Social Animal
13th January 2011
David Brooks is an astute observer, although only a pretend-conservative.
You can see a paragon of the Composure Class having an al-fresco lunch at some bistro in Aspen or Jackson Hole. He’s just back from China and stopping by for a corporate board meeting on his way to a five-hundred-mile bike-a-thon to support the fight against lactose intolerance. He is asexually handsome, with a little less body fat than Michelangelo’s David. As he crosses his legs, you observe that they are immeasurably long and slender. He doesn’t really have thighs. Each leg is just one elegant calf on top of another. His voice is so calm and measured that he makes Barack Obama sound like Sam Kinison. He met his wife at the Clinton Global Initiative, where they happened to be wearing the same Doctors Without Borders support bracelets. They are a wonderfully matched pair; the only tension between them involves their workout routines. For some reason, today’s high-status men do a lot of running and biking and so only really work on the muscles in the lower half of their bodies. High-status women, on the other hand, pay ferocious attention to their torsos, biceps, and forearms so they can wear sleeveless dresses all summer and crush rocks with their bare hands.
And there’s more where that came from. This extended description of the SWPL lifestyle (what we here at DP call the Crust) is very entertaining.
Many members of this class, like many Americans generally, have a vague sense that their lives have been distorted by a giant cultural bias. They live in a society that prizes the development of career skills but is inarticulate when it comes to the things that matter most. The young achievers are tutored in every soccer technique and calculus problem, but when it comes to their most important decisions—whom to marry and whom to befriend, what to love and what to despise—they are on their own.
And here’s where Brooks fumbles the ball, because ‘what to love and what to despise’ is at the heart of the SWPL narrative. Young Crustians absorb it from their helicopter parents, their carefully vetted childhood companions, their closely monitored schoolmates, and their fashionable courses of study at colleges everybody has heard of. I have seen it done; it is not a pretty sight.
Brain science helps fill the hole left by the atrophy of theology and philosophy.
Or at least among the secularized, materialistic, we-can-build-you eschaton-immanentizing ‘progressives’ of the global elite — of which, sad to say, Brooks is a member in good standing.
Researchers at the University of Minnesota can look at attachment patterns of children at forty-two months, and predict with seventy-seven-per-cent accuracy who will graduate from high school.
The remainder will become rap stars, professional athletes, or drug dealers making money in quantities that researchers at the University of Minnesota have difficulty imagining. Is this a great country, or what?
January 13th, 2011 at 22:09
Hmh, my father in law retired himself, and his second family, to Jackson Hole, and he’s never exercised in his life. He may have elegant calves, but I wouldn’t know; they’re always hidden under train conductor bibs.