On the dying idealism--among the youth, and in higher education

The beginning of a new academic year is marked by essays on what we want from higher education.  It is a rare privilege that we have in this profession unlike with others--as in the movie Groundhog Day, it is almost as if we get to redo things year after year hoping that this time it will be different and better.

A couple of days ago, I read one of those essays that was timed for yet another new beginning.  If only I had stopped after reading the essay; instead, I scrolled to read the comments.  My tweet was about the comments!

The comments/discussion in response ... a tragedy and a farce :( http://t.co/X4BW1b4fQz via @chronicle #Faculty pic.twitter.com/z7UM2bW6gM

— sriram khe (@congoboy) August 31, 2015

It is so disappointing that even at a forum like the Chronicle of Higher Education the comments and discussion are as awful as the ones at Faux News and the Rough Limbaugh show.  What prevents people from debating the merits of the argument?

The essay is by Mark Edmundson, whose essays I have shared with students in order to make them think about what they want from higher education,   He writes there:

We’re more and more a worldly, money-based culture geared to the life of getting and spending, trying and succeeding, reaching for more and more. We are a pragmatic people. We do not seek perfection in thought or art, war or faith. The profound stories about heroes and saints are passing from our minds. We are anything but idealists. From the halls of academe, where a debunking realism is the order of the day, to the floor of the stock market, nothing is in worse repute than the ideal.
The passing away of our commitment to ideals should not happen without second thoughts. Young people, who have traditionally been the ones most receptive to ideals, should be able to choose. Do they want to live a wholly practical life in a practical culture? Do they want to seek safety and security and never risk being made fools of? Or do they perhaps want something else? Every generation should be able to hold its own plebiscite on the issue of ideals.

Students go to Harvard these days not driven by ideals but to join the world of high finance.  Even at the "People's Republic" that Berkeley was in the 1960s, there is very little of idealism anymore.  It is the young that we expect to be driven by their ideal visions of the world.  As we grow older, we become less and less idealistic, dulled by the years of experience in the real world.

Edmundson adds:

Maybe we are best off without ideals. Perhaps there can be something bleakly noble in affirming ourselves as fundamentally Darwinian creatures who live to sustain our existences with as little pain and as much pleasure as possible. But is that all there is to life?

Some of us who contemplate about what this life is all about--atheists and true believers alike--would like higher education to have in its structure a place where students will learn to think about that.  Ideal versions of the world are related to what we think about life.  It requires contemplation.  Instead, higher education is increasingly only about information--not about knowledge and wisdom--that will be of practical value to students as they start living their own individual lives in the real world.

We seem to have come to an agreement that life is every man for himself, and every woman, too. The compassionate ideal is so dangerous to the self that it is not safe to put it into even displaced or sublimated form. Pressed to the wall, we affirm faith in individualism, and that is that.

That essay was an excerpt from Edmundson's latest book, which David Brooks refers to in his NY Times column.  Brooks, like many of us, has been going through a midlife crisis and has been all the more driven into understanding aspects of life.  With his own rich liberal education background, Brooks opens his column with:

Just once I’d like to have a college student come up to me and say, “I really wanted to major in accounting, but my parents forced me to major in medieval art.” That probably won’t happen. It always seems to be the parents who are pushing their children in the “practical” or mercenary direction.
These parents are part of the vast apparatus — college résumés, standardized tests, the decline of humanities majors — that has arisen to make our culture more professional and less poetic.

A less poetic world is, of course, not merely about the diminished status of poetry; instead, it is about the loss of idealism and food for the soul that typically are the realms of poetry.  The soul, for us who are secular and atheistic, is not about the soul that might be condemned in purgatory or about the soul that mingles in heaven with a god.  Referring to the soul is nothing but another way, a shorthand reference of sorts, to one of my favorite quests: what is this life all about?  

I do not suffer from any illusion that this year is when higher education will get it right in its Groundhog Day enactment.  But, I am delighted that we get such a new beginning every September.

