StephenKMackSD's Blog

For the past week I’ve been reading Pauline Kleingeld’s new book Kant and Cosmopolitanism:The Philosophical Ideal of World Citizenship published by Cambridge University Press. I measure a book by it’s first one hundred pages, so I have spent the last week concentrating on engaging with Professor Kleingeld’s impressive and enlightening scholarship. She is a first rate thinker and writer, who takes as her subject matter other thinkers, whose ideas are worthy of extended examination. Reading a great book has a remarkable intellectually revitalizing power.

I have missed Mr. Brooks essays in the Times of last week and am catching up on my reading, today.  In his essay of February 13, 2012 titled The Materialist Fallacy exploits his perennial theme of American Decadence, and the first indicator of that pernicious decadence is out of wedlock births. Mr. Brooks is morally conventional to the nth degree,though his is not an unconscious moral conformity,  but rather a conformity in service to the politically defensible Conservatism that he continually champions. In the first part of his essay he carefully defines the historical territory of American society and politics, of recent memory, and shows his unrivaled ability to a engage in a self-serving reductionism carefully engineered to fit his conclusions. He is an adept propagandist. But the defense of contemporary sociological scholarship and it’s conclusions about the importance of stability to the well being of children, and their potential for success in learning, growing and leading both productive lives as citizens, and as persons is not the actual question here, but the question of Mr. Brooks defending the dubious scholar Mr. Charles Murray and his latest publication Coming Apart. The question of what policies should be constructed using sociological scholarship, as a tool to engage in successful state interventions in the lives of citizens, not withstanding Mr. Brooks’ assurances to the contrary, is not the project of Conservatism 2012. “Starve the Beast” in the words of the Social Darwinist and political ideologue Grover Norquist, allied to a concerted effort of Republican Governors and state legislators, in twenty one states, to suppress the votes of people unable to obtain state issued photo identity cards is the real face of Conservatism, not the carefully modulated and intellectually respectable moralizing of Mr. Brooks.

Political Observer        

Glad to say that I have just received Professor Kleingeld’s new book and am reading it with rapt attention.

Happy Scholar

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/12/opinion/sunday/douthat-can-the-working-clas…

While contemplating a reply to Mr. Douthat’s essay of February 11,2012, titled Can The Working Class Be Saved?, a thought kept recurring to me that would give me no rest: in 21 states Republican legislators and governors have passed voting bills that restrict voting to those who must present picture identification in order to register to vote and to cast a legal ballot. These laws will restrict the voting rights of the working poor, poor blacks, people on fixed incomes, Social Security recipients, and students. One might argue that these groups represent a vital part of voters who regularly cast votes for Democrats. The rhetorical notion that Conservatives, the Republican Party, care about the ‘working woman or man’ and the ‘underclass’ and their welfare, wedded to a concern for protecting the process of voting from the nonexistent threat of ‘voter fraud’, make Mr. Douthat’s propaganda exercise moot. Although he paints himself as the mean between two extremes, Mr. Charles Murray’s Libertarianism and the New Deal Romantics, is any of this convincing, except as mere rhetoric in the face of the utterly undemocratic actions of America’s Conservative Party, the Republicans?

Since the election of Reagan in 1980 the whole of electoral politics, in America, has been focused on the middle class and it flourishing. The New Democrats were a product of the triumph at the polls of Reagan: they willfully forgot the legacy of the New Deal and made their peace with Wall Street which led to Bill Clinton, of both Welfare Reform and Financial Reform i.e. the elimination of regulations that have proved disastrous: the collapse of the world economy in 2008 and the fact that in 2012 near 147 million Americans live at or uncomfortably near the poverty line. This being the political background to Mr. Douthat’s exercise in faux concern for the ‘working class’ as the backbone of the nation. One can also observe that the Occupy Wall Street movement has changed the nature of the debate in America about income distribution, with the plangent idea of the 1% and the 99%.

Political Observer

http://greekleftreview.wordpress.com/2012/02/13/naomi-kleins-interview-about-…

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/07/opinion/brooks-flood-the-zone.html?partner=…

(“The administration’s policies on school vouchers and religious service providers are demoralizing because they weaken this ecology by reducing its diversity. By ending vouchers, the administration reduced the social intercourse between neighborhoods. By coercing the religious charities, it is teaching the faithful to distrust government, to segregate themselves from bureaucratic overreach, to pull inward.”)

Have vouchers proven to be the answer, even an answer to ‘Educational Reform’? Or simply a way for Conservatives to underwrite religious education, under the political guise of choice? The question of paying for the birth control of employees of religious organizations, who may be unattached to the religious organization except as employees overstates the case.

(“Members of the Obama administration aren’t forcing religious organizations to violate their creeds because they are secular fundamentalists who place no value on religious liberty. They are doing it because they operate in a technocracy. Technocrats are in the business of promulgating rules. They seek abstract principles that they can apply in all cases. From their perspective, a rule is fair when it can be imposed uniformly across the nation. Technocratic organizations take diverse institutions and make them more alike by imposing the same rules. Technocracies do not defer to local knowledge. They dislike individual discretion. They like consistency, codification and uniformity. Technocratic institutions have an unstated theory of how change happens. It’s the theory President Obama sketched out at the beginning and end of his State of the Union address: Society works best when it is like a military unit — when everybody works together in pursuit of a mission, pulling together as one.”)

