At this point it really should be better understood, but isn’t, that the only thing that gives meaning to David Brook’s life is inspiring a warm tingling desire in philosophy majors to commit a public act of hara-kiri.
In other, perhaps less rigorously trained individuals, the reaction may be somewhat more restrained and akin to the feeling one gets right before rigorously separating a toddler from his toy.
In either case, the desire is an overwhelming compulsion to oh…lord…make…it…stop.
But, it won’t stop. We can’t make it stop.
And the dripbeat goes on.
If mockery could defeat him, he would have already died a million deaths.
But it’s the stone cold unavoidable conclusion that all our learning and training, all the tools we have acquired to understand and explain the human condition, are like chainmail against the Mongol horde of pretentious foolishness that Brooks brings to the battle.
For what shall it profit a man, if he shall win the whole argument, and see another Brooks column three to four days hence?
Shall he make an enemy of meaningfulness?
Shall you pen a rejoinder?
“What,” you ask, “can you possibly mean when you say that ‘Meaningfulness tries to replace structures, standards and disciplines with self-regarding emotion?’”
You mean that people want to feel that their lives have meaning, that their existence isn’t pointless. And that’s selfish. It’s selfish because it’s not the “he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life” kind of meaning that provides structure and a common vocabulary.
John the Evangelist can confer some meaning on our asses, but your kind of meaning is “a paltry, irreducible, and contentless substitute” based “solely on emotion.”
…it’s subjective and relativistic. You get meaning one way. I get meaning another way. Who is any of us to judge another’s emotion?
Because it’s based solely on sentiment, it is useless. There are no criteria to determine what kind of meaningfulness is higher. There’s no practical manual that would help guide each of us as we move from shallower forms of service to deeper ones. There is no hierarchy of values that would help us select, from among all the things we might do, that activity which is highest and best to do.
Because it’s based solely on emotion, it’s fleeting. When the sensations of meaningful go away then the cause that once aroused them gets dropped, too. Ennui floods in. Personal crisis follows. There’s no reliable ground.
Far be it from me to “bathe luxuriously in my own sense of meaningfulness” here, but these words are not defined the way that David Brooks thinks they are defined.
He doesn’t think that characters from history like Nelson Mandela and Albert Schweitzer and Abraham Lincoln did what they did merely to get a tingly feeling, which is true. But he doesn’t show that they did what they did for any higher reason than that it provided meaning to their existence. Oh, yes, they “had objective and eternally true standards of justice and injustice,” but so do I and you and pretty much everyone who is the least bit morally serious. I do what I do because acting according to my values gives my life meaning.
Yet, remarkably, and contra Brooks this doesn’t trump happiness.
The person leading a meaningful life has found some way of serving others that leads to a feeling of significance.
Second, a meaningful life is more satisfying than a merely happy life. Happiness is about enjoying the present; meaning is about dedicating oneself to the future. Happiness is about receiving; meaningfulness is about giving. Happiness is about upbeat moods and nice experiences. People leading meaningful lives experience a deeper sense of satisfaction.
Evidently, they invented the word ‘fucktard’ for a good reason.
Some of the happiest people I have ever met were housewives whose entire existence revolved around selfless giving, usually with a mind to the future happiness of their husbands and children. They were happy because nurturing the well-being of their loved ones gave them all the meaning they required, and existential angst didn’t enter into the equation unless and until death and the hereafter entered into it.
Happiness is a gift that comes easiest to those with uncomplicated minds, simple tastes, and modest, achievable ambitions. Such lives are almost guaranteed to grant a deeper sense of satisfaction than the lives of deep thinkers and egotists who strive to leave an outsized stamp on the universe. I don’t think there is any sense in which Abraham Lincoln was happy, and even less so a sense in which he was satisfied. Yet, to the degree that he summoned the courage to make huge, consequential decisions and see them through, he did so precisely because he only found meaning and satisfaction in pursuing his eternal moral code, which also happened to be secular, even for the time.
It takes a certain kind of conceit, however, to rate Lincoln’s life as superior to the happy housewife whose concerns are more mundane and whose satisfaction more easily attained. Her happiness is real, and it is enviable. It does not need to be more than it is. One is no more dedicated to the future than the other.
Brooks never contemplates that the only meaningful kind of life that he actually values is actually the kind filled with melancholy, disappointment, and constant struggle. Think Jesus at Gethsemane, “O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me: nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt.” Think Socrates as he contemplates the hemlock, “Crito, I owe a cock to Asclepius; will you remember to pay the debt?” (Translation: my death is the recovery from an illness).
