Has Lost (though Often Bigoted) Leadership Morality Put Us in the Toilet? — New York Times Columnist David Brooks and Salon Editor Andrew Leonard Vehemently Butt Heads on the Answer — They Are Both Right, which Makes My Larger Point

13 July 2012

Theme — four integrated points

My four, apparently disconnected, but related points are:

(1) Truth is often not located between two poles — but instead at several poles, and in between, simultaneously.

(2) A too passionate allegiance to false dichotomies blinds us to the merit sometimes contained in our political adversaries’ perspectives.

(3) Moral integrity, alone, steers us toward wisdom.

(4) When moral Integrity is lost, we and society suffer.

These “truths” are so obvious, that we mostly forget to recognize and act on them

That is why I have selected the two following tidbits to demonstrate their merit — and how easily they are forgotten in the passions of our day-to-day arguments.

Citations — to the two print columns that I will use to support my four points

David Brooks, Why Our Elites Stink, New York Times (12 July 2012)

Andrew Leonard, It’s all the hippies’ fault, Salon (13 July 2012)

Kicking off this demonstration — columnist David Brooks on America’s alleged “meritocracy”

In recent years, I have not often agreed with the “conservative” New York Times columnist, David Brooks, who seems to have developed a tendency to see the past through excessively golden glasses. But, in this instance, he said something fruitfully insightful and in keeping with his old self.

My essay kicks off with Mr. Brook’s accurately negative comment about the “meritocratic elite” that so miserably governs the United States today.

The “noblesse oblige” aspect of the traditionally conservative pole — as David Brooks explains it

Mr. Brooks’ column points out that today’s governing and financial elite lacks the leadership values that its predecessor group regularly displayed. This predecessor elite was the White Anglo Saxon Protestant Good Ole Boy network.

Today, as a result of the meritocratic group’s miserable institutional performance, the public’s trust in government and Wall Street has fallen since the “bad” Good Ole Boy days.

Why has this happened?

Brooks thinks that:

[T]oday’s elite lacks the self-conscious leadership ethos that the racist, sexist and anti-Semitic old boys’ network did possess.

If you went to Groton [an expensive, elitist private school] a century ago, you knew you were privileged.

You were taught how morally precarious privilege was and how much responsibility it entailed.

The best of the WASP elites had a stewardship mentality, that they were temporary caretakers of institutions that would span generations. They cruelly ostracized people who did not live up to their codes of gentlemanly conduct and scrupulosity. They were insular and struggled with intimacy, but they did believe in restraint, reticence and service.

Today’s elite is more talented and open but lacks a self-conscious leadership code.

The language of meritocracy (how to succeed) has eclipsed the language of morality (how to be virtuous). Wall Street firms, for example, now hire on the basis of youth and brains, not experience and character. Most of their problems can be traced to this.

If you read the e-mails from the Libor scandal you get the same sensation you get from reading the e-mails in so many recent scandals: these people are brats; they have no sense that they are guardians for an institution the world depends on; they have no consciousness of their larger social role.

Note

For background on the LIBOR fraud that David Brooks mentions, go here.

The “liberal” counter-argument to Brooks’ stated insight — as Andrew Leonard explains it

Salon’s “liberal” Andrew Leonard excoriated David Brooks’ column.

He made some valid counter-arguments. But his too-enthusiastic liberal passion apparently caused him to miss the historical validity of the core point (about noblesse oblige) that Brooks was trying to make.

The problem of excessive passion — as illustrated by Mr. Leonard’s legitimate, but also mistaken, attack on Mr. Brooks

I selected Mr. Leonard’s essay to illustrate how “illiberal” doses of passion causes us to lose sight of the merits of our adversaries’ positions at the opposite pole.

Passion clouds balanced judgment. It makes us stupid.

Emotion that runs rampant encourages us to overlook the importance of listening to people, who are demonstrably not unintelligent or hypocritical puppets for a lying point of view.

Here is what Mr. Leonard said about David Brooks’ statements about meritocracy and Good Ole Boys

For background, you need to know that Brooks made a couple of intellectually unnecessary and argument-weakening comments that any self-respecting liberal would take the wrong way.