Here is Mr. Brooks on the inherent evils of Technocracies and Technocrats, so goes the Political Romantic party line of the unintended consequences, of the inherent mendacity of bureaucrats, and government run endeavors to ameliorate the condition of the poor. Is the New Deal an example of the failure of government to address the ecology of poverty and of non-holistic meliorist policies ? The Conservatives governed for six years before 2006, one would have thought that ‘Compassionate Conservatism’ would have produced more tangible evidence of concern and commitment to the poor. On President Obama’s military comment: our society works best when it takes seriously the fundamental concept of the cultivation of civic republican virtue within a constitutional framework.

(“But a realistic antipoverty program works in the opposite way. It’s not like a military unit. It’s like a rain forest, with a complex array of organisms pursuing diverse missions in diverse ways while intertwining and adapting to each other. I wish President Obama would escape from the technocratic rationalism that sometimes infects his administration. I wish he’d go back to his community-organizer roots. When he was driving around Chicago mobilizing priests and pastors on those cold nights, would he really have compelled them to do things that violated their sacred vows?I don’t think so. I think if that Barack Obama possessed the power he has today, he’d want to flood the zone with as much rich diversity as possible.”)

Mr. Brooks cannot resist the felt imperative,that manifests itself as the need to be a public moralist, to engage in one way or another in the hortatory rhetorical mode. He sounds, on so many occasions, like the Puritan scolds of our national beginnings, although he condones and consorts with the corporate Moloch with too much frequency to make the rehearsal of Puritan exhortations anything but nostalgic garnish.

Political Observer

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

Schumpeter in an essay in the January 28^th edition of the Economist titled The Power of Tribes manages to sing the praises of the tribalist ethos, at least in it’s economic iteration, as a handy reductive tool in the search for a usable explanatory frame, bolstered by social science and some impressive statistical data.Staring that deadline in the face makes more mailable the standards writers set for themselves. The narrow focus of the essay to economic matters, even though the ethical notion of value continally manifests itself in his arguments, makes this essays weaker than it might have been. He sounds almost like David Brooks on the hunt for a set of metaphors with which to build his opinions, and having found his material, fashions his rickety hobby horse and sets off at an uncoordinated gallop, thinking himself home free.

Political Cynic

If the regular reader of Mr. Brooks had any doubt that he is a devoté of the Conservative Political Theology of conformity to the dictates of male power: Patriarchy, that reader has now been disabused of that error. In this essay titled ‘How to Fight the Man‘ Mr. Brooks provides a pastiche of moral seriousness, partaking in an expression that was passe a generation ago. Mr. Brooks seems to existentially capture the Conservative ideal of a very selective reading of the moral and political Tradition. The means, a homily featuring Jefferson Betheke as believer in Jesus who finds the elders of the church expressive of a kind of corruption, of a sclerosis persistent in organizations dedicated to an uncritical theological conformity, unable to discover the true essence of the teachings of the master. Mr. Betheke is here cast as the wayward son who discovers the wisdom of the group elders, as part of the maturation process, or simply the acceptance of the rightness of the group. Virtue is not the moral end of the theological organization, but conformity to the collective will is it’s sine qua non. This can hardly be the object of astonishment except to the historically naïve, but Mr. Brooks uses it as introduction to a meditation described as advice to the ‘young rebel’. The heavy irony of the author of the ‘Milquetoast Radicals’ changing his rhetorical tone to that of an avuncular counselor to these young misfits rings hollow, to exercise a well worn cliché. Here is a selective collection of quotations, testifying to the political/ethical efficacy of authority and conformity:

“The paradox of reform movements is that, if you want to defy authority, you probably shouldn’t think entirely for yourself. You should attach yourself to a counter-tradition and school of thought that has been developed over the centuries and that seems true.”

“Joining a tradition doesn’t mean suppressing your individuality. Applying an ancient tradition to a new situation is a creative, stimulating and empowering act. Without a tradition, everything is impermanence and flux.”

“Most professors would like their students to be more rebellious and argumentative. But rebellion without a rigorous alternative vision is just a feeble spasm.”

“If I could offer advice to a young rebel, it would be to rummage the past for a body of thought that helps you understand and address the shortcomings you see. Give yourself a label. If your college hasn’t provided you with a good knowledge of countercultural viewpoints — ranging from Thoreau to Maritain — then your college has failed you and you should try to remedy that ignorance.”

“If I could offer advice to a young rebel, it would be to rummage the past for a body of thought that helps you understand and address the shortcomings you see. Give yourself a label. If your college hasn’t provided you with a good knowledge of countercultural viewpoints — ranging from Thoreau to Maritain — then your college has failed you and you should try to remedy that ignorance.”

