptions manifested in a Gen X urban woman of color from Southern California. That doesn't mean that either of us lacks the capacity to make up our own minds, or that she and I can't agree on anything. But our differences and similarities will always inform those opinions.
2
It is not all group vs. group, but what you fail to recognize is the purposeful and calculated strategy on the right wing to gain coherency by demonizing their political opponents as a primary rhetorical strategy. That is the genesis of this tribalism, the right wing tribalists. Please open your eyes about how your beloved conservatism has been completely co-opted by right wing tribalists. The left wing has not been co-opted in this manner.
1
This column should be in The Onion and not the Times. Brooks is a shining example of group think as are most NYT writers.
NYT columnist with high income insulated from working people's reality begins to wake up but still speaks from his white male conservative ivory tower and fails to understand race and ethnicity matter.
Our author forgot Marx: "The fundamental ideas of a society are that of the ruling class." Imagine that.
Yet even present-day Marxists (ie Althusser) cite group-causality as 'aleatory'; absolutely nothing is 'determined', as our author would have it.
Moreover, philosophers who write of individual autonomy have for the most part also assumed an intelligent minority of autonomous thinkers. It's granted that the majority would act on herd instinct.
Here, two issues:
1) Responsibility of the independent-thinkers as 'public intellectuals'. While established in Europe, this is lacking in America. Our present tribalism is a result of this.
2) Independent thought as a moral choice. Excepting Classical Greece, most all philosophers who have written of independent thought have also acknowledged a universal human capacity to do so: Aquinas, Descartes, Kant...so to what extent should we hold non-thinkes responsible for their negligence?
Lastly, we encounter the concept of Flight. Humans are hard-wired both to learn social norms and to derive a sense of Self in deviating from conformity.
Lines of Flight determine who we are as 'individuals'. This takes many forms, from pink hair to reading Plato. Here, the philosophers of record are Kant (Crit #3), and Deleuze.
Lines of flight are Personal Expressions, and vary by place and culture. While in France it's the cultivation of the personal intellect, in amerika it's the auto-creation of the economic self...
l
Brooks: 'How many times have we all heard somebody rise up in conversation and say, “Speaking as a Latina. …” or “Speaking as a queer person. …” or “Speaking as a Jew. …”?'
Times commenters sometimes begin with "I'm a so-and-so, ...".
That preface seems to be an attempt to establish credibility, legitimacy, authority, etc.
Brooks: "After you’ve stated your group identity, what is the therefore that follows?"
Either a legitimate attempt to relate a personal experience or a possibly fallacious attempt at proof by authority.
WVM: "Either a legitimate attempt to relate a personal experience or a possibly fallacious attempt at proof by authority."
After looking at examples from Times comments, there is a third case:
An attempt to establish uniqueness within a group.
Anyway, in more general terms, the "Speaking as" preface is simply one rhetorical device among many.
The very fact that the "unique", God blessed United States of America somehow managed to elect as your president (small p intended) a stupid, immoral, misogynistic, racist con man belies any reasoning that your education system is directed toward critical thinking.
3
Gee, thanks, eh! Still better than Hillary.
I always speak as a flat-fleeted person. I think it is silly to speak based on the color of one's skin but there are people out there that do it. Very sad!
2
St Augustine was not black, his mother was Berber, or if you prefer Moore, one of the shades of the white race. when specifying skin color in France, before the present subsaharian invasion, one had the choice in depicting one's skin to answer clear or mate. Nowadays Othelo must be black even though he was told to be Moorish, and so, poor St Augustine, and poor white race, if one has the copper type of shade, one must be partially black. Which implies that the Hebrews were also black. Read 'the Men of Africa'. Nowadays you must be black and preferably part of some non-straight male set.
Yes, Augustine was Berber. And you are absolutely right that classifying ancient peoples in terms of contemporary racial or color schemes is ignorant and absurd. But there's no stopping this racializing train we're now on. When the absurdity finally breaks through, and we can talk about shared historical experiences and geographies and cultural developments in appropriately scaled down fashion--and allow for greater individual variation--we'll become much more sane, and our ways of addressing problems won't do so much damage and cause so much confusion.
"St Augustine was not black, ..."
OK, Brooks could have chosen someone else to make his point about the relevance of group identity to other subjects:
"How does being Latina influence how you read a black writer like [Malcolm X]?"
Or maybe you don't consider Malcolm X to be a "writer"?
I so appreciate the clear thinking and grappling with the right questions that is always present in your columns. Reading them is often like getting a hit of pure oxygen. Well, maybe not pure oxygen- that's not supposed to be good for a person. But, you know what I mean.
I think this discounts the very real collective experience of varying religious groups, ethnicities, and minorities. We often say "those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it". That suggests that even if one never lived through those experiences themselves, they should be conscious of the implications in the current day. It's not possible to be Jewish in America and not see parallels between the gestapo tactics of Nazi Germany and the current practices of ICE agents rounding up the undocumented. In that case, I could very well preface my comments with, "Speaking as a Jew..." because I have internalized a history of my people that is quite similar to today's current events. It's not possible to be black in America and not be outraged by the excessive force in what is supposed to be a post-racial society, given their collective history. They have every right to start their criticism with "Speaking as an African-American..." Similarly, how can we not listen to a woman who states her position "Speaking as a survivor of sexual assault..."? There's an immediate communication of a first person testimony that would be taken with utmost seriousness if stated in a witness statement in a court of law. The point is, a group identification lead-in doesn't negate the person's opinion, nor does it mean they don't have an opinion of their own. It simply means, in my estimation, the comment is given a bit more weight and credibility.
It seems strange that Mr. Brooks would agonize over the distinction between individual reason and group identity, when he himself has flirted with the idea that, for instance, it is his genes which give him an affinity for the scholarship of Steven Pinker (March 1, 2018); and that men and women have inherently different mental capacities (Feb 22, 2018). Clearly the notion of having his own thoughts, feelings, capacities, and affinities defined in terms of biological grouphood doesn't bother him; but the idea that thoughts emerging from one's life experiences with other people in society does. If this doesn't count as an abnegation of individual capacity for thinking, feeling, and arguing -- if this doesn't count, in other words, as an abnegation of the very dignity that he claims to cherish -- I don't know what does.
2
Thank you, Mr. Brooks, for mansplaining how everyone not a white male is doing it wrong.
We are all living in systems largely created and enforced by white males. When we point out problems in this system, we are derided as the other and dismissed, or worse.
At one time, we might have worked together to improve this system. But it is now plainly apparent after the white male population's response to the administration of Barack Obama, white men want nothing to do with systemic improvements they did not think of first. And, when given a chance, seek to deliberately destroy improvements that help anyone who is not a white man.
It is so easy as a person of privilege to ignore the suffering of others not your sex or skin tone. Or, to sadistically punish those others.
What percentage of "white males" have had absolutely insignificant power--even the power to save their own lives and prevent inhuman suffering--under this system you attribute to "white males?" What percentage of "white males" "created" this system? There is a level at which racial and gender generalizations become powerfully and insidiously false.
1
Blah. You obviously do not know what it is like to realize that your body does change how you perceive and are perceived by the world. I am a military brat, and was raised on bases. At one point, we moved to a tiny Texas town that was largely still segregated and one of the first questions that I was asked was if I had moved to Taco Flats, a neighborhood of mostly Hispanic people.
Then I took a trip to visit my relatives in a wealthier Texas town. My little cousin and I could not look more different; his hair red, mine black. The first time that I took him to pick up groceries, I was wearing black eyeliner, a bright red peasant skirt, big hoop earrings. We had been at the beach, and I was SO tan.
The shape of my nose, the tan of my skin, and the clothing I enjoy apparently marked me to some people as Mexican in appearance and that affected how I would be treated. I was offered an interview by someone as a nanny, because my cousin was well behaved. I asked my aunt and it turns out that most of the help in town is Hispanic.
I've been pulled over just to chat about where I'm headed.
I was forwarded emails about how "Mexicans are choosing whites to water down the blood lines." I have kids & a white husband.
I thought that being Mexican was CYA dances and quinces until I moved to Texas. Being of Mexican descent informs my opinion. I can see the segregation built into this state clearly as I didn't live in it until I was an older teenager. I know that Texas is not the only state.
1
So does your experience of bigotry as a result of how you look mean you can only understand the experience of others of Mexican descent? Or do you now have the ability to empathize with those who face discrimination regardless of the reason, whether it's skin color, religion, gender or sexual orientation?
If it's the former, I feel sorry for you. Humans share the capacity to feel every emotion. The basis of those emotions and feelings predate our species. We're much more alike than we are different. Group identification is an awful fetish of our current culture. It's a blight and a sickness.
I am able to empathize more fully and be a better ally to those who are being oppressed. However, when I tell, for example, a white male in Texas that there is definite segregation and systemic problems within school districts and housing areas in these regions that is recognizable to me and that I have experienced this firsthand as a woman of Mexican descent, he absolutely can not tell me that I have not experienced bigotry or seen these separations in Texas just because his experience in life is different. My opinion on the state of our system of government, laws, culture, and my area is definitely influenced by what I have personally experienced by the body that I was born in and can not walk out of. That is why it is necessary for people to recognize when they should be listening instead of talking in certain situations. Quite frankly, a large population in this country would rather "tell it like it is" than listen to what someone else has to say and work to make things better for all Americans. Identifying yourself within a group to clarify your position is not necessarily group think. Often it is an invitation for the other party involved to listen in on an experience and vantage point that they would not otherwise have and learn something. Viewing this as group think and dismissing it out of hand is a way of immediately closing yourself off to the possibility of becoming a better human.
Right in the middle of you column is an ad from Facebook. Did you know that?
From a white female...
1
It seems the labeling and division into groups has been fomented by a desire to create and character "the other". Our country ha been down this path a number of times. Nearly every immigrant group has experienced it. Remember the sign "No Irish or dogs allowed"? Do you remember when we turned away a boatload of Jews escaping from the Holocaust? In the 1950s it was the "communists". We claim this country is a "melting pot". Our actions seem to show otherwise.
Philosophical analysis, aside, the most important group membership, perhaps in the history of the United States to date is being a patriotic American who will do all in their power to remove from office Trump and his Republican enablers. They are the greatest threat to our democracy since the Revolutionary War. Race and gender are irrelevant. Which side are you on?
1
Don’t be confused David. Your identity and experience should be completely divorced from your statement(s) which must be evaluated irrespective of who made the statement. And that evaluation must be scrutinized according to the evidence and logic. Nothing else matters.
I think any discussion of how people think should be begun with the realisation that people are not rational. You can indeed train yourself and others to be rational through education and social pressure but the temptation to be irrational will always be a greater force. Thinking is hard work and simply repeating the words of our social influencers is a far easier task. It's not really possible to be rational 100% of the time because of the extreme energy and effort required. So we fall back on narratives that are constructs of our social groups and this is why a diversity of social opinions is critical, because we do see things differently based on the experiences of those around us. A rough guess is that a healthy human might be 20% rational. That number goes down if we are socially isolated, overworked, depressed, using alcohol or other drugs (mind altering pharma included), hungry, or challenged on a basic survival level. This is why periods of social chaos or economic depravity are so dangerous for leaders, government, and society at large. It makes us crazy and the void of rational thought is filled by the social construct because it's a cognitively easier lift. This is why paying attention to what sort of social narratives are allowed to be passed off as fact are critical to a democracy. It's also why we're in deep doodoo.
You're smart David but I can't get over the title of "Speaking as a White Male". You put yourself into that category when 80 short years ago you would have been classified as an Untermensch. You know, some people still feel that way about you even if they don't say it to your face, my friend.
2
"I’m a columnist and I’m supposed to come to a conclusion, but I’m confused." You're finally, just now, admitting to confusion? How can you have read your own columns in the last few years and missed that? I think admitting your confusion may be the best conclusion possible for you.
1
I'm not a Groupie, Mr. Brooks, but I am informed by my station in society and culture where ever I happen to be. I was born in Texas, raised in the USA attending public schools, and spend my working career in the USA. Married twice, found and lost religion (but it was good entertainment at times). I consider myself a democrat but only because I believe that the most important members of our society are humans and we should make every effort to do no harm. It seems to me that republicans seek to control the amount of freedom an individual may have and greased palms allow one individual to have more freedoms or rights to more freedoms, that others. In other words, republicans think they merit more good and less bad and that everyone else merits more burden and less individual freedoms.
But I will say this, until I moved to France I didn't comprehend the depth that being an immigrant is. I'm not one to seek out people who think like me, speak my language or share my beliefs. Thus it is that I have very few but very close friends. What I have noticed among all my friends who have never been an immigrant is that they have no idea what it entails. Everything.
Every single thing has changed. My country, USA, is no longer my country but wants to hold on to me for the head-count. My fellow Americans in American believe I'm a traitor and we don't share anything in common. Where I am everyone seems to think of me as an invader who's proven they can't fit it.
Experience is education
2
Fashion is the passion! It is fashion that drives change, not philosophers. Fashion drives change because it is easy to access, much easier to access than logical proofs. We don't know really from where the fashion comes. I could postulate that in post-WWII the reason we said we believed in individuality because we were reacting against to all we were fighting, i.e., Nazism, Communism. But then, on the other hand, the entire world was entranced by collectivist ideas prior to WWII because of the economic depression, including the U.S. Hitler and Stalin just did it better. Anyway, my point is that we do not know from where fashion comes. That does not mean we should give up trying, including Mr. Brooks! Trying is how we accidentally make fashion, how we accidentally make progress. Bonne Chance!
Anyone who thinks that there is more similarity within a group than between groups, or said in reverse, anyone who thinks there is more diversity between groups than within them, is engaging in racism. As Jordan Peterson says, "believing there is more difference between groups than within them, is the Fundamental Racist Idea." Now what is identity politics? What is identifying as your race rather than the multifaceted human you are? It is racism. Most people in a given race category do not have the Same experience, and to suggest so is to lie. To say that because I am white, therefore anything, is racism. Just as to say, because someone is black, therefore anything. That's the clearest exemplification of racism. The fact that people on the left engage in identity politics while simultaneously espousing the idea that they are against racism IS ironic, a clear, incontestable contradiction, and maybe the most infuriating thing to anyone who understands reason and feels oppressed by Political Correctness, which, by definition, is racist.
The story of the ten blind men and the elephant is an apt metaphor. Each of the blind men was experiencing a different part of the elephant. One said it was a snake because he felt the trunk. Another thought it was a tree because he felt the leg. Another thought it was a barn because he smelled the rear end... and so on. We are all doomed to our own experiential interpretations of things unless we have access to the larger picture. If each blind men could merge his idea and experience with the others then they may be able to put together a whole. It might not be a description of an elephant but it brings the pieces in to closer alignment so that a mutually workable understanding can be reached.
Each individual from each group brings a dual interpretation. one is one's individual experiences and deductions, the other what one experiences in the people who surround him. We need both. In the end we all need to find common ground that respects what each person adds to the whole and understands why that person adds it. I believe that we are arrogant in our belief that we are able to understand other groups experience in totality, and that we refuse to the see the elephant of the elite privileged class, who has written and defined our history and culture from one fragment in the kaleidoscope.
Brooks: "What does that mean?"
Here are some examples from Times comments.
* I'm not like other Democrats:
** "I'm a Democrat and I have always liked Melania."
** "I'm a lifelong Democrat and among my favorite First Ladies are Betty Ford, Barbara Bush, and Laura Bush."
(Kate Andersen Brower OpEd, JAN. 25, 2018)
* I'm not like other liberals:
** "I’m a liberal and agree that movies, tv and gaming need course correction."
(Lindy West OpEd, MARCH 3, 2018)
* I am an authority:
** "I am a play reader & sometime dramaturg for small theaters ..."
(Jennifer Finney Boylan OpEd, MARCH 14, 2018)
* I have strong beliefs:
** "... I am a firm believer in the First Amendment."
(Jennifer Finney Boylan OpEd, MARCH 14, 2018)
* I am old and therefore experienced:
** "I'm in my mid-sixties, and I've never heard them."
(Jennifer Finney Boylan OpEd, MARCH 14, 2018)
Brooks, just remember February is Black History Month, but in the US, every day is white man’s day.
Actually David, you are not confused at all. Your piece is a thinly veiled, politically correct statement about your utter frustration with identify politics. I happen to agree with you, but I find it unfortunate and defeating that the current environment prevents you from clearly stating what is so clearly on your mind.
1
David, the notion that we train people to be individual thinkers is a farce. It is not about being a democrat or republican; but it is about group identity. And it is highly relected in all the opinion columns of this newspaper. It is highly appropriate for individuals to make up thier own minds about highly personal and moral issues such as abortion, premarital sex, religious beliefs. But, lets not kid ourselves. The majority of issues we are confronting today are collective issues and reflect ideas and isin ictions that are so often aimed at a specific group. These are patently obvious and have serious ramification for specific identities: immigration reform, racism, envoronmental issues, tax policies, etc. it is one thing to encourage all of us to make up own minds, but a humane, compassionate society should represent collective humanity, not simply preserving power of spefic groups. You are right when you say that our epistemological foundation is in radical flux. But knowledge is so often driven by collective compassion, scientific expertise and a strong moral foundation. Without that, its no wonder you are confused.
1
Great article, thank you.
This column is founded on a fundamental misunderstanding. Brooks claims that acknowledging you come from a certain place means that you agree that group identify determines (yes, he used that word) your opinions. No one made such a claim. I'm not sure why he jumps to the absurd conclusion that if you acknowledge the limits of your individual experience and how that might shape your views on things, that you're somehow letting being bamboozled into groupthink. The two things just don't follow. Claims to objectivity are hubris, pure and simple, The humble realize that even though they may try to get at the truth of things, there will always be ways that their perspective is going to be shaped by their own experience. And that experience can include being a member of a group. But no one is claiming that that experience is deterministic. Each individual has a different experience of being female or black or gay. Brooks' whole column is a reductio ad absurdum -- and a real insult to people who do make the claim that identity is important.
1
"Busy fighting communism and fascism, people back then [the fifties] emphasized individual reason and were deeply allergic to groupthink."
