I’d like to promise this will be last review of Bobo’s Social Animal that I share with you, but that might be a lie.
On planet Brooks, all convictions are equally worthless. The good life is a shiny, skull-numbing slither along the surface of things, and the best world is fashioned by wise, scientifically informed leaders. In that world, it is not absurd, let alone obscene, to use Kant’s reflection on the endless uncertainty of our moral lives in the way Brooks does: to comment on Harold’s decision about which brand of car to buy. This is your brain on Brooks: an organ hard-wired to reduce moral decisions to consumer choices.
And therein lies the appeal of this book. Who would not like to believe that we harbor deep within us the inborn ability to grapple successfully, and free of anguish, with the ever-multiplying, seemingly insoluble moral conundrums we face? Those of us who, unlike Brooks, live in a state of negative capability, must be willing to admit that he could be right, that our dourness and doubts about our prospects are mere error, that our sense of the unconscious as irredeemably wild, of human life as inescapably tragic, and of struggle and contradiction and belief as crucial aspects of what makes life worth living could be entirely misguided, or even perverse. On the other hand, if my true moral makeup is such that the decision to buy a Honda or a Ford is no different from the decision to have children or the decision to support a candidate or to protect someone from shame, decisions all arrived at as smoothly as an automatic transmission cycling through the gears; and if the government adopts policies to help me function that way, then, like Ivan Karamazov, I think I’m going to return my ticket.
Also too (and the review touches on this), it bothers me that Brooks wants to turns us all into soulless, cheerful social-climbers like himself. His plan to accomplish this isn’t all that chilling — it seems to involve charter schools tormenting kids with marshmallows — but it bothers me that he has a plan at all. I hate soulless, cheerful social-climbers and I’m sorry that they have so much influence in contemporary American society, but I have never once dreamt of sending them to re-education camps, never once thought of making them drink wine and read depressing books and listen to “For The Good Times” over and over again until they understood how hopeless it all is. Why can’t Bobo accord us fatalistic types the same respect we accord him?
(h/t reader J)
General Stuck
Brooks took the red pill, and he ain’t the only one.
Those of us that took the blue pill are left for eternity and a day to clean up the human stain fuckers like Brooks leave behind wherever they go. Everyone one has their place in the house of mirrors called America.
MonkeyBoy
Some may be tired of me pimping this but please go to the Amazon tags page for Bobo’s book and add or vote up snarky tags. At the moment the two leaders are “bourgeois wish fulfillment(54)” and “condescending narcissism(47)”.
A panning review gives a lot of verbiage that can be crafted into a new snarky tag.
UncertaintyVicePrincipal
Lest anyone get the impression from that excerpt that the reviewer went easy on Brooks overall:
Not that you were implying that he did, just wanted to underline that he thinks the book is a public embarrassment.
The problem with David Brooks, just speaking for myself, isn’t that he follows cognitive psychology or any of the rest of it. The problem is that he turns every subject that he has an interest in into justification for some right wing position, which he gets to sometimes only in the last milliseconds of his column.
Brooks could do a column about the latest research in the field of textiles or lubricating fluid or you name it and find a way to end the piece with some supposed sedgway into “and just as in the field of hydraulics, we can only hope that we choose the path that squirts the most material to the place that it’s most needed: upward”.
“The problem”, what am I saying. Among the problems with David Brooks….
freelancer
This a thousand times over. Best advice I can give is less insane smiling, read some books that bake your noodle, try to get a laugh out of everyday, and for fuck’s sake, just try being decent to people, everyone you can, even if you get nothing out of it.
Chris Andersen
Social climbers will always be with us. Where they become insufferable is when you realize they expect everyone else to be social climbers like them. Where they become sociopathic is where they assume that everyone already is, some just haven’t admitted it.
Karen
I think it’d be better if he had a mustache to twirl and an evil laugh: MWAHAHAHAHAH!
Cheerfully soulless people freak me out.
Cliff
it bothers me that Brooks wants to turns us all into soulless, cheerful social-climbers like himself… it bothers me that he has a plan at all
Never fear. People smarter and more honest than he have spent their whole lives devising social systems that have failed utterly.
