Mr. Brooks, in order for me to take your views on this issue seriously, I'll need for you to renounce your allegiance to the Republican party. Full stop. Now 40+ years on from Reagan, we've lived through the consequences of ruinous GOP fiscal policy, which is squarely at the root of all the things causing Americans like the ones you're describing here to behave so destructively. You support a party whose stated goals are easily summarized: help the rich get richer, and gut the social safety net on which the multitudes depend. The GOP stands very literally for nothing more than those two principles. So please do readers like me a favor and renounce the treasonous scoundrels once and for all. They don't deserve your endless accommodations.
375
It is not government’s duty to impose changes in the natural rules of capitalism so that those who cannot or will not compete might not suffer failure.
2
@From Where I Sit And yet, America's system of government has evolved (or devolved) — and both sides of the aisle are at fault, but the right more so, in my opinion — into a constant and consistent handmaiden of corporate greed, through the legislatively, executively (and now judicially) supported tenets of competition-killing corporate welfare. They don't want real competition. The free market you seem to espouse does not exist. The powers that be have indeed changed the "natural" rules of capitalism, not by duty, but by complete moral failure.
31
@Sarah
Your position is essentially that David should agree with your position on politics or you will throw all of his ideas out. This is a ridiculous position.
Your other view is that the GOP and it's policies are the principal thing to blame for the current state of affairs, which are in fact caused by a whole range of things. Some people (those with the correct view)
would say that a big part of this is that liberals "killed" religion to make room for a more individualized notion of the spiritual world, and yet there was no new institution to take the place of the church that would bring people together and instill moral norms within society.
9
Brooksie, you've done it again. You've written a faux-thoughtful article whose gaps in reasoning you could drive a truck through. First, what about yourself? You've divorced and married a woman old enough to be your daughter. Why are you detached from the mother of your children? And why do you persist in this side-job of writing the occasional opinion piece? And as others have said, you seem blissfully ignorant of the consequences of Republican economic policy, which has both men & women scrambling hopelessly for something like regular employment. Employers don't even want committed workers any more! I cannot believe anyone with even a slight grasp on reality would take this piece of writing seriously--it is either disingenuous or delusional.
61
Brooksy, what on earth does you know about the working class? Have you ever actually worked a day in your life?
16
Wow, it has been like this in black communities since, um...since...um...oh yeah! Since 1865. Now that it is happening to whites, take note! It really wasn't inferior culture and DNA after all! Its like the economic environment or something. Oh, this is deep, eh?
43
So have you fully revoked your membership in the strong, manly, Republic Party yet?
9
More thinly veiled racism from David Brooks. "Why can't black men be more like we wealthy, privileged white men?" Give me a break. He has three columns and all the others are variations on the three. This is the Daniel Patrick Moynihan special. Version 4,000. Time for a change, NYT!
14
Mr. Brooks - when you realize that the culture is conditioned and created by the economic system, you'll be a Marxist!
10
Whoever makes these decisions at the New York Times, can you offer an Op-Ed column to a more diverse group of people: more women, people of color, those with disabilities and those with working-class roots? I get it that you think you're being diverse in offering Mr. Brooks a platform because he is a well known "conservative." But really his opinion often sounds the same and is getting tedious and predictable. I'm not saying you shouldn't employ him at all. But maybe a few times a year instead of every week? Surely there are other "conservatives" you could employ>
24
I'd say a lot of the detachment is a result of social media, the internet and 24/7 TV. Back in those glory days of community and "god" the TV went off at a certain hour and we didn't have "phones" glued to our palms. The disconnect has been slowly, consistently building, along with abusive unregulated/unfettered capitalism which has stripped away the moral compact of unions/ guaranteed wages, pensions etc. And as far as religion and "god", most organized religions have revealed themselves to be moral shams (look at all those evangelicals who support Trump, really?!, and the abuses that have long been covered up in the Catholic Church, and the rejection of homosexuality, gender fluidity and the gross desire to control a woman's womb). Life is hard. Relationships can often disappoint and hurt. It's almost easier to disconnect these days, especially living in a country who's ongoing biggest mantra is $$$. And that it will bring you ongoing happiness. (just look at Trump and his cronies, it's not true) Republican's have steered the overt propaganda messaging that if you are not rich, you are worthless and it's your fault, and it's every man/woman for themselves. But ultimately I think if Americans had less access to constant distraction that enables one to live in a bubble of entertainment, information and "social" contact you'd see people connecting at a deeper level once again, and also able to better to inform themselves, and discern, what truly is worthwhile.
13
Mark Regnerus described this transformation quite well in his recent book "Cheap Sex: The Transformation of Men, Marriage, and Monogamy"
2
If any male is “tenuously attached”, it must be you-know-who: The powerful guy with no principle other than self-assertive interest, and with two ex-wives and a pretty much detached third,
He also claims to love golf, but has no attachment to the rules and norms of the game—or to the rules and norms of anything else.
25
Typically, relationships are more accurately described through perspective. Although flippant, the example of "changing churches like girlfriends" was one perspective from a Brooks-coined "haphazard self".
The detriments of participating in the gig economy are indisputable. Next stop - homelessness! The stakes are already high! The gigee is frustrated, if not angry. Now, the peanut gallery is ready to assign him -- a curative ethos.
If fully assimilated men/women, indeed, is a worthwhile asset, then society bears the burden TO MAINTAIN THE TRANSFORMATIVE ETHOS (that it purports to value). I can agree with Mr Brooks that success and sustainability would go hand-in-hand.
2
Or maybe, there is a new paradigm coming and for women to have power men have to lose some. http://www.hannarosin.com/the-end-of-men
1
Careful there, Dave. Social media, tabloid journalism, fear-based cults, and political tribalism have taught us that if there is a way for twisted people to take advantage of a system they’ll do it. Better put some safeguards in your organizations. Because when the sharpers, cutthroat politicians, foreign adversaries, and perverts see a way in...they’re comin’ at ya.
1
"BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!"
-- David Brooks beating the same old drum until it
breaks.
11
David, it's ok to just call up The Times when a piece is due and say "I got nothin'."
26
What a condescending, clueless column. “That has created the culture of the side hustle. The men feel that they have to have three or four occupations, and they bounce around among them so they can stay employed full time.”
Oh really? These men don’t “feel” they need three or four jobs, they HAVE to have three or four jobs because they need to make ends meet, a concept with which I am sure Mr. Brooks and his ilk have an extremely tenuous grasp. They epitomize what 40 years of the relentless Republican assault on the middle class and the poor has done to this country, economically, socially, and culturally an assault in which you, Mr. Brooks, have served as one of the GOP’s most fervent intellectual and political proponents and apologists. And your obvious desire to avoid delving into the disaster that Trump and YOUR Republican Party are inflicting on the nation leaves you sputtering all this sociological babble and gobblygook, which certainly wasn’t the case when you were excoriating Barack Obama and demonizing the Democratic Party as if it were the living embodiment of Satan.
No matter how you may renounce Donald Trump, Mr. Brooks, he remains YOUR president, the logical outcome of the racism, bigotry, homophobia, xenophobia, corruption and misogyny of YOUR Republican Party. And all of your clever sociological insights will never alter that sad fact.
30
David, such fantasies.
Surveys and faux-psychology will yield only delusions of a time that never was.
David, it is the attack on Truth, that causes fractions, tribalism, and resentment.
Only one party has embraced lying, character assassination, slander, greed, distortion, deliberate mis-information, and fraud; that is the party of Nixon.
It was 85 degrees F on the Arctic Coast last weekend. Global warming has been detected, and verified for over 30 years.
Yet your team, has deliberately pretended it was a non-issue. Lied.
Trump has met secretly with putin on five separate occasions. Why? What plausible explanation could you rationalize to explain his behavior, other than he is not representing the best interest of our Country.
And you love to involve God. But God's team doesn't use slander, anger, resentment, and lies.
It is way past time for you David, to admit to yourself, that you have been lying to yourself for years.
Time to start from scratch David, volunteer time.
9
"A society is healthy when its culture counterbalances its economics."
This statement, intended as a self-evident truth, is really a sly attempt to justify Mr. Brooks' beloved American style capitalism and shift blame.
The economic hardship faced by large swaths of American men (and women) is caused by the capitalism run amok that Brooks is ideologically obliged to defend. He tries to do so with the above quote, but isn't it an easier sell to support the opposite contention, that a society is healthy when its culture is in harmony with its economics?
Brooks, in essence, is pushing the 2019 version of blaming social ills on "the damned hippies." Sorry David, but it just isn't convincing. American men cannot find and keep stable, good paying jobs. Why? Because your precious American capitalism's voracious, "maximize this quarter's profit no matter what" mindset is antithetical to those jobs. You contend that a moral failure is the root of the quoted study's findings. I contend that you are, consciously or otherwise, diverting attention from the real culprit.
13
"A society is healthy when its culture counterbalances its economics. That is to say, when you have a capitalist economic system that emphasizes competition, dynamism and individual self-interest, you need a culture that celebrates cooperation, stability and committed relationships."
Et voila, you recapitulate the cornerstone of capitalist ideology in your opening two sentences.
I really do appreciate you, and we agree on a great deal. However, and I can only imagine you get tired of having this pointed out to you, bifurcating economy and culture the way you do is a huge conceptual error. It's also a descriptive error. That is, you don't describe reality accurately when you continue to insist on this dichotomy of economy and culture.
Capitalism is a social system that saturates both.
You resist this, I think, because you think it reduces everything to economism, either of a brute utilitarian or vulgar Marxist variety. But, insisting on the symbiosis of culture and economy does not need to commit one to reducing all human action to either utliity maximization *or* material need satisfaction based upon a system of false consciousness.
But then you write:
"Their private lives are as loosely attached as their economic lives."
And detail how precarious their existence is.
And you want to create a new culture out of that?
What Republicans do you have in mind to support that economic change? What bankers?
Your data should lead you to reconstruct your opening frame.
8
David, we may not always agree, but I applaud your continued efforts to write about the important underlying issues that nobody else seems to care about. This is definitely food for thought. Thank you.
2
The comments here are instructive. Anybody with the experience of actually being In the working class, either growing up in it or having a blue-collar job, finds Mr. Brooks’ view out of touch with reality in his understanding of the lives of ordinary people. Shocking. As for the study Mr. Brooks cites, forgive me for saying it sounds utterly inept and morally ugly. It was done a lot better a long time ago in “The Hidden Injuries of Class,“ by Sennett and Cobb (Knopf, 1972, and Norton, 1993). Writing five decades ago the authors told us in illuminating detail why working-class men and women often seemed “detached.“ The primary reason is that society constantly told them they were personally responsible for not being rich. The authors of the study cited by Mr. Brooks are, reprehensibly, sending a not dissimilar message. More broadly, the same message is being sent to the entire society by an oligarchy that has convinced everybody that only its members are entitled to the fruits of our economy. That’s been the Republican Party’s position since at least Ronald Reagan, and consequently has also been the implicit position of Mr. Brooks. Maybe one of these days he’ll own up to it. I won’t hold my breath.
17
@ADN
Excellent, thank you.
5
The autonomous and decoupled from entangling relationships is as perfect expression of the ideal system of laissez faire business free of government interference conservatives have embraced since Milton Friedman charmed them into believing that altruism and taxes were socially destructive and selfishness was the glue that binds societies. The clear conflict between selfishness and social interests, known world wide for all of written history dismissed without any justification. Selfish interests unless truly the product of enlightened self interest is a zero sum game. They do not produce the win win outcomes that social harmony requires.
Trump is uprooting mutual trust in this country and these haphazard working class men are as well. Countries often rot from the head down. The selfish credo of conservative Americans have been destroying the bonds between our citizens since Reagan cloaked reactionary anti-democratic ideas as true freedom and the path to universal prosperity by representing them in the language of FDR.
8
This op-ed piece is based on a fallacy. Yes, many (if not most) working and lower class men do not have middle class expectations or points of view. However, nothing in the piece, or apparently in the underlying book, indicates that anyone "detached" from middle class values (i.e., had a connection to them, and then lost it). What Brooks is responding to is the revelation, to him, that middle class values do not have the power among the working classes that Brooks believes they had in some bygone era. However, that is nothing other than a sheltered intellectual discovering the truth about what working people believe. There may be a place for a new type of community organization, like the Weavers, but the people of each community should decide what values it promotes.
8
Not just capitalism, and certainly not just men. Our technology enables us all to be ‘friends’ in a detached way, even when sitting across from another person. Live in suburbia, as far from each other as possible, for ‘space’. Care, but don’t expect or ask anything, especially if it’s too emotional.
It seems to be that detachment from church is more a mattee of many traditional - ie conservative - religions no longer applicable in modern times. Otherwise it is quite possible to be spiritual and lead a good life without hewing to outdated ‘norms’.
Most of all, as someone who has lived in other cultures, detachment/autonomy is one of the fundamental attributes of the American psyche, if I can generalize. Hence myths of self-made people, self-sufficiency, refusal to pay taxes or be forced to contribute to the common good, safet nets etc... (voluntary donations are different - they are your choice). In other words, socialism (or worse) is a dirty word.
6
To all boomers who have little empathy for those on the bottom because they mostly voted for Trump I can only laugh at the sad state of affairs they have created. Bush, Gore, Clintons, Obama, Trump. Wow. Now that’s a wrecking crew. And they loved Reagan as well.
1
But God forbid we should pay them more.
9
Mr. Brooks can't get himself to do what you advise him to do: renounce his allegiance to the Republican party, or at least to the current day version of it. He inately feels the need to do it, but can't get himself to say mea culpa for all his prior sermons. Blood is thicker than water.
3
David Brooks wants to have it both ways, as he makes clear in his first graph he desires a "capitalist economic system" to be balanced by "a culture that celebrates cooperation." Sorry, Mr. Brooks, but it is a fantasy to think that a culture of cooperation will save capitalism. It may, however, help to destroy it, which could only help the men and families you pretend to care about. You want to get real in helping? Renouncing your allegiance to the GOP would be a good start.
5
I'm really grateful for these insights from David Brooks on the lives of working class men. He brings a special ability to see beneath the surface and diagnose truths most of us can't see or don't want to see.
I read the study Mr. Brooks contorts to extol the virtues of the weaver initiative. It’s an odd citation since the authors admit to many shortcomings in study design and reach no conclusions other than more study needed.
Small and self-selected urban sample group; no control group; in-depth (90 minute) conversations!; anecdotal use of participants’ history (abuse, drug use, poor decisions, etc.)... These are hardly insignificant flaws.
The first author is quoted as suggesting that one solution would be to increase wages for in home health aides and another to promote the entrepreneurial aspirations of white men!
I won’t be using this study to corroborate my lifelong efforts to promote community cohesiveness. Seems that the weavers should be more discriminating in where they look for justification of their purpose rather than finding studies that create dissension (as seen in the comments) rather than unity, i.e, weaving.
“[Professor Edin]...said the policy solutions to this have so far focussed mainly on “going back to the past” through renewed calls for greater emphasis on unions, tariffs and assembly jobs. But she warned that the “old days were not the good days” and there was no going back.
Professor Edin said there was a need for more creative policy ideas and solutions, such as making jobs in home aid and care work better paid and also tapping into the expressive, entrepreneurial spirit evident in the “side bets” or side jobs of white working class men.”
7
@Agent 99
Citation for quote above:
https://www.lifecoursecentre.org.au/news-and-media/centre-news/the-tenuous-attachments-of-working-class-men/
1
@Agent 99
I neglected to say that I wholeheartedly support increase wages for home health aides. Considering most are women I don’t see how this positively impacts the haphazard male.
5
According to David Brooks, its a shame that our modern culture of autonomy, in which men are actually expected to act as fathers instead of self-gratifying career machines who are catered to full-time by their wives, "has replaced the older working-class ethos, based on self-discipline, the dignity of manual labor and being a good provider."
My grandfather was one of those cherished blue collar workers - on the line at Ford - back in the good ol' days beloved by David Brooks. He was a nasty drunk who didn't have two minutes to spare for his kids. And he wasn't an anomaly - he was the norm. He and his pals were in the bar every night spending "their" money and lord they would have laughed themselves sick at the idea that they should be anywhere else. (At home, helping with the dishes? Puh-lease.) My grandad eventually walked away from his family and wasn't much concerned with "providing for them" after that, BTW. Not that he was great at it to start with. My grandmother raised the family on her own - just like lots of women do now.
Blue collar men haven't changed. Our standards have just gotten better. And we have urban culture - and women's rightful demands for autonomy - to thank for it.
13
Here's something to think about. In 1980 my union grocery store job paid me $11.87 hrly. On Sundays my rate doubled to $23.74 hrly.
While checking out at my local chain store I asked the cashier what the pay was. Sadly, it was below my 1980 wage. On Sunday's the cashier gets an extra dollar! In 2019! This is a main cause of the psychological and financial depression most Americans feel. To rub salt in the wound of my cashier I didn't tell her we had full health coverage as well. Even the part-timers with $2 co-pays. That was the America in which I grew up.
15
Growing up through the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s and moving with my family around the country, we found “ woven” communities in the East, Midwest and South. Republican or Democrat, rich, middle class or poor everyone attended the same schools, houses of worship, community events and lived peacefully.
My parents helped others, others helped us. We were a community. We were also citizens of the United States of America.
Then Reagan came along and everything changed. Everyone for him/herself. Bigger is better. Materialism. Greed. The beginning of income inequality. Private schools. Gated communities. The person with the most toys wins. Me-Me-Me.
The loss of community. Fewer people knowing their neighbors. Job loss, poor public education, stagnant standard of living. Tax cuts.
Weaving lost.
I hope, Mr. Brooks, that you recognize how communities have become unwoven ( ie broken ) by the GOP’s insistence on less government, tax costs, a diminished support system, and millions of diminished “ individuals” with few places to turn.
Good luck in attempting to put Humpty back together again.
10
@It's About Time. How on earth did you decide that things changed with Reagan? Are you trying to say people need more government handouts?
The assembly line jobs so idealized by conservatives and envied by working class men were mind-numbing and soul-deadening. Their dignity stemmed from the fact that they paid so well that a breadwinner could afford a house, a car and a TV. They paid well because they were unionized. The communities centered around these jobs did not die because of the need for personal autonomy; they died because Reagan began a war against these unions which continues today.
17
@Nana2roaw Oh stop with such nonsense. Please tell us which conservative “idealizes assembly line jobs”. I think you mean Sleepy Creepy Joe.
It's not the men, struggling with three bad jobs who need to change. It's capitalism that needs to change. Living wages or guaranteed minimum incomes and healthcare for all!
18
No. Just no to this premise:
"A society is healthy when its culture counterbalances its economics. That is to say, when you have a capitalist economic system that emphasizes competition, dynamism and individual self-interest, you need a culture that celebrates cooperation, stability and committed relationships."
Instead, we need an *economic system* 'that celebrates cooperation, stability and committed relationships' and a social system that does the same. Otherwise it's just stress and conflict ahead of us forever.
12
David,
When are you going to admit that you're no longer a Republican? Just do it already. Register as a Democrat; that's the party that clearly aligns with the values you hold dear. Your continued support for the GOP absolutely baffles me.
6
This strikes me as the reaction of a person who didn’t bother to get the facts and actually read the piece before commenting. Brooks clearly espouses a conservative take on economics and culture in this essay and in many others, emphasizing as he does the importance of free market economics, community ties, and religious devotion. Your characterization of his writing as left-leaning or liberal is therefore baffling to me.
1
I'm waiting for him to 'fess up and admit he voted for Trump.
Meanwhile, Julie, let's talk about your support for this "Grand Old Party." Because that's what those letters stand for.
Defragment. Just call them by their name, not their brand.
1
Interesting but the sample was too small. Contrary to what many of your readers seem to be advocating I don't think you should renounce your membership in the Republican party. I hope you stay and help it recover from the terrible damage done by the Trumpians. We need a two party system and we need a capitalism that works for everyone not what we have now. Blame the big business schools who have been teaching that nothing matters but the bottom line. That doctrine has given rise to CEO's making 300 times what the hourly guy makes and companies paying zero income tax. Keep on keepin on David.
1
David Brooks writing about the dignity of manual labor!
3
I will stipulate that there is a problem. But nobody has the first clue as to how to solve it, address it, or even properly think about it. There is no evidence that this "Weavers" movement does anything except keep self-appointed do-gooders busy and off the streets. In his own deep but unacknowledged confusion, Brooks is being just as vague as leftist community activists are when they cry "we As A Community need to pull together, renounce capitalism, and foster a society which is healthy for all peoples!". How stirring. How meaningless.
6
Didn't some now discredited philosopher say something about religion being the opiate of the masses?
1
"A shift in what kind of men we admire and what sort we disdain"
I'm sure I will get flak for this but Tupac and Biggie and Kanye are not positive role models.
We are a long way from the peace,love and understanding of the sixties and seventies. Calling women all sorts of mysogenistic names is wrong. And excusing this type of stuff because they are from the streets or " keeping it real" only makes it worse.
8
Contradiction is reality.
No wonder mental illness, drug addiction, lying, cheating, stealing and
social ills ad infinitum are real life.
If I am distorting--I abhor extremism--then the negatvess are to emphasize.
if humankind is as alienated as often seems to at least me, then tragedy
is normal!
Does not capitalism often seem immoral in ordinary commerce?
My blunt unhedged response is yes it frequently feels so.
Unhappy however, is hellacious Venezuelan socialism.
And co-operation and compromise are necessities no matter the officious
"idiot-ology."
1
It is easy to slip into thinking "if only everyone thought and felt like me" when one has lived a charmed life. There are as many scoundrels, David, among the rich, as among the poor. Where is your sanctimony for them? I suppose some might diagnose your condition as late-onset noblesse oblige but, to me, you sometimes are just clueless.
9
@Didier
"Late onset noblesse oblige" nails it!
3
I have been thinking about this topic, in the following way. As a 65 year old, I was raised within a value system that would easily be communicated as what John Kennedy emphasized, " What can you do for your Country " , I sense that the shift from Family and Country to what can I get for myself, has had a profound and destructive influence on everything from the destruction of the family unit, to the emergence of a ruling class whose focus is nothing more that accumulating wealth at any cost.
I commend Mr Brooks for bringing this perspective, and hope and pray for the day, when we can return to our original values.
3
With Trump you ain't seen nothing yet, Mr. Brooks. Let's try weaving together the men in this country once it becomes a full fledged third world nation, after China reconfigures her economic mechanisms to eliminate us completely, after tax cuts for billionaires and lack of health care and elimination of social safety nets finally do us in. By then I will be happy if these listless and wandering men don't kill me. Republican thinking is rosy as heck, but one thing for sure, it is also deadly as sin. Cancel your weaving program, sir. Republicans can't expect us to smile while insisting we die too. Grow up.
3
Excuse me if I dismiss much of David Brooks' commentary. The man had a midlife crisis and now the rest of us have to listen and watch while he realizes that the US economy - and the policies that led to a concentration of wealth among a small number of mostly white families - has undermined communities, families, and individuals. Mr. Brooks, if you had taken off your conservative blinders for even a minute 20 years ago, you would have seen that this has been happening since Ronald Reagan. Your belated recognition that a focus on wealth concentration hurts EVERYONE who isn't a wealthy person is pathetic.
11
I thought Mr. Brooks left his wife of over twenty years for his assistant. How does that fit into this?
5
@Mercury S, hush, you. That would be the family values and commitment that Brooks is always claiming us poors and liberals lack. ;)
5
I want to take you seriously. I really do. But I can't help believing that the idyllic society you want to weave is just a rehash of the bad old days when women knew their place in the kitchen, gays knew their place in the closet, and blacks knew their place, period. Please devote some of your considerable intellectual firepower to describing how the benefits of personal autonomy, i.e., "all are created equal," can be maintained under whatever ruling class you are proposing.
5
I am really tired of Mr. Brooks blaming individual lack of religious faith or moral fiber for the systemic ills we’re currently experiencing. “Societies are healthy when culture counter-balances economics.” That’s absurd. Culture and religion historically have been a means to explain and preserve the economic organization and power relationships within a society. Why doesn’t Mr., Brooks explore the economic relationships that need counterbalancing? Men are detached from work because the Supreme Court decided that corporations are responsible to maximize value for shareholders exclusively. That decision severed the moral relationship between workers and the corporations they work for and freed corporations to make decisions based exclusively on the interests of the owners. To suggest that weekend workshops for “weavers” can heal the wound created by a society in which owners are free to accumulate all of the wealth created by workers is absurd. What would a “weaver” economy look like?
13
@Anita
Yes, but culture and religion have made great contributions to societies, too, when men had more on their mind than money. I think of my great grandfather, a noted surgeon, who made many contributions to the lives of others and as my girlfriend put it, when medicine was a noble profession.
1
What you have written here describes my male students of the last 10 years teaching at a community college, mostly minority students but some not. So what should come first, culture of economic support. I believe the economic support will generate the culture. After all why should a person change, how can a person change if the essential tools of change, what one gets from and learns form a job, is not there. It was obvious that most wanted into the system but the larger society and the culture of poverty from which they came makes that more difficult.
1
Ok a few thoughts:
1. Some good observations…particularly about their treatment of women.
2. Are there no LGBTQ people to speak to in these communities?
3. This all comes down to a lack of emotional education and/or a strong imprint of societal expectations.
I am the mother of teenagers. One of the most interesting things about being around young people is to hear their views on sexuality and gender. Let's just say that when it comes to all the norms we were taught, today's young people are noncompliant.
A lot of noise is being made about the "call me 'they'" or "I am non binary" blah blah blah. I think that in reacting to the more "shocking" aspects of this revolution, we are missing another subcomponent with the potential for huge societal change. I speak of the shedding of normative gender behaviors and the move towards more authentic emotional experiences.
In my children and their friends, I see dialogue that is much more elevated than the one I have with my friends. Not only are they accepting, but they speak of the currency and currents of power with a fluency that is astounding. They talk about power as a shift-shaper and they purposely shape and twist those currents to always find the most inclusive and flattened hierarchy that they can come up with. You can be what you want in their social group as long as you are authentic, truthful and inclusive.
So. That gives me hope. And Brooks, that should give you a different avenue to pursue. Young people…and LGBTQ.
9
What bothers me about Brooks's quest (one that begins before and extends beyond this column) for a shared fabric in our national identity, and, in this case, our economy, is precisely that he looks for it in work, family, church, marriage, and other institutions that effectively operate (or are operated as) wedges to pry people apart rather than unite them together.
4
@Paul
….and that he stubbornly but willfully ignores the power imbalances and renders LGBTQ as practically invisible.
4
"While I was never able to match the lyricism of her prose, or the sensitivity of her observations, I have certainly stolen many of her ideas and admired the gracious and morally rigorous way she lives her life. If there are any important points in this book, they probably came from Anne.”
I should trust you on character?
3
It should be obvious that part of the problem religion has (other than most of it being provably false), is that Evangelicals of all stripes and doubled down on the Prosperity Gospel whereby rich people are rich because they are somehow morally superior and poor people are poor because, well, isn't it obvious? All poor and economically stressed people need to do is pray and God will "bless them". I heard Joel Osteen recently speak on this ridiculous and damaging ideology. He told some story of a family who "prayed" themselves into prosperity. If I was middle or lower middle class and religious, I would find this ideology to be personally depressing.
4
As someone that is pretty much « anti-religion » I wonder if that is part of our modern problem.
These are men that have little interest in the religions they were raised in, but incapable of filling the void that religion can fill for others.
One need not be part of an organized religion to find meaning in life, but one needs to find some meaning to life.
Perhaps these are people that have stopped taking the placebo, but are not well, just the same.
Yet another opinion piece blaming the victim (this time working-class men) while completely ignoring the perpetrator (raw capitalism/corporations/income disparity/GOP policies / laws stacked against the worker in favor of the rich, powerful & corporations, etc.). Enough already. Yes, Brooks has once again identified an endemic group of problems while completely missing the causes. Typical.
5
Don't blame the poor for unfair pay practices.
Everyone used to benefit from rising national incomes. Not anymore....
Cumulative income growth 1946 to 1980 adjusted for inflation*:
Everyone: 95%
Bottom 50%: 102%
Top 1%: 47%
Cumulative income growth 1980 to 2014 adjusted for inflation*:
Everyone: 61%
Bottom 50%: 1%
Top 1%: 204%
What should we do? We could start by making two changes to the tax code:
1. Tax income from all sources at the same tax rates. A moral society should not charge lower tax rates on investment income than it does on labor income, but that's what we do. We tax dividends and capital gains at roughly 50% lower percentage rates than W-2 income. As a result, the richest Americans, who receive substantially all of the dividends and capital gains, pay lower tax rates than the middle class. Doesn't make sense (unless you are one of the richest Americans).
2. Dramatically increase the size and scope of earned income tax credits. This would allow everyone who works to have a living wage without distorting the labor markets. No one working 40 hours a week should be homeless in the richest country in history.
*Data source: Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman
8
I just read a little research paper where they concluded that if you start out as a barber, teacher, painter, mechanic, etc. and you stay with it, you usually are more successful in life financially. Changing jobs, seeking other things to do, following your dreams, depending on your own opinions, and listening to others like yourself, your financial outlook is not good. The working class men must come to the realization that when you walk with the wise, you become wise. Conversely, when you walk with fools, you become a fool. The bottom line is that parents must stress to their children, even if the parents do not have formal education that being disciplined is the right thing to do if you want to be successful in life. There is not one teacher, nurse, carpenter, lawyer, doctor or electrician I know that is not financially secure. They may not be millionaires but none of them are working class losers. Mind you, the successful working class people I know are the people who stick it out and are disciplined. And yes, these hard working people are a joy to be with. Unfortunately, the working class who walk with Trump become like him and don't realize they are fools just like the fools who followed Senator McCarthy in the fifties. Quite frankly Trump has given legitimacy to those undisciplined working class men. Your moaning diatribes coming from your buddies in the taverns and bowling alleys are accepted. Sorry for the stereotype of bowling alleys but not for the taverns.
3
Hmmm and you are from Florida. There might be some hope in your red state you are so reasonable.
"Cultural forces have also played a role, namely the emphasis on autonomy — being your own person, focusing on your own personal growth, shucking off any constraints."
You mean the conservative GOP, pull yourself up by your bootstraps thing. Us bloody liberals would prefer social safety nets to support people. Brooks wants more church for all.
3
Is David Brooks one of the enemy of the people Trump refers to so often? I hate to agree with Trump.
I don't see any benefit to religion, they are merely belief systems based on the nature of the adherent without any relevance to reality as god doesn't exist. While there may be a problem with haphazardry, religion is not an answer so I suggest that we stop using it as one. For example, if you're going to trumpet religion then you must accept any and all, including violent Christianities that promote white dominance and would have to argue that these Haphazards would be just as well off believing in White Christianity as they would in Buddhism. Let's get past religion already.
Mr. Brooks - didn't you also detach from the mother of your children to attach to a much younger research assistant? Perhaps it's not only working men that view the partnership relationship as a periphery one.
11
What have you seen about the role of the mother of Dad? Locally, it appears the apron ties keep Dad from developing ties with the mother of the child, and with considering education or job opportunities out of the area, although he will be allowed to move in with the girlfriends.
1
Mr. Brooks, are you aware of how close you are to the Vichy slogan of "Travail, Famille, Patrie" ("Work, Family, Fatherland")?
Furthermore, I'm curious as to how your dichotomy works here in a country like France where the economy is not as savagely capitalistic as the US economy. Is it here that the so-called "haphazard life" is necessary for the culture to counterbalance the economy?
2
@TRS80
I’ll take Vichy’s slogan over Marxist or Communist or Stalinist red fascist slogans any day.
No David,
We don't have a "culture that takes the disruptive and dehumanizing aspects of capitalism and makes them worse" instead of a balance of capitalist individualism and cultural cooperation. We have a capitalist system that has through consumption created a disruptive and dehumanizing culture.
4
If we want to build community, it might be a good idea to have government that has policy that works for all Americans.
At this point, we have “representatives” who really only serve the richest people in the country, and it’s crushing average people.
4
A society is healthy when its culture counterbalances its economics. That is to say, when you have a capitalist economic system that emphasizes competition, dynamism and individual self-interest, you need a culture that celebrates cooperation, stability and committed relationships.
When, in the history of the world, has this ever taken place?
2
Mr. Brooks presents a bizarre argument. He supports an economic system based on selfish competition, which requires balancing with something decent and cooperative. But why should we champion an economic system based on selfishness? Parents want their children to share their toys and not act selfishly. Yet Mr. Brooks wants adult economic relationships based on selfishness so long as we balance selfishness with some part-time cooperation and sharing.
This is madness and reeks of a lack of moral balance. One cannot exploit others from 9 to 5 and then seek to balance the selfishness with a bit of kindness and cooperation on the weekends and holidays.
What is needed is an economic system that is itself cooperative and requires no leisure-time balancing act. The path to heaven is not provided through the accumulation of wealth through exploitation of others, even when one has leisure time to be decent to others. Decency, Mr. Brooks, is not a part-time occupation to be endured only when one is finished with exploitation. This sort of attempted balance leads to a society that is mad.
Thinking that we can be morally healthy through some odd high-wire moral balancing act is doomed even with an illusory safety net. Conservatives often claim we were founded within a Christian tradition. We should heed the warning that a camel has more chance of passing through the eye of a needle than a society has in passing successfully through Mr. Brooks's circus balancing act.
7
"It’s to get more people to see that the autonomous life is not the best life. The enmeshed life is."
An ancient Ottoman myth disagrees with Mr. Brooks' statement above. The myth basically says that moths are in a dilemma at night. They can fly away from the light and be alone (alienation), or they can fly into the light and burn up (enmeshment). The trick in life is to find a balance between the two.
2
"God with no strings attached." Is that Trump's religious manifesto, too? Grace and faith are gifts. Where does that leave evangelicals?
Brooks is transparent.
If you have listened to this guy recently, especially over the last 2 years, you recognize that all of his advocacy, writing, speaking engagements, etc. have all centered on 1 singular overriding concept:
The highly idealized, whitewashed, and never-once-ever-in-history-accurate-or-true vision of the conservative "civil society."
Not just in the Paul Ryan way, blurting out the underlying lie, that the "civil society" should take the place of the social safety net, in the same way that ancient gilded age Americans talked about the role of philanthropy. Totally legit.
Brooks sees civil society acting as the foundation of everything in american culture.
Lets point out the obvious flaws :
1) if it ever had a chance of working, ever, in history, it would have.
It never has. Just because there are communities in rural america where people take care of their elderly neighbors, or urban areas where people raise foster kids (or similar) does not show the validity of this idea.
2) We must remember that for every idea, the implied point is that the ALTERNATIVES ARE WRONG.
The alternative being creating/funding organizations or, yes, government run bodies whose SOLE JOBS ARE to take care of the population.
In short, this is yet another example of Brooks, the desperate conservative apologist struggling to find a way to save the soul of the ideological movement he believes in.
its impossible Brooks. It never had a soul. From day 1. A lie from birth.
