Brooks and Rose
Luckily for this exercise, I watched David Brooks on Charlie Rose just before Rose guttered out. It was timely. I hadn’t paid much attention to either of these gents until lately, when I began watching the news regularly to follow the Trump scandals, so numerous, so ubiquitous, and sometimes so unsuspected. These two men make good material for a “compare and contrast” thought experiment. It’s about sex only incidentally. Mostly it’s about class and how it is defined.
This video is a sketch of the character of Rose, who projects a sort of tired gentility with his vulture’s posture and baggy eyes. He’s a working man’s notion of what a privileged upper class man might be like, to the naive eye the shine of the people Rose interviews rubbing off on Rose.
Rose is only a few years younger than me, but he has had two “open heart” surgeries to repair a valve. I suspect he had brain damage in the process. That may be the source of the lack of empathy that resides in the human prefrontal brain and that seems more and more to be the source of humanness, even the evolutionary edge that allows people to cooperate for complex and costly goals like going to the moon. But I suspect Rose never has been particularly empathetic — calculation lurks in those baggy eyes.
Brooks, who was born the year I graduated from NU (1961) which makes him a generation younger than Rose, suggests that the kind of apologies many of our Congressmen are offering for their bad behavior reflect “an inability to put your mind in the mind of the person you’re pushing yourself all over. It’s a sort of a moral and a humanist blindness, to another person’s experience.” I would add that the blindness is not confined to gender-based expectations in the realm of intimacy, but also to most social exchanges and assumptions.
Rose, speaking in 1986, says his marriage in 1980 split apart because of “Workaholism . . .It’s the saddest thing. — I lost track of my marriage. I consider it the biggest failure of my life, allowing my marriage to be a casualty of my own desire for a place in the sun.” A staffer (undesignated gender) remarked “He’s the most frightening combination of insecurity and egotism I’ve ever come across.”
A friendlier opinion, given in the early 1990’s, was “about Rose’s charm, his ability to schmooze just about anyone into an interview and to lure them into opening up.” . . “His definition of a good conversation is almost mystical.” As Rose puts it, “questions that get at and reveal who this person is, what makes them tick . . have these people take us on a journey of exploration of who they are, what they’ve done and hope to do, what passion beats in their hearts.” This is meritocracy, not based on achievement so much as the inspired uniqueness of individuals who are “famous.” Not earned by hard work nor found through education, but an essential gift of superiority.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h27M6VYV5wQ This is an edited clip of the Brooks interview with Rose that capsulizes what struck me. Brooks conveys a sort of boyish wonder that the world is so unpredictable and yet a willingness to watch from the sidelines until he has figured it out. (Rose is pretty much edited out of the clip.)
https://www.cjr.org/the_profile/the_transformation_of_david_brooks.php This article begins: “David Brooks was struggling with sin. More precisely, he was seeking a way to translate the Christian understanding of sin into secular terms for millions of readers. His emerging specialty, whether in his New York Times column or best-selling books, is distilling dense concepts for the mainstream. An ugly word for that, he notes, is popularizing.” But how could it be otherwise if the subject is populism?
Funt notes: “Brooks committed to a mission for the rest of his career: to restore comfortable, competent dialogue about what makes a virtuous life.” Now that we have buried our WWII heroes, what is the source of arete-based examples? (“Arete” is a moral strategy that uses virtuous people as models.) Brooks is a University of Chicago graduate, a kind of education that leaves a deep imprint. Even now the school is ransacking their own resources to answer the question of virtue. Every issue of the graduate ‘zine addresses morality, character, stamina in times of trial.
“Comfortable” is not normally thought of as linked with virtue, which Americans tend to define as produced by suffering, or at least denial. “Competent” is something we don’t seem able to define except in terms of financial success. Certainly no one on any terms can call our president “competent.” (If he was ever comfortable, he’s not now.) Comfortable is a word that brings up undressing which implies sex. (“Let me slip into something a little more comfortable,” says the vamp.) Brooks’ mentor, William F. Buckley, always projected ease and comfort in the midst of luxury, but in the background is always the suspicion of moral relativity and a blaming of poor people for not trying hard enough.
Darker, there is always a sense with U of Chicago people that they are talking over the heads of everyone else. When a U of C person says, “Have you read So-and-So?” they mean, do you have a grasp of that person’s body of argument? When most people ask whether you’ve read a book, they mean, “Are you keeping up with what’s popular?”
There is also a sense of entitlement to discuss anything at all, because it’s based on observation and analysis rather than emotional involvement, a commonality of experience. This is “group meritocracy” rather than the elitism of individuals, because it is based on belonging to a category of people with a language and set of assumptions, a way of doing things — which used to be true of Congress before Trump threw open the doors and led in a bar-fight, albeit a bar-fight of old men manipulating their sons. The Repubs were also believers in group meritocracy, but based it on control and wealth, which has taken them far away from merit. Corruption.
Some have said that the R’s are trying to create a new aristocracy, based on the model of Europe. Rose might like to be taken for “landed gentry”, though I can’t seem to shake the mental image of him as a child sharing a bedroom with his grandmother, working with her on scrapbooks of the rich and famous. Brooks remarks on a different “class” based on education, a group defined by legacy admissions to elite universities, but no less a “ruling” class through the manipulation of the rule of law. They are discrete, even self-deprecating. (They don’t escape the French deconstructionists, but only the more recent graduates have mastered that body of thought.)
So the image that sticks with me from this article is Brooks working on his weekly column by sorting his research notes, down on his knees on the floor to make little stacks of material that will amount to a paragraph each, totalling 806 words exactly. Discipline. If you use it enough, it becomes comfortable. But it’s a practise that can be dispersed by unanticipated winds.
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