More Big Think From David Brooks

Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France is one of those books that, like Coming of Age in Samoa, if elite-school liberal arts majors weren't assigned them as sophomores (I was), they at least knew about them. By the time I graduated, I thought of Burke as something of a dilettante, and my opinion didn't change much after I was assigned A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful in grad school. At minimum, founding one's world view on Burke strikes me as building a house on sand, even if it was the thing to do among certain conservatives of the past century.

But this is David Brooks. Two years ago but 50 years late, he discovered the Me Decade for himself in The Second Mountain, and last year in The Atlantic he declared the nuclear family a mistake. Somewhere I have some old books by Alan Watts I can send him. But now, of all things, amid the "devastation" of contemporary society that he apparently celebrates, he's rediscovered Edmund Burke. Whew. I need a moment.

Somehow, Brooks has become The Atlantic's big thinker, its current version of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and that's not far off -- The Atlantic is owned by Laurene Powell Jobs, who funds her eleemosynary efforts through something called the Emerson Collective. I remember one of my officemates as a graduate assistant, a committed Marxist, who had the insight that Emerson was something of a Dr Feelgood for Gilded Age capitalism, and he was right. David Brooks is his intellectual heir, maybe in the same way John John Kennedy was the heir of Joe. But although Mrs Jobs is said not to take a day to day role in managing The Atlantic, we must assume she finds Brooks's current prominence there at least something to tolerate, and I would guess the other lizard people pretty much agree.

In any case, having declared the nuclear family a big mistake last year, this year Brooks declares true conservatism dead on the somewhat flimsy authority of Edmund Burke, or at least his reading of Burke, or maybe his memory of his reading of Burke, or something like that.

Human society is unalterably complex, Edmund Burke argued. If you try to reengineer it based on the simplistic schema of your own reason, you will unintentionally cause significant harm. Though Burke was writing as a conservative statesman in Britain some 200 years earlier, the wisdom of his insight was apparent in what I was seeing in the Chicago of the 1980s.

. . . What passes for “conservatism” now, however, is nearly the opposite of the Burkean conservatism I encountered then. Today, what passes for the worldview of “the right” is a set of resentful animosities, a partisan attachment to Donald Trump or Tucker Carlson, a sort of mental brutalism. The rich philosophical perspective that dazzled me then has been reduced to Fox News and voter suppression.

. . . This essay is a reclamation project. It is an attempt to remember how modern conservatism started, what core wisdom it contains, and why that wisdom is still needed today.

. . . Our political categories emerged following the wars of religion of the 16th, 17th, and early 18th centuries. It was a time of bitterness, polarization, and culture war—like today, but a thousand times worse. The Reformation had divided Europe into hostile Catholic and Protestant camps. The wars were a series of massacres and counter-massacres, vicious retributions, and even more vicious counter-retributions.

Brooks's argument is that Trumpism has superseded a Burkean conservatism that emerged from the religious wars and the French Revolution. As he puts it,

[I]n at least one way, Trumpism is truly anti-conservative. Both Burkean conservatism and Lockean liberalism were trying to find ways to gentle the human condition, to help society settle differences without resort to authoritarianism and violence. Trumpism is pre-Enlightenment. Trumpian authoritarianism doesn’t renounce holy war; it embraces holy war, assumes it is permanent, in fact seeks to make it so.

. . . Conservatives thus spend a lot of time defending the “little platoon[s],” as Burke called them, the communities and settled villages that are the factories of moral and emotional formation. If, as Burke believed, reason alone cannot find the one true answer to any social problem, each community must improvise its own set of solutions to intricate human concerns. The conservative seeks to defend this wonderful heterogeneity from the forces of bigness and the centralizing arrogance of rationalism—to protect these little platoons when government tries to perform roles best done in families, when the federal government takes power from local government, when big corporations suck the vitality out of local economies.

But wait a moment. Didn't Brooks just last year declare that the nuclear family was a mistake? But here he's saying that families are little platoons that work things out, like Middle Earth against the Dark Lord Sauron. But if you probe Brooks, Middle Earth is just a big mistake anyhow, and all you're left with is the forces of bigness. Or was that just last year? I can see why Mrs Jobs likes this guy.

Here's where Brooks's Burkean-Middle Earth world view gets things basically wrong: the problem is that the US Republican Party isn't that kind of conservative. Its first presidential candidate was Abraham Lincoln, and his election on an anti-slavery platform was enough to start a war. How on earth did this "gentle the human condition"? The first two sentences of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address completely refute Brooks's theory:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.

Lincoln saw very clearly the need to settle differences over Enlightenment ideas with authoritarianism and violence. Years after Burke and the French Revolution. There are, to be sure, fringe libertarians and segregationist diehards who stil refer to the "monster Lincoln". If you take this to its conclusion, it sounds as if Brooks might be among them.

But sometimes even the little platoons need to fight. My view continues to be that Trump is a talented amateur who saw the sentiments of the little platoons and expressed them effectively. Brooks normally sneers at those platoons, summoning up characters like Patio Man or denouncing pro-Trump boat parades -- but what are those parades other than formations of little platoons?

Brooks is a paradigmatic example of how the elite universities are failing us.