This is a type of sophomoric libertarian critique that’s fallen out over the last dozen years because it obviously doesn’t work as an alternative source of social organization, at least not a desirable one, and younger generations don’t care.
Of course every state is coercive. That doesn’t make a dysfunctional state a basic compartmentalization of data a con or a grift, and it never meant that the state apparatus can just let the conscience of an individual run against it without consequences.
You can’t run a civilization without training people from the womb to restrain themselves for the sake of civilizing cultural norms. We need those norms. They are oppressive, by definition, but we need them. You’re (somewhat quietly but not really) implying that we don’t need them, or that in a free society, we would need different ones that pinch less.
I don’t think so. When you’re talking about big institutions, but when it doesn’t work in the ground. Another example of the same conditioning is learning to keep your mouth shut when talking to a person who just went through something like a bad breakup.
There’s a time and a place and a WAY to call someone out. Not understanding that is a consequence of an excessively permissive upbringing and it now codes as autist bullshit, because it’s so common. We should be doing better. Snowden didn’t, and now he’s an exile. I think he deserves it. He tried to play like Muhammad Ali refusing the draft and misjudged his moment.
I don’t think you want to see yourself as an easily labeled conservative, but this is what conservatives know and why they are conservative. Brooks is a conservative. This essay was written for a particular type of masculine rebel psychology that might be legitimate when they criticize a lot of things right now, but there’s also a lot of Civilization 101 stuff they want to be truth tellers about and they burn their own credibility when they just talk conspiracy instead of having a better way with greater appeal lined up.
Still a good essay, but it’s lost its place in time.
My opinion of Snowden is in the comment. Sure, he tried process, great. Why wouldn’t mid-level technical personnel be empowered to call out the government establishing foreign spy programs, monitoring their people, and violating basic privacy principles? I’m sure he seriously expected results from that.
Then he went public. Full media send, leaked docs, the works. Shockingly, the population of America, the same population that has already accepted their data being bought and sold by corporations years earlier, who accepted millions of cameras watching everything they do in every public space, didn’t revolt against its government spying on them and the world, and nothing happened. Off goes Snowden to Russia.
Snowden is Bradley Manning without the faggotry. He’s a stupid boy who wanted to be a hero and should have seen exactly that outcome coming from orbit. Maybe it’s possible to think the country is as legalistic as some basement dweller DMing a GURPS story he wrote himself, but it’s not smart.
That’s just it, though - Brooks isn’t a conservative, he’s a technocrat who wants to accomodate conservatives within the technocracy. (That’s why he can write for that temple of technocracy, the New York Times.) Thinking of family, church and employment as training centers for obedient citizens of the state is contrary to pretty much every version of American conservative political theory I know of.
The actual conservative view is that the family, the firm, the city, the nation and the church are each aimed at their own distinct ends; and if any of them is on top, it’s the church, because its end of saving souls necessarily touches on all the others. The evangelical and libertarian branches wouldn’t even grant that much; “the priesthood of all believers” means everyone is responsible for saving himself, with the church as just a guide, not an authority.
And the state? It’s just the agent of a nation, and if it’s betraying the nation (by, for example, promoting the goals of a caste of technocratic managers over the nation’s good) then the nation has the right to pull it down and replace it. The error in Brooks’ essay lies in him not considering that the “rings” might be in the wrong - a consideration that lies at the heart of American political theory, as it justified the Revolution.
This is a naive way to look at institutions. Whether secular government can supervene on religion has been a source of drama in history for as long as we’ve been recording it, but the basic point in the essay about necessity driving attachment and authority stands.
We’ve effectively settled the question: the people assented to material dependency on the government no later than social security and the New Deal, and the sidelining of religion in favor of a secular, economic social agenda is the core of the Enlightenment project that’s been going on for over three hundred years. Sure, institutions don’t fit into some neat matroyshka doll structure, it’s not that simple, but it’s also not controversial to say who’s winning those power games. How much evidence do we need? Did the Branch Davidian raid in Waco teach us nothing? Do the continually high divorce rate and continuously rising non-married rate just not register? Are we just not paying attention to the stripped down participation in religion and family?
