It could have been I first ran into Arthur C. Brooks in the NYT where he is apparently a regular columnist. Something he said about the Dalai Lama intrigued me; I wondered how he was connected to NYT conservative columnist David Brooks and went looking online. A couple of years ago the two men spoke together in Aspen and the difference between the two was immediately apparent. David Brooks gives us his opinion. Arthur Brooks wants to convince us of his opinion.
This book sketches Arthur Brooks’ growth from college dropout and musician to head of the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute whose attendant scholars have included Dinesh D’Sousa, Irving Kristol, Jeanne Kirkpatrick and Antonin Scalia. We learn what Brooks perceives as influences on his thinking as he moved from liberal to conservative.
“I believe that poverty and opportunity are moral issues and must be addressed as such.”
and
“We know that human dignity has deeper roots than the financial resources someone commands. We may wear the rhetorical uniform of materialists, but conservatives at heart are moralists.”These are troubling statements from Brooks. One wonders what he meant. It was my understanding that conservatives are always belittling liberals for being bleeding hearts and politically correct. Liberals are particularly keen on the morality of fairness, particularly in wages and opportunity. Could we actually be closer in [unexamined] attitudes than we think?
Brooks focuses on the dignity of work, welfare reform, poverty in his comments, and goes after Barak Obama pretty hard, all the while never acknowledging race when talking about poverty.
“Welfare spending also massively increased under the Obama administration…More important than anything else, though, the administration was turning its attention away from poverty per se and instead toward the old progressive bogeyman of income inequality.”Brooks felt the president was attacking “wealthy people and conservative Americans.” He’d explained earlier that conservatives give more to charity than do liberals. Brooks and fellow conservatives “were indignant at the president’s ad hominem attacks.” But Brooks and his fellow conservatives saw themselves in the president’s remarks. Obama did not point them out specifically.
I think I see where the problem might lie: conservatives, patting themselves on the back for being generous, are willing to give back via charity whatever money they collect in an unequal system that may give a little too much to business owners and high-level managers and may give too little to the people actually working the business. Of course, these generous wealthy donors decide which charities they will support, and so steer society. So those that have…perpetuate their havingness and the rest of us don’t really have much say. Does this sound healthy to you?
Brooks claims to be an economist. He must be being disingenuous then when he crows,
“…inequality actually increased over the course of the Obama administration…Consider the facts. The top half of the economy has, in fact, recovered from the Great Recession in fine style…a whopping 95 percent of the real income growth from the economic recovery flowed directly to the much-regretted ‘1-percent.’…And how about the bottom 20 percent of U.S. households? That group of earners was hit the hardest during the recovery. Their real incomes fell by 7 percent on average from 2009 to 2013, the largest percentage decline of any group.”Yes, Obama tried to save the global economy from tanking as a result of conservative economic policies. I think Brooks and I can probably agree that if Obama weren’t blocked in Congress, he would have done more to fix the inequality that came as a result of repairing the mess Republicans left him. Maybe Obama should have let the ship sink instead? Brooks is getting no buy-in from me for dishonest arguments like these.
Chapter Three has a subtitle: “How Honest Work Ennobles and Elevates Us.” Finally, Brooks and I can agree on something. We agree that work can be a source of happiness, wealth, and meaning. But Brooks is being disingenuous again, talking about putting a broom in the hands of the homeless and enlivening them with the dignity of work. It infuriates me that he can trivialize the discussion of the enormous national problems we have with inequality in our society. If he put a broom in the hands of every homeless person in the country we would still have a serious problem with our economy.
Let’s be frank. When work is not acknowledged by all parties to be worthwhile enough to pay a decent living wage, we run into problems. Either the work is important for a company or it is not. Don’t tell me companies will look after the concerns of their workers because it is in their best interests. No. They won’t. We have centuries of evidence that corporations hold workers over a barrel and maximize profits at the expense of workers. Human labor is expensive. It should be expensive.
I should be honest about my own prejudices. I distrust charity because I distrust the organizations handing it out. I don’t want Brooks to feel good “lifting people up.” I just want what I earned in a system that is fair. I expect many women and people of color in America today would say the same. Kind white men dispensing charity but who have also been part of a system structured to offer unfair wages to the majority of “workers” would do well to take note. Just give me what I deserve, what’s fair (hint: you may need to listen to someone besides yourself and your peer group), and then we’ll talk about who gets charity. It may be me, giving to you. Think how happy it will make me, to give you uplift.
To be fair, when Brooks discusses social justice, he says liberal efforts to attain this include redistributive taxation (oh yes) and social welfare spending. To conservatives, a social justice agenda …means improving education (for everyone, or just those who can afford to pay for K-12?), expanding the opportunity to work (no objection there…if only resumes from black-sounding names weren’t weeded out at the start of the process), and increasing access to entrepreneurship (don’t even get me started on who gets loans and at what rates). Of course, Brooks adds “true conservative justice must also fight cronyism that favors powerful interests and keeps the little guy down. (Tell me more about that please.)
A few pages later, Brooks is comparing parents experiencing poverty to children:
“…moral intervention must accompany economic intervention for the latter to be truly effective…I’ve never met a parent who believes that their kids have to receive their allowance before it is fair to ask them to behave decently. It’s the other way around! So way are these values good enough for our children, but not good enough for our brothers and sisters in need? When we fail to share our values with the poor, we effectively discriminate against them. And that hidden bigotry robs them of the tools they need to live lives of dignity and self-reliance.”Brooks undoubtedly means well, but it sounds to me like he will withhold assistance unless we go along with his beliefs and values. Would be that we all had the same opportunities he did/does. I am all for behaving well and being socialized to be better people. But where is the open-handed generosity Brooks was talking about earlier, when he led by example instead of by punishment? What do our Christian teachings say? Wait until someone is behaving well to help or to wash the feet of prostitutes and criminals?
Anyway, the problems of poverty are very difficult to resolve and we need people who think, hope, and try, like Brooks. All these years and we haven’t resolved them yet. But my guess is treating everyone with dignity and paying them well for their contribution to society, maybe even at the expense of one’s own take-home pay, may move the ball down a field a little faster. I mean, if you’ve got all the values and stuff, you can show us how it is done when you start with nothing.
This book is an attempt to show liberals how conservatives have areas of overlap with them and really do have compassion they claimed in the label Compassionate Conservatives…until that was thrown under the bus in the last election. It is a feel-good attempt to show crossover values. And I am picking apart about the ‘other side’s’ notion of social justice. Let’s face it: We need all the social justice we can get. And we do not need to convince anyone to begin using it ourselves right now. Give me what you’ve got in terms of social justice. I’ll work with that.
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