Political Observer

Mr. Brooks in his essay of January 30, 2012 regarding Libertarian Scholar Charles Murray and his latest book “Coming Apart” entitled The Great Divorce, has words of praise for his analysis of our present economic condition, through the lens that Mr. Murray provides. Mr. Brooks asserts that it is the most important book of the year. Although a critical reader might just be a bit doubtful about the Murray credentials as scholar, The Bell Curve being an example of a well defined ideological use of data, toward a political end. Does any reader have an obligation to treat Mr. Murray and his intellectual champion, Mr. Brooks with a high degree of caution and skepticism? I must admit that I always treat the essays of Mr. Brooks as propaganda: he fills his essays with such beguilingly ambiguous language that has an appeal that transcends political boundaries, e.g. 'political reform', 'tax reform', 'moral renewal', 'personal responsibility' etc., it contributes to the notion that Mr. Brooks possesses a high degree of moral/political seriousness.

Mr. Brooks is obsessed with out-of-wedlock births as a measure of declining American morality and with breathtakingly reductive notions of 'upper tribe' as opposed to 'lower tribe' conduct. Please note, the argumentative outcome is a foregone conclusion, all measures indicated as important to social stability and moral maintenance are middle class values of stability, wedded to the important value of sexual chastity, at least in the Conservative world view. Being that the 'upper tribe' values are determinative in this rhetorical context, of the necessary cultivation of public morality as imagined by Mr. Brooks aided by his ideological ally Mr. Murray then,

in sum, the 'upper tribe' needs to teach the 'lower tribe' how to live, in the reductive terms that Mr. Brooks so loves, by a government forced association. This seems like a complete deviation from anything resembling 'Conservatism', least of all it's Libertarian expression. But let me quote from the essay to provide some definitional frame:

“The truth is, members of the upper tribe have made themselves phenomenally productive. They may mimic bohemian manners, but they have returned to 1950s traditionalist values and practices. They have low divorce rates, arduous work ethics and strict codes to regulate their kids.”

“Members of the lower tribe work hard and dream big, but are more removed from traditional bourgeois norms. They live in disorganized, postmodern neighborhoods in which it is much harder to be self-disciplined and productive.”

For this all to make something resembling coherence, one need only think of the 'upper tribe' as the 1% and the 'lower tribe' as the 99%.Then it becomes a matter of the 'elites' assuming their natural place of moral/economic superiority as teachers of the 'lower order'. What is proving so frustrating to Mr. Brooks is that not many are listening to these preachments of an unsurprising Social Darwinism masquerading as Conservatism.

Political Observer

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^{Mr. Brooks in his essay of January 30, 2012 regarding Libertarian Scholar Charles Murray and his latest book “Coming Apart” entitled The Great Divorce, has words of praise for his analysis of our present economic condition, through the lens that Mr. Murray provides. Mr. Brooks asserts that it is the most important book of the year. Although a critical reader might just be a bit doubtful about the Murray credentials as scholar, The Bell Curve being an example of a well defined ideological use of data, toward a political end. Does any reader have an obligation to treat Mr. Murray and his intellectual champion, Mr. Brooks with a high degree of caution and skepticism? I must admit that I always treat the essays of Mr. Brooks as propaganda: he fills his essays with such beguilingly ambiguous language that has an appeal that transcends political boundaries, e.g. ‘political reform’, ‘tax reform’, ‘moral renewal’, ‘personal responsibility’ etc., it contributes to the notion that Mr. Brooks possesses a high degree of moral/political seriousness.}

^{Mr. Brooks is obsessed with out-of-wedlock births as a measure of declining American morality and with breathtakingly reductive notions of ‘upper tribe’ as opposed to ‘lower tribe’ conduct. Please note, the argumentative outcome is a foregone conclusion, all measures indicated as important to social stability and moral maintenance are middle class values of stability, wedded to the important value of sexual chastity, at least in the Conservative world view. Being that the ‘upper tribe’ values are determinative in this rhetorical context, of the necessary cultivation of public morality as imagined by Mr. Brooks aided by his ideological ally Mr. Murray then,}

^{in sum, the ‘upper tribe’ needs to teach the ‘lower tribe’ how to live, in the reductive terms that Mr. Brooks so loves, by a government forced association. This seems like a complete deviation from anything resembling ‘Conservatism’, least of all it’s Libertarian expression. But let me quote from the essay to provide some definitional frame:}

^{“The truth is, members of the upper tribe have made themselves phenomenally productive. They may mimic bohemian manners, but they have returned to 1950s traditionalist values and practices. They have low divorce rates, arduous work ethics and strict codes to regulate their kids.”}

^{“Members of the lower tribe work hard and dream big, but are more removed from traditional bourgeois norms. They live in disorganized, postmodern neighborhoods in which it is much harder to be self-disciplined and productive.”}

^{For this all to make something resembling coherence, one need only think of the ‘upper tribe’ as the 1% and the ‘lower tribe’ as the 99%.Then it becomes a matter of the ‘elites’ assuming their natural place of moral/economic superiority as teachers of the ‘lower order’. What is proving so frustrating to Mr. Brooks is that not many are listening to these preachments of an unsurprising Social Darwinism masqurading as Conservatism.}

^{Political Observer}

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