Brooks on Obama and the Left and Right

I am not super political, I am not a passionate Republican or Democrat, and I find the constant arguing and debating a bit sad and embarrassing.

There are things I really disagree with the President on, and things he has done I am really supportive of, and that was the same with our previous President too.

I know being a Christian, a Christian minister on top of that, people assume I would be a strong right wing conservative, well you know what happens when you assume...

David Brooks, op-ed writer for the NY Times hits this on the head.

In a sensible country, people would see Obama as a president trying to define a modern brand of moderate progressivism. In a sensible country, Obama would be able to clearly define this project without fear of offending the people he needs to get legislation passed. But we don’t live in that country. We live in a country in which many people live in information cocoons in which they only talk to members of their own party and read blogs of their own sect. They come away with perceptions fundamentally at odds with reality, fundamentally misunderstanding the man in the Oval Office.

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David Brooks on Our Self Congratulavie Culture

David Brooks is a columnist from the N.Y. Times. He is very insightful and witty as well. The excerpt below is from a column he wrote pertaining to how our country has gone from a humble and modest country to one full of ego driven, me-centric self worshipers.

I agree that the rise of the self-esteem "savior" has led to a generation and culture full of self lovers that are very vocal about it. However, I do not want to have a "good ole days" mentality. Brooks talks about the humble that came out of WWII, we also must remember that this humble nation had seperate schools for whites and blacks. We need to learn from the past, good and bad, that means taking of the rose colored glasses of our current era and past eras as well.

Here is an excerpt from the Column:

Today, immodesty is as ubiquitous as advertising, and for the same reasons. To scoop up just a few examples of self-indulgent expression from the past few days, there is Joe Wilson using the House floor as his own private “Crossfire”; there is Kanye West grabbing the microphone from Taylor Swift at the MTV Video Music Awards to give us his opinion that the wrong person won; there is Michael Jordan’s egomaniacal and self-indulgent Hall of Fame speech. Baseball and football games are now so routinely interrupted by self-celebration, you don’t even notice it anymore.

This isn’t the death of civilization. It’s just the culture in which we live. And from this vantage point, a display of mass modesty, like the kind represented on the V-J Day “Command Performance,” comes as something of a refreshing shock, a glimpse into another world. It’s funny how the nation’s mood was at its most humble when its actual achievements were at their most extraordinary.

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David Brooks on Sonia Sotomayor

New York Times Columnist has an interesting piece on what it took Sonia Sotomayor to now be on the verge of Supreme Court Confirmation.

It is also a look at her story while unique and inspiring is becoming more of a way of life for us all.

Here is an excerpt:

This isn’t the old story of a career woman trying to balance work and family. This is the story of pressures that affect men as well as women (men are just more likely to make fools of themselves in response, as the news of the last few years indicates). It’s the story of people in a meritocracy that gets more purified and competitive by the year, with the time demands growing more and more insistent.

These profiles give an authentic glimpse of a style of life that hasn’t yet been captured by a novel or a movie — the subtle blend of high-achiever successes, trade-offs and deep commitments to others. In the profiles, you see the intoxicating lure of work, which provides an organizing purpose and identity. You see the web of mentor-mentee relationships — the courtship between the young and the middle-aged, and then the tensions as the mentees break off on their own. You see the strains of a multicultural establishment, in which people try to preserve their ethnic heritage as they ascend into the ranks of the elite. You see the way people not only choose a profession, it chooses them. It changes them in a way they probably didn’t anticipate at first.

Click Here for Rest from New York Times

David Brooks: The End of Philosophy

David Brooks, columnist for the New York Times, sees a change in the way we look at philosophy and evolution due to the fact that we are moral creatures who have absolute right and wrongs.

The rise and now dominance of this emotional approach to morality is an epochal change. It challenges all sorts of traditions. It challenges the bookish way philosophy is conceived by most people. It challenges the Talmudic tradition, with its hyper-rational scrutiny of texts. It challenges the new atheists, who see themselves involved in a war of reason against faith and who have an unwarranted faith in the power of pure reason and in the purity of their own reasoning.

Finally, it should also challenge the very scientists who study morality. They’re good at explaining how people make judgments about harm and fairness, but they still struggle to explain the feelings of awe, transcendence, patriotism, joy and self-sacrifice, which are not ancillary to most people’s moral experiences, but central. The evolutionary approach also leads many scientists to neglect the concept of individual responsibility and makes it hard for them to appreciate that most people struggle toward goodness, not as a means, but as an end in itself.

Click here for more from his NY Times Column