Brooks Goes Insane in the Membrane

David Brooks had a NYT column last week that I can't leave uncommented. Unfortunately, it's behind a subscription wall. So I'll summarize. Rousseau sucks. He had a silly, optimistic view that human beings are good. The hippies picked it up and destroyed America, fraying our social fabric and making our public institutions fail so that people lost faith in government. Presumably, this is why people irrationally distrust Bush-Cheney. Meanwhile, we conservatives have a more "tragic" sense of human nature. There are lots of smart people who held such a view: Burke, Madison, Hamilton, Berlin, Hayek. They are mostly conservatives. Like me.

Brooks, teetering on the edge for so long, has finally lost his mind. A once thoughtful social critic has become one of those geezers who endlessly repeat the same ol' where-the-fuck-did-that-come-from stories of their youth to remind themselves who they are. I've blogged on Brooks's internal struggles before. But this exceeds them. Exactly how, pray tell, does Rousseauean optimism have any bearing on today's dour liberals? When exactly is the last time "hippies" controlled anything in this country, much less caused serious damage? Was it Jerry Brown, not Michael Brown, running FEMA? Where was that "tragic" sense when the Hayekians in the Pentagon and CPA were drawing up plans for a free market utopia in "liberated" Iraq? And were Madison and Berlin really "conservatives"? Not if you look at how they positioned themselves in the battles of their day, or how they defined notions of government--and executive--power. Hayek goes out of his way to say he's NOT a "conservative," although the movement ideologues adopted him. In fairness, it was his own damned fault, given his bouts of market extremism. How tragic!

What's really interesting here is that the GOP has become a deeply Rousseauean party: intensely anti-intellectual, obsessed with patriotism and civic unity, prone to flights of paranoia, and driven mad by the decadence of pop culture and its alienating affects on modern identity. So why do they insist on hating JJR so much? Cause he's French? Hell, he was Swiss, and he hated Paris and its effete snobbery with a passion that would make today's GOP proud. No, I think it's simpler. JJR isolated the source of all these ills in inequalities of wealth and power. In other words, he'd echo GOP social critique, but he'd blame it on GOP economic policies and institutional preferences. How tragic!

To be fair to Rousseau, this notion that he lacked a "tragic" sense is complete bullshit, as Judith Shklar and others have shown. Susan Neiman offers one of the most brilliant analyses of JJR's thought I've ever read in Evil in Modern Thought. As Neiman demonstrates, JJR was, to a degree rarely appreciated, a Christian thinker engaged in revisionist theodicy that attacked both Catholic "original sin" and enlightenment deism. His story of mankind in the Second Discourse is an attempt to retell "the fall" in a way that places the blame for our suffering squarely on our historical choices, i.e., our tragic exercise of free will over time, rather than attributing it to a defect in our heavenly design.

Of course, such a subtle point wouldn't fit with Brooks's little story. To define who you are, you need a simplistic enemy who defines who you're not. Brooks knew who he was in the 1960s and 70s. Back then, we could blame the dirty hippies for everything. But today? In an age where our social fabric is fraying as the result of tragic choices made by hubristic, conservative elites, we could use a little more of the real Rousseau, and a little less of the cartoon versions. With tragedy everywhere, we ought to start blaming the responsible individuals and stop musing about how such failures are merely inevitable. Despite his talk of tragedy, Brooks offers nothing but false hope.