David Brooks begins his latest column titled Flood the Zone of February 6,2012 with this opening paragraph:

(“Every once in a while, the Obama administration will promulgate a policy that is truly demoralizing. A willingness to end the District of Columbia school voucher program was one such case. The decision to force Catholic social service providers to support contraception and other practices that violate their creed is another.”)

These points are subject to empirical examination married to a search for the intent of action, but then comes this arresting assertion:

(“These decisions are demoralizing because they make it harder to conduct a serious antipoverty policy. “)

How can any citizen of this republic, who has been politically conscious for the last fifty years of our history, not find this bit of self-serving polemic just too steep, too freighted with political hypocrisy, to treat it as anything other than mere rhetoric? Let me assert that America’s Conservative Party has never been concerned with poverty,ever. Recall that Lyndon Johnson believed that he could realize, could supply “guns and butter”: imperial war and a domestic welfare state. Where were the Conservatives, then, where are they today? He expands his argument:

(“The essential truth about poverty is that we will never fully understand what causes it. There are a million factors that contribute to poverty, and they interact in a zillion ways. Some of the factors are economic: the shortage of low-skill, entry-level jobs. Some of the factors are historical: the legacy of racism. Some of the factors are familial: the breakdown in early attachments between infants and caregivers and the cognitive problems that often result from that. Some of them are social: the shortage of healthy role models and mentors.

The list of factors that contribute to poverty could go on and on, and the interactions between them are infinite. Therefore, there is no single magic lever to pull to significantly reduce poverty. The only thing to do is change the whole ecosystem.

If poverty is a complex system of negative feedback loops, then you have to create an equally complex and diverse set of positive feedback loops. You have to flood the zone with as many good programs as you can find and fund and hope that somehow they will interact and reinforce each other community by community, neighborhood by neighborhood.

The key to this flood-the-zone approach is that you have to allow for maximum possible diversity. Let’s say there is a 14-year-old girl who, for perfectly understandable reasons, wants to experience the love and sense of purpose that go with motherhood, rather than stay in school in the hopes of someday earning a middle-class wage.”)

Mr. Brooks, in the above, manifests his love of capacious theoretical abstractions, garnished with an abundance of current intellectual jargon drawn from the social sciences. This demonstrative of an ethical seriousness? He anchors these arguments in the person of an anonymous 14-year-old girl, who aspires to love and be loved and longs for a sense of purpose. These aspiration could be the most important when speaking about the goods that human beings value.

(“You have no idea what factors have caused her to make this decision, and you have no way of knowing what will dissuade her. But you want her, from morning until night, to be enveloped by a thick ecosystem of positive influences. You want lefty social justice groups, righty evangelical groups, Muslim groups, sports clubs, government social workers, Boys and Girls Clubs and a hundred other diverse institutions. If you surround her with a different culture and a web of relationships, maybe she will absorb new habits of thought, find a sense of belonging and change her path.

To build this thick ecosystem, you have to include religious institutions and you have to give them broad leeway. Religious faith is quirky, and doesn’t always conform to contemporary norms. But faith motivates people to serve. Faith turns lives around. You want to do everything possible to give these faithful servants room and support so they can improve the spiritual, economic and social ecology in poor neighborhoods.”)

Mr. Brooks celebrates holistic metaphors in the interventions that we must contemplate and practice in our project of to save the children of poverty from their dire fate. Can we even grant the man, and his pastiche of ethical/political concern, the compliment that he and his fellow Conservatives have any interest in the welfare of his 14 year-old protagonist? The New Democrats, in some cases, sound the right notes, but it is hard to take them seriously, as advocates for poor children. We are a secular state as an in order to: as guarantee that all can practice what each feels is ‘sacred’ or not, but within that secular frame.

Political Observer