These were:

I’d say today’s meritocratic elites achieve and preserve their status not mainly by being corrupt but mainly by being ambitious and disciplined.

They raise their kids in organized families. They spend enormous amounts of money and time on enrichment.

They work much longer hours than people down the income scale, driving their kids to piano lessons and then taking part in conference calls from the waiting room.

Oops.

It should be obvious that Brooks’ point about the superior leadership values of the past’s Good Ole Boy WASPs does not depend at all on characterizing today’s “meritocracy” as actually being meritorious, as compared to the rest of us.

Were Mr. Brooks a lawyer facing a jury, he would have lost the emotional basis for his case, by making these carelessly inaccurate (and offensive) statements.

Here is what Andrew Leonard said about Brooks’ momentary lapse into mistaken-ness:

David Brooks needs to spend an hour or two picking strawberries or cleaning toilets or busing tables and then come back to us and try to repeat, with a straight face, his theory that hours spent driving kids to piano lessons constitute the overcoming of daunting hardship.

An aside on David Brooks’ curious view of America’s alleged meritocracy

I agree with Andrew Leonard that Brooks’ perspective on America’s meritocracy is arguably absurd.

As a former historian, I see very few objectively provable signs that today’s elite is any more the product of merit than it is of established social privilege and the influence of financial resources.

It may indeed be that today’s elite is better culled from a larger and more diverse base of Good Ole Boys and Gals. But GOBs and GOGs they still tend to be. Just with more impressive paper credentials.

That, to my mind, does not a meritocracy make.

A true meritocracy culls its best from the entire population base. And, even more importantly, it measures qualities that actually matter in delivering perceptibly superior performance.

As a society, we have not even begun to create efficient ways of doing either.

The clouding effect of political passion — Andrew Leonard goes completely off-track by inventing an argument that David Brooks did not make or even imply (“twas them hippies”)

This portion of my discussion depends on the reader’s familiarity with the entirety of Brooks’ essay.

As is typical, when people misread (or lie about) what someone else said, it is impossible to quote a segment of the accused’s statement to demonstrate the untruth of the falsely made counterargument.

Here is the totality of what Brooks actually said about counter-culture:

Everybody thinks they are countercultural rebels, insurgents against the true establishment, which is always somewhere else.

This attitude prevails in the Ivy League, in the corporate boardrooms and even at television studios where hosts from Harvard, Stanford and Brown rail against the establishment.

As a result, today’s elite lacks the self-conscious leadership ethos that the racist, sexist and anti-Semitic old boys’ network did possess.

Apparently due to an excess of progressivist passion, Mr. Leonard pretends that David Brooks said that the meritocracy’s lapse in morality was a reaction to the perceived excesses of the 1960s’ counter-culture:

The implied blame-the-’60s scapegoating for the lax morality of today’s politicians and financiers?

That’s worth taking on, because Brooks isn’t the only one making such a claim.

It’s the ultimate culture war jujitsu move. Wall Street greed — it’s the hippies’ fault!

Let’s grant Brooks this much: There is a thread that connects the counterculture upheaval of the ’60s with contemporary Wall Street irresponsibility. But it’s not what he thinks.

Forget about the hippies trying to stick it to the man. The key transformative events of the ’60s and ’70s that broke down male WASP hegemony — the civil rights struggle, the full flowering of feminism, the emergence of the environmental movement — provoked real change in America, and a fierce counter-reaction, both cultural and political.

But it’s that counter-reaction that is responsible for much of what upsets David Brooks today, and not some ludicrous identification between contemporary derivatives traders and flower children.

But Brooks did not say what Leonard says he did — did he?

Brooks did not say or imply that today’s miscreants are the 1960s hippies’ fault.

He seems, at most, to be saying that pretending to be anti-establishment is seen as a virtue by today’s elite. When, in fact, the elite is the establishment.

Nor did Brooks say anything positive about the racist and bigoted perspectives of the past’s WASP, Good Ole Boy network.