What "people," Mr. Brooks? Certainly not wives who turned to valium out of frustration, boredom, and depression because a woman's place was in the home. Certainly not black people prevented from buying homes in white neighborhoods. Your comment in and of itself reveals the then-invisible "groupthink" of privileged white males. You cite Hannah Arendt as an independent thinker, but most women and people of color (and those we describe now as "other") had NO intellectual voice at that time.
To be a critical thinker, and to be able to dialogue with others at that level, we need to know who WE are first. Identifying what shoes we walk in is paramount to being able to shed them temporarily to walk in another's. My fellow professors who work in the area of critical race theory and identity politics are thebest at getting their students to interrogate their own beliefs, to critically think a
David Brooks was once s conservative columnist who supported just about anything Republican candidates for office said or did. But with an obviously incompetent G.O.P. president in the White House, Brooks writes broad summaries of sociological theories published by publish-or-perish academics, often implying that their musings support conservative ideology.
As a twice weekly columnist for the nation's most influential newspaper and weekly guest on TV's popular PBS 's Newshour, Brooks has lost a professional raison d'etre.
Dear Mr. Brooks,
Regarding your questions: "How many times have we all heard somebody rise up in conversation and say, “Speaking as a Latina. …” or “Speaking as a queer person. …” or “Speaking as a Jew. …”?
Now, when somebody says that I always wonder, What does that mean?"
Naming your race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, etc intends to send at least two message: 1) Making you conscious of that which you have probably already unconsciously used to classify and characterize me.
2) Making it clear that I have not lived the white dominant experience, so my statements may different from the dominant narrative.
It may also be a way for the speaker to build up the strength to take the likely backlash that will follow their statement.
I know you want to believe that you (and all Americans to some degree) do not unconsciously judge people based on their skin color, accent, or other characteristics. Perhaps that will be true someday, somewhere. But it is certainly not true in this country at this time.
If you are uncomfortable and confused when someone states their their race, religion, gender or sexual orientation, how are you--or any of us--going to be able to see and respond to the systemic racism and other discrimination that continues to weaken and erode our society?
Growing up white, female and poor I learned something valuable when I entered college. The moment you use the phrase "working class," you have begun to distance yourself from that group. Just questioning these categories suggests a level of privilege. My mother who worked in a factory never referred to herself as a white, working class woman. She would have felt foolish using that phrase because it would have been meaningless to her. She was a wife and mother who worked. So when we use terms like white male, white female, working class, poor, privileged, academic or bourgeois, we are already in a position of questioning that splinters us off from many of the others we're trying to define.
The minute I started using the phrase working class at home, my parents started regarding me with suspicion: we had become somewhat estranged.
1
Things happen to people who are not white males that never happen to white males, and to some white males that never happen to others. I went to law school in the early 1970's when hardly any women did. When I appeared as a lawyer in a Federal court in Brooklyn, NY in the mid-1970's, I was approached by a bailiff who told me something like "secretaries were not allowed to sit inside the bar." Of course, my very fancy DOJ credentials allowed me to stay and do my job. I can virtually guarantee that never happened to any white male. Also, I am of Jewish origin, but don't "look" it and do not have an easily identifiable "Jewish" name. Over my lifetime I have heard astonishing comments made about Jewish people - made in my presence only because it was assumed I was not one of "those" people. My father was recruited for a big accounting job (before he became a lawyer), but was not hired when they found out (after asking) that he was Jewish. While, of course, I do not "know" what it's like to be a minority black or brown person in the US, I can imagine. Sad that David Brooks is so clueless.
Yes, the united failed states is a fraud. However, democracy, liberty, and decency are not - they just are homeless after the american house collapsed in 2016. No worries: we have room for them in California.
#calexit
"Busy fighting communism and fascism, people back then [1950's] emphasized individual reason and were deeply allergic to groupthink." ???
I grew up in the 50's in NY. One of my early emotional memories is of my moderately liberal parents watching a tiny black and white TV (on a stand with a thick magnifying glass in front of the screen) as I sat playing on the floor.
I could feel the fear in the room, in the way that small children and dogs can sense what they cannot understand. I had no idea what they were watching or whether there was any connection between the fear that radiated from them and the blabbing grey faces on the Du Mont TV.
A few years later I figured out what it was they were watching and confirmed it with my folks. It was Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin and his side-kick Roy Cohn holding "hearings" designed to vilify, intimidate, and ruin the lives not simply of individuals suspected of being 'commies,' but of anyone who might think for themselves or imagine that there was any other reality than the groupthink that McCarthy was peddling.
Demagoguery worked as well then as it seems to be working now...only the TV screen is now in color, runs 24-hours a day, and is generating widespread fear and groupthink at the pace of a birdbrain's twitter.
St. Augustine was black?
1
I can see why Brooks is confused or my words, still lost.
He's still trying to rationalize why the GOP picked a toddler for the White House.
By the way, Brooks claims he's a white male columnist which he is but he never writes anything without the fog of his Republican ideology and furthering the wretched con of the right wingers.
Trying to intellectualize his platform has failed.
Keep searching Brooks, hopefully one day you will wake up.
1
Haha Mr. Brooks, I think you are so confused because it's the first time you are forced to think of yourself as having an identity: white Anglo male. You've probably cruised through life so far pretending you are just a neutral person, but now with everybody labelling themselves something, you wonder where you fit. Mr. Brooks, we people who are not white Anglo males don't choose our labels. Other people impose them on us every day of our lives. I speak as a Latina because no one will see me as anything more than that. Do you think if I tried to speak as a "neutral person" people would let me get away with it? Absolutely no. You've been missing out on the experience of being put in a box. All the rest of us are not confused, we now how this society works - and it's not in our favor. So once I've been labelled, I wear it proudly: speaking as a Latina, Mr. Brooks, welcome to the world of having an identity.
Speaking as an Op-Ed Reader... Your confusion, or rather your unguarded curiosity, is refreshing. Many of your fellow columnists are such hardened party liners that it seems pointless to read them. I already know what they think upon seeing the headline.
2
Well I think whenever someone starts a sentence with "Speaking as a..." I tune out. Does speaking as a .... mean you are better qualified? Am I unable to comprehend or empathize? You are saying all these things and more. That is not only offensive it is prejudiced And by the way, "Speaking as" does not mean you speak for everyone of your "group".
I am the master of my fate, the captain of my soul! Well, maybe not. But maybe also it doesn't matter. Don't get sucked into the black hole of being right or wrong, or of excessive introspection. Just be nice. That covers most things, and you can avoid your confirmation bias.
1
"When you put together a panel discussion or a work team, even on a subject like oncology, you don’t want to have a bunch of white males sitting up there. We know that something valuable will be lost".
The statement that "you don’t want to have a bunch of white males" implies that there are but two types of people. White males on the one hand, and on the other hand simply others who are identified based on the mere fact that they are not white males.
And this concept, that people can be identified as being non white is a most insulting, if not racist, idea. It makes no distinction whether the non white male is a woman, a latino, an Indian, Chinese, African American or a person of any of the numerous nationalities and ethnicities which outnumber whites by far.
If we can assume that there are perspectives on oncology that elude white males, this means that people can provide perspective based on their particular ethnicity and national roots or gender. Accordingly a Chinese person can provide a perspective based on his background, just as a latino can provide one based on his and so forth.
So the suggestion that there is a point in simply having a panel that is not made up exclusively of white males, meaning that that the rest of humanity all fall into a single category of being non white males harks back to the mindset of places like South Africa at the turn of the 20th century.
2
in a lovely twist, you'll get far more varied and interesting rejoinders to this topic from people who have different experiences... with education, persuasion, deliberation, power, democracy, professional representation, history teaching, and more.
in many cases, we don't know what we don't know. maybe representation seems redundant if you've never had to think about it. but it makes a big difference to me, for example, to see other women speak about the tech industry, or have an LGBT CEO who grasps the new updates in the employee handbook. being open to considering that women, LGBT people, people of color, people from different countries, etc may have quite different experiences with something otherwise taken for granted is kind of the essence of it.
1
Why not view ideas and perspectives as always an interaction between one's group memberships and whatever is unique about oneself (the latter of which is its own interaction between one's multiple group memberships, one's genes, and one's experiences)? Thus, when one of us says, "speaking as a white man..." that would mean speaking as someone who's views have been influenced, though not wholly determined, by being both white and male.
1
I have a different feeling about this. For an individual to have any political power at all they have to join a coalition. They may not agree withal the positions in that coalition but defend the ones they don't agree with to get their own point across. After awhile you may even think you agree with other points in the coalition.
So you had union blue collar people voting for Republicans over Viet Nam and gun rights, when the Republicans were totally anti-union. You have poor white voters dependent on the social safety net, voting Republican because of religious issues.
This coalition building creates a certain tribal cohesion that looks like group think.
1
We all have our stories to tell. They’re often relevant to assessing our viewpoints. But I can’t see why questions of race and gender should supplant reason, conscience, and our common humanity when we’re writing laws or developing cultural norms.
I don’t mind saying, when it seems relevant, that I’m a large well-educated white guy, born mid century, raised working class and religious in east Houston. I knew men who died early of diseases that seemed related to the hazards of work. I knew women, still artificially disadvantaged in seeking work that matched their interests and talents even though families were smaller and labor saving devices abundant, who poured their lives into TV soap operas or, in one case, lost her life to booze and pills. Some guys 2 to 10 years older than me were drafted and sent to Vietnam when the National Guard wasn’t activated and guys with pull got into the Guard. At 16 a bunch of us who looked big and rough were taken to tour the Texas prison for 1st offenders; I got rousted about once a year for 8 years; and I know the black and Hispanic guys had it worse.
But today I can’t work up the usual enthusiasm for this topic.
Donald Trump, Larry Kudlow, and John Bolton are in charge of peace and prosperity. Dark and stormy clouds are gathering. What can we do?
"Our political system is based on the idea that persuasion and deliberation lead to compromise and toward truth."
No, it's not. Our political system is based on the belief that elected representatives will, more or less, represent the people that elected them. The legislative institutions are based on the premise that decisions are made by accumulating enough votes {power} to prevail.
Compromise is a result of the lack of sufficient power to win a vote, combined with a personal belief that the use of physical force is not acceptable. It's that personal belief that allows the system to work.
It's that personal bias against the use of force that has be abandoned and repudiated by Conservatism. Instead of force as a last resort for self-preservation, it has become a primary resort for Conservatives.
And the team that believes that "might makes right" and it's better to "shoot first and ask questions later" is in charge of this country.
In the movies those that believed in "might" used to be the bad guys who got their just due in the end. Nowadays, they run the country.
1
I strongly recommend spending some real time with some less privileged people. Try a nursing home, especially home health aides. Go to a municipal court and watch how, among some that deserve their fate, DWB victims are penalized with fines and bullied into paying many times over for what are sometimes manufactured offenses (police tend to stop more people of color).
I was lucky to have some African American bosses, and they treated me well, but over time I realized that my good treatment was only an overflow of the way they cared for each other.
Sorry about "they" but it does not help racism to pretend to ignore the differences. Better to appreciate different qualities than to ignore them.
1
If one examines macro data, there's no doubt that types of people tend to think and vote alike. None at all. But that does not mean individuals within categories are doomed to follow the herd. I'm in what is called "the silent generation" and I've never been silent. Of course, a lot of good speaking out does one when your whole generation is silent, but that's another story.
1
I detect a possible flaw here. Mr. Brooks proffers that "[o]ur whole education system is based on the idea that we train individuals to be critical thinkers." I suggest a confirming look at that. Most schools practice undifferentiated curricula that reward students for behavior that is likely to be uniform, thus not particularly challenging. Show me a school where students are pressed to take charge of their own learning and I will show you a school where there is some thinking happening.
1
The sooner Mr Brooks's endeavored "greater emphasis on collective experience" can duly contextualize the unfair advantage his old/white-guy demographic has no doubt had since the creation of Adam, the sooner our order -- whence a more perfect union can form -- can more duly evolve by adapting to change. NOT by flexing one's muscles. After all, had Nietzsche been the guy cutting Eden's grass, we'd still be there.
Epistemological foundation in flux indeed. Methinks someone is spending too much time in the ivory tower.
... "If it’s just group against group, deliberation is a sham, beliefs are just masks groups use to preserve power structures, and democracy is a fraud. The epistemological foundation of our system is in surprisingly radical flux."...
It's not that simple David.
Democracy is not a "fraud."
Beliefs are not a fraud.
Beliefs are created out of facts, out of experience as we all live our lives in the real world. We all go to jobs, drive cars, raise families, pay money, learn from our experiences. Our most important core central beliefs come from this. Sure abstract beliefs around high order concepts such as "gay rights" :"abortion rights" "gun rights" are shaped by biases. But our most important beliefs come from direct experience.
The epistemological foundation of our system may indeed be in flux, but the real foundation of the real world is not as hard to understand or as dramatically changed in the past year as you would like us to believe.
For hundreds of years, the trend of civilization has been clear. More connection, material progress, social rights progress. Yes, people associate with groups. Surprise surprise. But stop looking at theory. Look at the real world trends of the past 5, 10, 20, 50, 100, 200 years, not just the news of the day.
Don't extrapolate from Trump's outlier tendencies to the arc of civilization. That would be a sham deliberation
1
Certainly not all beliefs are created from fact unless you include the absence of fact as a fact. Arguably, the most prevalent belief structure across the world is a belief in god and the religious beliefs surrounding same. None of these beliefs are created from any objective fact except the fact that no one can know with 100% certainty whether a god or gods exist. Belief in god rests on the fact that we don’t know the answer to all of life’s questions and some of those questions are unanswerable with our current understanding of the physical universe. A god fills in those answers for some and also answers spiritual questions for which there are no objective facts. A 100% certainty of belief that there is no god rests on the fact that no objective evidence for such existence can be shown other than the fact that polls show that 95% of all humans believe there is such a thing. Belief doesn’t make it a fact.
The same can be said for virtually every human social construct.
"The epistemological foundation of our system is in surprisingly radical flux." It's not OUR System that is changing, it is YOUR system. Disruption has still not been sufficient to lift the scales from your eyes.
1
A most thoughtful and necessary essay on a topic that has bedeviled me for many years. Brooks's ruminations have helped me understand the issue more clearly.
2
Aye, the ol' empathy - solipsism duality appears. Where one falls on the spectrum says a lot, in fact it may say it all.
1
I used to read Brooks's columns readying myself for his twist of the knife at the end of one column or another designed for wide and fair appeal: I could count on him to end up showing his real intent, usually an obvious assault on values and perspectives he no doubt sees as to the "left". This time around, he's up to the same trick, but claiming intellectual and emotional confusion. If only he had the courage at the end of this article to simply state that we're all of us in a terrible fix because the Republicans have over the years engineered a political and social world - energized by members of a white majority resentful of losing place to the emerging minority - where, currently, even the supreme court and the growing conservative, speedily appointed judiciary uphold a divisiveness that pits us one against another, convinced adversary against another, nuance and complexity begone. As the current brilliant and stable president might say: Sad!
3
Conservatism, especially the Fox News version, will always be a subset of liberalism. It’s within the context of a liberal society that various “groups” emerge. The biggest baddest group think that’s going on in America right now is the Republican Party and it’s media infrastructure. Its more like a religion or a cult or a self esteem builder for a great percentage of its followers who are blindly devoted.
2
My key to dealing with others is to treat them the way that I would like to be treated.
Even as a white male, I have been able to establish warm, mutually beneficial relationships with people from all walks of life, all races, creeds, and sexual orientations.
It's not that difficult to do.
My astonishment is over the number of people who cannot and will not approach interpersonal, and inter-societal relationships in the same way.
We all have something to contribute, some more than others. But ALL should be so entitled.
3
Perhaps your confusion is in thinking that the two are opposed to one another. My experience as a black woman has given me experiences that you, as a white male, either have not experienced or have experienced differently because in the same situation you are likely to encounter different reactions/responses from others and to base your assessment of that situation on different points of reference.
The problem I have with the 1950's perspective you cite is not that those thinkers valued individual thought. It is that they believed themselves to be objective arbiters of reality even as they discounted the legitimate perspectives of other people. Many men, for example, believed it was an objective truth that women were not as intelligent or capable.
So no, I do not think as a group. I think as an individual who also knows that my thinking has been deeply influenced by my affiliations, be they political, religious, racial, gendered, national, etc. Of course my understanding of Russia is shaped by the fact that I am American. Of course my understanding of Judaism is influenced by my Christian upbringing. Of course my understanding of Republicans is shaped by my experiences as a liberal who grew up in a conservative town.
To acknowledge that outside forces have impacted my life does not prevent me from rational thought. In fact, it would be deeply irrational to pretend that my life experiences have nothing to do with my perception.
3
The predominant US lens has been white male. Whether they acknowledge that or not, it has placed white men at the top of a pyramid. Most whites, many men, are not willing to learn more about other histories: slavery, Mexican, women, LBGT. Often I hear "its time to move on, I did not cause slavery, affirmative action helped, etc" - platitudes that require no deep thinking.
Marginalized groups have to look up to who controls the political and monetary pyramid to navigate society. The people at the top do not have to put the same effort into learning about others. This seems especially true for evangelicals and religious groups. They would do well to make an effort to learn more about others outside and shed their dogma.
I love my white male husband and brother.
"Our whole education system is based on the idea that we train individuals to be critical thinkers. Our political system is based on the idea that persuasion and deliberation lead to compromise and toward truth."
Sorry, Mr. Brooks, but the critical thinking is only valid when it aligns with that of white males. Any deviation is met with derision by the establishment aka elite hetero white males.
The persuasion and deliberation of the political system, too, is valid only when it represents the needs of that elite white hetero male group. Changes only come about through prolonged fights and efforts on the part of any and all other groups, when the hetero white males are forced to allow such changes because of overwhelming numbers of the "other."
Group membership is the only thing that matters when one belongs to the white hetero male group. All other groups are merely tolerated.
You say as a columnist you are confused in trying to come to a conclusion? Why not try an experiment in your own life? For a period of time, keep a journal of your interactions with people. Document entirely the group and your perception of each encounter (who by name, perceived group, etc. and the nature of the contact). Document your own reactions to these encounters (do you see them as peers, underlings, non-consequential beings; do you give weight to their opinions?).
Perhaps then you might reach a conclusion then.
