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There is a theory which states that if anyone discovers just exactly what the universe is for and why we are here, that it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. Then there is a theory which states that this has already happened.
In Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, the computer, Deep Thought, concludes that the answer to the "ultimate question of life, the universe and everything" is the number "42". Helpful, but not without the actual question, which Deep Thought doesn’t know. It takes a planet-size computer called the earth 7 1/2 million years to calculate what the question is. Twenty-four hours before the job is done, a bureaucratic slip-up by a galactic construction crew destroys the earth. It’s so inconvenient, you would think someone would apologize for it.
As luck would have it, David Brooks has the answer, so maybe God doesn’t need to say "Sorry" after all. Bobo is not mostly harmless and frequently seems to panic. But he knows The Meaning of Life. It’s not the Pythonesque vision of Irish washerwomen dropping children like clothes pins in the back garden. The meaning of life lies in a politically malleable, Wagnerian notion called posterity.
In The Power of Posterity, Bobo fantasizes about the consequences of half the earth’s population becoming sterile in an instant. How would that change what we do and why? P.D. James’ Children of Men explored similar territory fifteen years ago, with chilling realism and more maturity:
Not only has P. D. James created a tale of high literary quality, she has courageously extrapolated the chilling outcome of such a scenario. Pets and dolls treated as virtual infants; the despair of millions leading to mass suicide; the accelerated drain of manpower from the Third World to the Old World – there’s nothing outlandish about the author’s suppositions.
Bobo’s purpose is not realism, but catechism. He uses his fantasy like a proscenium arch, to frame his message, in hopes of persuading playgoers that what they see beyond it is true life:
People might focus on living for the moment, valuing the here and now…But, of course, we don’t lead individualistic lives. Material conditions do not drive history. [sic] People live in a compact between the dead, the living and the unborn, and the value of the thought experiment is that it reminds us of the power posterity holds over our lives.
Posterity as used here is as close to the health and welfare of real families as a medieval cathedral was to the teachings of Jesus. A cathedral is an expression of power. And Bobo is spreading the false notion that those who seek it are restrained by thoughts of what posterity or God might do to them if they abuse it. Works well in grade school, not so well in high school, and is nonsense in the political reality of Athens, Rome, Paris, London, Washington, Moscow, Tokyo or Beijing. Politicians care about what the law or other politicians can do to them today: censure, exile, imprisonment, dethronement, death.
The cathedral analogy is helpful because much of Bobo’s thinking is medieval or from the Renaissance (Machiavelli). Like power, a cathedral dominated the eye, the landscape and politics. Its building required a supreme will, a brutal concentration of resources, and generations of taxes and commitment from laborers and citizenry.
Ministering to the needs of the flock – serfs and townsfolk – was not relevant: the here and now did not matter for peasants, or so their church told them. It mattered a great deal to the bishops who collected taxes and glorified themselves God and their god-made king. The cathedral was a monument to their power as much as to God’s. The same is true of the cathedral’s modern equivalents: mega-corporations, banks, armies, statesmen of empire and their houses and capitol buildings.
In short, posterity is political; children and the adults they become are personal. Bobo seems to have that distinction clearly mind, though he avoids articulating it:
Without posterity, there are no grand designs. There are no high ambitions. Politics becomes insignificant. [sic] Even words like justice lose meaning because everything gets reduced to the narrow qualities of the here and now.
If people knew that their nation, group and family were doomed to perish, they would build no lasting buildings. They would not strive to start new companies. They wouldn’t concern themselves with the preservation of the environment….
There would be a radical increase in individual autonomy. Not sacrificing for their own society’s children, people would themselves become children, basing their lives on pleasure and ease instead of meanings to be fulfilled….
[T]here would be brutal division between those with the power to possess the future and those without.
Bobo is not describing a fantasy world; he is describing this one. The juvenalization of the Republican Party under Newt Gingrich and the adultery hiding secrecy bestowed on its members by the Family. The loss of a future as reason to avoid restraint accurately describes the CheneyBush administration and predatory capitalism.
Bobo retreats from this brush with reality with the bromide that he is engaged in a "thought experiment". The world he describes doesn’t exist, which is how he can end with this attempt to become Mitt Romney’s speech writer:
we are blessed with the disciplining power of our posterity. We rely on this strong, invisible and unacknowledged force — these millions of unborn people we will never meet but who give us the gift of our way of life.
Mormon visions aside, the ego hungering for power asks no permission before it takes it. Fear of God and future disdain does not restrain its efforts. Practical consequences are its only roadblocks, which is why such egos fight so hard to avoid them, corrupting the law and government in the process.
Families, on the other hand, are heartbound combinations of women, of men, of children; sometimes one or two, sometimes all three. Their health and happiness demand resources: medical care, schools, fair jobs, a safe environment, the right to speak up and the obligation to listen, and fair and open rules and public consequences for breaching the most important of them.