Career success doesn’t make you happy

If one read the autoethnographic posts in this blog from the time I began blogging, which was back in 2001 ... ok, you can't--I deleted them all in one stroke in 2007.  I then took a break, and restarted the blog in 2008.  If one read the autoethnographic posts since then, there is a good chance that a reader can put together a composite picture of who I am and what I value most and what I couldn't care for.  

Ever since my young adult years, I have been consciously making decisions in order to lead a life that makes meaning to me.  Meaning that cannot be measured in material terms.

While some might say I had no drive and am a failure, this blog itself is more than evidence that I am trying as much as I can to follow that old sage's advice not to lead a life that is not examined.

Thus, I was immensely pleased when I came across words that somebody else had crafted, which I could then make mine as well: "I'm in the twilight of a mediocre career."  I have been largely at peace with that because I have never intentionally and mindfully worked on progressing in a career anyway.

A career does not make a person.  It is irrelevant to who the human is.  Of the people I have quoted in this context in this blog, my favorite is Bill Watterson, whose creations always make me smile and think.  Watterson said:

having an enviable career is one thing, and being a happy person is another.
Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it's to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his potential-as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth.
You'll be told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what you're doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I guarantee you'll hear about them.
To invent your own life's meaning is not easy, but it's still allowed, and I think you'll be happier for the trouble.

David Brooks, who is a couple of years older than me but has always sounded way, way older (!) has yet another book coming out.  In one of those pre-release interviews:

“I’ve far exceeded my expectations. But then you learn the elemental truth that every college student should know: career success doesn’t make you happy.” In midlife, it struck him that he’d spent too much time cultivating what he calls “the résumé virtues” – racking up impressive accomplishments – and too little on “the eulogy virtues”, the character strengths for which we’d like to be remembered.

Sooner or later, most--if not all--of us realize that a successful career is not by itself the source of happiness.  Happiness is one of those strange things that comes from within.  A blue sky with puffy white clouds makes us happy. The giggle of a four year old makes us happy.  A dog chasing his tail makes us happy.  A good time with friends makes us happy.  What the hell has a career got to do with all these, right?

In his latest column, Brooks projects his book against the upcoming end of the academic year ritual: the commencement:

Commencement speakers are always telling young people to follow their passions. Be true to yourself. This is a vision of life that begins with self and ends with self. But people on the road to inner light do not find their vocations by asking, what do I want from life? They ask, what is life asking of me? How can I match my intrinsic talent with one of the world’s deep needs?

Even that is unnecessarily complicated.  I way prefer the Bill Watterson bottom-line: go about inventing your own life's meaning as the route to your happiness; "you'll be happier for the trouble."   As simple as that.

Rule-obeying college students? What has the world come to?

Our campus will soon become yet another tobacco-free campus.  No smoking tobacco. No chewing tobacco. No nothing.

And students seem to want such rules.  They seem to want to bring more rules on what they should not do on campus.  In fact, they gladly even lead such efforts.

What the hell is wrong with the youth today?

For the record, I have never chewed tobacco. Ever.  And my only experience with smoking was back during my first (second?) year of undergraduate studies, when I tried a cigarette and, according to my friends, I was apparently swallowing the smoke instead of inhaling it.  And that was the end of my tobacco minute.

Yet, I find it all bizarre that a huge campus can be designated as tobacco-free.  If an adult is going to smoke a cigarette in some corner of the campus far away from humans, what the hell is the public interest issue for us to step in and ban the consumption of a perfectly legal drug?  What is the harm to me from a student chewing tobacco in the dorm room?  On a sunny day, if a couple of friends sit on a bench and chew tobacco while talking whatever students talk about, what is so compelling for us to forbid it?  If they want to screw up their health by using tobacco, well, they have all the rights to be morons as long as they don't bother me.

"Bizarre" does not capture it well.  I need better, powerful words.  But, nothing works like "what the fuck!"