Speaking as a grouchy old retired academician (who happens to be a white straight former-midwestern male, for the record, not that it matters...) -- if our views are shaped that much by our backgrounds and identities, why do I find myself disagreeing with nearly everyone else?
3
"Perspectivism" and Foucault are just variations of the dictatorship of relativism, a conviction that objectivity is unaccessible so that everybody can do their own thing. Besides its general erosion of standards and social glue, it finds it most lethal expression in the faux "right" of "choice," that makes scientific truth as to whom is a human subject to perspective.
you are only scratching the surface. Hillary came from a middle class background, trump from wealth. She went to college and earned a degree whereas trump only went through the motions of getting an education. Yet she is considered rich and he is considered a man of the people, by some. Black people supported strong laws when they thought all people including whites would be held to account. They found out that white cops can shoot an unarmed, entirely innocent young man the backyard of his home and get away with it. Of course, they are now against strong laws. EXPERIENCE counts, history counts.
1
On a merely factual note: I am alarmed by David Brooks's reference to St. Augustine as a "black writer." Referring to race in the ancient world without extreme care will almost always result in anachronism, as any ancient conception of "race" as a phenomenon was radically different from the modern one we are familiar with.
Furthermore, St. Augustine was ethnically Berber, not what we would call black.
1
Perhaps the human capacity for self-awareness will help resolve some of David Brooks' confusion. Group membership 'determines opinion' only when we fail to understand and take into account our own group membership. Truly critical thinking begins with understanding how we have been shaped by our personal biography and social position. It begins there, but does not end there.
1
Pshaw, sir. To a man, or group of white men, who owns an oil well, a lot of policy looks like oil protectionism. In the face of incontrovertible evidence of the need to stop using oil, the owners of oil will hurt us all in their quest for oil ownership benefits. Cui bono, indeed.
If I didn't need help forming my own opinions and attitudes (not all of us are good at critical thinking), I would read only the news. I would not read the opinion pages, and I most certainly would not read the comments section. We all garner our mindset from other people - there is no other way; nobody thinks in a vacuum.
"Our whole education system is based on the idea that we train individuals to be critical thinkers."
Really? as a product of that system, I have to say, haha.
2
It's not an either/or David. Its both. We are individual thinkers, but we are shaped by our experiences, which often have a lot to do with our identities. Another way of putting this is that we all have choices, we just don't have the same choices. So do you think the Trump kids had the same choices as an African-American young man growing up in poverty, in a ghetto with ghetto schools? As a young Indian woman growing up in Mumbai? Of course not. Thats why the bootstraps thing is often a joke. A kid growing up in adverse circumstances has to use all their talents and energies just to get their heads above water or rise above discrimination. A straight white male starts the race of life several steps ahead, and if he is rich, he has won the race before it has started. The choices they are given vary so much.
1
Speaking for myself only, I cannot imagine that I could hope to speak for all 60-something, white males... or even all 60-something, white male librarians living in New Brunswick... even if I wanted to speak for them.
Who ever originated the notion that just because we are of a certain demographic, that entitles us to speak as the representative of that demographic?
1
If Brooks was hoping to convey the lack of clarity in the world, then this column - a short meditation, really - mirror it.
From what I could discern, empathy is the foundation for a moral society and all the constructs and networks within it. The GOP has made money the foundation, and Brooks has been carrying its water for years.
Why do you see this is a permanent shift? What's wrong with coalitions coming together to create space when society is hostile? Do you think people enjoy being spokespeople for their identity groups (of which most people are members of many)? Don't you think they'd rather just get on with the business of being an individual?
My point is that these group efforts are necessary when society needs to change. Our society has a long history of hostility to certain kinds of people, of seeing and treating them as less than whole individuals. Just look at the trans bathroom panic for a recent example. Why shouldn't people get together as a group and push back? Identifying with your group becomes empowering in this context.
This doesn't mean they've somehow permanently abandoned their individual identity. Not being treated as an individual is what causes these problems in the first place.
If it takes empowered identity groups to change things, then so be it.
Maybe the next column shouldn't ask what's wrong with such groups. Maybe it should ask what's wrong with people who feel threatened by them.
This sounds like a conversation I regularly have with my husband, a straight white man who grew up in a solidly upper middle class family, who constantly asks, "But why does so-and-so have to say 'As a queer African American woman'? I don't get up and say, 'As a straight white man.'"
Of course my husband doesn't have to preface his opinion, because he's not a member of a marked category. Straight and white (and male) are societal norms, assumed unless information to the contrary is given, and sometimes people think the "norm" represents the whole. When people state offer a divergent group identity as a preface to remarks, they are reminding us that the norm does not represent the whole and that they have had a different set of experiences that led to different opinions. They are also reminding us that everywhere they go, other people are constantly identifying them as outside the norm.
That said, when anyone attempts to speak as a representative of their whole group, that's somewhat problematic. There are as many differences within groups as there are between groups. But I don't think that everyone says "speaking as a" means "speaking on behalf of."
Recognizing the forces that shape one's outlook strikes me as a good thing, especially when we can learn to respect the way others' outlooks have been shaped as well.
6
One of the greatest benefits of our evolved brains is our ability to put ourselves into the shoes and skins of others. When we use the special pleading "you'll never understand because you're not a ...", we deny our common humanity and our substantial ability to imagine what something might be like. My gender and racial identity are part of my identity, but not all of it. Growing up in rural Pennsylvania, loving art, having siblings, being bullied, hunting and fishing, abandoning religion, working in construction and going to college, being a teacher - not to mention my unique genome and its profound effects - these things and more affect my perspective, and my ability to take on someone else's perspective. No one is one thing.
I don’t see a problem with being a deliberate thinker and a member of different groups that share a certain way of thinking shaped by common life experience.
I am an immigrant.
I am a father.
I am a physician.
I grew up in Germany.
I live in New Hampshire.
I am white.
I am agnostic.
Certainly I can relate easily to others who are in the same “group”. But still I have a unique experience that distinguishes me from others.
But I am also a learner who can derive an opinion in areas where I have no life experience, e.g. how racism disadvantages African-Americans or how climate change threatens the foundation of our civilization or why constitutional originalism lacks academic credibility.
Being part of a group informs me about potential biases in my opinion but also helps others to learn about what they can’t experience themselves.
Individually we are mobile pebbles in a fluid mosaic of our collective experience.
1
Q: "Under what circumstances should we resist collective identity and insist on the primacy of individual discretion, and our common humanity?"
A: It is not a question of which circumstances. Just be intellectually honest, but that has a price. And too few people are willing to pay that price for fear of losing their identity, (cultural, religious or political) or worse yet, their stuff (income, property and position).
The idea that group identity trumps individual differences is an assumption, not a fact. 200 kids were in my high school class, a small, lily white rural school in Western New York. We all went our separate ways, developed our own points of view, and established ourselves in different parts of the country with different skills, political outlooks, and educational levels. We are not carbon cutouts of each other. My best friend from high school was as conservative as I am liberal (usually). From NYS I moved to Hawaii and then New Mexico, living in substantially different cultures. That overprinted my baseline.
Still, we all started from the same place and that undoubtedly put a common denominator on what we, as individuals, overprinted with our choices and live experiences. As Mr. Brooks makes clear with his question of where individual thinking ends and group association begins, it all matters.
But the notion that we are only speaking as members of what superficially look like group identities is baloney. Is there a difference between Amy Goodman and Dana Loesch?
1
Glad to see Brooks isn't pulling any punches here. One wonders if this has anything to do with the reception of his article about "mobbists."
Thank you, Mr. Brooks, for pointing out that St. Augustine was born in Africa. I was completely unaware of that. I can't help but think your calling him "black" underscores the increasing absurdity of that label, but I suppose that's a different argument.
I think Brooks' problem may be eased by noticing that there are different sorts of opinion or belief. Some are about facts and then no matter what one's position in society or life experience, all would agree based on the facts. All would agree, for example, that Brooks' writes opinion columns for the NYT. Other beliefs are about positions adopted for reasons, and we use logic to check the validity of a line of reasoning. Again all would agree,regardless of position in the world, that if David is a man and if all men are mortal, then David is mortal. Some beliefs are about moral principles. Here there is difficulty proving ultimate principles, e.g. that 'murder is wrong'. Or that the intrinsic worth of humans lies in their ability to choose to do the right thing. We draw conclusions from these, but the principles themselves cannot be proven. We accept some basic ones as having stood the test of time and as being virtually unanimously endorsed. And we all or virtually all accept the same basic moral principles and draw conclusions based on them.
So called "perspectivism" recognizes that different groups of folks have very different life experiences and so a very different sense of what count as serious problems. The life of a black person in the US is very different than that of a white person. The life of a woman is very different than that of a male. One's history shapes one's judgments about what count as serious problems. Watch "The Color of Fear".
Why can't American history be explained in a rational nonpartisan way? Why is the perspective of our history have to be distorted by what race or political party we happen to belong to? Certainly Americans have committed grievous crimes of slavery & genocide. Yet we can look at the histories of almost any other nation state and find national crimes equal to or exceeding our own. Yes, minorities have been marginalized for much of the nation's history. But where have minorities had a better opportunity for advancement than has occurred in America during the 20th & 21st centuries?
Although many of our ancestors were guilty of racism & native American extermination, historians understand that it was a brutal time to colonize this continent, to break the bonds of allegiance to the mother country and form a democratic republic that has met the test of time, expunged the sin of slavery with a bloody civil war, and, without revolution, has evolved into one of the freest countries with the most opportunities for minorities and women to advance. Why is this not a part of our story as well? And why can't we look at the goodness & greatness of our country as well as its faults?
4
You need to make more of an attempt to understand why naming your social location might help conversation and confront privilege. It can and does. If you would read the texts you continually dismiss (or, if you have read them, read them more sympathetically, less defensively) you might discover that. You claim to be confused, but you don’t really seem interested in learning.
The whole point of saying “as a white male,” for me, is that unless I constantly think about it, I don’t know when and where that whiteness and maleness might affect me. And if I let my consciousness of it recede, that’s when the bad forms of whiteness and maleness can take over my thoughts, feeling and decision making. This is especially likely to be an issue when your identity is part of a privileged group: you forget that it is privileged. It becomes invisible.
Even if you don’t like Foucault, what about Hegel? For Hegel’s master, not naming and reflecting on his identity means he becomes unaware of the real dynamics of slavery, seeing only their ideal counterparts. He sees something immediately that he would see differently were he to approach it through a process of mediation.
If you think naming your social location will not help you grapple with a given text or speaker, what harm could it do?
And by the way, since you’re not a Latina reading Augustine, I can understand why that might not seem relevant. If you really want to know, ask a Latina reading Augustine.
4
Mr. Brooks - Perhaps the best way to begin your journey would be to start seeing everyone as a part of the whole. Trying to view a subset of humanity will never yield humanity anymore than seeing the arms or legs of a person will define the whole body. The arms and legs will give you context but nothing more.
1
Foucault didn't argue that "society is structure by elites to preserve their privilege" his point was exactly the opposite. He saw everyone as a participant in the discipline society, we all normalize things and condition(police) each other in to patterns(institutions or "apparatuses" in Foucauldian terms). For Foucault oppression was bound up in the ways that the oppressed participated in their own oppression and the ways in which architecture/space created potentialities of oppression.
Marx would argue that Brooks is performing ideological maintenance for capitalism. "Identity politics" can be used either to create a very diverse bourgeois class OR it can be used to remind people that their position should impact their political outlook. The former is the capitalist reification of identity politics: diverse middle class, sell out figurehead leadership, and still a massive population of people who can't get what they need where non-white people are heavily over-represented. The latter would be using identity politics to help people understand that their position guides their political action. This would be a good thing. This is evidenced when you have rural america cheering for a tax break for golf course owners: somewhere along the line their identity got lost by the dominant classes false ideology/identity. If more people actually examined their identity and saw how that has political implications: democracy would be in a much better place.
2
Some heartfelt sentiments and thoughts in comments below...But confirmation bias is its own comfort zone. Please, people, leave Foucault behind and think about a future together. Good column.
1
There are still such things as facts, which should be the basis of all critical thinking. There is no such thing as a valid opinion that global warming isn't happening; it's either an inadvertent untruth or a lie. Acceptable divergence of opinion comes after establishing facts. It's ok to debate whether and what to do about global warming; not to deny it's existence for propaganda.
1
I am struck by one section of your piece: "Then came Michel Foucault and critical race theorists and the rest, and the argument that society is structured by elites to preserve their privilege."
You went from Foucault to race theorists rather than mainstream sociology of the 30's through 80's: functionalism and structural functionalism. All of mid-century sociology argued that social norms established and maintained the existing social structure.
I point that out because by skipping that step, you make it sound like it was a radical idea. It wasn't. Framing matters. That's the point.
To me, as a social scientist born in the 50's, knowing you have written books drawing on social science from that era that is built on the notion of shared norms, I'm surprised at you (note how I contextualize my perspective). Saying where I'm coming from communicates my expertise and also that we are of an age. When relevant, it also telegraphs to the reader that I am reacting more in a scholarly capacity than from other social roles I occupy. In this case, scholarship is relevant. If we were talking about a topic where another role were important - sexual harassment, for example - and my interests were being discussed, I might use 'as a woman' to establish myself as a party of interest - and thus also my expertise in that area. Just as philosophers like Arendt did by saying they were philosophers and thus deep thinkers who should be listened to.
2
You have answered your own question. Just re-read your last paragraph. Our political system and perhaps even our ability to live and work together in peace depends on the assumption that we are free agents and our opinions are amenable to reason. Otherwise, our world would be a choice between Hobbesian conflict versus subjection to tyranny.
It seems to me that, when all the drama is cleared away, Mr. Brooks is simply asking, "How am I supposed to think?"
One of the reasons we have witnessed Mr. Brooks' forays into philosophy, pop psychology and sociology so often is he is confused as to how he should think. He's spent his career carrying the conservative flag having been smitten, at a young age, by William F. Buckley who was so skilled at organizing and presenting his thoughts and defending them as a gifted debater. Buckley made Conservatism sound reasonable and many parts of it were, especially in the 50s and 60s US. But Conservatism is based on the status quo and often looking back to the past, not to learn from it but to maintain it or relive it. Conservatism is, at it's core, at odds with change and change is as inevitable (actually more so) as the sun will raise the next morning. This makes conservatives uncomfortable but, being conservatives, they are basically opposed to change, especially in their own thinking. They find themselves (the smart ones anyway) twisting their thoughts and speech as the evidence mounts that they must accept change - something which to them is antithetical.
I feel your pain, David Brooks, but the answer to your question, "How should I think?" is not that hard. Set yourself free. Use that critical thinking and reason that your high-priced eduction tried to give you. Think the way you think you think. If someone says, "you've changed." Say, "Yup."
2
While your experience will help shape your opinions; and a large part of your experience will be influenced by your group identity. I know you can transcend your experience in developing your opinions. But this takes effort.
It is also unfortunate that too many people are too addicted to their emotional reactions on hot button issues.
2
There's the problem. You, Mr. Brooks, and many other white males, display a real inability to understand the fact that yours is not the only point of view in the room. The other part of the problem is that you don't listen. You tell us what you think should be which would be fine if you followed it up with a statement that others might feel otherwise and their views are as valid. What you and the GOP have done for decades is to demonize any person, organization, ethnic group, or religion that disagrees with you.
The GOP decided to call anyone who felt the war with Iraq was uncalled for unpatriotic. Our concerns were ignored. The entire LGBTQ community has been vilified by the GOP. Only exceptional African Americans are granted respect by the GOP. Your party, yes, the GOP, couldn't be bothered to respect or work with President Obama, an African American male who was twice elected to office. W was appointed the first time.
Change is part of life. Did you or anyone in the GOP ever consider the fact that being a white male doesn't make you infallible or the voice of America? You can continue to speak as a white male or you can learn to consider other points of view. It's up to you and every other person what you do: grow or stagnate.
4
You have always been speaking as a white male. I have always been speaking as a white female. But until recently I thought I was speaking as an educated, critical thinker--someone who could see through labels and emotions to find truth. I thought my assessments were neutral and honest. I was blinded by thinking my experiences, my cultural references, were the norm because I saw them in magazines, on television, in politicians, everywhere. But here's a more honest reckoning: I see the world through the eyes of dominance, through privilege and good fortune. I am beginning to accept that, and factor that into my assessments of events.
So, I think you SHOULD acknowledge that you are speaking as a white male, and your view of the world should change. You should look at politics and your reaction to others and acknowledge that as a white male you may not understand the feelings of powerlessness and dread that a young woman feels when a male supervisor tells her she should smile more, or how the Asian woman whose family has lived in San Francisco for 100 years feels when asked where she is from. Many white men dismiss these type of events or explain them away. It would be much better to acknowledge that as a white male they have not had these experiences, have not faced the same barriers, and then resolve to help remove them.
15
Well said. and thank you for writing about something other than Trump. There are more, and more important, aspects of life.
1
Brooks says, "The basis of human dignity is our capacity to make up our own minds." I believe the basis of human dignity is our capacity to love and open our hearts to others so that we can understand our minds and then move in directions that supports the dignity of ourselves and others.
2
Dear David,
Try this. Dissolve.
Now imagine that you have a vagina and two developed breasts, supported during the day by a front-snap brassiere. You live in a pretty nice mobile home, in upstate New York, with a porch and picnic table, and have just missed your period. Your boyfriend is volatile and owns a Deerslayer long gun, a semi-automatic Glock, and a revolver. Sometimes he gets mad. Once he burned your favorite blouse in a frying pan. You don’t speak to your mom anymore and your dad is in Elmira with another girlfriend.
You liked school, but that’s over. Your favorite book is Jane Eyre.
How do you think about everything? Do you think like David Brooks?
17
Speaking as a human being, humans tend to gravitate to group think. We find a certain security in it that but far too often it causes us to fail to question or challenge certain held beliefs of the group. But I think that you have hit upon our national conundrum, our education system today to a great degree does not teach critical thinking. We teach students to a test and as a result many graduate without an original thought in their heads or the ability to form one. Our democracy is a fraud. People like Senator McConnell, Paul Ryan and trump have help make it so. Deliberate with Obama, no the only goal was to remove him from office. our democracy has become solely about power and it is not power to the people.