4
The sexual revolution, and the demise of strong moral norms across the board, has had a devastating effect on the less educated members of our society. No one really wants to think about this phenomenon and its causes, but my guess is that it's related to our abandonment of the well-defined behavioral expectations for work and family that helped average people self-regulate. Throwing money at it might help but certainly won't solve it.
6
I see no mention of women's attitudes toward men and expectations of relationships as having any influence on men's attitudes. That's a rather telling omission.
6
"...the autonomous life is not the best life. The enmeshed life is."
"...bind himself into a community."
Is Mr. Brooks advocating for hive society now?
What ever has happened to America's "strong, rugged individual" ethos? Surely Mr. Brooks is not implying that the great American Johns, Ford and Wayne, were wrong?
I have worked for 15 years in working class white, black and Latino areas. This article captures well the challenges facing working class men. It is the gun slinger vs. homesteader mentality. But there are some homesteaders left (weavers). These homesteaders are very loving and committed, but also very tough in a traditionally masculine way. I feel it is also important that society recognizes there are positive traditionally masculine models.
6
"The researchers emphasize that while economic forces have disrupted the men’s lives, they are insufficient to explain the detached mode of life that has become common. "
“I treat church just like I treat my girlfriends,” one man said. “I’ll stick around for a while and then I’ll go on to the next one.”
"Another said he believed in God, but he rejected the idea of “a God with strings telling us how to live. That didn’t work for me.”
"But they expressed no similar commitment to the women who had given birth to those children..."
So these men don't like others telling them what to do, have little commitment to their girlfriends. etc. and find themselves detached from society? One wonders if immaturity and entitlement have anything to do with their plight.
7
The fact is that some people, regardless of their gender, survive and even revel in a hyper competitive environment while others do not. Of those who do not, some are crushed by it. That’s just life. No one is entitled to any guarantees. The problem with liberal agendas is that they refuse to accept this fact. They wish to create a monstrous bureaucracy to level it all out. Perhaps they themselves are not up to competing and so wish to handicap all those who are. We aren’t all equal in ambition, talent, intelligence, pedigree, education, stamina, knowledge, personality, innate ability, wealth or motivation. Therefore, outcomes will vary greatly. For every Jeff Bezos there will be hundreds of thousands of homeless. For every Mike Bloomberg, tens of thousands may be malnourished and emaciated. That’s a natural outcome in a competitive environment. The ugly alternative is communism or any or the failed economic systems that eventually lead to it.
1
How do you suggest we deal with “hundreds of thousands of homeless,” and “emaciated”, in the absence of any kind of government intervention? Or in this scenario of social Darwinism, are you suggesting that those less fit humans be euthanized?
2
Working class people, they're so mysterious unlike you and I. They're mesmerizing to observe and write about them like animals in the zoo. Not to mention, the creation of a cottage industry of those who observe and pontificate about
the working class. Oh what is to be them and observe them but never to directly interview them or interact with them or live with them . . . in community.
11
Or...the biggest two-generational change that drives increased detachment on the social side is the disavowal of responsibility to employees from our corporations.
If you want these men to be more engaged, you have to put real skin in the game on the work front. Otherwise...I'd like to stick around honey, but I gotta make the donuts.
5
Very compelling observations but how is the author so sure that it is capitalism that has caused this detachment? It seems likely that capitalism has not changed since the 1950s or has ever changed, but we have changed. We are less anchored in our communities, less committed to our relationships, less hopeful and committed to non-material things and as a result of these choices, we are detached. Maybe capitalism accentuates a divide already occurring but that doesn't mean capitalism has caused it. Watch "The Lives of Others" and compare the problems of real socialism our detachment problems. Capitalism is still the best of bad options.
1
the 1950s was a long time ago and a lot has changed. economically, we have moved from a manufacturing and agriculture based economy to a service economy, and now, to a financial economy. each step on this path has made men who provide manual labor, even skilled manual labor, less important. in Ike's day, profits were made by making and selling things, so the people who were instrumental in production were key, which gave them some bargaining power. now, we have devolved into a vampire economy in which a business is bought piecemeal on the stock market, until a controlling shareholder, such as a hedge fund, maneuvers into a position where they can make better profits selling off anything of value and on insurance payouts (default swaps) when the company goes out of business than they could if it survived. when the objective is to buy a house to burn it down to collect insurance, who cares what color they paint the bathroom? on every street in America except Wall Street this plan is a crime.
3
The original of the lone wolf mentality, in my experience and opinion, often begins for men with over- enmeshment by a controlling, manipulative, fear filled mother who takes hostages instead of loving and letting go. Often the husband and father is gone or unavailable. Returning to enmeshment doesn't sound too appealing. Something with more closeness but mutual respect for boundaries feels better.
1
I think the problem might be about the fear of being unhappy.
it is about the fear of recognizing your own worthlessness leading to anger and depression.
Fine, Mr. Brooks. I'm more than willing to support your social fabric project, and encourage others to do so, even though I don't agree with all the elements you describe as leading to a "thick" communities. But you are in a position to affect the way economic policy decisions are made, and you have been an advocate for the political party that has demolished government support of the arts, sciences, public education and the social safety net for decades. How about you stand up and insist the GOP do something about our economy and culture? How about being a bright, shining model to others by supporting the candidates who support the best economic policies and the strongest cultural and educational platforms?
5
David Brooks, in keeping with his political ideology, attributes low male labor force participation mostly to the cultural climate. But it is well known that thousands if not millions of jobs have disappeared. So where are these "good jobs" that men are supposed to take? This "haphazard" behavior is clearly a response to economic conditions in the labor force. While it is true that cultural factors play a part- this is just an example of economics influencing culture- It is a mistake to blame it all on culture- but it is an "out" for those not willing to change the underlying economic conditions.
6
Dave, 3 observations: 1. I wish you'd elaborated on the urban-rural differences with respect to the detachment you discussed. I suspect that 'gig' opportunities are largely an urban/suburban phenomenon; 2. Not even an oblique glance at the glaring matter of income inequality and agglomeration of gainful opportunities in favor of the already privileged? 3. the anecdotes and sociological inferences suggest that these detached men have developed an aversion to 'social intervention' and public attention like subsidies that might due to the go-it-alone ethos that has hardened in their minds. How do we tackle that? Talking about "wage subsidies" is akin to 'thoughts and prayers.'
2
My guess is that the “culture” of the “whites” in the 107 man group versus the “blacks” would be the most telling aspect of the study
11
@Scott G Baum Jr Facts, Scott!
Yes, the black men are much more likely to be involved in community organizations aimed at ending police brutality and economic inequality. But then they get accused of “identity politics” by people like Brooks.
1
I believe the US is a victim of Hollywood. I know this sounds trite, but what I mean is that the image of progress that you are presented with is exactly that, an imagined reality.
Progress has, in America as elsewhere, been achieved by cooperation and combined effort toward a common goal. Sure, certain individuals may at times have played key roles, but no matter how eminent the guide, getting a caravan of Conestogas across the Great Plains means working together. Building a railway is the work of hundreds or thousands, not one man with a plan.
The image of the loner against society or, at least, beside it has a romantic attraction, but it is poisonous. It is as detrimental to participation in the common project as the Left's tendency to blame society for all ills.
I'm glad to have read this, though I'll need to mull it over for a bit. Mr. Brooks, you emphasize the term "autonomy" here, but I have been impressed by the frequent trading of "self-determination" between the young adults with whom I speak. Absolute freedom, in the form of a perceived ability to create and recreate the self, has been elevated to the level of a tenet of faith. The resulting value system, as lived by some, makes all kinds of constraints--ones that used to fall under traditional labels of "virtue," "responsibility" and "duty"--into evils. For the individuals of whom I speak, it seems that every belief system which predates them is oppression, because they didn't originate it. On a related note, I've heard some of these speak of sexual relationships entirely in the terms of their own pleasure and "personal journey." Their "partners" (the term doesn't fit) are really just other isolated subjectivities that crossed their paths for a moment. ("Their journeys are their own....") It's disorienting to me. Though in some ways I really believe the younger generations are helping us think of our fellow humans as true equals, all these equal individuals seem more isolated, and any claims one might try to make upon another's fidelity becomes an invasion of another's sovereign territory.
1
Robin Hood; Please return and save us from evil Prince John!
WE, THE Working Poor PEOPLE of America need your help !
We used to have a vibrant Middle Class.
I am a 1st born American, growing up in the 1950's to two immigrant parents from Europe.
They worked menial jobs in hopes of a better life for me.
I went to college, State University, and finally paid off my student loans.
I make an OK living at the expense of virtually no time off.
I pine for the quality of life my parents afforded me.
I can relate to those who must undertake multiple jobs.
Luckily, when I went to college in the early 70's, student loans were extremely cheap by today's standards.
Today's graduates carry the burden of huge debt before they get their 1st job.
Most people I know; Citizens, Green Card holders, and some illegals . . . ALL want to work hard and have a decent life.
Some time for themselves - their families and friends - and of course - a next egg for retirement.
Robin, if you're listening, the robber-barons (Trump & the GOP) are bleeding us dry while they give away the riches of our country we all used to share in to the wealthy elite.
The new Sheriff of Nottingham (aka W Barr) is working tirelessly to continue to crush us our rights.
Robin, we need fairly priced healthcare for all Americans.
We need medications we can actually afford.
Many of us are literally being taxed out of our homes.
Our Freedoms and Rights are disappearing -
Robin - - - are you there !
5
Subsidized wages? How about higher wages. The usual fatuous (I can’t think of a more euphemistic substitute for (”crap”) from a study cherry picked for it’s generalized conclusions.
5
David, I think what many are trying to say is maybe the changes need to come from the top. Clearly all of us have seen the abundance of generosity from men and women in times of need, from of all stripes. But sorry, when men aren’t humbled by catastrophe, it’s the upper crust who like to run things and they don’t need us —until they need us. This is probably our problem, your problem, not the guy’s problem who is just trying to get through life the best way he/she knows how.
1
Too complicated keep it simple. I like ice cream, I'm gonna buy ice cream. I don't have money for ice cream, I'm not gonna buy what I like. So what.
I want kids, I get kids. I want a job, I get a job. Nowadays I can't even say I want a wife, but she can still say she wants a husband, fine, then that's how I'll get her. There's too much making things a problem and it would all be easier if people stopped making things so hard to understand.
I like people who are decent. Simple. People who want to mess things up -- the worst are those who never stop asking questions. The answer is right there, seriously? Most people don't even know the answer so then they should stop asking questions, please.
I seen men and they are the same, it's the world around them that's changed and it isn't their fault. Leave them alone. Men are trying their best and everyone has to complain about them. What I do? I don't weave. I go to the store and buy a jacket. I want a shirt I buy it. Weaving is just another one of those far left liberal ideas which is why we should leave the weaving to China!
1
In most of Mr. Brooks’ pieces, there’s an idealization of the virtue of church-going.
I sense a bit of elitism here: Let the masses have their religious opiate, it’s good for them, even if we enlightened folk know that religious doctrine is pure pablum.
And if we the enlightened go to church, as I assume Mr. Brooks does, we understand that it’s a hypocritical exercise performed for the purpose of social cohesion.
I suggest that instead of church, Mr. Brooks should prescribe bowling leagues for the Great Unwashed that he presumes to care about.
Too harsh? Maybe not.
4
Yes. It's not uncommon for the religious to assert that when their opinion can be traced to religious beliefs then, that opinion trumps any other opinion. In these cases, a smug sense of superiority is clearly called for as far as they are concerned.
@Tom VanderMey Bowling Leagues? The Dude as the model of salvation? Too harsh? Maybe not.
“Our interviews strongly suggest that the autonomous generative self that many men described is also a haphazard self,” the authors write.
A rather subjective statement by the authors, wouldn't you say?!?! The exact opposite could also be true as in, "our interviews strongly suggest that the autonomous generative self that many men described is also capable of acting with high moral and ethical standards if so educated and supported by the culture they live in."
3
What about getting cheap goods from China? Will the Titans of Business and the Congress they fund weave into your thick and trusting blanket?
These very men will get a chance to go to battle with Mother Nature in the near future. Then, we'll all be one big community, but it may not help us.
1
Wage subsidies? How about breathing life back into unions.
7
I agree. A great idea, but as long as slave labor exists in Asia and Latin America, unions cannot compete. Simple economics.
1
I find the concept of the 'weaved life' brainless. What if you find yourself among people you detest? I mean your can tolerate them, treat them with mutual respect if they don't impinge on you too much. But a 'weaved life' with them is the last thing you want. That's one of the things I love about living in a large city - the assumed right to anonymity.
2
Right on, David Brooks. It's called biblical living where we believe a higher authority that trumps any selfish, introverted life, with a moral code that elevates families, marriage, and raising kids as the foundational element of society!
It's not a Republican or Democratic party idea that so many readers above argue. It's a basic set of moral values based on the fact that human life is of infinite worth, not based man-made values, but on God, as He revealed Himself in the Bible and in the person of Jesus Christ.
1
I feel t that the title could have been a little more "apt". Yet, I cannot top many of the brilliant comments from other readers. Still, here goes my five cents:
Ah, yet, the True System that runs the entire show on this spinning rock will make sure that the corrupt pillars of the corrupt system will be, and is being, dismantled, piece-by-piece, until a new Just and Equitable System is implemented upon this planet.
There is absolutely no way around this, because the consciousness of the masses must rise. Those that cannot and do not rise, as the coming energies of 2020 thru 2027 (or 2025, if we're lucky) will "command and demand", what will be, must be until there is a complete replacement of what currently stands, and "Truth and Justice for All" is made real.
1
Since 1970 when I first saw the John Ford film "The Searchers" with John Wayne as Ethan Edwards, I have thought that it provides an excellent characterization of this cultural phenomenon. Ethan Edwards, the strong, silent, persevering type (with a barely concealed background of darkness in his character and history) is the celebrated model of masculinity in American culture. This model long preceded the 1970s, as evident by the 1956 date of the film. In fact we can go back to the 19th Century dime novels and even James Fenimore Cooper's novels in the 1820s. Who is Ethan Edwards but a reincarnation of Natty Bumpo of the "Leatherstocking Tales"? The "noble savage" of 16th and 17th Century European literature also presages this. He has no strong ties to family or community, but lives a lonely life on the edge of civilized society and uses violence to force his self-defined moral code on a community that he views as appealing but corrupt. He would have to give up his long suffering endurance that he values as the sign of his moral worth to accept the love, comforts and security of a home, family and community. Notice that all these characters are male; home, hearth and children are the province of women and less strong males who are seduced by civilized community.
5
I was born in 1964. I remember the chaos of the 70's. I was also came of voting age during the Reagan era. An era that demonized workers rights, unions of any type, public schools (defunding) and partnered with the religious right.
In some ways this country has not recovered from corruption and deception of the Vietnam era and the false patriotism that started in the Reagan era.
Workers and the middle class has been slowly destroyed by those who believed in the absolute purity of capitalism. This is what is left.
6
Economics is a big part of male malaise, but it goes much deeper. Men are taught to be providers but assume that this also means we are at the top of the family and social hierarchy.
And it's not just working class men that are disconnected from meaning in their lives. It's all men.
This is what patriarchy does. It requires roles over empathy. It demands obedience to structures that we know are wrong.
It demands support of those who we shouldn't support and it disconnects us from our capacity to feel, to empathize, to have compassion.
Patriarchal roles are easier, at least on the surface because if we opened ourselves up to those feelings we would see the incredible damage we have done.
More importantly, we as men would be drawn to change it. Instead we withdraw into the non-feeling world of male comradely. We are awkward with emotions because boys are taught that emotions make one vulnerable and men can't be vulnerable.
So we bottle up those feelings, except at sports events and on beer night where they explode, often in self destructive ways. But then we return to our patriarchal world and wonder what went wrong with our relationships.
We complain that we don't know how to act around women because of the me Too Movement. In reality we didn't know how to act long before the movement. Now women are saying "you figure it out and when you, then call me."
The economy makes it worse but the real fault lies in our culture.
5
@Drspock
How about opening up feelings in order to share the joys of parenthood with your partners, something they absolutely would welcome ? Or spending time with your partner doing something you both enjoy, besides sex ? Or talking together, maybe learning something together, whether a hobby or a skill or about history, politics, anything really that would make that mysterious woman seem human to you ..
The 50s are a long time ago, with the strong breadwinner image and the man working and aloof. Why groups of men would buy into this I have no idea, especially if they actually regret having no relationships.
Children love attention .. it takes so little to be part of their lives .. and the promise of free babysitting may thaw the coldest heart of the baby mama ..
Also think there should soon be mandatory paternity checks and then support .. DNA tests exist .. and if you choose to be a parental bum, then pay to fund some other childcare or child charities ... No free rides here, you make them ,you support them.
2
Good article and true. What is the saying? We go faster alone, but farther together. Ancient civilizations knew this was the only way to survive and thrive. Study after study has shown the dangers to our physical health if we live without human connection. We were not designed to live without community, as imperfect as it may be.
Life circumstances (divorce, death, frequent moves, mental or physical illness) can make finding a community difficult for some of us. The best communities I know of are places of worship. The good ones welcome newcomers.
1
There is another reason for the rise of the haphazard self in America. We have to morph into whatever self is suitable for work, for job interviews, for public spaces, etc. We aren't allowed to have a bad day, a thoughtful day, or any day other than a great one. We can't be angry, upset, depressed, overjoyed, or too quiet. Everything about us is subject to criticism from others.
If we're not acceptable to anyone as we are how are we supposed to be consistent? If we're supposed to wear a smile all the time, never frown, never ever be sarcastic, what's the point to developing a consistent personality or approach to life? Chances are someone like you Mr. Brooks, will find something wrong.
I'm ready to give up on searching for a job. Why? Because, no matter what I do or say I'm judged by my age rather than my qualifications or ability to learn. I switched fields 20 years ago. That indicates a willingness to be flexible and an ability to learn. No employer has cared about that. All they've cared about is how expensive I am, not my skills, interests, or what I bring to the job.
No one has offered to help me. I've asked for help. What I've been told is anything but helpful. It amounts to conflicting advice except for one thing that everyone loves to say and that your party favors: it's my fault and that there are plenty of jobs out there and that I'm a valued person. Not valued enough to hire, or help out after over 35 years of paying taxes.
5/14/19 1:29pm
11
@hen3ry - excellent comment - powerfully said...
2
I'm very surprised that you see the economic culture and the pscho/social culture as two separate forces that ideally should balance each other out. That's as non-sensical as thinking the mind and body balance each other out. No. They act in concert and "weave" together into a whole, one that is healthy or sick, depending on the habits practiced by both mind and body. One's economic life and one's personal psycho/social life similarly weave together to create a whole. These men have become haphazard men because they have been treated haphazardly by the economic culture - that is WHY this is happening. It's not some other force happening alongside the economic dynamics of the country. The demise of unions, of fair treatment by corporations, of a general sense that your employer saw you as a person - this collapse is what has led to a social collapse. Even though I think you are on the right track with a lot of the questions you are asking, if you can't see this fundamental fact I'm not sure how you will be able truly to influence the conversation.
6
You write, "A society is healthy when it counterbalances its economics." And how difficult is that when society is being strip-mined for profits? The atoms of a real society are relationships bonded by reciprocal obligations that provide purpose and meaning, not autonomous individuals acting under tenets of utilitarian ethics. I do hope Weave: The Social Fabric Project succeeds.
6
While the piece seems spot on, the lead is demonstrably, distractingly, false. And that is meaningful, because it reveals the fundamental flaw at the center of most Conservatives' thinking.
First, why it's false: If one follows this logic, then the prescription for socialist economies - even 'socialist lite' ones, such as in Scandinavia - would be for a culture that celebrates selfishness, chaos and superficial relationships. I think we can all acknowledge that that dynamic is neither theoretically nor actually true. Just the opposite - successful socialist economies reflect a strong social fabric. So the idea that there is an inevitable counterbalance is a one-off conceit.
And therein lies the problem with modern Conservatives. They want to hang on to the fiction that raw self-interest is somehow, through the magic of the marketplace, transmuted into a cohesive, well-functioning society...that people can be ruthless, bloodless competitors in their professional lives without also paying the price of callousness in their personal lives. That their higher virtues can be switched on and off depending on context. Hogwash.
It's high time for Americans to admit that the Libertarian-fueled fantasies of the cowboy mentality, of Die Hard, of Cool Hand Luke and Gordon Gekko are just that - fantasies. And to recognize that all success - whether it be at home, in the workplace, in sports or even art - is the result of teamwork...of the meshed talents of many.
[outofspace]
9
@Adam. Most good American workers are neither “bloodless, ruthless competitors in their professional lives” nor altruistic, compassionate empathizers with everyone they do business with. What they are are professionals who treat their customers with respect, courtesy and expert knowledge. This idea that in socialist societies it’s all sweetness and humanitarian camaraderie is false as we saw in the Soviet bloc or in Orwells 1984. Socialists are often assuming empathy everywhere will occur when socialism takes place and everyone shares the same fate. I prefer doing business with or going to the doctor knowing I am getting expert professional care, which in case you haven’t noticed is what motivates the best doctors, nurses, etc. Yes, there is also room for Florence Nightingale, but I see few socialists in these comments advocating or following her example.
"A society is healthy when its culture counterbalances its economics. That is to say, when you have a capitalist economic system that emphasizes competition, dynamism and individual self-interest, you need a culture that celebrates cooperation, stability and committed relationships."
So, you'd prefer the Soviet Union then, David? After all, it was a communist economic system with a culture about manipulating those economics for selfish gains. That's healthy, to you?
Maybe an actually healthy society is one where competition, dynamism, and individual self-interest are counterbalanced by other economic factors, like taxation. That way, the societal load to clean up capitalism's messes might be a little lighter.
1
Exactly me.
Now 68 thank goodness for Medicare and Social Security.
At Dr now.
I never wanted kids as my father was a bad example. Yet a corporate success.
I did marry a widow with child. That now old child and her children are my only tie to......
1
Blood and guts capitalism used to be practiced only by a small group of elite business leaders whose darwinian behavior was walled off from the larger culture. Their actions had direct impact on people’s lives, but the personal aspect was abstracted away by layers of economic mechanism.
Today, though, structural changes in the economy over the last 50 years have made capitalist warriors of us all, and this has become our culture. From the billionaires of the Valley and Wall Street to the small business owner and her contingent employees to the Uber driver and her passenger, everyone is on the make, looking for an edge, strategizing to get ahead or just survive. People under the age of 50 came of age in this society just as they came of age in the society of moral liberation and tolerance that has arisen since the 1970’s.
There is a long tradition of conservative commentators bemoaning the purely cultural changes that have arisen since the 1970’s, as you repeat here, just as there is a growing liberal lamentation of the economic changes over roughly the same period. Few seem to want to recognize that these changes are mutually affecting and practically in concert. There are good, astonishingly liberating aspects to them as there are horrible and lamentable aspects. But they each inform the other. We are a freer, more permissive society as much in business as in what we used to call our moral choices. Thinking of them as separately malleable phenomena is I think erroneous.
2
The dollar a working class laborer has is very different from the dollar an executive with "investments" has. One sweats for his dollar and sacrifices to maintain a family and home while the other checks how many dollars were accumulated for him and looks to what more he could accumulate....and to do what?
7
Franz Kafka wrote The Metamorphosis about the same problem that Brooks is describing, but with greater insight. There are two absurdities in The Metamorphosis: the first is that a man is turned into a bug, and the second is that despite having just experienced this horrific transformation, that same man is more concerned with getting to work on time than with his drastic physical transformation. This is where Kafka is smarter than Brooks. The problem is not that the economy and the culture are out of tune with each-other, the problem is that the economy has become the culture.
9
I will never forget something my dad told me: the greatest gift a man can give his children is to love their mother.
With all the talk of family, and doing everything for our kids, this statement is the key to actually modeling the first essential building block of a meaningful life.
8
Sorry Mr. Brooks, but this is utter drivel. You expect to change a base animal into a species that can rise above its base instinct into some holistic Jesus.
Ain't gonna happen. The base animal falls for the con every time.
Ergo, we have Trump. A man with no obvious skills (other than lying), who is adored by the same men you'd like to transform into weavers.
Yeah, that will happen right after President Base Animal stops looting children's cancer care non profits.
But go ahead and keep idealizing. Rather than advocate a Bernie style government that enforces your ideals, make believe Trump, McConnell and other vermin will suddenly transform into caring individuals.
Yeah, right after my hair grows back in.
5
@Eddie Menkin,
Goodness! Working class people as base animals unable to rise above their instincts? I think the happily married, high earning welders, HVAC technicians, chief mechanics and lawn service owners I know would take issue with that depiction. Mr. Brooks isn't idealizing from some ivory tower; he's organizing conferences and travelling the country to meet and learn from the people who are pushing back against the disintegration of family and community, and using his column to share what works with as many people as possible. That's pretty good! It's more than I'm doing. To close, I thank you for your revealing choice of words regarding a Sanders presidency: enforce your ideals. Yep, that's the progressive wing of the Democratic party in a nutshell, and why I would only vote for Senators Sanders, Warren or Harris if one of them was the nominee. Heaven forbid! 😂
An autonomous life is the rational response to worldwide economic disparity, unfair and unchallenged theft of individual wealth by entrepreneurial flippers, the holocaust of mass employment industries and the high probability of divorce.
5
I assume that all,of these working class men are white. Their lifestyle, can’t keep a job, bum off of others, moving from girlfriend to girlfriend, popping off babies they have no intention of supporting or raising, is the stuff of white racist stories about black men, but when they are white, they are victims who need society to pull them up by their bootstraps. Yes, the world isn’t what it was fourty years ago, but where is their personal responsibility? No one is forcing them to be be socially and sexually irresponsible, they choose to be because it is easier for them. Now they even have a President who is like them: socially and sexually irresponsible, bumming off of others, popping off children he has bragged about having nothing to do with the raising of, although he does temporarily marry his baby-mamas.
9
Your bias is showing. With one click you, too, could have read about the methodology of the study and discovered that it included equal numbers of black and white subjects. Here’s an excerpt:
“Between 2000 and 2013, we deployed heterogeneous sampling techniques in the black and white working-class neighborhoods of Boston, Massachusetts; Charleston, South Carolina; Chicago, Illinois; and the Philadelphia/Camden area of Pennsylvania and New Jersey. We screened to ensure that each respondent had at least one minor child, making sure to include a subset potentially subject to a child support order (because they were not married to, or living with, their child's mother). We interviewed roughly even numbers of black and white men in each site for a total of 107 respondents.”
3
In other words, a sample so tiny it has zero statistical significance.
Not until everyone becomes a supine, groveling, self-abasing quisling, supplicant and sycophant of the white, male patriarchy blithely accepting its blinding shibboleths and its shattering economic doctrines will the likes of David Brooks and Charles Murray (of Bell Curve and Coming Apart infamy) ever be satisfied.
Placed in an empty, cramped cage with little food and with nothing to do but to drink from two spigots - one of liquid opiate and the other of plain water, a rodent will drink only the opiate. Take an opiate addicted rat and place it in a "Rat Park" full of interesting pursuits, games, fellow rats, food, warmth, cleanliness, safety and the same two spigots, and the rat will only drink water.
Create a "Human Park" and watch humans form deep connections, thrive and prosper. It's the conditions (economy included) stupid.
7
"Many of the men told them that the economy doesn’t allow them to provide the same standard of living that their fathers could provide."
Mr. Brooks seems to be holding this out as fact, based on the Edin et al. paper.
I thought this was a "chavanistic, retrograde," viewpoint that helped disqualify Stephen Moore - https://www.newsweek.com/fed-pick-stephen-moore-women-comments-male-earnings-chauvinist-1409920
Look, either it's true or it isn't. The economy either is or is not good for an large swath of men these days.
2
Sorry, can someone explain to me why this is all about men? Poor men! Stinks to be white and male in a world of opportunity, and yet there is something that holds them back--and it's society's fault for not being more communal? Somehow this makes little sense to me. Why isolate this group as someone special? The aggressive nature of capitalism impacts us all. Better to think of its impact on society as a whole and consider changes than to bemoan the fate of those among us with the most opportunity as a result of it.
4
@Samantha Pulliam because Mr. Brooks understands men. Because women don't have these problems, in his eyes at least. Mr. Brooks has shilled for the GOP for at least 2 decades. In that time the GOP has not enacted any policy that benefits women of any economic, racial, or religious strata. In the eyes of the GOP women are nothing more than adjuncts in society.
Women go hungry. Women get depressed. Women have to support themselves. But our society overlooks this and tosses most of us aside once we're no longer fertile. It tosses all of us aside once we're over the age of about 50 or so. But Mr. Brooks and the GOP haven't had that experience yet. They do not understand what it is to be unemployed, unable to find a job, and unlucky enough to be middle class.
9
Why should belief in a mythical Super Being be essential to a stable society?
1
Stop blaming the failures of capitalism (and men) on “culture.”
1
Mr Brooks again uses his column to show off. He searches out an obscure "paper" in an obscure journal to tell us benighted souls about it.
The men surveyed in this paper sound like losers from birth. How did these guys get so shiftless, so unambitious, so lazy, uncaring, mindless?
How is it that they can't get enough training to allow them more than part-time handyman jobs or move to find better employment or educational opportunities?
Going to a church is no sign of belonging in a community; churches are filled with the elderly, and promulgating nonsense. They are largely another gimme-your-money business. Why would these young men or anyone want anything to do with them?
How is it that they don't commit to a partner or that they don't even know if they become fathers? How could they be so unfeeling and cavalier, so removed from their own life events?
No amount of "weaving" and community building is going to make community members of the men Mr. Brooks describes.
Poverty and bad environment only explain so much. These men sound more like a construct to illustrate an ill-conceived notion about a society that doesn't and never has existed. Except in Mr. Brooks mind.
5
More patriarchal, pseudo religiously bromides about the men losing meaningless social constructs that boil down to men being dominant and in charge. Useful tools perpetuating a system that has done very little for the female of the species.
4
Mr. Brooks should consider reading Chernow's 1998 masterpiece Titan to acquaint himself with the realities of modern capitalism and origins of modern plutocracy. As a reformed social darwinist myself, I can say that intellectual maturation is a very positive thing I'd urge him to explore. There is great virtue in occasionally descending from one's Washington brownstone to interact with the bumpkins one is paid handsomely to observe from safe distance. I'd invite Mr. Brooks for a drink when he is next in Westchester but, from this article, it seems likely that he remains an active teetotalist.
1
Mr. Brooks decries a culture in which men lose connection with their wives and community and our culture's failure to encourage a new commitment on the part of men.
Ordinarily, personal remarks about a columnist are not appropriate but Mr. Brooks in his new book The Second Mountain writes about detaching himself from his first wife of many years because "I don't do commitments well". He then takes up with woman 23 years younger and marries her after a three year pursuit. There is nary a word in that book about the impact of his choices upon his former wife and three children. Also, like the mend discussed in this opinion piece, Mr. Brooks also admits to no firm religious commitment.
Do as I say, not as I do.
14
@Alex Apparently Mr. Brooks enjoys being paid to be a preacher, and his New York Times employers are gambling that readers won't be turned off by the facts about his character. They are wrong.
4
Here's the solution. To all our problems. Well, maybe not all, but most. Just think monasteries.
Then think Gutenberg. Got that so far? Monasteries, then Gutenberg.
Next: Ivan Illich, "Deschooling Society." II invented the internet (sorry Mr. Gore). This from wikipedia:
"Particularly striking is [Illich's] call (in 1971) for the use of advanced technology to support 'learning webs': 'The operation of a peer-matching network would be simple. The user would identify himself by name and address and describe the activity for which he sought a peer. A computer would send him back the names and addresses of all those who had inserted the same description. It is amazing that such a simple utility has never been used on a broad scale for publicly valued activity.' (Illich 1971)
Yes, the WWW was invented by Illich in 1971.
Put all this together: LEARNING UNTETHERED FROM BRICK-AND-MORTAR INSTITUTIONS.
Nothing so new here, obviously. But it is the solution we have been needing: A Gutenberg-style revolution in education that eliminates the need to attend physical universities.
Make all degrees and certification, to the extent they are necessary (no commitment here on that question, as I generally agree with Randall Collins, against credentialism), available online for free, funded by the government.
That's it. No need for 1.6 trillion in education debt. Universal free learning through the Web. Go to Yale if you want, but cert through the gov't.
2
Such pejorative phrases: haphazard, loose, chucking.
Because a young man dreams of being an artist?
Hates church communities?
Thinks religious ideas are silly?
Has an active dating life?
Is a jack of all trades?
How selfish.
No derision for the reckless greed which makes stability impossible for them?
What about the greed that gobbles out cities like Seattle, where one bedroom apts increased from $1200 to $2500 in 8 years?
Hurrah for Amazon and Google!
Now everyone else, the people born here, leave!
Or weave!
What about the trillions wasted in Iraq?
Think that impacts their lives?
This massive Republican deficit?
They can't find community because they can't go to NYC with $300, become a starving artist, paint, drink, join a punk band, in the honorable tradition.
That ended in the 1980s with AIDS, Giuliani, and the selfish ultra rich converting 40% of the apartment stock into pieds-a-terres.
The NYC starving artist scene, that was community!!
Who wants your barn dance and church marms?
Haphazard? Self centered?
Cultural change is happening.
These men don't relate to you.
Or your church.
More importantly they don't have your money, or the huge advantages that life handed you.
That doesn't mean you get to tell them who to be.
5
Dancing now...young people basically hop around on the floor or grind to simulate sex. Dancing in the past...young men had to learn a few steps to dance with girls. Sex now...teenage girls are more often willing partners. Sex in the past...young men found sexual partners in girls they had relationships with and a few girls who were willing partners to many.
When women gave up this power over male behavior/commitment, things changed. Not blaming women, not suggesting a solution or a return to a golden age, just an observation about one factor in male disengagement. It's a thing that happened that made a difference.
I saw this encounter recently in high school - a stylish teenage girl was approached by a handsome male friend with very saggy pants. He smiled and whispered something meant to be charming. She stopped and said loudly, "The only thing I want to hear from you is that you bought a belt or suspenders," and walked crisply away from her stunned friend. He sags no more.
2
Unlikely dreams. Like making a living telling New York liberals about your version of neoconservative morality? That seems rather unlikely.
3
Mr Brooks must never read the letters responding to his pieces, otherwise he would quit positing these ridiculous theories.
4
@Barbara LoutosM DB has said that he does not read the comments. I could see them being overwhelming (and sometimes unreasonably personal/harsh), but makes me wonder about his own self-reflection, growth, empathy, etc. - if he stays in his elitist bubble of lecturing us.
2
"The lone wolf man has had his day."
I wish.
1
I thought Hands Across America would solve everything.....
2
Published some years ago,Susan Faludi's 'Stiffed,The Roots of Modern Male Rage,'goes a long way in articulating these very issues. Highly reccommended.
3
Haphazard? I think selfish.
