David Brooks on Three Kinds of Anti-Semitism

David Brooks
NYT

Since I've been speaking of religious intolerance lately, let's take a glance at an Opinion piece by David Brooks titled "How to Fight Anti-Semitism" (NYT, March 24, 2015), in which makes a threefold distinction among types of Anti-Semitism:

In the Middle East, anti-Semitism has the feel of a deranged theoretical system for making sense of a world gone astray . . . This sort of anti-Semitism thrives where there aren't that many Jews. The Jew is not a person but an idea, a unique carrier of transcendent evil: a pollution, a stain, a dark force responsible for the failures of others, the unconscious shame and primeval urges they feel in themselves, and everything that needs explaining. This is a form of derangement, a flight from reality even in otherwise sophisticated people . . .

In Europe, anti-Semitism looks like a response to alienation. It's particularly high where unemployment is rampant. Roughly half of all Spaniards and Greeks express unfavorable opinions about Jews. The plague of violence is fueled by young Islamic men with no respect and no place to go . . .

The United States is also seeing a rise in the number of anti-Semitic incidents. But this country remains an astonishingly non-anti-Semitic place. America's problem is the number of people who can't fathom what anti-Semitism is or who think Jews are being paranoid or excessively playing the victim . . .

I would alter what Brooks says about Anti-Semitism in Europe. It's not primarily a response to alienation, not among Muslims, anyway. The "young Islamic men" who turn to violence are absorbing much of the Middle East's "deranged theoretical system." This system, as described by Brooks, sounds like a religious one, given the talk of Jews as "evil," as a kind of "pollution," as a "dark force," even as the reason for this "world gone astray."

An article by Bernard Lewis, "The Roots of Muslim Rage," is good for understanding why much of the Muslim world has grown delusional about its failures. You can read this article in The Atlantic (but after clicking on the link, you have to wait for about 15 seconds for some sort of ad to disappear).

Scriptural Minefields for Journalists . . .

David Brooks
NYT

In an otherwise exemplary column, "Religion and Inequality" (International Herald Tribune (Global Edition of the New York Times), page 9a-c, June 15-16, 2013), David Brooks writes:

In Corinthians, Jesus tells the crowds, "Not many of you were wise by worldly standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong."

Just for the record, that's Paul (not Jesus) writing (not speaking, except maybe to an amanuensis) in I Corinthians 1:26-27 (not just "Corinthians" -- and it's from the New International Version). Also, Paul is not addressing a crowd, but rather, the Church at Corinth. As I expected upon reading this misattribution by Brooks, there were a lot of sarcastic responses throughout the Internet, which I see no need to post here. If only Brooks believed in the verbal plenary inspiration of the Bible and could argue like Ken Ham that "Jesus wrote ALL of the Bible":

"Jesus, the Creator, is the Word. The Bible is the written Word. Every word in the Bible is really the Word of the Creator -- Jesus Christ"

An excuse, perhaps problematic in its own right, but an excuse. Brooks, however, doesn't share that theology -- not by a long shot -- so he doesn't have this way out, and he has since 'corrected' the attribution:

In I Corinthians, Paul tells the crowds, "Not many of you were wise by worldly standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong."

Brooks needs to let those crowds disperse, too, but he was at least forthright:

The column . . . incorrectly described a passage from I Corinthians that ends with the statement, "God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong." It was written by Paul, not spoken by Jesus.

Right, but not written to crowds, though possibly to a crowded Corinthian church . . .

David Brooks: Ideal Leaders "full of passionate intensity"

William Butler Yeats

(Image from The National Library of Ireland)

William Butler Yeats is one of my favorite poets, and in my Berkeley years, way back in the 1980s, I read him religiously, which is perhaps how he wrote to be read, so I'm always gratified to catch some allusion to his poetry, especially one encountered in the writing of a columnist and public intellectual like David Brooks.

In his recent NYT column on Congressional gridlock, "Sin and Taxes" (November 22, 2010), Brooks notes that current-day American politicians are different from those of even as recent as the 1990s, and he reasons why:

For centuries, American politicians did not run up huge peacetime debts. It wasn't because they were unpartisan or smarter or more virtuous. It was because they were constrained by a mentality inherited from the founders. According to this mentality, a big successful nation exists in a state of equilibrium between its many factions. This equilibrium is fragile because we are flawed and fallen creatures and can't quite trust ourselves. So all of us, but especially members of the leadership class, should practice self-restraint. Moral anxiety restrained hubris (don't think your side possesses the whole truth) and self-indulgence (debt corrupts character).

