Abstract: David Brooks soars off into an eerie philosophical void in some escape mechanism that might distract him both from his job duties and his melancholy. We are invited to ponder the imponderables along side him as he sorts through only two offered possibilities for the young to make choices on their futures, and takes the long and holistic view. One view is based on judicious long-range planning and the other is an eclectic stance where the learner analyzes his choices as they present themselves along the Path of Life. Human practice probably lies between these narrow options.
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[I offer extensive quotes in this blog so that the reader can view the exact language and can be confident that nothing was taken out of context or that nobody was misquoted. The easiest way to take in the salient points is to read the emphatic points in the quotes and then peruse my comments. Comments on my comments are always welcome: ryckki@gmail.com.]
Introduction to Incoherent Babblings and the New York Times:
As the summer heat cooks the body and the inane scribblings of the New York Times cook the brain cells of those who seek competence, reason and a future in politics, a convenient and soothing diversion is usually indicated after a time. It is fluff time! A reading of the propagandistic screeds from the far left-oriented writers at the near-bankrupt New York Times—aka the Walter Duranty Papers[1][2]--wearies the senses and enables the radiating frontal pain usually experienced from challenging a neuronal set that is customarily geared toward instruction and chain gang motifs rather than analysis. To sooth these mental wounds, our Chief Babbler David Brooks[3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10] peruses some philosophy from a business professor and, like the stalest cliché in the political repertoire, he “offers us both sides of the story.”
Since this is philosophy embedded deeply in religious trappings and wrapped with some political cover to disguise its beginning and end, it is not proper for me to show that he or the authors he cites are in error in any form or manner. This is an essay on the opinions of other opinions. Circular, as such, it is unassailable. There are no firm answers to any of the questions he proffers us to ponder so we can just relax and have some good laughs [at his expense] and stay alert for some nuances that might have passed us by if we had ignored this piece.
We must plan at an early age:
“This is a column about two ways of thinking about your life. The first is what you might call the Well-Planned Life. It was nicely described by Clayton Christensen in the current issue of the Harvard Business Review, in an essay based on a recent commencement talk.
Christensen advised the students to invest a lot of time when they are young in finding a clear purpose for their lives. “When I was a Rhodes scholar,” he recalls, “I was in a very demanding academic program, trying to cram an extra year’s worth of work into my time at
This is fine, but now he offers an opposing ideology:
“The second way of thinking about your life might be called the Summoned Life. This mode of thinking starts from an entirely different perspective. Life isn’t a project to be completed; it is an unknowable landscape to be explored. A 24-year-old can’t sit down and define the purpose of life in the manner of a school exercise because she is not yet deep enough into the landscape to know herself or her purpose. That young person — or any person — can’t see into the future to know what wars, loves, diseases and chances may loom. She may know concepts, like parenthood or old age, but she doesn’t really understand their meanings until she is engaged in them.”--- The Summoned Self
One can struggle to decide why this errant process is some form of summoning. The Summoner is some kind of mythical creature that beckons to some of us from the foggy abyss. Here, Brooks casts away the hard-core achievement metrics and classic determinism and elements of this choice and replaces them with the notion that other “commitments defy the logic of cost and benefit, investment and return” inherent in this second mode. The Believer in this mode must proceed down some undefined pathways and choose new and more promising pathways as they become apparent. We wonder if we could compare this Summoner as the Director who guides True Believers given to us by Eric Hofer.
Could I be so crass as to inject a cliché about left brains and right brains…..? I will skip that this once.
Brooks concludes with a conundrum:
“The first vision is more American. The second vision is more common elsewhere. But they are both probably useful for a person trying to live a well-considered life.”---The Summoned Self
Pondering this for a while, and relating it to my earlier years when my academic career was cut short by LBJ and the Viet Nam War, I must have chosen the first path outlined by Christenson since my designs for a career in the electronics wing of some military hardware contractor were my first and most achievable goal. That first experience coupled with careful planning and marriage then forced me to choose a middle ground between these two stereotypes and I switched into Chemistry and Biochemistry as my second pathway. Thus, it seems that I was some blend of the two young persons illustrated here having had to struggle with both theories in a short period.