2
In any event our opinions are determined by the physical law.
Individual differences will always plague our attempts to increase curiosity and build on intelligence. Our schools were formed to provide our children with what they need to survive in any current environment; the thought process needed for acting in reasonable ways. All of this is always under attack by those lacking intelligence or the will to learn. We can send our kids to school but sometimes it just does not take. We often come face to face with laziness and a tendency to short cuts. The result for those tendencies, is a person like Trump. He is ill- equipped to handle the complexities of our society, so he reduces all he has learned to short sound bytes. The deliberate lack of thought and foresight is used to reduce complexity. His anger is all to often the result of perceiving others as forcing him to think beyond his soundbites. He has now decided that too many "egg heads" complicate his rudimentary thought process so he replaces those "egg heads" with diminished thinkers like himself. No more problems for our dim-witted president. We desperately need to put in place protections against such ill equipped individuals in the future. Not just anyone should be a President of the USA.
The whole thesis of this op ed is based on a false assumption--the idea that everyone used to to arrive at "objective" conclusions, via independent thought & cool logic. And now, David suggests, objectivity & individuality have been debased by "group think." Really?
What "objective" higher logic allowed the majority of the white male population (including the majority of the faculty of Harvard & Yale) to think slavery & then Jim Crow were fine, or, at worst, unfortunate necessities? What "objective" higher individual reasoning barred women from the vote until after WWII & kept them out of most universities & professions til recently? What "objective" critical reasoning enabled males to declare that women enjoyed being pinched, groped & hooted at on street corners or that the most "logical" explanation for every rape accusation was that the victim is a liar or a fantasizer?
Yet all of these so-called "truths" flourished in the days that Brooks romanticizes and would be flourishing still were it not for the rise of the very identity consciousness Brooks decries.
Answer: Quite obviously is none. But neither the palpable illogic nor the treachery to the women in their own families prevented these great "objective" thinkers from actively supporting in word & deed social policies that destroyed the lives of thousands.
So much for the "objective" and "logical" mind of people like David Brooks.
5
Thank you for a well-written article, Mr. Brooks. I'm anxious to hear if you arrive at a personal resolution on how you proceed.
What seems to emerge as a critical piece of the shift towards demographic identity in debate is the idea of establishing credibility around what is being discussed. To me, the reverberations #YesAllWomen, #MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter (all of which I agree with) are half-pleas, half-demands for the white-male majority to recognize there is a unity of experience that they cannot understand. And it does not seem unreasonable to suggest that the majority can (and should) sympathize, but may not be able to empathize with these experiences. And if the majority (white, male, cisgendered, heterosexual) has never encountered a situation that mirrors #MeToo, how can they empathize? Sympathize absolutely, but not experience the same feelings of despair or powerlessness, as their inherent privilege is to be able to avoid the causes of these feelings.
This ties in to Mr. Brooks' point is engaging in debate around these issues. If there is a minimum level of credibility required to discuss a fraught issue, such as abortion, can someone who will never have to make that choice (a male) make a valuable contribution to that debate? If a central value of democracy is the idea that all are able to contribute, then it appears that a male should be able to. Excluding based on identity seems a difficult case to make, if all come to the table in good faith (a BIG if).
If you think your opinions are not shaped by your identity as a white straight male, you are fooling yourself. We are all shaped by our experiences--the roles we choose and the roles that are forced upon us. It's just that the opinions shaped by your identity have masqueraded as the truth for too long.
2
Of COURSE we are shaped by our experiences, identities, and categories, whether self imposed or imposed from without.
That doesn't mean that we can't acknowledge when they may be biasing us, and it certainly doesn't mean we can't reason beyond them, through a combination of humility, intensity, and eclectic autodidacticism. We need to be "woke" to our starting points, but recognize them as just that, starting points. We can speak for more than our "groups".
I am white, male, bisexual, Easter European by ancestry, Jewish by birth, atheist by inclination, socially awkward by constitution, and more than a bit of a nerd. I am all these things to greater or lesser degree at various points. I may speak/write from any or all of these perspectives at times, recognizing their influences on me, but hopefully I can also transcend them all with focus and self-criticism, and with a ferocious pursuit of truth. And then, hopefully, I am ultimately speaking for me, for this entity, not denying the parts that make it up, but not kowtowing to any one of them, either. That is, presumably, the endpoint here--what we're aiming for if we want to talk about the "good life", or how to make "a more perfect union".
I recognize how easy it is to speak from only one identity, but it's not impossible to speak from an encompassing whole, just more difficult.
If I do say so myself (phrase intended), I think many of the comment writers here manage to do this more often than they believe.
4
David, you are thinking too hard. Sit back and let your instincts guide you. After reading articles and watching you this past year, I think you have the insight and knowledge base to know where the lines should be drawn. For my part, I go with the personal responsibility route, researching, trying to find the truth, relying on other's first-person experiences to help me figure out what is perspective and what is reality. Deal with the reality you know and of people you trust to be critical thinkers. We are a part of many groups and cannot be labeled or categorized according to any one of them because we will not agree with all the conclusions and rhetoric of that group. We do the best we can to know the truth and react accordingly. When we die, we die alone, as an unique individual. As long as you keep questioning, keep searching for reality, you will continue to do just fine!!
1
"Our whole education system is based on the idea that we train individuals to be critical thinkers."
But it does not. It trains them to be test takers, because that's how funding is obtained. Is there anyone who believes that our education system is, in fact, turning out critical thinkers?
Once this principle was abandoned, in favor of a conservative, outcome based approach to education, as measured by test scores, something had to fill the space left by the dearth of critical thinking. Group membership fits the bill nicely, supplying not only a support network for beliefs, but a comfortable platform from which to speak with generic authority. Hence, "Speaking as a [insert label here]..."
3
Let's see, when was the term "groupthink" coined? In 1952, by William Whyte, author of The Organization Man. This was a time when American fears about conformity, fueled by anxieties about Soviet collectivism, dominated cultural commentary and pop culture. But most of the people talking about the evils of conformity were "speaking as white men." The people who might have belied the danger of a kind of national groupthink? They weren't allowed to speak.
1
Mr. Brooks touches on this component but it bears more emphasis: personal identity matters when it bears directly on the topic we're addressing.
I'm male, therefore I concede that my opinions on women's health topics are less relevant than those of women. I'm a white native-born citizen, so I admit my knowledge about race-based discrimination is less informed by direct experience than that of others.
But our opinions about topics like environmental protection or healthcare certainly can and do cut across lines of personal identity. Speaking as a human being, I agree with Mr. Brooks on this.
2
You're starting from a false premise, Mr. Brooks. Many of the critics you're responding to probably do as well, but nevertheless, the problem is not that group membership "determines" opinion, it's that experience influences opinion. It's honest and should be helpful for speakers to acknowledge where they're coming from and what they can and cannot speak to from direct personal experience. That should never be the sole determining factor in forming an opinion. We all need to try to listen to others and educate ourselves about experiences outside the range of our own circle of family and friends. From a philosophical standpoint, will we ever be able to achieve pure objectivity, or arrive at an absolute truth about anything in the infinitely varied and individualized human experience? Probably not. But that doesn't mean that "group membership" does or should determine our opinions--and I think you know that. What matters is how open we are to hearing and considering the points of view than our own.
1
Soooooo.....nothing going on in politics today? Couldn't find anything else to write about?
What cares the psychopathic ruling class?
3
Whether as part of some Republican group or as an individual, I am afraid you have become irrelevant either way. Our country is under the thumb of a terrible human being and this is what you choose to write about?
2
St. Augustine is black? I thought he came from a Roman - Berber city in present day Algeria.
1
While I consider myself to be a moderate democrat, I always find myself wanting to vomit whenever someone says "speaking as a ...." unless it is directly and obviously relevant to the topic.
1
Just one white male...
Mr. Brooks,
Thanks very much for this piece. I very much appreciate the concept and tone of your current series of musings (your tone has always been exemplary). This column felt particularly on-the-nose.
I was educated in the 90s and early aughts (in prep school and liberal arts college), and my experience was largely the model you ascribe to the 50s--if you stood alone and researched carefully and hard, you could transcend your own background and render independent and objective judgments about society.
Now a teacher myself, I still shill New Criticism, and more generally the idea that words and actions should be interpreted before context is introduced. But I do discuss context, increasingly, and spend more time on it than we spent on it when I was a student.
And that seems like a good general compromise--that we only think through our group perspective after we've come to an authentic independent conclusion. I still believe that I do this.
But then, after reading your column, I happened to watch part of the video of the recent shooting in Sacramento, and that's another sort of reminder of how far we appear to be from being able to expect people generally to do the work to make independent decisions when so much does appear to be determined by one's spot in society.
Never have I ever had the slightest concern about being shot by the police in my yard. But, I'm also a white man. I don't want to have that thought, but it feels inappropriate not to.
1
Poor David is confused. He genuinely can't understand why old white men don't get to make all the decisions any more. Why should the perspectives of queer people or people of color matter? Why can't it just be the way it used to be? This column is simply a better-educated version of "Make America Great Again."
This well-educated racism, the kind that comes with the "well, if you're going to get that angry we have nothing to talk about" response, perhaps better explains the election of Troll than marching Nazis does. Because there just aren't that many of those. Polite educated white racists in the suburbs are the people who really elected Troll.
With this final admission, will Brooks finally bow out and let someone coherent take the space? Frankly, I'd rather have an honest racist loudmouth there than this nonsense.
2
>> When you put together a panel discussion or a work team, even on a subject like oncology, you don’t want to have a bunch of white males sitting up there. We know that something valuable will be lost. <<
No, in fact, we don't. Not at all.
Some 90 percent of the nation disagrees with you on this, Mr. Brooks, and moreover, that 90 percent is right. Get your head out of the sand. You've let yourself be indoctrinated with weak-thinking trash.
1
Our whole education system is based on the idea that we train individuals to be critical thinkers.
REALLY??? Maybe you missed this afew years back....https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/texas-gop-rejects...
For an in depth treatment of the subject, please check out “Crisis in the Modern World” by Reneé Guenon.
Are Jews white? This is quite a claim. How can those who claim Israel as their original land be white? Can you have your cake and eat it? I am confused.
1
How disingenuous of you to not understand how your privilege as a white male colors everything--and is to blame for a lot of the idiotic columns you've written in the last year. How you keep this job is beyond me--wait, it's not. Your photo should be next to the dictionary definition of white male privilege.
1
“a black writer like St. Augustine”?
… or maybe Alexander Hamilton, eh?
1
Identity may, in fact probably does, not directly shape opinion. However, identity assuredly shapes experience, and experience shapes opinion. Where the problem lies, in my opinion, is the tendency to treat groups as monolithic. What is the 'white male' experience. Do I, as a 66 year old white retired computer programmer, share more experience with a 30 year old white coal miner or a 70 year old black retired systems analyst? What is the "black experience"? Does Collin Powell share more experience with Norman Schwartzkopf or Dr. Dre?
We are all individuals with our own life experiences, which shape our opinions and politics. We share some of these experiences with other people, making up groups. But like a Venn diagram, there are intersections of experience with various people, and none of the individuals are perfect subsets of any group.
1
This idiocy was summed up ages ago in the fable of the blind men and the elephant. “Having handled an elephant’s trunk, I can confidently assert that an elephant has the shape of a snake. Etc.
1
Most of the discussion here is ahistoric and so ephemeral and unstable. ing. Nothing makes sense outside of its historical context. It is the loss of this sense of historical context that results in naive and useless ideas. It is common to judge America as frightfully evil because of how we expanded into our continent. This is at best silly. Our 19th century behavior can only be understood in the context of the nineteenth century mentality and in the nineteenth century our behavior was not worse than that of others at all. Can anyone honestly say that other societies did any better? Easy judgments that they were reflects nothing but an incurious ignorance. First of all other societies, even those imagined as socialist paradises, are all rife with the same biases, vulgarities, materialism, and cruelties as we are. I've lived in several European and Asian countries. It is also certain that their behavior in the nineteenth century was not better than ours. We cannot assume that ethical standards are eternal fixed truths. Perhaps but that is so only teleologically. In the 19th century no one felt that the death penalty was subject to question. It is also true that cruelty and violence was widespread. Without historical reflection we cannot grasp where we stand or why. The shallow and rather silly relativism (which I might add would have apalled Nietsche or Foucault) is the source of the strange bastardized ethical mush that we are all dealing with.
"a black writer like St. Augustine"??
St. Augustine was from North Africa, in the region that is now Algeria, not sub-Saharan Africa. Augustine wasn't black.
3
The comment should not surprise you. Our public education system is a fraud as well as bankrupting many of our municipalities, e.g., L.A. Oakland, and Chicago.
1
Um, more like "Black people: Can I say 'black?' Do I need to say African-American?" or "How does the African-American community feel about XYZ?" to an individual. Or "how do you, as a woman, experience ABC?"
1
It sounds like the Conservative White male David Brooks is simply uncomfortable with diversity but he just can't quite figure out why.
3
All of us have opinions that are shaped by our shared experience as members of groups as well as by own individual critical thinking. This is not new. What IS new in my 67 year lifetime is the loss of widely shared sources of factual information. In my youth, Americans had widely divergent political opinions but most got their facts from Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley, Edward R. Murrow et al. And, knowing that the entire nation was listening, these sources placed a premium on getting the facts right-- not on advancing any point of view. This elevated individual critical thinking over group identity. That has changed. Today most get their facts from politically polarized media echo chambers that reinforce "group think" and denigrate individual thinking. In my youth, knowing that someone got their news from Walter Cronkite said little about their opinions. Today, with few exceptions (the NYT being one), if I know your media, I know your politics. We are a divided nation in part because we no longer share common, non-partisan sources of news. It is a great loss.
We need to VOTE. We need to elect leaders on the basis of their character, intelligence and experience. We need to re-learn this. We have to shirk and resist our tribal tendencies that seem to emanate from our nature as humans (you know, human nature), and only by the actions of a wide swath of people - our society - looking in a mirror and pro-actively returning to the notion that we are a democratic nation that takes pride in being a beacon for the world in this democratic experiment, will WE pull ourselves out this morass. Facism, civil war, global confrontation, or a withering spiral to insignificance and unimportance on the world stage - these are the paths we are choosing for our country if we fail to see the power of voting. How can you not VOTE? That is what confuses me. C'mon. We are better than this.
I think that David Brooks is having a difficult time with the realization that his group, male/white/educated, is no longer in total control. And he's looking for some way to make it all stop.
2
You have me confused, too. Are you trying to say you don't know who you are anymore, because I think you've been saying that for a while? You keep presenting yourself as a conservative white male, but you keep drifting away from the conservative groupthink. More often than not, in what you write, I see a man who is afraid to say he's NOT a conservative anymore, that he has more in common with those liberals his conservative groups say are awful, sinful people who are ruining the USA. Yes, you're confused, and so am I. Who are you really?
David
Speaking as a black male means this. Today's NY times.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/22/us/video-sacramento-police-shooting.html
Be glad - you will never be killed like this by police in USA, because of the color of your skin, the neighborhood you live in etc.
There will never be a white Trayvon Martin. NOWHERE ELSE in the CIVILIZED WORLD could the murderer of Trayvon Martin have gotten away scot free, with his weapon intact and then auction it for a big profit on eBay.
That seems to be the society, Sir, that your party seems to cherish.
Wake up before it is too late.
3
MJ- White female Californian: agree. I am humiliated and saddened by the death of this guy. 20 shots-- really sacto police? for one young man about whom you knew NOTHING? Believe me, there will be lots of talk and excuses, perhaps a commission. Nothing will change.
Brooks is overstating the extent to which modern liberals buy-in to full on Nietzschean perspectivalism. Most all political debates boil down to:
(1) What is my value?
(2) What are the facts?
(3) How do the fact compare to the value?
For example, we first need to determine what we mean by freedom, equality, fairness (values), then we need to collect a bunch of data from the world (through the scientific method and our own lived experience), and then apply our values to the world.
I do not think that most on the social justice left are saying that perspective dictates our answers to the value questions. We, like Brooks' ideal thinkers Arendt and Howe, strive for an objective and universal meaning of freedom, fairness, equality, justice, etc.
The added wrinkle from the social justice left comes from Step 2. When those values, that we all acknowledge are universal and objective, are applied to the lived experience of a straight, white male - it's easy at Step 3 to conclude that we are living up to our ideals of freedom, fairness, equality and justice. But not so when someone with a different set of eyes takes in their facts. “Speaking as a Latina. …” or “Speaking as a queer person. …” means "I am privvy to facts that you are not because of certain experiences I have had that you have not."
I don't think the notion that people of different races, gender identifies, and sexual orientations experience the world differently is even that controversial.
1
Mr. Brooks had near a dozen question marks in his column. Those squiggly punctuations represent uncertainty. When you are open about your uncertainty, that is humility. I went through the "Readers' Picks" (currently 144 of them), and the vast majority didn't even have one question mark.
You've somehow convinced yourself that your opinion is the best one. You are unabashed about it. Where's your self-doubt? Where's your humility?
David, you speak as a white, male baby boomer who can't possibly presume to identify with this frothing mob of under-educated, dis-informed, morally vacant Trump Republicans.
2
St. Augustine was black? A quick Google search says he was a Berber. It would be suitable ending if David confused a North African Berber as a black African in this column about him being confused by identity politics.
2
Yes David, it is group against group and the Republic is doomed!
David,
You mention roughly five ways of "getting your perspective", of which, frankly, I never heard of any of them.
That is the root of your problem. You don't need somebody famous, white and male to tell you what to think.
You learn that when you are a kid, right before you stick up for the Mexican that is getting made fun of on the school grounds only to have both of you get beat up, but, you both understand you were standing your ground.
Or, you get that in the locker room after you take on the kid who has been pinching your sisters breast at her locker, and, crack his skull by accident on the concrete floor.
Or, you climb under the hay truck with the African Americans when it rains, and, chat ..... making it all equal.
Or, you recognize that the "southern strategy" and the "war on drugs" was really a war on African Americans.
And, David, you DO all of these things WITH YOUR OWN MIND.
Not trying to use somebody else's ego and values.
YOURS.
Good luck. Must be a sad place to be an old man lost.