This ethos has dissolved, on left and right. The new mentality sees the country not as an equilibrium, but as a battlefield in which the people, who are pure and virtuous, do battle against the interests or the elites, who stand in the way of the people's happiness.

The ideal leader in this mental system is free from moral anxiety but full of passionate intensity. This leader pushes his troops in lock step before the voracious foe. Each party has its own version of whom the evil elites are, but both feel they've more to fear from their enemies than from their own sinfulness.

Compromise is thus impossible. Money matters should be negotiable, but how can one compromise with opponents who are the source of all corruption?

A bit of Calvinist-inspired Protestant self-doubt, it seems, is good for the state of the soul, but with politicians too sure of their own election, the consequence is an all-out, no-holds-barred culture war in which the self-righteousness scorn their opponents as totally depraved.

But enough moralizing. You surely caught the allusion to the poem "The Second Coming" in this line by Brooks: "The ideal leader in this mental system is free from moral anxiety but full of passionate intensity." Here's the entire poem by Yeats:

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

I won't attempt any lengthy explication, or try to apply this 1919 post-Great War poem to our time. That would be tempting, but this isn't the place for it, though the line "the centre cannot hold" is surely apt, and perhaps also subtly intended by Brooks in referring to our current 'ideal' leaders, so "full of passionate intensity," the type whom Yeats identifies as "the worst," a characterization with which Brooks apparently agrees.

But rather than further pursue that line of thought on these leaders so full of sound and fury, I'll just enjoy the lines of the poem . . . pausing to appreciate the literary allusion.

"The Gospel of Mel Gibson"?

Poor schizoid Mr. Gibson, eh?

Oh, perhaps he's no greater wretch than the rest of us, but he certainly seems to be currently working overtime at bringing himself lower than what you might expect to scrape from the bottom of that proverbial barrel, and his image has taken quite a long, hard tumble since his heady days with The Passion of the Christ almost seven years ago.

I've read enough in the transcript from the recording of his self-righteous, narcissistic bluster towards Oksana Grigorieva to realize that we only now truly know the guy, and I don't care to know him any closer by reading more of that.

I'll therefore take some distance from the man and turn to an astute analysis of Gibson's narcissism by David Brooks in his recent column, "The Gospel of Mel Gibson," published with the New York Times (July 15, 2010):

There used to be theories that deep down narcissists feel unworthy, but recent research doesn't support this. Instead, it seems, the narcissist's self-directed passion is deep and sincere.

Note this clever use of the quasi-religious term "passion." We'll return to this. But first, more on the typical narcissist:

His self-love is his most precious possession. It is the holy center of all that is sacred and right. He is hypersensitive about anybody who might splatter or disregard his greatness. If someone treats him slightingly, he perceives that as a deliberate and heinous attack. If someone threatens his reputation, he regards this as an act of blasphemy. He feels justified in punishing the attacker for this moral outrage.

More religious terminology there from Brooks on the narcissist's messianic self-regard, with additional religious language of the sacred yet to come:

And because he plays by different rules, and because so much is at stake, he can be uninhibited in response. Everyone gets angry when they feel their self-worth is threatened, but for the narcissist, revenge is a holy cause and a moral obligation, demanding overwhelming force.

Brooks then turns to Gibson and describes his verbal attack upon Oksana Grigorieva as "primal and searing" in "unleashing one . . . barrage after another," his "breathing . . . heavy," his "vocal muscles . . . clenched," and his "guttural sounds . . . like hammer blows." His "crude and derogatory" words "come out in waves" as he tries "to pulverize her into nothingness, like some corruption that has intertwined itself into his being and now must be expunged." Brooks is especially struck by Gibson's self-righteous -- dare one suggest messianic -- self-regard:

It is striking how morally righteous he is, without ever bothering to explain what exactly she has done wrong. It is striking how quickly he reverts to the vocabulary of purity and disgust. It is striking how much he believes he deserves. It is striking how much he seems to derive satisfaction from his own righteous indignation.

How did he fall so far? Recall that this was a man -- as reported by Allison Adato in "The Gospel of Mel," People (Vol. 61 No. 9, March 08, 2004) -- who imagined himself already so low:

It's the director's left hand nailing Jesus to the cross. The cameo is more than a Hitchcockian gimmick. Gibson feels his telling of the Passion holds all humanity responsible for the death of Jesus. And, he has said, "I'm first on line for culpability. I did it."

I recall being struck by those very words back in 2004 and thinking that they sounded something like what many evangelicals might utter, perhaps echoing the words of St. Paul in I Timothy 1:15, that "Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am chief."

But Gibson's words seemed somehow different, perhaps because he had physically acted out the role of the one actually pounding in the nails. Consider his statement: "I'm first on line for culpability." If Brooks is right about Gibson being a narcissist, then we shouldn't interpret Gibson's confession of his culpability as an expression of humility, but as a claim to primacy.