The first path might be deemed some form of determinism and from the Greeks we hear this:
"Nothing occurs at random (maten), but everything for a reason (logos) and by necessity."[12]--Leucippus
“The Pythagoreans, Socrates, and Plato attempted to reconcile an element of human freedom with material determinism and causal law, in order to hold man responsible for his actions.”
Aristotle steps in to straighten all this out.[13] [see footnote]. Aristotle asserts that there must be some connection to a prime mover [Our Summoner?] and that events were influenced by accidents and chance.
It appears that Brooks cites authors who have indirectly pondered or lectured upon the redacted writings of the Ancients who then transposed those thoughts into modern terms neatly truncated to fit our instant history. It is difficult to believe that each variant was enjoyed in any pure form. The times, they are a’changin’ as we all know.
It is a pity that H. L. Mencken is not around to poke holes in this piece. But, the reading was refreshing compared to other oozings from that ragzine so I proclaim that Brook done good this time.
rycK [a 5th generation Californian in exile]
Comments to: ryckki@gmail.com
[1] The Babbling Brooks of the
[2] In honor of that celebrated Communist stooge and liar and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for the
“He said that these people had to be "liquidated or melted in the hot fire of exile and labor into the proletarian mass". Duranty claimed that the Siberian labor camps were a means of giving individuals a chance to rejoin Soviet society but also said that for those who could not accept the system, "the final fate of such enemies is death." Duranty, though describing the system as cruel, says he has "no brief for or against it, nor any purpose save to try to tell the truth". He ends the article with the claim that the brutal collectivization campaign which led to the famine was motivated by the "hope or promise of a subsequent raising up" of Asian-minded masses in the
[3] The Babbling Brooks of the
[4] The Babbling Brooks of the
[5] The Babbling Brooks of the
[6] By David Brooks Op-Ed Columnist Published:
[7] The Babbling Brooks of the
[8] The Babbling Brooks of the
[9] The Babbling Brooks of the
The Babbling Brooks of the
The Babbling Brooks of the
The Babbling Brooks of the
The Babbling Brooks of the
The Babbling Brooks of the
From the Babbling Brooks: Confusion, Hokum and Fluff: Vote for Obama
Echoes from the Babbling Brooks Envision a New Conservatism. The New York Times Advises Us on Society, as Usual: Higher Taxes Posted by rycK on
Brooks of the New York Times Mumbles about Bugs, Independent Voters and Mechanical Liberalism
http://rycksrationalizations.townhall.com/g/50bf9f36-0e0b-4e9a-be6d-5234d0d54f2c
The Babbling Brooks of the
The Babbling Brooks of the
Echoes from the Babbling Brooks Envision a New Conservatism. The New York Times Advises Us on Society, as Usual: Higher Taxes Posted by rycK on
[10] The Babbling Brooks of the
[11] The Summoned Self
By Op-Ed Columnist David Brooks Published:
[13] “The first major philosopher to argue convincingly for some indeterminism was probably Aristotle. First he described a causal chain back to a prime mover or first cause, and he elaborated the four possible causes (material, efficient, formal, and final). Aristotle's word for these causes was ἀιτία, which translates as causes in the sense of the multiple factors responsible for an event. Aristotle did not subscribe to the simplistic "every event has a (single) cause" idea that was to come later. Then, in his Physics and Metaphysics, Aristotle also said there were "accidents" caused by "chance (τυχή)." In his Physics, he clearly reckoned chance among the causes. Aristotle might have added chance as a fifth cause - an uncaused or self-caused cause - one he thought happens when two causal chains come together by accident (συμβεβεκός). He noted that the early physicists had found no place for chance among their causes.”-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will_in_antiquity#The_First_Determinist
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