2
How was it determined that St. Augustine was black? I thought that he was a Berber.
Hey, backstage crew, submitted this last night when there were just a few dozen:
Nothing new here, Brooks. Wake up--years of multiculturalism conditioning in the public education system and Neo-Marxists stomping about "moulding tomorrow's civilization".
Look in the NYT Opinion Kingdom mirror for the answers and the forecast--cloudy, rain, low-visibility, and uncertain winds.
1
Why we need to have sympathy for white males when they are lamenting they may lose their dominance!
It was white male going out of their own territory to invade other people's territory, destroy other people's cultures and other people's way of life....for centuries...
White Supremacy blames diversity for their losing their majority and dominance status. But in the first place, they acquired all these at the expense of other people's territory, other people's culture and other people's way of life. Even on continent America, they were not the original dwellers. They stole from others.
So if white males are honest, they should all move back to where they originally came from and assume their dominance and majority at their true home.
Such a sophisticated topic can never be reduced to above. The real point is that no one can rewrite history and no one can carry the responsibility of their ancestors. We have only hear and now to work on. I feel diversity is the direction to go for human race.
2
Critical thinking is no longer a skill that is taught. Even on the college level, we are trained for the work to follow graduation, not the decisive thoughtfulness to our choices in living...
You teach sheep how to live in the herd. Don't pretend surprise when that is all they care to learn. Thoreau's rugged individual ran to hide in the woods years ago. and sadly, no one has coaxed him back into this mess we created.
78
Only group think could lead someone to assert that St. Augustine was 'black'. He lived in what is now Tunisia and Algeria, surrounded by Berber-speaking rural people, but he was a Latin-speaking citizen of the Roman imperium. Like modern North Africans, he was not black, nor were the peasants around him.
2
Mr. Brooks may be "confused" because he unnecessarily complexifies. To me, it's much simpler. What we fear and what we want will often determine who we are. Fears and wants are, in part, hard-wired into us by Mother Nature and, in part, nurtured into us by the family and the culture.
Look at the culture today and you get a pretty good idea of why particular human traits are ascendant and others are in remission. Most important in this analysis is that we live in a culture where fear sells so it is constantly hyped (see, e.g., Trump). Convince somebody that they should be afraid and they will become very tribal, especially if their particular "tribe" or "tribes" can be easily identified. And both the hyping of fear and the appeal to tribe is much easier nowadays with all of our media platforms.
When we are afraid, one of the most potent "wants" of all (even more so than sex) is made even more potent -- and that "want" is the want for power as we tell ourselves that only power will keep us "safe" and allay our fears.
Unfortunately, the thinking part of our brain (as the last to evolve) is much better at justifying our fear and wants and then planning how best to avoid our fears and achieve our wants than in analyzing and harnessing them.
Start with that and "confusion" abates.
Speaking as a conscientious objector in Vietnam, a life-long Democratic voter, a gun and concealed carry permit owner, a gay marriage supporter, a woman's right to choose supporter, a death penalty supporter, a husband of a former police officer, a step-father to a man with several tours of duty in Afghanistan as a Green Beret, a union supporter, a supporter of evidence of human-caused global warming, an ACA supporter, a white male, a voter for Hilary Clinton who thought Barak Obama was awesome, and a supporter of keeping marijuana illegal because it is a drug....
I wish to state that my opinion is that this is another of David Brook's thought-provoking articles. Keep them coming, please.
And I hope everyone who is like me feels the same way, because I know there are a lot of you out there!!!
1
"Under what circumstances should we resist collective identity and insist on the primacy of individual discretion, and our common humanity?"
As soon as Republicans turn their brains back on, and stand up to Trump's craziness.
1
David,
I would suggest you yank yourself out of such elaborate "thought dilemmas". Who cares where a concept comes from? What difference does it make if an idea comes from a group or an inspired speech? Get over it.
My second suggestion is "as a Conservative Republican" that you write about things like fairness and the rule of law. Write about the balance of power as our founders hoped it would function. Write about the lies and dysfunction spewing forth from The President of the United States of America. (I know, you have tried, but don't let up now...it's getting worse!)
My third suggestion is that you dedicate yourself to establishing a list of like minded Republicans who actually have some American Values (Judeo-Christian if you will) such as inclusiveness, real patriotism, universal human rights, and compassion for those less fortunate. This should be too difficult. The list is quite short but perhaps you could help it grow.
Integrity, honesty, public service, being a leader for all Americans - these ideas are independent of "group". They are basic and part of the founding idea of this nation. I don't care if these values come from a right wing think tank or a left wing socialist society.
We are at ground zero in the values and honesty department. That's where the fight is - not in some internal intellectual debate. Get back to the fight!
1
I had some similar thoughts yesterday, oddly based on having just watched Black Panther. Ultimately, this is where I landed: tribalism is destructive but tempting. We must always acknowledge our own tribal tendencies and actively work against them by acknowledging each person as an individual worthy of equality and respect - and voting and raising our own kids accordingly. And then I realized that this is something that I've known myself since I was a child discovering my own feelings on religion, racism, and even middle school cliques. These days, I've often found myself pondering existential questions only to realize that I knew the answer when I was 12, and I'm not quite sure how I forgot it.
Reverse engineer the question and ask if religion and money in politics and the NRA holding common sense hostage is fanaticism, or our sorry evolution.
The solutions are in plain sight.
David Brooks is my favorite Times columnist: he is so obviously sincere in his desire to discuss important truths, and he is willing to "show his work." The result is that he sometimes arrives in some surprising places, such as: " If it’s just group against group, deliberation is a sham, beliefs are just masks groups use to preserve power structures, and democracy is a fraud."
This is also why I find him frustrating. Because when he's uncovered a truth that freaks him out, he retreats from it back into the comfort of a conservative version of Enlightenment humanism. In itself, there's something endearing about that; but sometimes, David, we have to admit that just because it would be better for it to be so, doesn't mean it's so.
I think that the fact that you choose to call an ethnic group, a gender, a race, or a sexual orientation a "political label" is what is driving your confusion. We technically have a choice in determining our political labels, while our identities (or at least the parts of their identities that we have no control over), we do not. How does being a Latina (or in my case another type of brown woman) influence how I read a black writer? We share a common thread of being subject to racism, pure and simple. Thus, we may emotionally connect to that black writer in a way that perhaps a white heterosexual man, cannot, even though he intellectually sympathizes with that writer's plight. I hate to call what you are experiencing as "white privilege" because I think that term is pejorative and over-used, but because you make up the dominant/powerful group in today's America, you have a choice as to whether you identify with your "label." You thus have the freedom of a purer version of independent thought (so much that it can exist) than someone who does not have the privilege of not identifying as much with their group. I hope that helps.
How do I as an upper middle class white urban woman respond to David Brooks? With a shrug of annoyance that he has taken on the role of village explainer, and finding it slightly risible that he has picked up what my children would call a version of ‘woke’ speech in which he adopts or ‘ co-opts ‘ a tone of equivocation—of not being sure what he thinks and ‘exploring’ it when he knows when he begins it where the comment is going to end up: that there is virtue in people trying to think as clearly as they can, for themselves, and to listen to others. That’s news? The only news here is that white men of privilege are waking up to the fact, rather late, and that other people exist, and that the map of the world does not have their face stamped on it.
You're confused because you're arguing with a straw man.
2
Part of practicing good independent thought is learning to, at least occasionally, take a step back and try to look at the circumstances and conditions thhat might be contributing to how and why you think what you do.
But this process should be individualized. Asking everybody to think about the SAME biasing factors just introduces a new bias. Imagine you ask a class of students to read a text from American history, and you try two different approaches. In one, the teacher tells the class "When you're reading this, think about the ways that your own identification and social conditions might affect your understanding of the events in this story," and in the other the teacher says "While you're reading this, remember that white people are always privileged in America."
Which is likely to yield smarter students and a better conversation?
"When the natural weakness and imperfection of human understanding is considered, with the unavoidable Influences of education, custom, books and company, upon our ways of thinking, I imagine a man must have a good deal of vanity who believes, and a good deal of boldness who affirms, that all the doctrines he holds, are true; and all he rejects, are false. ... It is no more in a man’s power to think than to look like another." -- Benjamin Franklin, April 13, 1738.
It ought not to be about denying the existence of truth, or of reality. It ought to be about admitting that none of us has all the answers, and it may be worthwhile to listen to someone who has had a different education and experience than we have had, who has grown up following different customs, reading different books, and knowing different people than we have.
It is not about group identity, it is about expertise. If one says, "speaking as a Asian American man," it need not be different than saying, "speaking as a scientist" or "speaking as a police officer."
We aren't surprised if a physician thinks little of our opinions on medicine, or a lawyer of out opinions of the way the law works. Why then should we be surprised if a black woman thinks little of our opinions about what it is like to be black or female in America today?
However, one's unique perspective may be more or less relevant depending on the question at hand. Is there a black female perspective on, say, gardening?
Please read Robert Sapolsky's book "Behave" regarding how our opinions are formed, and how we act. There is a mix of hormones, social cues, values, and free will. Glowing example: Major Hugh Thompson Jr. who stopped the My Lai massacre. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Thompson_Jr.
" . . . a black writer like St. Augustine . . ." This assertion is misleading. If Mr. Brooks is referring to Augustine's skin color, he's guessing, since we don't really know what it was, though it may well have been brown since his mother was a North African Berber. If he's using "black" to denote Augustine's cultural identity, he's off-base, since Augustine, who lived in the 4th and 5th centuries AD, would have considered himself a Roman - i.e. a citizen of the racially fluid Roman Empire - and the leader of his Christian community. His skin color seems not to have been an issue in his life or in his philosophy.
3
An amalgamation of individual thinking, morality and responsibility informs and creates a society, not the other way around. Collectivism is a form of intellectual fascism that imposes the mores and philosophies of a self-identified elite on the masses in the hope of influencing their individual behavior. The trade off is relief from individual responsibility and the results of that are predictably disasterous. Look at where we are now, after so many years of liberal collectivism.
It's the old conundrum, David, nature versus nurture. One cannot dismiss what occurs at our birth. It will define us, how we look, how we speak, how we act, how we are perceived, for the rest of our lives.
Some suppositions will be inescapable. How could they not be? Before we engage most strangers in conversation, or even dare approach them, our brains have sized them up, based on nothing but non-verbal physical tics and cues. Those so-called "gut reactions" can be very valuable. They can also be wrong, but we can't escape making them. We are animals who sniff out danger, trying to gather enough information in deciding whether someone may be friend or foe. It's what makes us human.
And so it goes. You speak as a White Male, David.Really, what other choice to you have? What is incumbent upon us, the listener, to do is remove the best we can your physical appearance from your words. It's your words, processed in your brain, that is the greatest indicator of you. The late Stephen Hawking should serve as a prime example to us all. What we refer to as someone's personality emanates from the brain not from the vessel that contains it.
DD
Manhattan
I think it is a bit of a fiction to imagine a place of hegemonic knowledge/group identity for America followed by some kind of post-modern fall. (This is the same country that freaked out about the idea of a Catholic President with JFK).
In the same way histories are starting to look more critically at the apparent uniformity of America (viz 'A Renegade History of the United States') authors have looked back differently at the diversity and differences within seemingly homogeneous populations and societies such as ancient Rome.
Perhaps we need to look to models that seemed to embrace fairly diverse cultures and beliefs such as the Austria-Hungarian/Ottoman as systems to advise.
Speaking as David Brooks, I would like to say... Oops, I can't do that. Or can I? Can we? Maybe yes and maybe no. Perhaps we are stuck in this web of intertwined subjectivity (inevitable personal biases that must be known to be overcome) and objectivity (the possibility of reasoned discussion in our own heads and with others). I suggest we go back to U Chicago for more deliberation on this epistemological topic, David.
Oh good Lord, it's a mixture. Is that really so hard? You did not spring forth fully formed from the head of Zeus: you have a background. You also have a brain.
To take just one of your examples, Shakespeare was a gifted writer and imagined some compelling female characters. It's also easy to trace misogyny and stereotypes in his plays. Thus his plays both captivate us as stories AND give us a window into the beliefs of his time.
1
“Why are people’s views of global warming…and other scientific issues strongly determined by political label?” This is just infuriating. “People’s” views of global warming are not determined by political label, Mr. Brooks, for heaven’s sake, unless the “people” are right-wing conservatives. This blurring is David Brooks’s signature move—he collapses the sins of the right into the sins of “people,” or the times we live in, which allows him in effect to stroke his chin reasonably and muse in a morally and intellectually strenuous way about the moral and intellectual failings of the people these days. He does this over and over and over, ensuring that despite his genuinely strong intelligence and education he will have next to nothing actually useful and illuminating to say about the issues. Nonetheless he maintains his position at the Times, remains wealthy and influential in promoting the depressingly common view that if only the extremists of the irrational left and right could be overridden by reasonable centrists such as him, all would be well again.
But the irrational left simply doesn’t exist in any politically significant way in our country, while the irrational right is now in charge of all three branches the Federal Government, having bestowed Donald Trump upon us. It seems highly likely that Mr. Brooks’ privilege as a member of a largely white-male elite is one explanation for his otherwise unforgivable blindness to these facts.
Two matters:
First, You are falsely equating perspectivism with subjectivism. From an American perspective Benedict Arnold is a traitor. From the British, he is a loyal hero. Each is objectively true from its particular perspective. And correspondingly an American would perfectly agree that from the British perspective he is a hero, even though his own would be different. The problem that Nietzsche is addressing is that there is no ultimate transcendent perspective above all others. The issue is figuring out the perspectives that shape my understanding and those of others.
Second, you jump too quickly from Nietzsche to Foucault. You need to linger on Heidegger in between, where the apprehension of my being is related to my disposition. (dasein) Here my concern as being is to find what is most authentic.
The burden one one trying to understand others is to attempt to unpack the various perspectives to attempt to get at the disposition of being, as indeed Arendt was doing.
I always assumed one should formulate one's opinions based upon facts not necessarily from one's group background. In Florida one has a cross section of the Eastern part of the United States. Many Trump supporters ignore facts in their viewpoints as to why they support Trump. They go by their "feelings" instead. They also have a distain for President Obama which can be explained from a racial viewpoint and a distain for his intellectualism. They also watch Fox News which reenforces their views. A major "news" organization ignores facts and asserts it's opinions as facts is corrupting our political landscape. Possibly this reflects a failure of our education system. Group thought is dangerous to a democracy.
Brooks is not playing with a full deck? Who cares about 60-70 years ago because I am scared about the future with stupidity in great abundance in the Republican Party!
2
Well, just this morning I scrolled through a comment thread about the man who was shot in his backyard. It was notable that the voices shouting that he was a dangerous criminal, that the police must have had justification etc (none of that appears to be true) were all male and I'm guessing all white. They all seemed to believe most sincerely that there must have been some justification.....and I'm guessing it's because they have no understanding of being judged instantly, unfairly, dangerously based on their race or gender. It seemed bizarrely improbable to them. The people of color and the women on the thread knew better that such things happen.....
Thanks Brooks. Finally someone from the Times fighting the identity politics ideology adopted by everyone else at the Times. It's as Jordan Peterson exclaimed, "The idea that there is more difference between groups than within them IS the Fundamental Racist Idea!" Read that again, because I bet you didn't get that the 1st time, "The Fundamental Racist Idea is the belief that there is more difference between groups than within them." Yes, the left has fallen victim to this belief more than any other group. Why? For one, the group is based on ideology so with regard to that question, everyone on the left is the same in believing identity politics is good. That belief is necessary for membership. And what is that belief? Everyone on the left seems to as though everyone in the group were the same: look the same, think the same, capable of the same academic achievement, even have the same experience. Otherwise why would they accept "speaking on behalf" Like everything, there's always a distribution graph where one bell curve representing one group does not line up perfectly with the bell curve of another group, but every group has more in common with most other groups than they have uncommon. I dare go so far to say that Identity politics and phrases like "speaking as a..." is engaging in the "Fundamental Racist Idea." But good luck explaining that to a lefty. You probably will get called a Nazi or a Racist, the irony DRIPPING from their mouths without a clue.
2
David, if people don't believe there is objective truth or objective fact then a functioning society becomes impossible. Take a look at Amy Wax's piece in today's Wall Street Journal.
Writing seriously on this topic needs to include "The Lonely Crowd" by David Riesman (1950), a remarkably prescient examination of the subject.
Very good column, I can't even add anything to it. But it's sad that a lot of the commenters are so soaked in identity politics thought that they can't even hear what he is trying to say.
1
I'm with Hannah Arendt and Irving Howe. Brooks doesn't seem to understand that THINKING is still possible. Didn't he learn anything at the University of Chicago?
1
You state, rather offhandedly, that St. Augustine was black. I'm not sure if anyone knows definitively whether he was black, white, or someplace in between. The truth is, it doesn't matter. Or it shouldn't matter. His writing, and reasoning, stands on its own merits. Calling him a "black" writer seems to be undermining the point you're trying to make.
David Brooks does a tortured dance around the reality that he has made a career of peddling a line of smarmy and unctuous conservababble and pseudo philosophy, firmly rooted in his niche as an enabler and celebrator of rich folk privilege and elitism
2
You see this daily on the network news. The black reporter does the interviews and reporting about the black news story, the Hispanic reporter does the interviews and reporting on the Hispanic news story, etc. There is never anything revealed by these reporters that would not have been reported by someone from a different ethnic group.
I await the iconoclastic news desk that will someday simply have reporters do interviews and news reports.
It's quite odd to read an article which ostensibly criticizes black and Latino people engaging in racially-based group identity and politics; it's largely what black and Latino people have been saying ourselves for decades. Paraphrasing Dr. Martin Luther King: “ be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character”. We repeatedly witness people of color judged as a group: when some commit crimes, we all seen as having a propensity for criminal behavior. When some black athletes take a knee to protest police brutality amongst other injustices, black people collectively are painted as unpatriotic (despite large percentages serving in the military) and anti-police. Mexicans are described (by a Presidential candidate) as rapists and criminals. Muslims categorized as supporting terrorist ideology when some Muslims commit terrorist acts.