The government has the role of managing conflict between individuals and other institutions, and the power of coercion. It’s not ideal, and they don’t usually flaunt it like the vast majority of other governments that make examples of challengers to power. It’s *distasteful *. But the nation-state is the highest practically recognized level of authority in our world. It will be all we can do to stop the catastrophe of a one world government as the Davos boys keep trying to build one.
If you’re running an organization, particularly an intelligence organization, you need reliable people. That’s an immediate managerial concern, not in itself a general social value.
Brooks does say “he’s right” and “Sometimes leakers have to leak. The information they possess is so grave that it demands they violate their oaths.”
Brooks does then go out on a limb with broad generalizations about how Snowden undermined trust in general, so broad that it almost reads as parody. But it was unlikely that Brooks would post an unqualified endorsement of leaking from the NSA.
Brooks published on June 10, 2013, a week after Snowden fled to Hong Kong and two weeks before he continued to Russia.
One of the great limitations that our hush-hush agencies (Snowden worked for two of them) labor under is that the task they've been given starting from the Cold War, fomenting regime change through civil unrest in nations unfriendly to the US, involves undermining the apparatus in those nations. That means the Americans who do that work have to understand the apparatus, to know how it works and what its limitations are, in order to weaken its grip on the population it was built to control. From there, it's a short mental hop to applying the same understanding to our own apparatus, and thus to weakening its grip on themselves as individuals. They can't truly submit once they've spent a career undermining the submission of large numbers of foreigners.
David Brooks wouldn't know that. He's spent his whole life inside our domestic apparatus and it's been very good to him, so it's not weird that he thinks the insubordinate have something wrong with them.
This is a type of sophomoric libertarian critique that’s fallen out over the last dozen years because it obviously doesn’t work as an alternative source of social organization, at least not a desirable one, and younger generations don’t care.
Of course every state is coercive. That doesn’t make a dysfunctional state a basic compartmentalization of data a con or a grift, and it never meant that the state apparatus can just let the conscience of an individual run against it without consequences.
You can’t run a civilization without training people from the womb to restrain themselves for the sake of civilizing cultural norms. We need those norms. They are oppressive, by definition, but we need them. You’re (somewhat quietly but not really) implying that we don’t need them, or that in a free society, we would need different ones that pinch less.
I don’t think so. When you’re talking about big institutions, but when it doesn’t work in the ground. Another example of the same conditioning is learning to keep your mouth shut when talking to a person who just went through something like a bad breakup.
There’s a time and a place and a WAY to call someone out. Not understanding that is a consequence of an excessively permissive upbringing and it now codes as autist bullshit, because it’s so common. We should be doing better. Snowden didn’t, and now he’s an exile. I think he deserves it. He tried to play like Muhammad Ali refusing the draft and misjudged his moment.
I don’t think you want to see yourself as an easily labeled conservative, but this is what conservatives know and why they are conservative. Brooks is a conservative. This essay was written for a particular type of masculine rebel psychology that might be legitimate when they criticize a lot of things right now, but there’s also a lot of Civilization 101 stuff they want to be truth tellers about and they burn their own credibility when they just talk conspiracy instead of having a better way with greater appeal lined up.
Still a good essay, but it’s lost its place in time.
So, lets get concrete. Put up: What’s your opinion of Snowden?
You do know he did try to use “channels” and “correct process” first, right?
My opinion of Snowden is in the comment. Sure, he tried process, great. Why wouldn’t mid-level technical personnel be empowered to call out the government establishing foreign spy programs, monitoring their people, and violating basic privacy principles? I’m sure he seriously expected results from that.
Then he went public. Full media send, leaked docs, the works. Shockingly, the population of America, the same population that has already accepted their data being bought and sold by corporations years earlier, who accepted millions of cameras watching everything they do in every public space, didn’t revolt against its government spying on them and the world, and nothing happened. Off goes Snowden to Russia.
Snowden is Bradley Manning without the faggotry. He’s a stupid boy who wanted to be a hero and should have seen exactly that outcome coming from orbit. Maybe it’s possible to think the country is as legalistic as some basement dweller DMing a GURPS story he wrote himself, but it’s not smart.