1
Mr. Brooks preaches a return to family, church, and social cohesion while failing to mention that he left his own wife -- a woman who changed her religion and her name to marry him -- and wed a research assistant over 20 years younger than himself. Physician, heal thyself.
8
Not only the “lone wolf man”, but the warrior, thr hunter, the “sportsmen” aka killers and the “developers”, aka environmental destructers.
This world is being destroyed by “toxic masculinity”. We do need more weavers, and lovers and environmentalists. I know women aid and abet toxic men, they are often charismatic, but we need gentler men.
Of course this won’t happen. The meatheads, the killers ( sportsmen ) and destroyers ( developers) are not going away, and will end up wrecking the entire biosphere.
2
Jonathan Metz's recently published book, "Dying of Whiteness," addresses a similar topic--the mortal, emotional, spiritual and bodily consequences of our lawmakers' economic policies on middle and lower-income White men.
His empirical analysis found economic policies (e.g. gun control repeals, stifling of the ACA, cuts to schools and social services) are making life sicker, harder and shorter for these people who right-wing policymakers purport to help. It's fascinating and depressing.
Mr. Brooks: I'm a 27 year old woman of color who reads your column often. My minister at our Unitarian Universalist church reads you, too, and sometimes sends your columns to our congregation. I understand you believe in the power of us being in right relationship with each other. Please consider using your power to call your fellow Republicans out of their complacency and not support the current occupant of the White House and his enablers.
3
Only “autonomous” people can power a just society. Two different but apparently easily confused changes occurred over the last century:
One, the struggle for individual autonomy over and against the societal constraints of earlier times, and
Two, the concomitant movement away from community and towards a kind of self-centered “Epicureanism”. (That word is as benign as I can get.)
Although these two things may seem to be one and the same, they are not. Much as the struggle about Roe vs Wade should not be seen as being about abortion, as a moral issue, but rather, and about the pregnant woman’s “autonomous” right over her own body.
The reason this kind of thinking is dangerous is because it runs the risk of blaming “human nature” for behavior that the observer condemns, instead of, in this case plausibly, the consumerist propaganda that has deluged American society since the golden age of the nineteen fifties promised a pheasant in every pot for working class folk.
Speaking of fathers, mothers, and children: Some years ago I taught at a medium security prison. Chatting with some of the inmates before class, I mentioned my son. One of the inmates mentioned that he wanted to have several children. Naively I asked him what did he look for in a wife. He was nonplussed by the question and said, sincerely, "I don't plan on getting married." We then started work on their GED.
1
After reading these comments, I wonder how men in socialist societies thrive. Not in theory, but actual peer-reviewed research about how much better socialism is over capitalism for males. I suspect the research is scarce.
1
The Democrats say “give a man a fish so that he can avoid being hungry”. The Republicans say “let a man learn by himself how to fish so that he can never again be hungry”. What the right policy should be is “ teach a man how to fish”.
Teaching takes policies that favor affordable education, financed by a fair progressive tax system, and a safety net to account for the unknown.
Everything else is just talk, something that Mr. Brooks is excellent at.
Brooks sees the interplay between culture and capitalist economics as healthy. I think he's right that it's healthy for capitalism, since a faithful man makes for a reliable worker, but it's not as healthy for the culture, which capitalism seeks in many instances to obliterate--local groceries replaced by WalMarts, local churches replaced by megachurches (which in turn look just like the WalMarts) and so on. Capitalism enjoys a happy laborer, but the effect is not mutually beneficial--it only goes one way.
4
Maybe the rich should have some community spirit.
At this point, they seem to have no interest in participating in America. They just want to take. America is just their playground, with no responsibility.
We have embraced the exploitation of workers and demonized people who actually work for a living.
If we want to build community, maybe treating each other better and really caring about each other would help.
The rich will never have enough.
Meanwhile, we have working people who can’t afford basic needs.
Survival of the fittest will not build the community that we need.
236
@Grove They just wan to take? In 2016, the top 25% paid 86% of the total taxes paid.
2
@dickwest Then that means that 75% of our country is not making money enough to contribute to the tax base. Whose fault is that, really? Most people want meaningful work that gives them dignity and the means by which to build stable and satisfying lives. Instead we have a ruling corporate class that pulls every trick in the book–including writing the book–to let them maximize profits at the expense of society as a whole. When people who work full time as teachers, health care workers or for some of our largest corporations still need government assistance such as food stamps to get by, clearly there's a problem. Demonizing those who are already struggling is not the answer.
40
@dickwest And look where all of their money goes: Social Security, Medicare (both elderly groupus) and the military (corporations mostly). How does the middle class benefit from any of those categories?
5
Isn't the haphazard self a circular thing ? Individuals lose their bearing and get detached from a society where loyalty is scarce, the community suffers and gets less inclusive. We then raise anxious kids who lack positive role models and struggle to be hopeful about their future. Things get worse until there is an awakening to the need for a more inclusive, human and equal society.
This problems goes far beyond working class men. You could make the argument about the me first culture being a problem a lot more easily using a study off 107 upper middle class men who also feel under siege and fear loosing their privileges.
For working class men, the odds are stacked against them. They aspire to live "normal" lives as depicted on TV, which are not sustainable with their level of income. While some of them can find a way out of just surviving economically, not enough money is flowing their way to make this a possibility for most of them. Too many people chasing $ in a market where demand can be displaced by automation or foreign imports.
I am hopeful that young people are seeing the problems created by hyper individualism and greed coupled with corruption and are getting politically engaged.
3
This is happening to women as well. It's happening to children, and to families. In fact it's a societal problem that's been caused by a complete lack of a decent social safety net and the continued use of identity politics to divide the country.
I was born near the end of the baby boom. When we were ready to join the workforce there was no room for us. When I graduated from college Reagan had been elected, the economy was not in great shape, and jobs were tough to find. I graduated with a degree in biology and minor in chemistry. I sent out hundreds of resumes. I heard how desperate the science sector was for people. I never saw any evidence of that. Nor did any of my peers.
What most of us saw was a complete lack of interest in hiring us, training us, or investing in us as employees or as worthwhile people. Programs that had helped the earlier baby boomers were ended. Programs that had helped the WWII vets were ended. The cost of living increased beyond our ability to pay for things. There were numerous articles about our failures to launch as adults.
Conditions now and then are very similar. Wage stagnation, employers refusal to hire, pay, train or invest in employees. The difference is that people born after the mid to late 1950s never caught up to their parents' standard of living. Living on credit doesn't count. We've lost jobs, friends, everything to an economy and a country that worships liars, cheaters, and business above all.
5/14/19 12:08pm
8
Uh David!!
All men detach. Not just working class men.
It is a rare and precious find if your partner is male and knows the kids schedules or yours. Total aloofness and feigned insult if brought to their attention.
113
@nurseJacki@ Truth! Of course, another man probably cannot recognize that very easily.
3
@nurseJacki@
The patriarchy and its privileges deserve to be overthrown, but it is so very human that those who would do this engage in many of the same generalized gender group bashing activities ("all men detach" and "probably can't recognize it" that misogynists engage in about their supposedly obtuse opposites. It will be a good day when all genders no longer feel the need to generally bash the other and see the individual for what they are as humans instead of what they generally imagine their applied label determines.
5
@nurseJacki@ I am aloofly insulted by this.
4
Go back in history to see what Conservatives really want. Men working 60 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, MAYBE Christmas off. No sick days, no vacations, no healthcare, no retirement, pay in company scripts, good only at the company store. This is the goal of Capitalism, and what the GOP has been working towards for decades. it was always the goal. Conservatives since the Robber Barons have alway fought against "family time", or anything else except workers working always. Think it is different now? Better check your email and voice mail now to see what your boss thinks.
7
@gratis
That's an unfortunate view of conservativism. What you describe is the Trump faction's dream--but certainly not that of all conservatives, of which Trump is hardly an example. William Weld is a conservative--and mounting a primary challenge to President Trump, bless his heart. Sam Nunn was a conservative Democrat. Gerald Ford was a conservative. So was Eisenhower, by today's standards. T.S. Eliot was famously conservative. Disraeli was, as well. David Cameron and Angela Merkel are both center-right figures. By international standards, so is President Obama, for whom I voted twice. Genuine conservatism, which I hope will have a renaissance when the country eventually recoils from the excesses and abuses of the Trump moment, values community, tradition and order, not the atomization of society sought by the reflexively disruptive, historically ignorant, inherently destabilizing Trump contingent. Just sayin'! 😊
.
This is indeed a time of cultural flux …
I don’t think the high-end “winners” of this society (the 1%) understand how steep the social cohesion drops off just below their socio-economic level. Women who are not satisfied monetarily and sexually have a trade-up mentality and tend to divorce at alarming rates – sending their families and community into a tailspin.
The flip side of the lone wolf is the vain woman.
#bluecollarlogic
1
Yes CONTEMPT for organized religion. Because in this world of change the "Rock of Ages" is crumbling. And good riddance!
The majority white Christians brought us Trump, even as all along they have been bringing us war, jail stuffing, poor-bashing, and environmental destruction. Oh, and guns, guns, guns.
Their Bible morals can't stand the test of modern ethics and now serve as a mechanism of separation rather than unity. It is simple, they have become the idolaters of their own religion - making of it blasphemous idolatry.
It is completely possible to have a faith in God, or whatever, without any religion. Actually, Alcoholics Anonymous has been operating on that basis with great success for a long time.
Since the conservative religions contribute to separation and difference, we are better off without them.
3
Mr. Brooks, I think you've got it backwards.... as shown in your first paragraph : "when you have a capitalist economic system that emphasizes competition, dynamism and individual self-interest, you need a culture that celebrates cooperation, stability and committed relationships."
Walmart, like McDonald's before it, built empires on minimum wage employees and part time employees, destroying tens of thousands of small businesses that did attempt to provide a living wage. Like the opioid crisis, your 'haphazard men' may be a byproduct of this devastation of the working class.
Happy weaving...
Our 'capitalist economic system', in its current evolution, promotes NOTHING, except:
a) the concentration of wealth
b) the destruction of our society
c) the death of our planet
13
There was once a long ago dream time when the culture of working men embodied the thick community Brooks so often pines for. It was the saloon not the salon. Drinking was what bound the unruly masses together. Uninhibited and with courage in hand, they went forth, as true American disrupters, to form unions, to hit the streets, to cry havoc in the face of their oligarch overlords. Prohibition put the qibosh on that. The puritanical, Calvinistic mindset is well suited to keep the peasants at heel under the kindly ministrations of the local church. I’m not advocating everyone going out to get stinko but the cowering timidity of the sheeple in the face of the Second Gilded Age is discouraging, to say the least. One of the first things FDR did was repeal Prohibition, he campaigned on it during the Depression. Coincidence?
5
Apparently NYT is training journalists and commentators alike in effective deployment of The Journalistic Passive, a dour case which rears its ugly head here, again, to sad effect.
Politically speaking, to give credit, Mr. Brooks is an acknowledged master of the form, which he employs most often to skirt Conservative (that is, Republican) responsibility.
For example "...the economy doesn’t allow them to provide the same standard of living that their fathers could provide".
Guns don't shoot people...
The economy really doesn't care much about such tripe as standards of living, and couldn't do anything if it did.
This condition, the foundation upon which many of Mr. Brooks' recent social and spiritual crises rest, is not only intentional, it is the desired outcome of Conservative economic policy. That is, we are exactly where Mr. Brooks' team put us.
Corporations don't just fail to support their employees (as any real Capitalist enterprise knows it must do), they view it as a net positive to keep them desperate and demeaned.
Mr. Brooks' party prefers their money all in one place, and takes dramatic steps to accomplish this.
While Brooks himself whimpers pain in his spirit, deep and hurtful empathy, he and his party set up this situation in opposition to both the founding spirit of the nation and well-established (and critically important) tenets of both capitalism and the free market.
He covers his tracks by laying blame on "the economy", as if that isn't really him.
4
Try interviewing folks in the socialist-democratic countries and then the corporate capital ones (like ours) and see which government system is best for workers.
Bet you find lots of happy folks working in Finland versus Michigan. One government is to promote and protect people the other to promote and protect corporations.
6
I’m guessing that David Brooks is the kind of person who, if someone is telling him something he doesn’t want to hear, he covers his ears and sings very loudly, or makes crazy noises to drown out the person’s words.
Or he might just pretend the person isn’t there.
If Brooks wanted to mount a crusade against gun violence and mass killings with guns, he would say: “We need to pray more for the victims and their families.”
If he wanted to lead the effort to combat opioid addiction he would revive the old “Just Say No to Drugs” campaign – it would be a brand new campaign called “Just Say No to Drugs!”
And while we’re at it: “Just Say No to Climate Change!”
And to remedy the crisis of working-class alienation, Brooks proposes an “event” at what is billed as the “epicenter of culinary creativity in DC” where 250 intellectuals will consume gourmet food and wine and listen to speeches!
Now that’s getting down to business. David, the working-class males of America salute you!
(I presume there will be a similar event for working-class females – perhaps at a posh spa in Malibu?)
4
Mr Brooks, a member of the Establishment, wonders as the Haves always do. What to do with “waste people” perhaps we could find some better use for them. No more colonial outposts to send them to. Try to have a modern thought.
4
Curious column from a conservative columnist whose party has worked for decades to unravel American institutions and society.
3
The men described here are simply unwilling to make a real commitment. Fifty years ago we would call them bums, with huge peer pressure to get their sorry act together.
Today many of us have given up on our fellow Americans. Racial stereotypes which were once based on opinion have with lots of contact hardened into open contempt. If you work in any school system with high diversity you see extensive gaming of the system to get unwarranted benefits—whites, blacks, everybody. And the kids see it and it changes them. They also see kids who brag about not doing homework, kids who refuse to remove their earphones in class, others for whom the n-word is a matter of pride. No one can learn to be responsible in this environment. No one can not become more racist. No one can build trust
So it all falls back on home. The men described here are the antithesis of a good role model. They are bums. It would be a miracle if any of their kids turn out as responsible adults
Time to stop feeling sorry for these people. Let them ruin their lives in poverty. But hold them in total contempt
I grew up poor. My dad worked hard and was proud. We lived in a mix race, mixed religion neighborhood with lots of tensions. But men were expected to be respectable, and largely were. No one cut any person any slack on behavior just because they were poor. We helped each other.
Men who misbehaved were ostracized not pitied. Bums!
2
I have a hard time understanding Brooks. He wants to be a “Socialist,” it seems, but he knows which side his bread is buttered on so he’s not.
The idea that men are detached from their communities and it’s their communities’ fault is not very Republican at all.
Now I know what that lapel pin that Mr Brooks has been wearing Is. It’s Weave: the Social Fabric Project.
Love love love the photo by Damon Winter!
The fabric of humanity in American society is fraying at its edges and in the heart as well. If the intact family unit is the building block of civilization, it seems to me that our economic system of corporate oligarchy works against the creation of the family unit. How can children flourish, not just survive when both parents have to work 2 jobs to support the family. They work 2 jobs because they can only find part time jobs with no benefits. Since average wages haven’t risen since 1980, it should come as no surprise that 50% of Americans can’t afford to own a car that costs 14,000$.
3
Uh, yeah, it takes a village.
I don't mean to mock you. You're 100% right about what you want and hope for. And what you say is powerfully important.
You just refuse to see who your natural allies would be, or admit who your natural adversaries are.
149
@Bill Camarda
Could you say more about this please--who David Brooks' natural allies would be, and who his natural adversaries are?
1
@Jan In my view, the people who try to provide authentic support for communities, and for working families who need more resources, higher wages, more time, and someone on their side against large corporations and the predations of the free market tend to be Democrats.
Those are the folks who are naturally sympathetic to communitarian worldviews such as Brooks's. ("It takes a village" was the African saying Hillary Clinton so deeply admired.)
In contrast, there are political forces that prioritize the concentration of wealth and the unleashing of corporations to demand endless hours, worse working conditions, and lower wages from struggling households. Those forces tend to align with the Republican Party.
So it is now: every week we hear about some way Trump's appointees in the Labor Department, Consumer Financial Protection Board, and elsewhere are making life harder for ordinary people who are already struggling.
In our political environment, few Republicans in office or the national media demonstrate any respect for or interest in anything but money and wealth. Not for teachers and schools, not for families who desperately need daycare or eldercare support, not for volunteers in the community, and certainly not anyone who seeks to build bridges across our divisions.
Neither party is anywhere close to perfect. But if Brooks truly cares about helping people rebuild their social connections, he should be a progressive Democrat.
16
Mr. Brooks advocates for wage subsidies. These allow businesses to pay their least educated workers at a below-subsistence level. The company makes more money and the stockholders benefit. We taxpayers pay are in effect paying a portion of the company's labor cost. Add in Medicaid to employees who aren't provided insurance and you've got some excellent corporate welfare. Trump's tariffs are right for the wrong reasons. We should have been charging an across the board tariff on imports from countries that exploit workers, abuse the environment, oppose democratic principles, and play dirty in business. This would give our corporations room to pay decent wages without being undermined by competitors who don't play by the rules.
2
Kids at least sometimes join gangs because it makes them feel like they belong to a family of sorts. As Brooks points out, the ethos of modern day America is individualistic so joining even a gang isn't seen as a solution to the problems of solitary living. I agree with him that we need to weave stronger social networks.
If Mr Brooks wants positive but unstructured improvements to our social values, I suggest he starts with the young children. Maybe have them start of the day with a pledge to values instead of the flag abstraction.
Something like this:
I pledge allegiance to the egalitarian and altruistic principles that are fundamental to the best hopes of the United States of America.
1
@sherm
Sounds like Maoist an incantation.
I appreciate the many comments that point to the decline of unions and to the ways in which law, and especially how the Supreme Court, has been cultivating a regime of hyperindividualism and greed. Consider the recent Supreme Court decision in Janus which in a 5 to 4 decision overruled precedent that a worker represented by a union may be required to pay a fair share for the costs of collective bargaining. Based on a radical and highly individualistic interpretation of the First Amendment, the majority ruled that such a payment violates individual freedom of speech. Aside from requiring that nonunion members who pay nothing get the same wages and benefits as union members who pay dues and the obvious weakening effect of this on unions, the decision fetishizes the individual over the collectivity and heightens resentment.
3
The 4th Vital sign. Basic vital signs like body temperature, blood pressure, and heart rate keep you living, but 4th sign, buddies, keep you living well. It's easy in the information age for a guy to keep connected electronically, but its pretty hard for a guy, young or old, to be connected meaningfully.
2
"A society is healthy when its culture counterbalances its economics. That is to say, when you have a capitalist economic system that emphasizes competition, dynamism and individual self-interest, you need a culture that celebrates cooperation, stability and committed relationships."
Has it occurred to Brooks that the culture he deems pathological is a reflection of the economic system he embraces? It is foolish to expect a culture that celebrates cooperation, stability and commitment to flourish in a ultra-competitive capitalist economy where success requires a killer instinct and mere survival can require a willingness to sacrifice everything and everyone you hold most dear.
Brooks, like many conservatives, wants culture to humanize economic warfare and temper the voraciousness of capitalism. He should connect the dots. The he would realize that to change society's culture he needs to change the way we do business. More government regulation of markets, not less; a higher minimum wage, one that allows people working full time to lead decent lives rather than dwell on the edge of poverty; public policies that make medical care available to all on the basis of need. These are the sorts of measures that will improve people's well-being and create the basis for the sort of community Brooks craves.
5
The central objective of any "New Deal" (Green, etc.) should be to END "paycheck to paycheck" as a big American way of life. We are hearing a lot about out of work folks with no cushion. People are in dire straits because they are living paycheck to paycheck. And you can believe most P2P people are not saving for their retirement. Even with totally dependable paychecks - as one previously assumed federal government work provided - that's still no way to run a workforce.
America is clearly leaving vast swaths of its population out in the cold. Full time jobs not paying a living wage. No benefits. No job security. No confidence that things will get better.
Security and confidence make people more productive as employees, more likely to become entrepreneurs, more effective as parents and less likely to make desperate and destructive decisions.
Our workforce is the crown jewel of our country. Talented, hardworking, intelligent, inventive and dedicated people are kept from being their best when financial anxiety is their everyday companion.
Letting our workforce erode is criminal when it is done for the financial gain of the top tier of the affluent; it's exploitation to the point of theft. FDR said, "I answer that no country, however rich, can afford the waste of its human resources."
7
Seems to me that we need a society that the vast majority of its members feel part if. What we have in the US is an environment that many people find somewhere between indifferent to hostile toward them. It's not a place where people belong. It's where they happen to be.
4
The ease with which people conceive children with partners they are not committed too is scary. Birth control is readily available and this casual, non committal path to parenting is a huge problem.
Have all the sex you want just don't have children you can't or won't take care of.
Society needs to teach men to own this issue as much as women have to.
5
"The history of all hitherto existing society† is the history of class struggles.
"Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master‡ and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes."
It is timely to revisit the basics. No better place to start than with Marx and Engels. Note for our current situation the "common ruin."
2
A central concept men can sometimes embrace, which I was trained to do myself, is that to save the community you need to be detached from it. Ala The Lone Ranger. (See: The Seven Cultures of Capitalism, early 1990s)
Or simply detaching emotions from a given situation so as to figure out, objectively, the right thing to do, as an EMT needs to do - but this gets applied to many non-emergency situations where emotional involvement is better than not.
Yes, our individualism is out of balance and I agree with Brooks concept that what the economy requires of people should be balanced with what society requires. Adam Smith's concept of capitalism and free markets working well was in the context of a stable community with loyalty to the community in place.
With our enormous power now to adversely affect the wealth-creating capacity of people for decades into the future, we need to curb our enthusiasm about chasing individual wealth and experiences, and include future people/creatures in our community that we consider in our choices. As Brooks notes, the complete freedom that some people are chasing presently is destructive to them and others. Let's "weave" the future into our decision-making via both economics (prices that tell the truth) and decision-making cultures at work and home.
1
People who have lost their job need to fall back on some sort of social safety net otherwise they become disengaged drifters and aggressive Trumpers. The duty of government is to provide a sound balance between capitalist competition and social justice to avoid deep inequality. When society is there in your moment of need, there is a good chance you will want to preserve that safety net and be there for others later. But if the system treats you badly, steals your job and self-respect, you perceive society as a pack of wolves looking for meat and will fight back or disengage entirely. This is the cancer that ails us now. The Lone Ranger and Cowboy culture prove counterproductive when the government stacks the deck entirely to the advantage of dehumanizing capitalism.
144
@Sergio Som in Finland yo lose your job? You still have health care, child care, education for you children and unemployment benefits. here? The corporation that fired you increases the profits to shareholders.
16
Ok, now I am 100% convinced Brooks is in a 12 step program. This “weave” idea sounds like a very superficial self-help program more akin to an ephemeral hashtag movement than a sustainable solution. ie, a reason to sell books. Yes, there are many men in these circumstances. They are not saints. This sounds like a program, similar to their churches, that may be attended briefly, then mive on.
3
The has been a steady decline of a breakdown in society (and the family unit) relative to the steady decline in the tax rate of personal and corporate incomes. It is that simple.
It is all a matter of time, if people (whether that be mother or father) do not have it, (because they are working themselves out of any structures) then something has got to give, aye ?
Not only has the conservative movement (over decades) decimated said tax structure (and its balancing out effect across all of society) but it has downloaded every single cost of society onto the backs of the poor and middle class. It has taken away all protections within unions and rules of government that allowed ''families'' to flourish.
Now they simply do not have enough time, trying to play catch up, and trying to survive.
2
But Mr Brooks, what about those bootstraps I've been hearing about since Jimmy Carter left office?
1
I like the #weave meme, David. I think, though, that inducing capitalist loners to participate in these deep communities and thick relationships is going against type. Consider another article in today’s NYT, about the Chinese rail workers. Unhappy about their work conditions, 3,000 of them coordinated themselves and went on strike - without any written documentation.
The Chinese culture recognizes the importance of the collective. Here in the US, we worship the individualistic spirit. This is at odds with acting as a collective, with being a weaver.
2
One throwaway line about wage subsidies at the end of the article and paragraph after paragraph about how these men feel " the economy doesn’t allow them to provide the same standard of living that their fathers could provide". Maybe if we had policies like universal basic income maybe many of these men might have the standard of living of their fathers had. Values means nothing if you cannot eat and have shelter.
7
You're starting to be the guy who doesn't read his own paper.
I'm sorry to tell you that the problem is not the lack of regard or connections the working man/weaving man has or doesn't have, it's the discordancy of the real (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/12/opinion/windstream-bankruptcy-cds.html?action=click&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage§ion=Opinion
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/11/opinion/sunday/generic-drugs-safety.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage)
with the imagined
(https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/13/opinion/working-class-men.html?action=click&module=MoreInSection&pgtype=Article®ion=Footer&contentCollection=Opinion#commentsContainer).
I don't want to take away from your efforts but you are more than this— your gift for explaining just might be able to reach the real offenders and stop our slide into the sea.
3
Just watch TV..... Sadly, the commercial side fights for our souls, and the weak are the most vulnerable...
Beer, Viagra, Insecurity, Anger..... these are the by-products of 'making the sale'.....
So "drink up"..... as the ship of state and of our culture goes under....
2
Conservative white men are not the answer. Conservative white men are the problem.
10
What's the racial, LGBTQ, etc demographic data on this group?
2
You can't separate the trends outlined in this column from mass incarceration. I saw how it played out on the streets: young, energetic black men were put behind bars, frequently for possession of marijuana and other low level drug offenses, where they learned some very bad habits. Discipline was externally supplied. You can't trust anybody. You are probably unemployable. The prison food makes you fat. I saw a lot of young men serve their time but be utterly transformed into listless, angry people who no longer felt in control of their lives. They would spend their days on the couch watching TV, often with an ankle bracelet (can't get in trouble staying home watching TV), monthly visits to the P.O., all the ambition and hustle beat out of you. And you know what? This transformation is exactly the goal for those people who advocate and administer mass incarceration policies. It is some sick stuff.
4
Mr Brooks - Your myopic finger in the dike will certainly drown you quite soon. There are no programs - yours or any others - that can right this world wide sinking ship of greed, egotism, hubris and hatred.
4
As that sage David Byrne said, same as it ever was, same as it ever was.....
No need to worry. The socialists will make everything better for everyone!
*capitalists need not apply
or just maybe you have have fallen into disrepair. You clearly do not listen to anybody particularly your responders.
3
“A society is healthy when its culture counterbalances its economics. That is to say, when you have a capitalist economic system that emphasizes competition, dynamism and individual self-interest, you need a culture that celebrates cooperation, stability and committed relationships.”
Zzzzzzzzzz.
One of THOSE David Brooks columns. Mid-management PowerPoint pixie dust nothingness. A surge of diction you cup your hands under that leave your palms and lips dry. A desperate, dignified media influencer breathlessly fighting the conclusion he reads on his ceiling every night at 4 A.M.: Oh my word, I advocate for the evil side. I have been wrong all along.
I feel sorry for you, David Brooks. But redemption! There’s always redemption! Start speaking truth to power.
4
Unemployed fifty-seven year old working-class David Brooks walks into an employment office…
5
@vishmael
If you can't produce like a thirty year old you're gone.
1
These generalities border on fantasy.
4
Paraphrasing here, Mr. Brooks, but I'm sure you've heard, "Where there is no bread, there is no [spiritual life]. Or family life, or much of anything else. It's the economy, stupid.
6
Sounds like a lot of theses guys need to grow up.
2
Europe is heathen yet more your utopia, at least northern europe is. Maybe we need to study what works a bit more and THEN do some introspection of America and Americans? I see the non religious democratic countries as the most at peace.
Also capitalism run wild by Wall St. American capitalists force a system of work until you die. Americans are too ignorant and lead by people at least as ignorant...therefore America is redundant.
2
Watch Manchester by the sea. It’s better than this column. And btw, nothing you write touches on the poverty induced by white racism and it’s destructive effects on black lives. I’d suggest that these corrupting effects creep out to affect whites, as they always have. See the odious Charles Murray who began by racistly attacking blacks, but now also deplores the low intelligence of poor whites. As bt Washington said: you can only keep a man in the gutter by getting down there yourself.
2
One highly compensated hedge fund manager earns as much in a year as 20,000 American families earning the median family income. Those families have sketchy access to child care, health care and housing. They have little in savings for a ‘rainy day’ and virtually nothing saved for retirement. The ‘pension’ went the way of the dodo. They can’t afford to send their kids to college without taking on a crushing load of debt. They’re one missed installment payment away from the repo man.
And you have the temerity to ask what is wrong — and to attribute our problems to a fundamental lack of ‘moral fiber’ and religious commitment?
Our nation is in thrall to a handful of obscenely wealthy individuals. Thanks to ‘conservative policies,’ those wealthy, powerful individuals are able to suck up an ever increasing share of the nation’s wealth; and can use their wealth to buy our elections and our legislatures, which in turn means they choose our judges, which in turn means even our courts skew increasingly towards protecting the interests of corporations and the wealthy at the expense of the common good, including the environment.
But sure, all will be well if we all just ‘weave’ a bit more and devote more time and energy to an imaginary sky daddy.
Poppycock. If you want ‘social cohesion,’ you need an economic and political system that enriches the many, that exists to serve the common good - not to embolden and empower a few greedy souls while exploiting and impoverishing millions.
11
@Chambolle,
You've articulated it perfectly. Thank you.
Keep saying it!
1
I don't know what universe David Brooks lives in, but it's not a real one. He's smart ... but tone-deaf.
6
There have always been detached men whether they had high or low income. The problem is not really about money. It is simply that lower income people are shamed while higher income people are admired. Praise for “working so hard” is reserved for high income people. Did you ever consider what kind of effort it takes to work for low wages, showing up while knowing it is never enough?
5
David Brooks- spiritual concerns are likely to lift up the man, but not the society that he lives in.
For that, he begins and ends his life in an effort to make money.
If you want lasting change, you must admit the need to be 100% ECONOMIC inclusion.
Church will follow.
1
Isn't this just confirmation bias 101? He starts the study with his conclusions already decided, so it's extremely biased. Also, doesn't the economic system have an influence on culture? Maybe capitalism is the problem?
2
@Jake Sanders
Capitalism is a part of the problem. A good healthcare system, education system, retraining for those job's that have become outdated and irrelevant, ongoing education to help all of us, environmental protections that work for folk, consumer protection, good paying employment with a good benefit package, mutual respect for all regardless of religion economic and ethnic background, all the stuff that is being stripped away from most of us is a good place to start. You cannot have a productive population when they see the system is stacked against them.
But then I am now an old white man who tried to make thing's better for some during my life. It feels like swimming against the current but I refuse to give up hope.
2
Gosh Mr. Brooks maybe, just maybe, for once you can acknowledge there is a productive role of government? I applaud your grass roots efforts, but it is no match to the big dollars behind the hidden Super Pacs, who want nothing more than to keep steam-rolling ahead with less government oversight and more of their corporate activities financed by taxpayer money. And they will use the church pulpit and Faux News to keep flooding their flock with their divine message of socialism is evil, capitalism is God's way.
The current contorted conservative movement of merging Christianity and Capitalism into one (because under this system of check and balance everyone acts responsibly because of their faith and desire to get ahead, right?), doesn't work, not even for a minute. By putting capitalism in check, you gain safer workplaces, better healthcare, better education, clean air, water and environment, etc. and a greater sense of self-respect. Why? Because basic human nature is the need to feel that your contribution makes a difference. Toiling as most are today, with no sense or hope of a better future for yourself and family is what's killing men, families and communities. And it will keep worsening under this oppressive plutocratic regime.
5
@JK
I completely agree.
Another fine column Mr. Brooks about a depressingly interesting study that needs to be discussed. Without going too deeply into what's behind this collection of lives, which are far too typical nowadays, can we just spend some more time on what's actually been written here? Men without much of a relationship to their kids? Their wives? Absent of religion and/or any community or organisational involvement?
American capitalism, not classical capitalism, American capitalism simply cannot sustain the systemised America we all grew up educating and preparing ourselves for. And something needs to be done about it quickly. Our kids are now saddled with both college debt, and republican rich-people debt, which is gonna require a great deal of forward thinking of a NEW American capitalism. A new system which pays off well to newer entrepreneurs who, in turn, pays back in th form of taxes to the society that made their success possible.
And a good place to start? Our crumbling infrastucture and transportation system! The Transportation Department should be treated now more robustly than Defense where more people could be gainfully employed and then feed back to the nation with non-wasteful production which then makes the lives of most of us easier and more productive...
1
@thcatt
A good healthcare system for all and a good educational system for all would be a great benefit for all.
The Republican party opportunistically reacted to changes in the economy in ways that benefited the rich, but they were reacting, not leading those trends. The fall of Communism, and the entry of 5 billion people (esp. China) into the world capitalist economy was what changed things, and what we have to deal with. Geriatric politicians with memories of 1968 aren't going to bring it back, either Bernie or Biden.
.
So, looking forward, not backwards:
1. Let's focus our education system on teaching skills for the 75% who aren't going to be getting a bachelors degree, and for whom there are no bachelor degree jobs, anyway. University for all is a cruel, stupid joke, favored by too many of the educated elite. Skills for all is what we need.
2. Let's subsidize work, not capital. Stop taxing wages for SS and FICA, convert it to a consumption tax. Tax wealth, property, dividends and capital gains more, labor income less. Don't give a guaranteed income; give wage subsidies to increase the dignity of work, not the dependency of handouts.
3. It's not about traditional unions. Workers have been abandoning unions for 30 years. They are weak in a global economy and unable to deal with workers who have a wide range of skill levels.
4. Focus assistance on moving people out of poverty, not making them comfortable in poverty.
.
Working class men aren't enmeshed because women find them more of a burden than a help. Stop looking backwards for solutions.
2
I swear he is doing this on purpose as a joke. How can anyone so consistently look past the obvious effects of predatory capitalism and right-wing politics and settle on airy concepts like social connection as the root of the problem? Such a person would have to be almost comically myopic about both themselves and the world around them. I could go into specifics in Brooks' case but then this comment would likely not be published.
9
Any wonder that suicide is on the rise? Durkheim identified anomie, the lack of social connections, as a major factor in the rate of suicide a hundred years ago. Yet, we’ve drifted further and further apart.
3
“But cultural change is needed, too — a shift in what kind of men we admire and what sort we disdain.”
Says the man who dumped his wife of 28 years for a much younger model (23 years), and then has the temerity to lecture us on family commitment and crisis of dads-that-leave. Sounds just like Newt, Bill and Donald. Disdain!
8
The Rise of exhausted men working 3-4 Jobs to make a living, as opposed to the haphazard self. Where does the author imagine these men will have enough leisure time to connect with anyone? Lost in a Conservative bubble hoping that weaving God-knows-what in their few precious moments of liberty will provide them with connectivity. Maybe a living wage? I know ... I should go weave it out. 😛
4
@Anita
Many women are stuck in the same quagmire. It's hard to feel good about anything when you have no time to cope with minor problems that turn into major crisis before you know it's happening.
