Evening Conversation with David Brooks and Patrick Deneen
2018 ж. 7 Мам.
16 678 Рет қаралды
In this evening conversation from May 7th, 2018, entitled, "Has Liberalism Failed?", journalist and author David Brooks and professor Patrick Deneen discuss the present and future of classical liberalism and whether it contains the seeds of its own destruction, as well as hope for renewal. The conversation was co-hosted by our friends at the Pepperdine School of Public Policy and M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust.
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Patrick Deneen is a true genius. We need a million of him, articulate conservatives comprising half of the professorate. He writes the clearest diagnoses of why people make so many mistakes, in their lives and in the market, and how liberalism misunderstands human nature.
Wow. David Brooks delivered a sermon that was more religious than many of the ones I listened to as a child in a protestant church. For anyone who doesn't think that secular Liberalism has become a religion for many, simply direct them to this talk. It reminded me of John Gray's review of Steven Pinker's latest book, which he called "a feeble sermon for rattled liberals." Although to be fair, I thought that Brooks gave a decent sermon.
He's quite didactic, apparently claiming an authority that he blindly, narcissistically, doesn't realize his audience has not granted him.
I agree. This is a religious sermon in the praise of god named Liberalism.
I agree that Brooks's talk doesn't address Deneen's arguments. It's a flowery, impassioned defense of ... something, not sure exactly what. Maybe just a way of life that he's enjoyed, that's been good to him. It certainly isn't a defense of Liberalism as defined by Deneen. Perhaps Brooks senses that Deneen's vision of a social order built on self-limitation and sacrifice would put an end to the easy living of people like him, a way of life for which others less fortunate have to pay the butcher's bill. At some level, he - a man who writes about morals - may simply be rationalizing the transgression of having divorced his wife of 30 years and married a much younger, more attractive woman.
Deneen is a genius and a good man
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49:25 "All good ideas became false when taken to the extremes". I would argue, if idea taken to it logical extreme became false, it is because it was bad idea all along.
Religion definitely won't go away but the impulse is being taken in negative ways. There is a religious devotion to breaking down any semblance of the traditions that once united us.
One has always to remember that Brooks is a journalist. His mind is filled with second-hand mental furniture. His thinking is a footnote, - it always ‘comes after’. His only talent is to quote really great thinkers, which isn't very difficult to do.
Brooks says that 'generation after generation have been willing to die' for the 'creed.' Though not so many from his particular 'tribe,' it would seem.
A friend suggested I read Deneens book. Before I did so I wanted to watch a few videos to get the gist of his book. I've watched several, and I still don't get it because he speaks in such abstract, academic terms that it's clear he is not accustomed to holding effective, clear dialogue with those of us not within the academic family. Consider, for example, this quote from this very conversation with Brooks: "...a drawing down on a set of resources, a kind of inheritance, that the political order itself, or the deepest set of Anthropological assumptions, could not itself replenish." (54:47) I have a high IQ and 2 graduate degrees --- I'm not stupid --- but this is so abstract and academic and narrowly esoteric that Deneen makes it impossible for a general audience to follow his logic. He's speaking to other PhD's who have narrowly focused on his area of study.
At the root of his argumentation is the premiss of liberalism and its axiom. Hi argument is that Liberalisms fundamental premiss about what a human is, is a false premiss and the cause of its doom. So he is in a way attacking this premiss of liberalism. And then he theoughout the book analyse society , USA, and argue how this false premiss of liberalism is the cause of different wrongs in society. My own criticism is he should write a followup with more evidens for his arguments. But its a book you should read, and if you dont get all of it you will get some of it. And thats a prosess of learning to. I did not get ALL, also because Im from Europe. We are also living under liberalism, but not the same way as USA. Especially whn it Comes to the economy. We got a very free market! But its Just a different cutlture. But I live in Scandinavian and I could recognize alot of what he talks about. Like how liberalism end up using the state and law expansion. I want to end by referencing a Norwegian conservative from the 1700: "where there is the most laws, there exists the most sins" it was his obersvation. So the use of laws we see today, being used as a form of supression technique. For instance, in Norway, in the name of liberalism the frontbearer in government is trying to implement a law. Which will suppress convertion therapy, but the definition of that practice is so distirted. That it will effect parents who tries to help their Child if it is suffering from gender dysphoria. At the same time, the same fovernment official is fighting for the right of the same Child to get hormoneblockers. That such a prime example I think. You should read his book, buy it or read it at the public library its only 230pages.