Fuck, think of drunk Richard Nixon talking to the ghost of Abraham Lincoln.
Happiness has got nothing to do with it, but it’s nice if you can get it.
That’s what we mean when we say that everyone needs to find their own meaning to life, because we can’t all find it watching the goddamned Mets. We’re not all going to be in the last history book to burn up with the Sun.
The philosophy of meaningfulness emerges in a culture in which there is no common moral vocabulary or framework. It emerges amid radical pluralism, when people don’t want to judge each other. Meaningfulness emerges when the fundamental question is, do we feel good?
I hate to keep hitting David Brooks with The New Testament since it isn’t his Testament, but he loves it so much. He could familiarize himself with some of its wisdom like, I dunno, The Mote and the Beam? How’s this for a common moral vocabulary: “Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.”
This is broadly understood to be Jesus’s way of telling future David Brooks to zip their pie holes about the meaningfulness of other people’s lives.
Jesus didn’t tell people that they would feel good. Jesus didn’t feel good. He wasn’t fucking happy.
He lived a meaningful life, though, didn’t he? I mean, we’re still talking about him, aren’t we?
And isn’t that the kind of immortality that Brooks wants for himself and believes we should want for ourselves, too?
But, for whatever reason, some of us just want to watch the goddamned Mets.
Not me, of course, but there you are.
Yes, there’s a lot wrong with Brooks’s piece. It’s poorly thought out and poorly written. But I do not find it totally incomprehensible.
Basically it’s an argument against meaning as arbitrary or completely subjective, and against the conflation of meaning with emotion or happiness. I think he intended to contrast meaning and ‘meaningfulness’ in a way something like Colbert’s contrast of truth and ‘truthiness’. But he screwed it up because he’s continually conflating what he needs to distinguish, and he starts this off by using John Gardner as straw man for something he did not even say.
Meaning is enhanced and deepened by emotion and is never entirely divorced from it, else we would lack motivation to seek meaning. To admit this would complicate an argument that is already too much for him to handle. But he is right that a warm and fuzzy feeling is not in itself meaning, though it may give a feeling of meaningfulness. In other words, feeling shouldn’t masquerade as or substitute for meaning.
But there is a psychological, experiential component to eternal truths that are out there, and we do have to construct them through our own personalities and experience and cultures, not because there’s no external reality but because we are IN REALITY different people with different experiences and cultures. And because as spatio-temporary, sensory beings, we need to learn through experience. Even inspiration is linked with experience.
If this were a student paper, I’d give it a C, inasmuch as Brooks is actually trying to say something, but not saying it very well. However, he is not a student, he’s a columnist for the G-D NY Times, who for reasons best known to themselves pay him good money for such stuff.
Yes. I’m here to pimp my piece on the piece, in two parts, snark and semiotic.
Wow. Should someone call an ambulance?
“I hate to keep hitting David Brooks”… huh? He and his ilk deserved to be kicked in the balls repeatedly until a new reality is attained. Practically speaking the lineup is: Alito/Scalia, then Boehner then Brooks…
…And I used to be such a nice guy…
What?
He’s got an ilk?
AG
It has seemed to me that Brooks has been arguing we need to preserve the institutions of civil society – church, family, community service etc that conservatives used to believe were critical. Liberals, progressives, and the radical GOP are not so interested in these institutions (for different reasons), but Brooks thinks they are critical to rebuilding civil society. His views seem more traditionally “conservative” than those coming from the tea party.
Otherwise he is, like many of us, just another old guy trying to make sense of a world that seems to be coming apart at the seams. I don’t share this disdain for Brooks’ philosophical analysis of 2015 america. In some ways it is very liberal: we need to have structures and institutions that care for the needs of society. Wouldn’t such a result be capable of fulfilling progressive fantasies of an egalitarian society? He harps on the need for service to others. Isn’t that something progressives believe is important to the development of our children and those “less fortunate”?
Those institutions (eg churches) have, in the past and present, been racist, sexist, and hostile to gay people (among others) so we are content to reject them and throw them away. Brooks is concerned that we have nothing to replace them and fill the constructive roles they once played. He is, I think, right about that anyway.
Meh – who am I to judge?