3
Nonsense. Ignore the obvious, because it just does not fit within what remains of your justification program for our
rancid Capitalist Globalism and what remains of the political
party to which you have dedicated your life.
Today's Republican Party and the eroded, tiny core of traditional American conservatism that yet remains have
become a daily embarrassment.
All of this autonomy of self and disassociation is a reaction to the environment in which today's worker finds himself.
The government, which is not really our government anymore, has become the essence of hypocrisy, advocating morality while committing crimes against humanity.
So many of these churches seem to contradict the real message for which they were formed, pulling in wealth while counseling self-denial, preaching abstinence while indulging in the worst base forms of fornication and abuse.
Pick a platform and wait. It will soon fall out from under you.
The lone wolf identity is all he has left.
Stay, fanatical liberals! Stay your foreign insult of our generous America. You say income inequality shackles working men to hardship and suffering, but the fault lies in your own autonomous culture.
We have seen horrible pictures drawn of financial injustice by liberal fantasists, and yet on oath we have never witnessed one scene of oppression by owners, never beheld an undeserved layoff, owner-to-worker pay ratio, or infliction of any financial excess more severe than parental right would justify for simple honest familial business skill and value-add differentials.
On the contrary, we are touched by affectionate kindness among the benevolent owners. We state our honest belief that U.S. workers should be the happiest class on God’s Earth. And yea may they be, for we have seen with our own eyes, when cultural weaving is thick, men do not cry for income equality. In coastal elitist cities we heard of companies who were cruel to their workers, but the indignancy which this injustice summons in our thick communities establishes how an enmeshed social fabric cures all ailments.
We spake with one worker
- You did not sigh to be economically free?
- No, mistress, I didn't. I was too bound to my community for that. I wouldn't have left those thick relationships, even with my three jobs, for all the equality in the world. I loved that woven culture better than anything.
Thus see how a community does lovingly bind together, and falsehoods of unjust society be disproven again.
1
[...tend to have contempt for organized religion....]
Although false, organized religion kept people in line by promising them that things would be 'evened up' in the afterlife. Without a belief in fairness, people become depressed about their future.
David:
When dignity of the workforce is considered as important as the stock price, then communities will take root rather than exist as wishful bromides in your columns.
1
Working collectively towards a New Green Deal might work even better.
2
How curious that Mr Brooks, who discarded the religion of his birth for another one in adulthood, would lament that American men "...are also loosely attached to churches..." and that they "have contempt for organized religion and do not want to tie themselves down to any specific community."
I wonder if that would have anything to do with the systematic rape of young boys in the Catholic Church nationwide? Or with the rock-hard allegiance of so many protestant churches to the ugly extremism of the hard-right GOP? Or with the intrinsic racism of the Southern Baptist Convention, which came into being because of its solid support for slavery?
But Mr Brooks thinks it's a bad thing for thinking men to eschew organized religion?
Mr Brooks should take a closer look at the reality of those organized religions before claiming that keeping one's distance from them is a bad thing.
5
It's a dog-eats-dog world. What more do we need to say about the current version of the American dream?
2
Brooks is merely offering cover here for the real Republican policy: slashing jobs; depressing wages; automating industries; killing medical care; and cheap, plentiful, easy-to-score fenantyl as the new grape Koolaid.
America doesn’t need a working class anymore, and no amount of weaving will change that. It’s not class warfare – it’s genocide.
2
As so often, David has breathtakingly simple solutions for extremely complex social changes.
To wit,
>the economy doesn’t allow them to provide the same standard of living that their fathers could provide
There are multiple reasons for this, far beyond the control that, it is suggested, might be exerted by sticking to one church, or being a "better Dad".
The fabric of American society, such as we knew it in the second half of the 20th, is being ripped apart by forces individuals are utterly powerless to combat. Is it any wonder people (not only males!) find themselves at lose ends, vote for djt, etc.?
Was society in the second half of the 20th good? For many, emphatically not all, it was stable, predictable, offered opportunities for measured advancement. For others, life remained a stagnant ghetto backwater, off to the side of an apparent mainstream "march towards progress".
Without addressing the broader, endemic, and burgeoning inequality in our society, chummy meetings of "weavers", reminiscent of the quilting gatherings of yore, will get us nowhere.
“..you need a culture that celebrates cooperation, stability and committed relationships.
We don’t have that...”
We have socialism for the elite and unregulated capitalism for the working class and the poor.
3
Our founders left Europe because the economic system was rigged against the common man from birth. If you were born poor chances were you would live your life poor and die poor. The economic elites used religion to control the common man and explain to him he was poor because of his own moral failings. Not much has changed over the last 200 years in conservative thinking, rather than address the root cause it must be a moral failure.
1
Working in a dry cleaning store in my youth for $1.25 an hour, the owner, a survivor of Auschwitz and Dachau gave me this wise advice:
"Money is not the most important thing in the world. Your health is. But, if you are healthy, then money is the most important thing in the world."
2
I think you're going to see the rise of something called the "Engineer's Guild", the EG, or something like it soon.
We've had it. You know how this goes. We win!
We'll win this! When it comes to fighting for my compatriots, I will always win!
No idea what this is?
Us Engineers need a union. Like Germany.
“Capitalism does not permit an even flow of economic resources. With this system, a small privileged few are rich beyond conscience, and almost all others are doomed to be poor at some level. That's the way the system works. And since we know that the system will not change the rules, we are going to have to change the system.” — Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
2
Birth control for men and women would go a long way toward solving this problem.
1
We fail because we focus on the fleeting and not the culturally deep aspects of affect and meaning
1
Sounds like David Riesman’s “Lonely Crowd” turned on its head. We’ve tried “inner directed” and it just made us lonelier. Now let’s go back to being “other directed”—or this time shall we say “woven”?
I hope I’m being unfair; but the cute punning title “Weave the People” itself makes me skeptical.
I was wondering why all those RVs were camped in the parking lot of RFK Stadium. A convention of the Association for Applied Kumbaya, eh? Was that Mr. Brooks' motorcade I saw there the other day? As a resident for 30+ years of a neighborhood east of the stadium that's full of the kind of men Mr. Brooks visits with occasionally, I've been privileged to have a longitudinal view of the phenomenon that he knows, maybe, only in snapshot. What Mr. Brooks is working on is a short-term solution for the current generation. Good luck with that. Long-term, the solution is more autonomy, not less, to be achieved by equalizing educational quality across society, from early childhood on, to an unprecedented extent.
1
"A society is healthy when its culture counterbalances its economics."
Inane, preening smugness and empty gravitas. By the author of the immortal sentence: "They say you’ve never really seen a Bruce Springsteen concert until you’ve seen one in Europe." How does David Brooks presume to write about the mindset and the burdens of lower-class people? I will never know.
I call it out--this column looks down its nose at those who stitch jobs together because they have to in order to put food on the table. "Side hustle," sure. Men--always the men--dismissed for bouncing around, working off the books, acting "semi-detached." Indeed, Mr. Brooks.
I suggest we stop describing the less fortunate as less mature. The corrosion of global capitalism may be a crisis of character, but the crisis is among the wealthy, not the less well off.
But I guess when one profits by opining about the "Road to Character" that others should take it's not a side hustle. Many are not so lucky; instead they suffer this foolishness. Tragic nonsense.
1
David, I think you have it backwards. It is the capitalistic system that is detached from working-class men. It affords no pride or security.
I remember Mr. Brooks writing a lot about tribalism during the election and I often wonder when reading his essays on community how he feels the two concepts are related in today's culture.
“There need to be better economic policies, like wage subsidies, to improve these lives.“ Really, David? Tell that to your party and they will freak out. So much for this great economy, that’s leaving the middle class behind. WINNING!
1
Lack of attachment to religion. Maybe they grew up listening to evangelicals lecturing them about values and principles only to watch evangelical leaders abandon any pretense of religious teachings. Church should be a unifying force in a community but living in the Bible Belt I have observed that it is now a sorting structure. You are who you are by which church you attend, the bigger the church the closer to God seems to be the thinking, provide all kinds of services to its members so that they don’t need to interact with people who aren’t their church family, religious schools teach students that it is an ungodly world out there so stay in the safe confines of your group. When we moved to LRA the first question we would get asked when meeting new people, is what church do you attend. Expressing views which were perceived as agnostic/atheist is a sure way to end up as the pariah of the neighborhood, being Lutheran which evidently is a liberal theology didn’t open any doors either. Maybe David should try living in the south and experience how religion has become perverted so that he may develop an understanding of why the rise of the “nones” , those that choose not to be affiliated with religion. Religion has no one to blame but themselves for their falling membership, they aren’t practicing what they preach or worse, maybe they are.
2
What you weave you first have to spin. How Brooks can continue to spin and unspool cause from effect is truly astonishing. Sociopathic capitalism has unwoven society and left workers separated from work and their own self-concept through low pay, at will employment, and economic inequality of every strand.
1
The traditional value of the working class was class solidarity. This was the product of factories bringing thousands of workers together in one place.
In the 1930s, industrial unionization united skilled and unskilled laborers in working class consciousness and hatred for the bosses, scabs and cops. Mr. Brooks hasn't a clue that millions of Socialist workers had nothing but contempt for the bourgeois values he so piously wishes they would regain.
"A society is healthy when its culture counterbalances its economics. That is to say, when you have a capitalist economic system that emphasizes competition, dynamism and individual self-interest, you need a culture that celebrates cooperation, stability and committed relationships." –– David Brooks
David Brooks loves to posit the idea of opposing forces (like Bohemians and the Bourgeois) and then torture them into a new, imagined synthesis (like what he calls "Bobo's") and call it a solution. He like to imagine all-out wars that emphasize "shock and awe," overwhelming, massive firepower, and economic sanctions, but balanced with a "hearts and minds" initiative that celebrates self-determination, nation building, and social reform. You know, a "healthy" war –– robust and kind.
Mr. Brooks needs to live for a year inside the life of the average American who has to repeatedly trade his or her time and effort in order to make money to break even. And I don't mean just "work." I mean "struggle," for that's what it is. A week, a month, or several months might give him "an idea" of what it's like, but he will always be looking forward to the end of the "trial," and plotting his next book or article. No, it would have to be for at least a year in order to give a sense of what a worker's life looks like from the inside when there is every indication that this life will continue until the worker can no longer work. Think Sisyphus. Our system takes no prisoners.
3
We have that detached man in the White House! Brooks is smearing a very diffent group of men though. He’s smearing men who aren’t billionaires or debt billionaires but working class men whose jobs don’t pay enough to support their families.
Econimic stability isn’t everything but it is important to being able to living a good life. The more men and women are forced to work two and three jobs the less connected they will be to family and friends. May be if those churches you think are so important would stop attacking women for long enough to realize that the real enemy of family and community stability is the ego centric and anti worker party they all love, the GOP!
Mr. Brooks is kidding himself in a truly tragic way. William Powell and others decided in the 1970's to destroy the United States by creating massive deficits and unsustainable debt, destroy rational communication by erasing reasoned laws about the use of media and to crush serious intellectual debate by a culture of ridicule and denigration. Today Senator Mitch McConnell is a ruthless dictator who loathes working folk and seeks to divide and conquer them by peddling prejudice and religious bunk. Mr. Brooks 'Weave' is just 'Promise Keepers' or Jordan Peterson prattle by another name. You can solve all of this dislocation by a honest minimum wage and better education for all of us, not just rich Republicans.
2
@David Fairbanks
I'd say the culture of ridicule has actually worked just fine in reverse for decades. I shed no tears for the Democrats in this battle. And your rant convinces me of nothing but. hey, it's not supposed to!
Two words: higher wages.
If Brooks wanted to mount a crusade against gun violence and mass killings with guns, he would say: “We need to pray more for the victims and their families.”
If he wanted to lead the effort to combat opioid addiction he would revive the old “Just Say No to Drugs” campaign – it would be a brand new campaign called “Just Say No to Drugs!”
And while we’re at it: “Just Say No to Climate Change!”
And to remedy the crisis of working-class alienation, Brooks proposes an “event” at what is billed as the “epicenter of culinary creativity in DC” where 250 elite intellectuals will consume gourmet food and wine and listen to speeches!
Now that’s getting down to business. David, the working-class males of America salute you!
(I presume there will be a similar event for working-class females – perhaps at a posh spa in Malibu?)
1
What David Brooks describes is certainly true, but it is merely the working class male manifestation of a problem far more endemic, evidence the rate of singlehood and reluctance to have children endemic among urban, college educated people. There is a universal loss of innocence. It is not just God peopleno longer believe in, it is belief itself -- in government, people, relatives and friends.The greatest loss of faith has been in corporate America which runs on a model perfected in the concentration camps . Employees are human 'resources' -- disposable for any or no reason. Fortunes are spent on bogus slogans and team building yet everyone knows that these are as genuine as "Arbeit macht frei". This of belief in others is manifest in the arts, music especially. Music and lyrics of popular music through the late 60s were sounds of innocence, of a desire to relate and connect. One cringes at today's music; the crude vulgarity, the absence of poetry, the noise for noise's sake, the primal scream that announces that all hope is lost. We talk more than ever about appearance, yet we look worse than our grandparents did. We talk about sensitivity to various self-styled victim classes, not realizing that we are ignoring ourselves, and allowing our own cohesiveness to disintegrate even as we pay lip service to lionizing and fortifying the cohesiveness of marginal groups that have little if any bearing on normative life which is dying if not already dead.
Sounds like he is describing the Trump presidency to a tee:
"... at the very moment information-age capitalism detaches many working-class men from stable careers, the autonomy ethos teaches that it’s right to be semidetached, that the best life is one lived in perpetual flux, with your options perpetually open."
Unfortunately, the chaos Trump has created is actually being propagandized by the MSM as a successful presidency.
From conservative columnist Jennifer Rubin on the media's re-interpretation of a successful presidency:
"The media’s predilection for false balance and a weird awe of President Trump’s defiance of all moral and constitutional strengths (He defies conventional politics! He breaks all the rules!) leads to the “nothing matters” and “his base is still with him!” sort of coverage that seems to concede, even after the 2018 midterms, that Trump is politically successful."
Is it any wonder his base behaves the way they do?
Is it any wonder why we refer to them as the "forgotten man."
2
"There need to be better economic policies, like wage subsidies, to improve these lives."
How about the return of unions? Imagine if Walmart workers, to cite one possibility, were unionized. Not one mention of unions in this piece. How typical of Brooks.
2
Kinda what happens when the powers that be respond to competitive forces of globalization by taking aim at the lower half with extreme tax cuts for themselves and attacks on social safety net, on education, on healthcare, on anything that aims to help their fellow citizen. Kinda happens when they replace even quaint notions of "noblesse oblige" with paid-for mouthpieces that pit us against neighbor and stranger alike. They even monetize their miserable messaging. The rot is entirely at the head.
3
“I treat church just like I treat my girlfriends,” one man said. “I’ll stick around for a while and then I’ll go on to the next one.”
Is this not a quote from Noble Leader DJT?
Is DJT not the epitome of "haphazard self" ethos?
4
Unfettered capitalism = atomized human beings. Surprise, surprise. If you want to reweave the social fabric, David, you need to stop supporting the GOP policies that favor business over absolutely everything else.
Yes! A shift in the kind of men we admire and what sort we disdain. Unless we stop admiring people for making lots of money by contributing nothing, skirting the law and then declaring bankruptcy, we're lost.
1
Weave: The Social Fabric Project. Has anyone taken the time to google this organization co-founded by David Brooks? If one or two have, they may want to ask, “Why all the criticism of this piece?” Admittedly at first, this was not my favorite Brooks’ essay. Frankly, as a woman I did not want to have a half-sentence comment defining me as an ignored wife. But..that was until curiosity prompted me to learn about Weave. I think maybe we should put this column in the context of the above. It transcends politics, thankfully. We need to take a break from the horrible Trump and his gang. At least I do.
1
A double whammy from the "culture of narcissism" the bloody Boomers transformed America into on their watch. On the one hand, rich Boomers eviscerated the job prospects, towns, and marriages of working-class America to make more money for themselves with globalization and tech. Then, for dessert, they created a mass culture reflecting their own "looking out for No. 1" ethos. Christopher Lasch predicted all the destruction the Boomers were going to wreak on America with their grotesque self-centeredness in his class 1979 book. All the wreckage the Boomers would create with their selfishness was clear to see forty years ago. It's too late to try to put the narcissism genii back in the bottle now. Just ask Brooks, who wrecked his own marriage to "do his own thing," just like so many other selfish Boomers.
1
There are many many reasons why men and women have detached themselves from their communities, Probably the number one reason is they do not feel welcome. It’s a two-way street David. After this interview, go interview the other side and see what they have done to get individuals, all individuals, involved. You might find some are a little finicky. Honestly, I've never seen an American who wouldn’t help, even the poor bum on the street will help, but he/she senses your intent, almost like an animal, so you had better treat them with dignity. (And there’s probably your number one problem!)
1
Meanwhile, if selling stuff to China can no longer offset the waning numbers of individuals to whom capitalism's requisite "liar's poker" needs to lie, displaced men will soon be forced to cut their own grass again. A hands-on need which will stem immigration far more than good neighborliness building good fences.
David Brooks should stop blaming the victim and instead study the declining fortunes of the working class in our supposedly "booming" economy.
3
Lone wolf Trump is perfectly content puffing up himself. Why on earth do some Americans admire him? That's why America will never be great again with him in office.
Is “weaving” another term for community organizing?
I am all for connectedness, but don’t understand the difference, DB is describing.
Per usual, another blame game column from Mr. Brooks. Look at the main cause and you will find it's our ridiculous conservative values that are at the root. Combine so-called religious devotion with economic uncertainty and poor education, add in a little American selfishness, and there you have it. How about comparing the plight of the American working class with more liberal democracies and then you'd shed some light.
What does any of this have to do with the status of black African American men?
On the evening of April 4, 1968 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was looking forward to dinner at a local ministers home in Memphis Tennessee. He didn't make it.
And the Poor People's Campaign planned for the District of Columbia that summer lost it's moral spiritual charismatic influential heart and soul.
Dr. King's last quest was to unite the black and white working American classes along common educational socioeconomic interests instead of dividing them across color aka race aka ethnic aka national origin caste lines.
Black men in America still lag behind white men on every positive civil secular metric.
Most glaringly in mass incarceration. Black men are persecuted for acting like white people do without any criminal justice consequences. Thus 40% of the Americans in prison are black.
Even though only 13% of Americans are black. Prison is the carefully carved colored exception to the 13th Amendment's abolition of slavery and involuntary servitude.
But black male doctors and lawyers and scientists and engineers lag behind their white make peers and white men who are not their peers. High school graduate entertainers like Glen Beck, Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh are extreme exemplars of the type.
1
There's too much to explain to David here, so I'll just stick with one of the aspects of detachment he mentions: The Church. Organized Religion, Big Religion, whatever you want to call it, has been failing people for a long time now, and accordingly people are leaving in droves. Can your church talk to your boss and help persuade them to give you a raise? Can your church help you finance a newer more reliable car for your family? Can prayer save you from your back pain, since your company's health insurance isn't adequate? You can toe the line, work hard, show up on time, be a good dad and husband, and follow all the rules The Church lays out for you, and it doesn't mean squat when the bills come due, and you get laid off or downsized, or just never move up in your chosen field. David, your chosen political affiliation has been pushing the 'Power and Freedom of the Individual' for 50 years now. In reality it is an ethos of "Dog Eat Dog", and Caveat Emptor. Great if you're a Big Dog or rule maker, brutal if you're just average or a runt. Before you can claim to have evolved, you have to own up and admit to contributing to the malaise. And you have to go to CPAC to solicit donors for your 'Weavers', and get back to us on how that went.
I question your sampling technique---just completed the book, Blueprint by N. Christakis---an anthropologists whose descriptions of human proclivities---more cooperative than autonomous--is far different than the men described in this article.
1
"The lone wolf man has had his day."
A good way to get weaving at this proposed event might be to acknowledge that, in the real world, Homo Lupus Solus has never actually managed to have a day.
I'm sorry David, I don't carry change on me.
As a 79-year-old veteran, married, with children and grandchildren what I have witnessed for years now is this dynamic of complete disregard for courtesy, lack of empathy and regard toward fellow human beings. For example, someone speeding cuts you off and then gives you the finger as he flies by you. Privileged immature youths that believe they can do whatever they want without consequences. Regarding Mr. Brooks comments, we have since Republican ignoramus, incompetent, racist Reagan broke the unions, called for smaller government, cut money from the states and introduced this trickle-down economic scam that benefitted the wealthy over everyone else to what we have now a criminal incompetent enterprise. These issues are what he should be writing about not patting himself on the back for creating this think tank that will do nothing for the people it's intended to help.
1
" Boston,Massachusetts; Charleston, South Carolina; Chicago, Illinois; and the Philadelphia/Camden area of Pennsylvania and New Jersey. "
Is it really a "heterogeneous" sampling technique if we didn't even look to the Mid-West or West Coast for input?
Brooks is turning into a life coach now? Your party has created this havoc. Stop telling me and others how to "feel" and act. Your time would be better spent if you did your proselytizing to all your fellow GOPers. Tell them to stand up and be counted and do the right things for this country. Instead, you continue to "weave" a portrait of working class America, a state of being with which you have no familiarity.
3
No wonder Trump won. These men seem as unrooted and aimless as him. As Trump drifts from one manufactured crisis to another these men create their own individualized crisis within their family unit. Oh and so many lame excuses for their irresponsible behavior. They are Trump's core voters and they mirror the man himself.
1
The current occupant of the White House, and now the unchallenged leader of the Republican Party, is the standard-bearer for belief in the zero-sum economy: there are winners, there are losers, and you have to do anything & everything it takes to be a winner.
Not exactly a formula for building a community, unless it’s modeled after “The Lord of the Flies.”
3
Absolutely shaking my head in amazement that Mr Brooks just NOW understands this while thanking him for voicing what many of us out here in the USA having been trying to say for years. Capitalism without restraint will destroy all but the super wealthy, who will sit by, sipping on expensive liquor while they watch us poor saps duke it out for a bit of wealth. Clergy complain that men don’t take responsibility in church life anymore but refuse to acknowledge those men’s jobs don’t allow them the time to do so with employers expecting a good employee to be available at the drop of a hat all day, any day. Stable married life is nearly impossible when both partners have the economic baggage of things like student loans and are scrambling to find an elusive economic security that keeps being snatched from their hands.
Add to all this a thrice married leader who pays off porn star mistresses with money that he didn’t earn by honest means and demonizes anyone that makes him cross on any given day while the few good church goers left fawn over him as the new Messiah, I don’t think it’s any mystery why the culture no longer “celebrates cooperation, stability and committed relationships.” Welcome to the real world Mr Brooks.
2
Education could provide a sense of place in the world if early on it would include teaching civics and social responsibility. Along with an emphasis on compassion and empathy, education can foster in people a sense of self worth by teaching that actions have consequences and can make a difference.
Too often education is focused on fitting square pegs into round holes and fitting people into the workforce, but a sense of social responsibility can help foster a sense of belonging and self esteem. People need to know they have a place in the world and that whatever they are capable of contributing matters if they are to feel that they themselves matter. That, in turn, helps to foster heathy relationships and fights this sense of alienation.
We do not need churches to teach us moral values when those values can be instilled in the schools and in the home. The teaching of civic responsibility, personal responsibility and moral responsibility at an early age can help foster a sense of belonging and self esteem.
Add to that a fostering of creativity, resourcefulness, and critical thinking, and you go a long way toward eliminating the kind psychological predisposition that dictates feelings of being disconnected from which many people suffer today.
Social evolution has picked up speed in our lifetimes, and many roles are rewritten between the scenes. The question is whether the rewrites are whimsical spinning or if they strengthen the narrative arc. The answer is that it's hard to know because we are all players and spectators at the same time.
The social contract for men used to include access to a secure (although not necessarily fulfilling) employment to provide for their families and military duty on demand in exchange for respectability. There is no certain path to respectability any more, and that is partly because large segments, including most women, have withdrawn from the old social contract and would not grant respect to men based on the old rules.
Living a life without a known path to respectability is very much like ostracism and hurtful to the individual. But when a large number of individuals are removed from the path to respectability, social norms themselves lose meaning.
1
I am one of the men you write about. I am 66, work for a church for 10 dollars an hour, because I have to. I thought about being around the church more but when I see the Church Administrator pull up and park his black Porsche Boxster, even if it is a cheap one. I resent it very deeply. But there is nothing I can do. The law is on his side.
126
@roger I wish you would tell him how his car makes you feel. If he is a believer, he won't be able to dismiss the importance of what you are saying.
14
@roger mclain
Roger, you probably already know this but you are in the wrong job........AND church, but are stuck there because it's the only job you can find. My heart goes out to you, I have friends in similar situations. 2 choices, find another job/church, or stay......but whichever you choose, do the best you can at whatever it is that you do, and be proud of that for yourself.
Best, Mike
17
@roger mclain
Thank you for sharing this poignant image. I hope you get a raise. I’m sure that at least some people who attend the church would be touched by your story.
19
The part about the girlfriends really hit home hard. I'm a millennial woman, and even though I'm in favor of sexual freedom and making sure you attain your personal goals, I also really want a long-term, hopefully permanent partnership. But nobody else does, and that adds to the loneliness, because I can't really count on or make plans with anyone I'm dating. I have my own friends, but there's a certain level of support you can have with a partner (changing careers, going back to school) that just friends can't provide. This is the result of our ridiculous and hurtful "thank u, next" culture. And I completely agree: you can't have good relationships with your children without knowing how to be a good partner. We want all the benefits of love without any of the work.
6
It looks like working-class men detach from community because they are always working and exhausted and stressed. The solution is better pay and less hours. If a man with more free time, more money chooses to get involved in church or "Weaver" programs, great. But let's not dictate the terms of community in place of more money, less hours. It STARTS with a comfortable living wage, humane hours, universal healthcare, great education, accessible, cheap college. Legislate that. Side social programs that build community are a byproduct of above legislation.
6
The nature of the "side hustle" economy that has engulfed us is fundamentally different than the economic system I grew up in during the late '50's through the early '70's. My father always worked at least one part-time job, and sometimes two, on top of his full time job as a municipal fire fighter. During those years, a family of 4 or 5 could get by on a single income, although it meant having only one car and probably not doing a whole lot of vacationing. If you wanted more, like my father and many others that I knew of, then you worked part-time.
Of course the difference today is that our economy has been "restructured" such that a significant portion of blue collar and manual labor jobs are designed to be less than full-time. A job as a cashier at a grocery store or a floor clerk at Walmart is constructed so that you don't work enough hours to be considered full-time and eligible for benefits. You also don't earn enough on short-hour positions to make a living. The long-term problem with this is that in a consumer-driven economy, if the mass of consumers don't earn enough to consume, our "prosperity" will disappear.
6
Maybe it's a working-class thing, but I was struck by the observation that "Every week, it seems, I meet some young person whose life was decimated when Dad left."
In fact, women are much more likely to initiate divorce than men are, and it has been so for at least 80 years. Dad is less likely to leave, than to be left behind.
Part of the problem is that working-class men are less valued today than ever, at work, in the home, and by our whole society.
5
Brooks promotes a variety of interesting ideas. The problem with Books is always the same. The principal motive in psychology is our intuitive pursuit of survival and success. It is described in many ways, such as seeking to have a stake. Part of that is perceived opportunity.
People today feel they do not have a stake. Remember Marlon Brando's angry lament, "I coulda' been somebody."
The main thing that destroyed opportunity in the world, and that destroyed the growing American prosperity, was the neoliberal economics brought on, in part, by Nixon but mainly by Reaganomics and Thatcher, which Brooks helped promote.
Since 1980, vast wealth and income have flowed to the top. Everyone else has stagnated or declined. That is the loss of opportunity and the loss of a stake for most people.
Americans usually did jot talk about class war. We believed we were all part of growing prosperity. After the '08 crash and the Great Recession, we saw the vast growth of inequality. It was Warren Buffett who began the talk about class war. He stated that his class had initiated the class war against everyone else, and had won. Bill Moyers responded to Buffett and wrote the history of our current class war in his article in The Nation.
The founding document of our current class war was the infamous Powell Memo, his Marie Antoinette memo. Nixon appointed Lewis Powell to SCOTUS, and it's been downhill from there.
3
Bill Moyers in The Nation, 11/2/2011 -
"How Wall Street Occupied America"
http://www.thenation.com/article/164349/how-wall-street-occupied-america
Letters in reply 12/26/2011 -
http://www.thenation.com/article/165004/letters
Quoting from "Weave: The Social Fabric Project began with the idea that America’s social fabric is being ripped to shreds by distrust, loneliness, alienation, inequality, racism, spiritual emptiness and tribal enmity." The one thing that Mr. Brooks' Relationships Manifesto does not address is income inequality. All the other is fluff to make us feel good about ourselves and other people while we starve to death physically and morally.
2
I'm skeptical of Brooks's premise that a community's culture counterbalances its economic system. Much more likely is that the two evolve together, with each reflecting and reinforcing the other. Most important, I don't think you can change one without changing the other. You can't retain today's laissez-faire capitalism and simply change the culture to something more caring and cooperative. The reason is simple: modern capitalism demands companies maximize profits and therefore also maximize efficiency. This means companies must move, change, or reduce jobs whenever doing so improves efficiency and increases profitability. To the extent they can, they must also minimize labour costs. Employment is inherently unstable in this system and wages always under pressure. Communities and families break up when jobs disappear and people are left to choose between moving elsewhere to find employment or remaining where they are and sinking into poverty. Men who can't find jobs quickly become a burden to their female partners—usually creating more work for women and rarely providing sufficient help with childrearing and housekeeping. Moving a family to follow a job means separation from the support structures of neighbours, parents, and other relatives and is practical only for wealthier families who can afford daycare or the luxury of a stay-at-home spouse. So capitalism leads directly to the break up of families and communities—to repair those you must change the economic system.
2
The fear that many men seem to have of genuine intimacy is so common as to not be seen. This also, in my opinion, underlies their disconnection. The gender differences in the sense of self were examined in insightful ways in the Stone Center papers. Generally women’s sense of self is relational; men’s sense of self is more autonomous, and in fact in Western cultures, requires them to renounce connection precisely because a relational sense of self is deemed feminine. For men to be relational has historically been deemed to be weak, ‘gay,’ and shameful. This is also reflected by and in a patriarchal culture that currently is pushing hard against the equality of women and women having wider societal power (including present move to destroy women’s reproductive rights.). If what is relational has been seen as feminine, then to be masculine is wrongly seen as having to be the opposite, to be non-relational. This article makes this very point in noting that men may want to be connected to their children, but not to the women who they impregnated (once again, the woman becomes ‘just’ a womb, and not a worthwhile relational person and partner in her own self.) The MeToo movement has helped but change has been despairingly slow; and the current backlash (Kavanaugh and attacks on women’s rights, for example) is harsh indeed. Men themselves, those more ‘woke’, need to step up. And right now.
4
It does seem that the American style of capitalism has reached its logical end-state of alienation, loneliness, resentment, and cynicism. Unlike Europe and Asia, the US’s ground of being is an extremist version of individualism unlike any seen, I’d guess, in the history of our species. To some degree this was diluted by the necessities of agrarian life. The industrial revolution and then more developed consumerist capitalism purified it. Each against all is a philosophy that cannot support the kind of culture that Mr Brooks craves. I don’t know how to think about changing this, the more so at this moment when most of the powers that shape us press this radical individualism constantly, to the point where wanting the common good is ferociously attacked as socialism.
2
Though the current economy does function pretty effectively in its attempts to robotize the remaining human workforce-and this is certainly a depressive force in society affecting nearly all workers, I don't think it's accurate to attribute the fickleness of many American males to economic factors alone. American males of all economic classes have long struggled to remain attached to family and community, regardless of the state of the economy or existence of unions- which no doubt provide a bulwark against unmitigated power at the hands of amoral C student business majors. Still, how to explain the fact that most women, particularly those in the trades, remain attached to children and community and in fact seem to double down in such efforts of late with or without a partner? I think at its base it may come down to a simple sense of entitlement among many American males regardless of social class but particularly among the lower, lower-middle, and struggling middle class: to dip in and out, come and go as they please, show up....or not, take all they need while giving only what they must. Most women's marital, personal, social, and professional lives would be over inside of a calendar year if they behaved in this manner. Sense of duty, stability, oh dread....obligation; these are the boogey men of the weak, self centered American male, and the natural attributes of rational people everywhere, who don't need to be "woven in" so they can be more effectively controlled.
4
The most glaring example of the "haphazard self" in America is not even a working class, or working, for that matter. Perhaps a good start would be evicting the largest lone wolf, anti-community person in the village--Donald Trump.
6
Weave and capitalism are antithetical to each other. Since the rise of capitalism in the United States after the Civil War traditionalism has be overturned and overturned again. Traditional values are steamrolled by capitalism. It is one reason those who fled totalitarianism of Europe in the 20th Cent found it hard to acclimate to America. They were not to the extreme individualism of the United States. The current Republican Party shows what happens when you let it run amok.
1
The French sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858-1917) said the same thing well over 100 years ago: "Modern society is a dust heap of isolated individuals."
5
David, at Vermont Public Radio in the Brave Little State section you can find a podcast with this title: Vermont Hustle: What It's Like To Work 3 Jobs.
First line: There’s a joke about the employment scene in Vermont: “What do you call a Vermonter with two jobs? Lazy.”
All too revealing, right? I hear that mentioned every time I stream at VPR and always think, why is there not a Podcast: "Why should anyone have to work 3 jobs?"
Now to your article in which the word "women" appears exactly once. That says a lot, won't waste words explaining.
Hop over to Sweden. I think one could say that it is widely accepted that in Sweden the norm might be that both partners, man-woman, man-man, woman-woman, are expected to work.
This is not easy, but it clearly is a lot easier than in my USA. Pre-school child care is much easier to obtain. Six-week vacation is standard. Medical care is easy to access and is close to being free. A year or a bit more of paid parental leave is standard, and can be shared between partners.
And this fascinating detail, just my own observation, not yet a study result. I know or see many fathers who came here seeking asylum from all the well known places, now pushing a baby carriage, taking the baby to one of my coffee shop. Not sure they would have been doing that in home country. I do not ask.
Only-NeverInSweden.blogspot.com
Citizen US SE
9
Did the lone wolf develop in parallel to toxic competitive capitalism or because of it?
If we all live in areas in which we struggle to survive financially - our careers can be summed up as the was the Middle Ages as being nasty, brutish and short - does that drive the social disconnection Brooks writes about?
Personally I believe the concept of "He who dies with the most toys wins" and its corollary "He who has no toys is a loser" is the fundamental destabilizing construct in our society. It is sold as conservatism and libertarianism on FOX and in political circles, and is the chief influence against motivating people to be communitarian.
Social justice is for losers.
Brooks wants to return to the days in which tight religious communities were the underpinning of our society. But that ship has sailed - old community churches and parishes are dying even as televangelists and giant mega churches thrive. People move out of parishes, and out of small towns that had strong congregations. People who people those churches have moved on along with the livelihoods that kept them local.
