David Brooks and the Politics of Meaning
I have immense respect for David Brooks. He’s a brilliant writer, and the way he’s approached his New York Times gig – by moving beyond the generic political issue column and into the broader realm of politically informed cultural criticism – has been, I think, a great success.
So it’s no surprise that his most recent column, The Conservative Revolution, has stuck with me. Yet what’s been on my mind is how troubling I find the ideas it expresses.
Brooks starts by describing the ascendancy of British Conservatives and notes the simultaneous decline of the American right, and then explains that, between the two, “the flow of ideas has changed direction. It used to be that American conservatives shaped British political thinking. Now the influence is going the other way.”
As for why, he offers the following explanation:
The British conservative renovation begins with this insight: The central political debate of the 20th century was over the role of government. The right stood for individual freedom while the left stood for extending the role of the state. But the central debate of the 21st century is over quality of life. In this new debate, it is necessary but insufficient to talk about individual freedom. Political leaders have to also talk about, as one Tory politician put it, “the whole way we live our lives.”
That means, first, moving beyond the Thatcherite tendency to put economics first. As Oliver Letwin, one of the leading Tory strategists put it: “Politics, once econo-centric, must now become socio-centric.” David Cameron, the Conservative Party leader, makes it clear that his primary focus is sociological.
This is the lesson, Brooks argues, that the American right must learn. It makes sense that a sociologically inclined writer like Brooks would find this style appealing. And I have no doubt that there are some electoral successes to be found should the GOP broadly adopt this tack.
The problem, though, is that this grants legitimacy to the idea that people ought to seek meaning from their government. And at the same time, it encourages political parties to ply their constituents by offering meaning as their product.
Frankly, I find this idea appalling and depressing, and, when taken to its logical endpoint, diminishing of – possibly even antithetical to – the sort of small, self-chosen community bonds, those of family and neighbor, church and community, intellect and interest, which seem far more integral to society than anything shaped by even the most efficient and benevolent hand of government. To seek meaning from government and politics is to cease to seek meaning from other outlets; in Europe, secularization has generally increased with its dependence on government. Why seek community in the church when you can find it at the ballot box? Yet Brooks writes approvingly that British conservatives are “trying to use government to foster dense social bonds.” Is community now to be a public utility? It’s a vision of government as a clunky state-run Facebook.
Brooks would no doubt argue that he only wants to see government strengthen those traditional community bonds, not supplant them. That’s an admirable goal, but I’m not sure it’s an attainable one. The very nature of retail politics (and competitive salesmanship in general) is to move toward bolder, grander claims — always to do and be more. Any effort to put government in the business of aiding those bonds will, I suspect, lead to a government that seeks to simply be the bond.
Perhaps this was inevitable. In the retail world, this is an increasingly popular marketing tactic. Products are sold based on the lifestyles they represent, the ideas they seem to symbolize, the self-image they grant the purchaser. Community and culture are the primary value-adds of some of today’s most successful brands. Yet I shudder to think that our government should reinvent itself this way – cleaner, perhaps, and with a hipper, more modern sensibility too, but oppressive, in a way, and certainly more expensive – a trillion-dollar, bureaucratic Whole Foods.
Just wanted to note that in my experience, “small, self-chosen [or inherited] community bonds, those of family and neighbor, church and community” are far more robust in Europe than here.
— matt · May 10, 04:42 PM · #
I think you’re totally right, Peter, and commenter matt, above, makes a good point, too. The little bit I know about the British conservative model makes me think that by endorsing it, Brooks is actually ceding the field to liberalism. Choosing between differently branded versions of governmentally-supplied meaning doesn’t appeal to me, even if one brand employs more “conservative” overtones. I hope this turns into a longer thread.