Anyway, there’s no way he’ll turn everyone into yuppies. There will have to be a class of unfortunates, let’s call them Unter-yuppen, for the wealthy to spit upon.
Otherwise, what’s the point?
Jewish Steel
I don’t think Keats would’ve liked Bobo much either.
TooLoose LeTruck...
Nice Dylan quote…
Last truly great Dylan album…
Still listen to parts of that sucker… to this very day…
Who’s David Brooks?
Arclite
A bit off topic, but had to share. On the one hand you have people who think The Onion is real:
literallyunbelievable.tumblr.com/
On the other hand, you have have stories like this:
foxnews.com/scitech/2011/05/27/italian-scientist-charged-manslaughter-failing-predict-earthquake/
Seismologists charged with manslaughter for failing to predict a quake? Really>
MonkeyBoy
soulless cheerful social-climber is now on page 3 of Bobo’s tags. If you have already used up all of your 15 votes, you can remove some by first clicking on the Agree with these tags? line.
Stan of the Sawgrass
Doug, you keep saying you’re going to swear off on Bobo-tailing… but maybe you need to find a twelve-step for that. Don’t rush into it, tho.
Still, don’t discount some possibly interesting research just because Bobe’s gotten his dirty fingers all over it. Go over to Radiolab’s site at WNYC and find “Mischel’s Marshmallows.” It’s an interesting piece of research, and it’s no surprise that Bobey seized it for his own purposes, but I’m not sure that Mischel intended it to be used as a stick to beat libruls with. Kind of think he didn’t. I haven’t looked for peer review/criticism on his work, so consider this hearsay, and inadmissible.
MattR
@Arclite: I feel like there’s a good joke about Fox News being the source for the real news story, but I’m not witty enough to make it tonight.
That earthquake story is pretty crazy. I bet the spokesman for the US Geological Society thought it was an Onion-like joke when Fox initially called him for comment.
Ripley
Because he’s a cunt?
kdaug
@freelancer: Be gracious to the assholes, for they serve as signposts for us all.
MikeJ
@MattR: Why has nobody asked Bobby Jindal about it?
MikeJ
Oh goody. Brooks is to be on cspan2 in 10 minutes to talk about his book.
MattR
@MikeJ: That should put me to sleep nicely.
D Johnston
In every review I’ve read of this book, the reviewer suggests that Brooks is a good writer. How can this possibly be? Brooks is an atrocious writer, a failure on every possible level – mechanically, artistically and persuasively. In this case, the guy was taking Brooks’s claim that this is a satirical novel (“You don’t get it. It’s supposed to be that bad.”) at face value. Are people really still so enamored with Bobo that they’re willing to overlook that?
Also, in spite of the passage quoted above, the reviewer seems to believe that Brooks has a case. Any time someone says that, I feel like grabbing him by the lapels, smacking him across the gob and saying – in a firm but gentle tone – “You can’t make an empirical point through fiction.” Brooks can misuse all the science he can get his hands on to suggest reasons why his characters do certain things, but ultimately they do those things because Brooks is forcing them to do those things. I could have a character abruptly kill himself mid-conversation and, no matter what explanation I cook up, his spontaneous suicide was due to me and me alone. None of these reviewers seem to get that.
Bill Murray
Neo-liberal economics in a nutshell
James E. Powell
What is the purpose for David Brooks? I mean, for him it’s money and notoriety. But what about for other people? Why is he employed? Couldn’t any idiot wear Harry Potter glasses and pass himself off as a right-wing intellectual? Why does anyone read him? Has he ever said anything that wasn’t standard issue conservative bullshit or merely stupid? I do not get it at all.
John Puma
In our society, the economic system (not once mentioned in the constitution) has supplanted the system by which we govern ourselves, that provided by the constitution.
The controlling economic system allows us to think of ourselves ONLY as consumers.
It is no wonder then that any given whiny, brainless shit, like Brooks, totally incapable of independent thought, can only approach moral decisions as consumer choices.
