[Today’s run: 3.2 miles]
David Brooks is a pundit, politically left-center-ish, who writes for the New York Times and talks on NPR/PBS programs.
He wrote an article in The Atlantic which is probably a good article.
But early in the article he inserts a jarring note that I found detracted from his thesis.
His article is entitled How America Got Mean which is definitely a subject worth exploring. (You may notice that, if you bring up the article in a browser the browser tab has a different title: Why Americans Are So Awful to One Another).
Here is the bit that just threw me off the tracks:Moral formation, as I will use that stuffy-sounding term here, comprises three things. First, helping people learn to restrain their selfishness. How do we keep our evolutionarily conferred egotism under control? Second, teaching basic social and ethical skills. How do you welcome a neighbor into your community? How do you disagree with someone constructively? And third, helping people find a purpose in life. Morally formative institutions hold up a set of ideals. They provide practical pathways toward a meaningful existence: Here’s how you can dedicate your life to serving the poor, or protecting the nation, or loving your neighbor.
For a large part of its history, America was awash in morally formative institutions. Its Founding Fathers had a low view of human nature, and designed the Constitution to mitigate it (even while validating that low view of human nature by producing a document rife with racism and sexism).
Ok.
I don’t know about you, but to me that parenthesized statement is a perfect example of the “meaness” that Americans have got. It is gratuitously rude. He is making a point about the need for moral education. He brings in American history and the some historic attempts to provide moral education through institutions and public practices. Then points out these areas where he finds the constitution lacking when measured from his perspective 200+ years further on.
It is not the kind of line that shows self control, wields social skills, or lifts one to moral purpose.
It has the smell of modernist moral superiority.
Ah! Maybe I am seeing the light. Maybe he is writing a treatise on morality and rudeness, throwing in a rude line in a playful and self referential way, echoing what he just described: Constitution writers had a low view of human nature and produced a document proving them correct. I (says Brooks) am producing a document on the current fault of widespread gratuitous rudeness, throwing in a line which proves that I am correct.
Unfortunately, I don’t think he is that subtle of a writer (semi- gratuitous rudeness). That would be a subtlety beyond my usual expectations for this writer.
And soon after that point I quit reading. I’ll have to go back later, now that I get the joke, and read the rest of the article.