— Matt Frost · May 10, 05:10 PM · #
In the recent debate about my colleague Kent Gramm’s departure from Wheaton College, much attention was given to Wheaton’s policy (known to all who teach here) of requiring faculty to discuss the circumstances of divorces with the college administration. Now, it’s certainly possible to make a strong argument that this is a bad policy, but as I followed the debate I found it interesting that many commentators believed that such policies should be illegal — that is, that people should not be allowed to waive certain rights, even if they are only doing so within the context of a specific community, even if they could leave that community at any time, and even if they really want to do so. In fact, many assumed that such voluntary associations are illegal. For a number of Americans, the very idea of willingly limiting one’s freedoms, or compromising one’s privacy, in order to (for instance) strengthen the bonds of community, is a repulsive one.
This is especially ironic when you consider how many of these people have unwillingly, or at least unwittingly, conceded vast tracts of their privacy to banks, governments, and Google. For them, it appears, only involuntary concessions are ethically defensible.
It has been Wendell Berry’s argument for many years that American culture has been systematically dissolving the various mediating structures of our lives, leaving nothing but the utterly public world of government and the utterly private world of the individual. I think this is correct, but I also question whether government can be thought capable of building up structures that would weaken its own hold over us.
— Alan Jacobs · May 10, 08:40 PM · #
I’ll defend Brooks just a bit. There’s a fair ways we could go in pursuing Brooks’s goal of strengthening families and communities without committing to a Michael Lerner-style politics of meaning. That is, without government prescribing what the unifying substance of communal life is supposed to be. Its telos or whatever. Or even, really, that there should be some overriding meaning, beyond the idea that stable families and coherent communities are good in themselves. I suspect some of this is in Grand New Party. Tweaking the tax code in pro-family directions, etc. My concern isn’t with a politics of meaning per se, but with something more insidious, an unleashed administrative apparatus…the fusing of therapy and sovereignty. Bureaucracies empowered to treat our antisocial tendencies. Brooks seems to balance uneasily between a defending existing communities and something more officially constructive. This sentence gave me pause: “These conservatives are not trying to improve the souls of citizens. They’re trying to use government to foster dense social bonds.” Foster dense social bonds? What does this mean? How might dense social bonds be open to government fostering? A policy of Burkean nostalgia pursued through the modern administrative state…I dunno, it makes my skin crawl, the thought of it.
— Matt Feeney · May 10, 10:59 PM · #
Perhaps this tendency is therapeutic not in the vulgar sense, but in the literal sense of recognizing troubling signs and symptoms and then taking action to treat or mitigate them.
Forgive me, because I’m a gestalt guy, not an analyst, but it seems to me that this interventionist approach (call it social keynesianism) is actually going to be a) popular with British voters and b) generative of more recognizably conservative and pro-social outcomes then the implied alternative of social friedmanism.
Plus, I do think there is an important distinction between soulcraft and fostering social bonds. You can in fact meaningfully disavow the former while enthusiastically intervening to improve social relations between individuals (and groups) in a dense, urban, pluralistic society. Actually, in the multicultural reality of modern Britain, I doubt the threat of Burkean overreach is all that great.
Finally, is “meaning” really, as Peter says, the product being offered here? I think this is a type of overstatement characteristic of many conservatives, eternally on the lookout for Voegelin’s political religions.
To me, the sort of thing the Tories are selling looks a lot more like societal preventative maintenance: we don’t want to change society’s telos, we just want to change society’s oil. In a social market economy, nobody gets to pursue their own vision of the Good if the social engine seizes. Everybody suffers if the social bonds fail.
I think that is even more true for the U.S. today than it is for any Anglosphere or European nation.
— Tim · May 11, 05:20 AM · #
Tim…If you’re a gestalt guy then I’m an astrologer.
— Matt Feeney · May 11, 05:23 PM · #
For gestalt, read tends to make ridiculously sweeping assertions based on minimal amounts of facts and logic. It’s the Evel Knievel school of political economy – just jump over the yawning chasms where the actual body of the argument should be to the glorious, sparkling conclusion. My favourite quote could quite possibly be “Evidence? I don’t need evidence – I’m a philosopher. I can intuit Being directly.”
— Tim · May 11, 09:59 PM · #
Well, I come from the world of political theory, where, when addressing a policy issue, you to think on it until the tangential relevance of an imposing thinker comes to mind, and then you talk about the thinker.
— Matt Feeney · May 12, 01:35 AM · #