So having laid out what's wrong with you in the first half of this thing, Brooks is now going to tell you what you can and should do. Brooks isn't going to give any policy recommendations as much as he's going to argue that they're unnecessary. Instead, he's going to push for something that I've previously called the "Why Not Plant a Tree?" strategy, the approach of addressing all problems through the safest, least controversial, least impactful means possible. It's a staple of "centrist" thought, and now we're going to get Brooks' version.
Brooks' ideal socio-political system was realized in 2002. He's never said this directly, but if you read between the lines - the rambling about unity and "common myths," the disdain for dissent and discussion, the acceptance of frictionlessly powerful elites - and it becomes pretty clear. His goal here is to find a way to recreate that age without the need for terrorism, with the solution lying in some synthesis between his own The Road to Character and Rod Dreher's The Benedict Option.
1. As T. S. Eliot observed, the chief illusion of modern political activity is the belief that you can build a system so perfect that the people in it do not have to be good. The reality is that democracy and the economy rest upon a foundation, which is society. A society is a system of relationships. If there is no trust at the foundations of society, if there is no goodness, care, or faithfulness, relationships crumble, and the market and the state crash to pieces. If there are no shared norms of right and wrong, no sense of common attachments, no yearning for racial justice, then the people in the market and the state will rip one another to shreds as they vie for power and money. Society and culture are prior to and more important than politics or the market. The health of society depends on voluntary unselfish acts.
Here, we begin to transition from Brooks' analysis of people on an individual level (namely that we're all basically monsters) to his analysis of people on a social level. The imagery is still pretty grim - the nation is but a cage of fiends, and without something to stop us we will "rip one another to shreds as [we] vie for power and money." And yet, what we need are "voluntary unselfish acts," and how do we manage that when we're all fiends? Of course, with Brooks it's always easy to guess - in previous works he expounded on his theory that it's impossible to be a good person without "institutions," a theme he echoed in that speech I posted last time.
2. In this day and age, our primary problems are at the level of the foundations. They are at the level of the system of relationships. Our society is beset by ever-higher levels of distrust, ever-higher levels of unknowing, racism, prejudice and alienation. One bad action breeds another. One escalation of hostility breeds another.
3. The call of relationalism is to usher in a social transformation by reweaving the fabric of reciprocity and trust, to build a society, as Dorothy Day put it, in which it is easier to be good.
The refrain in these two points is pretty common among Sensible Centrists, this notion that our only real problem is some abstract interpersonal glitch. Here, Brooks calls it "distrust," while others (including Brooks, elsewhere) call it a "bubble" or "tribalism" or "hostility" or what have you. The simplest way to understand this is that to the elite media figures who occupy this position, our worst (and, indeed, only) problem is disagreement. If we all agreed, everything would be fine.
4. The social fabric is not woven by leaders from above. It is woven at every level, through a million caring actions, from one person to another. It is woven by people fulfilling their roles as good friends, neighbors, and citizens.
Enter the paleoconservative argument for "small government," rephrased for a new generation - or is this a step beyond? Sensible Centrists generally dislike the idea of policy solutions to public problems, and Brooks in particular has suggested that his ideal system features a largely symbolic federal government. Later, we'll get a glimpse at what Brooks thinks the government should be allowed to do.
5. Whenever I treat another person as if he were a stereotype, I've ripped the social fabric. When I treat another person as an infinite soul, I have woven the social fabric. Whenever I lie, abuse, dismiss or show easy contempt for a person, I have ripped the fabric. Whenever I see someone truly, and make them feel known, I have woven the fabric. Whenever I accuse someone of corruption without evidence, I have ripped the social fabric. Whenever I disagree without maligning motives, I have woven it. Whenever I ignore the legacy of racial injustice, I rip the fabric; whenever I acknowledge the brute facts of the past and try to rectify them, I weave it. The social fabric is created through an infinity of small moral acts, and it can be destroyed by a series of immoral ones.
