The Sad Case of David Brooks

From time to time I read columns by David Brooks. I do it to save you the indignity of having to slog through his jejune thinking and pseudo-profundities. I trust you are grateful for my efforts.

From time to time I find something interesting or thought-provoking. Such was the case with his reflections about the division of labor. See my post on January 8, 2024.

The day before yesterday Brooks set out to rescue the Humanities. You see, college students are abandoning courses in the arts and literature, to study STEM subjects, computers and business.

Brooks mentioned in passing that most college courses in the Humanities have become indoctrination mills, forcing students to believe the right dogmas. And he might have mentioned that these courses are so thoroughly saturated with DEI concepts that a student will be spending much of his time slogging through inferior works of art and literature and philosophy, the better to affirm the professor’s sense that he did not get his job to fill a diversity quota.

It does not take too much for Brooks to lose himself in empty speculation. It takes even less for him to start whining about how he is getting in touch with his feminine side. With apologies, a lot of this column feels like it was written by a high school girl. 

He writes:

We are jolted into not taking other people for granted but to sense and respect the immense depth of each human soul.

Being a human cliche, Brooks explains that reading literature will enhance your capacity for empathy. You will note that he keeps using the word “deep.” It’s a convenient way to disguise his superficiality.

We know from studies by the psychologists Raymond Mar and Keith Oatley that reading literature is associated with heightened empathy skills. Deep reading, immersing yourself in novels with complex characters, engaging with stories that explore the complexity of this character’s motivations or that character’s wounds, is a training ground for understanding human variety. It empowers us to see the real people in our lives more accurately and more generously, to better understand their intentions, fears and needs, the hidden kingdom of their unconscious drives. The resulting knowledge is not factual knowledge but emotional knowledge.

As I said, this is drivel. Art is not therapy. It is not trying to help you to get in touch with your feelings. The figures on a canvas are not human beings. The characters in a novel are not human beings. They are, in each case, representations of human beings. If you do not know the difference between a human being and an artistic representation of a human being, you belong back in high school. 

Evidently, Brooks has missed the point:

But culture and the liberal arts help us enter the subjective experience of particular people: how this unique individual felt; how this other one longed and suffered. We have the chance to move with them, experience the world, a bit, the way they experience it.

Dare we say that pictures are not people They are not individuals. They do not live in the world that we inhabit. Great artists create alternative, fictional worlds. They show what might happen, not what will necessarily happen. 

If you were getting tired of Brooks’ longing for depths, he now introduces a new concept-- complexity. 

Deep reading, immersing yourself in novels with complex characters, engaging with stories that explore the complexity of this character’s motivations or that character’s wounds, is a training ground for understanding human variety. It empowers us to see the real people in our lives more accurately and more generously, to better understand their intentions, fears and needs, the hidden kingdom of their unconscious drives.

Since fictional characters are not real, they do not help us to understand real people in our real lives. What happens on the stage is not the same, for example, as what happens in a game.

On the most obvious level, literature has a predetermined ending. A chess game does not. Get it?

You do not read Hamlet to learn about his suffering. You might want to know, as he himself asks, why he does not do what he has been told to do. For those who care, the reason is, he is not certain that his dead father was really his father. 

The play is a moral enigma. How did it happen that King Claudius proclaimed Prince Hamlet to be his heir when King Hamlet did not do so? 

The issue, dare I say, is not how you feel about that, or even whether you feel any empathy for Hamlet’s position, but, as the play makes more than explicit, what do you do? What is your next move in the game? Clearly, how you feel is secondary, as is the question of how Hamlet feels about it all. 

Whereas Brooks believes that watching fictional characters helps us to get in touch with some ersatz emotion, Aristotle explained that watching a great tragedy produces a catharsis, a canceling of emotion. 

