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Tag Archives: David Brooks

I Am a Strange Loop

19 Saturday Sep 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Biography, Philosophy

≈ Comments Off on I Am a Strange Loop

Tags

Carol Hofstadter, David Brooks, Douglas Hofstadter, grief, I Am a Strange Loop, loss, marriage, mourning, The Road to Character

Carol and Douglas Hofstader

“In the month of December, 1993, when we were just a quarter of the way into my sabbatical year in Trento, Italy, my wife Carol died very suddenly, essentially without warning, of a brain tumor. She was not yet 43, and our children, Danny and Monica, were but five and two. I was shattered in a way I could never have possibly imagined before our marriage. There had been a bright shining soul behind those eyes, and that soul had been suddenly eclipsed. The light had gone out.

What hit me by far the hardest was not my own personal loss (‘Oh, what shall I do now? Who will I turn to in moments of need? Who will I cuddle up beside at night?’) — it was Carol’s personal loss. Of course I missed her, I missed her enormously — but what troubled me much more was that I could not get over what she had lost: the chance to watch her children grow up, see their personalities develop, savor their talents, comfort them in their sad times, read them bedtime stories, sing them songs, smile at their childish jokes, paint their rooms, pencil in their heights on their closet walls, teach them to ride a bike, travel with them to other lands, expose them to other languages, get them a pet dog, meet their friends, take them skiing and skating, watch old videos together in our playroom, and on and on. All this future, once so easily taken for granted, Carol had lost in a flash, and I couldn’t deal with it.

There was a time, many months later, back in the United States, when I tried out therapy sessions for recently bereaved spouses — ‘Healing Hearts’, I think they were called — and I saw that most of the people whose mates had died were focused on their own pain, on their own loss, on what they themselves were going to do now. That, of course, was the meaning of the sessions’ name — you were supposed to heal, to get better. But how was Carol going to heal?

I truly felt as if the other people in these sessions and I were talking past each other. We didn’t have similar concerns at all! I was the only one whose mate had died when the children were tiny, and this fact seemed to make all the difference. Everything had been ripped away from Carol, and I could not stand thinking about — but I could not stop thinking about — what she’d been cheated out of. This bitter injustice to Carol was the overwhelming feeling I felt, and my friends kept on saying to me (oddly enough, in a well-meaning attempt to comfort me), ‘You can’t feel sorry for her! She’s dead! There’s no one to feel sorry for any more!’ How utterly, totally wrong this felt to me.

One day, as I gazed at a photograph of Carol taken a couple of months before her death, I looked at her face and I 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 welded us together into a unit, the kind of unit I had but dimly imagined before being married and having children. I realized then that although Carol had died, that core piece of her had not died at all, but that it lived on very determinedly in my brain.”

__________

The most moving section of Douglas R. Hofstadter’s endlessly layered and enigmatic book about the nature of self, I Am a Strange Loop.

I should mention that I first heard of Hofstadter’s work from David Brooks, who has cited this passage in several of his columns since first quoting it in “A Partnership of Minds” in July 2007. These remarks command a full page in his newest book The Road to Character.

Read on:

  • James Fenton hits this exact note in his poem “For Andrew Wood”
  • A relevant reflection from Edmond de Goncourt’s journals
  • Sehnsucht

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David Brooks: What Do We Mean When We Say Someone’s “Deep”?

10 Friday Jul 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Speeches

≈ Comments Off on David Brooks: What Do We Mean When We Say Someone’s “Deep”?

Tags

Aspen Ideas Festival, David Brooks, Depth, ethics, Honor, morality, Morals, speech, The Road to Character, virtue, Wisdom

David Brooks

“I think we mean that the person is capable of experiencing large and sonorous emotions… People who are deep are spiritual. They’ve come to some stable philosophical convictions about fundamental things; they’ve made firmly-rooted moral commitments.

To put it in another way: they have a built a web of unconditional love. In the realm of intellect they have a permanent philosophy about how life is. In the realm of action they have a commitment to important projects that can’t be completed in a lifetime. In the realm of morality they have a certain consistency and rigor; they’re not always perfect but there’s a sort of moral demand that pervades everything they do.

The next question is, how long does it take to get depth? When we look at people who we think have depth, we notice that it doesn’t happen all at once. The desires that lead you astray, those things are fast — lust, fear, vanity, gluttony. The things that we admire most — honesty, humility, self-control, courage — those things take some time and accumulate slowly.