Leaving aside the meat of this point (which is ample, fatty and rancid), I'd like to take a break from analyzing the content and look at the writing. I've occasionally played up great dismay at finding some small yet glaring error in someone's writing, but it's not because I actually care about things like dialogue tags or slightly mangled aphorisms. Rather, I'm told that editors care about those things and that I should care as well, and that if I leave such a trivial error in then it's my fault that I was rejected. I'm angry at such things because they would be mortal sins in my own writing but personally, I don't give a shit.
This passage, though? This I care about. This is a nightmare paragraph.
At first glance, this is another fine example of Brooks' fondness for willful repetition, but it's actually worse than that. Read carefully and you'll see that this is another Goofus-Gallant comparison, with the sentences switching back and forth between "ripping" and "weaving." If you didn't notice that, that's okay - blame Brooks. This whole paragraph scans really badly. Readers tend to skim over long sections of text, which is why we teach people to structure persuasive passages in specific ways. That's why the first sentence of a paragraph gives the topic of the paragraph - it greatly increases ease of reading.
So what is the topic of this point? A person reading quickly might read the first sentence - Whenever I treat another person as if he were a stereotype, I've ripped the social fabric - and think "Ah, Brooks is lecturing those distrustful people" and skip to point six. In doing so, he completely misses the comparisons which are the meat of this paragraph. And even if he tries to read the whole thing, he still might get lost - the positive and negative sentences start the same way, which makes it very easy to lose your place or skip something. It's a serious readability issue.
There are several possible fixes. He could have moved the last sentence to the beginning, which is clearly where it belongs. He also could have split this into several smaller points consisting of one matched pair of rip/weave statements. My gut says that this was how it started, but there was a serious eye-roll risk when people saw four of these things in a row.
6. Personal transformation and social transformation happen simultaneously. When you reach out and build community, you nourish yourself.
Then I saw this and wondered if he'd referred to relationships as "nourishing" before, and he has - but only a few times in this piece, and in more than one context. It feels less like a motif and more like a sign that he wrote this over a fairly long period of time and never went back over it. He has a "great" idea, leaves the manifesto idle for a few days, then has that same "great" idea again. A lot of writers have this problem, especially when editing. I can't tell you how often I've inserted a killer line into a chapter during a rewrite, only to discover in a few minutes that the same line was already in the text a page or two later. This is why a reread is always a good idea if you care about the craft.
David Brooks does not care about the craft. His writing is artless, unclear and bloated because he has little interest in developing his "calling" now that he's already established. This is why I'm giving him shit over that "vocation" line. He can't see his own flaws through the unearned praise he gets.
7. The ultimate faith of relationalism is that we are all united at the deepest levels. At the surface we have our glorious diversity. But at the substrate there is a commonality that no amount of hostility can ever fully extinguish, that no amount of division can ever fully sunder.
"Glorious diversity" is such an affluent white suburbanite turn of phrase, isn't it? You can see here a bit of Brooks' longing for that new golden age of 2002-04. It's sort of paradise as envisioned in 2000's-era corporate marketing materials - people in a variety of hues all agreeing on the greatness of their institution. No disagreement, no hostility...except for those people who do disagree, but they're enemies anyway.
8. Relationships do not scale. They have to be built one at a time, through patience and forbearance. But norms do scale. When people in a community cultivate caring relationships, and do so repeatedly in a way that gets communicated to others, then norms are established. Trustworthy action is admired; empathy is celebrated. Cruelty is punished and ostracized. Neighborliness becomes the default state. An emergent system, a culture, has been created that subtly guides all the members in certain directions. People within a moral ecology are given a million subtle nudges to either live up to their full dignity or sink to their base cravings. The moral ecology is the thing we build together through our daily decisions.
9. Rebuilding society is not just get-togetherism, convening people in some intellectually or morally neutral way. There has to be a shift in moral culture, a shift in the definition of the good life people imagine together.