If the play tricks you into thinking that the bad things that are happening to the hero might happen to you, you will feel terror. But, when you understand that you are not Oedipus and that it is not happening to you, you will feel pity for the character. The pity cancels the terror and you feel relief from negative emotion.

Anyway, Brooks believes, like most conventionally banal thinkers do, that we can solve all of our problems by injecting more empathy. 

I’d argue that we have become so sad, lonely, angry and mean as a society in part because so many people have not been taught or don’t bother practicing to enter sympathetically into the minds of their fellow human beings. We’re overpoliticized while growing increasingly undermoralized, underspiritualized, undercultured.

You might imagine that he is calling for a return to religion. After all, you do not become more spiritual by reading Sophocles and Homer. And yet, religion involves community. It involves ritual and ceremony. It involves socialization. About all that, Brooks has nothing to say in this essay.

Apparently, Brooks believes that we are all haunted by the question of how we should live our lives? This is also jejune nonsense. Most of us are born into families. We have roles to play within those families. When we go to school or get jobs we gain more roles, along with duties and responsibilities. As you might guess, Brooks is a budding aesthete, so he is all for himself. He has nothing to say about our obligations to others. 

It is based on the idea that unless you immerse yourself in the humanities, you may never confront the most important question: How should I live my life?

As it happens, Brooks is borrowing from a religious tradition, the one that shows how to undertake spiritual and mystical voyages of discovery. Therapy has taken up this meme and turned it into a search for awareness.

We start with the tiny circle of our own experience, but gradually we acquire more expansive ways of seeing the world. Peer pressure and convention may try to hem us in, but the humanistic mind expands outward to wider and wider circles of awareness.

When Brooks closes his essay with a reflection on the famed eighteenth century writer, Samuel Johnson, he explains that Johnson, as he got older, became more charitable, more giving toward the less fortunate.

It does not take a very extensive knowledge of religion to know that you learn charity from religion, not from literature. After all, Christian love is called agape, which is translated as the Latin caritas and the English “charity.” I have no problem with Johnson’s having found religion, but let us not pretend that he learned it by reading The Iliad.

Naturally, Brooks gets empathy wrong. He ignores the simple fact that the best way to enhance the empathy circuits in your brain is-- to get pregnant. If you cannot get pregnant you are out of luck in the empathy derby.

A pregnant woman gains the ability to feel more empathy, for a simple reason, that she will be caring for an infant, a non-speaking being whose needs she will need to read without being told. If you shower friends and family with empathy you will be infantilizing them. 

In truth, this was reported in the New York Times, by Pam Belluck on December 19, 2016. One does not understand why Brooks does not read the newspaper of record more carefully. See my post.

Belluck reported on research performed by Dutch researcher Elseline Hoekzema at the University of Barcelona:

Pregnancy changes a woman’s brain, altering the size and structure of areas involved in perceiving the feelings and perspectives of others, according to a first-of-its-kind study published Monday.

Most of these changes remained two years after giving birth, at least into the babies’ toddler years. And the more pronounced the brain changes, the higher mothers scored on a measure of emotional attachment to their babies.

She continued:

Pregnancy, she explained, may help a woman’s brain specialize in “a mother’s ability to recognize the needs of her infant, to recognize social threats or to promote mother-infant bonding.”

If you are not going to give birth, you can undergo what a literature professor calls a secular rebirth. God knows what that is. A literature professor calls it a renovation, as though you are a fixer-upper. No kidding.

Mark Edmundson teaches literature at the University of Virginia and is one of those who still lives by the humanist code. In his book “Why Read?” he describes the potential charge embedded in a great work of art: “Literature is, I believe, our best goad toward new beginnings, our best chance for what we might call secular rebirth. However much society at large despises imaginative writing, however much those supposedly committed to preserve and spread literary art may demean it, the fact remains that in literature there abide major hopes for human renovation.”

This is silliness. Sorry to have gone on at such length. I will simply add that great art looks back at you. It involves the way others see you, not how you feel about yourself.