Our Mister Brooks Goes to College

David Brooks went to a symposium, then he wrote about some stuff people said there in a format he evidently thinks is a newspaper column. Somewhere toward the end of the sentences he strung together he writes, "Public life would be vastly improved if people relied more on the concept of emergence. Many contributors to the Edge symposium hit on this point." He tries, fairly unsuccessfully, to explain what "emergence" is.* Not surprisingly, the New York Times moderators chose not to publish my comment on Brooks' column, which follows (also, terrific update below):

Like Jerry Seinfeld's proposal for a "show about nothing," this is a column about nothing. There's no unifying theme other than, "Once I went to a symposium where scholars said stuff." Ticking off broad glosses of some of the stuff the scholars said does not an essay make.

Maybe if you thought of an essay as an "emergent system," you could write a coherent column. By your definition an "emergent system" (which is, to say the least, an awkward label for what you describe) is "bottom-up and top-down simultaneously." Emergent systems "have to be studied differently, as wholes and as nested networks of relationships." Your column is neither a "whole" nor do you make a connection to create a "nested network of relationships." Instead, your column reads more like class notes -- unrelated topics you will think about when it's time to study for the test.

You have valuable real estate here on the pages of the New York Times -- so valuable, in fact, I will now have to pay for the pleasures and pains of reading what you construct on that parcel of real estate. Next time, give me my money's worth.

* Evidently, "emergence" is an old concept going back to the Greeks. According to Wikipedia, pioneeringy psychologist G. S. Lewes first coined the term in the 1870s to apply to the general concept. Lewes doesn't explain it much more clearly than Brooks does, but at least I think I get it now:

Every resultant is either a sum or a difference of the co-operant forces; their sum, when their directions are the same -- their difference, when their directions are contrary. Further, every resultant is clearly traceable in its components, because these are homogeneous and commensurable. It is otherwise with emergents, when, instead of adding measurable motion to measurable motion, or things of one kind to other individuals of their kind, there is a co-operation of things of unlike kinds. The emergent is unlike its components insofar as these are incommensurable, and it cannot be reduced to their sum or their difference.

(This footnote on Lewes was not part of my comment to Brooks' column.)

After reading my comment, a friend who also comments on New York Times columns (don't try to guess who; you'll be wrong) sent me this e-mail. I've edited out some unrelated portions of the e-mail (which were hilarious but I'm not sharing 'em):

Nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it. -- David Brooks

Oh yeah? Spoken like someone who has never been hungry, or out of a job, or afraid for his life. "I'm worried about being able to feed my kids and pay the rent." "Oh...not to worry, stop thinking about it and it won't seem nearly as important."

Sez you.

This is the sort of ivory tower think-tank speak that makes it clear how disconnected people like Brooks are from the real world most of the rest of us inhabit. Oh, not his buddies on the right. They're all very well off. Like the Kochs in that Greenwald piece, their biggest worries are that people say mean (and well deserved) things about them, not that they're scared to go out at night because their neighborhood no longer has adequate lighting or police protection or that the local school has been closed by cutbacks demanded by well-off white right-wingers who need that money in the form of even more tax breaks for themselves, so now the boarded up school has become a shooting gallery for heroin addicts and a hangout for thugs.

The rest is just pure pseudo-intellectual wanking. And not even good wanking. If you're gonna jerk off for 1,500 words, make it worthwhile, make it fun at least. Not boring, repetitious, and needlessly recondite. And not quite so stupid.

(Reproduced with permission from the author.)