Largely, people of every race want to be seen as individuals. Speaking as a white male, you may not have experienced angst when the recent Austin bomber was revealed as a white male, or when the Las Vegas mass murderer was revealed as a white male, or when the mass shooter of the week is acting out. When a criminal is revealed to be - for example - a black male, many black people feel angst, despite being law-abiding and having nothing to do with the perpetrator or suspect. Mr. Brooks, you don't need to convince black and Latino people to embrace individuality - we've been trying to all our lives.
158
Whenever a mass shooter or terrorist is revealed to be white, like in Las Vegas, mainstreem media and social media ALWAYS try to make it about race. They try to make mass shooting a "white thing" even though statistics says otherwise. Just look at this piece: http://www.newsweek.com/white-men-have-committed-more-mass-shootings-any...
The narrative that only minority groups that are being shamed or being judged as a collective needs to end.
3
We hear often that the demise of something (religion, discipline, the family) is the source of our problems, and that folks growing up without an active church experience, or with a non-traditional family or with different ideas about how to discipline their kids have lead to the "breakdown of society!" So, people unhappy about society's problems sometimes become less of an individual and more of a member/supporter of one of these things: they become intensely active in their church sometimes even more than their parents were, they become "law and order" types, or they enter the culture wars in order to defend The America Family.
That makes me uncomfortable because it is based on a group presumption that may not even be true. There were cycles of excruciating problems in American society from 1776 until the 1960s despite the popular model of a traditional marriage with a stay-at-home mom, spare-the-rod-spoil-the-child discipline and almost mandatory church attendance among "decent people." The thing is, while it possibly was better and safer for the majority (white American families of European descent) this status quo now fondly remembered as "the good old days" required that everyone not a member of this majority accept their place under the top level, and put up with less opportunity, freedom, respect and safety.
The desire to rectify this inequity or to deny it seems to have driven many of us into the safety of groups that think as we do.
1
We are tribal out of defense. As individuals we need to process information to discern patterns that can guide our actions. We used to have too little information. Now we have so much our ability to process it is overwhelmed and we seek help to maintain mental balance. Our tribes have pat answers that offer solace. The depth of our need creates an addiction for the comfort that solace provides. As a scientist I have learned to endure failure and uncertainty. I do not need my tribes (There are a number, one of which we share) as much as most do. It helps to believe that what is troubling us has happened before and will happen again. Endure
1
Biggest Brooks whopper of all time: "Our whole education system is based on the idea that we train individuals to be critical thinkers." No, at least not today: the current educational system is based on the idea that we train individuals to be job-capable. Indeed, almost no one whom I know, even in education, can give even a reasonable definition of "critical thinking"; plainly, what we cannot define, we cannot teach.
Group thinking strikes me as a new kind of bigotry--all members of a group are or do this or that, and everyone is typical. How absolutely false to experience! It is good to be inclusive, but even inclusion must mean more than tokenism because one person cannot represent a group. To think otherwise is to demonstrate the pernicious influence of racism, sexism, etc.
68
Mr. Hays you are correct. Our education system, schools and colleges have lost their way. Secondary schools, in particular, are mostly about workplace skill building, and universities have morphed into glorified vocational schools, Such is not necessarily the fault of schools, though they (schools boards, college administrators, and superintendents) ought to resist and be a countervailing force, Businesses and society are calling the shots and in general don't sufficiently value critical thinking and the liberating arts.
2
I get your sentiment but this is the line of thinking that absolves you from conversations where you're part of the demographic who caused the problem. This is akin to saying "Not all Men", or "Not all White people". The reason group identity opinions are on the rise is that people realise that whether you are directly responsible or indirectly you're still complicit. You may not be a mysoginist, but your male privilege has propelled you forward. You may not be a racist but your white privilege has helped you a long way.
I can't disassociate myself from speaking as a black person because there are time where the shade of skin determines whether I get arrested humanely for shooting up a school, or get shot in my own backyard while talking on the phone.
117
"Not all Muslims"
"Not all Mexicans"
Those are ok though right? We can't categorize the individuals by nasty stereotypes of the groups. Unless its men or white people.
8
It amazes me that you can write this column about "group membership determin[ing] opinion" as though the only group memberships that matter are ethnic or racial when you yourself belong to a group - the Republican Party - which more strongly prescribes the positions of its members than anything you mention.
There is no ideological reason why someone who wants laxer regulations on pollution and guns should also want stricter regulations on abortion and sexual expression. That is an utterly incoherent position. There is no ideological reason why someone who wants lower taxes on the rich should also want more aggressive foreign policy; the two have nothing to do with one another. But if you want to be a Republican in good standing, you simply must believe all of them.
This is the fifth or sixth column Brooks has written in recent weeks trying to slyly attack "identity politics" - without using that term - as though they are the exclusive preserve of political liberals. They are all equally poorly-argued and unpersuasive.
It's almost as though what he believes is predetermined by where he stands.
136
If you understood the US Constitution and the founding of the United States then you’d understand where the Republicans are coming from.
1
Conservative white males are always accusing anyone who is not and who speaks out individually or with a group as participating in "identity politics."
You are correct that the Republican Party is a combination of the most insane ideology imaginable: religion, private business and corporation protection, misogyny, firearm protection, aggressive military. When you break it down, all of these ideologies lead to the protection of white male patriarchy with religion as the camouflage.
2
It's almost like there aren't courts full of judges or law schools full of scholars interpreting the Constitution, and you think only Republicans know how in read the Constitution...
I grew up in an entirely white suburban-Detroit town. I didn't know any Jewish people, any Black or Hispanic people, although I had dealt with many in stores and at baseball games and parks, and I don't think there were any Asian students in my high school. It was a lovely childhood, but when I went away to college, I sought out and got to know students of other religions and races and it was surprising to see how "not different" they were. When I moved to East Lansing, the home of Michigan State University, I discovered what true diversity is. We have many, many "foreigners" here studying at MSU, and enriching the community with their musical speech patterns, bringing their traditional foods to neighborhood gatherings, and sending their bright and curious children to our schools. One Swedish family of doctors studying at MSU's medical school shared their 3rd grade son with us on the soccer field--leading to our team's only winning season!
Having lived in both an exclusively white town and in a multi-cultural community, I have to say I prefer the multi-cultural one. I can't say that the folks from different countries think or form opinions differently, but I can say that the society, food, music, sports and culture are far richer with their contributions.
3
Mr. Brooks, nothing has changed, except your awakening that your views--the questions you think to ask, your blindspots, the relative weight you give to particular voices and evidence--have always been shaped by your position in society. As a white man, you have had the privilege of ignoring your own position. White male as been "normative" in our culture and has stood in for the "rational human being." Everyone else was an exception. In many ways that's the key component to privilege: to be the invisible measure against which all others are judged. So the only thing that has changed is your perception. Welcome to the world the rest of us live in.
5
I would recommend that Mr Brooks read up on the concepts of incentives and biases in economics, and on intersectionality.
I am sure that Mr Brooks understands that different people bring different experiences to a conversation. He might look upon those identities as shorthand for shared experiences. A woman will, in general have certain common experiences that a man will not experience, a black woman will probably have certain shared experiences that a white woman will not (which will both share some qualities with black men, or white women, but the experiences of a black woman will be distinct to that group.) Futher, the weighing of priorities will be often different for different groups on average.
By having certain experiences, your view of the world will be changed. A doctor will have different views of what is important based on their training and experience. An oncologist will be different from a pediatrician.
The thing is you can train to be a doctor, you can’t train to be a black woman. To state, as a black woman, that person is bringing the training and experience that makes them more of an expert on their experience than a white man will ever be. A white man can train themselves to empathy, and respect the qualifications that a lived experience of someone else impart. They should recognize that there is a unique area of expertise beings stated when one claims identity. This doesn’t make it unassailable but it does make it an expert opinion.
Of course, it's not a choice between an isolated thinker immune to the biases of history and culture on the one hand, and someone who is able only to parrot cultural memes on the other hand, though in my opinion, the latter describes the world more accurately. In addition, I find more intelligent people are not more likely to resist groupthink, though they are often better at rationalizing and justifying it. Read Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind.
People think the election of Donald Trump signaled our descent into Idiocracy. Actually, the way to Idiocracy was paved by our every statement being prefaced and assessed by superficial categories of race/gender/ethnicity. Too many shortcuts to reasoning and actual reasoning gets lost. Sad fact, but many so-called liberals are as illiberal in their thinking as Trump and his flunkies.
3
The phrase "speaking as.." is a means of clarifying, and sometimes authenticating, identity. In the age of internet comment boards, how would you know my gender, ethnicity, religion, or age unless I tell you? That's not necessarily an adoption of collective identity. "Speaking as a white male..." doesn't mean you are identifying with all white males. A more accurate statement might read "I happen to be white and male and here is what I think about this issue."
You're only slipping into collective identity if you're using personal information in order to establish credentials. "I am white and male therefore I know about this issue." Even here the subject is slippery though. If you say "Speaking as a medical doctor..." you have in fact established a specific credential. Moreover, you can use that credential to challenge assumptions normally associated with your collective identity. "I happen to be a white male but I disagree with this particular white male because in my experience..."
Which brings us all the way back to the intellectuals of the 1950s. May I remind you "Down and Out in Paris and London" was a memoir and "Homage to Catalonia" was autobiographical. Orwell wasn't just making stuff up. He did possess relevant experience. The primary takeaway: All these different views of opinion aren't necessarily mutually exclusive. You can be Nietzsche one moment and Foucault the next. It all hinges on context.
“Our political system is based on the idea that persuasion and deliberation lead to compromise and toward truth.”
"Compromise," yes, "toward truth," not necessarily. Our earliest efforts at democracy in the United States produced a compromise that left us half slave and half (more or less) free. The lie of racial superiority was preserved so long as the South was willing to accept boundaries for the existence of slavery. Democracy is a system for replacing violence with votes and war with compromise. It's the best system we've been able to devise, but its progress toward truth is a "drunkard's walk."
"Our whole education system is based on the idea that we train individuals to be critical thinkers."
No, it isn't. Read your own newspaper. Education is valued primarily for producing skilled labor, not skilled citizens. In the current political climate, the university as trade school is the favored model.
It's extremely difficult to train critical thinkers in a society where belief systems that contradict scientific consensus have a privileged position. Think of a public school teacher trying to teach evolution or climate science in a religiously conservative community. Religion gets a mulligan when facts conflict with faith. It's one of the compromises we've made to avoid violent religious conflict.
Unfortunately, that gets in the way when we're faced with issues like climate change. Mother nature never compromises.
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David, kudos on going with an "I don't know!"
As a white Jewish man (couldn't help it), I have found that group identity, privilege, and location within power structures matters is one helpful frame to understand why we believe what we believe -- and definitely not the only one.
With awareness, one might gain additional humility to review one's perspective critically and also avoid a practice amongst those who are have more privilege than others in our current society of universalizing our experience to all people, regardless of their background and experience. For example, one might say that "I believe all people find their self-worth and self-esteem through hard work," and therefore believe in all sorts of policy ideas based on that, but what's really happening if you are saying you believe hard work is how you find your self worth. That may be true for you and your group but not for all people.
I have seen these categories be transcended to where another kind of conversation is possible about what might be universal about our shared experience. The only way to that place is through the muck and grace of identity and privilege. Unfortunately for op-ed writers, this makes for a potential dud in terms of internet traffic. Identity wars keep going because of a political economy -- salvos get clicks, votes, raise money -- and it often takes a different set of capacities to engage meaningfully in a more positive frame.
People allow their likes and dislikes to influence their judgement of what is true and false. I do it too, but I make an effort not to.
Speaking as a white male, I must confess that for the first 50 or so years of my life my words were spoken without any awareness that the reasoning behind them may have been colored by whiteness or male-ness. I still tend to think my opinions and conclusions are "objective"... and I'm still surprised by how different they are from those of my friends who don't share my whiteness or male-ness or liberal-ness or educated-ness. This, I think, is the greatest disadvantage of white-male-ness: that our group has the least awareness of being a group whose perspectives may be different from other groups.
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Contemporary anthropologists will tell you that the individual inquirer, standing apart and objectively assessing anything is a myth. Never happened. Each individual is influenced by their prior experiences. Even scientific inquiry is not neutral: the questions scientists choose to ask and how they ask them are determined by internal and external forces.
This is not to say that critical thinking doesn't or can't exist, but that it must be conducted with the knowledge (and acknowledgement) of our own personal postures in relation to the subject. This is why identity matters. If you're a white male cop and you've been conditioned all your life to see black men as dangerous, it is your conditioned identity that makes your decisions, not reason. Unfortunately we don't know what we don't know. Only new experiences will change our personal posture toward people and ideas.
Other identities, those long suppressed and marginalized by the majority, assert themselves out of necessity. Necessary for the individual, necessary for society.
5
This is how the NYT can soft-shoe the profile of a white Texas bomber and dredge up negativity in their profiles of black victims of police shootings.
1
If I draw a picture of a mountain from one side and you draw a picture from the other side the pictures we draw will be different. But if I travel to where you are standing and draw a picture from the same spot they will be more or less the same. I once knew a man who served with special forces behind the lines in the Philippines during WW II. When he made a derogatory remark about Japanese I objected and said I had Japanese friends who were very nice people. He replied, that may be, but I was there and I know what I saw. Of course there was no way I could travel back to the Philippines during WW II to stand where he had stood. This is why it is very important to read and study history. It is only through the words of historians that we can travel in a limited way to a different place and a different time, to begin to try to see and understand what other people may have seen. One of the biggest errors we can make is to judge other people out of the context of their time.
Universities encourage rational thinking, thinking for oneself, unraveling complexities and inquiring into the origins of "facts" and "theories". this is a wonderful gift and one that infuses the individual with talents which help navigate life.
But life is more than rational thought. It is a matter of genes and cultures. Living beings have a built in bias towards homeostasis with a tilt towards a future, surviving, and going forward, growth... This tilt is more often expressed in feelings. Feelings of security and support for our innate sense of survival depends much on our culture, upbringing, nurturing or not. Different groups experience this in different ways. It isn't illogical that whether stated or not, one speaks as ...an individual and a member of a culture and that culture has a long and shared experience of what works for them and what does not.
The feelings of one from a culture are highly relevant to what they will perceive as justice, fairness, welcoming or threating. So a comment that one speaks as "" ....."" is a necessary context which helps to understand their comments.
Whatever actually drives you, David, which only God knows for sure, at least I hope you will strive for what I guess you are saying you prefer as the better way for thinking - do your own thinking.
Good luck, I try too.
First, David ... stop with the "isms". Take a deep breath, and commit yourself to empirical validation and evidence-based discourse. Lux et Veritas will surely follow. There, that was easy ...
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Any society exists as a tension between the individual and the collective whole. Too much in either direction collapses the structure, i.e. if all act as individuals we have anarchy, for a totally collective mode, think North Korea. But in order to form a collective structure one must first have a raison d'etre for it. Thus we form our tribal mentalities, identifying by our ethnic group, sexual or gender orientation, political views, Party affiliations (or not), and so on. The problem is that none of our self-identifying aspects act in singularity, but are existing as a tension within each group with which we assert identification. That is to say that within every group is a whole spectrum of others also part of the group who may be 180 degrees out of where I am on an given issue. Multiply this by the number of individuals, by the number of groups each identifies with, and looking at the big picture you'll likely find enough chaos to keep quantum physicists happy.
What endangers the fabric of our larger society is everyone pulling away from the center into polarized extremes. Without a narrative "glue" to give us a common purpose, what's to keep it all from breaking down into fractured hostile tribes, with the accompanying warfare between them? We've forgotten life's basic lessons, "you don't always get what you want," and "you get more by sharing than by being greedy." Of course, when the President at the top is the epitome of greed, is this really at all surprising?
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I want to dumb it down a bit David re your scholarly but esoteric piece.
Basically the country is now run by the extremes ie the extreme liberals in the 15 largest states and the electoral majority extreme conservatives in the other 35 mainly smaller states.
What we now need are populist progressive candidate on the left like Bernie and Lamb and populist conservative candidates like Flake, Corker etc. on the left.
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"How much are you in control of your own opinions?" None. Brains make opinions. When opinions arise arise in consciousness, you notice them.
Why, as a columnist do you feel compelled to come to a conclusion? Do you not think your article with many leading questions must force the reader to come to a conclusion? Your article is thought-provoking enough...
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And once again, the NYT's commenters prove Mr. Brook's point.
Do people not read the column, or do they just not understand it?
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Mr. Brooks, where did you get the idea that "our whole education system is based on the idea that we train individuals to be critical thinkers"? Every conservative education plan of the past 40 years was designed to do precisely the opposite of training students to be critical thinkers. And as adults, conservatives are the perfect models of how to act if you hold a worldview of right/wrong, black/white,us vs them mentality. Conservatives are sheep.
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A friend kept telling me that liberals over-intellectualize everything. Perhaps he was over-simplifying. Observation, interpretation, critical thinking - all take time and effort. It is easier to go with the tribe than be the standalone in the crowd; after all, what's the point of making an argument for something you alone care about if it doesn't agree with the group you are supposed to belong to. Your friends might think ill of you and might even mock you for it.
The path of least resistance usually follows the law of gravity. It leads us down, not up.
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Foucault was right. ALL laws are made to protect the wealthy.
Because the wealthy CREATE the laws.
When was the last time you saw legislation made by lower middle class people?
All you have to do is to keep abreast of what's happening day to day on any country on the planet.
But this can't last forever. The karmic wheel must turn.
The end of this will be when the world's stock markets collapse.
And it looks like one Donald J. Trump will probably make it happen.
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As a privileged white male, no wonder you are confused. When you've been part of the majority in power your whole life, you don't have a clue what's it's like to be disenfranchised, vulnerable, at risk, female, black, or gay, or Muslim, or ...or..or. Unless and until you examine your own male white privilege, you will continue to be clueless and to write columns that don't truly expand outside your own worldview. There are plenty of resources - go read some!! You need to own your own biases and critically think your way into other groups lived experience. We all do. There is absolutely no way to not experience the world from part of your group.
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Interesting article. Just one fact-check. Saint Augustine was not "black" as we understand "black." He was born and lived most of his life in North Africa and probably looked like today's Berbers. He would have considered himself Roman, and his early life was oriented toward Roman success as a governor or senator.
