Tag: David Brooks

Against Nostalgia

Mark Davis1 Comment

 

Some conservatives carry on even as the bizarro world continues to invert reality on Trump’s watch. Over at National Review they are kvetching about state and local regulations for hair stylists. Damn, look at the market distortions! If only we could unlock that 1/2 of 1/10th of a percent of the market we would achieve libertarian liberation! Meanwhile, Donald Trump is taking an ownership stake in Intel and imposing export tariffs on Nvidia like a socialist dictator. And David Brooks at New York Times proclaims that cultural factors override the role of money in terms of making or breaking the success of people. If only we were more…Swedish we would not have to descend into nihilistic doom cycles.

It’s not that these aren’t partially true, of course, but merely that they are shadow-boxing on an old battlefield filled with muskets and cannonballs. The new war has moved on.

This inverted reality calls for something different. The notion that we can reclaim social stability through nostalgia or micro-microeconomics lacks sensibility, credibility, and honesty. We live in a modern world where even core concepts like the reliability of the Gospels is widely distrusted, which in part explains the increasing view of Christian institutions as centers of manipulation and cruelty. There never was any there there, just shadowy programming and ignorance before the internet era. Get them young enough and they can be groomed, like Epstein’s victims. The critical role of culture and institutions was always as fragile as the communications and information systems that supported it. Now there is nothing but the dark potential of power.

And here I am, so negative! And just after inventing my own religion built around trust and optimizing our personal and group engagement with the state and the world.… Read the rest

Bobos and Grifters

Mark DavisLeave a comment

It’s a good time to be a pundit trying to find a vein of gold that explains the polarization of modern America. Is it political, societal, sociological, psychological, economic, or some mixture of all of the above? Take David Brooks’ new Atlantic essay on bobos and boubours. Here we have modern politics emerging from social, economic, and meritocratic trends that build on his riff on Richard Florida’s ideas of the creative class in the early 2000s. I’ll sum it up as simply as I can, though I also want to touch on why it seems flawed to me. But here we go:

  1. An intellectual elite arose that controls media, educational opportunities, technology, and culture (the “bobos” for bourgeois bohemian).
  2. Our politics (and some international as well: Marine Le Pen, Boris Johnson, etc.) reflect a backlash against these new overlords by the “boorish bourgeoisie” (boubours) who see their political voices suffocated in this new class order.
  3. Maybe if we mixed together a bit more we can reduce the temperatures and empathize with one another better.

OK, so Brooks is on that solution bandwagon that always reaches for more social integration to solve all ills. It is positive and very bobo (I doubt he would disagree given his self-confessional acknowledgement of his own status as part of the creative class in the article.) We have seen calls for less assortative mating, more bipartisan dinner parties for congresspeople, and other ideas in the past.

All very positive, agreed.

But what if the real problem is more sinister? How about the idea that many people are being manipulated by con artists with respect to the things that should matter to them?… Read the rest