Once upon a time, David Brooks was a soldier of the conservative right.
During this period, he had wandered out of a liberal youth (because he "came to his senses") and across the moderate plains to become a semi-incendiary gadfly in the pre-Tea Party days, arrogant and cavalier and none too concerned with the moral implications of his party's demeaning and misleading rhetoric. The farther he wandered, the more he reflected his chosen tribe's increasingly tenuous connections to truth and reality.
There came a moment when a switch flipped inside David Brooks’s head, and he began to see a bigger picture. He turned from the conservative path - or, at least, the precarious path of his peers - and set out in a new direction, pursuing a more honest odyssey.
It cost him dearly in standing with those peers, but he would not be deflected. His new journey was one of discovery, revelation, and - perhaps most significantly - humility. David Brooks sought to rediscover who he was, and in the process, he came to view the people around him in new ways.
In a series of books - The Social Animal, The Road to Character - he explored fresh approaches to understanding others, and thereby came to understand himself and the society around us all very differently.
His latest work, as of this writing, is called The Second Mountain, and it frames Western society as it is in this moment, alongside the better society we have been in the past and need to become again.
The quest society lays before us, he writes, is the climbing of a mountain - a quest in pursuit of self and gratification. But there is a second mountain, Brooks asserts, one of rediscovery of our connections to the world, the society that enables us, and the people around us.
It's worth our time to survey both mountains.
The first mountain has a path called hyperindividualism, a social frame that is centered on the person, rather than the group. Brooks notes that this path has widened considerably since the post-war years, as technology and consumerism have blossomed in the showers of Western wealth.
The messages of hyperindividualism are many, Brooks notes, listing them all:
- Life's journey is individual and personal, and the goal should be to reject the interests of collective humanity in favor of personal happiness;
- That happiness is accomplished through achievement, success, the accumulation of wealth and power and status;
- The essence of fulfillment is being better than others, and that betterment follows the shedding of restraints imposed by society;
- Self-sufficiency, self-actualization and autonomy are the noblest of goals.
This is the plan of action suggested by the society we inhabit on every channel, at every level, Brooks notes. Our economy, our culture, and our politics all derive from this principle of hyperindividualism. It is the book of axioms that defines the lives of millions in his own Baby Boomer generation and the X that followed.
But hyperindividualism, Brooks insists, is a lie.
Hyperindividualism is toxic.
Hyperindividualism "gradually undermines any connection not based on individual choice," he writes, "the connections to family, neighborhood, culture, nation, and the common good. Hyperindividualism erodes our obligations and responsibilities to others and our kind."
That erosion, he continues, has created a long list of problems: social isolation, polarization, the weakening of the family as a social structure, tribalism, a general loss of community, and "a spiritual crisis caused by a loss of common purpose, the loss - in nation after nation - of any sense of common solidarity that binds people across difference, the loss of those common stories and causes that foster community, mutuality, comradeship, and purpose."
It gets worse. Hyperindividualism "leads to a degradation and a pulverization of the human person," exploiting egoistic drives, encouraging over-the-top self-interest. The drives to seek connection through service to others is muted; the "longings of the heart and soul" are pushed aside in favor of "the desires of the ego." In the long run, he says, "Hyperindividualism creates isolated, self-interested monads who sense that something is missing in their lives but cannot even name what it is."
Consumerism plays no small role in this subversion, placing emphasis on material acquisition; meritocracy redefines "success" for the worse. Worst of all, hyperindividualism is "a network of conditional love," leading its practitioners to believe that love is earned, that worthiness to be loved is barter, and making them deeply sensitive to the judgments of others.
"When you build a whole society on an overly thin view of human nature," Brooks asserts, "you wind up with a dehumanized culture in which people are starved of the things they yearn for most deeply."
And it's making us all more tribal, he concludes: When the inherent meaninglessness of hyperindividualism triggers subconscious red alerts, the individual goes partisan, finding security in an Us and purpose in the channeling of their accumulated toxins of dissatisfaction and emptiness in the direction of a targeted Them.
All of this is pretty grim. But there is an alternative, Brooks suggests - a refocusing on those features of humanity that cannot be secured through hyperindividualism, but from a different way of thinking, a new approach to living that he called relationalism, which we will take up shortly.
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