I'm not a big Brooks fan. We get on the rhetorical boat in this article thinking we're headed for deep water, a la Viktor Frankl, who saw people grapple with what life expected from them in a deeply personal and horrifying way in the Nazi death camps. Instead, Brooks takes us on a lightweight fun-filled harbor tour, telling us that working at the seafood house is its own reward. Lecturing us that traditions deserve to be respected and that personal desires minimized.
What life wants out of you is a deeply individualistic thing. Life is not the same as Baseball. It's not the same as reporting, or college. College might expect you to study and get good grades. Life expects you to continue to learn and grow. Life is anything but an institution. E-gad, man. Drop the poetry book and take a look around.
I don't know what he's smoking, but whatever it is, I'll pass. It sounds like the prelude to a call to arms to support tradition. This philosophy of the group or the tradition being greater than the individual is strangely narcissistic -- I'm very important because I'm part of a very important institution. Whatever it is, it's not American in origin. At least I hope not.
As a former service member, I'm deeply aware of tradition and the higher value of culture and civilization above the individual. But that only exists in the context of supporting the individual's right to reject, to reinvent, to be stubborn, ugly, and ornery. Without that, institutions become machines to eat people and their lives.
Thanks for the ride, David, but next time I'll stay home.
The article argues the general conservative view of life, I believe. The valuing of customs and culture over the new. I can't say I agree with it, but I definitely understand it. There was a great TED talk on understanding the divide and each viewpoint: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/jonathan_haidt_on_the_mor...
The view is out-dated regardless and only matters for historical interest.
Since the institutions of America have already been uprooted and remade by the generations of the 1960's, 70's and 80's, it moronic for, say, the generation of the 2000's to do anything but further remake them.
If we lived in 16th century England, the question of what to do with our living history might matter.
"Bankers, for example, used to have a code that made them a bit stodgy and which held them up for ridicule in movies like “Mary Poppins.” But the banker’s code has eroded, and the result was not liberation but self-destruction."
Or, perhaps, to reconsider anew forgotten ideas and examine their applicability to modern life.
The idea that "the old rules don't apply" had a lot to do with the decision process that obliterated Wall Street.
Sure, the rules from five year ago might be bad and the rules from fifty years might be worth a look. But the rules from five hundred years - "take only gold, take a pound of flesh from those who don't pay" certainly don't.
We've got choice now. No reference to "the value of tradition" can remove it.
Has anyone ever examined how TED became so damn watchable? You could learn more by watching their free online videos than by watching the presentations of a dozen other conferences.
The comments here are disappointingly one-sided. Nowhere did Brooks suggest that he wanted to return to the good ol' days with all its warts. Incremental evolution of systems is a known good strategy. There's no reason whatever to believe that that doesn't apply to institutions, too. If you find yourself unable to see how tradition can transmit useful information through a society made up of people of varying critical thinking abilities, you may be letting your politics unreasonably bias your analysis.
Considering what value traditions and institutions may serve can be an intellectual exercise. It doesn't mean you suddenly want to rescind female voting and return to slavery. It seems impossible to have interesting discussions with about 99.5% of the population, because they show not even the remotest ability to avoid emotional reactions to words.
"Incremental evolution of systems is a known good strategy."
Not always. Evolution keeps multiple branches around and sometimes discards the most prominent one. There is something to be said for admitting failure and starting from scratch rather than continiously patching a non-working solution.
>> "Incremental evolution of systems is a known good strategy."
>
>Not always.
That's why he wrote "good" instead of "optimum".
Besides, keeping around several branches and discarding one, even the current "most prominent", is incremental. (The system in question consists of all branches.) FWIW, evolution is almost entirely incremental.
Note that advocates of the new often overstate the failings of the old, which frequently did handle many cases. Sometimes those cases are no longer important, other times they're less important than new cases, but even when both are true, a given new system may not be better.
Advocates of the new also tend to forget that the fact that there are possible new systems that are better than the status quo does not imply that the new system being pushed is better.
New can be more fun. That's both an advantage and a disadvantage.
David Brooks comes from a magical time when people could have a single profession or employer for their entire working life, and might feel like their personal sense of self-worth was related to how well they did their jobs. (This was long before the invention of men’s room attendants, debt collectors, and fryolater de-greasers.)
This also reminds me of a Robert Heinlein quote I recently read:
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
Can't we do both? In a way, I prefer specialization. Then I don't have to think so much about what I'm doing, and can spend more time thinking about more interesting things.
It's interesting how now we think being a fulfilled person means being able to do a bunch of stuff. That just seems exhausting to me. People aren't really so interested in the skills, anyways. It just makes them look cool to others, which is what they really care about. Then the process becomes self perpetuating. It's a very roundabout and unsuccessful way of making good friends.
Yes. If I may interpret Heinlein, he wasn't saying that you need to be an expert in each of those things... he was saying you should be able to do it.
You still can be an expert in some things too, as long as it's not at the expense of those things.
(I'm not saying I agree; I don't entirely disagree or agree. I'm just trying to explain what he was saying, as best as someone else can divine his opinions.)
I would say you are also with David Brooks on this one. He is saying precisely that there used to be strong institutions in American life, and that they are all waning now.
Would Sandberg have been so dedicated to the institution had he not made millions in it? Maybe. But baseball is far too respected given its spotted history of cheats and over-paid egomaniacs.
Important and meaningful institutions like teaching and medicine are filled with individuals who will not be getting a bailout or make millions like baseball players or bankers. Most true adherents to vaulted institutions are individualist chiefly educated in the "liberal" studies that Brooks pans.
In fact, JP Morgan (a liberal individualist), is seen as the savior of US 19th century banking after a crisis that is eerily similar to today's. Brooks' claim that "there is another, older way of living" rings hollow because educated liberals did not destroy even older institutions like the Magna Carta or the Enlightenment over the last eight years.