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David - you concede too much! Why is it obvious that, when putting together a panel on anything - even oncology - you would not want a bunch of "white guys" up there? Is that because all "white guys" are the same? Or is it because a woman would obviously think differently than a man about oncology? Or a black person would think differently? Come on, your whole point is that an individual's opinions are not (and should not be assumed to be) dictated by that person's race or gender.
Be honest - you included the above statement because you were afraid that if you left it out, you would be shouted down by the mob as a sexist and a racist. That is a major problem in our society today. If you push individualism over identity politics, you get run out of town.
Rational people need to speak up and fight together. Otherwise, we are being led down the rabbit hole where everyone is categorized by inherent characteristics. Rather than each of us being considered as an individual, we will simply be the white guy, the brown woman, the transgender guy. Why would we want to live in such a world? Shouldn't we strive for something better? A place where each of us is viewed as unique?
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Yes.
It's not rocket science to become a balanced objective thinker!
ALL of our cultural/societal well being has been created by individuals banding together to work for the common well being.
The stupid and self destructive have just found each other now and have become a tsunami of regression fed by an exploiter- in - chief and his equally defective group of weak minded applicants.
ALL is well behind the blue walls and the regressives will fade into irrelevence.
Time and demographics are not on their side.
Speaking as an American who grew up believing that the Declaration of Independence, Gettysburg Address and Statue of Liberty stand for what's great about the United States...
Speaking as a thinking person who believes in scientific method and that knowledge is power...
Speaking as a 61 year old white Jewish liberal who never felt truly 100% American until Barack Obama was elected (something that may only be understood by those who remember that WASPs were once considered the only true Americans)...
We must not let ignorance and ego triumph.
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Just to respond to the inquiry of Mr. Brooks...
We start with observation, pure and simple. If someone else wants to translate that perception into failing to consider gender, race, or political background, that is fine. But only to the extent that the perceiver's awareness is heightened by the observations can there be any relevance. Facts must be pure and simple. If everything becomes hyper-interpreted by sociological, political, gender or psychological factors, when does it ever stop?
How does "what you believe is determined by where you stand" influence perception? How do we know if an assertion is true? How do we really understand whether "Speaking as a Latina" or "Speaking as a queer person" or "Speaking as a Jew" is a real perception of reality? If I've been harassed, physically or verbally as a queer person, how does that create that I am speaking for that group? It is all theory. Theortically, because I have had these experiences, I am speaking in a way you cannot. But if that is really true, can you ever really come close to understanding another's perspective?
The answer would seem to be "no." All we can do is listen sensitively, perceptively, and with the great humility that we do what we can to understand, fully acknowledging that we all have different experiences yet we can all listen with empathy. There is no conflict in this perspective, in contrast with the conflict in Mr. Brooks's theorizing about what another thinks.
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Brooks column is excellent, even though he only express he is confused.
Following statement is a good example.
"Our whole education system is based on the idea that we train individuals to be critical thinkers."
I believe I know what happened?
Today's social media effectively neutralized or reversed that critical thinking.
How do we know this, Today's generations who were born around 1990's doesn't belong some social groups organically, their attachment to these groups are mainly via social media means that intermediary plays a significant role.
If you think that once Nazi's and Communists used their time media resources to intermediate peoples identity and where they belong, Today that role is assumed by Facebook, twitter etc.
Today Facebook shapes the mind and souls of more than a billion people all over the world.
We learned that Cambridge analytica works, Facebook help to reformat 50 million people mindset.
Some oppose this explanation but Today fascism and Communism are facebook and twitter etc. 100's of millions following them like Hitler's Nurnberg and Stalin Moscow gathering.
These billions if facebook followers screaming to our face, sig heil every day.
We are hearing more and darker clouds and totalitarianism waking up from the grave.
Mr. Brooks, you write "One of the things I’ve learned in a lifetime in journalism is that people are always more unpredictable than their categories." That is a key observation and one I hold on to when reading the work of journalist and pundits who make life easier for themselves by lumping people into categories. People in the real world, my world, are far more complicated. I have found that listening to people around me has given me great hope for the future. The people around me are not "group-thinkers" but compassionate people who are trying to get through life as best they can, just as I am doing.
If my comment is, “Thank you for writing this. It needed to be said,” what is my group (identity)?
You are confused. On the one hand, we've surrendered our individual capacity for thinking to a collective group think, but yet "wider inclusion has vastly improved public debate." Which is it? These times do seem singular in many respects: it does feel as though social networks like facebook and twitter are eating away at our ability to think hard about issues. But is it "identity" politics that's to blame, and is this "perspectivism" a recent phenomenon? Nietzsche developed his ideas about perspectivism in the 1880s, 70 years before your golden age of the 1950s, which were just as possessed by groupthink as we are now, though the animating idea then was Communism. "Speaking as a ... " is a kind of shorthand way of establishing what the law courts call "standing" but I wouldn't read too much into it, as you do here. People are individuals first and group members second. If anything, the focus on group identity has only been intensified by your colleagues in the media, who find these labels a convenient substitute for more complicated analysis. Journalists are lazy. Many now seem to spend their time transcribing twitter feeds and talking to one another instead of getting out and pounding the pavement. Maybe that's what you're feeling.
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Once again, I've learned more from the comment section than the original opinion piece. Mr. Brooks, you need to expand your horizons.
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The notion that group membership and personally lived individual history do not significantly influence and matter in determining our opinions is ludicrously contrary to our normal human nature and nurture.
The ability to think clearly, originally, independently and critically with humble humane empathy is a notable iconic rare aspirational human virtue that deserves to be judged upon it's own merits.
Mr. Brooks focus on his being 'a white male' ignores his natural born Canadian Jewish origins, his University of Chicago education, his Wall Street Journal professional journalist experience, his professed conservative Republican Party partisan political preference and his American citizenship naturalization.
But Mr. Brooks speaks from all of those contexts and perspectives to people who share all, some or none of those characteristics in a diverse nation with a defining distinctive history regarding color aka race.
A nation where a half- white by biological nature and all- white by cultural nurture man named Barack Obama cannot represent nor ever write 'Speaking as a White Male....'.
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Hannah Arendt did not believe in standing alone and transcending your background. Hannah Arendt believed human action is essentially tied to a community. Brooks’ model here is the isolated, atomic subject, which Arendt views as an inhumane way of life.
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I appreciate Mr. Brooks offering us a public 'thinking through' in this way. Perhaps it would help to reflect further on whether people "busy fighting communism and facism...were deeply allergic to groupthink." As well, grappling with what Foucault actually wrote instead of dismissing it with all 'the rest' might give insight into many of the comments here.
As a fellow white man, this may be the first time I've almost completely agreed with your line of thinking, although I can't help but also hope that the conditional conclusion you reach is a white man's straw man: "If it’s just group against group, deliberation is a sham, beliefs are just masks groups use to preserve power structures, and democracy is a fraud." If that were the case, I suppose we would have reason to worry. And it's hard not to see how that stereotype of identity politics has been used to justify a nasty backlash. But the admission of identity, ideally, is a recognition of potential limitations, not of definition. It's not a "therefore" that follows the admission, just a comma.
The distinctions made in this piece, between how we were then and how we are now, between individual critical intelligence and group identity, are just way, way overstated.
It's a mixture of both. Always has been, and is now.
You write: "Then came Michel Foucault and critical race theorists and the rest, and the argument that society is structured by elites to preserve their privilege."
This is just bad intellectual history. The criticism of ideology--"the ideas of the ruling class are the ruling ideas of a society"--has been around since Marx and the 19th century.
Of course my ideas are shaped by where I come from, "who I am" as an X. And of course I can develop a critical perspective on these ideas.
Even the most fervent advocate identity politics believes both of these. Even people making the loftiest claims for critical detachment do too.
The discussion becomes useless when, as in this essay, the alternatives are made into incompatible absolutes."We used to think this, now we think that..." It's like a mixture of academic sterility and internet-troll exaggeration.
But I guess it sells newspapers, or gets clicks.
Very poor paraphrasing of the intellectuals he is citing. You would thing David Brooks would be more careful. This rendition of the ‘history of ideas’ is half baked at best.
With his typical absolutist mindset, Mr. Brooks misunderstands most of this....
"Now we are at a place where it is commonly assumed that your perceptions are something that come to you through your demographic identity."
- Wrong! One's perceptions don't come THROUGH your group; but your experience of being in that group does (partially) influence how you interpret life's experiences.
How many times have we all heard somebody rise up in conversation and say, “Speaking as a Latina. …” or “Speaking as a queer person. …” or “Speaking as a Jew. …”? After you’ve stated your group identity, what is the therefore that follows?"
- Backwards! There is no "therefore" implied. They're simply explaining what influences their perspective. Also, they aren't claiming to speak for ALL of the group.
"For example, in the 1990s, African-Americans strongly supported tougher criminal justice laws. Now opinion has shifted and a majority of African-Americans strongly oppose them."
- Over-generalization! African-Americans in the 1990s were no more monolithic than they are now; why did you impose that on them?
"But other times, group identity seems irrelevant to many issues. How does being gay shape your view of U.S.-German relations or breaking up big tech?"
- Too simplistic! It depends on the context and the specifics of what's being discussed.
"But the notion that group membership determines opinion undermines all that."
- Wrong! Group membership INFLUENCES opinion; it does NOT determine it!
"I’m a columnist and I’m supposed to come to a conclusion, but I’m confused."
dude. it's almost like you directly concluded in the three grafs prior that the role and utility of identity in shaping one's views depeds on content and context.
obtuse isn't even the word.
A tiny bit of food for thought:
Once we spoke face to face. We were well known within our communities. There as no need to self identify because everyone understood who we were-our church, our politics, our role in society.
With the advent of the internet and lots of new types of classifications that are not intuitively obvious and with which we wish to self-identify, people state their affiliations.
I don't think it's changed. Read any fiction written in the last 200 years. One thing that is crystal clear is people self sort (or are forced to self sort) into groups with certain characteristics.
If you've imagined something different, Mr. Brooks you are deluding yourself, because one thing that comes across loud and clear in every piece you write is how you belong to a group that is passing away into a bygone era. The OpEd piece is just another in a long string of things that make you seem incapable of moving on with the rest of us.
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While many would say that Bannon is the spawn of the devil, he got it right when he said economic nationalism beats identity politics every time.
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One aspect of the problem, stated as “what determines our opinions?” is acceptance of the rather non-scientific view that our opinions are determined. Science is not synonymous with determinism and to assume so is a vulgarization of science. A metaphysical determinism devalues the human being. If science was simply a form of determinism, it would devalue human beings. Your confusion either calls for a more complex understanding of science, including social science, or it asks for a better language for understanding human beings—perhaps an aesthetic or religious language, neither of which appears to have much traction in the world today, including your world of journalism. A step in the right direction would be to acknowledge there are other languages, forms of words and concepts, with which to understand us human creatures and the cosmos in which we live. It emphasizes the human faculty of listening. You, and many of your colleagues, appear to exercise this faculty almost habitually. Continue to do so. It will serve you well.
Oh, and get off the “individual vs. the group” thing, which is really rather trivial.
I tend to agree with this perception.
Worse, however, is the notion that ones group may seem to skew what others believe that person to believe.
“You are a white man, so you are a racist.”
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Remember it's your Republican party that puts party above country, leading to our present impotence regarding Russia. So thanks for that.
I've often heard Mr. Brooks in speeches refer to himself as hired to be "the conservative" op-ed columnist at the Times. "Now, when somebody says that I always wonder, What does that mean? After you’ve stated your group identity, what is the therefore that follows?"
Is St. Augustine black? His mother, Monica, a Berber. His father, Patricius, it has been argued was a Roman (in the ethnic sense and not merely in his citizenship). Unless you subscribe to the notion that all North Africans are black, which they're not, Augustine probably fell somewhere between Gadaffi and Al Pacino.
and since skin color is everything, your weird designation between "Gadaffi" and Al Pacino is somehow a way to "identify" him? In this country, many of us have been and continue to be mixed to a vague shade of light brown/beige that would fall into the gap between those two men, so I'm not sure why we should pay attention to skin color at all anymore.
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Sorry, Mr. Brooks. Our educational system is NOT based on training critical thinkers, and that is a large part of what is wrong with our country today. Critical thinkers do not take their information from Fox and Facebook.
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A commenter lamented that David, “…needs to spend more time with those people who really do vote. Show up for coffee at "Ethel's Café" at 6 am and talk to people who are about to go to real work helping and serving their fellow Americans. Those are the people who pay our bills and they are the ones that should be heard.”
I disagree. You basically get the same plain White people at "Ethel's Cafe" as who David speaks with, perhaps not as wealthy or educated. I've been to many an Ethel's and heard them talk. They talk politics a lot and quite seriously. In some ways they cling more strongly to their opinions than most because they only read/hear/see one news source.
Where David needs to go is the inner cities. He needs to visit the poor Black and Latino city neighborhoods and speak with those people. Those people also vote, go to real work, pay our bills and serve their fellow Americans. All the while dealing with discrimination, poverty, crime and little chance to advance in society. They have to feed their families and try to sustain a meager existence in America. They don't have time to sit around "Ethel's Cafe" at 6am and shoot the breeze before going to work.
Mr. Brooks identifies himself as a 'white' male. Our government applies the same appellation to me. The difference between us is that he appears to believe it but I know it is a lie. Chalk is white, charcoal is black. I've never seen a human being whose dermal pigmentation matches the appearance of those substances.
One summer day I was talking with a friend and co-worker when she used the phrase, 'As a black woman...". I interrupted her and asked if she would call me a "white man". She agreed. I then placed my suntanned arm next to hers and asked "What do you see?" visibly shocked, she said, "My God, you're darker than me!" We then talked about why society readily accepts the black/white lie. We agreed it's a bad habit instilled in childhood by people we trusted and never questioned. It's also a more convenient shorthand than a truthful alternative description of a person. And, of course, it is an insidious and effective accelerant of demagoguery and hate.
I think there are two reasons society
Mr. Brooks, you are a white male. You can choose to take an academic approach to understanding all the confusing diversity around you. People in their particular groups notice every minute of every day that they are not embraced by "your kind" (white males) and "your kind" holds most of the power. Power dynamics decide reality for everyone. When an unarmed black person is stopped for a broken tail light, asked to get out of the car, and ends up dead, all black people take notice: the police are not there to protect us, but to monitor, contain , and suppress us. Mr. Brooks, you know that the police are there to protect you and your power. This is just one example. When you refer to the wonderful diversity on decision-making boards, do you mean boards where white males are a minority? Of course not. "Representation" (tokenism) is seen as sufficient, but representation does not ever constitute a voting majority. It is always a "voice" that those with real power (white males) can consider (or not). So in every situation, in every encounter, some are reminded that they are not part of the REAL group, but only representatives of a group, always to be discounted by those who retain power. The fact that you are so confused is the problem. Perhaps you should retire because the world has shifted around you. Most readers tire of your confusion and would like some insights about how to move forward together. (Hint: it's not letting white males decide everything for all of us).
Brooks lacks some introspection here. Over the last couple of years his columns have been quite individualistic, uniquely exploring philosophical outlooks not usually explored in political columns. He has become readable and thought provoking. In the past he was a pretty loyal conservative ideologue. I read his columns as "yada, yada, yada...Democrats fault."
Of course being gay is relevant to how someone might perceive US-Russia relations and you can add social media to that. If my president of the United States is bear hugging the butcher of Russia, my concern is deep as the butcher believes I should be exterminated. If sai president does not confront the butcher when the butcher plants false news and steals my identity and unleashes even more hate in my country, my life is in danger.
And being a Latina probably does affect the way she reads St. Augustine. First as a person as color and second more than likely Catholic who consider St. Augustine a saint.
Every person comes from a place with their own perspective. That’s not to say they get their own facts. But as a comfortable married white woman, I might consider something very different than a white single mother with three children.
Why the confusion? We live in a time characterized by Asimov's statement "my ignorance is as good as your knowledge." Taken to new heights by an election which produced an unabashed liar as the winner, the Rupert Murdochs of the world have parlayed voter discontent into a tearing down of most of what was good about this country, instead drawing the battlegrounds in terms of only polarized views laid out for a mostly uneducated citizenry.
The Brooks faux hand wringing about deliberation being a sham and democracy a fraud only seems to lack an audience beyond NYT readers to allay any confusion about what has happened to this country.
"When you put together a panel discussion or a work team, even on a subject like oncology, you don’t want to have a bunch of white males sitting up there. We know that something valuable will be lost."
This baffles me.
Don't we want the best oncologists, regardless of race, religion or sexual preference?
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The best oncologists have not solved the problem! Differences in experience can lead to "unconventional" (i.e., not white male) thinking with the potential to reframe a problem, or a change in the approach. Interdisciplinary work has this effect, and it can lead to advancement.
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And that leaves the difficulty of determining who is the best. Particularly when potential candidates are eliminated based on irrelevant factors such as race, gender, religion or sexual preference.
1
The issue is that too often the picks for a panel discussion or a work team are made on the basis of who we know rather than who is the best. The cycle is reinforced when later choices are made on the basis of who has been chosen most often in previous rounds.
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There is an important distinction that Mr. Brooks obscures. When we consider the individual/group distinction we may be attempting to prescribe how we should reason, as he did with his opinion writers, or we may be describing how our opinions are molded by our in born identity. It is arguable that the height of the Cold War garden variety Anti-Communism strongly recommended individual opinion formation but actually derived from rigid collective conditioning. We should all be careful of those who call for us to affirm our individuality on the count of three. I support an aspiration to individual thought. As an educator I have made an introduction to formal logic, forensic criteria, and self conscious epistemic categories central to what I see my role as being. I have pursued this approach even in sub-cultures and foreign nations where individual thought was held in lower esteem. At the same time it would be arrogant for me to think that I have arrived at some pinnacle of self determination. Possibly what the "speaking as an X" expresses is a sense of humility regarding the universality of one's arguments. It may mark a greater awareness of the social construction of our individual selves. There are reasons why we can take a persons ethnicity, religion, area of residence,age and education level and make a good guess as to whether they shop at Whole Foods and who they voted for. Condemning so-called politics of identity may be a plea for false individualism.
That's a lot of hand-wringing to end up in a false dichotomy, Mr. Brooks.