There are all kinds of rights issues that one can raise.  Set those aside.  What worries me even more is that students are so eager to craft more and more rules and welcome all kinds of intrusions from the elders in the university.

I find this conformist behavior troubling.  Well, I have been troubled about such trends for a long time.  Back in 2001, David Brooks wrote about "the organization kid" in which he wrote about the Ivy League students, but it was more than about those elite few:

Robert Wuthnow, a sociologist, lamented, "They are disconcertingly comfortable with authority. That's the most common complaint the faculty has of Princeton students. They're eager to please, eager to jump through whatever hoops the faculty puts in front of them, eager to conform."

That was in an essay back in April 2001.  Students being "disconcertingly comfortable with authority."  And that has escalated.  A rule-obeying student population that I find to be shockingly disappointing.

Brooks wrote then:

Not only at Princeton but also in the rest of the country young people today are more likely to defer to and admire authority figures. Responding to a 1997 Gallup survey, 96 percent of teenagers said they got along with their parents, and 82 percent described their home life as "wonderful" or "good." Roughly three out of four said they shared their parents' general values. When asked by Roper Starch Worldwide in 1998 to rank the major problems facing America today, students aged twelve to nineteen most frequently named as their top five concerns selfishness, people who don't respect law and the authorities, wrongdoing by politicians, lack of parental discipline, and courts that care too much about criminals' rights. It is impossible to imagine teenagers a few decades ago calling for stricter parental discipline and more respect for authority. In 1974 a majority of teenagers reported that they could not "comfortably approach their parents with personal matters of concern." Forty percent believed they would be "better off not living with their parents."

The youth of today were also raised that way.  Again, let me remind you that this is from 2001--before the events of 9/11, which then triggered the police-state apparatus that we now have in the US:

Other cultures controlled behavior by citing divine commandments. We control behavior by enacting safety rules. And we've all noticed that these rules are growing stricter and stricter by the year. Not long ago young kids bounced around in the back seat of the family sedan; nowadays any parent who allowed that would be breaking the law and would be generally viewed as close to a child abuser. Not long ago kids rode bikes unencumbered. Now a mere scooter ride requires body armor, and in many families kids aren't permitted to ride out of sight of the house.

Those kids are now today's youth who demand more and more rules even as adults!  How awful!!!

In case you think that the "child abuser" argument that Brooks made is hyperbole, well, remember the news about the free-range parents?  You forgot?  Here is a recap for you from last month:

The Maryland parents investigated for letting their young children walk home by themselves from a park were found responsible for “unsubstantiated” child neglect in a decision that has not fully resolved their clash with authorities over questions of parenting and children’s safety.
Danielle and Alexander Meitiv hoped the nationally debated case — which has lit up social media and brought a dozen television film crews to their Silver Spring home — would be dismissed after a two-month investigation by Montgomery County Child Protective Services.
But the finding of unsubstantiated child neglect means CPS will keep a file on the family for at least five years and leaves open the question of what would happen if the Meitiv children get reported again for walking without adult supervision.

Yes, the "crime" the parents committed was to allow--and encourage--their kids to walk home by themselves from a neighborhood park!

Oh well.  Is it any wonder that the youth seem to yawn at the Snowden revelations?  The rule-obeying students will make it all easy for a 1984-like scenario to unfold.  All the better that my time is limited.  Until then, rebel I shall! ;)

David Brooks and his geography foot in the mouth!

It is so easy to be a pundit these days (editor: ahem, aren't you pretending to be one as well? Awshutup already!).  BTW, did you know that the word "pundit" comes from Sanskrit?  Interesting eh, that India gave the world nothing (zero) and all the wisdom (pundit) :)

Anyway, back to punditry.  David Brooks is one busy guy dishing out his wisdom on the pages of NY Times, on NPR, and on PBS, among other places.  Was it yesterday on the PBS news program that he even joked about how Obama is so weak now that even Brooks as a candidate can beat Obama in 2012?  Haha, funny.