His point about the WASP elite was confined to the fact that it saw and acted on social interests that transcended its own selfishness.

This is the “noblesse oblige” principle that I referred to here. I was making a point similar to David Brooks’. In my case, it was about Governor Mitt Romney’s failure to live up to the arguably more personally and socially noble principles that his father lived out.

The negative result of indulging blind political passion — where Leonard’s argument went, unfairly, off the rails — and an accompanying moral point about “soul shine”

Andrew Leonard’s mistaken reading of Brooks’ column means that he completely missed the validity of what the New York Times columnist had said about the comparative governing superiority of the old, non-meritorious regime.

Leonard also missed the single most insightful, therefore important, comment that Brooks made:

The language of meritocracy (how to succeed) has eclipsed the language of morality (how to be virtuous).

If anyone wants a single explanation of the American predicament, that is it, in one sentence.

If Brooks’ comment is not brilliance, concisely displayed, I don’t know what is.

Leonard’s angry response completely missed this.

To my moral mind, missing the obvious shine in someone else’s soul is one of the biggest “sins” that one can commit.

Of course that is a wrong that most of us frequently commit. Which, of course, is where humility should enter.

However, Mr. Leonard’s comments about bigotry do highlight a weakness in David Brooks’ expressed perspective

I agree with David Brooks that the old, quasi-aristocratic culture’s acceptance of noblesse oblige sometimes resulted in less governmental malfeasance and certainly in better banking.

But Andrew Leonard is correct that the old WASP elite’s way brutalized millions of people who had dissimilar skin, culture, and (sometimes) religion.

On the other hand, Leonard errs in so cavalierly dismissing the power of noblesse oblige in delivering slightly less personally selfish institutions.

“So where is the pole-spanning truth that you mentioned at the beginning of this essay, Pete?”

Morality.

Brooks and Leonard both base their fundamental arguments on the worth of unselfish, moral leadership.

Brooks sees value in conserving some of the (very) flawed stewardship perspectives of the quasi-aristocratic past.

Leonard would (apparently) toss all that out, in hopes of re-inventing society in a significantly more admirable form.

An objective observer might recognize that the fundamental dispute between the two writers has significantly more to do with what is achievable than with what is desirable.

I doubt that the two men disagree about the horrors of bigotry or, fundamentally, about the undesirability of egregious economic inequality.

Their implied disagreement about what is societally “doable” is precisely what distinguishes historically defined conservatives from traditional liberals.

In the past, such people could reach compromises because they recognized the political necessity of progress by increments. Conservatives preferred going slowly (or not at all). Liberals did not mind the occasional (or frequent) wrecking ball approach.

Today, in contrast, we do not compromise our even extreme political positions because we have allowed unreasoned passion to cloud our hearing and judgment. Just as Brooks sees unjustified comparative merit in our alleged meritocracy, Leonard invents an illiberal argument that Brooks did not make.

Though both men’s essays are accurate and valuable in some important respects, both demonstrate excesses that seem to characterize the intolerance of today’s extremist political positions.

The moral? — If unreasoned passion clouds my hearing, I cannot hear the truth in your statements

None of us own Truth. None see all its myriad facets.

Truth is everywhere and nowhere.

In consequence, extremism in any direction almost always damages us.

That is the fundamental point to spiritual teachings about moderation, humility, and loving one’s neighbor and enemy.

In this regard, I am certain that David Brooks and Andrew Leonard would enthusiastically agree about one point. The decline in American leadership’s ethics is the prime cause of the mess that our avaricious, self-centered culture is mired in.

The two writers might even be willing to extend their agreement to include my sense that the public’s personal morality has taken a dive, as well.

Ethics-based integrity is important because it is the (often unseen) hand that guides us toward personal and social wisdom.

Wisdom’s absence causes a very long fall. We are falling now.

PeteFree.com

Has Lost (though Often Bigoted) Leadership Morality Put Us in the Toilet? — New York Times Columnist David Brooks and Salon Editor Andrew Leonard Vehemently Butt Heads on the Answer — They Are Both Right, which Makes My Larger Point