No, nothing’s burning. Dave’s thinking again, and in his new book The Social Animal, he explains exactly what the rest of us should be doing with our lives, which is, basically, doin’ that Fifties thing. As Michael Agger tells it, as Dave tells it, we need to start listening to our unconscious. Back in the day, we thought that if we listened to our subconscious, well, we’d start killing our fathers and raping our mothers, but apparently Freud got it all wrong. According to Dave, “They [the unconscious parts of the mind] are not dark caverns of repressed sexual urges. Instead, the unconscious parts of the mind are most of the mind—where most of the decisions and many of the most impressive acts of thinking take place. These submerged processes are the seedbeds of accomplishment.”
The way Dave sees it, when we don’t let the submerged processes take over, well, we end up voting for Obama, hanging out in la-di-da ski lodges in Aspen, and, yes, sipping latte’s and cheating on our spouses—the whole nine yards—instead of believing in God and killing the heathen, the heathen being pretty much anyone who gives us crap.
Alexander Pope, limitless in his praise of the author of the Iliad, remarked that “Nature and Homer were, he found, the same.” David Brooks feels the same way about David Brooks.
Afterwords
Like me, Michael Agger isn’t too taken with Dave’s latest effusion, missing the “comic sociology” of Dave’s earlier effusions. Well, I don’t. Dave has the knack shared by Michael Lewis and Malcolm Gladwell of delighting yuppies by supplying them with self-deprecating wit that enhances their sense of self-worth. I can even laugh at myself! My virtue is without limit! In Dave’s world (and Mike’s and Malcolm’s), the people who are richer than we are always have worse taste, and the people who are poorer than we are, well, they have less money, which I think is how it should be. And so Dave and Mike and Malcolm make millions, while those of us who don’t know how to write books that people want to read can do naught but grind our teeth in silent rage, until our dentists are almost as rich as Dave.