What wasn't funny to William Easterly is Brooks' ignorance when it comes to the American Midwest and the electoral dynamics there. I have reproduced here practically the entire post:

A frequent theme in this blog is the importance of local knowledge for development. David Brooks helpfully illustrated in his column today on my home region the Midwest. He brilliantly demonstrates how outsiders can get lost in the jungle in a region not their own.
Brooks’ Midwest is:

that region of America that starts in central New York and Pennsylvania and then stretches out through Ohio and Indiana before spreading out to include Wisconsin and Arkansas.

Mr. Brooks is apparently unaware from his vantage point on the Far Eastern Coastal Rim that central New York is still in the East, not the Midwest. And there has never been a single Midwesterner in two centuries who ever thought they were in the same  region as Arkansas.

The Midwest has lost a manufacturing empire but hasn’t yet found a role.

Um, Mr. Brooks, were you aware that the Midwest has a few farms? Actually some of the best farmland in the world? and that it produces gigantic agricultural exports for the whole world?
Describing the electoral losses of the Democrats, he says:

The old industry towns in the Midwest were the epicenter of the disaster.

Great insight, except for the fact that the only places Democrats won in the Midwest were in the old industry towns.  Mr. Brooks, you have just earned a one-month scenic tour to chat with the nonexistent Republican House members in Cleveland, Youngstown, Akron, and Toledo, Ohio; Detroit and Flint, Michigan; South Bend and beautiful Gary, Indiana.

Yes, geography matters :)

David Brooks needs a break. A long one, preferably.

If Brooks is going to churn out columns like this one on the princes and the grinds, and he gets paid for it, I suppose we are all living proof that there's a sucker is born every minute!

There is nothing new or substantive there.  I stand corrected: it has a whole bunch of metaphors, all in one column enough to claim the title of the master manipulator of metaphors from another NY Times columnist.  Let us list the metaphors in this Brooks column, shall we?

• Prince
• Grind
• Conversational ping pong
• Cockroach up his arm
• Social butterflies
• Social polish
• Sitting on mountains of cash

And the winning one is the final sentence all by itself:

the real issue is how we are going to light a fire under the country’s loners, its contrarians and its narrow, ambitious outsiders.

WTF!  seriously, they get lengthy profiles for writing stuff like this?  Hey, George Orwell, can you stage a miracle of sorts and straighten these people out?

The best one though is this comment (#112) in response to Brooks' column:

Mr. Brooks, you are continuing your argument for the benefits of a liberal arts education founded in the classics. Your grinds are merely technicians, trained to do one thing very well. The princes you describe, on the other hand, use their more well-rounded education to charm legislators and siphon money out of taxpayers when the grand temples to their Odyssean egos come crashing down. Remember Odysseus killed all of his wife's maids even though they were powerless to stop the suitors. Those maids were really grinds. So much for the ethical justifications for reading in the classics. It is not what we read that matters, but how critically we read anything.

The economic value (?) of a college degree

A long time ago, back in graduate school, Martin Krieger remarked that often in the public policy arena, it is not what you say, but who says it.  It made a damn fine impression on me :)
So, when I write about public policy issues, well, nobody listens ... if the same point is made by, ... oh crap, here is the deal: at least two of my op-eds on the diminishing value of college degree have made it to print, and have generated discussions.  But, I am not the only one.  Here is an excerpt from this piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

The standard argument is that “college graduates are more productive persons, and the income differential associated with four year degrees has risen over time.” That argument’s validity is increasingly questionable, again I think a consequence of college degrees losing their distinctiveness. ...

We are engaging in massive credential inflation. Whereas in 1940 it was perfectly respectable for persons with less than a high school education to deliver the mail and unknown for college graduates to do the same, by 2010 almost all mail carriers had a least a high school education and probably close to one in five has a four year degree (we are awaiting the 2010 Census data for the exact figure). Moreover, as more go to college, standards inevitably suffer, as the results of the National Literacy Survey conducted roughly decennially indicate.