1:31:45 "Liberalism is deeply consistent with human nature". Due how new in human history and alien to almost all human society system liberalism is, I cannot see in this nothing more that statement of deep faith in liberalism. Can I add, dogmatic and blind faith?
I most align with Patrick Deneen. David Brooks make, as other in this comments points out, sermon in which ask for irreligious faith in human soul, to which approach I see no merit.
I think Deneen is fundamentally right and I think his work is very important. However, that Locke scholar really brought out some of the weaknesses of his position as espoused in Why Liberalism Failed. To argue that liberalism generates more inequality than traditional society teeters on absurdity. And this is a deep problem with conservative positions like Deneen's. How can you have traditional society and culture without fostering hatred and war? How can we work against liberalism without working against tolerance? This is a question I would very much like to know the answer to.
I think that's a good question. I presume that Deneen rhetorically avoids debating equality directly since it is a thorny issue. It seems that he instead takes to pointing out that the system which purports to be the most equal (liberalism) is failing to produce one of the the very things that gave it legitimacy in the first place. After having read his latest work, Regime Change, I gather that he believes there will always be inequality, and that equality should not be any polity's fundamental aim. The upper classes should be mixed with the lower classes as much as possible to produce an elite that sympathizes with the larger population and strives to seek their interest. So instead of resentment, this illiberal inequality would foster a sense of familial kinship. Tolerance would be limited by the common good.
@@Scynthescizor Now that is the kind of reply you don't expect on KZhead. Thank you for that. That is a reasonable way to tackle the problem. I do hope that a sort of noblesse oblige would be fostered in the aristocracy in a post-liberal inequality just as it sometimes was in pre-liberal inequality. But I guess I have the deeper worry that the value of tolerance would be lost. Perhaps it should be lost along with (faux) equality. But I can't bring myself to think so. Can we tell a similar story a la Regime Change about tolerance? Is intolerance inescapable, and is there some healthier, illiberal intolerance too? I don't know. I can't bring myself to say that liberalism has failed with respect to tolerance. I continue to believe in it, and to believe in it in its liberal form.
@@clenchedfist17 I think the problem with liberal tolerance is that at a certain point, it becomes incoherent. We cannot coherently tolerate two fundamentally incompatible worldviews. For example, can we tolerate both the Nazi and the bolshevik? Another example from modern politics is "can we tolerate both those who believe that men and women have different natures, and those who deny this?" The answer on both the progressive left and conservative right is increasingly "no." Both sides find the views of their opponents morally repugnant and dangerous for the social order, rightly stamped out. The liberal position here is to aim at some Frankenstein's monster of pluralism, whereby the nation hobbles along without any consensus on fundamental questions relating to the purpose of the human person and the social order. The more fundamental and incompatible the views, the more the brain is hollowed out when trying to accommodate them all. What is a body when there is no brain left?
Well at least Brooks finally outed himself as a liberal, not that it wasn't obvious before.
Serious question, What does david brooks actually contribute? Is he supposed to be some semi comedian, or 'worldly' intermediary?
David Brooks is out of touch in today's political climate under President Trump. This has been evident with Shields and Brooks on PBS. Both are like peas in a pod. Brooks is mostly like minded with Shields in disseminating political issues. In other words, Brooks is so confounded by Trump that he leaves little to nothing in a point/counterpoint process. But, when another pundit is filling in for David Brooks, you better believe Mark Shields is back on his heels defending his side of the issues. PBS would do well to replace Brooks with a pundit who has backbone because frankly, Brooks looks like a deer in the headlights ever since Trump was elected President.