Mel is just too good to be any place other than "first on line." His "Passion" is first and foremost about himself . . . as Brooks implies in his clever, striking pun on "passion," just one of many wordplays, beginning with his column's title.

Gibson's gospel turns out to be just Gibson, a self-glorifying narcissist flaming out as a falling star in a long, tedious arc of insidious descent.

Reinhold Niebuhr in President Obama's Political Theology?

Reinhold Niebuhr

March 8, 1948

(Image from Time)

Although I haven't read a great deal of his writings, I first dipped into the works of the great theologian and political theorist Reinhold Niebuhr when I was studying with the historian Samuel Haber at UC Berkeley back in the mid-eighties. My slight familiarity with Niebuhr's views was just enough to make me wonder about the extent of Niebuhr's influence on President Obama's Nobel Prize Lecture and his political thought generally, an influence that the President has at times acknowledged.

Turns out, I'm not the only one thinking about Niebuhr here. In the New York Times article that I cited yesterday, Ted Widmer noted the influence of Niebuhr on the President's Nobel Lecture:

Yet another source, to my ears, was a writer who went unnamed -- Reinhold Niebuhr, whose 1944 classic, "The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness," probed deeply into the justice of war at a time when the most total war in our history was being waged. Despite the fact that he remains a saint of the American left, Niebuhr left no doubt that he approved war under the right circumstances, as Obama surely knows. (Widmer, "Obama's Nobel Speech: Sophisticated and Brave," New York Times, December 11, 2009).

Widmer's remark was published on the eleventh. The very next day, David Brooks puts President Obama in the tradition of so-called "Christian Realism" and cites Niebuhr as a precursor:

As the midcentury theologian Reinhold Niebuhr declared: "Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary." (Brooks, "Obama's Christian Realism," New York Times, December 12, 2009).

Widmer's reference to Niebuhr's book The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness might lead those who haven't read it to conclude that Niebuhr held so-called 'Manichaean' political views on good versus evil -- with "us" as the good guys and "them" as the bad guys -- but one point of the book was that we are all capable of great evil, even in the pursuit of great good. The citation from David Brooks fits with this view, and he calls it "Christian Realism" for its chastened understanding of human nature. Brooks suggests that President Obama's ethnicity played a role in his familiarity with Niebuhr and "the Christian realism that undergirded cold war liberal thinking":

Obama's race probably played a role here. As a young thoughtful black man, he would have become familiar with prophetic Christianity and the human tendency toward corruption; familiar with the tragic sensibility of Lincoln's second inaugural; familiar with the guarded pessimism of Niebuhr, who had such a profound influence on the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

In 2002, Obama spoke against the Iraq war, but from the vantage point of a cold war liberal. He said he was not against war per se, just this one, and he was booed by the crowd. In 2007, he spoke about the way Niebuhr formed his thinking: "I take away the compelling idea that there's serious evil in the world and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things. But we shouldn't use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction."

Brooks would recall that quote well, for it came in an interview that he conducted in 2007 with then-candidate Barack Obama, who explained:

I take away [from Niebuhr] . . . the compelling idea that there's serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things. But we shouldn't use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction. I take away . . . the sense we have to make these efforts knowing they are hard, and not swinging from naïve idealism to bitter realism. (Brooks, "Obama, Gospel and Verse," New York Times, April 26, 2007)

Candidate Obama's summary of Niebuhr led to an intellectual discussion of the extent to which the latter had truly influenced his political thought, along with the possibility that he was merely citing Niebuhr to 'pander' to Brooks and that his truer political theology was the social gospel. For those interested in this issue, go to the Pew Forum site on "Obama's Favorite Theologian? A Short Course on Reinhold Niebuhr," for the remarks of Wilfred M. McClay (University of Tennessee at Chattanooga) and the response of E. J. Dionne Jr. (The Washington Post), who agrees with Brooks that Barack Obama has genuinely been influenced by Niebuhr.

But I've said enough for now . . .

Strange, overlapping loops...

Teashades
"My future's so bright, I gotta wear shades..."
(Image from Wikipedia)

In late 1979, I moved from Waco, Texas to the San Francisco Bay Area, living first in Menlo Park and then in Atherton with my 'significant other.' Such was the politically correct expression for one's main squeeze back then, a linguistic formula that eschewed sexism and homophobia in one tongue-twisting abstraction -- though I jokingly called her my 'insignificant other' (which might be partly why that relationship didn't work out so well).

Sorry, Linda of the lovely auburn hair.