If Brooks wants to find a central organization to gather around, he needs to help eliminate the central toxicity of our times. Divisive politics based on marketing to single issue voters; kleptocracy, oligarchy and corruption; and the dissolution of community through the dissolution of livelihoods.
3
“When its culture counterbalances its economics? “ When was that?
6
The United States is slowly creeping towards Russia-style Oligopoly, if Trump is re-elected there will be no turning back as he will further pack the courts. If you think it is bad now just wait 15 years when AI and automation has wiped out 15% of jobs across the spectrum. America is run by billionaire bankers for the benefit of the 1%. Our ignorance is their power.
6
Mr brooks have you looked at the role SSD as welfare for working class white males .What are consequence What is SSD role in opioid epidemic among working class males.
You know, David, you might want to actually read some of the Marxist classics, beginning with Karl himself. There you will find an explanation of the fundamental contradiction between capitalism and social integration, the much discussed alienation that cuts more and more deeply into American culture.
3
Existence before essence.
The material conditions of one’s life determine consciousness.
Sociologists have long known that women enjoy and value “enmeshed lives” while men tend to cherish their autonomy. This difference is quite visible in the animal kingdom, where many animal societies evince matriarchal structures. Historically, women have always been “peace-weavers.” In “Beowulf,” women function as peace-weavers by marrying men from other clans.
Sustained, reliable, meaningful livelihoods and incomes lead to better social relationships. Unfortunately, the last three decades have witnessed the accelerating transformation of the economy into an internet economy, which has degraded many traditional vocations and created a need for websites, internet commerce, and delivery services.
What is needed is a new version of the New Deal, including a contemporary version of the Works Project Authority, which would compensate unemployed men and women for services-oriented work.
Activate the trillions mouldering in bank accounts and mutual funds and use this stored value to actualize meaningful human activity.
1
What about the attacks carried out by the media and feminist on men in general? Bad boys just shrug it of but good boys can't help themselves. They either give up or have miserable lives.
I know a lot of guys that grew up in broken families where the mother turns the children against the father. It tears the kids apart. Boys begin hating themselves. Everything they aspire to as males falls under the specter of their no good father.
Is it healthy for the media to keep up the assault against patriarchy, males and masculinity? It's a no win situation for to many of us.
2
Men have ceased to operate and simply reached their expiry date. Finished. Done. Dusted. Why bother as women might just change libido interest toward objects of mechanical affection or a different gender than men.
The further and further we sink into out front misogyny, the more our culture sinks. As we see in the courts, men are getting away with sexual assault, they are promoting the idea of new and young conquests, states are taking rights away from women, SCOTUS likely to follow.
If disrespect and disdain for half of the population is the model, this is what happens.
1
His first premise is so flawed that it is laughable: namely, that late-stage capitalism today could be balanced by communal values. Capitalism is at the root of why men live lives detached from the common good--which begins with their detachment from families and neighborhoods and religious and civic organizations. And to lay this at the feet of "working-class" men is doubly offensive since corporate culture is rife with corporatists, both men and women, who have been trained to have no respect or time for the common good. His column is an insult to working people. His much-touted, self-serving conversion to a kind of humanistic ideal is absurd.
5
It is almost comical that a conservative or any mature person for that matter, thinks that economy and culture could stay separate.
7
"We have a culture that takes the disruptive and dehumanizing aspects of capitalism and makes them worse. "
Maybe, David, we just have the natural consequences of capitalism run amok?
Maybe, David, capitalism itself is the problem. It creates big winners and big losers based on, primarily, your birth parents and their wealth (not your hard work and smarts as those who win in capitalism would have you believe). Right? Jeff Bezos comes from a wealthy family in Texas that owns 40,000 acres of land down there.
Maybe, David, if we had a system that blended regulated capitalism in the sense that the fruits of creativity were shared, then, we would have a softer and kinder culture?
Maybe, David, culture and capitalism are not separable?
In which case, your life long love of Republicans, de-regulation, corruption, illegal activity and general corruption in the name of capitalism has been in vain.
I have watched the incompetent run American corporations in the dirt due to corruption and lack of capability for my whole career.
I watched the incompetent Bush (W) run the military into the ground in two Middle Eastern Countries. Most recently, Boeing has begun showing outward signs of the disease.
Capitalism, in the end, is just corruption/incompetence. And, corruption stays in the family.
Hence, those outside the corrupt, capitalist circle, are dirt poor and will stay that way. This makes life hard. And hard lives are imperfect.
6
American workers and families are being squeezed to their last breath from this form of rapacious capitalism that has taken control of the country.
I don’t recognize America anymore as a benevolent country willing to give everybody a chance to make a decent living.
Now everything has a a cost , a code , an aseptic way to rob you blind , especially in healthcare , where the health of a patient comes last , but costly and innumerable codes come first .
The top 10% already owns 70% of the country’s wealth , how worse can it get ?
3
The authors of the study admit to its statistical shortcomings, still the cause of the problem is already known:
The breakdown of the American family.
When the family is together, the odds of success for Mom, Dad, and the kids are much better. Programs and policies to help ease the American family's burden should be a priority.
However, with Dad gone Mom (usually) ends up poorer, and with the kids. Boys feel lost and drift to violence and drugs. And girls seek companionship that often leads to out-of-wedlock births.
Like President Obama's My Brother's Keeper initiative, the Weavers hope to connect men to each other and mentors. This should be supported and applauded
The role "Dad" should have played.
2
“Part of the work is to build thick communities across the country, so everybody, including detached young men, will have a chance to be enmeshed in thick and trusting relationships.”
Culture, like grammar, is descriptive, not prescriptive. The desire to “build thick communities” is wishful thinking. Culture is self-generating and self-defining, and is the result of so many uncontrollable variables that believing it can be “built” is fatuous magical thinking. “Social engineering” is an oxymoron.
1
I cannot help but think this is just another 'pull yourself up by your bootstraps' boosterism while avoiding the root cause of the problem beset on these men. None of this will solve the problem that the livelihoods of our middle-class have been destroyed in service to the special interests of corporate power and wealth. Even worse, they were tricked into supporting their own destruction with shameful lies and false promises peddled by right-wing propaganda. None of this feel good stuff will make one iota of a difference as long as this country continues with a national party devoted to the destruction of the rights, privileges, and protections middle class men (and women) enjoyed in previous generations.
You say we need to change our cultural attitudes towards men. How about we need to change our economic system, and our political system right along with it, to give these men the means and wherewithal to stand tall and define their own image.
2
And this differs from rich men how?
Or, looking at it another way, you're surprised that there are humans who walk away from what they view as a raw deal?
This article is sanctimonious beyond belief--a striking example of the very mentality behind what "these men" are detaching themselves from (and no wonder they are).
1
Then, David, you have groups, who sit around and doing nothing but find ways to trip up certain men, as in humans, or judge them. And these groups are usually the groups you are wanting others to join? We have a guy in our town who pitched a fit when they tried to turn the home of his neighbor, where a handicapped child had lived her entire life, into a group home for other handicapped. Just the model citizen.
Individual self-interest is one of the tenants of the Republican Party, and I wonder how these men vote, if they do vote. Their masculinity is tied to the belief of the American Individual, but we live in a society and they feel left out. These men and our country as well could benefit from caring more about the “we” instead of the “me”.
The study this piece references specifically selected men with at least one child, and who were likely to be "subject to a child support order (because they were not married to, or living with, their child's mother)."
It is invalid to extrapolate from such a focused sample onto "working class men" or society in general.
1
Let them eat culture! David Brooks discovers the harsh economic realities of working class life in America's Neo-Gilded Age and concludes poor men's cultural attitudes must be at fault. Ironically, he adopts the metaphor of weaving to solve this, where weavers were among the first casualties of the rise of Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution. His analysis and solutions are so wrong-headed that he's turning his commenters into "vulgar Marxists" insisting upon the determinism of the means of production in the first and last instance.
4
I'd enjoy seeing the demographic breakdown of Mr. Brooks' weavers...race, gender, socio-economic status, religious affiliation (or lack thereof), employment, education level. If it is a bunch of privileged elites or a cross-section of Americans who long for a kinder/gentler society.
1
Phewie! Talk about blaming the victim!
Back when NAFTA was being debated, I argued (with a Republican friend) that it would break our society as we knew it, rip families apart, and devastate our base of decent jobs. The R. friend disagreed, saying that in only a few very specialized job categories would this be the case. Now look at the pickle we're in, having given away the store to countries where wages are lower and environmental protections nil.
Charity is great, but if wages had kept up with what CEOs have reaped, the minimum wage would be $33/hour today, instead of $7.25.
7
Brooks writes, "In short, at the very moment information-age capitalism detaches many working-class men from stable careers, the autonomy ethos teaches that it’s right to be semidetached, that the best life is one lived in perpetual flux, with your options perpetually open." Brooks apparently has never sat in pre-lay off seminars or compulsory Unemployment Insurance job training where workers, male and female, are told that constant flux is the new reality. Some of these demoralized workers go to prosperity theology mega churches for sustenance only to be told that the money you give will be multiplied tenfold. Men and women are not widgets yet, big business including big religion has always treated them as such.
6
As a working class hero of sorts (retired) this doesn't sound like anyone I've known. And I've lived and worked in rural Alaska, Hawaii, Oregon and California; suburban Oregon and California, and NYC. Not one family in the middle class suburban San Francisco neighborhood I grew up in during the 50's and 60's went to church, yet we had an extremely tight knit community. We were in each other's pockets, as they say.
3
American Capitalists have far more in common with oligarchs in Russia, Saudi Arabia, Ukraine, China, and England than they do with the under and unemployed in America. The real problem for the alienated men is also the greatest threat to democracy and capitalism itself and that is the concentration of wealth in a shrinking minority that is walled off and immune from moral suasion, association with or proximity to the majority. The 0.01% do not know or care about normal people, normal needs, normal communities. Many in this very exclusive cadre consider their “charity” and “humanitarian giving” to surpass the taxes that they no longer pay at all. Brooks is on a threshold where he may learn that government is not the problem, government is the solution. If Brooks can put aside his prejudice about government and consider government to be a place where community can provide for it’s members. Corporations have taken that community away with money and asserted itself as the savior, “more efficient than government”. Government, our non secular community, “government for the people” is the solution after it is purged of the criminal element that has established itself in the GOP.
5
I feel so conflicted about this entire article. Here is why... I have been lucky to have a high tech job that for the last 30+ years has provided me with a great income, great career, great opportunities. But, I haven't held a job for longer than 4 years, most between 1 and 2 years. Welcome to the high tech, project oriented, workplace. Even top tier companies higher on demand, do a project, and fire on demand. Ever wonder why Facebook and Apple have so few employees? Welcome to subcontracting.
My dad used to change jobs every 10 years and was considered a job hopper. And, I truly consider myself lucky, because I have worked in a high demand, high tech, industry that has allowed me to take great jobs - they just don't last long. They also have allowed me to move around, as needed. The price that I have paid is less connection to the community. My one stable rock is my life partner of many years and my son. Without them, I don't know where I would be.
It's not surprising that men feel disconnected. Feminism has taken their dominant, traditional, role at home. The declining influence of the church has taken the traditional role of husband. Globalism has taken their jobs and job security. More companies provide fewer benefits and no job security, forcing folks to do whatever it takes. It's a race to the bottom, with men feeling displaced. Women suffer just as much, in different ways.
All these are signs of a changing economic structure with changing rules.
4
Talk about generalizations! Certainly, some working class men walk away from family responsibilities, shirk duties and are full of resentment. So do some professional men, and wealthy men--and women. Do we need a more connected, empathetic, and communal society? Of course, but look to individualistic capitalism rather than to the people victimized by it.
5
"Some found out they were fathers only years after their children were born... Naturally, if the men are unwilling to commit to being in a full family unit"
It seems that some of the time it is not the men wanting to commit to the full family unit. And it makes sense. Men born in the 70s or younger have been hearing their entire lives that women don't need men in the same way fish don't need bicycles. While the prior arrangement of male breadwinners and female homemakers was certainly patriarchal in its strictures, no one can argue that it sent the message that men don't need women. So if these men want to focus on the father-child relationship and less on the full family unit can they be blamed? Are they not following lessons learned?
Perhaps there is a sort of silver lining here. From those ‘lives of quiet desperation’, economic forces have forced men into a ‘masculine revolution’. Just as women realized they had choices, were more than a few stereotypes, these men are forced to pursue hobbies-as-second jobs, pursue ideas of opening a small business, learning tech skills they thought they’d never need. Economics has freed them from straight-jacket-suits, soul killing jobs, fears of losing raises, health insurance, bad efficiency reports.
Turning away from hypocritical religious institutions but not turning from a belief in some idea of God, shows they are grounded in reality.
Wanting to connect with their children but not necessarily the mothers of those kids- how is that different from those men who are serial practitioners of marriage and divorce? We change, we grow up, grow into new.
Weaving? Weave a new recognition to accommodate new economic, social realities. Don’t try to weave them back into that quiet desperation. It’s not going to work with women, so let these men be....many things, too. And weave truth into their children- tell them we from a different time watched parents stay together ‘for the kids’ , that was often worse than any form of separation.
1
So, what makes for social stability? Why aren't these working class men regularly attending church, getting married, and providing a stable home life for themselves and kids some learned only later in the that they had?
Nevermind these guys saying "the economy doesn’t allow them to provide the same standard of living that their fathers could provide." Nevermind that these "men feel that they have to have three or four occupations [to] can stay employed full time.”
Nah, forget even exploring that "feeling." Let's just go with the never-explained, "the researchers emphasize that while economic forces have disrupted the men’s lives, they are insufficient to explain the detached mode of life that has become common."
I am all for efforts to build community, but how about also showing some respect for what these folks tell us about their experience?
4
By this logic, if government and the economy was geared towards cohesiveness, wouldn't that mean that people can pursue their dreams and their creativity? As work becomes more automated, robotics more of a reality, the day is going to come where robots and automation services and repairs self-driving vehicles, homes, clothing and even consumable goods are 3-D printed, the prospect of a universal basic income will become a necessity. Would it not be best to teach people how to be enmeshed in society from this perspective? Being a respectable upright citizen of the 20th century is proving to not be what it means to be one in the 21st century, in terms of livelihood and lifestyle. As we watch the isolation of the younger generations caused by the digital world, presently, this is sign of what is to come. We need to bridge the gap of a healthy interwoven society with the increasingly isolated individual.
Mr. Brooks, I could not agree more with your comments and insights. While laws are an important element in a structured society, there must be respect for the laws and other societal institutions for there to be a stability. To respect the structures of society, there must be self-respect and respect for others. While this requires that each of us cede some authority to a higher entity, the responsibility that society works is still on us, the individual. Your journey from the purely political to a more spiritual focus provides a great benefit to all.
1
Even in the worst times, Americans found ways to be part of communities. Listening to the stories of my parents and grandparents and their struggles during the depression and World War II, I always understood that they supported and drew strength from their church and their community.
It's easy to say we are too busy or too stressed to do these things today but, honestly, if we just put down our phones and looked at the folks around us, we would see plenty of ways to engage. As Mr. Brooks points out, the benefits of this are endless.
2
the men you describe are cannot put it into words but subconsciously they know:
1. the economic system is rigged for the wealthy
2. they have no power
3. scarcity is real
4. climate change is going to change everything.... for the worse.
beyond that? the programs we need and the society you describe are alive and well..... in countries that are not scared out of their boots by the word socialism.
6
the men you describe are cannot put it into words but subconsciously they know:
1. the economic system is rigged for the wealthy
2. they have no power
3. scarcity is real
4. climate change is going to change everything.... for the worse.
beyond that? the programs we need and the society you describe are alive and well..... in countries that are not scared out of their boots by the word socialism.
Liberalism supported the erosion of family, mainly by caricaturing fathers and husbands, and encouraging their marginalization. But, sure, blame it on capitalism. But when the state replaces the husband/father, the problem is not the economy.
1
The state in this country is about as far as it could be from replacing fatherhood.
2
@Barbara Loutos
I suggest you reread that article, especially the part where fathers do not even know they have children. The lower the SES, the less likely a child is to have a father in his/her life. Fathers have been made dispensable by social programs and family law.
1
I read these comments by the men quoted as a lack of emotional connection that they are not willing to do the hard work required to have strong relationships. At least one man quoted that he "treats church just like I treat my girlfriends, I'll stick around for a while, then I'll go on to the next one." A pretty dismal comment.
On the other side are those men that have to work three or four jobs to keep their heads above water, so there is little time to devote to commitment to anything but their survival.
It is a poor commentary on our Capitalistic society that any citizen should have to work multiple jobs to survive. Our politicians, companies and labor unions have failed us. In particular our Politicians. They do not believe in a Federal living wage, they vote in tax reform bills that only benefit themselves, companies and the other wealthy members of American society.
The fabric of American society is almost completely ripped apart.
It will take more than the Weaving experiment. We need to start the weaving with our elected officials who are not doing the job that they get paid very well to do, thanks to the taxpayers. If our Leaders do not make a commitment to raise up our society by providing a decent minimum wage, fair taxation, forbid American companies from seeking out tax havens, and stop infringing on our ability to progress, these men do not have a chance to weave themselves back into society.
It takes more than a Village. It takes moral leadership.
5
Wage subsidies, huh ?
Why not just have a living wage, from the employer?
4
@I_morpheus
Exactly. Since the 80s the salary subsidies have mostly been flowing upwards, from wage earners to the C-suite crowd. Time things flowed back the other way.
1
H. sapiens has been around only 200,000 years or so. These things take time. Look at other species who, relative to us, have their act together. They've been at it for much, much longer. (Too bad that when we take ourselves down, we're going to take many of them with us.)
Daniel Bell in "The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism" made pretty much the same point 40 years ago. The values, ethics and and disciplines that supported capitalism are eroded by the raw self-gratification that capitalism promotes. And what do such an undisciplined and self-involved people do except become hustlers alienated from their own culture and past; unmoored from any traditional attachments to family, faith and community?
I imagine they escape into identity and tribalism to recapture what they have lost.
4
@BillAZ
The word "alienated" is a clue that someone (or two) else pointed this out in the mid/late 19th century.
"We have a culture that takes the disruptive and dehumanizing aspects of capitalism and makes them worse."
Well, well. I agree with this. And these are the core Conservative values, the goals that all real Conservatives strive for, and for several decades. This is the fruit the GOP has been cultivating since Grant was president, as the Robber Barons proved, as the current bunch of American oligarchs prove.
4
As long as our economic system enshrines hyper-individualistic consumerism as the driving value of the system, all the work of re-weaving will be constantly undone. We need to shift to Regenerative Economics, which will transform capitalism to build on nature's wisdom about regenerating webs of dynamic relationships. John Fullerton is the Adam Smith of the coming era.
1
Thank you for the essay and starting the Weave project. Many people excel at identifying problems; few have the courage to do something to fix them.
Good luck trying to change the culture! Especially the myth of the Lonely Warrior, long a staple of literature and popular stories.
Republicans use cultural issues to pick up voters, get them to vote against their own best interests, but in the end, culture cannot be legislated.
1
There are 168 hours in a week. According to you these guys are working a regular job and one or two "side hustles" to pay the bills. That has to be 50 to 60 hours minimum, throw in time for commuting, setup, cleanup and you get 70 to 80. Eating takes an hour or two even if you get takeout at taco bell or McDonald's. So we are up to 90 now. With all this hard work, I hope you will allow these guys five hours of sleep per work night (25 more hours) and maybe eight on weekends to make up for sleep deprivation during the week. (Add 16) . They are probably not driving new cars so you have to give them three or four hours a week to do maintenance, and I'm sure their wives/girlfriends want them to help with the cleaning, shopping etc. Okay we are down to maybe 25 hours a week, or 3.5 hours a day for family time and activities to recharge the batteries like talking to friends or watching a ballgame or going to a movie. Of course these guys are only getting five hours of sleep a night so I'm not sure how much time they will need to shake off the stress and strife of their 12-hour work days. The math just doesn't seem to add up.
I think the weavers need to weave about two or three more hours into a day or else weave together some CEOs and investors who will be wiling to share more of the spoils with the worker bees.
6
To say nothing of the working class woman....
She began first as a working housewife when the home budget required two cars instead of one, and a boat for the lake place.
Next came a full time job which often absented her from the home during those critical hours when the kids grew up to become the too often dissociated adults we see today.
There is no longer a "social fabric" to hold us together. I worry less about the men than I do the women in this topsy-turvy world professional subjugation.
7
True to form, Mr. Brooks blames those who have been most harmed by the economic policies he has spent a career advocating. In his world, it’s the fault of the laborers, not the system that has been stacked against them. As long as Uber’s early investors got rich, who care about the drivers struggling to make ends meet? Let have more tax cuts for the wealthy!
In this world, the wealthy would pay no taxes, but to relieve the (inevitable) suffering, good people like Mr. Brooks create foundations that minister to the poor, lecturing them about lifestyle choices and “thick communities.”
Mr. Brooks is like I doctor I know, the kindest soul, soliciting donations for patients who can’t pay their medical bills, but vehemently opposed to Obamacare.
19
We are in a sad state as a nation when CEOs earn tens of millions of dollars or more, and workers are paid an unlivable wage, retirees are forced to live in poverty or continue working until they drop, and young people begin their lives tens of thousands of dollars in debt that even Bankruptcy cannot erase. When I was in high school in the 60s, I read about Sweden. I should have moved there when I was young.
10
Aristotle said that we are social animals, but I wonder to what extent.
We are certainly not homo economicus; most work to live, and hate having to do that. Mea culpa.
We like variety and security, so we have to share our souls out to those gods. Which can easily get out of whack: too much or too little of each.
We are basically restless, frustrated, and, as Thoreau said, living lives of quiet desperation. One can see how, out of despair, people were caught up in the idea of heaven. This disappointing world can't be why we're here, right? And reincarnation? No, thanks!
We're made, it seems, to seek happiness; most of us find it in patches of our lives, and once tasting it, we are henceforth addicted, from babyhood.
One size doesn't fit all: We are all slightly different. Thus, it seems impossible that 7.5 billion people could find their individual happiness permanently secured.
Maybe this is a vale of tears. It certainly is for many of us.
Search for solutions we must, driven by pain and sadness, but your solution, if found, probably wouldn't work for many others, perhaps none.
It's a long, bumpy journey, usually embarrassing, at the least. For some, it's a nightmare's nightmare. No wonder many of us pray for the end of this hellish world and the beginning of the next, heavenly one.
It's the perennial battle of life, human edition.
Not to leave my very small audience, both of you, in despair, an exit does exist: Spinozism. That Dutch lens grinder figured life out.
1
Emotional detachment is a safer place than commitment. Work systems can seem harsh and uncaring if driven by rules and rewards for unquestioning conformity. If communities are rural and small it can be tough to find and participate in a piece of community that builds trust and a sense of belonging. How can every guy find a sense of community?
2
Wrong! Society is healthy when the LAW counterbalances the natural tendencies of capitalism. In the past, we had the SCOTUS labeled countervailing forces, which included union and worker rights, minimum wage laws, and disallowed things like forced arbitration for parties of unequal power.
When such rules are in place, a healthy culture will follow. Why? When people feel society respects them, they respect society in return. When they think society is on the take, guess what?
432
My 42-year old brother is one of the men Brooks writes about. Stronger minimum wages and worker rights won't help him, but a more connected culture might.
In his early 30's I tried twice to set him up in my company with an entry-level union job with strong wages and benefits. He turned me down both times in favor of the "freedom" of owning his own (now failed) power washing business. Now he picks up contracting and remodeling work from time-to-time, mostly for family and friends trying to help him out.
He's a good, hard-working man, but he is disconnected. He feels ashamed that he isn't more successful, so he doesn't socialize much. He's great with his live-in girlfriend's kids, but they know he's not their dad - and she knows he'll never marry her.
I agree that we need to strengthen worker laws, but what my brother needs - what I desperately try to give him every time we talk - is a sense of value beyond his ability to earn a paycheck; a connection to society based on his humanity, not his buying power.
We need a culture that values the honesty, goodness, and integrity that men like my brother offer, not one that simply dismisses them as underclass losers.
41
@WJL
In a democracy, law reflects rather than determining culture. The values and, consequently, the heroes praised by the culture determine who is empowered to lead and craft the laws. Sometimes conservative laws are the expression of a cultural backlash to the rapidity of change and at other times such conservative movements are evidence of the powerful nature of deep, persistent, and--often--misguided myths.
Brooks' theory here seems to be that when we realize how much we need each other the laws will shift to provide a check on the natural, if perverse, tendencies of capitalism.
9
@WJL
Laws only work when they reflect a healthy culture. Without a healthy culture, laws are ignored. The Trumps of the world ignore the law (tax law, the constitution) because the culture allows them to (40% support, Fox News). Limousine liberals may believe that if only they could pass the right laws, society would magically sort itself out. Don't believe the fantasies of lawyers. Only a healthy society consents to live by the rule of law. Strong leadership and cultural change comes first; laws merely cement the new culture in place.
17
What does it say about a society where pensions in the private sector are now rare and the government has abdicated educating its youth beyond high school? It says that our society has become every man and woman for himself/herself. Isn't that the Conservative creed that Mr. Brooks subscribes to?
81
For eighteen years, I've worked various surveys for the Census Bureau, visiting sampled households in my rural area to gather demographic data on a variety of subjects. By far the most difficult respondents to get answers from are single-male households. Especially young, single males. Exactly as Brooks says, the impression I get is that they think they live in a vacuum, unconnected to the world at large. Good luck trying to persuade them to do anything that might benefit the country.
8
In a society where manual and engineering skills are not valued anymore, depression in workers is the result (and it isn't just the men). Very little is made in this country, and machines, robots, and computers are doing much of that work now. This economy is making money for only a relative handful of people, and it poisoning the rest of us with under employment. You can't be proud of your skills and productivity if there isn't a job for you, and you can't get a different job because vocational retraining is not free here.
Indecisiveness and detachment are classic symptoms of depression. People who have depression can't exercise "personal responsibility" and self-discipline (so these people who claim it is a moral failing should shut-up and fix the problem), because the brain energy isn't there. It is not a moral failing. It is a disease caused by too many vulnerable people in helpless, hopeless environments. We have a selective economic depression in all skilled labor jobs, and it is causing depression in tactile, kinesthetic, manually-oriented people. Skilled labor is part of the daily sensory diet that keeps us engaged and happy. If someone doesn't feel capable, depression and despair is all that is left for them.
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@Sarah McIntee Thank you, Thank you, Thank you!! I couldn't have said it better myself.
9
@Sarah McIntee
Don’t fall trap to that “trap”!
You've given new (and probably valid) meaning to the term economically-depressed.
4
A bet a large number of white working class women are in a similar dilemma, or worse. But they aren’t thought of as working class and so are nearly invisible. Always have been. When middle or affluent women talk about affordable child care I always wonder who will be providing that service? It will be working class women. Talk about being disenfranchised!
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@AG I'm convinced white women, like members of minority groups, are raised to be more resilient in the face of adversity. To expect it, plan for it, and steel their minds for it. That doesn't solve everything... there are problems too big for the individual to solve alone.
But it's a buffer. It means that a problem is just the problem, not the problem plus thwarted expectations of something better.
4
@AG Brooks would say that what separates women from men is they are the backbone of religious institutions.
2
@Maria: Traditionally, men have been expected to be successful, while success has been seen as an exception for women. This might be changing, but the change is not complete. A man who is not successful feels like less of a person than he should be. I suspect this state of mind doesn't impact women as much as men.
5
The expendability of America's labor force, and corporations' lack of any felt duty to them, their families, communities or institutions was overlooked in this article. My father and three uncles worked with their hands their entire lives as journeymen in unionized jobs. They built houses for their families, attended and contributed to local churches, participated in civic activities and sent children to college. They often worked overtime hours, but at increased rates of pay, and by their own choice. None of this would have been possible without the power of the union, and its moral impact on their employers. Union and wage suppression, lack of job benefits, summary job loss, corporate indifference to the communities where they live, and the transfer of produced wealth to CEO's and shareholders are the reasons for working-class detachment; it's a survival response to a hostile environment.
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@Bill Harrell I worked for a company for 13 years. Those represented my prime working years. They downsized me 3 months shy of my 55th birthday. That was 6 years ago. Since then I've struggled to find a steady job. We're told that there are tons of jobs out there, especially in STEM fields. I used to work in one. I've applied to tons of jobs. I've had interviews that went well. In the end I'm rejected because of my age.
Our politicians worship the corporations that donate to them. They worship the rich families that donate to them. The rest of us don't exist except as annoyances similar to gnats. There is reason people feel alienated. We work and we're kicked in our teeth when we're down. We see the lies in action. Unemployment is much higher than the official rates. The comparisons of our poor to Africa's poor mean nothing unless you're an economist comparing one society to another.
I doubt that Mr. Brooks has known a single day of unemployment, of worry about where his next paycheck is coming from, where he's going to sleep, or if he can afford medical care he or his family needs. In short, Brooks is living a wonderful life. Most of us are not.
20
@Bill Harrell
You see this only from one perspective, but in fact there are two. It's not just employers that feel no duty towards employees; the reverse holds as well. The workers want to be able to jump every time a new better deal comes along without much regard for how their departure impacts the employer (I gave you my two weeks'; what more could you possible ask for?). Under these circumstances it is unreasonable expect employers to feel any long term obligation to the employee.
2
@Bill Harrell Cause and effect is in play here, as it is everywhere. I have no idea what you're talking about when you say "the moral impact on their employers". Corporations, by their own admission, are merely profit-maximizing machines... they can have no morality. Everything is a tradeoff. The effect you saw was a temporary economic retreat to prepare for larger gains reaped by relocation, automation, or some other shift. Unions stressed the machine, it responded and the stress became part of its operating environment. Your projection of feelings onto that machine are misguided.
I think Brooks means well, but until he is willing to look honestly at the flaws of capitalism and the Republican Party/conservatism, he will continue to miss the essential points of what ill our country.
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@Doodle
I think that he has and is looking at those flaws but is working hard (too hard perhaps?) to avoid using language related to parties because that works in opposition of his goal of stitching people together rather than rending them asunder. He has moved substantially away from his more consistently conservative blather over the past 18 months.
13
@Doodle I think he hates what Trump is doing to the country and the Republican party and he is trying hard to understand and not do what Trump does (and many liberals, too) and paint things as black and white and simplistic.
6
@Wanda
Thank you, Wanda. Those of us who have never been Republican are waiting to see where the line is. Can Trump really shoot someone and get away with it? Maybe if that person was a lib or brown it would be justified.
3
Brooks consistently deflects by suggesting spiritual solutions to problems that really need political solutions. It's a conservative cop-out.
21
I am struggling to understand why the side hustle, a perfectly predictable and normal reaction to our present version of capitalism, is somehow something to blame on the employees rather than the corporations who have abandoned long-term commitments to their workers and to society in favor of a quick buck. Collective bargaining is all but dead, thanks to U.S. capitalism and globalism; the social safety net is endangered by conservatives, and disruptive industries have created a gig economy where the side hustle is the only venue. How on earth do these giant economic trends, fueled by uncontrolled corporate greed, end up as character flaws for smug pundits to blame on ordinary workers?
591
@Paul Rossi, I agree. The system harms all of us, including blue collar workers. I am a woman but fit some of David Brooks's categories. I long ago gave up on organized religion. I am divorced but my husband had a fairly stable professional career. We had joint custody and lived in the same neighborhood initially. Both of us were committed to and spent time with our children, I didn't work until my youngest was three but I worked in a high school so my hours fit well with my children's hours. I have a pension, a 401k, and Social Security but still will have a hard time if I need extra help or different living arrangements as I age. I worry about my children who have professional jobs but no pension. Their jobs are less stable than their parents' jobs. I doubt their retirement benefits will support them in retirement as well as mine has. I like the idea of restrained capitalism with an adequate safety net. We need to realize that there will always be people who can't work or who can't make enough money to survive. We need compassion and financial help for those people.
41
@Paul Rossi Well said! Thank,you.
9
@Paul Rossi - It sounds to me like the men interviewed for this study were taken from the inner city. Chicago is a big place, full of working class and middle class people. It's also heavily Catholic, with many thriving churches, and has strong neighborhoods.
And why is a second job for working class men called a 'side hustle' with it's negative connotation, but not for middle class men who need to do the same thing, and just as often off the boards? eBay is made up of these people. Likewise Amazon Marketplace, which boasts an incredible number of working class, middle class and college grads trying to hit it big as resellers. And why only men? I know many women who work one job and sell makeup/art/cooking utensils, etc on the side, trying to pay the bills. I know others who work two regular jobs. I cringe when elites talk about working class or poor people, because they only know them in the abstract.
As far as the church goes, I'm an atheist in a working class, church-going town. I've spent thirty years looking after numerous elderly neighbors, helping them around the house, in the yard, driving them places and answering calls for help when they fall in the middle of the night. Their adult kids are usually very active in the church, Bible study groups, services three times a week - three have been deacons and/or youth group directors. I wish their ties to mom and dad were half as strong as their ties to their churches.
12
Do you ever notice that the wealthy, overly educated and powerful cannot but help preach to the poor and unfortunate about why they find themselves in that state. The powerful never seem to grasp that the policies and laws they champion are the reason so many people are poor and uprooted. What moral compass points inexorably toward another tax cut for the very wealthy, while watching your neighbors slip further into subsistence and/or poverty ?
16
David truly admirable thoughts. It reminds me of the summer I worked during college at a welding shop that fabricated tanks for the auto industry back in 1968. The work was hard, dirty and repetitive but i learned some valuable lessons working with these guys many of whom did not graduate from high school. With few exceptions they worked hard and they were supportive of one another on the job and off. I especially recall a big teddy bear of a guy I'll call "Andy". Andy was not as the expression goes the brightest bulb in the box but he was kind, affable, honest and loved movies. One day he forget his lunch box and his wife showed up with his two young kids in tow to hand him his lunch pail. He introduced me and I got to experience watching this man interact with his family as he sat and ate his peanut butter sandwiches and recalled his favorite scenes from the movie "The Mighty Joe Young" they had watched on the tube the night before. No it didn't make me want to be a welder but inspired me to aspire to more than just a good paycheck.
Today I would imagine these guys sitting around the lunch table heads buried in IPhones. Their wives have jobs outside of the home and they both come home exhausted, mumble a few words at each other, have a quick meal and head off to bed only to repeat the same thing the next day. This is what we have become, but we own three flat screen TV's and can see our way to vote for the most anti-social man in the country as our so-called president.
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@Steve
That guy was probably in a union, or if not, supporting an industry that had them.
32
@Steve
And you think what you describe in your last paragraph is only going on with manual labor workers? We need to be careful about class prejudice and imagined assumptions here.
11
@V.B. Zarr
I think that you are over reacting a bit. David's article was about blue collar men, a specific segment of our work force and my comment was not attempting to address what white collar workers or the unemployed or the poor may do.