To maintain a free and progressive society, individuals must critically interrogate existing dynamics of power and privilege. I don't see what's so difficult about that.
While Brooks speaks of how people's beliefs are determined by their place in society he misses a much greater factor in how people's beliefs are determined, and that is that they are based on the society they live in.
There can be no better example of this than people's beliefs about homosexuality, ranging from the belief that they should be persecuted to the belief that there is absolutely no difference between marriage between members of the opposite sex and members of the same sex.
People who live in western countries share the latter belief, while people who live in Russia, not to mention those who live in muslim countries believe homosexuality is if not a perversion, it is certainly not a right.
And the reason that the people of these different societies have these opposing beliefs about this issue is plain and obvious. And that is that western society decided to change their views about same sex relationships with the turning point being the supreme court ruling that gay marriage is a right, while those other societies continued to maintain their age old beliefs.
Every change in people's beliefs, for example from slavery being right to being wrong, and the same in regard to racism, was not based on millions of people changing their minds independently based on their objective thinking. It was based purely on the fact that people believe whatever it is that the society they are part of reached a consensus to believe.
Perhaps one's views on climate change, health care, gun control, etc. reflect one's fundamental views of goverment and community. If you don't trust government, don't want anyone telling you what you can or cannot do, and don't see yourself as part of community with concerns for welfare of others or community in general, THEN one opposes environmental regulations, taxes, subsidized health care, etc. One denies climate change because to acknowledge it is to concede greater government authority over your lives.
The missing link is money.
Humans are animals, ruled by instincts. Philosophers can only attempt to put words to what is already a hardwired reality. We are both individuals and group mentality. Democracy is the only system that tries to accommodate both sides of humanity.
What has set the world on edge and made Brooks doubt his reality is the imbalance in what is shared wealth and what is personal wealth. This is a frequent and recurring theme throughout history. New rising players on the world stage are agitating the system resisting or distorting the inner animal. The environment is pushing it's own agenda.
Fear and money are driving the political systems. What will keep humanity from running over the cliff like lemmings is the instinct for preservation and balance - all for one and one for all. That is the foundation of our system.
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Although thought and imagination may transcend experience, our starting place for thought and imagination begin in our experience- including our experiences as a member of all the groups to which we belong.
I agree that our background is a factor in how we think. However, we each have a unique and individual background no matter what group (ethnic, religious, geographic) or groups influenced us. I would never us the expression, "speaking as a...", since no one factor defines me. Is it being gay, growing up in a largely white middle class neighborhood on Long Island, going to college in NYC, being exposed to various cultures while living in NYC for twenty years during the 70's and 80's? It's all those things and I'm sure no one else has those same experiences from which to draw on. That's why I think that individual judgment is just that, individual. Unfortunately, I'm sure there are some people who don't get that varied an experience in life due to their circumstances, and so a group mentality does arise.
Mr. Brooks notes at the end of his think piece: "But the notion that group membership determines opinion undermines all that." That, to me, creates a more simplistic characterization of what is going on. In my experience, when a person declares "speaking as a xxx", it is a declaration of "I want to represent a perspective that may be being overlooked in this discussion." The person is not claiming to speak for the entire group, but rather offering a perspective not yet considered. The diversity of voices explaining different perspectives makes us stronger IF we are willing to listen, engage, and modify our thinking if we're persuaded by what has been said.
"The person is not claiming to speak for the entire group, but rather offering a perspective not yet considered."
In my experience, this is not the motivation. The implication is "Since I am a member of this group, my opinion is more valid than those who are not a part of this group." It's asserting a privilege based on identity.
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David, the problem is that we have allowed cults masking as religion, party, etc. to flourish. They built their power on group-think and the destruction of an objective reality. Up is down, black is white, true is false. We have banished honest research and fact to the dustbin by withdrawing funding, outright bans, or opposition research to make everything an unknowable debate. In this climate where there are no facts to cling to, we instead latch onto an identity. That's all that's left.
Democracy is not a fraud. The Cults want the people to conclude this so we will embrace despotism. But Democracy requires a baseline respect for truth.
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I'm on the side of your 1950s intellectuals, Mr Bruni. People regularly transcend their personal situation to think critically about subjects that affect them personally such as politics. But not all people. Some people are instinctively critical, and some people are instinctively tribal, and some people become stuck in one or other of those modes. I think the tragedy of modern politics is that one side has become almost exclusively tribal, while the other exhibits the usual bell curve of critical thinking vs' tribalism. Will the right recover, or will the left go the way of the right? Time will tell.
"If it’s just group against group, deliberation is a sham, beliefs are just masks ..."
Tribalism seems "hard wired" in our species by human evolution, and looks to be a deep and darned near immutable feature of human social organization. It provided a clear adaptive advantage when human society was organized as small, competing bands of hunter/gatherers in the ancient, prehistory beginnings of our species, tens and hundreds of thousands of years ago.
In modern society that ancient social wiring is no longer evolutionarily beneficial, and has turned increasingly and profoundly destructive on balance. Once you become sensitized to it, you see it everywhere, doing great harm to group interactions on all scales, and also to our epistemological structures.
I've concluded that transcending that innate human feature is the fundamental challenge of our species. Because tribalism is deeply coded into our core makeup, perhaps at a genetic level, transcending it involves in many respects a conscious effort to work against our very nature. Perhaps accomplishing that would be the crowning achievement of enlightenment.
Thank you for this column. I am more troubled by the stories about Facebook and Cambridge Analytica than I am about John Bolton starting a nuclear war. Psychographic profiling is already here, and the efforts to control my thinking are only going to increase; on the other hand, there is some remote hope that our elected officials will finally stand up against a berserk Executive intent on bringing on the apocalypse. Or possibly, I fear the prospect of someone controlling my brain more than I worry about bodily harm. I shut down my Facebook account, but what now? Should I get off the grid and move to a farm in Idaho? I can’t remember being this scared for our collective future before...
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Identifying of which tribe, clan or group you are a part gives some modicum of credibility to your opinion but only on matters particularly pertaining to your group. When you opine on something not pertaining to your group, announcing your membership in the group is of no value. And including your membership in the group is senseless. Example:“As a conservative, I think Tom Brady is awesome”
When you speak counter to the perceived interests or opinions of your group, your belonging to the group adds weight.
That is why many commenters preface their remarks with identification to a group before bashing the group. It is a common tactic of persuasion. Of course, as soon as I see that preface, I immediately suspect the opposite.
The epistemological foundation of an individual worldview is comprised by some type of sociology of knowledge which fluctuates over time. A critical thinker will enter into a type of group think in order to understand and make a home there. Even if there does exit some objective absolutes that all individuals can discover, then that will result in some sort of commonality of knowledge shared by various group paradigms. Republicans and Democrats are both liberal in the classical sense although the understanding of those common values have morphed.
The are a load of good insights generated by this article. Finally David admits that he is confused. Well we all are confused to some extent. When you are in something that doesn't feel right and you have no way out, well that creates confusion and anxiety.
People are talking about the growing disparity between rich and poor. From my perspective their is also a growing "responsibility' disparity. Many folks feel less empowered by their work and have not replaced the identity wrapped up in work with constructive alternative advocations.
The same thing can be said about our education system. Having been a HS instructor for 30 year, I tend to see the decline of real problem solving, critical thinking and creativity in our schools. Our schools progressively treat children like a commodity, by placing emphasis on metrics rather than problem solving and critical thinking. As a result, our citizens are less prepared to adapt to the accelerated and changing conditions.
David's claims," Our education system is based on the idea that we train individuals to be critical thinkers". This may be the case for my children who receive an excellent education in a public school, in advanced classes and on the 'Constitution Team'. But for the most part, lower middle class schools are starved of resources (60% when compared with 1990), ineffectual in areas of application and problem solving, and coerced to teach to a test.
Education provides just another example of inequity.
"The epistemological foundation of our system" has always been in flux. Once you learn Plato's late dialogues were between him and Aristotle, it's clear there has always been a dispute about whether there are absolute truths. Marx advanced the theory of hegemony long before Foucault, but perhaps Mill understood better than most that the truth is, "many-sided." Some things, though, are indisputable except by zealots and madmen. Was there a holocaust? To deny such a thing puts one over the precipice of sanity and into the abyss of madness. And if, "Our whole education system is based on the idea that we train individuals to be critical thinkers," then we've failed. Evidence resides in the White House.
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David, the reason you are confused is because, for the most part, you think logically, while a large percentage of people in this country do not. Many people, on both the left and the right, have allowed politicians and the news media to do their thinking for them. And apparently, the more radical the thinking, the better. Constantly reinforcing the us versus them mentality by using race, gender, sexual orientation, and so on gets you re-elected and sells news papers.
The really sad part is, this divisiveness goes against the self interests of most people. Surveys show that, when you break down issues individually, and ask people not only how the feel about that issue but how they actually behave, there is much more common ground than is portrayed by the politicians and the media. In other words, most of this 'point of view-ism' is artificial.
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Two points to make: first, Mr. Brooks’ arguments and suppositions are way too complex. Are we shaped by our groups, by the people around us? We don’t need to speculate at all about that. The simple, but unarguable, reality of various religions that dominate in different geographic areas of the world should demonstrate to anyone that groupthink gives most Mideast residents a different belief system than Europeans—or Americans. Different enough to foster wars going back millennia.
Second point: David, you don’t need to tell us you’re speaking as a white male...
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David: Define “African-American”
I learn from reading 100s of columns and 1000s of comments that Americans cannot think or write about human difference without employing USCB race terminology even though they can neither define “race” nor “African-American”.
You ask:
"Under what circumstances should we resist collective identity and insist on the primacy of individual discretion, and our common humanity?"
I answer that I resist being put into the collective identity box that the USCB and American medicine put me in (1932 birth certificate – color = white). Every day in the Times I see people being referred to as black in one sentence and in the next as African-American, two USCB terms for a “race”.
First we are put into race boxes and then are seen by all too many as belonging to a genetically unique group and by others – see Nicholas Kristof (Whites Just Don’t Get It) and George Yancy (Dear White America) - as being programmed by skin color to be racist.
I refuse to be assigned a collective identity and I insist on the primacy of our common humanity. My intellectual heroine, Professor Dorothy Roberts, speaks for me:
“Will Americans continue to believe the myth that human beings are naturally divided into races…? Or will they affirm our shared humanity by working to end the social injustices preserved by the political system of race?” (p. 212-Fatal Invention)
Only-NeverInSweden.blogspot.com
I hate to break it to all you so wrapped up in “identity politics” and “political correctness”, but race, gender, age, etc. are completely irrelevant to the value of an opinion or viewpoint.
Facts exist, and rational analysis of facts to reach a valid conclusion is not rocket science; however, taking the race, gender and age of the speaker into consideration is a silly, self-deluding exercise.
“Facts is facts” is true whether or not the speaker is white, black, or rainbow colored; or male, female, or any combination there of.
It’s only in touchy-feely La-La Land that these factors are taken into consideration, and then usually to avoid addressing unpleasant truths.
I suggest your argument is overly simplistic - "facts is facts" is valid for observable, measurable, repeatable phenomena - in these cases I agree, social identity is not a factor. The truth of an individual's (or groups's) experience in the world, however, is in a different domain - I suggest that ignoring race, gender, socio-economic status, religion, and other social factors in understanding this kind of truth is, in your words, a way to "avoid addressing unpleasant truths". Policy decisions are rarely based solely in reason or empirical fact - they involve the interpretation of those facts through the lens of abstract principles and lived experience in the world. The world is not binary (fact or not fact) - the world is complex, nuanced, and its interpretation is influenced by the experience of the interpreter. Weaponizing differences in experience is wrong - acknowledging and valuing them in policy considerations is essential to the health and freedom of a diverse nation. Sure, it was easier when policy came mostly through the experiential lens of white men - but think how many other Americans were marginalized. It is harder now but moves us closer to the ideal that all persons are created equal and are endowed with the right of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Weak argument, David.
You assume that groups are homogenious, all groups predictably hate the other, and then you proclaim that deliberation and critical thinking are dead. Oh, the vapors are getting to you. Be honest: Don't you know 10 or 100 republicans who all hold slightly different ideas about a variety of issues including how they feel about democrats? Stop declaring that facts are dead-- those of us who work every day with little facts like disease, poverty, literacy, air quality, education really have no time to stop and fan ourselves. We have to get along and work together because we have actual work to do. We happen to live next door to neighbors we like or share an office with people we like who have views different then others have and life experiences that are different. Every day my eyes are opened to things and experiences I never understood before. Be honest David-- have you ever imagined what the Me Too Movement has taught every one of us, what the March for Our Lives movement has accomplished in such a short time?
Spare me with "The epistemological foundation of our system is in surprisingly radical flux." A foundation cannot be in flux-- unless your foundation is quicksand. The epistemological foundation of America is that we are better with the full participation of all-- and the sooner the better to achieve that-- but the foundation itself does not change. It is a real rock, of human deceny, all humans--not just those in your 1950's white vision.
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Yes Mr. Brooks, you always speak as a white male, just remember that others can speak for themselves. Thanks.
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David, the reason we love you is that you are an independent critical thinker. And so are Krugman and Douthat, from their respective corners. That is why "papers" like the NYT will continue to matter, and will in the end prevail.
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When someone says they are "Speaking as a ..." they are seeking immunity from criticism. There is a lot of truth in Nietzsche's claims re: perspectivism but not all speak from the stereotypical point-of-view of one of their group, it is common, but not necessary, for one to do so. One should not seek to do so. Moreover a single individual may themselves speak from knowledge of multiple perspectives - we are capable of it - that's something Nietzsche didn't think about. Let's refrain from blaming his human finitude and fallibility shall we? Identity politics is poison. There is no substitute for hard-graft reading widely and thinking carefully and submitting to free debate - regardless of the identity of you, those you read or those you debate. "I am a ...., so...." should never be acceptable as a form of argument.
The educational system and our culture have failed at producing individual critical thinkers. When anonymous Facebook trolls can influence an election, you know we've failed . . .
David your alleged confusion is easily explained. The eras you hark back to were all eras of white supremacy, just as every person you mention was white. Now that white supremacy is not taken for granted, now that black people have thoughts and names that can be cited and quoted— tho you do not—it must indeed be disconcerting and confusing for you. For others of us, it’s heady and refreshing: as Dubois or Hurston or Marshall would have told you, if only you read them. Your education, as for most white Americans is woefully inadequate and incomplete.
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Great piece.
"If you go back to the intellectuals of the 1950s, you get the impression that they thought individuals could very much determine their own beliefs. ... Busy fighting communism and fascism, people back then emphasized individual reason and were deeply allergic to groupthink."
That was not my impression. The anti-Communist mindset was groupthink on steroids. It gave us HUAC and a rigged society and movement conservatism. There has never been a more clearly defined mindset and collective identity than movement conservatism.
Perhaps you ought to step back and think whether you should preface your statement with "Speaking as a Movement Conservative ... " rather than "Speaking as a White Male ... "
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I’ve looked far and wide and I can’t find anyone who actually thinks that your social identity determines your opinions in any kind of straightforward or totalizing way. It’s another Brooksian straw man, based in half-understood social theory, like a lot of what he puts out these days.
Mr. Brooks, as a 72 year old white woman please let me tell you what I think. It's past time for you to put aside your personal angst over how our opinions are formed.
It is now time for you to confront your opinions head on. You're a Republican. It's time for you to come clean on what you REALLY think about what is going on in our country. What can I say? Even Joe Scarborough has had the courage to address what is going on in the White House. Now it's your turn.
David, what you say we lost, and you know seem to being seeking, was deliberately stolen by the conservatives of our country for political expediency.
I point to the Newt Gingrichs and Tom Delays, Fox News, and the Rush Rooms where white males gathered to hear mongering sold as political ideas.
Before you dismiss me as, or awesome me to be, a reactionary liberal, I want to make clear that am a fifty five year old white male who began my political awakening reading (and enjoying) George Will and William F. Buckley. But their intellectual and well thought arguments,and I dare say your's as well, has been betrayed by your own political party who found it easier to dehumanize certain people and make people afraid. They did not do this to further ideas, but to have power.
Truth still matters, no matter what "group identify" it comes from.
This entry is tired and irrelevant. Conservatives have urged this complaint ever since blackness was discovered on the Pettus Bridge.
St. Augustine was from Hippo, in modern Algeria. The population there was of Berber and Punic descent.
To me it would be better to consider the counterpart of your conundrum...
I cannot imagine how confusing it must really be to be black in this country. Least first recognize that race does not really exist - it is purely a cultural creation. It is like saying that blonde and brunette people are "different races". When they check the DNA they find no difference apart from the skin color itself. It is a mistake that was allowed to continue because it suited the people who had money and guns and power. This country, this world, makes people white and black. To illustrate the feebleness of these "ideas": Americans used to draw clear lines within "white people" too (Irish vs Jews vs anglo etc). And yet, this giant disgusting mistake shapes the reality of their lives. It is the reason why a young peaceful black man was shot 20 times in his grandmothers backyard the other night. A black American has no other country, yet this country will not truly embrace her either. No matter how many wars she fights, or jobs she works, or people she loves, or hurdles she crosses. Yet this is her home and where her family are buried. I truly cannot fathom it.
"I'm a columnist and I'm supposed to come to a conclusion, but I'm confused."
Well, at least some things haven't changed, Mr Brooks.
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As a white male liberal(ha ha) let me state this as simply as possible: It is wrong to see people as members of a race or gender or group for what we all agree are bad purposes -slavery,patriarchy,white supremacy,etc. It is just as wrong when used for what some think are good purposes - preferences,affirmative action,etc. It is wrong because it is wrong. If we cannot use our brains to find a larger truth in our common humanity then we are doomed,no better than animals in the jungle.
"And there are other times when collective thinking seems positively corrupting. Why are people’s views of global warming, genetically modified foods and other scientific issues strongly determined by political label? That seems ridiculous."
Equally ridiculous, but more insidious, is how our Supreme Court justices...on *both* sides...seem so often to arrive at their conclusions based on their politics not on the law. You take a case that is ostensibly about some arcane technical interpretation of legal language, but that has implications about labor or race or religion, and all the justices reliably fall in line. Disgusting.