PS – no one cares if you want to watch the Mets. But if you ignore your kid all summer while getting drunk and passing out in from of the TV because the Mets are losers… well, who am I to judge?
“… he is, like many of us, just another old guy trying to make sense of a world that seems to be coming apart at the seams. I don’t share this disdain for Brooks’ philosophical analysis of 2015 america. In some ways it is very liberal: we need to have structures and institutions that care for the needs of society. Wouldn’t such a result be capable of fulfilling progressive fantasies of an egalitarian society? He harps on the need for service to others. Isn’t that something progressives believe is important to the development of our children and those “less fortunate”?
I completely agree with the substance of what you say here, and I do think that is what Brooks was trying to get across. However, I don’t think Booman ever got to this, his disdain was directed at how badly it was written, and I can’t disagree with that either.
Going not so much on what Brooks is trying to say here, but on long experience of his usual pedestrian twaddle, I cannot give him quite as much credit as you do. Because while I agree about the importance of traditional institutions, culture, etc., I think Brooks’s own view of them is shallow and rather closely tailored to his own privileged position in the modern corporate world.
It’s not that it’s poorly written.
It’s that he cannot handle the concepts he’s trying to manipulate.
Yes, we can suss out what he’s trying to say, but only by ignoring what he actually says. And it’s not because he isn’t in some sense clear. It’s because he insists on his own usage, and creates definitions for words that are highly idiosyncratic.
He loves to create dichotomies, which is basically the only way he can understand the world, but in this case he cannot decide whether it is better to have a happy life or a meaningful life or a life that is neither exactly but perhaps more fully both.
What is a happy person like? Are they all about taking and not giving? Are they always living superficially in the present?
Of course not.
What is the effort to live a meaningful life like? Is it the opposite of the life that Mandela and Lincoln lived?
Of course not.
Are people who seek meaning in their life through service rather than religion really superficial, flabby moralists, with the attention span of gnats who do what they do only for the transient tingle it gives them?
What about the people who seek meaning through service because of their religion?
And how do the meaning-seekers get more satisfaction in this broken world than those who seem happy by nature?
The piece isn’t a mess because of the writing but because of the concepts that underpin the writing.
As a professional editor and teacher, I constantly encounter bad writing, and I see my first task as trying to figure out what the writer is actually attempting to say. If I can (and I usually can) I then rewrite it as close to the original as possible, i.e. I correct it; and if I can’t figure it out, I try to define the problem and query the author.
With the Brooks piece I immediately went into that mode. I thought that, in the larger picture, he was saying something and that I could more or less see what it was.
I began writing a comment, which forced me to examine the piece more closely. The more I examined it, the more muddled it appeared, and the more detailed my comment grew.
By this time it was past midnight; then I accidentally zapped the entire thing. It must have been at least seven paragraphs by then.
I was so frustrated, I quickly rewrote it in the shorter and less detailed version actually submitted. By that time it was well after one a.m. and I could no longer keep my eyes open.
So, I have a deeply rooted habit of trying to figure out what the hell somebody actually means, and I think of it in a pragmatic way, as a problem of bad writing. It’s sort of a professional assumption: the writer does mean something and my job is to help him/her say it.
(With students of course, this is not always the case. Sometimes they haven’t got a freaking clue.)
My deepening exposure to the Brooks thing was beginning to resemble quicksand, and in the process I realized just what you are saying now — that nobody could write that badly unless they were truly out of their depth.
In other words, I gradually realized that it was worse than I’d thought. And what made it particularly bad is that the concepts he was making a total hash of ARE NOT DIFFICULT CONCEPTS.
Brooks’s problem is more intellectually pretentious than Dubya’s immortal “Bushisms”, but in the end it is similar. It comes from arranging words in some sort of sequence without actually processing the concepts behind them.
So there were definite ideas there, ideas that are often discussed in relation to one another. Brooks arranged the words for these ideas into syntactic structures, but was unable to arrange the actual ideas into a coherent pattern.
And that at least makes sense: Did he not say that STRUCTURE IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN MEANING? of course, if he could have given it meaning, he would have been happy. But damn it, he doesn’t want to be happy!
I’m an editor, too.
And I think you can grant that he makes a rather straightforward case provided that you’re willing to accept certain things on his terms.
