Results tagged “New York Times” from Koax! Koax! Koax!
The always reliable David Brooks of the New York Times just keeps cranking them out. Here's today's thumbsucker.
Brooks's record of deep thought is not a good one. Historically, his columns tend to report either that the earth is flat or that snow is cold with equal certainty and authority, based on how the summaries of other people's opinions that he's been reading square up with what he already believes. (I would bet you folding money that Brooks hasn't read an actual book by Gertrude Himmelfarb in twenty years.) Today's column reports with great concern that there's a very cold snow blanketing the flat earth.
tl;dr: I don't like him.
What I observe in the twentysomethings I know: their big epistemological and moral struggles appear to stem from the absence of authority - not of a specific authority, but of the idea of authority. George W.S. Trow captured this almost twenty years ago in his essay "Collapsing Dominant," where he described the reaction of his young friends to seeing J. J. Hunsecker in Sweet Smell of Success: they wanted more of that. They recognized that Hunsecker's a monster, sure, but what they saw in the movie is something that has vanished from the modern landscape: a world in which there could be an authority like that.
I think this comes from a lot of different sources. The largest is that authority has eroded because the people who once had it betrayed themselves as corrupt. (There's an idea you won't see David Brooks conjuring with.) It long ago became difficult to ignore the fact that the mainstream maintains itself by shitting on the margins, and that it will sacrifice its stated principles to do so in a heartbeat. If you know people in the margins, ignoring this becomes impossible - and young people are a lot closer to the margins today than I think they've ever been. For the most part, young people don't look at the controversy over gay marriage as embodying a moral dilemma; they see it as people who have power trying to deny it to people who don't. They see all manner of politicized issues - abortion, the war on drugs, anti-terrorism - in the same light.
The hostility to the idea of authority is central to their worldview. They embrace Wikipedia specifically because they know that it can't be trusted. Nobody gets disillusioned when an article in Wikipedia turns out to be biased; what do you expect from something that's communally authored? Wikipedia doesn't promise anyone that it's correct; all that it promises is that it's correctable. I don't think it's possible to overstate the importance of this idea to people who have grown up with no authorities that they can trust.
You can see this at work in the attitude towards music piracy. The old way of looking at things is: It's not okay to steal. The new way of looking at things is: The only reason that you even think of piracy is "stealing" is that the lawyers and PR people hired by a small handful of incredibly rich thieves are manipulating law and public opinion.
Which underscores a really, really important aspect of this attitude, and another thing you won't hear David Brooks introduce into the discussion: They're not wrong.
Brooks's record of deep thought is not a good one. Historically, his columns tend to report either that the earth is flat or that snow is cold with equal certainty and authority, based on how the summaries of other people's opinions that he's been reading square up with what he already believes. (I would bet you folding money that Brooks hasn't read an actual book by Gertrude Himmelfarb in twenty years.) Today's column reports with great concern that there's a very cold snow blanketing the flat earth.
tl;dr: I don't like him.
What I observe in the twentysomethings I know: their big epistemological and moral struggles appear to stem from the absence of authority - not of a specific authority, but of the idea of authority. George W.S. Trow captured this almost twenty years ago in his essay "Collapsing Dominant," where he described the reaction of his young friends to seeing J. J. Hunsecker in Sweet Smell of Success: they wanted more of that. They recognized that Hunsecker's a monster, sure, but what they saw in the movie is something that has vanished from the modern landscape: a world in which there could be an authority like that.
I think this comes from a lot of different sources. The largest is that authority has eroded because the people who once had it betrayed themselves as corrupt. (There's an idea you won't see David Brooks conjuring with.) It long ago became difficult to ignore the fact that the mainstream maintains itself by shitting on the margins, and that it will sacrifice its stated principles to do so in a heartbeat. If you know people in the margins, ignoring this becomes impossible - and young people are a lot closer to the margins today than I think they've ever been. For the most part, young people don't look at the controversy over gay marriage as embodying a moral dilemma; they see it as people who have power trying to deny it to people who don't. They see all manner of politicized issues - abortion, the war on drugs, anti-terrorism - in the same light.
The hostility to the idea of authority is central to their worldview. They embrace Wikipedia specifically because they know that it can't be trusted. Nobody gets disillusioned when an article in Wikipedia turns out to be biased; what do you expect from something that's communally authored? Wikipedia doesn't promise anyone that it's correct; all that it promises is that it's correctable. I don't think it's possible to overstate the importance of this idea to people who have grown up with no authorities that they can trust.
You can see this at work in the attitude towards music piracy. The old way of looking at things is: It's not okay to steal. The new way of looking at things is: The only reason that you even think of piracy is "stealing" is that the lawyers and PR people hired by a small handful of incredibly rich thieves are manipulating law and public opinion.
Which underscores a really, really important aspect of this attitude, and another thing you won't hear David Brooks introduce into the discussion: They're not wrong.