6
David,
I think you're missing something.
No matter how connected one may feel, celebrating Christmas with the whole family is not feasible if you don't have money for gifts.
Joining a church that meets on Sundays isn't feasible if most Sundays you're working (cleaning someone's gutters, fixing their sink, etc.) because you need the money for rent.
Being a trustworthy and loving partner for life isn't feasible if you can't help in an emergency because your bank account is tapped out and sometimes your car won't start and you can't afford to get it fixed.
Income creates opportunities if you have it. But not having it destroys relationships, hopes and dreams.
So until we get out from under the thumb of Neo-Liberal/Movement Conservative economic "principles" There's going to be a lot more "bowling alone".
496
@laurence What you have described is exactly what black men have experienced for generations in the economy due to rampant institutionalized racism. It is very interesting to see how much a concern it becomes when such forces start undermining white familial relationships as much as they have black ones.
27
@laurence So true.
And some would argue the much more expensive and elaborate houses and cars and stuff we have is part of that picture, that high cost of the middle class lifestyle.
But in reality the high cost is largely about the high cost of living in good school districts as families bid up prices of housing in good school districts, and of ever rising medical costs.
As Elizabeth Warren (writing with her daughter) pinpointed so accurately already back in 2003 in her powerfully accurate analysis in "The Two Income Trap".
9
@laurence
More than that, not everyone values what David Brooks values.
3
When corporate CEOs make 250 times what the average employee at their company makes, it’s no wonder working class men need to take on multiple side hustles to earn what their breadwinning father’s did. David Brooks, how about addressing income inequality as a root cause of the alienation of these 107 random men, not their spirituality and loss of community connection.
638
Precisely. If these guys were not spending their time dreaming of possibly unrealistic careers, or their last waking moments trying to earn enough to make ends meet in part- time work that would be a problem too!
13
After WWII, my father and men like him found themselves without jobs. They took anything. My dad drove a truck selling salad dressing. Others became carpenters and put up Levittown. They got their GEDs if they had left school to enlist and, like my dad, then took college courses for years to become mechanical engineers.
What they had to hold them together was a sense of family from (often immigrant) parents whose good parenting gave them some rootedness. In turn, these men married, more often than not stayed with their wives, and in the main were good family men.
Parenting. Almost always what matters.
8
@B., you forgot to mention that jobs were more plentiful then and government help was more available. There was also the GI Bill to help with college, FHA to help with housing, and medical bills weren't over the top. They didn't have health insurance but doctors carried many open accounts and patiently waited for people to pay. It was good for most families but we have moved far from that time.
30
We need government policy that encourages the best in our culture, not the worst. Being rich is a metric that confers the assumption of success and talent. But many of the very wealthy, Trump being a prime example, made their wealth skirting or breaking laws or exploiting loopholes.
In the meantime, the minimum wage hasn't risen in decades and it's no longer a living wage. How can anyone feel dignity in work if it doesn't pay the rent?
12
It is no coincidence that the structure of communities has fallen apart at the same time that capitalism has run amok.
David, go talk at your CEO friends. They are the problem. Their ethos is what needs fixing in this country. It's not the fault of the poor guy juggling three jobs in a community where the only major employer left for Mexico.
Funny (not) how this complaint sounds so much like what was said about black communities for decades. White folks said it was black folk's own fault. Now the same argument is being turned against the white folks. Because the right wing has painted itself into a corner with their beggar-thy-neighbor policies, and has no where else to turn.
716
@Thomas It does make you wonder where Republican leaders can go from here. It is hard to believe that simply blaming Muslims, Mexicans, and Black people will keep helping them deflect the anger of the white working class for the damage they have done for very much longer. But I may be mistaken.
17
@Thomas this reminds me of what was said about the latter part of the baby boom generation. The big difference is that now we have at least 2-3 generations suffering for our political shortsightedness. The reason we don't know each other is because we're too busy trying to survive.
I remember knowing all of my neighbors. I remember knowing that it was safe to wander through my neighborhood, ask to use the phone if I needed to, or take shelter with them if it rained and I was a bit too far from home to walk without getting soaked.
America has become a country that refuses to take care of its own unless they are rich. If you have a ton of money you can get whatever you need. If not, you're told to drop dead.
18
@Thomas You miss the point. When the right was excoriating the blacks, it was all their fault. It was inherent to what they are. Now that it's whites, the fault is external. Brooks nowhere says "those terrible working class whites, they have no morals."
12
As many have pointed out, Mr. Brooks is missing the point. The culture comes from the economics. When the entire system is based on the market, and how it is all knowing and all powerful, the culture is the same, it's a market, and it throws out what it doesn't need. As has been pointed out many times, this works neither culturally nor economically. It's quite good at generating stuff, but its often not stuff anyone really wants or needs, and no one ends up happy. Economically or culturally.
On another note, why only men? What about working class women?
9
"Culture" as Brooks fantasizes it is not independent from the economic system. The economic system is in fact the fundamental expression of a culture.
9
"It’s not working, even though the men have the best of intentions. This way of being too often leads to an alienated life. It certainly doesn’t work for the children."
This may well be true. But working class women face the same economy, and are paid lower wages, as well. And somehow they manage to keep their families together and raise their children, often without a male partner to help. They understand that "intentions" don't matter, and actual work does, no matter how back breaking.
This is not an apology for our current economy. It is vicious, it is corrosive to human relationships, it is predatory. I'm in my sixties. I recall when the economy was much more fair and equitable. I remember a real middle class in the 1960's and 1970's. I recall when families could spent time together every evening and weekend. This way of life is a pipe dream for most families now.
But I find it difficult to feel sorry for many men who are now caught up in this economy. After all the majority of them have voted for Republicans whose policies have created the very economy that has treated them so poorly. They continue to support Trump in numbers far outstripping women voters.
So I just cannot feel too badly for many of these men. I'll reserve my sympathy and concern until the time men in this country actually begin to vote for representatives who will protect their rights as employees, and who are supportive of their families.
664
@DB Cooper Perhaps you can feel sympathy for the women who are forced to go it alone as a result of the dynamic Mr. Brooks describes, or the children who ache to be close to their fathers. Men may shoulder some of the blame for their failures, but the effect hurts more than just them.
6
@SP,
I certainly do feel sympathy for the women and children who suffer under these policies. This was my point.
19
@DB Cooper - Hear Hear! Your last two paragraphs sum up my thoughts, which are based upon witnessing many blue-collar friends (mostly male) vote against their economic progression due to emotional immaturity. Trump figured out how to manipulate that emotional immaturity and take male laborers down his rat hole.
I have empathy for their plight, but no sympathy for their condition, as it's self-inflicted due to low cognizance and associated poor decision making. It'll happen again, don't worry; they are too predictable.
20
"That is to say, when you have a capitalist economic system that emphasizes competition, dynamism and individual self-interest, you need a culture that celebrates cooperation, stability and committed relationships."
This makes no sense at all, as if the economic system and the "culture" in which it is embedded are completely detached entities. I guess David is pining for the state of affairs 100 years ago, when after 6, 12-hour days at the mill, you get to spend Sunday mornings with your family at church. Now those were the days! If an economic system routinely degrades human dignity, then why would anyone be surprised that the result would be hordes of grumbling, disenfranchised souls? There is a type of support group which does address all the ills Mr. Brooks writes about and it's called a "union". It was unionization that helped create the post-war boom and it's demise under the GOP and Saint Ronnie heralded the despond we now find ourselves in. David however, would never seek out this simple remedy, when there are plenty of unproven others that won't cost the capitalists a penny.
799
@Anti-Marx
A grotesque assertion quite consistent with your moniker, but the sad fact is that America's "volunteer" army is largely a product of de-unionization. Many young people in once thriving, but now economically depressed regions have found a career in the military to be their only salvation. However, as a soldier in the US armed forces, in life and death they remain largely invisible and are casualties to whatever policy blunders the administration at that time conceives, with no say in the matter. Essentially, they are mercenaries. Those in power are quite happy with this arrangement, since their children will never be called upon to fight and they can continue to make money hand over fist, with little risk to themselves or their families..
129
@stan continople
I was going to write a comment along the lines of yours, but you have said it so well there’s no need. I’m an academic specialist in economic sociology who finds David Brooks’ attempts to explain social disintegration without looking at underlying economic and political forces maddening. In addition to the disappearance of unions, this includes continuing attempts to dismantle the social safety net that remains the last lifeline in many blue collar and rural communities.
You can’t “weave” together a broken culture without focusing on these realities any more than GW Bush’s widely mocked Thousand Points of Life was able to. Both are political justifications for doing nothing while blaming the victims.
166
@stan continople
Thanks for your eloquent posts. The one about our "volunteer" army is particularly haunting - I remember one summer, living up in the Adirondacks - hearing the myriad ads to "join the National Guard" or this or that branch of the military, and thinking...well, I guess that's about all these is to do to earn a wage if one lives around here. Just imagine what a civilian conservation corps could do instead, if we replaced the $750 billion plus annual war budget with domestic work.
28
The world is changing faster than we can digest. We are no longer a country of farms, no longer a country were young men left high school and went into the factories. The financial crisis hastened that process and effected men more than women. The new world is one of technological and greater demands for an education. In the last 50 years women have taken on a larger role in this new work environment. The traditional role of the male is changing. The new society calls for a lot more sharing of family responsibilities. Maybe a lot more house husbands.
2
The bottom line is that there is no substitute for living a life of meaning, whether that meaning is based on religion, belief in god or other purpose which is larger than ourselves. If your life has no meaning it is much more likely that you will drift toward a life whose only "purpose" is maximizing self-gratification.
3
" Mr Brooks column assumes his hypothesis that "A society is healthy when its culture counterbalances its economics", is correct and works from there.
Its the old story ....if you start from the wrong place the directions are unlikely to get you where you wanted to go.
Working class men are working several jobs because their main job does not pay a living wage. When you work 70 hours a week at 3 part time jobs of course you become disconnected from your family - but at least the electricity stays connected.
For many years Mr Brooks has pushed the policies of the GOP - which have led directly to the position we are now in. Massive wealth inequality. Oligarchy. Labor laws and unions have been gutted, free market capitalism has been allowed to run rampant and the rise of the religious right has shaped modern society. Its like living in the last 10 minutes of a monopoly game.
Ironic that Mr Brooks calls his "club" Weavers. In North Carolina the textile industry has been gutted, filleted and relocated to China, Vietnam etc. There are no Weavers left.
Maybe Zeppelin builders, or Dodo pluckers would be a more apt name for his society.
10
The notion that culture needs to counter-balance the negative social effects of capitalism takes us back to Burke's REFLECTIONS ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE and to the Adam Smith of THE THEORY OF MORAL SENTIMENTS. While it's an attractive notion, there is something essentially wrong-headed about it. The point of capitalism is that it colonizes all aspects of life and disrupts them. ("All that is solid melts into the air," as Marx says.) It submits ever atom of our being to the market. There is no way that "culture,' however loosely defined, can counteract the powers of capital. When men--and notice that they don't include Latino men in their survey--become fungible vendors of labor, when they are reduced to mere commodities, is it any surprise that they treat others as instruments, not as people. How can you expect loyalty from people who are so easily discarded--and who know it?
4
While labour is as crucial a factor in production as the capital yet, due to the distorted production system and skewed market, it is the latter that becomes decisive under the prevailing conditions of the unbridled capitalism. To change this culture of dehumanisation and alienation the skewed relationship between the capital and labour-the main factors of the economic production-is to be corrected,which needs just economic policies and not hollow suggestions for the community building.
9
The assumption that capitalism is one size fit all is a wrong assumption - broadly there are two types of capitalistic society - family based and individual based. We assumed individual based capitalistic system and type of policies and regulations we practice are more geared towards the individual rights - gun right, divorce right, women right, children right, religious right, right to information, right to privacy, - all are geared towards individual autonomy. In this environment how a person practice and develop attachment to family values. Today, in American society there is no mechanism to teach a child the family values. In this context, how you expect them to display family values in their adult life. They never learned to share their happiness and grief, their belongings, their emotions, they never was asked to giving and loving others without motives, they never suffered as a child because they cooperate with others. These are subtle values of human development and only systematic maturing these values create permanent impression in human physic. It is now too late to change the course - our individualistic social and economic system is deep rooted. Only way we can moderate the negative effects of this forces is to think of a future society that is build on better individuals - an autonomous man full of love, empathy and enlightenment - the man who has deep understanding of spirit, a man who knows thyself. Buddha wanted to create that type of man.
When David Brooks declares that the "lone wolf man has had his day," it's not clear whose perspective is being referenced--Hugh Hefner's, perhaps? Few women have thought that a "lone wolf" would make a good catch.
1
@Melissa
Um, there seems to be one in the White House. And plenty more in CEO chairs, including the Silicon Valley and social media Gold Rush, etc. Why Mr. Brooks doesn't see the connection or comparison, and IDs this as a working-class or working-poor phenomenon, is truly puzzling.
Our individualistic culture and tribal tendencies seem to be at the root of the problem, but the solutions offered such as meditation and mindfulness training so many wonderful writers, thinkers, and researchers, all seem to be missing an important piece - that of true self reflection and evaluation - what that is and how to do it. It is hard to train yourself to truly open your heart to others if you aren't trained to effectively take a good look in the mirror every night and acknowledge the good and bad in what you have done that day, and your promise to do hopefully do better tomorrow. I think the this act was traditionally trained and internalized as the confessional part of traditional religion. As religion has faded, for many valid reasons, from our lives, we have not yet found a way to train and internalize ourselves and our children in this fundamental act of self reflection. We can't expect to ask others to look at themselves if we don't know how to truly do it ourselves or at least have a fundamental and agreed definition and description or language of what it is. I wish some of the wonderful research and writing would focus more on that.
5
@susan p.
Thank you, Susan P. The issue has something to do with the inability to engage in serious reflection, not to mention personal reflection. It is one thing to reflect on events happening around one, it is more challenging to consider one's own behavior and how it affects others.
A young woman graduating from university this Friday, tells me that people her age are very much afraid to be alone with their own thoughts. To the point that they avoid any kind of introspection for fear of what might surface as a result of doing so.
If that's true, then to me---that's disappointing and frightening. But the culture has also taught young adults to be like this, to be afraid of their own thoughts and to avoid any consistent act that might lead to self-awareness. So my question is, can people change if they do not know what they need to change? No wonder people suffer from disconnection, loneliness, and for some, depression and other forms of mental illness.
1
David Brooks writes that "The researchers emphasize that while economic forces have disrupted the men’s lives, they are insufficient to explain the detached mode of life that has become common." Here's what the researchers miss: As individuals, we use what’s visible to explain our supposed choices, even though there are so many invisible forces, such as early experiences, inter generational trauma, displacement, economic hardship and so on that render our choices less choice and more inevitabilities. So the men explaining their lack of willingness or disinterest in community is their use of what’s visible to them: lack of economic stability and failure to support their families adequately, and justifying their detached behaviors after the fact, in order to save face and hold onto a modicum of self respect. In other words, they look at their behavior, and are trying to make sense of it - it looks like they just don't care so that's how they explain it or perhaps protect themselves from the pain of their disconnection. But that they are just "detached" cannot be true...nobody would "choose" detachment over community, it's antithetical to human nature.
7
Let's do the math: 107 men out of 320 million people may or may not be indicative of a trend, but I get Mr. Brooks' point. He is actually butting up against the our biological imperative that has men out hunting and fighting while women stay with the children and keep the village working. Maybe he just read Mrs. Clinton's book, It takes a Village.
Stable men have stable relationships. Stable men come out of stable relationships. Stable families have wage earners, a place to live, food to eat, health care and education. No matter where you take Mr. Brooks' premise, you end up back where we should be: supporting our communities and supporting our population so that life, liberty and the pursuit of a happiness belongs to all of us, not just the wealthy ruling class.
Mr. Brooks should have a lunch with AOC, then let's see what he writes.
23
How different are these people from people in the 50’s and early 60’s? Watch some of the serious dramas in movies and on TV from that period. Even a series like the Twilight Zone, underrated for its view into the dysfunction and anxieties of that time, gives you the confirmation that 2019 is no different. Somehow a large number of people have created the fiction that that period was some kind of Golden Age, destroyed by Ronald Reagan and evil plutocrats. While we think of the Fugitive as an action story with Harrison Ford, the TV series plus others like Route 66 gave pretty grim views of people facing serious problems. Martin Milner and David Jansen ran into a lot of losers just like these guys.
2
"... get people to think differently. ..get more people to see that the autonomous life is not the best life. The enmeshed life is [best]...the weaving man is what we need, the one strong enough to bind himself into a community."
This is simplistic, black and white thinking. Poor people with enmeshed lives will still be stuck with crumbs. I guess Brooks holds the vulture capitalist view that society's ills are not the government's problem.
I'm not rich, but I like my autonomy, and I don't want to have to depend on the kindness of strangers.
9
@DL
From my reading of this column, Mr. Brooks is saying that people should be kind strangers, rather than depending on kind strangers. Everyone exercising their autonomy to the fullest, without connections to a web of others, leads to Thomas Hobbes’ state of nature where “life is nasty, brutish, and short.” Helping out in a classroom, being a Big Brother, volunteering at a food bank, etc., all work to help everyone have a better life, both the helper and the helped. And, with such connections, it makes life a little better for most of us. Someone getting food from a food bank is less likely to steal to get money to buy food.
It seems to me that the premise of your column is fundamentally flawed. Why would one assume that in a healthy society, culture should be imbued with qualities that are directly opposite to the values embedded in its economic system? Isn't it more likely that culture mirrors economics. As you mention, our capitalist system, as currently structured, disrupts the lives of workers, robbing them of their dignity and breaking their emotional attachment to work, family, and society. Their work is devalued, as reflected in stagnant wages and emotional detachment from their jobs. There is no longer any sense of common enterprise. As income inequality soars and the creation of wealth seems to depend more on cunning and celebrity than work, the work ethic is itself devalued. The "side hustle", as you call it, is a desparate reaction to that economic reality, not some unrelated cultural or moral failure. I don't see how one can change a capitalist culture through artificial means without changing economic policies which shape and inform culture.
23
I don't actually believe that "A society is healthy when its culture counterbalances its economics," but if you do you might consider changing the economy to counterbalance all these problems you are describing.
13
I'm very curious to know just how these 100 or so working class men were selected. Because I know plenty of "working class men" and what I know doesn't line up with this research.
3
David Brook’s columns columns often remind me of my grand father, who complained about change, both good and bad. The world is constantly changing and old, traditional ideas are not always golden. The role of religion is largely insignificant. David Brook’s idea of broadly blaming change for all ills is not intellectual.
3
@Jay
I particularly find Brooks' quaint idea of an idealistic, religion-centered culture so outdated it is laughable. Also, he does not seem to appreciate the impact this new iteration of robber baron corporate greed has had on workers, formerly lower middle class, who have had their dreams destroyed and are struggling to survive on minimum wage, or a level not too far above that.
8
"That is to say, when you have a capitalist economic system that emphasizes competition, dynamism and individual self-interest, you need a culture that celebrates cooperation, stability and committed relationships."
Isn't that a prescription for a society that produces schizoid individuals who aren't very likely to be able to mesh into a coherent family or society? Can we really be totally different people at work versus at home and in the neighborhood?
11
The part of the equation that is missing from Mr. Brooks' article is the female perspective. Women's expectations play a big part here. They grow up expecting to marry a breadwinner, a man who works steadily and supports the family. The result of men unintentionally having to hustle and change careers is dissatisfaction on the part of their partners. Would a wife be happy under these circumstances? Would a girlfriend want to marry a guy who can't support a family? It will also strengthen the bonds between the woman and her brood, further alienating him.
2
Weave? I don't think this is a term that will ever appeal to haphazard working-class men. I'm not sure they would even define the term clearly enough to want to be part of a 'weave' group. Let's develop some 'government supported' social policies that provide training and jobs that are meaningful to anyone who wants to work.
7
@elained
Yeah, seriously. To bandy that word around in that way, and think that's going to fly, reveals pretty much zero life experience of socializing with the men he describes. It's not the most important point here, but it sure is a real red flag indicator of how out of touch Brooks is with the people he's pontificating about.
What some people don't seem to get is that the society and culture we've got is what's been modeled and legislated from the top down - in this country it's every man and woman for themself, grab everything you can, while you can. Capitalism as we know it in the U.S. is broken and unless our politicians and enough of those of us who vote them into office come to realize that unfettered, unregulated, profit is the only thing that matters capitalism is not a healthy system, our society and country will continue to deteriorate.
12
This is a wider casted take on the general weaved v atomized thought. With 14/7 commerce ( stores and restaurants open 9 am - 9 pm ) and everyone’s attention on their smartphone screens it is hard to convene socially, leisurely and civically. Workers in our service economy which includes retail, mechanical, health care and trades no longer have weekends. The 5-7 pm at the local watering hole is gone. Many no longer know what a Sat-Sun weekend means. For Professional and Career types there is the email/text leash of their colleagues keeping aim on objectives and collaborating on projects. Kids are over scheduled and receive/feel the pressure of measurable accomplishment rather than learning/doing/maturing. They too are deep, deep into their phones as digital natives.
14
So basically these “detached” young men don’t want the jobs they are qualified for, which don’t support the unrealistic lifestyle they’ve come to expect from social and broadcast media. But at the same time those low wage jobs no longer support a substantive and decent lifestyle—-one that, albeit less bling-y, still enables and informs a more ordered and engaged personal life. That’s how people become woven into the sturdier fabric of society; the nexus of personal responsibility and the social support to enable it. In other words, a good school system, reliable and affordable healthcare, job training and apprenticeships and higher education that doesn’t cripple their futures with debt.
Capitalism plus religion is not a magic formula that can substitute for social policy that provides the rock steady support on which people can build their futures. If the quality of our social fabric is shoddy we should first examine the warp yarns that are supposed to be fixed and give a strong foundation to the weave. An increase in the national minimum wage to a living wage would at least be a start.
34
Detachment -- it's a cycle. It begins with an economic order that needs its own Weavers to provide a thick layer of opportunity. A layer that includes blue collar men. It is FDR's and Eisenhower's economy that found a role for blue collar men. Not the economy produced by Reagan and Clinton.
When blue collar men struggle and find themselves unable to provide for themselves, let alone for a wife or children, they struggle to reinvent themselves. They fail to find opportunity for their reinvented selves. So they walk away.
This happened in the late 20's and early 30's when young men living in a society with an economy based on unregulated capitalism and inequality took to the rails and lived as hobos.
Mr. Brooks, look at what your conservative order has wrought.
39
I think your biggest problem in getting people involved is we seem to have a “respecter of persons” problem, probably sown in the churches whom you are looking to help in the problem. David, having been the sibling of not one, but two handicapped siblings, I have a unique perspective on how people treat others. That, and, the younger generation seems to trip over the older generation, if you listen. Sure you’ve got a problem, but it’s probably not the fault of those whom you interviewed.
3
"That is to say, when you have a capitalist economic system that emphasizes competition, dynamism and individual self-interest" you wind up with the nightmare we have.
27
Lone-wolf life styles involve loving the cubs but not the mate. One element of this trend is that women no longer embrace dependency on men as in prior generations. The concept of a homebound wife in an apron focused on domesticity has gone the way of the dodo. That woman enabled blue-collar men to believe they were essential, even dominant. The 'little woman' was the invisible ideal around which they formed a purpose and identity. This 'head of the household' mentality also denied women a sense of equality. That concept has disintegrated along with the income that supported it. But some men don't want to alter their expectations in the home. They don't want an equal partnership with a woman as it undermines their status. Kids are ok. They see Dad as the top dog he imagines himself to be.
19
What could be an interesting discussion is hampered in this essay by inherent weaknesses: 107 interviews isn't enough to draw any kind of conclusion about societal trends; the idea that the attitudes of these men is new is not supported by anything cited in this essay—there is no comparison study from years past to support the argument.
16
Ideally, I think we need this proposed community mindset, which I applaud, to affect our economics. Call me a radical.
"There need to be better economic policies, like wage subsidies ...," David writes.
Really? How about, instead, a culture that says ii is not OK to pay working people so little in the first place? Do we value education? Then shouldn't we demand that teachers' pay reflect our values? Is a living wage really too much to ask for?
Bottom line: There is no reason in the world that CEO's have to be so disproportionately well-compensated that their workforce is forced to rely on government subsidies -- at the expense of each and every taxpayer.
66
Capitalism is not the problem here, culture is. Capitalism allows individuals to pursue their own self interests. It promotes the division of labor & enables skill specialization. It’s an economic system but not a cultural framework. Our culture promotes abortion, Godlessness, abandonment of religion, extreme violence, and disintegrated families where fatherless children are the norm. Given the latter, it’s easy to make capitalism the scapegoat but correlation is far from causation.
A sample size of 107 out of roughly 80 million employed adult males also seems ridiculously small. I can easily point to many working age males without college degrees who are successful adults. They own businesses, work in good jobs, have families, and look nothing like these disaffected interviewees. Seems more like a study with a predetermined outcome looking for validation.
12
Opening paragraph is a boomer's fallacy. Economics drives culture in a total capitalist society.
Money isn't real, its just something we all buy into. It represents trust. That a hyper-individual economy could exist healthily over a supportive community society is cognitive dissonance.
A culture of community wilts in the winner-take-all economy; life inevitably becomes about ripping people off in order to make enough money to raise a family. Work paid hourly is a losing battle.
Though fleeting, something akin to what Brooks describes may have existed in the immediate post-war New Deal era of his youth. Reaganism killed that in the pursuit of infinite profit.
To a millennial who's only known post-Reaganism, Brook's sermonizing is beyond embarrassing. It's actually frightening.
34
@Sam
To a boomer who remembers pre-Reaganism, Brook's sermonizing is beyond embarrassing. It's actually frightening.
5
While I don't necessarily agree with some of his points, I truly appreciate these pieces by David Brooks. I also appreciate that the Times supports these kinds of interesting and broad contextualizations of contemporary society, culture, and politics. With that said, here is my disagreement with this particular observation. Mr Brooks states:
"A society is healthy when its culture counterbalances its economics. That is to say, when you have a capitalist economic system that emphasizes competition, dynamism and individual self-interest, you need a culture that celebrates cooperation, stability and committed relationships."
While I do agree with that assertion in a way, I don't know what culture he is referring to. If we were-- in the Adam Smith sense of the term-- a "capitalistic economic system", then I agree. However we are a sort of vulture plutocracy built around a war machine with a working class and middle class culture that has been struggling post-Reagan. If anything our culture has transformed into a sort of consumeristic "me and all of my stuff versus you and all of your stuff" environment where we battle one another in the vacuum of the competitive labor market. We have seen the decline of "cooperation and committed relationships" since the disempowerment of unions, environmental rights, community boards and so forth in favor of neo-liberal policies and privatization.
25
Consider the wealthiest urban neighborhoods in the 60s, Upper East Side NYC, River North Chicago, West Side DC, Beverly Hills CA. At the time, only 20-30% of residents had college degrees and the working class was socialized in the neighborhoods. Laborers, academics and white collars living in the same building.
Adjusted for modern dollars, the average and median household income in those neighborhoods were $60K-70K/year, with a national median of $50K/year. Today the average and median in those neighborhoods are over $200K/year with a national median of $59K/year. Over 80% have college degrees.
Over the last 40 years the businessman and academic have fused into a well-graduated, well-credentialed super-professional. Competition, dynamism and individual self-interest have depreciated non-technical, non-cognitive labor power in the ever more advancing technological landscape that has maximized productivity by inventing and employing automation.
Everything is dandy if you're part of the innovation economy. Home-ownership and marriage are up, children out of wedlock and divorce are down. The exact opposite is true for communities blindsided by this economic shift. They are products of the competitive but fluid system.
The lone wolves, are now happily espoused home-owners and eager to continue highly-earning. They owe their well-credentialed status to lenders that have generalized debt.
Wolves and lambs voting on what's for dinner. The result won't be riveting.
15
Interesting but not an unusual result from the study that has its problems. "Black and white working-class neighborhoods of Boston, Massachusetts; Charleston, South Carolina; Chicago, Illinois; and the Philadelphia/Camden area of Pennsylvania and New Jersey" is not really representative of the US. I agree on one of David's points, a individual person's work is no longer valued and neither is community or personal involvement. If you are just a disposable widget in your employment, your community or your interactions with other people, it doesn't do much for your outlook on life.
9
I would support 2-year national service opportunities for all young adults. Politically we could never make this mandatory but if these opportunities provided similar benefits as military service (salary, room and board) and focused on infrastructure, trade skills, community projects, education of disadvantaged, care of elderly and disabled, the return on investment in societal benefits could be enormous. These young people would grow in maturity, appreciation of diversity, learn the power of cooperation and community and hopefully carry these new attitudes and skills into the next phases of their lives. The only candidate I’ve heard propose something like this is Mayor Pete Buttigieg. He has my vote.
23
A lone wolf in America speaks:
Why am I a lone wolf? It's something I am called by others, not something I chose for myself. Why am I called this by others? Because power in society, for all technological advance, all scientific advance, all artistic advance, all social, economic, political advance, does not use these advances to truly determine the incredible diversity of human ability and try to form humans into increasingly effective teams to solve humanity's problems, but uses these advances as much as possible to reinforce presuppositions of what teamwork, society, collective action, group over individual or lone wolf thinking is, and in end does nothing but continually prop up itself under guise of being the responsible course of action for society and humanity as a whole.
By all our advances today we can get clear pictures of every person in society, determine with great accuracy potential of every person, and consequently get tremendous grasp of all the types of teamwork that can be formed, not to mention forms of teamwork for the betterment of humanity, but power resists such examination for the sake of itself, preserves privacy for itself, and puts itself forward in a curated, controlled, and branded fashion, and decides what group behavior, teamwork is along quite presupposed, in fact archaic lines if we take into consideration religion, and brands anyone who doesn't go along with its decisions as being too individualistic, selfish, outlaw, lone wolf to society.
3
Add in the 50 y.o. cohort who were eased out of their jobs ( so called - downsizing/ early retirement ) who may or may not still have a family to support but whose prospects are dim in terms of any sort of career or parallel status pursuits ofttimes. Ageism creeps in and it persists, nobody is getting any younger but society generally opts to incorporate youth.
7
@Will Eigo This is true. There are many college educated men out there who never found employment that justified their educations, so they drifted. Now they are approaching their 50s and, while they might not realize it yet, they are becoming unemployable.
3
Sadly, as long as Mr. Brooks and others continue to toot the horn of capitalism, a system of economics without the moral rigors that a democracy requires, these men -- and women -- will never get back on track. In a few short decades capitalism has come to define what too many Americans value. Not so many years ago we defined our society as a democratic system. No longer. In fact, this almost sounds self-righteous, doesn’t it?
14
Was there a disparity in the research based on race and geography, were all men born in the US or some first generation Americans and was research based on extensive interviews or questionnaires. Not a very encouraging or hopeful piece for those facing challenging economic and cultural times.
2
This article doesn't go far enough, because it doesn't look at these men as agents of disruption. Just a small example... back when I lived among them and was one of the women they dated, I noticed that the first thing that happened with any new relationship is that I lost control of mealtimes and hours of sleep. I had a fixed schedule for work, and they didn't, but they messed mine up rather than using their flexibility to match it. All of them.
That sense that everyone needs to adapt to them is why they're going to be the first people chased out of workplaces and churches as well as relationships. Or, if they stay, they'll chase everyone else out and break the organization.
I'd note that this behavior is normal for teenagers of both sexes. But you're supposed to change between 15 and 35, and it seems that these guys aren't changing.
25
I like the idea of making men feel part of a community and commit to a community but the men Mr. Brooks describes are simply immature and lack self-efficacy. They don't want to grow up and are unwilling to commit to something because of a string of failures. I see this thought process develop in high school and college students. They want to check out from formal society and believe that they do not need school. This turns into a life of living on the outskirts of communities while trying to be a part of a community. The same problem exists with women too.
8
We have gone from a country of self motivated responsible individuals to one of entitlement seekers.
Promoting further public assistance programs would only amplify the problem. Do we need to rethink our educational system and eliminate the chasm between the workplace, and the feel good education that is touted as preparing individuals to enter it successfully? Absolutely, we do. With this we need extended child and eldercare, what we do not need are to promote handouts.
2
@George
You must be talking about the handouts and entitlements for corporations and big farmers, right? American workers need good paying jobs with benefits. Have you looked at the distibution of wealth in America lately? As far as education, when was the last time you visited a classroom?
3
@George ridiculous, typical gop strawman argument who exactly is asking for a handout?
1
@George
How do the nordic people live so awesome, yet few are religious and few are nutso capitalists?
We suffer as a community when we turn our back on an institution rather than trying to fix it from the inside. It seems cool to walk away from injustice or hypocrisy, as if we are taking a stand. Wilhelm Stekel: “The mark of an immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.” I hope the Weaver group isn't trying to re-invent the wheel, but is looking at how established houses of worship can grow imperfectly, how scouts and other civic groups can serve local needs. These groups are not perfect, but building from within a group can reap a lot of benefits.
3
I am not sure any conclusion can be drawn from roughly 100 interviews. Certainly no policies should be formulated. It certainly warrants an expansion of those interviews to find out if his conclusions have merit. We know we can paint an entire sex with one brush. We know we live in a society where many people are damaged. From the President to many in the Congress to our states, cities and neighborhoods, people are not well. We see the destructive behaviors on all sides. How do we change a society whose behaving at all levels the way it is? It will be difficult because the people at those levels would have to look at themselves and admit they should change. Unlikely to happen.
3
In America, our spiritualism is being driven by the TV preachers pushing their Prosperity Gospels. They don’t address their followers real needs, but feed them excuses that blame minorities and coastal elites for all their problems. Weavers sounds like another “non-profit” excuse to hold retreats, sell books, and solicit donations. Labor Unions are the better option. They can directly address the real problems of working people.
21
It seems to me that the "autonomy ethos" that David Brooks seems to feel causes much of our societal problems is simply a response to a dysfunctional society. If community, church and business provided these men with enough of a feeling of security instead of massive anxiety, they would most likely stay within its confines. But, in a society that labels people as disposable, Mr. Brooks blames the people and not the society. I would have expected more from him.
10
Mr. Brooks mistakenly imagines culture and economic systems as opposing forces. This is incorrect. Culture is what grows in the space left in people's lives by economic reality. The men Mr. Brooks describes as "lone wolves" are the discards of winner-take-all capitalism. Their way of life is the culture for which our economy leaves them space. Without major financial support from corporations and government, no amount of weaving can undo that.
24
Kintsugi is the ancient Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum. In someone else’s words, the art of embracing damage. Making something old and valued new, functional and even more valuable. What's been broken are our values. What's required is our ideals and compassion as well as our actions.
Hopefully the effort described in this inspirational piece is a good place to begin reweaving and transforming what's been torn in our society into what becomes treasured once again.