A nation in crisis should ask where have all the liberal individuals gone and not lament the status of institutional group think.
I suspect that that if we could measure great teachers and great doctors to the extent that we measure great ballplayers, there would be orders of magnitude improvement in their salaries as well. Baseball is a market economy like any other.
If I had the skills to play professional baseball, I certainly would. The problem though isn't that the money isn't good in the minors. You can make 100k/year in AAA. It's that their careers are so short and their skills are highly in demand. Unless you make it to the big leagues and stick for more than six years, you still need to find another profession.
The reason professional ballplayers make more, is that they compete in a winner-take-all environment. Thanks to televison, baseball playing is now "scalable." The world only needs ~500 pro baseball players to satisfy its baseball entertainment needs.
When we can make doctors scale like that, there will be a few doctors making billions each. Teachers can scale by writing books, and they sometimes make millions.
Orders of magnitude? Are you arguing that the only thing standing between the best 2nd grade teacher in Harlem and millions is an efficient means of measuring talent?
Major League Baseball is certainly not a market economy like any other - it is a federally-protected monopoly, or American Institution if you like.
If we could the quality of teachers with the precision that we measure baseball players, then yes, the best teachers could make millions teaching the children of the super-rich. Additionally, colleges would pay a premium to have the top teachers if they were measured by a universally acknowledged standard. You have to remember that there would only be a few hundred of them.
I also expect that if you could educate a child with the best teachers, you would reliably get very effective adults.
History is littered with geniuses whose students went on to make groundbreaking discoveries as well.
You were not supposed to analyze the words deeply. The words were shaped to elicit the emotions of safety, security, and familiarity that presumed to exist in the "good old days". On the surface it might feel good. Yet to live it as we approach the singularity of almost vertical rate of change, its all but impossible.
I agree with Heinlein: "Specialization is for insects." Humans are not indistinguishable and interchangeable hive creatures. We are competitive/cooperative individuals each with unique and changing combinations of capacities, skills, interests, drives, and dreams.
"New generations don’t invent institutional practices. These practices are passed down and evolve."
This is simply incorrect. Institutions are made by people and can be changed by them. As said in the article institutions can be very important the lives of people, so people should think about them very critically and improve them continuously.
Don't accept the status quo!
Institutions "can be changed" is the same as saying that institutions "evolve."
Seems the disagreement is on the semantics of "invent institutional practices." How different does a practice need to be to be considered newly invented, rather than an evolution of an old one?
This view is not only ignorant, I think it is dangerous.
We should only trust institutions that are capable of meeting the real challenges we face today. But neither the problems of hosting 6->9 billion people on earth nor figuring out how to capitalize on the vast knowledge we've gained over just the past 100 years were anticipated by existing institutions.
We don't have longstanding traditions around the roles of 'internet entrepreneur' or the 'genetic programmer'. Why? Because they're not old enough; they haven't been around long enough for a halo of rich meaning and culture to form around them. The real economic value (let alone environmental/social value) of modern roles have not had time to become embedded in longstanding tradition.
If we make decisions based on tradition, we blind ourselves to everything that is made possible by the unique place in history we find ourselves in. I think it's a dangerous time to do so. You cannot live as though nuclear warheads have not been invented, just because it feels good to respect old institutions. You cannot live as though there are 500 million people on the planet, when there are 6 billion, just because it feels good to follow in the footsteps of your forefathers.
Human culture does a fantastic job of making people feel important by building rich traditions around important roles in society. For 99% of human history that was probably very useful; most of the time it made sense to adapt to existing institutions, because they were likely to be around for the rest of your life. But that's no longer true.
I think "life" asks us to wake up and smell the coffee. Neither the problems we face today nor the tools that may solve them are embedded in tradition and institution. The slower we are to adapt, the longer we remain stuck on old habits, the more harm we'll cause by pouring energy into systems designed to solve yesterday's problems.
I feel sorry for David Brooks, because he may never experience life.
He may never experience that moment when one knows he or she truly exists, that there is no blue pill, no "way we are supposed to act", and that life is not about climbing the ladders constructed by those who have come before us.
"They impede personal exploration. They enforce conformity."
I believe there is a battle going on which is not referred to as a battle, but has been going on since the dawn of civilisation I think. The battle is between those who are pro-choice and those who are anti-choice. This guy seems to be anti-choice, he does not seem to want us to think, he seems to want us to be sheep, to accept what we re told without question, to be, well, peasants in the 13hundred and obey the modern priests and all their mights or be condemned to hell.
I did not know who the pro choice fighters were until I was acquitted with TED. Those guys seem to be all about empowerment, creativity, being open minded to different perceptions, etc. But even amongst the scientists there are many anti choice, but not so many as the politics lobby to which seems the newspapers belong also.
Life directed by institutions, by national patriotism, by religious devotion, by obsession with any one thing I believe is stagnation.
What life wants out of you is a deeply individualistic thing. Life is not the same as Baseball. It's not the same as reporting, or college. College might expect you to study and get good grades. Life expects you to continue to learn and grow. Life is anything but an institution. E-gad, man. Drop the poetry book and take a look around.
I don't know what he's smoking, but whatever it is, I'll pass. It sounds like the prelude to a call to arms to support tradition. This philosophy of the group or the tradition being greater than the individual is strangely narcissistic -- I'm very important because I'm part of a very important institution. Whatever it is, it's not American in origin. At least I hope not.
As a former service member, I'm deeply aware of tradition and the higher value of culture and civilization above the individual. But that only exists in the context of supporting the individual's right to reject, to reinvent, to be stubborn, ugly, and ornery. Without that, institutions become machines to eat people and their lives.
Thanks for the ride, David, but next time I'll stay home.