Amir_Khalid
David Brooks is like a guy who pulls you aside and starts telling you a long rambling story; when you ask him to come to the point, he gives you a baffled look and says, “Point?” At least, that’s the impression I get when I read his columns. They strike me as his twice-weekly quota of rambling, with an occasional dash of scienciness. And then, as he comes to the end of his allotted 900 words, he bungs in a semi-related (if that) conservative notion plucked at random from the air.
kdaug
@James E. Powell:
Did you not read his latest “What I Did on Summer Vacation” hagiography to British aristocrats and elites?
Pity we all didn’t go to prep school together.
Pat
I believe people who live in a closet as David does has to pander to the elites with talk full of snobbery because it somehow makes them feel protected from who and what they really are. David, with all his correctness will never be at peace with society because he cannot find any peace within himself.
It must get tiresome to have to get up everyday and live a charade, but that is his choice and by all appearances it pays pretty well.
harlana
@MonkeyBoy:that made me smile
swellsman
Truly, it is a marvel what Madison Avenue has achieved. Beginning in the late 1960’s political campaigns started hiring professional marketeers to help them craft slogans, TV pitches, etc. The markateers were just as good selling candidates as they were at selling television sets and shaving cream.
Fast forward a coupla decades. They are still selling these products but not for the products themselves; instead, they sell the product’s “image.” Pepsi = youth; Coke = America.
And now candidates are, in turn, sold based on their consumer choices. This one is a “truck-driving real American,” that one “drives a Volvo and drinks a latte.” On its face this is absurd, but not in our society because consumer choices are now understood – by everyone – to be accurate reflections of a person’s inner character. How people dress, what people drive, what kind of coffee a person drinks . . . these are all the indicators you need to know whether that person is or is not decent, upstanding, moral, smart, etc., etc.
Brooks is remarkable only for having internalized this garbage so comletely that he doesn’t even notice what an ass he looks when he spouts it.
arguingwithsignposts
@UncertaintyVicePrincipal:
DO NOT WANT!
JohnR
@Ripley:
Well, could be he does. I don’t accord him any respect whatsoever and cheerfully wish he’d take my advice and go marry Megan McArdle. I’m sure she wouldn’t mind (although perhaps her present husband (she is married (at least technically), right?) might resent losing his gravy-train), but then perhaps they might produce a real-life Damien. Unintended consequences are part of life, though.
Mark S.
I hate Bobo’s pseudo-history almost as much as his pseudo-science. I’m surprised to learn that everything was hunky–dory until the French Enlightenment, that Rousseau had such great faith in the power of reason, and that the French Enlightenment was so much more influential in the English-speaking world than the British Enlightenment.
JohnR
@MonkeyBoy:
‘drive-by Applebys philosopher’ is very nice, indeed. I also particularly enjoyed the comment in the Publisher’s Weekly review:
That pretty much sums up Mr. Brook’s entire professional output. What a cruel epitaph.
WereBear
Since Conservative Intellectuals no longer exist in nature, they must be created.
Jado
Ha. You used “David Brooks” and “respect” in the same sentence.
That’s adorable.
mattski
@ DOUG –
Keep the Bobby D slow train of quotes coming
Lydgate
@D Johnston:
Exactly. I have been annoyed with all the reviews that fail to make this point!
Lydgate
@Amir_Khalid:
Well, the thing is he does have a point. It just does not follow from anything he wrote.
JohnR
@James E. Powell:
Ooh! Ooooh! I know that, Mr. Kahtter! His purpose is to make Tom Friedman look incisive and insightful!
Anoniminous
Brooks is to neuro-psychology as Focus on the Family is to Gender Studies.
jake the snake
@swellsman:
This.
It is a shame the Fred Pohl and CM Kornbluth’s “The Space Merchants” is out of print. Published in 1951 as a dystopian satire, parts of it have become scarily prophetic. This was well in advance of Vance Packard’s
critiques of the consumer society.
Sorry, probably push the limits of fair use.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Space_Merchants