In other words, if you accept that happiness consists of thoughtlessness and selfishness and superficiality and an inability or lack of desire to focus on consequence and the future…
If you accept that those who dedicate themselves to serving others are a different category from the happy, and that they are ultimately live more satisfying lives…
If you accept that most of the people who are seeking meaning in their lives are really only looking for the transitory feeling of being a good person that comes with doing a good deed and that they are in a different category from the people who seek justice or serve others to fulfill timeless traditional religious exhortations…
If you accept that the desire to live a meaningful life is a empty sham that most people pursue with the focus of a mayfly…
If you accept that the critical thing in life is to figure out the gradations between the things that would be good to do and the things that would be great to do, and that we all agree on what those things are and why they’re so great…
And what is the point, in the end?
The point is that “radical pluralism” places a social cost on David Brooks when he judges others, and he doesn’t like that. He wants us to be better people and he doesn’t want to get the stink eye when he scolds us for watching the goddamned Mets.
The propositions you lay out are consistent with what he says in the piece. They paint him as shallow and rigid considerably beyond the shallowness and rigidity I have always attributed to him.
The case he makes is consistent, I suppose, but the consistency is merely logical; it does not correspond to any actual world. It is the solipsistic world of David Brooks, where the good conforms to a set of shallow and arbitrary dichotomies drawn up by David Brooks.
His writings are thus of interest only in a clinical sense. What stands out most to me is not that Brooks is judgmental or that he doesn’t like to be disagreed with. That’s true of many people, and after all, incisive judgment and articulate disagreement are what makes the world go round. It’s the sheer emptiness of his ideas that I find so striking.
The idea that life can have meaning is a Christian myth invented to bash atheism.
Texts have meaning.
Signs and symbols have meaning.
Life is not the kind of thing that could have a meaning.
What would it mean? “Eat at Joe’s?”
Oh, wait. 42.
Hat tip to Douglas Adams.
This is different from the question whether life has a purpose.
It does; ask the white mice.
Another hat tip to Douglas Adams.
Signs and symbols have meaning only when interpreted. So you have to interpret your life, or anyone else’s, in order to find meaning in it. Meaning gives it value. Could that be what Socrates meant when he said “The unexamined life is not worth living”? However, the act of interpretation is also a part of life, isn’t it?
You make a compelling case for the crucifixion of Brooks.
No doubt that your having taken the time to post about his piece has given Brooks’ life more meaning. Or something.
No doubt it has. Brooks pitches himself as being the liberals’ favorite conservative.
Not even close for me. My favorite is Larison.
Larison is too reflexively cruel for my taste. Maybe Friedersdorf, Fukuyama or the late Kuo.
Mine is Obama.
Oh no. Wait a minute!!!
That’s backwards, isn’t it.
Obama is the conservatives’ favorite liberal.
Right.
Now I’ve got it right.
Or is that left?
Y’can’t tell the players without a scorecard anymore, and the scorecards are both top secret and thoroughly redacted in case some whistleblower decides to get really real.
Oh well.
People like Brooks are sucking up lots and lots of money. That’s good for the rest of us because it helps to keep us lean, mean and hungry. Eventually, maybe we’ll actually do something instead of constantly complaining about the maunderings of rich, empty windbags.
Nevermind.
Yore freind…
Emil Litella
a swamp of phrases that make no sense. more of his struggle to deal with his divorce and finding some meaning after his empty years of pandering to wealth and what he considers status – that’s my interpretation. I say he should stop trying to apply his personal naval gazing to everyone else and go to a therapist.
how the Times can pretend this has anything to do with intellectual discourse?
What’s wrong with naval gazing? Admiral Dewey did very well with it.
nice correction, thanks
A lot of people don’t find any use in politics and remain aggressively ignorant or don’t care or susceptible to republican bullshit because of it. No….meaning, unhappy. Since politics is factually vitally important to our continued existence, I look on those people with a little bit of contempt.
What profit if you watch the mets (at least not the fucktard Yankees) but NYC floods due to climate change and theres no social security because the republicans rejiggered the program to fail?
On a lighter note go read Charlie Pierce’s blog today on this. LMAO.
Remember:
Brooks doesn’t write columns.
He arranges piles.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/31/opinion/brooks-the-sidney-awards-part-2.html?smid=tw-nytdavidbrook
s&seid=auto&_r=1&
With a mandatory Driftglass link:
http://driftglass.blogspot.com/2013/12/david-brooks-talks-to-todays-youth.html
The man tries so hard to sound profound, but the more you deconstruct what he’s saying, the less sense it makes, till at last you’re left with a puddle of pretentious gibberish.