8
Unlike the boo-birds that populate the comments section of David's columns, I tend to appreciate and agree with much of what he writes. However, in this case I have to take exception to what David says about organized religion. The fact that many men do not wish to ally themselves with a church (or synagogue or mosque for that matter), is not necessarily indicative of some sort of decline. Western, or Abrahamic religion, is of a piece. There are other approaches to spirituality, most notably those found in India, that are very, very different, and which do not necessarily require a building to participate in. In fact, through those paths one can discover that the entire world is one's community! And not just those who go to this building or that one.
7
"The researchers emphasize that while economic forces have disrupted the men’s lives, they are insufficient to explain the detached mode of life that has become common. Cultural forces have also played a role, namely the emphasis on autonomy — being your own person, focusing on your own personal growth, shucking off any constraints."
This is not new. Robert Putnam's "Bowling Alone" has never been more relevant: the disintegration of social clubs, unions, and other programs (many funded by the state or by non-profits reliant upon state funds to keep them going) has been steady over the last two decades. It's the product of capitalism, yes, but also Reagan-era Republican policy that believed charitable and social organizations already ensconced in their communities were a drain on the government. Coupled with the rise of the internet and wide-reaching, but decidedly individualistic, means of communication, our palpable, day-to-day networks are no longer the same. There is no "rise" in this detachment; it is the inevitable fallout of an insidious, slow-moving but lasting perfect storm of poor policy and unpredictable cultural evolution.
12
What I find interesting in Brooks' column is that he is, as usual, proposing what is an essentially communitarian solution to a rather real issue: the sense of alienation and detachment caused in part ( I would suggest largely) by economic injustice and a failure of the current legislative bodies to address them. That the resulting alienation and detachment have what can be seen as "ethical" and "moral" consequences is pretty obvious.
David Brooks, though, also as usual, makes the consequences the cause, and reduces the cause - the essentially sociopathic nature of late capitalism - to not even a cause, blaming the "culture" for failing to celebrate a particular set of moral values to which he ascribes.
I simply can't understand how Brooks fails to recognize that communitarian values and solutions have been crucial to every progressive movement in the United States - from Abolition to LGBTQ rights; from the fight for workers' rights to the struggle for immigrants' rights. I appreciate Mr. Brooks's belief in community. I would suggest a good place for him to start is for him to start listening to The Weavers - Pete, Ronnie, Lee and Fred. They can tell him about community.
16
“The lone wolf man has had his day; the weaving man is what we need, the one strong enough to bind himself into a community.”
Fascinating take away and a whole lot to unpack there. Living on\off the grid by choice or necessity comes to mind.
1
Same as it ever was. A hundred years ago most labor was seasonal and men were often absent for long stretches. Henry Ford had a program where he would double a workers wages if he would live in a permanent home with his family and work for Ford full time. It was that hard to get men to stick with one job long enough to benefit from training.
11
What is a healthy psychological "self" in America? How do we arrive at a nation of optimally functioning human beings? What does it mean to find the golden road between developing human individuality and social responsibility, being a team player on team America and team humanity?
My answer, and coming from a person who is a high school dropout and has been accused of being lazy, selfish, not a team player, and a lone wolf is this: With each passing day we arrive at technology and science and art by which we can chart in exquisite detail the trajectories of human lives and natural events in time and space, and can get a clear picture of the best of humanity among us, yet the powers that be prefer to use all of this technology to protect themselves in their "privacy" (permit no true picture of themselves) and to put themselves forward in vastly curated, branded fashion, while using this technology to spy on their own citizens and to compress, form, organize, control their citizens so that their own power is not compromised. Power in short fears all of our human advance by which we can a better picture of the truly worthwhile people among us, those truly deserving of being known and emulated.
Let's take Russia as an example because it would be too painful to use America: For all of the millions in Russia, all the cultural/scientific/technological advances which occurred there, all the great humans which can be potentially known, we have Putin sitting on top squashing all.
7
I like the analysis but effecting cultural change takes decades of consensus and effort and can't be accomplished with bi-monthly meetings at a diner.
9
I'm not so sure this text is a reliable estimation of what American males go through. For example, the authors state "we are not drawing on a representative sample. Our interview subjects do not include working class men without children, or from smaller cities and rural areas, or from the western or south-central regions of the United States. Moreover, men in our sample are more disadvantaged than a simple random sample of men with a high school degree but no college diploma, in part because they were all living in cities where many traditional working-class neighborhoods were in decline." Does that sound comprehensive to you?
Moreover, in their conclusion, the authors state "we believe it is too soon to predict how these changes will play out over time as society adjusts to them." They also offer what they call an "optimistic reading" of their findings: "working class men are now sharing in the autonomy and generativity that was largely the province of middle- and upper-class men in previous generations. Moreover, the interest they show in being involved as fathers and in helping others could represent a widening of the boundaries of masculinity in ways that are more consistent with contemporary family and work life."
So why the negativity? I suspect Brooks sees an opportunity to push his eternal (Small Town USA + folksy togetherness) > (Big Cities + evil individualism) trope.
5
I agree Zack that there's not much to this study. If you want the full national story on the withdrawal of working class men, read Timothy Carney's book "Alienated America."
5
If weaving cleans up problems that individualism makes, the weavers will fail. They need to be involved when the problems are being created, not just cleaning up after them. Their involvement will be experienced by individualists as preaching or enforcing unnecessary rules, and is generally successfully resisted.
The weavers have to have a voice in economic decisions so the decisions balance general welfare with individual profits rather than being guided by profits and leaving the general welfare to be managed by the Invisible Hand or whatever. This voice does not happen when corporations move out without worrying about whether there will be anything around that their workers can transition to, and especially when they have resisted any expensive government efforts to aid a transition.
Culture and economics influence each other in complex ways; if well-paid lifetime jobs are not to be had, autonomy is forced onto people whether they want it or not. And if autonomy is inevitable, people look at the bright side of life and seek values that will help them survive.
9
107 respondents, that's it? Seem like an awfully small sample size to arrive at such a broad range of conclusions. Peer reviewed? By who? I'd like to learn more about the specific sampling process. Hard for me to believe the results as presented.
20
@Holmes - I agree and I am sure many others will too.
Here is the opening sentence in the article David Brooks uses:
In this essay, we explore how working-class men describe their attachments to work, family, and religion.
In short, the authors do not even use the standard opening line, The goal of this study was.
They tell us right away, this is nothing more than an essay.
The title may have attracted Brooks, but if he could not find more substantial studies of the subject, he should not have written his own "essay".
It happens right now, except for this coffee break, I am editing a manuscript for a Swedish medical research team, so I am not taking the time to read The Tenuous Attachments article available in pdf.
Maybe later.
I have a comment awaiting review.
Only-NeverInSweden.blogspot.com
Citizen US SE
3
@Larry Lundgren and Holmes
A Brooks essay atop the Edin et al. essay just gets us to more vague ruminations about what's happening on the ground in the U.S. and beyond. Brooks' gauzy focus on "working class men" sounds more like an attempt to atone for completely missing why Trump won. As you may recall, Brooks emphatically and intentionally tried to stop Trump in 2015-2016, week by week, cut by cut, slight by slight, slander by slander, libel by libel. Unfortunately for Brooks, the weaver then was Trump, not HRC, Brooks and the Times. The horse is out of the barn on the new round of community building, and Mr. Brooks is still not in on the event though he is supposed to be a "conservate" voice in the Times. Not.
1
@Dave Oedel The SA mobs rioting in the streets of German cities in 1932 were communities too, as are our own "Proud Boys". So are the "militias" which appoint themselves armed cop, judge, and jailer on our southern border, and so are the no-longer-fringe groups which promise to resist if trump is either impeached or not re-elected. So are ISIS and Hamas, as were the Branch Davidians and the Kool-Aid drinkers of Jonestown. A community is as neutral an entity as a hammer, which can be used to drive a nail or to crush a scull. The true problem, which David Brooks manages always without fail to identify, is the reduction of human beings to economic roles: producer, worker, consumer, taxpayer, etc. Plus the fact that our system as presently constituted tends to promote sociopaths to positions of wealth, power, and influence, as demonstrated by the current occupier of the Oval Office.
mr. brooks puts an inappropriately negative gloss on this research report, which i found reassuring and enlightening.
the working-class "haphazard self" is not the result of lower economic expectations (as brooks maligns it) but is described by the study authors as men seeking "an engagement with more autonomous forms of work, childrearing, and spirituality, often with an emphasis on generativity, by which we mean a desire to guide and nurture the next generation."
many jobs means learning many skills, meeting different kinds of people and forming the "weak ties" that sociologists have found essential to economic welfare. adopting a "haphazard" work strategy can be a healthy adaptation to the past decade of wage layoffs and economic turmoil. the age of the sample is not clearly reported, but i suspect most of them are 20 to 30 -- what i call the decade of exploration.
these millennial men value "nurture and warmth" in relationships, value "personal growth and development" in themselves, and are pleased to learn they are fathers. the detachment from female partners can be a mutual choice as women seek similar autonomy from working class female stereotypes. apparently this isn't "thick enough" community for brooks, who looks for alarm to market his personal project.
to me, these men seek new paths in a culture in flux; they embody american optimism and responsibility. to brooks, they're just grifters of the "side hustle." please read the report, and decide for yourself.
12
@drollere
I agree. Re: cultural change.
A vocational expert could chart the ages. work experiences, and experise for 107 "workingmen." When people work, over time, they acquire certain work skills that may or may not be transferrable to other work.
By the eighth grade, people are supposedly taught how to make change, manage a tax return and a checkbook. They also should have been exposed to "Self Reliance" by Ralph Waldo Emerson.
A lot of workers never acquire any significant skills. They may be able to drive a car and make change. But if they haven't worked at a job that is complicated or requires critical thinking, they have virtually no transferrable skills.
In some jobs, like in the construction trades in the north, there is no work during bad weather. An electrician working on high rises my not be able to work on the principal job in bad wearher, but may be able to put out a shingle to get jobs that pay almost as well as the principal job.
It is not exprected that someone who hauls concrete would have any transferrable skills, unless that person has learned to lay out the forms used to hold the conrete, estimate the cost of materials and be a finisher.
Almost all of the workers probbly have limited transferrable skills and are competing for low wage work. They do not have the capacity to be self reliant. They see jobs at the lower skill levels illed often "off the books" by immigrant labor.
Women have always been weavers- just a fancy male patriarchal name given to what women in all cultures have always done. They used to be called homemakers, PTA presidents, Women's auxiliary. Creator of the civilized community.
Unsung, unappreciated, acting only with permission but at least funded by the male breadwinner. Now, thanks to feminism, women have found they can participate in the working world, fund themselves, and decide how much weaving is fulfilling and rewarding to them.
Though the working world is nowhere close to being a level playing field for women, women have been shown to perform equally well or better than men. Women doctors have better patient outcomes than men.
Men are thus superfluous. To women, to society and to themselves. Being a male breadwinner is not enough. For women, for society, or for themselves.
Mature men now have the opposite journey to make. They had been trained only to be individualistic providers, and not taught the intricacies of family and community building. They must experience the grunt work, the frustrations, and indignities women have always had to deal with, from wiping baby bottoms to wiping up the kitchen after a church supper.
They may find that the sacrifice and time demands required to make connections, nurture relationships, and support their various communities is more rewarding than another Netflix rerun. Or not.
35
@As-I-Seeit, men have traditionally gone to war, and have endured unimaginable suffering and hardship since the beginning of civilization. Both genders get their own slice of the indignity and hardship pie. You are missing the entire point of this article if your conclusions are that men are somehow superfluous.
Give the people what they need: Jobs. Good, family-wage jobs, with adequate time off, and encouragement to take that time for personal exploration and renewal. And make paid time for community service both a paid benefit, and an expectation.
Institute a national draft, with a requirement of two years' paid service on the part of every citizen at some time between the ages of 18 and 30. Include a broad range of civic service and community betterment--the contribution for any individual to in part reflect his/her skills, interests, and desires/needs for training.
Yes, Tocqueville marvelled at the American propensity for civic association, but he didn't live in an age of massive cultural hegemony, based on marketing-fueled, 24/7 entertainment. We need to reinvigorate our culture with solid and universal citizen participation, but in my opinion it needs to be shaped and nurtured by a broad national commitment and mandate, much more than "a thousand points of light," which will not I think create the scale of change we need.
15
Don't you see that the character of the economic system is basic and configures the character of the rest of society? You say: "We have a culture that takes the disruptive and dehumanizing aspects of capitalism and makes them worse." It doesn't necessarily make them worse, but it necessarily takes them on. If greed and accumulation dominate the economic system, those values will also infuse society as a whole. You can't tout capitalism and have people apply cooperation to the rest of their lives. The only way you are going to achieve an immeshed, loving social fabric is to have a sharing, humanistic economic fabric.
49
The writer documents a problem with working class men. If this isn't a problem of more affluent men, then the answer seems pretty tied to money and working conditions. It's hard to form stable relationships, join organizations or build community with long, irregular working hours.
But what are seen as vices for working class men are standard for higher earners. High earners tend to be on the look to 'trade up' when it comes to jobs as well, just their jobs pay better and offer more stability, and they're more likely to leave by choice, and employers are fine enjoying their talents until they move on. This competitive economy doesn't work so well for those who don't have access to better career tracks.
And why should churches be seen as a solution? Churches are losing members. Maybe the churches don't have enough to offer? Maybe they're seen as judgmental? Long ago churches tended to be tied to ethnic/immigrant communities, so belonging was more likely due to shared culture than belief.
18
I cannot help thinking that a "Weaver" movement is a total waste of time. I have been involved in community organizing since the 70's, starting with the movement against the Viet Nam war. I have been active in housing issues, industrial health and safety, community media, disaster preparedness, and others. In every case, the people who participated were primarily from the middle to upper-middle class. Men and women from the working class or lower classes often do not have time or energy for community activity, precisely because they work hard for long hours, or they are scrambling for jobs. You can promote "thick" and trusting relationships all you want, but first we need to establish an economic base that promotes stability, and not so-called "creative destruction".
62
Interesting comment. It would be interesting to have similar studies from other wealthy countries, and then some not so wealthy ones. For instance, I wonder if the lower personal stress of a Scandinavian economy results in a different dynamic, and whether the gillet jaune protests in France are symptoms of the same issues as in the US. The per capita income in the US in real dollars peaked in the 1970s and has been in slow decline since. I have waited for a cultural uprising as people realized what was happening, but the effects on the family have been masked by more workers per family and low priced goods from China. Well, we are running out of additional workers in the family and also of cheap goods from the third world, so some larger reckoning is at hand.
6
Americans now live in an 'individualistic' age.
People only commit to things conditionally..... as long as it doesn't interfere with their needs and wants of the moment.
This 'Age of the Individual' has been a long time coming.....several decades.
I'm old enough to have seen this myself.
I think we have finally arrived at 'the point of our final destination'.
Or am I missing something here?
2
The premise of David Brooks thesis that culture is an independent countervailing force on economy is hard to back up with evidence. You don’t need to be classical Marxist thinker and believe that economy determines culture. Actual evidence shows that habits learnt through economic system has a large influence on habits of culture. A more humane economic life fosters a more humane cultural life, mutually reinforcing each other.
13
For decades Republicans have peddled the free market as the best way to a just society. What they did not realize is that capitalism is an economic system, not a system of morals. Through the evangelical language of capitalism we did not get the promised “city on a hill.” Instead, we lost faith in the power of our own character and self determination.
5
Brooks misses the fact that the main cause of American cultural problems is American style marketing and capitalism. When many children notice that the average McDonalds restaurant is in much better repair than the schools they attend, what do they think? When advertisers spend thousands of times more on colorful splashy advertisement than public schools and libraries spend on books and supplies, what should children think? When far more Presidential Medals of Freedom are awarded to celebrities and sports heroes than to scientists and engineers, what do our citizens learn about accomplishments? (and this medal is far from the only place where celebrity is respected and honored much more than other kinds of accomplishments).
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Helping people manage their lives when a capitalist economy makes that almost impossible is one of those moralistic solutions. Attributing to individuals sole responsibility for their problems is part of the problem we face to begin with. Prescribing thick community is such a moralism, and communitarianism like traditionalism is an artificial reclaiming of the natural.
The modern world is self-conscious and values are not given by communities and traditions, but consciously elaborated and chosen. (Compare pop music to folk songs.) Communities are a relic of peasant societies being replaced by voluntary associations and social networks. This is not bad, but different. So communitarian traditionalisms (strong communities and families anchored by traditional religious institutions) cannot be a solution.
Neoconservatives have been saying this since the 70s, when they started telling black men that raising their kids and not structural poverty, and avoiding drugs and not class war through policing, were the cause of their problems. Get an ethics, they seemed to say, and so, get a community.
You cannot join a community; you join groups, like today's churches, which meet occasionally. Artists and scholars may have far-flung friendship networks based on shared interests, and could not want it otherwise.
It's smarter and freer. Ethics, the question of the good life, is based on thought and the arts, not social givenness, which is no panacea.
1
The subject discussed here is an example of a transient localized reduction of entropy in a universe where the total entropy tends to increase.
There is no solution to this. It is just the way a mechanistic universe works.
3
Sadly this is just another symptom of the demise of the middle class.
3
Nice try, David, but what you suggest is much harder than it looks.
You are also missing the point, humanity cannot grow indefinitely on finite resources. We would not even have a fraction of the problems that we have today if we weren't facing overpopulation.
We have a lot of lofty idesls but we keep trying to square the circle because we don't want to see the obvious truth: things are not working because you cannot wish or pray away reality, you are supposed to learn from it. In absence of a coherent strategy, we continue to repeat the same mistakes. time and time again.
"It's easy to say that you can do something, but words matter little when you don't know how to take action."
@Dad I do not buy the idea that the problem is over population and limited resources. The family is strong in China, for example, where there has been overpopulation for centuries. It is the institutions which make for cohesiveness. My simple advice to men is to join something. Commit to it. Unions, a spiritual pathway shared in an institution, community groups, really join your family, whatever. Your mission is to find the group. They are around. They will make you stronger.
3
There is a large amount of age discrimination too - especially at age 50 and above.
4
The men feel that they have to have three or four occupations...
FEEL that they have to?
For Pete's sake. They're broke.
64
At Chamber of Commerce during the Raegan administration the weekly speaker was a “labor management advisor.” Companies hired him to bust unions or stop them from getting started in the first place. It has been okay, however, for an employer’s workers to form a company softball team.
10
A culture that rejects its own economy is not stable.
A culture that does that also enables the abuses inflicted by those who profit from the economy.
Better to have an economy that suits the culture, and for people to profit from behaving well, not enabled to behave badly.
4
You want economic factors, how about real estate speculation that kicks out small business owners? Triple the rent, you can leave a place empty for two years and gamble on getting 3X the third, meanwhile neighborhoods have empty storefronts and people who had businesses or trades are out of luck. Or gentrify out the mechanics and plumbers, put in bars and coffee shops that hire a gaggle of part timers. Who are all working three jobs.
11
Workers need a stable job, one that pays enough to support a family, with health and time off. One needs regular hours and location. A guarantee that work will be there to plan a life around.
Without these things, your idealized life is much, much tougher.
Doable, but a struggle.
Signed,
Carpenter/Jack of all Trades. Retired.
11
I wish there were a less haphazard use of "Working Class" as though that term had some sort of mutually agreed-upon definition.
While this reported study, as described by Mr. Brooks, provides some interesting observations and statements that have the ring of truth, it would be far more meaningful a presentation if we were clued in on what "Working Class Men," as a category, consists of, including how many Americans are in that category, and how different they are from the rest of the accordingly sliced-and-diced American populace.
6
Many of these alienating phenomena have structural roots. Look at sport in schools, for example. In many countries, you can participate in a sport through elementary and high school, then find an adult community club and continue playing. That does not exist in the USA for the vast majority (as I witnessed as a teacher).
Take baseball or football: By the age of 11, even Little League teams are getting competitive and the less talented are at the end of the bench or not playing at all. Ask what proportion of the school population is playing an organised team sport? In the ghetto it may be as low as 5%, in a suburban public school it may be as “high” as 30%.
A typical high school of 1,000 kids offers one Junior Varsity football team and one Varsity team. That is 22 starting positions and about 22 reserves - 44-50 players from a total of 500. It is the same for girl’s soccer. I had one student who “played” football for four years in high school. He never got on the field for a single minute of playing time - but he carried his helmet through the corridors proudly for four years!
Next, repeat the winnowing process into adulthood. What are the adult participation rates - from an already low base? It gets lower and lower. I am using sport as a window into the society Mr Brooks is describing - the enmeshed society is not possible because the community structures do not exist from middle school onwards. The top 10-20% are catered for, and everybody else falls by the wayside.
11
@Fred Clark - please read the research report before you opine. the authors use words like "engagement" and "commitment" to describe these men, who "participate" (your word) as fathers, workers, friends, and worshipers.
brooks is flat wrong to attribute the "side hustle" to standard of living; to these men it's a way to escape the monotony of wage work and greater personal freedom. many are optimistic about their economic future.
finally, the study authors quote the sociologist émile durkheim, who wrote that alienated people could not be salved by reviving past traditions (as brooks seems to believe), but by removing the injustices that affect their lives. i feel very optimistic about the path these men would follow in a society where working class men receive the same justice as the elites.
4
@Fred Clark I don't think this is accurate. There are many adult sports leagues all over the country. Even in my tiny FL city, there are orgs that offer softball, volleyball, kickball, soccer, bowling, etc to adults. And I know there are tons of ways to play amateur sports in large cities, too.
Survival Mr Brooks Survival. Detachment has become necessary for survival, You don't attach to a job when it may not be there tomorrow. Most have to grasshopper just to keep their head above water. When you have to go from job to job and when you are in competition with the people you work with to avoid layoffs or having your job shipped to India attachment is the last thing you can afford. Survival doesn't allow for it.
Family vs. career family particularly doing shift work you just drift apart you don't see each other awake for more then a half hour a day between your 2 or more jobs and you just become 2 strangers who share a residence. Or has happened to me her career mandated a move to N.C. mine didn't allow for it. So long good bye good luck. Survival in this day and age doesn't allow for anything but work for a big chunk of the population when it comes down to it do you keep your job or your family bearing in mind that if you leave your job for your family you may not find one that pays has well or that many won't hire you because you put your family first. For all the talk of work life balance your company expects to come first PERIOD.
As for faith, Someone else will have to speak on that issue I don't have any.
But Mr. Brooks survival in today's world no longer allows for attachments to places, people, companies or faith. Survival has to come first or you won't be around for the rest.
21
@Stephan
Your description brings home the reality of America for many people today. Strangers sharing a house. Love ripped apart. Constant work. Permanent instability. Connections risky.
This is a system that creates profits through the economic enslavement of people who seek nothing more than stable, humble lives, with food, clothing, and maybe some weekend football. And we enslave our fellow Americans!
Even more baffling, the enslaved then vote for the party of their enslavers (Republicans) and spew bile at the party that fights to give them a safety net and a fair shake (Democrats).
The politician who untangles this mess and makes it right is the next face on Mount Rushmore.
21
One young man I know is the antithesis of what you describe. He has made a life of his passion for bringing people together
in myriad ways in Chicago. He started a co=working space called Second Shift, started a weekly coffee and conversation group to improve his neighborhood, and also started a board game group that has been meeting for several years now and has about 200 members. His name is Levi Baer. He has several websites and if you are looking for advice on weaving people successfully I think he is your go to guy. I have known him for over thirty years - having met him when he was quite young - and I have never failed to be amazed at what he has going on that works to bring people together. I'm just sorry I don't live near him now. You are correct Mr. Brooks, our world needs more weavers and far fewer shredders.
6
The lack of attachment seems like a reaction to the sense that a career may not last for a career (perhaps also witnessed in their father's career), a high risk of divorce and the chances that one's church will eventually get a pastor more interested in lining his pockets than the pews or a priest doing something far worse than that.
These things may have led to a less fulfilling lifestyle, but there is often a psychological pull to both mitigate downside risk and chase a moonshot, especially when so many people act like shameless career climbers and advertise that fact (or image) on social media.
This pattern seems like a natural consequence of living in a world that has degraded their sense of trust and eroded their bargaining power in all settings. All things considered, these defenses sound fairly muted.
2
Huh, David? Only conservatives would breezily separate culture and the economy and then blame a degraded culture for the nation’s woes. What has happened since the Reagan administration – and the rise of a dominant conservative movement -- is a persistent decline in the nation’s economic well-being. The consequence, not surprisingly, has been growing dislocation and despair, especially among working-class males who have faced endless disappointment and marginalization. Economic progress abroad has left the US more vulnerable to foreign competition while conservative economic policies at home have left US workers less successful, less secure and less hopeful. So, David, don’t blame our culture for our woes. Blame the conservative movement, which you have supported throughout your career, for espousing policies that have undermined the well-being of America’s working class. The individualism you lament has been the individualism that the conservative movement has glorified, and the community spirit and cooperation you extoll have been enfeebled by conservative movement’s relentless assault on government. So, good luck with your #WeaveThePeople scheme. But for me, it seems to be just another lame diversion from what really needs to be done to reverse decades of decline. We need to stop blaming the people for their failures and, instead, start strengthening government programs, especially at the federal level, to spur economic reforms that improve the well-being of all Americans.
51
We live in a second gilded age and David Brooks proposes a 19 C solution to combat "side gigs." If people were paid a living wage, it would not make our billionaires any poorer and workers more productive but no.
That is not a solution but pulling up by your bootstraps is when the boots are nailed to the floor. This is what one can safely call a "McSolution." Something that the center right and the conservative foundations will endorse while their "experts" and employees go out for their wine and cheese ( should I add caviar?) get mixers.
8
As a pre-teen already chest-deep in delinquency, anger, and hopelessness while my single-parent Mom worked 2 jobs trying to support us, I lucked into one of life's jackpots.
An Uncle and Aunt saw the distress and offered to "help" out (and take me off my poor Mom's hands.)
They were professional people and needless to say, my life changed hugely. I know myself well enough to believe I probably would have become a "good" crook, gangster, or con-man without their intercession.
May more young people be helped by those who are able. Please. I guarantee you that it works.
11
Or maybe, just maybe, there are men who just don’t want to commit. And now that there is less societal pressure for them to do so, they don’t. Maybe it has nothing to do with economics at all, it’s just some men being their true selves.
8
@Laurel C
Someone below implied that the only thing that kept them in line before was the fact that they caused babies.
To suggest as David Brooks is that the economy with its obscenely widening inequality is separate from the culture with its social fabric unraveling is a fallacy. The argument wrongfully absolves the economic policies that are contributing as much or more to the problems he wants to fix through cultural remedies alone. I might agree with some of his his suggestions, if he at least concedes that capitalism needs its guardrails restored... since he hasn’t, it hard to take his arguments seriously when he views things this one sidedly.
24
@Ted Almost no one responding to this piece seems to have a clue what it's saying. A Something is profoundly wrong when so many people miss the point so widely.
Does David Brooks "suggest... that the economy with its obscenely widening inequality is separate from the culture with its social fabric unraveling"? No; that's the exact opposite of what he says. Those two forms of disintegration promote each other and aggravate each others' consequences. They are two sides of a coin.
Brooks can't convince anyone of his argument until he can get them to comprehend it. That's discouraging.
2
@Ted A
Right on. That is fascinating to observe David Brooks wallowing in those sociological curious and offering his half-baked "solutions", all the while refusing to see the underlying economic causes and relationships. Like a blind kitten who could smell but not see, he somehow managed to grasp the alienation part of the equation, but can't fantom that it is just an effect and not the cause of the problems. "Weave"? Seriously?
I'm not sure what which men this paper surveyed, but as someone from rural Wisconsin, I can tell you it surely wasn't the working class men I know. Maybe it's just the provincial attitudes of the eMidwestern, blue-collar workers I am familiar with, and not of America generally, but none of the men I grew up with would ever agree to be part of a study published in The Journal of Economic Perspectives- much less offer up their views on religion and family. This study might be relevant somewhere, but it isn't relevant everywhere, and I think that this sort of blanket application is one of the reasons rural Americans feel misunderstood and isolated.
4
@Cole
Cole,
I lived a long time in the Midwest and did both blue collar and skilled trades work with many, many men. I am struck by the irony of your comment.
On the one hand you posit that "none of the men I grew up with would ever agree to be part of a study [like this one]" and then you say results cited would not be relevant and thus these folks feel misunderstood and isolated.
Hmmm. Perhaps if these men did agree to be part of these kind of studies they might learn something useful and then feel more understood and less isolated. And, researchers need to make extra special care to reach out of their "bubbles" and find
the kind of groups you are describing.
4
“Wage subsidies”? That is Brooks ‘ answer to the fact that some people have to work 2 or 3 jobs to stay afloat? The government-my taxes-should subsidize wages that wealthy CEOs should be paying? How about the idea that corporations should pay living wages?
59
I appreciate Mr Brooks sensitivity to the moral dilemma of the working class male. His description of some of these males is gutwrenching. They seem to be guys focusing on trying to do the right thing by providing for their children. I think the challenge of relationships with their wives is not necessarily their fault or anybody's fault but a sign of the times. I would like to see more data on divorces.
I wish Mr Brooks for all his sensitivity would realize if you haven't got the money to pay the rent, fund college and pay for the health care needs of your family that becomes your focus. Higher minimum wages, better healthcare for all are key measure that would permit families,including men and women to lead more fulfilling lives and keep families together.
10
Rampant Drug addiction -Alcoholism -and unhealthy lifestyles degrade self esteem and discipline.
Vast income inequality produces envy of the rich and beautiful who are ubiquititous in a culture that rewards pleasure above everything.
And then there's all the bread and circus available on screen 24/7.
These are not assiduous men working multiple jobs!
Those are a rare minority!
1
The System has changed. The means of production has changed, that's the main thing. But other cornerstones of society have been disrupted such as the church, the university, and government. Hence, men have become unmoored. They can neither believe in something, use it to their advantage, or rail against it.
The testosterone-driven animal throws a punch at the system; the artist, musician or writer flouts the system or provides mental flight to another; the Object Maker acknowledges the system and uses it; but the transcendent Prime Mover determines the system which is recognized by others. The system may be a family, a corporation, a state, a religion or any relationship with explicit rules or implicit values.
Hence, it would benefit myriads of men if David or another scribe would define the System for this age, and its elements whether they be academic, pragmatic, or mythic.
Yes David, there is a masculine Self and a System, but it has been hidden by turbulence in society and lack of a hero who can lead and give things definition.
1
Wow. I generally tend to disagree with many of Brooks's writings on culture, but this is spot-on. We live in an atomized, detached, isolating culture. Especially our younger people, who have grown up in such a culture. However, I think our hyper-capitalist system is a main culprit. Our culture increasingly sees every interaction as transactional - a market exchange. This is what that leads to.
Something that really struck me about this column, though, is that economically speaking, working class white men are in the same position that working class men of color have found themselves in for generations. Scant job opportunities, prolonged periods of unemployment. The habits that such lack of opportunity gives rise to. Of course, men of color are tagged with all sorts of stereotypes because of this lack of opportunity - it's interesting that this is a milieu that is increasingly inhabited by white men too. A pretty striking illustration of the continued lowering of the standards of living in the USA.
12
It’s interesting that it’s described as unrealistic when a working class person dreams of being a writer or DJ.
11
Let’s see. These working class men suffer because they cannot provide for their families as they would like to, but in the hopes of doing so they have two or three or four jobs, seek to broaden their work skills by enrolling in courses , care deeply about their children, want to be more expressive, and yet they lack discipline, lack respect for the dignity of labour and don’t want to be good providers. Something is wrong here. The men Brooks describes seem to be hard working people who very much want to be good providers but can’t be because of that economic system Brooks praises so much. The amazing thing is that these men haven’t given up in total despair when not even God seems to care about them or their families. Brooks seems nostalgic for the opium of the masses.
18
These unfulfilled men have made their choices on career, education (or lack thereof ) and the number of children they fathered. They probably have too many to afford which is the first problem. Make your life choices very wisely; no one is interested in your complaints and you will live by the consequences of your decisions.
@Jan
Seeing as we are a civilization, and are all interconnected, there is a very good chance that you too will be living with the consequences of their decisions. One way or another.
It would be in your best interest and health to be interested in the hardships/mistakes and needs of those unfulfilled men.
It could prove dangerous not to.
5
I rarely read Brooks although I am a fifty year subscriber to the Times. I find his sanctimonious and destructive mimicking of the writing of Bill Buckley uninteresting.
The fault underlying the view of Buckley and the conservatives who have driven the development of the US economy from 1970 stems from the belief that removal of regulations, tax cuts, and free trade would provide a stimulus to economic growth that would benefit everyone. President Ford’s Secretary of Treasury, William Simon advance this idea again and again.
Forty years on the results are clear. The conservative approach propounded by Buckley and Brooks has created human disaster described in the article.
Sadly many in society will follow a Pied Piper when the situation becomes difficulty. Brooks is today the Pied Piper of societal reform. His “Weave” program is a placebo which will do nothing to address the problems.
There is a telling graph in the paper by Edin et. al cited by Brooks, It shows that only half of the whites ages 25 to 55 i believe their standard of living is better than their parents.
This nation was built on the expectation that hard worked would lead to a better life for oneself and one’s offspring. The loss of this belief dooms the future. No amount of weaving can solve that problem.
Perhaps Mr. Brooks will stop weaving and suggest ways to address the critical issues. A major reform of tax codes would be a start.
72
Well, that IS capitalism though. It can’t exist without intruding upon everything. What social cohesion there is in working class communities always has been closely tied in with ideological as well as organisational opposition to capitalism. So it’s outrageously ironic when purveyors of capitalist ruling ideology bemoan the inevitable consequences of their own success.
15
@Christian Haesemeyer That suggests that all capitalist societies should be pretty much the same on these characteristics, and that is manifestly not true. Western European social democracies (which most certainly have capitalist economic systems) do not have the same level of individualism and idealization of the solitary that Americans have always had a love affair with (see pretty much every western movie), but have taken to serious excess over the last few decades. America itself has always had a capitalist system, but has varied over time in its cultural norms around community vs individualism (in spite of the aforementioned romanticization of the lone cowboy). All of that variation suggests that a simple unicausal (capitalism is always x) theory doesn't bear up to empirical scrutiny.
4
@Jane Smith Conservative Americans like Brooks think of most Europe as socialist, not capitalist. The European countries are not as extreme as the United States because their capitalist system is tempered by more elements of socialism than us.
9
But that’s not because European capitalists are nicer. It’s because they haven’t yet managed to smash social resistance to the same degree that American capitalists have.
1
Detachment from work, family and church may just be because there is little or no time to embrace any of it much anymore. Stability can be provided by a government who cares enough for it's citizens by providing universal healthcare, by offering a decent minimum wage, by giving families paid maternity/paternity leave, by supporting post-secondary education as so many other countries do. But, the United States see these things as anti-capitalist, as, (god-forbid), socialistic, then, out comes the boogeyman saying government should not get in the way of free-enterprise.
