Monk

“The emotions are, in fact, in charge of the temple of morality, and ... moral reasoning is really just a servant masquerading as a high priest.”

-- Jonathan Haidt

David Brooks has a good column today on morality and the limits of philosophy. The heart has ways that the mind can only begin to fathom. This notion of emotion-based morality doesn't seem especially prescriptive, but only brings out why we have so much trouble catching the essence of morality in our deeply reasoned snares, being such a living, dynamic force - the quintessentially human.

( Brooks column )

The second part of Obama’s plan is the creation of an auto czar with vague duties. Other smart people have called for such a czar to reorganize the companies and force the companies to fully embrace green technology and other good things.

That would be great, but if Obama was such a fervent believer in the Chinese model of all-powerful technocrats, he should have mentioned it during the campaign. Are we really to believe there exists a czar omniscient, omnipotent and beneficent enough to know how to fix the Big Three? Who is this deity? Are we to believe that political influence will miraculously disappear, that the czar would have absolute power over unions, management, Congress and the White House? Please.

This is an excruciatingly hard call. A case could be made for keeping the Big Three afloat as a jobs program until the economy gets better and then letting them go bankrupt. But the most persuasive experts argue that bankruptcy is the least horrible option. Airline, steel and retail companies have gone through bankruptcy proceedings and adjusted. It would be a less politically tainted process. Government could use that $50 billion — and more — to help the workers who are going to be displaced no matter what.

But the larger principle is over the nature of America’s political system. Is this country going to slide into progressive corporatism, a merger of corporate and federal power that will inevitably stifle competition, empower corporate and federal bureaucrats and protect entrenched interests? Or is the U.S. going to stick with its historic model: Helping workers weather the storms of a dynamic economy, but preserving the dynamism that is the core of the country’s success.

-- David Brooks for The New York Times

This is an indication of some of the dark portents swirling about the economy. Such massive shake-ups. They are trying to address the fallout of a crisis that has yet to slam most of us, but it may be like watching a hurricane coming at you just off the coast, and we're only feeling a little strong wind now. Some people predict food riots in America in the years to come. Oh, Obama, I wish you were a messiah, because we might need one.

David Brooks gives us a good take on the civil war among conservative Republicans. You can feel the personal edge to it, since Brooks is one of the ones being left out of their reindeer games.

Though, I'm not so confident about his forecast that ultimately the moderates will get the upper-hand. I'm afraid the Ayn Randians and Christianists are too deeply rooted in Americana and will maintain the dominant voice, and that they are only now in the minority opposition thanks to a cratering economy. I'm afraid are Culture War is not behind us and we remain a divided nation.

One might think that the civil war in the Republican Party would be between the libertarians and the Christianists, but they are presumably only embracing each other that much closer now that they are an embattled minority. The tensions between those camps come out when their Party is in the ascendancy as they fight for priority and the spoils.

( Brooks )

P.J. O'Rourke offers his own brand of humorous lamentations.

This is a divide that goes deeper than economics into the way people perceive the world. If you show an American an image of a fish tank, the American will usually describe the biggest fish in the tank and what it is doing. If you ask a Chinese person to describe a fish tank, the Chinese will usually describe the context in which the fish swim.

These sorts of experiments have been done over and over again, and the results reveal the same underlying pattern. Americans usually see individuals; Chinese and other Asians see contexts.

-- David Brooks for The New York Times

Brooks has an interesting column today, especially for a conservative, that looks optimistically on the rise of collectivism, along with the strength of Asian culture and outlook.

( Brooks )

Obama’s tone was serious. But he pulled out his “this is our moment” rhetoric and offered visions of a world transformed. Obama speeches almost always have the same narrative arc. Some problem threatens. The odds are against the forces of righteousness. But then people of good faith unite and walls come tumbling down. Obama used the word “walls” 16 times in the Berlin speech, and in 11 of those cases, he was talking about walls coming down.

The Berlin blockade was thwarted because people came together. Apartheid ended because people came together and walls tumbled. Winning the cold war was the same: “People of the world,” Obama declared, “look at Berlin, where a wall came down, a continent came together and history proved there is no challenge too great for a world that stands as one.”

When I first heard this sort of radically optimistic speech in Iowa, I have to confess my American soul was stirred. It seemed like the overture for a new yet quintessentially American campaign.

But now it is more than half a year on, and the post-partisanship of Iowa has given way to the post-nationalism of Berlin, and it turns out that the vague overture is the entire symphony. The golden rhetoric impresses less, the evasion of hard choices strikes one more.

-- David Brooks for The New York Times

One wonders how a messianic-sounding Obama would actually rule when he has the power and must make his choices. Who is Obama really? Is it the kind of question we should be asking of a prospective president? Shouldn't we have a much better idea of the man as a political leader?

But I think about the McCain Supreme Court, and how Obama does seem to be liberally inclined, and how we need some kind of backtracking after eight years of Dubya, and it seems worth a throw of the dice. Sometimes you gotta have a little bit of faith, my brothers and sisters. Here, have some more Kool-Aid!

David Brooks brings out how Obama is not the goody-goody a lot of us thought he was. Remember, it was common to think of the guy as selling us rainbows and butterflies, but more people are noticing that a smooth and ruthless political operator lurks behind the messianism.

Seeing Obama's performance yesterday regarding public finance, even I felt a shiver of fear run up my spine. Who knows where this guy might lead us in power. But I think, hey, he is a liberal. There is no doubt about that. Let's see where that takes us. We haven't had a truly liberal president since Lyndon Johnson, forty years ago! Since then, the very idea of a liberal president has been made to seem un-American. Maybe it is time to try again.

( Brooks )

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I should get something down on the results of the Iowa caucus, since it is our first set of hard results on the presidential elections. I'll go with David Brooks, though he writes a bit exstatically on it, but that in itself does capture some of the national mood, or at least the mood of the commentariat, and it is nice to see some American optimism.

( Brooks )

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David Brooks used to work with Bill Kristol, as I recall, and it looks like Mr. Kristol called Brooks for a favor, not wanting to be the only one glorying in Bush's excellent leadership. It must have been a big favor, for Brooks to come out and make himself look like such a fawning idiot:

I left the 110-minute session thinking that far from being worn down by the past few years, Bush seems empowered. His self-confidence is the most remarkable feature of his presidency.

Ignorance is bliss, buddy.

As I was reading this column, I had to keep reminding myself that this isn't a Dowd satire, but the punchline never came, just the lame cover that if there is failure it is because no man could have been great enough to save the day, forgetting that it is Dubya's own major-league fuck-ups that have brought us to this.

( Brooks )

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David Brooks has also been driving around and doing his own sampling of popular music. Not country music. And he has noticed a certain toughness in the feminine ideal these days, if it can be called feminine. No submissives here! Baby's gotta be tough these days in the wild social frontier.

( Brooks )

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