David Brooks Has Fallen Off My Pedestal

We all have our role models. David Brooks was mine. No, I’ve never met the man, but I listen to him every Friday evening on PBS’ The News Hour. I’ve been listening to him for decades.

What I have always admired is Brooks’ ability to look at an issue and come to a balanced, reasoned, pragmatic position. His positions never involve emotions and hysterics, characteristics so common today in American politics. Whereas the “liberal” in the other chair of “Brooks and _____” will always take the progressive position on any issue, you can never be certain where Brooks will come down. He will often surprise you with a nuanced, middle-of-the-road position. That is how I look at the world. I guess that is why I admire him.

One News Hour segment has stuck with me for years. Brooks was discussing what he believes to be a crisis of masculinity in our country. Men do not know how to be men anymore. Young men, in particular, have no sense of purpose and direction; they lack self confidence; and that is why they get involved in so much silliness: drugs, crime, bad relationships, etc..

“That is really insightful”, I thought to myself. “If only we had more David Brooks in this country! If only we had more emotionally stable, university educated, men who have learned to analyze a complex situation and come to a reasoned, pragmatic solution.”

But my neatly ordered world revolving around David Brooks imploded recently.

I recently discovered the following about him, summarized here in The New Yorker:

In 2013, the Times columnist David Brooks, then in his early fifties, divorced his wife of twenty-seven years, Sarah, and moved into an apartment in Washington, D.C. The personal crisis that ensued overlapped with a spiritual one. He was writing a book called “The Road to Character,” offering guidance, through biographical case studies, for how a person might engage in moral self-improvement, and two of the chapters made examples of Christian lives: St. Augustine’s and Dorothy Day’s. His correspondence with a young research assistant [she became his research assistant; helping with his book; she is 23 years younger than Brooks] , a Christian woman named Anne Snyder, grew intense. Brooks was a practicing Jew, if one on the downslope of belief—his wife had converted and then become more Orthodox than he—and Snyder, in elegant memos and correspondence, worked to persuade him that his account of Day’s sense of Christian grace missed the sublime core. “The foundational fact,” Snyder reminded Brooks, “is you cannot earn your way into a state of grace—this denies grace’s power, and subverts its very definition.” For Brooks, this carried the clarity of revelation, and soon he let it be known, among his acquaintances, that he was experiencing religious curiosity. An informal competition opened for David Brooks’s soul. He received, by his own estimation, three hundred gifts of spiritual books, “only one hundred of which were different copies of C. S. Lewis’s ‘Mere Christianity.’ ”

One morning, passing through Penn Station at rush hour, Brooks was overcome by the feeling that he was moving in a sea of souls—not the hair and legs and sneakers but the moral part. “It was like suddenly everything was illuminated, and I became aware of an infinite depth on each of these thousands of people. They were living souls,” Brooks writes in his new book, “The Second Mountain.” “Suddenly it seemed like the most vivid part of reality was this: Souls waking up in the morning. Souls riding the train to work. Souls yearning for goodness. Souls wounded by earlier traumas. With that came a feeling that I was connected by radio waves to all of them—some underlying soul of which we were all a piece.” Brooks’s spiritual momentum was quickening. While attending the Aspen Ideas Festival, he hiked to the edge of American Lake, pulled out a book of Puritan prayers, and had a transcendent experience buttressed by the appearance of a “little brown creature who looked like a badger.” He eventually realized that he was in love with Snyder and confessed his love to her. (Eventually, they married; this, presumably, is what Alexander Portnoy’s parents so feared.) In the last third of the book, Brooks describes an interesting and irregular progress toward New Testament ideals, and, by the end, he sounds like a Christian, even if he isn’t quite ready to describe himself as one.

Gary: Now, I am not judging Brooks. Divorcing your long-time spouse in your 50’s is his business, not mine. Marrying a woman who is 23 years your junior (as long as she is at least 18) is his business, not mine. Converting from Judaism to Christianity? I could care less. And, admitting that some of your articles in your opinion column in the New York Times were really love letters to your 23 years-younger love interest is…juvenile but none of my business. But from a guy who has spent years teaching and “preaching” that American men should be more mature and reasoned, I am disappointed.

And look at the reasons why Brooks is converting from Judaism to (evangelical) Christianity. Do you see any discussion about a reasoned, pragmatic analysis of historical evidence? Nope. Brooks had two transcendental (emotional) experiences: in a train station and at a lake (with a badger). That’s it. Good grief. So much for reason and pragmatism. My role model has fallen off my pedestal.

I will bet good money that if you look at the conversion experience of most people, even highly intelligent, educated people (like Brooks, Francis Collins, etc.) they were based on emotions and not objective evidence. The supernatural and the promise of eternal life is very, very alluring (in particular to people having a mid-life crisis, it seems).

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End of post.