Continue.
That’s just it, though - Brooks isn’t a conservative, he’s a technocrat who wants to accomodate conservatives within the technocracy. (That’s why he can write for that temple of technocracy, the New York Times.) Thinking of family, church and employment as training centers for obedient citizens of the state is contrary to pretty much every version of American conservative political theory I know of.
The actual conservative view is that the family, the firm, the city, the nation and the church are each aimed at their own distinct ends; and if any of them is on top, it’s the church, because its end of saving souls necessarily touches on all the others. The evangelical and libertarian branches wouldn’t even grant that much; “the priesthood of all believers” means everyone is responsible for saving himself, with the church as just a guide, not an authority.
And the state? It’s just the agent of a nation, and if it’s betraying the nation (by, for example, promoting the goals of a caste of technocratic managers over the nation’s good) then the nation has the right to pull it down and replace it. The error in Brooks’ essay lies in him not considering that the “rings” might be in the wrong - a consideration that lies at the heart of American political theory, as it justified the Revolution.
This is a naive way to look at institutions. Whether secular government can supervene on religion has been a source of drama in history for as long as we’ve been recording it, but the basic point in the essay about necessity driving attachment and authority stands.
We’ve effectively settled the question: the people assented to material dependency on the government no later than social security and the New Deal, and the sidelining of religion in favor of a secular, economic social agenda is the core of the Enlightenment project that’s been going on for over three hundred years. Sure, institutions don’t fit into some neat matroyshka doll structure, it’s not that simple, but it’s also not controversial to say who’s winning those power games. How much evidence do we need? Did the Branch Davidian raid in Waco teach us nothing? Do the continually high divorce rate and continuously rising non-married rate just not register? Are we just not paying attention to the stripped down participation in religion and family?
The government has the role of managing conflict between individuals and other institutions, and the power of coercion. It’s not ideal, and they don’t usually flaunt it like the vast majority of other governments that make examples of challengers to power. It’s *distasteful *. But the nation-state is the highest practically recognized level of authority in our world. It will be all we can do to stop the catastrophe of a one world government as the Davos boys keep trying to build one.
If you’re running an organization, particularly an intelligence organization, you need reliable people. That’s an immediate managerial concern, not in itself a general social value.
Brooks does say “he’s right” and “Sometimes leakers have to leak. The information they possess is so grave that it demands they violate their oaths.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/11/opinion/brooks-the-solitary-leaker.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share
Brooks does then go out on a limb with broad generalizations about how Snowden undermined trust in general, so broad that it almost reads as parody. But it was unlikely that Brooks would post an unqualified endorsement of leaking from the NSA.
Brooks published on June 10, 2013, a week after Snowden fled to Hong Kong and two weeks before he continued to Russia.
The New Yorker reviewed only a day later:
https://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/david-brooks-and-the-mind-of-edward-snowden
https://www.pbssocal.org/shows/newshour/clip/shields-and-brooks-on-syria-snowden-and-surveillance-1378501370
Brookes revealed himself for who he really was, and he cannot walk it back.
One of the great limitations that our hush-hush agencies (Snowden worked for two of them) labor under is that the task they've been given starting from the Cold War, fomenting regime change through civil unrest in nations unfriendly to the US, involves undermining the apparatus in those nations. That means the Americans who do that work have to understand the apparatus, to know how it works and what its limitations are, in order to weaken its grip on the population it was built to control. From there, it's a short mental hop to applying the same understanding to our own apparatus, and thus to weakening its grip on themselves as individuals. They can't truly submit once they've spent a career undermining the submission of large numbers of foreigners.
David Brooks wouldn't know that. He's spent his whole life inside our domestic apparatus and it's been very good to him, so it's not weird that he thinks the insubordinate have something wrong with them.
I saw that phrase “gently gradated authoritative structures” and my mind instantly translated that as “the boy didn’t learn his place.”
Grotesque. Not even through the intro, and I’m pissed off.
You should read the article itself. Do it while looking at the smug look on his face in all his publicity photos. It’s even more enraging.