Philosophical Apprentice comments.

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Headline: How to Save a Sad, Lonely, Angry and Mean Society

A selection from Brooks’ latest Public Moralizing. Yet not a word about the Gaza Genocide! Brooks does offers an extended diagnosis of what ails us…

Many professors seem to have lost faith too. They’ve become race, class and gender political activists. The ensuing curriculum is less “How does George Eliot portray marriage?” and more “Workers of the world, unite!”

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I confess I still cling to the old faith that culture is vastly more important than politics or some pre-professional training in algorithms and software systems. I’m convinced that consuming culture furnishes your mind with emotional knowledge and wisdom; it helps you take a richer and more meaningful view of your own experiences; it helps you understand, at least a bit, the depths of what’s going on in the people right around you.

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The novelist Alice Walker lamented that she lacked models.

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Then she found the novelist and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, who, decades before…

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I’d argue that we have become so sad, lonely, angry and mean as a society in part because so many people have not been taught or don’t bother practicing to enter sympathetically into the minds of their fellow human beings. We’re overpoliticized while growing increasingly undermoralized, underspiritualized, undercultured.

The alternative is to rediscover the humanist code. It is based on the idea that unless you immerse yourself in the humanities, you may never confront the most important question: How should I live my life?

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In the History of Mr. Brooks’ political opinionating/moralizing, where might The Reader place this misbegotten, vulgar, attempt to construct a usable literary/political character, Joey Tabula-Rasa: Mark Twain made both Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn vivid characters in his novels! Joey is an inanimate political place-holder, conjured by a maladroit practitioner of propaganda:

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What lessons will they draw from the events of the past month? How will the fall of Saddam affect their voting patterns, their approach to the next global crisis? One way to think about this is to conduct a thought experiment. Invent a representative 20-year-old, Joey Tabula-Rasa, and try to imagine how he would have perceived the events of the past month.

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The Collapse of the Dream Palaces

Roger Scruton makes an appearance:

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The philosopher Roger Scruton argued that this kind of education gives us the ability to experience emotions that may never happen to us directly.

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Headline: Scruton sacked by second newspaper for tobacco links

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/scruton-sacked-by-second-newspaper-for-tobacco-links-9276787.html

PROFESSOR ROGER Scruton, the darling of the intellectual right, was sacked as a commentator for The Wall Street Journal yesterday in an editotial after admitting he took money from the tobacco industry to place stories in the national press.

The philosopher, a professor of aesthetics at Birkbeck College, London University, has been told to “take a holiday” from the prestigious newspaper because he failed to disclose his ties with Japan Tobacco.

An editorial in yesterday’s European edition of The Wall Street Journal admitted: “We’ve come in for criticism lately because one of our contributors, the British conservative writer Roger Scruton, wrote an essay for our European edition while being paid by a Japanese tobacco company.

“Our long-time standard is that such financial ties should be disclosed, so readers can make up their own minds.” The move follows his sacking last week by the Financial Times over his tobacco links.

The Wall Street Journal had intervened to defend Professor Scruton over his £4,500-a-month contract with the tobacco giant.

But it said yesterday: “Mr Scruton had an obligation to tell us and his readers about his tobacco financing when he was writing about tobacco issues; he didn’t, and so he will be taking a holiday from our pages.”

Newspaper executives in America are said to be “furious” at Professor Scruton’s claims that he can use his contacts to place pro-tobacco articles.

In an e-mail, sent to Japan Tobacco last October, Professor Scruton boasted: “We would aim to place an article every two months in one or other of The WSJ (Wall Street Journal), The Times, the Telegraph, The Spectator, the Financial Times, The Economist, The Independent or the New Statesman.”

Professor Scruton and his wife, Sophie, are consultants to Japan Tobacco, which produces Camel cigarettes.

Yesterday, Clive Bates, the director of the anti-tobacco group Ash, said: “Japan Tobacco should follow the FT and Wall Street Journal and dump Roger Scruton. Anything he says on tobacco now will immediately be discredited.”

A spokesman for The Wall Street Journal said last night that Professor Scruton, who has worked for the paper since 1996, was not told in advance about the editorial.

Iris Murdoch :

Attention is a moral act. The key to becoming a better person, Iris Murdoch wrote, is to be able to cast a “just and loving attention” on others. It’s to shed the self-serving way of looking at the world and to see things as they really are. We can, Murdoch argued, grow by looking. Culture gives us an education in how to attend.

If attention is a moral act, where might The Reader place Mr. Brooks’ inattention to the Gaza Genocide?

Philosophical Apprentice