"Moral ecology" is definitely a recycled phrase from The Road to Character. He loves using "moral" as an adjective for everything, perhaps because he thinks that you have to use the word moral to be moral - remember when he made that argument? Good times.
These two points and the next are the most important ones in this section, for we see the definition of Brooks' ideal society, and it's actually fairly radical. In his utopia, problems are primarily solved through social pressures and morality plays - we won't need all those filthy government initiatives if everyone was nice, dammit. At first brush, this sounds oddly anarchistic (specifically, social anarchism), but anarchism is rooted in the belief that people are innately good and Brooks doesn't believe that. Historically, conservatives used the everyone-is-evil presumption to justify exercising more control over people's lives, so how can Brooks use the same argument in defense of less control?
The answer to this conundrum lies in the works of Rod Dreher. Unlike those biographies that he almost certainly skims to look intelligent, I believe that Brooks read The Benedict Option cover-to-cover and was really inspired by it. His recent obsession with "localism" and neighborhoods obviously comes from Dreher, and it's likely that this pseudo-anarchism has a similar source. Dreher, who fears the "secular" government, imagined that you could build an ideal society around an institution (namely, a church) and you wouldn't really need so much government. Brooks merely lifted that idea and incorporated it into his own, much mushier beliefs. He doesn't want less control, he just wants a different power structure.
10. The state has an important but incomplete role to play in this process. The state can provide services, but it cannot easily provide care. That is to say, the state can redistribute money to the poor, can build homeless shelters and day care centers. It can create the material platforms on which relationships can be built. But the state can't create the intimate relationships that build a fully functioning person. That can only happen through habitual personal contact. It is only through relationships that we become neighbors, workers, citizens, and friends.
Finally, we have the government's actual role in all of this. Brooks hates talking about policy, and this bit of vapor is still more detail than we usually get. For the record, Brooks recently wrote a column where he went into even more detail. The original post broke down this column, but there's just not much there - a collection of paleocon compromise positions (e.g. non-striking "worker's councils" instead of unions), faux-pragmatic centrist hobby horses (e.g. the "let's pay to move them all to North Dakota" bit, which seems like it contradicts the whole localism thing, but whatever), and typical non-specific mush.
The most interesting bit was a statement about letting neighbors judge each other. The original post ended with a spiel about that, but then Brooks wrote another column that pissed me off more than they usually do so I'll probably end up rolling that into its own post. Suffice it to say that Brooksland isn't exactly "unified" - his dream world is a nation broken up into a hundred thousand HOAs ruled over by local elites, all held together by a modern noblesse oblige and a common national myth and overseen by a primarily symbolic federal government, the Congress reduced to a panel of philosophers and storytellers keeping all these new fiefs from invading each other.
But it is even this extensive? Rod Dreher is a man who talks in miles but acts in inches, and Brooks is the same way. He isn't actually calling for any big changes in the government, certainly nothing that would change his own life (which he clearly finds satisfying). In true conservative fashion, he wants everything to stop, move back a few step and stay there. True, he'd like it if the peasants were more deferential to their betters, but he'll be happy if they just stop agitating.
David Brooks isn't an anarchist anymore than Rod Dreher was. Brooks still envisions control, but he rejects a codified system in favor of informal, de facto control based around tradition. If you don't believe me, well...wait a month, I'm sure Ross Douthat will tactlessly pen a column openly expressing all of this. I suspect that he's been reading from Brooks' book collection and typing out the notes in the margins by mistake.
Thanks for the deep dive into the shallow pool. Brooks is trying to build an argument that justifies the conservative faith in Small Town America as the organizing principle of American society. The insistence that individuals who "know each other" can pull each other up by their bootstraps, and provide charity to each other, and police each other with no Government interference is pretty much the whole of Conservative philosophy. The duct tape holding this worldview together is "shared values" which for some reason goes to some ugly places very quickly under the glitter and spackle Brooks is throwing up here to obscure previous implementations of this governing model.
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