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 apparentl...