We are spending ever larger amounts of money as a nation trying to demonstrate that we are good, bright, disciplined, and hard working -- qualities traditionally associated with college graduation. The costs are becoming so large that entrepreneurs and others may look for alternative ways of certifying competence and skills.

I have pretty much the same things in the latest op-ed here, and in this op-ed, and in a number of blog posts.  Listen up, people! :)

Now, I do want to reiterate that I am not arguing in favor of gutting liberal education and the liberal arts.  I am a huge fan of it. I have made it a conscious decision to be in the very profession--after ditching electrical engineering!  But, we ought to recognize what we are doing, admit that we are already in a crisis, and begin to work towards a better future for the young and the talented. 
BTW, I wish David Brooks had done a better job at defending the liberal arts than the one he has--he is way more capable than this ... maybe he is wondering why Krugman is on vacation in Europe, while he is still toiling away :)

Hail to the Chief!

Well put:

David Brooks: Gail, would you mind if I praised Barack Obama today? I thought not. I’m feeling grateful to the prez these days because we happen to be in the middle of a bunch of midsized crises. There’s the oil spill in the Gulf (which is verging on a big crisis, I guess). There’s the Times Square bomber. There are various floods in Tennessee and elsewhere. The European Union is falling apart over the Greek debt crisis, and so on and so on.
It seems to me that Obama is handling his role, which ranges from the marginal to the significant, in these events with calm professionalism. He’s active yet not annoying. He’s not taking credit for everything. He’s not creating friction by making any missteps. He is calm, cool and collected.

And, Brooks has more to say:

David Brooks: Sometimes people fault Obama for being too cool. I can see their point 5 percent of the time, but 95 percent of the time, it’s good to have a president with equipoise. Times like this — with stuff bubbling in all directions — are typical.

Yes, sir!

Who is Obama?

David Brooks has a good column; he writes:

In a sensible country, people would see Obama as a president trying to define a modern brand of moderate progressivism. In a sensible country, Obama would be able to clearly define this project without fear of offending the people he needs to get legislation passed. But we don’t live in that country. We live in a country in which many people live in information cocoons in which they only talk to members of their own party and read blogs of their own sect. They come away with perceptions fundamentally at odds with reality, fundamentally misunderstanding the man in the Oval Office.

Yep, we are far from being a sensible country.  The hysteria about the president, and the politics, says more about us voters than anything else ....

Haiti, the tragedy

I wish David Brooks had stopped with the first half of his column.  The first half is wonderful, and to the point.  The second half .... 'nuff said.  The best part is this:

This is not a natural disaster story. This is a poverty story. It’s a story about poorly constructed buildings, bad infrastructure and terrible public services. On Thursday, President Obama told the people of Haiti: “You will not be forsaken; you will not be forgotten.” If he is going to remain faithful to that vow then he is going to have to use this tragedy as an occasion to rethink our approach to global poverty.

"The White Messiah" in Hollywood movies

Who knew that David Brooks is a good movie reviewer too! :)
I have not seen Avatar, nor do I have any plans to.  I remember reading the lengthy feature about the movie and the director in the New Yorker, and that was enough for me.  Anyway, Brooks has a great column in which he writes that Avatar:

rests on the stereotype that white people are rationalist and technocratic while colonial victims are spiritual and athletic. It rests on the assumption that nonwhites need the White Messiah to lead their crusades. It rests on the assumption that illiteracy is the path to grace. It also creates a sort of two-edged cultural imperialism. Natives can either have their history shaped by cruel imperialists or benevolent ones, but either way, they are going to be supporting actors in our journey to self-admiration.
It’s just escapism, obviously, but benevolent romanticism can be just as condescending as the malevolent kind — even when you surround it with pop-up ferns and floating mountains.

 Yep.  It makes for romantic escapism, as much as "Dances with Wolves" or "The Last Samurai" were .... Oh, wait, I did go to see those movies!  I suppose I am older and wiser now. At least, I think so :D

Pragmatism, or dumbing down expectations?