It’s an ensemble of settled feelings. It’s not something that happens to people when they’re fifteen.

And these individuals often possess a certain virtue.

And the word ‘virtue’, again, it has pompous connotations. It seems stuffed-up, self-righteous. But all virtue means is that you have your loves in the right order. We all love and desire a multitude of things: love, friendship, family, popularity. We all desire money, to be good shape. And we understand whether we’ve thought about it or not that some loves are higher than other loves — that the love of family is higher than the love of money. If you’ve sold out your family to make an extra buck, you’ve done something wrong.

If the love of truth or friendship is higher than the love of popularity. If somebody tells you a secret and you blab it at a dinner party, you’ve become popular for a few minutes in that conversation, but you’ve inverted your love. And so being virtuous is not some pompous thing, it’s not some puritanical thing. It’s just having your loves in the right order.”

__________

Pulled from David Brooks’s speech at the 2014 Aspen Ideas Festival “The Road to Depth: Thinking about What Character Is”. Find these ideas elaborated in Brooks’s new book The Road to Character.

There’s more:

  • Philosopher Ronald Dworkin summarizes a way to value your life
  • Wallace Stegner summarizes his worldview
  • The walk back from the mailbox

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Do the Jews Prove God’s Existence?

23 Thursday Apr 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Religion

≈ Comments Off on Do the Jews Prove God’s Existence?

Tags

and the Search for Meaning, Communism, David Brooks, Faith, Frederick the Great, God, Jewish History, Jews, Marxism, Nikolai Berdyaev, Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, religion, Russian Revolution, The Great Partnership, The Great Partnership: Science, The Meaning of History, Zimmermann of Brugg-in-Aargau

Chief Rabbi

“How probable is it that a tiny people, the children of Israel, known today as Jews, numbering less than a fifth of a per cent of the population of the world, would outlive every empire that sought its destruction? Or that a small, persecuted sect known as the Christians would one day become the largest movement of any kind in the world?

Nikolai Berdyaev (1874-1948) was a Russian Marxist who broke with the movement after the Russian Revolution and its aftermath. He became an unconventional Christian — he had been charged with blasphemy for criticising the Russian Orthodox Church in 1913 — and went into exile, eventually settling in Paris. In The Meaning of History, he tells us why he abandoned Marxism:

I remember how the materialist interpretation of history, when I attempted in my youth to verify it by applying it to the destinies of peoples, broke down in the case of the Jews, where destiny seemed absolutely inexplicable from the materialistic standpoint… Its survival is a mysterious and wonderful phenomenon demonstrating that the life of this people is governed by a special predetermination, transcending the processes of adaptation expounded by the materialistic interpretation of history. The survival of the Jews, their resistance to destruction, their endurance under absolutely peculiar conditions and the fateful role played by them in history: all these point to the particular and mysterious foundations of their destiny.

Consider this one fact. The Bible records a series of promises by God to Abraham: that he would become a great nation, as many as the stars of the sky or the sand on the sea shore, culminating in the prophecy that he would become ‘the father of many nations’…

Somehow the prophets of Israel, a small, vulnerable nation surrounded by large empires, were convinced that it would be eternal.

‘This is what the Lord says, he who appoints the sun to shine by day, who decrees the moon and stars to shine by night… ”Only if these decrees vanish from my sight,” declares the Lord, “will Israel ever cease being a nation before me” (Jeremiah 31:35-6).

There was nothing to justify that certainty then, still less after a thousand years of persecution, pogroms and the Final Solution. Yet improbably, Jews and Judaism survived.

King Frederick the Great once asked his physician Zimmermann of Brugg-in-Aargau, ‘Zimmermann, can you name me a single proof of the existence of God?’ The physician replied, ‘Your majesty, the Jews.’”

__________

The distinguished and unfailingly charismatic Chief Rabbi of England, Jonathan Sacks, writing in The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning.

I know nothing about Berdyaev, but in the two minutes I spent looking him up I ran across three quotes of his that are worth filing away in the bank:

“Bread for me is a material question. Bread for my neighbor is a spiritual one.”

“Every single human soul has more meaning and value than the whole of history.”

“There is a tragic clash between truth and the world. Pure undistorted truth burns up the world.”

Not a fool.

Last month, Sacks sat down with David Brooks for a wide-ranging conversation about spirituality and meaning. It’s worth a watch.