Those are real needs pressing here and now. We can demand that they be met. Or we can return to medieval priorities and wait until we no longer need them, when we enter the kingdom of God (or the other place). Or we can wait longer, until the politician’s mythical future has come to pass or until Arthur Dent returns home.
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A question for Mr. Brooks: Concern over whose posterity restrained the American forces who kidnapped Saad Iqbal Adni, based on false information, had him tortured and then kept him in prison until his release seven years later with an, “Oops, shit happens,” but no apology or compensation? What would they have done had they not acted with such restraint?
- Clive Stafford Smith
Brooks is an idiot. OK, now that I’ve gotten that out for the millionth time… Usually Brooks takes on the mantle of spokesman for the great moderate middle. It is a pose, a usurpation because middle or whatever, most Americans do not share his views or his prescriptions. Just look at issues like healthcare, the economy, and Iraq, to name a few. On most of the venues where Brooks appears no one is going to challenge his right to speak for those who, it can be shown, clearly disagree with him. But almost anyone could. That’s where posterity comes in. This group has the advantage of being a majority but is conveniently not around to take issue with the words Brooks puts in their mouths.
On a more serious note, this is malarkey. World population looks to hit 9 billion by 2050. Unless something comes along to change the calculus, it will be below one billion by 2100. Given our current technological development and overuse of resources, especially water and oil, we are already above the earth’s carrying capacity. The math in this is not difficult but it is inexorable. Posterity I think will have other concerns than looking back at idiots like David Brooks. Brooks’s phrase about the “disciplining power of our posterity” is an obscene joke, given that likely future and Brooks’ role in shilling for the most shortsighted and rapacious among us.
I hope you are correct, but the fact remains no one knows for sure what most Americans feel or want. We say 76% of Americans was some form of single payer health insurance. Our representatives who are not totally out of touch with their constituents, disagree. Lobbyists are powerful, as is money, but our representatives are not inclined to commit political suicide as they would if they vote against the wishes of 76% of their constituents. This ambiguity must be eliminated. Our first order of business is deciding how to do this.
The point is 76% of Americans do NOT support single payer health insurance. In point of fact, both Rasmussin and Gallop show all public options DISAPPROVED by the public 58-42%.
No link of course and the reference is to the most conservative veering pollster around Rasmussen.
ekunin, politicians feel they can con the rubes. Being where they already are proves that. Political suicide only would happen for them if they went against their corporate masters who hold the money.
Brooks’ examples frequently contradict the claims he makes for them. My favorite from today’s column that Brooks must have phoned in from the Eastern Shore was this:
It’s gibberish. It seems to say that the needs of the here and now are inadequate in themselves to support notions of “justice”, whatever that means to David Brooks. That’s flat wrong, a mixture of half-digested sociology and religious pablum. Spraying this intellectual vomit in the midst of an inadequately articulated debate on the necessity of investigating official government torture and the need for credible health care reform is pure sabotage.
I took Bobo’s column to be a paen to the Faithful, and purported justification for those living in gated communities to “take care of their own” and demand that government take care of only the same few people.
If this were a decade after the Civil War, Brooks would be selling Social Darwinism and phrenology, and raking in big bucks from Rockefeller and Carnegie. That is, before the latter found religion and gave away much of the world’s biggest fortune to fund the educational and cultural yearnings of the newly industrial powerhouse of America.
To be honest, I can only take Brooks in very small doses anymore. When I do, I am thinking something like this: talking point, aw shucks moment, claims to speak for group he does not represent, talking point, false equivalence, lie, talking point, everyone does it, false sympathy, inserts shiv and twists it, shakes head in worldly wise fashion, best moment of all he STFU.
I feel the same way. But then the Times not only promotes Brooks’ column, it sets him up with Gail Collins in a NYT version of the Jim Lehrer comfy corner known as Brooks and Shields. It doubles Brooks’ reach, but in a semi-blog format. That’s because it’s not really a blog – Collins and Brooks don’t really interact with commenters; they exchange very occasional, mutually laudatory naff comments to each other that readers comment on.
The Times compounds the spectacle by hiring jejune conservatives like Ross Douthat instead of another progressive as or more liberal than Paul Krugman, whom they still regard as shrill, perhaps because he’s been correct so often where the Times was not. Douthat delivers Brooks-like pablum with less experience and learning. He’s an improvement over the odious Bill Kristol only in that he can spell.
The chorus from the Right is growing and it seems unwise not to refute it, at least in a small way. That progressives would rather ignore such writing because it is obvious, boring, hypocritical propaganda is ironically what helps establish that writing as a baseline against which other views are assessed. It’s even used as a fulcrum for levering still more conservative, less well thought out views.
Case in point:
The Conversation – In Praise of Partisanship, by David Brooks and Gail Collins.