Talk is cheap.

Yes, it is easy for me to comment and editorialize about the big (and small) issues of the day. But, hey, that is what democracy is all about. In fact, I wish more people would do the same. Those of you reading this, well, start your own blog. Write to your elected reps. Better yet, unseat them next time around!!!

I have been cautiously optimistic about BHO ever since his campaign days. My first red flag was when I heard him being interviewed on NPR--I think it was with Michelle Norris. This was way back, even before he announced his candidacy. She asked Obama more than once whether he was planning on a presidential bid. And, every time Obama hedged his responses so well that I kept thinking he reminded me of somebody, but I could not place who it was.

Later as the campaign picked up momentum, I concluded (and shared with maybe two or three people) that it was Bill Clinton he reminded me of, and that Obama was Slick Willie without the sex :-) Of course, I will gladly take a Slick Willie without sex over the muddler from Midland, or the phoenix that is older than the pyramids. But, hey, Obama is slickness as we have never seen before.

The two or three people I shared this with thought I was being cynical. My daughter calls me a naysayer. I call myself a realistic and cautious optimist. Which is probably why the David Brooks column appealed to me--about BHO prioritizing legislative pragmatism. And, that is also why I find this FT column by Clive Crook so apropos; here is an excerpt:

On both climate change and healthcare, in other words, the US wills the end but not the means. This is where a president trusted by the electorate and unafraid to explain hard choices would be so valuable. Barack Obama, where are you?

The president has cast himself not as a leader of reform, but as a cheerleader for “reform” – meaning anything, really, that can plausibly be called reform, however flawed. He has defined success down so far that many kinds of failure now qualify. Without hesitating, he has cast aside principles he emphasised during the campaign. On healthcare, for instance, he opposed an individual insurance mandate. On climate change, he was firm on the need to auction all emissions permits. Congress proposes to do the opposite in both cases and Mr Obama’s instant response is: “That will do nicely.”

The White House calls this pragmatism. Never let the best be the enemy of the good. Better to take one step forward than blah, blah, blah. The argument sounds appealing and makes some sense, but is worth probing.

First one must ask whether the bills really do represent progress, however modest. As they stand, this is doubtful, especially in the case of cap-and-trade. Then one must ask whether the US will get to where it needs to be on climate change and healthcare via a series of small steps. Perhaps the country has just one chance in the foreseeable future to get it right. The White House has said as much: “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” Botch these policies this time, and it may be years before Congress can start again.

A White House that is more interested in promotion than in product development has another great drawback: it squanders talent. Mr Obama has impeccable taste in advisers: he has scooped up many of the country’s pre-eminent experts in almost every area of public policy. One wonders why. On the main domestic issues, they are not designing policy; they are working the phones, drumming up support for bills they would be deploring if they were not in the administration. Apart from anything else, this seems cruel. Mr President, examine your conscience and set your experts free.

The greatest waste of talent in all this, however, is that of Mr Obama himself. Congress offers change without change – a green economy built on cheap coal and petrol; a healthcare transformation that asks nobody to pay more taxes or behave any differently – because that is what voters want. Is it too much to ask that Mr Obama should tell voters the truth?

Yes, it is easy for me to write such stuff, and it is way harder--immensely more difficult--to not only lead the country, but also set the pace for the entire world. But, you know, even Rama had his critiques!

Quote of the day

There is a complexity to human affairs before which science and analysis simply stands mute.

Pretty good, I think. It is the concluding line in David Brooks' column.

But, otherwise, I am not sure about such a column where it is not his original thoughts and critique, but it is a review of another work that he quotes. Well, "quotes" is an understatement because the entire column is based on that work in the Atlantic. It is like a book review: an article review!

