Most dangerous jobs Июль 22, 2008
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Intellectual Usury Feels Good, at First
Occasionally people ask me why I’m so hard on New York Times columnist David Brooks, whom some of them find quite insightful and others so irrelevant they can’t understand why I get angry at all.At last, I’ve found a way to explain it. It’s all there in his column of today, “The Culture of Debt.” I’m sure that many of my correspondents will find the column reasonable on first reading. It captures everything that is wrong with this man and his ideas — and maybe with readers who believe him.Brooks, a self-described conservative and sometime practitioner of “comic sociology,” author of On Paradise Drive and creator of the all-American working-class type “patio man,” knows he has to say something about the devastation raging through countless recently-viable neighborhoods like the one in Cleveland featured on Bill Moyers’ Journal last Friday night.
Brooks knows that millions of the very homeowners he’s been rhapsodizing may lose not only their present homes but any prospect of owning homes again. But he never comments honestly on the information presented by The Nation economics editor William Greider and public officials in Ohio, in one of the most riveting and instructive Moyers shows I’ve ever seen. Brooks makes what we have to presume is an individual, moral decision to deflect the truth and, indeed, to lie. He shifts from comic sociology to pathetic sociology in order to do it. All sobriety, he wrist-slaps predatory lenders but sticks it, more in sorrow than in anger, of course, to the hapless, desperate homeowners who sat listening politely to smooth talkers they’d allowed to offer them fistfuls of “cash back” for signing their savings and hopes away.Ciiting a Times story about a woman whose home was foreclosed in the current tsunami, Brooks frets that Times readers posting comments on whom to hold accountable have been talking past each other: Blame the predatory lenders, one side says. No, says the other side, blame homeowners who lacked enough grown-up self-restraint to say, “I can’t do this deal,” or “I’d better not go there,” Brooks, fresh from his latest deep reckonings in sociology and political philosophy, announces a way out of this either-or debate by proclaming a “third position… held in overlapping ways by liberal communitarians and conservative Burkeans.” (Whenever he does this, he is about to drown truth in euphemisms and plausible half-truths that are somewhat like the kind that predatory lenders tell.)Brooks’s truism-drenched “third position” starts “with the notion that… individuals don’t build their lives from scratch. They absorb the patterns and norms of the world around them. Decision-making — whether it’s taking out a loan or deciding whom to marry — isn’t a coldly rational, self-conscious act. Instead, decision-making is a long chain of processes, most of which happen beneath the level of awareness. We absorb a way of perceiving the world from parents and neighbors. We mimic the behavior around us. Only at the end of the process is there self-conscious oversight.
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“According to this view, what happened to [the borrower who’s been dispossessed], and the nation’s financial system, is part of a larger story. America once had a culture of thrift. But over the past decades, that unspoken code has been silently eroded.”
Blame the culture. Blame the individual decision makers. Blame both. Step back and remember that the individual and the society are interdependent. This is a shell game on the edge of an abyss. Since Brooks goes on to talk about our individual responsibility for eroding norms, can we hold him individually responsible for his decision to play this game?
1. Brooks lies about how the devastation occurred. An “unspoken code has been silently eroded, he reveals.” Silently, David? Marketers of all kinds have spent billions for 40 years telling Americans they deserve a break today and that marketers from McDonald’s and credit-card companies to mortgage lenders will give it to them instantly. This has been the most monumental, unrelenting campaign to destroy a culture the world has seen, barring perhaps the fascist and communist propaganda juggernauts of the 1930s. Our own governments are in on it, not just via de-regulation but with lotteries.
What more does Brooks need to know before he’ll take a responsible personal decision to write tin his column that decency hasn’t “silently eroded” but has been assaulted? Hello? Last year in New Haven, we wound up saying “Hello?” four or five times an evening during the dinner hour to callers from local mortgage lending companies. How hard is it for David Brooks to imagine that poorly-educated people, desperate for cash and barely meeting their mortgage payments, would take those calls?
It’s hard to tell, because, while Brooks makes absolut …
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