1. A good society is like a dense jungle. There are vines and intertwining branches. There are enmeshed root systems and connections across the canopy. There are monkeys playing at the treetops, the butterflies darting below. Every creature has a place in the great ecosystem. There is a gorgeous diversity and beauty and vitality.
David Brooks is awful at metaphor, but this one is downright horrifying. Metaphorically, the "jungle" is seldom used in a positive sense. It describes something lawless and brutal and primitive, nature red in tooth and claw. Most of those playful animals are there to be eaten by something higher up the Great Chain of Being, and indeed this must be so for the good of the biome. Brooks' "good society," then, seems to be one built around an unbreakable hierarchy in which those on the top freely prey on those beneath, and where challenges to the system are unthinkable as they might otherwise unbalance the system and destroy it.
2. A good person leading a good life is a creature enmeshed in that jungle. A beautiful life is a planted life, attached but dynamic. A good life is a symbiotic life-serving others wholeheartedly and being served wholeheartedly in return. It is daily acts of loving-kindness, gentleness in reproach, forbearance after insult. It is an adventure of mutual care, building, and exploration. The crucial question is not, "who am I?" But: "Whose am I?"
Continuing the grim metaphor from the previous point: The term Brooks selects here is "symbiotic," not "mutualistic." Symbiosis just means that two organisms share some common existence, but it does not suggest that both organisms benefit equally or at all. Parasitism is also a form of symbiosis, and there are a lot of parasites in the jungle.
It's a silly thing to notice, but the alternative was a full paragraph about Mr. "Whose am I?" dumping his wife for a newer model and/or links to all of the articles where he seems to be using his column to indirectly make a point to someone in his personal orbit.
3. Most of us get better at living as we go. There comes a moment, which may come early or later in life, when you realize what your life is actually about. You look across your life and review the moments when you felt more fully alive, at most your best self. They were usually moments when you were working with others in service of some ideal. That is the agency moment. That is the moment when you achieve clarity about what you should do and how you should live. That is the moment when the ego loses its grip. There is a sudden burst of energy that comes with freedom from the self-centered ego. Life becomes more driven and more gift. That is the moment when a life comes to a point.
This is where I fully break with my earlier promise regarding tu quoque and talk about Brooks himself. This document contains the language of revolutionary life change, but Brooks has never really exhibited such a shift himself. In interviews with Brooks and in his Aspen speeches, he suggests that he realized his "vocation" in childhood and discovered Great Man Theory - the defining trait of his politics - as an undergraduate. The last big shift in his life was moving to Brussels, but he followed that with a quarter-century of opinion writing that, at best, has evolved as much as any organism does over a single generation.
More to the point, Brooks - at least in his public life - has never really been involved in these kinds of big collective projects. No Labels? He gave a few speeches for them, but I haven't seen any evidence that his involvement went beyond that. This Aspen thing? He's not a member of some working group, he's a frontman chosen for name recognition. His television appearances, his columns, his books, his ridiculous college lectures - all primarily individualistic pursuits.
My question for Brooks, then, is "How do you know that these moments of change and collaboration are the best ones in your life if you've never lived them?" But I know the answer to that. Like so many things that are wrong with Our Wonderful Newsmedia, the answers can be found in Tom Scocca's "On Smarm." Scocca writes about a phenomenon of writers that is particularly pronounced among journalists - a tendency for people who achieved success by producing conventional, safe material to advise others to write more experimental, aspirational fare. A generous commentator might argue that this is the old jaded master cautioning his pupils of the hollow victories of worldly success; A more cynical observer might point to that master's recent output and ask "Then why isn't he writing high-order material now, when he has the clout to get it published to a wide audience?" Simple answer - it's a lot easier to talk about leading a better life (and reap the accolades for it) than it is to actually live that better life.
Brooks can talk about rejecting status for meaning all he wants, but actions speak louder than words. If he really wants to exemplify this ideal figure, he doesn't have to be MLK or Gandhi. He can be Bill Watterson, receding from public life at the height of his popularity because he felt that his work was done and there were other things he'd rather do. That's a dedication to vocation - Brooks is a fucking poser.
...Man, how long have I been rambling about this? Better wrap it up:
4. When you see people at the point, you see people with a power that overcomes division and distrust. Distrust is a perversity. No one wants to live in a distrusting place, or be lonely. Distrust comes about because of our own failings of relationship. But love has a redemptive power, Martin Luther King argued. It has the power to transform individuals and break down distrust. If you love a person and keep loving a person, they may lash out at first, but eventually they will break under the power of your care. Division is healed not mostly by solving the bad, but by overwhelming the bad with the good. If you can maximize the number of good interactions between people, then the disagreements will rest in a bed of loving care. When trust is restored, the heartbeat relaxes, people are joyful together. Joy is found on the far side of sacrificial service. It is found in giving yourself away.
And there's "distrust" again - distrust meaning disagreement, as previously established. Reading this passage it occurs to me that Brooks - like most recent would-be political philosophers - defines his beliefs more by what he opposes than what he supports. What does he support? Nice things, friendliness, music and good food, and I'm sure he only left out puppies and chocolate because some people are allergic to those things and thus they are too divisive. By contrast, he's against a lot of things - capitalism (too competitive), socialism (too stifling), democracy (too argumentative), internationalism (too...actually, why does he dislike this one again?), federalism (too centralized) and a whole host of social movements which just aren't his speed.
Maybe he goes into more specifics in the book. It's possible that I'm totally wrong about the book, which won't be out for weeks and lacks even a few sample pages. Perhaps it's not just another set of book reports and is instead the overarching discourse on society that he's been building toward for his entire career. The reason I doubt this (aside from it being David Brooks) is that this list is the conclusion of his book, not the opening. This isn't an executive summary of his arguments, it is his argument in total, and there's just not much here aside from bland platitudes meant to soothe an audience that's wary of change and fearful of argument.
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