BROOKS SEEKS HOPE

Some people have "wolf teeth", almost fangs.  My UU minister had them and hated them.  But when he became rich enough to have them made "normal", he lost his seeming edge and bite that had made him more than just a nice guy who went along.  David Brooks has baby teeth where his fangs ought to be, and it makes him seem a lot nicer and more innocent than he really is.

No, I'm wrong.  Watching vids, I see that his fangs are in place as normal, but the incisors next to his two front teeth (Bucky Beaver) are unusually small, giving him the look of a child with new adult teeth.  It's a point of hinged time, taking a new direction.  Apt.  Brooks is leading the culture into a new point of view that's actually very old.

Watch him in the last half of this vid clip.  (Ignore the first minute which is a silly disorganized and incoherent hostess.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNeaXnZsbac

What Brooks is really saying is that he's discovered the humanities: art, story, empathy and all that.  He had been a head-tripper at U of C when a young man, as I became as an old woman.  His joke about the school is the one where it's "a Baptist school where atheist professors teach Jewish students about St. Thomas Aquinas".  This is a Div School joke.  Today's university is more likely to be a legacy student in the Business School studying discredited economics, while pretending to be socially sophisticated.

In the end he changed, which he explains in this vid:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ev_MXxcfG4U

It was an experience of a group so emotionally open and inclusive that he thought, "Why have I been living the way I have when I could be living the way these people are?"  He describes it as recognition that all people have "desiring hearts" that long for fusion with others through intimacy, at the same time they have souls that yearn for good.  This leads to "radical mutuality."  

in turn this leads to the idea that "people on the marginal edges of society find a better way to live and other people copy them."  As a journalist and a perpetual student, he offers some sensational examples which he has acquired through an organization called "THE WEAVE: SOCIAL FABRIC PROJECT.

https://www.aspeninstitute.org/programs/weave-the-social-fabric-initiative/

I was wondering how Brooks found all these groups with their founding stories and detailed "structure" of how to operate.  I run across such groups every now and then, but in my experience with them -- which is all more than twenty years in the past -- they are generally time-limited and powered by one charismatic individual.  "The Weave" was his guide.  But because Brooks doesn't have time to invite people over for dinner, much less go to their houses, I wonder about his judgement. How does he know this stuff will work?

Brooks, like both Shields and Judy Woodruff on PBS, is irritatingly middle class.  He doesn't allow for people like me who never have formal dinners -- just walk around with a bowl of something so as not to interfere with writing.  I subscribe to the historic Blackfeet practice of keeping something on the "fire" (in the fridge) and dipping into it when needed.  Canned goods and sandwiches make it easy.  But Brooks is talking about Aspen, for goodness sake.  They are not only middle-class, but high end, the class that loves to travel to fine places and sit together exclaiming over "defiance of evil," defined as isolation and suicide, or maybe the culture's distrust of institutions and neighbors.

"Tribal" thinking based on hatred refers to stigma, the diminishment of people not as "good" (rich) as us.  I think his idea that "people on the marginal edges of society find a better way to live and other people copy them." is a valid premise for a bad reason: the real margins are constantly dying -- not from suicide or drug use, but from poverty and being shut out of the safety nets.  (The ones Trump and the Repubs are quickly eliminating.) They're just gone, those most marginal of marginals.

Two groups I've followed closely for the last twenty years,  but the one that originally kicked off my interest in the U of C and highest learning is ironically the one that let me down.  The UU's are NOT on the margin.  They thought they were pioneers of thought, but they turn out to be the ragged edge of Enlightenment as it now makes room for the return of the Whole Human in relationship, alongside strict scientific logic and proof.  It's not evil, but its focus is too tight.

In 1975 the PNWD of the UUA offered a Leadership School that wove together theology, organizational design, history, and personal devotion.  It broke me open the way that Brooks was broken open by people who hug.  This is apart from my first real participation in the middle class.  (Undergrad years at NU were in the higher middle class, but I was in theatre, which is different -- as close to classless as we could get. On purpose.)  

U of C Div School would have been a mistake except for Richard Stern, who was an elite Manhattan product and not at all a hugger, but somehow interested in the "others" and their stories.  The mistake became clear when I was actually serving congregations, all of whom were middle class.  Hear the distaste?  They were stuck.  Leadership School was soon merchandized into a tool for growth and an effort to make the institution of the UUA stop shrinking while keeping "Others" out so nothing would change.  No Mexicans. No one from Alabama.  Some nice token blacks.  Hear my exasperated contempt for this?  I try not to admit it.  They expect only to dish it out and will not respond well.

The two groups I have really watched for decades cannot be joined by me.  I have no provenance for an indigenous heritage, though I am deeply committed to the land on or off the rez.  The other one is a gathering of boys who have AIDS.  I don't qualify for them either.  But I'm far more aware of who they are than they think.  Not as a label, but as unique individuals.  Both groups are in process, dynamic, moving, exploring.  That's what makes them so fascinating.

Brooks talks about the technology of intimacy -- he means something roughly like organizational design.  Not lovers but family.  He speaks in a voice that sometimes shakes.  He says, "we'll walk this thing together."  In another place he realizes that a conversation can be "four jungles into the weeds."  But it's still attempting to defy evil. walking together while we talk.