A Mid-Life Crisis That David Brooks Turned Into Gold

First, watch this, and I'll eventually give my thoughts on it!  David Brooks

By the way, I didn't mean gold in the sense of money; I meant valuable insights for us.

(For those of you still wondering whether it is worth spending your precious time watching this TED talk by David Brooks, here's a little more information!  (I know, I know: people have no clue how busy you are.  Idiots, all of them.)   David is the conservative counterpart to the liberal voice of Mark Shields, in the reflection / opinion portion of PBS News Hour, with Judy Woodruff.  Just the fact that David Brooks has been selected for this job to some degree indicates that he is a moderate, and that he is at least capable of civil and rational speech, and of reasonable reactions to the news of the day.  Among conservative voices, today, there is almost no other voice to which liberals listen to on an ongoing basis.)

The reason I took this break was that I simply did not have a suitable response to this video, which is both so touching, and so sad.  Still, it is better to give a bad response than no response, to an attempt at communication which must not have been easy for Brooks, or perhaps not so difficult, because writing and communication is his job.

It is interesting that he classes himself as merely an average person, but an articulate one!  There is no doubt that he is articulate---certainly in the print medium, and where he has had time to prepare his responses---and he is wonderfully well prepared in the areas of economics, and political history.  But in the area of personal psychology, he is just beginning to get his sea-legs.  But he is by no means average; moderate conservatives that have resisted being swept away with the Tea Party and Trumpian tide are few.  Or they may be many, but they're hard to find.

After listening to the opening remarks of David Brooks's talk, I get the feeling that his personal problems, and the rise of the New Alt-Right (I loathe dreaming up new words to describe existing things; but it seems something that one has to do, just for the sake of specificity) came together in a devastating way to throw David Brooks completely off balance.  (It is impossible for many people to keep politics out of marriage.  I do not want to read more into what Brooks has said than there is, and perhaps that is a subject for another day.  Of course, if you have no strongly held political beliefs, you could marry anyone, and not be the worse for it.)

One of the major thrusts of David Brooks's talk is his discovery of the group called The Weavers, in what appears to be a sequence of accidents.  I personally had never heard of this group, but from his account, it seems that they constitute a wonderful spiritual home for anyone, given that church is not an option.  I recently discovered, quite by accident, that half our small social circle consisted of conservatives.  Not so conservative as to find it uncomfortable when my wife and I make occasional liberal outbursts, but conservative enough to have voted for Trump.  So they merely tolerate our politics, just as we have tolerated the conservatism of most of our acquaintances, because this is a very conservative area.  So I can easily see that, when the Brookses broke up, David could have been all at sea in many ways, but in no way more importantly than the philosophical environment a person needs for mental stability on a day-to-day basis.

Talking about churches, many of us---and certainly my family and I---are not believers, for which I thank the Lord; and if I were, I would think that most congregations are EITHER merely good at avoiding thinking about the difficult questions before all of us, OR simply arriving at the wrong conclusions, and believing that Trump has been anointed as the saviour of the righteous, despite that his is clearly a very weak vessel indeed.  Some member of the Falwell family, for instance, has given the opinion that Christians have played nice too long, and Trump has been sent providentially, as their instrument of playing dirty.  (You can easily find a reference; lots of political writers have written about the question: Why do Christians tolerate the licentiousness of Trump?)

Within our wider social circle, there is at least one articulate conservative, who is willing to explain why decent, right-thinking conservatives are willing to let Trump take the lead, for the moment.  Basically, for them, economic stability, and business strength, comes first, before welfare programs (which is how they classify almost all the initiatives that form the objectives of the Democrats) can be considered.  Once the economy is strong---and for them, we need to be super-strong---we can start looking at income inequality, or gerrymandering, or equal pay for women, and that sort of bleeding-heart issues, including clean water for Flint.  An axiom of US conservatives is that: Government cannot solve all the problems of Society.  We have to carefully select which problems have to be tackled through the Government and the Law.  Conservatives simply recognize a much smaller set of Government-solvable problems than the Liberals do.  That way, you get a smaller government, lower taxes, and a stronger economy.  That, in a nutshell, is the philosophy of all conservatives.  The New Alt-Right simply has some more innovative ideas about ways and means.  (I can just hear them say "Damn right, we do!")

Among other things, David Brooks appears to have found a way that he can understand his instinct for altruism.  Is altruism learned, or is it innate?  At any rate, The Weavers have made him comfortable with it, in contrast to ultra-conservatives, who consider altruism a weak, liberal attribute.

The bottom line is that all of us need a community that is comfortable with our need to reach out.  This blog satisfies my own need to reflect on what I see and read, and without criticism (enforced non-criticism, I might add; somehow I have set up the parameters of this Blog in such a way that nobody can react.  I think I fixed it just yesterday.)

Well, that's all I got, as my daughter would say!  Don't forget the second debate (or second set of debates) in a couple of weeks.

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