The set up is that Mr. Brooks claims now to be a “conservative independent” – shortly after the downfall and near self-destruction of the Republican Party. But he frames his original choice to leave the Democrats to join the Republicans as the act of a man casting off childish things. He later claims that he has a responsibility as a “journalist”:
Is that thunder or Glenn Greenwald screeching in Brazil? Note the careful, but unconvincing distancing of himself from anything smacking of dinners for dollars at the WaPoo’s Weymouth manse in Georgetown.
These excerpts suggest that Mr. Brooks is a self-promoter who lacks intellectual integrity. I recommend the whole “conversation” with Ms. Collins only for those who do not easily get motion sickness.
Mr. Brooks claims to have “grown up” and left the Democrats for the Republicans coincidentally at the beginning of the Rise of Ronnie and the start of decades of Republican dominance in Washington. Mr. Brooks’ recent self-identification as a “conservative independent” rather than as a Republican corresponds with the waning of that dominance. With timing like that, Bobo could replace Holy Joe Lieberman or Snarlin’ Arlen Specter in the US Senate.
Genghis Khan sure did not have posterity growing up the will to power creates posterity or the power crumbles.
Growing up in a crappy situation he fought to resolve that situation and created posterity because he was good at it.
Genghis paved the way for Kublai Khan who Marco Polo had great admiration for.
Short version Bobo is wrong Again.
Bobo’s thought experiment assumes that everyone will accept the inevitable sorry human nature can has and will again keep going when all hope is gone.
The Black Death did make many people assume the world was ending. The God returning to claim Mexico Cortez killed thanks to disease so much of our population Spain had to import African slaves to help do all the work because their were not enough survivors.
Jerusalem was burned to the ground its people scattered did the Jews lose hope?
Humans can wait Generations for a Messiah, for things to change, To continue when all hope is gone is what makes us great.
I do agree the GOP is in shambles they are acting in a self destructive manner but then again they are not great.
Their belief in Crony Capitalism is shaken but they can’t admit that thought to themselves yet.
They do have to change or die lets see what they choose.
Bobo is a Mormon? Is that what the believe? Prosperity sounds like what the money changers whose tables Jesus upended believed. Al Franken called this belief Supply Side Jesus.
Bobo was raised Jewish in Manhattan. The Mormon reference relates to the vision that millions of yet unborn, whole mature personalities wait in line in heaven to be brought to earth. That’s theme I read into Bobo’s language:
The claim that “posterity” is what saves and guides us and gives us meaning is a powerful allusion to fundamentalist Christian views of sex roles and the purpose of family. My point is that however it influences individual or group thinking about their lives at home, it has no restraining influence whatsoever on the egos of those bent on obtaining and using power. If anything, as Bobo has just done, it’s a tool used to manipulate followership.
For all his obvious propaganda, Bobo cobbles together underlying themes that comprise the warp and weft of human emotions. I think his fabrics are terribly flawed and fall apart at the touch, but sometimes they look attractive or comforting.
Agreed the GOP and Bobo seem fatalistic.
Three quarters of Americans want improved access to health care. That’s an overwhelming agreement on a single policy, given that that 24% is largely comprised of the young, who still think they’re invulnerable; the rich, who can pay for what they want and who think that pooling risk is an indirect tax their often unnearned wealth; the politically gullible, who vote against their own economic interests; and the resolutely radical conservatives, who vote against anything that doesn’t pay them enough or pays anyone else anything.
A universal single payer system would provide the most health care for the least money, while still leaving privates an opening for boutique or supplemental business. But they want the whole pie and are spending a million and a half a day not just to buy politician’s votes, but to bury the public in propaganda about the evils that reform would bring. They never say what evils already exist. Egregiously, progressive Democratic politicians rarely fill the public debate void.
A public option appears to be the next best thing. A credible public insurer would provide a benchmark against which to measure and highlight how badly served the public now is by the private market. More importantly, it would help deliver better health care, it’s primary objective. That the delivery of that care needs substantial reform, too, no one denies. It will have to come via subsequent, complementary programs and legislation.
Congresscritters know exactly what that 76% support for credible health care reform means. There’s no ambiguity. Congresscritters are simply in conflict with their constituents.
Lobbyists are on the ground on Capitol Hill like leaves in autumn. They are paying great sums and promising more for the right votes. They are also threatening to put their money to use opposing the re-election of anyone who doesn’t play ball.
That includes exacting retribution on wholly unrelated legislation. (Lobbyists work in packs, which collectively cover most legislative matters). That’s effectively a threat to make a Congresscritter ineffective on what matters to him or her unless they play ball on blocking health care reform. That’s the big kahuna, bigger than anything but defense spending.
Besides, the lobbyists have mapped out Congresscritters like a hiking map in Cornwall. They know every farmhouse, outhouse, brick wall, pig yard, ditch and beach. They know exactly who, on which committees and what total number of votes they need and they’re working hard to knock them down one domino at a time. Imagine the Brooks Brothers riot in your front parlor every day from now until Nov. 2010.