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Globalization was about the integration of worldviews, products, ideas and culture. There would be a global convergence around a set of universal values — freedom, equality, personal dignity, pluralism, human rights.
No it wasn't. It was all about trade, and trade is all about money. The so-called "Four Freedoms" of the free flow of "goods, services, capital and labour" was nothing but an restatement of the dynamic elements of capitalism. Liberal cultural values was simply pogey bait and dross.
It was sometimes assumed that nations all around the world would admire the success of the Western democracies and seek to imitate us. ... They would become more bourgeois, consumerist, peaceful — just like us.
Peaceful just like us? Just like Gulf War, Bosnia & Kosovo, No Fly War, Afghanistan, Iraq War ... The United States is so peaceful that its defence spending is more than the whole rest of the world's military spending combined.
Ukraine’s brave fight against authoritarian aggression is an inspiration in the West,
No it isn't. It is a tragedy instigated by the West which refused to acknowledge Russia's legitimate security concerns. (We have discussed this elsewhere.) Instead of cajoling the parties into a peaceful settlement, the "West" is fueling arms to the fire which may "screw Russia" but can only result in more misery, death and destruction to the Ukraine.
Brooks then goes on to observe that All manner of antiglobalization movements have arisen and that geopolitics is definitively moving against globalization. True, but why?
Hazarding a guess, Brooks opines "we probably put too much emphasis on the power of material forces like economics and technology."
By the "power of material forces" he means the "power of money." In other words we (the gentrified elites to which Brooks belongs) put too much emphasis on profit and growing its investment portfolios.
In contrast to these "we", Brooks then informs us that ordinary "human beings are powerfully driven by what are known as the thymotic desires."
Ooooh. "Thymotic desires." Jam! Brooks has obviously been reading Robert Kagan, the Neocon who defined "thumos" as "“a spiritedness and ferocity in defence of clan, tribe, city, or state." Actually, "thumos" is Ancient Greek for "spirited" or "animated" and it refers non-appetitive, non material values that get us... well... that get us motivated and worked up. According to Brooks, these value are:
1. "Great swaths of people feel looked down upon and ignored,...Perceiv[ing] diminishment as injustice and respond[ing] with aggressive indignation."
2. "Most people have a strong loyalty to their place and to their nation."
3. "People are driven by moral longings — by their attachment to their own cultural values." People are driven by moral longings — by their attachment to their own cultural values,
What is interesting here is how Brooks has hidden a poison pill in a muddle of words. It is true that most people have had a loyalty to their place and nation. It begins, actually, with "Honour thy father and mother." It is known as patrio-tism to father-land, as in the Welsh hymn "Land of Our Fathers." And not just people. Lions have loyalty to their pride and wolves to their pack. The Romans called it mos maiorum, the ways of our fathers which leads to, point three, moral longings and attachment to familiar cultural values.
There was no need for Brooks to get all expository here. The word nation derives from natio- to be born of. "Nation" is more than a boundary in space, a border. Maybe for Brooks that is all it is, but for most people the family and friends to which one is born into of a father in a place and time is the flesh and blood organism known as nation. That is why Aristotle says that the basic unit of the polis is the family, and the polis itself is a larger family. Of course it includes "cultural values" ... our "customs and usages", and these custom and usages also include concepts of right, wrong, customary, praisworthiness and acceptability. It seems strange that this should have to be laid out in analytical seriatim as if examining a frog on a plate.
Well OK... Brooks is telling most of us what most of us feel and know. Alright. But within the tendentious but otherwise commonplace observations, Brooks slips in the "thumos" of perceiving diminishment as injustice.
Perceiving? It is just a matter of subjective perceiving? You know the lowly folk getting all uppity in their aspirations and "responding with aggressive indignation." As perhaps in...
He hath put down the mighty from their seat: and hath exalted the humble and meek.For a Christian, which Brooks most decidedly is not, diminishment of human beings IS injustice. Not subjectively, but objectively. That is why the Church's social doctrine is based on the Preferential Option of the Poor, which calls on us to UNdiminish our brother. And not just the Church, but capuchin monkeys as well. :)
He hath filled the hungry with good things: and the rich he hath sent empty away.
He remembering his mercy hath holpen his servant Israel:
As he promised to our forefathers, Abraham and his seed for ever.
Several years ago a study was done in which a group of capuchin monkeys were each paid a cucumber to do a task. One day without notice, at the end of the "work day" only half the monkeys got paid a cucumber. The other half got none. ALL MONKEYS -- paid and unpaid -- went nuts, threw the cucumbers at the humans and refused to work. It would seem that the perception of objective injustice is a thumotic desire that is deeply ingrained and not a "cultural artifact."
The point here is that within a contrived "anthropological" exposition of rather obvious human emotions and motivations, Brooks insinuates a nasty desparagement of the poor... whom he references as those who "perceive" that they are being diminished and respond like angry apes. When in fact the response of angry simians reflects an innate axiomatic moral principle.
Okay... so, apart from disparaging the "resentful poor," Brooks tells us that most people the world over are loyal to father, family and fatherland and feel at home with the familiar. He is perfectly right. It is the stuff of all noble sentiment.
I vow to Thee my country, all earthly things above
Entire and whole and perfect, the service of my love;
The love that asks no questions, the love that stands the test,
That lays upon the altar the dearest and the best;
The love that never falters, the love that pays the price,
The love that makes undaunted the final sacrifice.
In other words "we" in the West are self-absorbed, selfish pricks, who don't give a shit about relationships and who (not being the resentful poor) "probably put too much emphasis on the power of material forces" of money.
It's priceless. One of doyens of the Slime is telling his gaping and credulous gentrified readership that "We in the West" have no use for those "thymotic desires" of love of father, loyalty to fatherland, defence of family and service to God and Country, of longing to commit to something greater than ourselves, that in turn both shapes and reflects who we are.
No, no, no, no... Brooks proudly declares himself to be a stateless person. We in the West (or at least on the Upper West Side) want none of that. GIVE US OUR POLO PONIES!!!! (Or least our yachts and share rentals in the latest trendy vacation spots.)
It is from the heights of this weltanschauung that Brooks then mentions -- almost casually -- that "Global politics over the past few decades functioned as a massive social inequality machine. In country after country, groups of highly educated urban elites have arisen to dominate media, universities, culture and often political power. Great swaths of people feel looked down upon and ignored."
Well gee whiz. You don't say. Only they dont just "feel looked down upon" they ARE affirmatively oppressed, by those elites who dominate the tax code, manage the economy and daily and by the minute reap their asset appreciation off the backs of the working class. Great masses of people HATE you David Brooks, they really do. And what they hate most is that you are so debased and alienated from normal "thymotic" aspirations that you don't even perceive your aliented sin.
No. Instead, Brooks concludes, stating "what haunts me most is that this rejection of Western liberalism, individualism, pluralism, gender equality and all the rest is not only happening between nations but also within nations."
Does "economic equality" figure in with "all the rest"? Obviously not. What's important to Brooks is gender equality; not that equality which would tax his ass so that someone else might have affordable housing, free education, health care as a right, a living wage and a secure livable pension. No. That kind of Cucumber Equality is irrelevant to Mr. Brooks. Not once does the need for economic equality get mentioned except to say that we in the Upper "West" Side have rejected all that social solidarity stuff and to disparage those who go without as being resentful and angry. The feel-good mantra of "liberalism, individualism, pluralism" is simply the fig-leaf for a "massive social inequality machine." Brooks just told you that; and, worse yet, he regrets that people are rejecting the machine.
I don't know if that day will ever come, but when it does, there will be a place reserved for David Brooks on the Place de la Concorde.
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