Anyway, she was pursuing her doctorate in history at Stanford, while I was working for Wells Fargo Bank in Palo Alto, where I performed each day the essential task of putting a "stop payment" on every second-thinking bank client's check. I used a manual typewriter and had to press each key extra hard to force the imprint to carry through the top sheet and two sets of carbon and paper. Facing me across the large desk sat another person doing exactly the same thing. Together, we typed out stop payments in the rhythmic stereotype of low-level clerks.

By evening, I played at being a bohemian intellectual -- visiting cafés where I got to hear a then-unknown Tuck and Patti perform jazz for free as I drank inexpensive glasses of champagne, or where I could read the newly-known Douglas Hofstadter's Pulitzer-Prize-winning Gödel, Escher, Bach over rather more expensive cappuccinos, all the while dreaming of graduate school and a future so bright that I'd have to wear shades.

My future didn't turn out quite like that.

Nor does anybody's, I guess ... neither the immensely talented Tuck and Patti nor the intellectually gifted Douglas Hofstadter.

The former appear to have spent years on the road, touring. I once saw an ad for a performance of theirs back when I was living in Germany, perhaps around 1994. They seem to have missed the big time.

Some few years later, perhaps in 1996 or 1997, a highly successful Hofstadter -- published, tenured, recognized -- lost his beloved wife Carol. I was reminded of this on Saturday as I read these words by David Brooks:

Douglas Hofstadter was a happily married man. After dinner parties, his wife Carol and he would wash the dishes together and relive the highlights of the conversation they'd just enjoyed. But then, when Carol was 42 and their children were 5 and 2, Carol died of a brain tumor.

A few months later, Hofstadter was looking at a picture of Carol.

He describes what he felt in his recent book, "I Am A Strange Loop":

"I looked at her face and looked so deeply that I felt I was behind her eyes and all at once I found myself saying, as tears flowed, 'That's me. That's me!'"

"And those simple words brought back many thoughts that I had had before, about the fusion of our souls into one higher-level entity, about the fact that at the core of both our souls lay our identical hopes and dreams for our children, about the notion that those hopes were not separate or distinct hopes but were just one hope, one clear thing that defined us both, that wielded us into a unit, the kind of unit I had but dimly imagined before being married and having children. I realized that though Carol had died, that core piece of her had not died at all, but that it had lived on very determinedly in my brain." (Brooks, "Bonded by Loops and Flares," International Herald Tribune, Saturday-Sunday, July 21-22, 2007, p. 7)

There's something both insightful and deflating about this. The part that especially lets me down, I think, is his choice of the term "brain." I would have preferred at least "mind." Why he chose that very material word when he's willing to use the loaded term "soul" remains somewhat opaque to me. I suppose it's partly because he thinks that the mind is the brain, but if so, then why not use the word "mind"?

But let that be.

Brooks likes Hofstadter's theory of the self and thinks it applicable to some of our social problems in America:

A self, he believes, is a point of view, a way of seeing the world. It emerges from the conglomeration of all the flares, loops and perceptions that have been shared and developed with others. Douglas’s and Carol's selves overlapped, and that did not stop with her passing.

I bring all this up in an Op-Ed column because most political and social disputes grow out of differing theories about the self, and I find Hofstadter's social, dynamic, overlapping theory of self very congenial.

It emphasizes how profoundly we are shaped by relationships with others, but it's not one of those stifling, collectivist theories that puts the community above the individual.

It exposes the errors of those Ayn Rand individualists who think that success is something they achieve through their own genius and willpower.

It exposes the fallacy of the New Age narcissists who believe they can find their true, authentic self by burrowing down into their inner being. There is no self that exists before society.

It explains why it's so hard to tackle concentrated poverty. Human beings are permeable. The habits that are common in underclass areas get inside the brains of those who grow up there and undermine long-range thinking and social trust. (Brooks, p. 7)

I'd need to know more about this conception of the self as a collection of overlapping perspectives, which means that I'd need to read Hofstadter's recent book, I Am A Strange Loop, but his theory is at least potentially applicable toward explaining some of the problems facing inner-city African-Americans that Barack Obama has written about.

But I'm not sure -- even if the theory is true -- how to apply it to solving our inner-city problems.

But I do see how Hofstadter's insight into the fusion of souls explains my failure with my long-ago Linda. Not sharing "identical hopes and dreams," Linda and I never grew into a fusion of shared souls. Rather the opposite. People talk about growing apart. Perhaps they lose that shared point of view, that shared way of seeing the world.

But here I am again, talking to myself about books that I haven't read because I'm not successful enough to afford them. That bright future has eluded me, it seems, but that's okay, for I've never looked especially good in shades...