Learn more:

  • ‘We are the people who sanctify life’: Sacks on the moral meaning of Israel
  • Galileo squares faith and reason
  • Viktor Frankl affirms the significance of life — even in a death camp

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Our Partisanship as a Moral Failing

02 Tuesday Sep 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Politics

≈ Comments Off on Our Partisanship as a Moral Failing

Tags

American Government, American Politics, Charlie Rose, compromise, Congress, David Brooks, debate, Democrats, Government, interview, James Madison, Jon Meacham, Michael Beschloss, Moderation, policy, political philosophy, politics, Republicans

David Brooks 32

John Meacham: If our country itself is irreconcilably polarized, then in classic republican — lowercase “r” — thinking, that is going to be reflected in our political system.

David Brooks: I’m coming around to that view, which I was very resistant to over the last ten years. A lot of people have argued that [polarization] begins out in the country, not in Washington. I guess I more or less accept that now.

And I think it’s a moral failing that we all share. Which is that if you have a modest sense of your own rightness, and if you think that politics is generally a competition between half-truths, then you’re going to need the other people on the other side, and you’re going to value the similarity of taste. You know, you may disagree with a Republican, or disagree with a Democrat, but you’re still American and you still basically share the same culture. And you know your side is half wrong.

If you have that mentality that ‘Well, I’m probably half wrong; he’s probably half right,’ then it’s going to be a lot easier to come to an agreement. But if you have an egotistical attitude that ‘I’m 100% right and they’re 100% wrong,’ which is a moral failing — a failing of intellectual morality — then it’s very hard to come to an agreement.

And I do think that we’ve had a failure of modesty about our own rightness and wrongness. And I’m in the op-ed business, so believe me that people like me have contributed as much as anybody to this moral failure. But I think it has built up gradually and has become somewhat consuming.

__________

David Brooks and Jon Meacham, in conversation when Meacham subbed for Charlie Rose this summer.

More:

  • George Washington rips party politics
  • Mark Leibovich rips our cowardly political culture
  • Meacham and Brooks riff on Jefferson and Hamilton

John Meacham

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The Incredible Rise of Alexander Hamilton

29 Tuesday Apr 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in History

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Alexander Hamilton, American History, American Revolution, Biography, Childhood, David Brooks, Elizabeth Schuyler, founding fathers, history, James Hamilton, Jon Meacham, Jr., politics, Ron Chernow, Thomas Jefferson, United States History

Alexander Hamilton4

“Let us pause briefly to tally the grim catalog of disasters that had befallen these two boys between 1765 and 1769: their father had vanished, their mother had died, their cousin and supposed protector had committed bloody suicide, and their aunt, uncle, and grandmother had all died. James, sixteen, and Alexander, fourteen, were now left alone, largely friendless and penniless. At every step in their rootless, topsy-turvy existence, they had been surrounded by failed, broken, embittered people. Their short lives had been shadowed by a stupefying sequence of bankruptcies, marital separations, deaths, scandals, and disinheritance. Such repeated shocks must have stripped Alexander Hamilton of any sense that life was fair, that he existed in a benign universe, or that he could ever count on help from anyone. That this abominable childhood produced such a strong, productive, self-reliant human being — that this fatherless adolescent could have ended up a founding father of a country he had not yet even seen — seems little short of miraculous. Because he maintained perfect silence about his unspeakable past, never exploiting it to puff his later success, it was impossible for his contemporaries to comprehend the exceptional nature of his personal triumph. What we know of Hamilton’s childhood has been learned almost entirely during the past century.”

__________

From Ron Chernow’s biography Alexander Hamilton.

To make matters worse, and add yet another card to a deck already stacked against him, young Alexander was simultaneously struck with the same fever which eventually took his mother, and was therefore too delirious to even say farewell. Because the family had only a single bed, Chernow notes, Alexander was “probably writhing inches from his mother when she expired.”