When a society feels it's safety-net firmly in place, sees their taxes coming back to them in supportive ways, then you have the beginnings of the social fabric you so long for Mr. Brooks.
31
@Holly Right Holly, a "good" life requires resources, can't be done on the cheap. Reminds me of a Chinese saying, "To expect the horse to be good, and to expect the horse to not eat grass."
The situation Mr. Brooks describes, men moving from job to fob in a mad search for security, is not a fault that can be ascribed to men alone. The social contract where a man could have one permanent job which would supply the needs of his family has failed. Most jobs these days provide little benefits and can disappear in a moment. Perhaps this situation could be described as the haphazard society where people in general are tossed as of no use.
People feel 'enmeshed', trapped and frustrated in this no win society. But as far as this article blame, it misses the mark. If anything is to blame it is the capitalist system which no longer honors the dignity of work or the human beings who do it. It is also the result of a GOP controlled government which no longer honors the distress of people who need and deserve a strong safety net system.
17
@just Robert
I discovered that my state food stamps for a single individual provides $180 worth of vouchers per month and general cash assistance pays $200 per month. Can anyone survive on that?
I can't imagine what would motivate the Republicans to approve a 7 fold increase in the safety net. That's what it would take to pay rent, utilities, food, clothing, etc. I can imagine a 7 fold reduction in taxes for the rich. I've seen it in my lifetime.
11
My life in corporate America became a marathon for the corner office, where at last I could be treated as an adult. So did my wife's. We split up after 20 years of marriage. She made her corner office, I did not. I found it ridiculous, at age 50, to still be fighting for the right to be treated as if I could legally drive a car. And then one day, still the head of my department, I was tagged a 'Senior Engineer'. I went from a child to an old man, in one day. That's not an accident: that's the modern corporate system.
I think it is wonderful to ask men to weave themselves back into society. But the unweaving was highly profitable for those who did it, and the profit is why they did it. As long as that remains unaddressed, I wonder how effective Brook's call will be.
17
@Phil Brooks is always wishing for pie in the sky. I don't know whether he is being innocently naive and superficial, or tribally disingenuous as a conservative citizen, or hopeless incapable of self reflection as a conservative intellectual?
What Brooks willingly overlooks is the decimation of unions and organized labor by the republican party, as they have promoted right to work policies as the embodiment of the true American individual while they sit back and rake in the profits. The results are low wages, low to no benefits and families in crisis. In a previous era family, church, the lions club and a bowling or softball league used to take up some of the slack, but not now.
Only when workers are paid a decent "union wage" with adequate healthcare and childcare benefits, so that those who wish to, can take turns staying home without going bankrupt, can a world as Brooks imagines it actually be possible.
41
@JEB
Unions were organizations for working class men, where they came together to work for their collective good. Union busting destroyed that.
2
I've skimmed (but not intensively read) the entire study you cite, David....and I'm not impressed with either its rigor and design nor its vague and general conclusions. How in the world could a policymaker base any kind of targeted program on such rubbish? I currently read a lot of academic material in the social sciences, and this piece does seem typical of both the way research questions are posed, and how they are pursued and concluded: The motive questions are often slack, the categories are ill-defined, and the way in which data are gathered and analyzed (the methods) seem almost impossible for another study group to replicate with any degree of "match." The fact that this was published in an economics journal seems quite anomalous.
As to your intent, David: I may be interpreting this "defensively," but I detect a very large element of "blaming the victim" in all of this. The finding is that men whose educational and work/life-skill attainments are modest seem a bit rootless and laden with anomie? And that they don't closely identify (at least not for very long) with "institutions" in this profit-driven, meritocratic world? And at least part of the implied conclusion is that they're somehow deficient, derelict in duty, and have failed to bring to life a real "autonomous and generative self"?
I may have this all wrong--but my impression is that the conclusion finds fault with human beings, not the crushing, dehumanizing capitalist culture in which they live.
21
@Robert
Agreed. It must be hard for Brooks, a professional writer who performs no manual labor, to cluck his tongue at these poor,
unacomplished men with "unrealistic dreams" of obtaining the life he has.
1
Mr. Brooks wants the world to be more compassionate (tho' he prefers for that compassion to come from individuals, organizations large and small, and virtually anyplace except the government). And he wishes we all felt more interconnected. Fine. If we ALL felt like part of the human condition, we might act with more urgency on matters like climate change.
But I tire of his emphasis on church.
I'm not sure if his concern is more about religion or spirituality, or that churches are centers of community. I just wish he'd write every so often that there other places to find those things... provided that's even what one wants.
I didn't grow up in any denomination, and I still feel part of several communities. I have religious and non-religious friends. I'm glad for anyone who finds religious practice uplifting, or who finds it makes him/her a better person.
But Mr. Brooks consistently omits any reference to/reliance on the importance of rational thought. Because what will really benefit us all is the ability for people to think critically, weigh evidence, and formulate solutions to the world's problems. I think many people he'd like to see in church would do just as well, or better, at the library.
One of my smartest friends is a virologist who says, "My God is the carbon molecule." He's an unspiritual rationalist. And he cures diseases. Especially as we slide farther down the Trumphole, society wouldn't suffer if we guided more people to be like him.
23
It seems the conservatives, economically, want people to "pull up by their own boot strap" while, culturally, want them to live "enmeshed life". Brooks seems to think there is something "cultural" separate from economic. Amazon Prime, Netflix, Facebook, "corporate culture," malls, cars, etc, are they economic or cultural?
I do agree our lives have become haphazard, not just men, but also women and children. I think this is in large part because our lives have increasingly been influenced, then dictated and controlled by how multi-billion, transnational corporations produce and market their products in pursuit of, not wholesome societies, but maximum profit for themselves. In this pursuit, they also interfered with our government to only benefit them, hence corrupting our democracy. This pursuit of profit is what prevents a collective reckoning of global warming and a collective will to provide healthcare as human rights.
Human as flawed beings are by nature greedy. But the corporate art of "advertising and marketing" to create desire, turned into need, has normalized and increased greed.
When I read this line, "There need to be better economic policies, like wage subsidies, to improve these lives, " I have to laugh. I thought conservative Brooks is against "hand out" to "moochers"?! What about higher, living wage? Does Brook think workers not deserve them?
Mr. Brooks, capitalism requires "lone wolf", whereas elements of socialism is what bring "enmeshed life."
16
I wonder if Mr. Brooks is aware that his weaving philosophy is basically reinforcing the economic stratification that is undermining a healthy country? Again he supports people in their own communities building strong social ties within their community with little or no interaction with wealthier communities. I respect that Mr. Brooks is attempting to grow beyond his entrenched ideology but I wonder if he has a developed enough empathy to actually understand the totality of the problem.
Every one of the articles he writes in this new vein, though well meaning, exposes the reality that he doesn't know firsthand the issues facing the average American. He constantly refers to documented studies or books or occasionally personal encounters with others but he will never understand the greater problem because he refuses to see his culpability in the ills of the society directly caused by the modern Conservative movement which he championed for years.
At its core Conservatives believe that some people deserve more than others and it is right and righteous that they take whatever they can because they can. Millennia of men knew this as greed and the great destructive power of greed was understood and warned against. When seeking remedy for the ills of our society one first must look at the primary driving force of our ills which is greed. You only create band-aids, work-arounds, or distractions if you fail to address the actual problem and nothing will ever truly get better.
30
While the spirit and intent of this essay is well placed and correct, I do find that Mr Brooks lets these and other American men in similar circumstances off the hook on how, and how much, they themselves have contributed to their own malaise and disenfranchisement.
While these men are not ‘deplorable’, I believe they have on the whole, not done (nor are willing to do) much of the hard mental and emotional work that could provide them more fulfilment in an uncertain world.
How?
- By not automatically accepting and propagating values antagonistic and fearful toward the ‘other’ - be that race, or gender, or ‘foreigners’, or ‘elites’ or others who haven’t harmed them;
- By wilfully remaining either ignorant, or unaccepting, of helping others, of contributing to society, of educating themselves to how the world works, and working hard/risking that which must be done to improve their circumstances;
- Of grasping complexity, esp. with regard to a political system that *could* work better if they did more work to understand how not to be tricked by politicians and corporations; It apparently feels good to wave their red hats and cheer all the things coming from those who say they’re on their side, but actively work against them.
I’m not saying these are ‘bad men’, as in malevolent men ... but some, maybe many, are ‘bad’ in not doing the work to look after themselves.
4
@johann
Comments like this won’t win them over either. Just drives the wedge deeper. They have been ignored by Washington and so took a stand. May not be the stand you wanted them to take. So instead of alienating them, convince them with actual policies that can help them.
I”m not saying your a bad person, just maybe you not grasping the complexity of the situation
If you want to improve workers' lives, pay them what they earn through their productivity. Productivity has risen dramatically over the last three or more decades but wages have stagnated. That's because the earnings from their work goes increasingly to a small number of people, a preponderant number of whom owe their wealth not to hard work or ingenuity but to inheritance. That sort of social structure is what prompted my ancestors to emigrate to America, and who were able to provide our family a better life.
Perhaps you should spend more time reading your colleague Paul Krugman's column.
89
@Tom Herling Agreed. I think the biggest hoax of our modern day is the thinking that workers are takers who make no contribution in wealth making therefore deserved to be paid pennies, whereas CEO and capital owners are the only wealth makers and therefore deserve most of the pie.
3
@Tom Herling
This is the simple economic analysis that Democrats should be preaching, not for example railing about greed or evil bankers, like you-know-who.
And when David Brooks is employed as a contract worker in a warehouse somewhere instead of typing on his laptop in a multi million dollar house in a tony section of DC maybe he will be able to talk about working class lives with some kind of truth and authenticity, instead of organizing little clubs to somehow help them out. Good luck with that one, David.
3
Until the working class turn their anger at the cutthroat capitalists, their plight will continue to be dismal. Many working class people are stuck in the very bottom of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, i.e. meeting their physiological needs such as food, shelter, sex etc. Our capitalist society results in high levels of uncertainty in maintaining a decent livelihood over the long term. Ageism, jobs being shipped off-shore and automation all take a toll on the psychological welfare of people. The result is one of despair, and a lack of trust in the institutions of a functional society.
14
Does the Social Fabric Project weave in the Social Network? While a person's actual life may look haphazard to the human eye, the computer eye sees the unity in it all. The modern man comes together on-line. Many are concentrating their transparency for the online world. Many are saving their vulnerability and sensitivity for their digital facing life.
4
There is something so disingenuous about Brooks having been a proud cheerleader for traditional conservative policies that have resulted in working-class alienation - and then his turning around and bemoaning that very alienation.
Brooks refuses to confront his Republican Party’s or conservatism’s promotion of the very capitalist free-market policies that result in worker alienation. (BTW Karl Marx illustrated this very problem a long time ago and did it much better.)
Instead Brooks offers Sunday school bromides as a solution. He proposes kumbaya conferences like WeaveThePeople where we are encouraged to let “Sparks Fly Upward.” Gee, I’m energized already.
David, do you think the captains of industry and Silicon Valley will see the sparks and change their behavior? Will they make people’s jobs more meaningful and fulfilling? Will they pay a living wage so the men you speak of don’t have to work multiple jobs and can devote time to their families?
My bet would be that pipe-dream strategies like WeaveThePeople will have zero, nada, zilch effect on the problem. Why? Because they blame the victim and leave the cause firmly in place. And in doing so, they enable the cause – capitalism.
Capitalism doesn’t have a conscience, nor does it care about alienated workers. That’s why capitalism must be encouraged – top-down – to contribute to the social glue America needs.
Or - we can just write fanciful columns. I guess it sells books – and tickets to conferences.
115
This piece is all about power, and paranoid rich white men who are terribly afraid of losing it. They'd feel a lot better if all the worker-bees went to authoritarian churches that preached the prosperity gospel, so we could see these same rich men as righteous instead of rapacious. I get the feeling that when David writes "enmeshed," he really means "brainwashed" by and "totally dependent" on a theocratic culture. Horrifying!
Also, the irony that the word "enmeshed" has serious negative connotations in the world of psychology appears to be missed by David [from Wikipedia]: "Enmeshment is a concept in psychology and psychotherapy ... to describe families where personal boundaries are diffused, sub-systems undifferentiated, and over-concern for others leads to a loss of autonomous development. Enmeshed in parental needs, trapped in a discrepant role function, a child may lose their capacity for self-direction; their own distinctiveness, under the weight of 'psychic incest'..."
This column is terrible, David!
20
For the last sixty years or so increasing numbers of women haveing been standing up and saying, in effect, "I don't need a man to make me happy." Maybe men have come to the same realization about women, without exclaiming it from the rooftops.
7
We can’t separate the decline of the working class from the breathtaking rise of economic inequality. Most of the GDP growth since the 1980s has ended up in a few pockets. For the rest of us, that means deteriorating public services, fewer educational and job opportunities, and harsher competition for basics like housing and higher education — all critical pillars of “entangled” communities.
But Brooks’ point is that economics can’t explain all of this. There is also a cultural component, expressed in the form of hyper individualism, confused ideals about manhood, declining neighborliness, and a weakening sense of social obligation. Economic inequality isn’t forcing these men to repeatedly vote for lower taxes (thus decimating their public institutions) and refuse to commit to their families.
Brooks is overly focused on the cultural side of the equation, but any solution to this problem has to address economics as well as cultural factors.
18
How can I downvote comments?
Another thought provoking piece by Mr. Brooks. Thank you. We can’t all live in a progressive echo chamber.
1
Church, really? The best thing I ever did was to free myself from the constraints that dictate a religious life. Thinking for one's self is far more advantageous than gluing yourself to a tribe that can only see things through a lens of mysticism. Not belonging to a church doesn't mean you're anti social, any more than it means your not spiritual. Good luck with Weave but I'm with Christopher Hitchens, "Religion ruins everything".
26
@Rick Gage Amen, brother!
2
David Brooks still hasn’t woken up. The culture will never recover until our heinously destructive capitalist system is gutted and fully reformed. Today I learned from someone researching accuracy on an AOC tweet that just FOURTEEN families in the US control 60% of the country’s wealth. If the worker had even got a fraction of the productivity gains of the last 100 years we’d all be enjoying a 32 hour work week, full health coverage and 12 weeks of vacation. But all this wealth has flowed to the tippy, tippy top.
Yes, cowboy culture and the fallacy fantasy of the self-made man needs to go. But the real issue is our sick capitalist system that enriches only those persons who already control the wealth.
166
Too bad divorce didn't become such an easy option for both sexes. Sometimes this even meant commitment to even more that one person, as opposed to casual hookups. What we gained in becoming a more secular culture, we lost something we could do better at.
Media and tv have a lot to do with this, though they don't admit it much.
David Brooks forgets that " weaving " can only be successful when held together by a sturdy frame called a loom. What is David's metaphorical " loom " in our fractured world of income inequality , governmental dysfunction, and identity politics ?
33
This is a good article but I have trouble with the notion that going to church, in and of itself, is a way to be enmeshed. You can't be too promiscuous with religion or religious ritual. We understand this implicitly when someone becomes too"enmeshed". It's good to believe in Santa Claus as long as you don't really believe in Santa Claus. Faith trumps religion, that's not my idea. Christ himself had no stomach for the religion of his time and told his followers not to pray in public.Faith is fleeting thing, when we say that it is too fleeting we are spinning our wheels and kidding ourselves. When it is time for us to be clear, it will be abundantly clear. Until then we struggle.
7
Its all about economics. Not communities.
8
"Dream Weaver" is a song by the American singer Gary Wright, released as the first single from his third studio album The Dream Weaver (1975) in December 1975.
5
Brooks is good at sifting the ashes of great sociologists like Robert Nisbet and Alexis de Tocqueville. Good points but the emphasis needs to be much more on economics. Not going to "weave" America together on part-time and Amazon warehouse jobs. As in the industrial revolution the "creative destruction" of global capitalism shatters social and cultural institutions as well as economic ones.
12
"A society is healthy when its culture counterbalances its economics. That is to say, when you have a capitalist economic system that emphasizes competition, dynamism and individual self-interest, you need a culture that celebrates cooperation, stability and committed relationships.
"We don’t have that. We have a culture that takes the disruptive and dehumanizing aspects of capitalism and makes them worse."
Why would anyone expect the culture to espouse different values than the economy that dictates our daily lives? Why expect boys who sit around all day killing swarthy foreigners in violent video games not to become racists? Why expect adolescents who are permanently glued to their smart phones to become socially aware?
We have forfeited our most basic cultural values to the dictates of the global consumer economy. We passively submit to being programmed into patterns of alienation because someone can make money off the exercise and making money, no matter how, has now become the unquestioned highest social good.
The freedom to choose between Coke and Pepsi is nothing more than a deceptive form of slavery. We have allowed manipulation by gross economic forces to blind us to the greater possibilities of human existence. We are rapidly approaching a dangerous point where no one will be left who remembers a better form of life.
26
Why should a culture have to counterbalance the economic system? Your very first sentence perfectly explains your inability to grasp the causes and consequences of alienation. A more humanizing economic system could aid culture in building a cohesive society. The one we have now actively undermines community and tears at the social fabric you want to weave.
48
@Simon
Exactly, Brooks seems so much out of touch and understanding of the relationship between culture and unsatisfying economic system.
9
This portrayal of the working-class men might be interpreted as 'Existing' versus 'Living'. In another era, an economist I worked for, popular with 'Our Finest' and going to battle with the Trade Unions, snorted when I once made reference to 'The Man in The Street', because he knew that I had little notion of what I was talking about. He was right, and a vague concept based on reading Steinbeck and Upton Sinclair's Jungle does not make one a sociologist.
“I treat church just like I treat my girlfriends,” one man said. “I’ll stick around for a while and then I’ll go on to the next one.” A little levity here might be needed in this man's affinity for variety. Maybe there are better donuts at St. Andrews, or he is in search of Perfection.
The older working-class men appear to be fading. Some of them have found their 'family' on the second try, while remaining aloof to their offspring. The younger ones are not fooling around, but often the sole carer of their children where something has gone awry with the female in this alliance. It is not necessary to ask the bread earner what happened.
But regardless of their age, political and religious views, you might find a lot to admire in these hard working men and they all play a role in their community.
A lone wolf would be suspect, and although back-stabbing takes place on occasion, they are the first to respond to a call for help.
The foundation of The Pyramid, they often make The Rich sound shallow and vacuous.
1
It's funny. I'm a liberal software engineer who grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, but the values he says are being lost : "self-discipline, the dignity of manual labor [all labor to me] and being a good provider," are pretty much the value set that I live by, even using similar wording. I'm not always successful at realizing those virtues, but those are the values of the people in my life who've affected me the most, whether liberal or conservative.
5
The emphasis of capitalism is self-interest that now leads us perpetually from job to job. We have an internet that eliminates the need for local connectivity ... you can join a group that is composed of people you will never meet. We no longer form small connected communities.
The fact is that humans evolved in small groups and were always involved with contributing to that small group. People that successfully added value gained social prestige, free-loaders were ostracized, and those that were in between were still valuable. But the local connection is no more. We can transport ourselves far and wide. People working multiple jobs in multiple places, with frequent relocation is socially disabling.
The current US economy no longer allows a long term attachment to a place and vocation, with a strong social bond to the place we live, and the place we work.
There have been many social constructs that allow trust with strangers. Religions. Patriotism. Even sports tribalism. Those are disappearing.
The long term monogamous bond was a strong and useful social and religious construct. Religion has faded. The social construct has also faded as the economy which requires a dual-income pair only works for a few people. With the norm now constant separation, serial monogamy is the best most people can hope for.
The economic and cultural forces do seem to be working to prevent the organization of local communities that we once had.
5
"Enmeshed" is not a word that I would describe as a healthy one. When people individuate and then return to a family (biological and/or extended) to share their experiences, perhaps this is where a weaving community can gather strength. Individuation or the "John Wayne Syndrome" as I like to describe it, is toxic driven and when there is no ability to share thoughts and feelings we get a community of men who are hobbled. Suicide and addiction can take hold. Men pass on their world view to their children and the cycle repeats itself.
Martin Haagland's "This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom" might offer a different perspective on the relationship between labor and meaning, capitalism and freedom.
1
All I know I learned from a Starbucks cup.
No really, but I remember the day I read this on my cup and began to see the world differently:
"The irony of commitment is that it's deeply liberating-in work, in play, in love. The act frees you from the tyranny of your internal critic, from the fear that likes to dress itself up and parade around as rational hesitation. To commit is to remove your head as the barrier to your life." Anne Morriss.
Once the commitments to work and love were expected of young men, and were often very satisfying. Now it feels like many walk around in fear of commitment needing to "keep all options open" and end up empty. Mr. Brooks has written about one of the most heartbreaking casualties of our self absorbed culture.
7
Here is a thought that many Times readers will reject with anger and contempt: Many features of 21st Century life play a role in the male dissatisfaction described here, among them wide spread use of contraception and abortion.
5
@Francis Dolan
Bravo. Finally, some true diversity of opinion in these comments.
It is extraordinary in this piece that some young men don't learn until years after the fact that they are fathers yet are reproached for not approaching the women for deep, committed relationships.
1
I don’t know about that, but I find it telling that so much of this article does seem to be about male dissatisfaction.
1
@Francis Dolan
Women can get pregnant very easily, it's unlikely today's man would go back to traditional sex roles, where families are large. Can you imagine the poverty?
4
I can't take David Brooks seriously. Like every other conservative, he keeps blaming people, looking for faults in their character rather than in the lousy, heartless, inhumane capitalism that's the actual reason why their lives are being ruined. We need a new capitalism that serves people instead of this predatory system where people are serving capitalism.
156
Yes, but mainstream culture weaves us into wars - senseless slaughters usually for profiteering, for animal dominance fights, or in retrospect for no purpose whatever. Independence gives you a least a chance to opt out of the wars. It's much harder to opt out if part of your family or community believes and lives the propaganda.
1
Consider the idea that these men like it that way. No women telling them to clean up. Beer in the fridge. sports on TV day and night. The side hustles are to avoid taxes and higher child support while making payments on the $50000 truck they have no real use for or the latest gun for the collection. You can try to ennoble these men boys David but that is only because you don’t know any.
17
@Susan M Hill
And what, may I ask, is wrong with freedom, beer in the fridge, sports on TV, etc.? What is wrong with men living their lives without women telling them what to do?
Is it more "noble" to sacrifice freedom for unrequited commitment?
5
@Susan M Hill, They need those $50,000 behemoths to carry around their huge, yet fragile, egos.
1
Brooks starts off by noting that a capitalist economy that "emphasizes competition, dynamism" must be counterbalanced by a culture that "celebrates cooperation, stability and committed relationships."
A couple days ago he started off yet another one of his columns with a similar truism.
Later on he plows through a few exemplars before concluding that "there need to be better economic policies" that should be accompanied with "cultural change."
No mention at all about which party and which administrations have championed economic policies detrimental to the working/middle class. Tax cuts for the rich? Oh yeah, we'll serve it on a golden platter even if it means greater national debt.
No mention at all about which party resists any change in cultural norms and values. Want to blame the gays? Want to blame Muslims? Sure, happy to do so. Just understand it'll be in coded language so only you will understand.
I don't know whether to laugh or cry in noting, with deep irony, that the winning slogan of the most recently elected orange-man (with lesser votes than the so-called loser) was MAGA. In other words, let us go back to segregation, Jim Crow, women as baby producing machines, homophobia, religious persecution, and on and on and on.
I've asked this question of Brooks many times: Isn't it time to name the true enemies of our country? Isn't it time to point a finger at the true criminals? You are too smart not to know the answers to these questions.
54
Amen. Quite alright to call for the changes and commitments Mr Brooks calls for, but until he acknowledges the catastrophic harm the current GOP has brought onto the USA, and denounces them for the immoral, fascist “leaders” that the country now has, he is whistling past the graveyard of America.
14
I would like David to return to politics now...
6
I clicked the link and downloaded the paper.
It does not include a detailed description of how the interviews were conducted. Nor does it include a detailed description of how "data" was extracted from the recordings.
Without that information, I can't assess whether they measured interviewees true selves or what they feel comfortable telling an interviewer. Those aren't the same thing.
My guess is that this study will be tough to replicate.
7
Ouch! A little too close to home. Nothing like seeing your own life described to make you want to cringe a little.
6
Wow, 34 comments so far and nobody has yet blamed this on career women or the public schools feminizing boys at their behest.
I’m wondering if everyone out there is feeling OK.
6
@Di
Well, you were just ahead of the one blaming it on contraception and abortion.
5
@Di you spoke too soon. Check out the one that blames it on contraception and abortion.
They’re frying the fat off us, Dave! North America once had the advantage of having nothing but a few natives to wipe off a rich continent that we white folk managed to ravage minimally by only a few wars. But as trade globalized, our comparative advantage had to be slip away, and there’s no purely “cultural change” that will save us locally now, short of a thorough reconstruction of our educational system.
2
The detatched, or dislocated, men he describes are simply living lives a a post-social-compact world, such as was basically promoted by neoliberal, "rational choice" economists, who despite being radical free marketers (except when government was necessary to underwrite the financial risks of the wealthy and create infrastructure and other conditions to facilitate the enrichment of the already wealthy), embraced Marx's view of culture as mere superstructure, a veneer to prettify what are really just Hobbesian, self-interested transactions. Morality and culture are just a mask in this view.
Amartya Sen illustrated the moral outlook of "rational choice theory" in a conversation presupposing its standards:
"'Can you direct me to the railway station?' asks the stranger. 'Certainly,' says the local, pointing, in the opposite direction, towards the post office, 'and would you post this letter for me on your way?' 'Certainly,' says the stranger,resolving to open it to see if it contains anything worth stealing."
Moral culture consists in reliable expecations people will act honestly, not just as purely selfish machines. But Chicago economics (Posner) consciousy re-eingineered society and institutions on the bedrock of calculated self-interest, thinking this more reliable, less fanciful, then morality.
We have the gig economy instead of mutual commitments, for example. "Every man for himself" was consciously put in place of traditional moral culture and "fairness" standards.
5
Mr. Brooks, as a U. Chicago graduate, you doubtless have read the following quote in Thucydides. I challenge you to state any other moral stance enacted/respected by the "rational choice"/"human capital" crowd besides the following:
"...we shall not trouble you with specious pretenses---...since you know as well as we do the right, as the world goes, is only in question between equal power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must."2
This familiar, even cliche, quote from the famous "Melian Debate" is exactly the Chicago economics stance: might makes right. Do you pretend, for one second, that the financiers and bankers of Wall Street operate by any other principles? Just today the Times ran an op-ed on hedge funds (financial sabotage for CDO profit) confirming this.
The detatched workers you profile are only reciprocating the post-morality "every man for himself" cynicism Chicago economists (and economic conservatives generally) elevated to the status of a religion.
In a word, the amoral culture you limn is the creation of economists who really sought to beastialize us, and fulfill the Hobbesian war of each against all, for no other ultimate purpose than money and power.
Conservatives have supported that agenda, liberals opposed it. Which camp have you been in?
Think the root cause is right in front of us but we all don’t seem to want to admit it...it’s the destruction of marriage as an institution.
Imagine if these men had to make a commitment to a family. It would require them to make hard choices, deny themselves and put others first.
Instead we allow them to pursue autonomy (aka fear of commitment) and increase their selfishness. And where does selfishness lead...but more selfishness. And sadly we reward them for it, where’s instead we should recognize it for what it is: a refusal to grow up.
Good luck on providing a fabric for them to connect to. It won’t work because they are only thinking of themselves and not of a community...so they only will participate to see what they can get out of it.
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@George
Wealthier men fare better with marriage. Do they just have more character and commitment?
@Avie. I agree more wealth makes commitment less about your situation. But Your statement is just enabling. Your providing an excuse that allows people to blame their situation and say yeah i’ll take care of others as soon as I get mine. It prevents people from growing up.
Well, it ain't your daddy's capitalism anymore. Industrial capitalism anchored workers into neighborhoods, unions, and lifetime employment at the plant. What's left of it is at best tenuous and impermanent - as the residents of Lordstown have recently discovered. Remaining with GM means uprooting your life, family, neighborhood, and disposing of the social bonds that took decades to build and move to some low-wage southern redoubt.
As the economic structure goes so does the culture. But infuse that culture with a consumerist ideology that makes a god of the individual and "freedom" from constraint the highest aspiration and what you get is a mass of atomized hustlers, most of whom ripe for the latest demogogic riverboat gambler promising revenge on the elites. Weave may be great, but it's no match for the Leviathan of consumer capitalism which is hollowing out the nation's soul and destroying our future.
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In our society, nothing is more respected than money, or the facade thereof. We are raised to appreciate the value of a brand-name shoe, and early on recognize poverty as the crippling, exclusionary, and dangerous trap it is. We may be able to look back to some earlier examples in history and say those times were better, and perhaps in some ways they were, but from here on out, the journey we are making as a society is without precedent. There is no map or blueprint. The issues these young men now face are new and unique. Options have shrunk. Educational standards have been compromised. Being well-educated doesn't equate to being well-paid. Cost of living is exorbitant. Pay is uneven and unequal. One can no longer head to new frontiers, go West, set up a homestead, live off the land. We are a struggling, lonely, disconnected society. In Arizona, private prison employees are embedded in high schools to scout for future inmates. identifying them to the appropriate interested parties. Our sense of decency, fairness, and justice, is reprehensible. The weft and weave of our system is nothing more than an intricate trap, creating and protecting the wealth of the few while destroying the hopes of so many who see nothing to hope for in their work options. These problems will not be remedied by quilting circles or bake sales. We need real and meaningful economic change, and we need to rethink our acceptance of unbridled capitalism. Capitalism and Democracy are not synonyms.
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Mr Brooks, though I understand your are trying to find a solution to the plight of rural Americans, your efforts seem naive and unrealistic.
How about we are facing a more natural process of depopulation of country side as a new, and maybe late, phase of capitalism? On top of that, and given our deep anti-government sentiments, particularly in areas you describe, and a natural process of desensitization to religion, Americans in stressed communities found themselves in a socially tough predicament at least partially due to their own fault. Their religion now is right wing radio, their emotions focus around fear and resentment, rather than ‘love thy neighbor”.
Economic hardship probably accelerated this process, and churches focused on anti-abortion, or overly engaged in politics, and in other areas on the prosperity gospel, did not provide much of a moral compass as to how to keep communities together.
Can’t imagine better conditions for the degeneration of moral values. I consider that an utter failure of American Conservatism, which in it’s struggle for power and money, morally devalued itself.
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@CarolinaJoe
Conservative areas have higher marriage rates, and also conservative women have always shown more sexually satisfication than liberal women, statistically.
@Alexia please provide links to the studies that provide the statistics you mention.
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@Alexia
Can you cite evidence?
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The basis of religion is nothing more than a group with the same questions human beings have always had - why am I here, what happens next? Some religions are dogmatic, some not. Some are big players in real estate. Some are good for business contacts or finding a spouse.
Any worthwhile religion is about justice, living a good life, honesty, contributing to the community, helping the poor and less fortunate.
Not so long ago you needed a trade to survive. The country had an abundance of craftsmen. Neighbors could gather and build a barn in a few days. Houses were built from stone, brick, and wood, and are still the finest structures in the country. What today is comparable? Walmart, Burger King, Sunglass Hut?
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@Gimme Shelter There is a theory that religion serves a purpose of creating trust between strangers. Humans evolved in small social groups ... tribes of less than 150 people. Humans are really only capable of forming social connections with about hat many people. Once populations grow, there needs to be a way to form trust networks.
One such way is a shared religion, especially one which is about, as you say, justice.
It was not so long ago that the most common occupation was a subsistence level farmer. A person who gathered from the local commons areas (perhaps fishing and collecting) and whose LIFELONG occupation was generating survival level food and goods to both take care of oneself, and to help in the local group. The lifelong job within a stable industry, in a stable community was an adequate replacement for that subsistence level farmer gig.
Now, jobs are too impermanent. No one is building a home for neighbors, but they are building for strangers, and with no real necessity for craftsmanship.
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The present disparity of wealth needs a large place in this discussion. Not since just before the Great Depression has the disparity been so great. Shifting a massive proportion of wealth to so few people places gradually increasing strain on all the rest. The resulting lack of economic stability contributes directly to social instability. Combine that with a contemporary ethos of the primacy of the self and, well, here we are.
What frightens me most is how this might lead to support for an authoritarian figure. Someone who champions the little guy by blaming the ‘system’ or ‘deep state’ or whatever. When it seems that the ordinary social structures don’t provide a satisfactory sense of identity, perhaps identifying with someone who scorns the ordinary social structures will. You see where I’m going here.
But this was not Mr. Brooks intent. Thank you David for another insightful look at our contemporary society- however one might spin it.
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"When you have a capitalist economic system that emphasizes competition, dynamism and individual self-interest, you need a culture that celebrates cooperation, stability and committed relationships."
I have never been quite sure whether David's refusal to acknowledge that culture is embedded in the economic system is naive or disingenuous. Sorry, Mr. Brooks, but to have a culture that celebrates cooperation, stability and committed relationships requires an economic system that emphasizes cooperation, stability and committed relationships.
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@vcbowie Here 'culture' is meant not the outcome, but as the ideas that guide us, by which we make our choices.
Ideas.
Starting with the ideas of how to be, people then make their personal choices, and that results in the 'culture' we observe, and this culture then causes the economic choices and rules we set up and live out. To see that clearly, compare an equally free market capitalist nation like Germany to us, and look at the sharp differences in livability, social alienation, CEO earnings, etc.
These interviews remind me of Susan Faludi’s prophetic but maligned _Stiffed_. If we had listened more closely in 1999, when it was published, we might have defused the rage that brought us Trump.
I think we should pay attention. I don’t know whether Weaving is the answer; it sounds good, but I live in a pretty small town and I know that you can have both a thick community and a lot of unfounded grievance and paranoia at the same time. The latter, unfortunately, can be used to cement the former. I do think we need to work on building a culture of community. I just think we have to agree on its values: the human over the theoretical. Us over me. You over us. Difference as delight. Fixing things over fear.
That’s the world I want to live in. The interviewees may not feel the same, but this is for sure: I’m not gonna get there by sitting back and judging people, no matter how unlovely their opinions.
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Really, David. Isn't it rather the case that the economic system follows from prevailing cultural values? In a culture which subscribes to the proposition that success and worth come from outside, from things and power and "prestige" and -- yes -- from "values" and dogma dictated by theological doctrine and other "moral authority" -- "cooperation, stability and committed relationships" are continually under threat from outside forces. When "success" and "worth" are tethered to evanescent externally imposed things and values, they can vanish with the next economic downturn or the next spiritual crisis. If you lose that tether, you lose the gravitational force that holds everything else together. Such a culture is inherently unstable.
Of course, neither joy nor worth come from outside -- they come from awareness and acceptance of things as they are, outside and inside. So you actually have to step away from the mainstream culture, and its associated economic system, to find the meaning that creates the space for true cooperation and stability and meaningful relationships.
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