Among the worst news in news is when David Brooks↱ shows up to support you:
If you haven't heard the jokes about David Brooks in recent years, maybe you should.
Still, though, for people of my generation, there is something to it. After decades of complaining about godless relativism, look at Brooks' faith: It's a feel-good make-believe in which he gets to choose sides, and in doing so, feel better about himself compared to everyone else.
Which, in turn, is also the unfortunate joke describing the last several years of his columns.
To the other, this is Sciforums, and inasmuch as we might observe in our community any lack of "moral ecology", pretty much the only thing to say of Brooks' overwrought recycling of two-bit Christianist supremacism about religion, morality, and lack thereof, is that it takes a special kind of effort to validate David Brooks: "We have most to fear," he frets, "from the possibility that the biblical metaphysic … will fade from our culture … and young people will grow up in a society without any coherent moral ecology at all."
Funny story: There's this guy I know, and, y'know, he's just some guy, whatever; but he's long been an atheist, and as long as I've known him he has loathed the accusation that his lack of biblical faith somehow equals a lack of morality. Okay, it's not really so funny: Over time his insistent behavior as if to fulfill the condemnation is actually kind of sad. These days, he can sometimes be seen begging rounds with religious people he thinks he can take in a fight, and has become so utterly relativist I can't recall the last time he stepped out of his amoral egocentrism, and he even moved on to telling people what they need to believe in order that he can fight with them. In his own way, he fulfills what he otherwise pretends to loathe and reject.
Still, that's only one person. To the other, that one person is a reminder that David Brooks can still actually find an audience. And if we need the ski-boxer's third, well, it is not unwise to actually consider what audience might attend the declining columnist struggling to lead Americans away from the liberal elitism of sandwich meat↱.
Nonetheless, look at the calendar. We're back to the old one about, No Bible = No Morality. It almost reminds me of an old song.
Almost.
Never mind.
____________________
Notes:
Brooks, David. "How Faith Shapes My Politics". The New York Times. 24 September 2020. NYTimes.com. 28 September 2020. https://nyti.ms/30cSqIs
See Also:
Brooks, David. "How We Are Ruining America". The New York Times. 11 July 2017. NYTimes.com. 11 July 2017. http://nyti.ms/2tLQPrm
During my decades as an atheist, I thought the stories were false but the values they implied were true. These values—welcome the stranger, humility against pride—became the moral framework I applied to think through my opinions, to support various causes. Like a lot of atheists, I found the theology of Reinhold Niebuhr very helpful.
About seven years ago I realized that my secular understanding was not adequate to the amplitude of life as I experienced it. There were extremes of joy and pain, spiritual fullness and spiritual emptiness that were outside the normal material explanations of things.
I was gripped by the conviction that the people I encountered were not skin bags of DNA, but had souls; had essences with no size or shape, but that gave them infinite value and dignity. The conviction that people have souls led to the possibility that there was some spirit who breathed souls into them.
What finally did the trick was glimpses of infinite goodness. Secular religions are really good at identifying some evils, like oppression, and building a moral system against them. Divine religions are primarily oriented to an image of pure goodness, pure loving kindness, holiness. In periodic glimpses of radical goodness—in other people, in sensations of the transcendent—I felt, as Wendell Berry put it, “knowledge crawl over my skin.” The biblical stories from Genesis all the way through Luke and John became living presences in my life.
These realizations transformed my spiritual life: awareness of God's love, participation in grace, awareness that each person is made in God's image. Faith offered an image of a way of being, an ultimate allegiance ....
.... In a society that is growing radically more secular every day, I'd say we have more to fear from political dogmatism than religious dogmatism. We have more to fear from those who let their politics determine their faith practices and who turn their religious communities into political armies. We have more to fear from people who look to politics as a substitute for faith.
And we have most to fear from the possibility that the biblical metaphysic, which has been a coherent value system for believers and nonbelievers for centuries, will fade from our culture, the stories will go untold, and young people will grow up in a society without any coherent moral ecology at all.
About seven years ago I realized that my secular understanding was not adequate to the amplitude of life as I experienced it. There were extremes of joy and pain, spiritual fullness and spiritual emptiness that were outside the normal material explanations of things.
I was gripped by the conviction that the people I encountered were not skin bags of DNA, but had souls; had essences with no size or shape, but that gave them infinite value and dignity. The conviction that people have souls led to the possibility that there was some spirit who breathed souls into them.
What finally did the trick was glimpses of infinite goodness. Secular religions are really good at identifying some evils, like oppression, and building a moral system against them. Divine religions are primarily oriented to an image of pure goodness, pure loving kindness, holiness. In periodic glimpses of radical goodness—in other people, in sensations of the transcendent—I felt, as Wendell Berry put it, “knowledge crawl over my skin.” The biblical stories from Genesis all the way through Luke and John became living presences in my life.
These realizations transformed my spiritual life: awareness of God's love, participation in grace, awareness that each person is made in God's image. Faith offered an image of a way of being, an ultimate allegiance ....
.... In a society that is growing radically more secular every day, I'd say we have more to fear from political dogmatism than religious dogmatism. We have more to fear from those who let their politics determine their faith practices and who turn their religious communities into political armies. We have more to fear from people who look to politics as a substitute for faith.
And we have most to fear from the possibility that the biblical metaphysic, which has been a coherent value system for believers and nonbelievers for centuries, will fade from our culture, the stories will go untold, and young people will grow up in a society without any coherent moral ecology at all.
If you haven't heard the jokes about David Brooks in recent years, maybe you should.
Still, though, for people of my generation, there is something to it. After decades of complaining about godless relativism, look at Brooks' faith: It's a feel-good make-believe in which he gets to choose sides, and in doing so, feel better about himself compared to everyone else.
Which, in turn, is also the unfortunate joke describing the last several years of his columns.
To the other, this is Sciforums, and inasmuch as we might observe in our community any lack of "moral ecology", pretty much the only thing to say of Brooks' overwrought recycling of two-bit Christianist supremacism about religion, morality, and lack thereof, is that it takes a special kind of effort to validate David Brooks: "We have most to fear," he frets, "from the possibility that the biblical metaphysic … will fade from our culture … and young people will grow up in a society without any coherent moral ecology at all."
Funny story: There's this guy I know, and, y'know, he's just some guy, whatever; but he's long been an atheist, and as long as I've known him he has loathed the accusation that his lack of biblical faith somehow equals a lack of morality. Okay, it's not really so funny: Over time his insistent behavior as if to fulfill the condemnation is actually kind of sad. These days, he can sometimes be seen begging rounds with religious people he thinks he can take in a fight, and has become so utterly relativist I can't recall the last time he stepped out of his amoral egocentrism, and he even moved on to telling people what they need to believe in order that he can fight with them. In his own way, he fulfills what he otherwise pretends to loathe and reject.
Still, that's only one person. To the other, that one person is a reminder that David Brooks can still actually find an audience. And if we need the ski-boxer's third, well, it is not unwise to actually consider what audience might attend the declining columnist struggling to lead Americans away from the liberal elitism of sandwich meat↱.
Nonetheless, look at the calendar. We're back to the old one about, No Bible = No Morality. It almost reminds me of an old song.
Almost.
Never mind.
____________________
Notes:
Brooks, David. "How Faith Shapes My Politics". The New York Times. 24 September 2020. NYTimes.com. 28 September 2020. https://nyti.ms/30cSqIs
See Also:
Brooks, David. "How We Are Ruining America". The New York Times. 11 July 2017. NYTimes.com. 11 July 2017. http://nyti.ms/2tLQPrm