The fact that Hamilton overcame these enormous setbacks to quickly rise to political prominence — not to mention emotional normalcy — is a testament to the singularity of both his intelligence and his resilience. What’s more, as one often senses in accounts of the Founders, not only was he a luminous statesman, but he also emerges from the page as, well, a pretty cool guy, with a personality somehow more endearingly human and three-dimensional than many in Washington today. I’ve already posted some about Hamilton the bachelor, to which Chernow adds a priceless anecdote:

Hamilton, twenty-five, was instantly smitten with Schuyler, twenty-two. Fellow aide Tench Tilghman reported: ‘Hamilton is a gone man.’ Pretty soon, Hamilton was a constant visitor at the two-story Campfield residence, spending every evening there. Everyone noticed that the young colonel was starry-eyed and distracted. Although a touch absentminded, Hamilton ordinarily had a faultless memory, but, returning from Schuyler one night, he forgot the password and was barred by the sentinel…

For those interested in reading more about Hamilton, I recommend Chernow’s book (which is lengthy yet well paced), but not before you watch the fantastic exchange between Jon Meacham and David Brooks about the competing political visions and personalities of Hamilton and his rival Thomas Jefferson. In this discussion, Meacham takes the side of the subject of his biography, as Brooks, a traditional conservative, defends Hamilton. The following remarks from Brooks are highlights of the discussion and supplement the words above:

I’m going to get the dates wrong, but you’ll get the idea.

So when Hamilton was thirteen, his mom died in the bed next to him. He was adopted by his uncle who died — who committed suicide — then he was adopted by his grandparents who died within a year. So by fourteen he’d lost everybody he ever loved except for his brother. A court came in and took away his property. So at fourteen he essentially had nothing. By twenty-five he is George Washington’s Chief of Staff and a war hero. By thirty-five he’s been the author of The Federalist Papers and is one of the top lawyers in New York. By forty or forty-five he has retired as the most successful treasury secretary in U.S. history.

And so he is a story of intense upward mobility. And his philosophy was to create a system of government which would allow poor boys and girls like him to succeed.

Read on:

  • Alexander Hamilton the bachelor identifies what he likes in a girl
  • David Brooks and Jon Meacham discuss Jefferson, Hamilton, and the ‘art of power’
  • Jefferson and Hamilton duke it out over the national debt

Alexander Hamilton

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Jon Meacham and David Brooks on Jefferson, Hamilton, and the Art of Power

24 Sunday Feb 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in History, Politics

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

Alexander Hamilton, David Brooks, Jon Meacham, Monticello, Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

Thomas Jefferson

Jon Meacham on Thomas Jefferson:

“He fell in love with his wife. It was a great marriage. Her early death was, for him, an almost suicide-provoking episode. He wandered the woods of Monticello with his daughter afterward, and his friends — Madison, Edmund Randolph, others — worried he wasn’t ever going to come back down from Monticello.

At that point in the traditional biography, the ‘Jefferson-as-lover’ story ends. And then you enter the alleged speculation about Sally Hemings, who was an enslaved person at Monticello. She was also Jefferson’s late wife’s half sister.

I think Sally Hemings reminded Jefferson of his wife.

And I believe that they had a relationship that lasted from 1787 to the day he died. Nearly forty years — the longest relationship he would have with any woman. They had, I believe, six children.

There is DNA evidence — and I think to argue that a man who had an endless appetite for art, for power, for food, for wine, for ice cream, for collecting, for land — to argue that, somehow or another, he would then stop short of engaging in the most sensuous of activities beggars belief.”

____

Alexander Hamilton

David Brooks on Hamilton:

“This is my big beef with Jefferson. Let me start with Hamilton. I’m going to get the dates wrong, but you’ll get the idea.

So when Hamilton was thirteen, his mom died in the bed next to him. He was adopted by his uncle who died — who committed suicide — then he was adopted by his grandparents who died within a year. So by fourteen he’d lost everybody he ever loved except for his brother. A court came in and took away his property. So at fourteen he essentially had nothing. By twenty-five he is George Washington’s Chief of Staff and a war hero. By thirty-five he’s been the author of The Federalist Papers and is one of the top lawyers in New York. By forty or forty-five he has retired as the most successful treasury secretary in U.S. history.

And so he is a story of intense upward mobility. And his philosophy was to create a system of government which would allow poor boys and girls like him to succeed. And there were two things in the way of that.

One was there were these local oligarchies that were holding down economic dynamism, run by rich plantation owners like that bastard Jefferson. And two: technology. Technology was not advancing as far and as fast as he thought it should. And therefore he created federal research projects. He created in New Jersey a research park which became America’s first industrial center. And so he was an enthusiastic embracer of technological innovation, whereas Jefferson, that old stick in the mud, believed in the yeoman virtues. You know, out there in the fields with the tobacco.”

__________

Excerpts from a conversation between Jon Meacham and David Brooks about Jefferson, Hamilton, and the art of power. Watch the entire entertaining and illuminating discussion below.

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