We are not "in a war of reason against faith"

So, there I was reading David Brooks' rather strange column, and all of a sudden I run into the following sentences:

The rise and now dominance of this emotional approach to morality is an epochal change. It challenges all sorts of traditions. It challenges the bookish way philosophy is conceived by most people. It challenges the Talmudic tradition, with its hyper-rational scrutiny of texts. It challenges the new atheists, who see themselves involved in a war of reason against faith and who have an unwarranted faith in the power of pure reason and in the purity of their own reasoning.

I got ticked off.
As an atheist, I have never felt that I was involved in a war of reason against faith. On the contrary, I am sick and tired of the "faith" people's attempts--on a regular basis--to push science and reason to the remotest possible corner. If at all there is a war, there is only one warring faction and that is the "believers".

Second, I do not see myself as having "unwarranted faith in the power of pure reason and in the purity of their own reasoning" .... oh, please .... I walk around with doubts all the time. I just plainly refuse to accept through "blind faith" ideas that religions and religious people want me to believe. Brooks does not seem to understand that in reason and science we always leave room for possibilities. As long as the evidence we have leads us to certain conclusions, well, we can't adopt a position that will contradict that data, can we? On the other hand, as Keynes remarked, when the facts change we correspondingly change our minds.

Heather Mac Donald has a similar point:

As for non-believers’ purported faith “in the purity of their own reasoning,” I have no idea what Brooks is talking about. The new atheists are not on an intellectual purity crusade; they see the whole of human thought as evidence of the richness of the human mind. They embrace the gorgeousness and grandeur of music, art, and literature as a source of meaning and wisdom.

She adds a lot more. I liked this:

With all respect to David Brooks, this claim strikes me as nonsensical. The new atheists are arguing not against the view that morality is innate, but that it is the product of formal religious teaching. It is the theistic and theocon worldview that is challenged by what Brooks calls the “evolutionary approach to morality,” not the skeptical one. It is the theocons who assert that unless society and individuals are immersed in purported Holy Books, anarchy and depredation will rule the world.

Skeptics respond that moral behavior is instinctual, that parents build on a child’s initial impulses of empathy and fairness and reinforce those impulses with habit and authority. Religious ethical codes are an epiphenomenon of our moral sense, not vice versa. The religionists say that morality is handed down from a deity above; secularists think that it, and indeed the very attributes of that deity himself, bubble up from below. Children raised without belief in divine revelation can be as faithful to a society’s values as those who think that the Ten Commandments (at least those not concerned with religious prostration) originated with God.

I think that Brooks should restrict himself to writing about politics and economics, and not wade into philosophy, reason, and faith.

Carmageddon and the Car-Dealer-in-Chief :-)

I was listening to President Obama's remarks on the continuing GM/Chrysler saga when I was driving, and I could not understand why he talked about the government standing behind auto warranties. It felt bizarre. I felt the same way when he talked about weather-proofing roofs in the context of the stimulus bill discussions; remember that?

Thus, I was eagerly looking forward to Jon Stewart's satire, because I was that confident that it was one strangely humorous press conference. The Daily Show did not let me down. But, first, an excerpt from David Brooks' column:

by enmeshing the White House so deeply into G.M., Obama has increased the odds that March’s menacing threat will lead to June’s wobbly wiggle-out. The Obama administration and the Democratic Party are now completely implicated in the coming G.M. wreck. Over the next few months, the White House will be subject to a gigantic lobbying barrage. The Midwestern delegations, swing states all, will pull out all the stops to prevent plant foreclosures. Unions will be furious if the Obama-run company rips up the union contract. Is the White House ready for the headline “Obama to Middle America: Drop Dead”? It would take a party with a political death wish to see this through.

And now, Jon Stewart:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
Carmageddon '09 - Lemon Aid
comedycentral.com
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Obama, Goldman Sachs, and David Brooks

I am not sure if I would have ever expected David Brooks to end an opinion piece of his this way:

Over the past few years, people from Goldman Sachs have assumed control over large parts of the federal government. Over the next few they might just take over the whole darn thing.

David Brooks?