Newspaper Reader follows the Brooks’ Historical pastiche!

stephenkmacksd.com/

Oct 26, 2024

Editor: The first paragraphs of David Brooks’ lamentations about the approaching America Elections:

I had hoped this election would be a moment of national renewal. I had hoped that the Democrats could decisively defeat MAGA populism and send us down a new national path.

That’s clearly not going to happen. No matter who wins this election, it will be close, and this is still going to be an evenly and bitterly divided nation.

In retrospect, I think I was expecting too much of politics. When certain sociological and cultural realities are locked in, there is not much politicians can do to redirect events. The two parties and their associated political committees have spent billions this year, and nothing has altered the race. The polls are just where they were at the start. If you had fallen asleep a year ago and woke up today, you would have missed little of consequence, except that it’s Kamala Harris leading the blue 50 percent of the country now and not Joe Biden.

It’s clearer to me now that most of the time politicians are not master navigators leading us toward a new future. They are more like surfers who ride the waves created by people further down in the core society.

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Editor: The Reader need only look to Brook’s ‘The Collapse of the Dream Palaces’ as paradigmatic, of the propaganda produced since. Here is a link to my July 10, 2019 commentary on that political intervention:

Reading ‘The Collapse of the Dream Palaces’ in July 2019: American Writer’s selective commentary

Editor: What follows this lamentation, is a 990 word Potted History, made to measure: in the name invoking a kind of clarity, let me choose just ten quotations from this Historical Pastiche:

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Waves of immigration swept across the country, transforming urban America. Political corruption was rampant in cities, and political incompetence was the norm in Washington, D.C.

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But other movements did indeed produce rebirth. First there was a cultural shift. The cutthroat social Darwinist philosophy was replaced by the social gospel movement, which emphasized communal solidarity and service to the poor.

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At the top of society, moguls like J.P. Morgan imposed order on the corporate world to reduce boom and bust. Philanthropists like Andrew Carnegie and John Rockefeller built libraries, museums and universities.

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Today we face another great civilizational question: How can we create a morally cohesive and politically functional democracy amid radical pluralism and diversity?

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Our nation still lacks the sense of social and psychic safety that would allow us to have productive conversations across partisan difference. We still lack a national creed or a national narrative that would give us common ground among competing belief systems.

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Groups like Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter burst to the fore. Racial equity programs were sweeping across corporations and campuses.

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The country is moving rightward on issues like immigration and economics, and Kamala Harris is moving with it.

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It’s simply unfair to ask Harris, who has been a presidential candidate for all of three months, to lay out a vision for comprehensive national renewal under these conditions.

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Even today we are enjoying a period of economic renewal that makes America, as The Economist put it, the “envy of the world.” It’s our social and political relationships that have turned poisonous, producing exhaustion.

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Editor: The final paragraphs Brooks historico-political intervention:

In 1902, the psychologist William James wrote a book about conversion experiences called “The Varieties of Religious Experience.” Occasionally, he wrote, some belief or vision touches people at “the hot place in a man’s consciousness,” the “habitual center of his personal energy.” These visions arouse great fervor, shake loose existing assumptions and lead, often enough, to heroic action.

Editor: On the question of James in Mr Brooks, see William James: Damn Great Empires! William James and the Politics of Pragmatism:

Alexander Livingston

Published online:

22 September 2016

Published in print:

27 October 2016

Abstract

Damn Great Empires! provides a new perspective on the works of William James by placing his encounter with American imperialism at the center of his philosophical vision. This book reconstructs his overlooked political thought by treating James’s anti-imperialist Nachlass—his speeches, essays, notes, and correspondence on the United States’ annexation of the Philippines—as the key to the political significance of his celebrated writings on psychology, religion, and philosophy. It shows how James located a craving for authority at the heart of empire as a way of life, a craving he diagnosed and unsettled through his insistence on a modern world without ultimate foundations. Livingston explores the persistence of political questions in James’s major works, from his writings on the self in The Principles of Psychology to the method of Pragmatism, the study of faith and conversion in The Varieties of Religious Experience, and the metaphysical inquiries in A Pluralistic Universe. Against the common view of James as a thinker unconcerned with questions of politics, this book places his writings in dialogue with champions and critics of American imperialism, from Theodore Roosevelt to W. E. B. Du Bois, as well as a transatlantic discourse of modernity, in order to excavate James’s anarchistic political vision. Bringing the history of political thought into conversation with contemporary debates in political theory, Damn Great Empires! offers a fresh and original reexamination of the political consequences of pragmatism as a public philosophy.

https://academic.oup.com/book/8144

Editor: Brooks’ final salvo:

For a whole society to change, the people in the society have to want to change themselves. A smug, self-satisfied, “I am right” nation is going to be perennially stuck in place.

Newspaper Reader