Thread by @TomLevenson

So, we may have reached peak @nytdavidbrooks. In another of his grand(iose) attempts at sweeping cultural pronouncements, he lists 5 crises we're facing now...and then decides that the critical one is the problem of social justice advocacy...1/

2/ Yup: He lists #COVID19; "a rapid education on the burdens African-Americans carry every day." (how is that a crisis?--ed.); political realignment as the public rejects Trump and his party (again-a crisis?); risk of economic depression, and, wait for it...

3/ "4th, a quasi-religion is seeking control of America’s cultural institutions. The acolytes of this quasi-religion, Social Justice, hew to a simplifying ideology: History is essentially a power struggle between groups, some of which R oppressors & others of which R oppressed...

4/...Viewpoints R not explorations of truth; they R weapons that dominant groups use to maintain their place in the power structure. Words can thus be a form of violence that has to be regulated."

Quoted in full for the gobsmackery of such cant, & 2 avoid cherrypicking charges.

5/ An aside: there's bad faith throughout the piece.*

E.g. We're losing on #COVID19 becoz "We just got tired so we’re giving up."

This is Brooks' goto move: denial of agency in any crap outcome 4 R leadership...

*If it weren't for bad faith, Brooks wld have no faith at all.

6/ There's no room in Brooks' analysis for, say, the impact of Trump, Pence & GOP govs. systematic & ongoing rejection of PHguidance, on failures around the country. Nah--it's the unnamed, amorphous "we" whodunnit.

Bluntly: this is flat out intellectual dishonesty.

7/ But back to his "quasi-religion." a) It still amazes me how those who tout the value of religion as a social and cultural force (more than, usually, as a personal belief system serving emotional and spiritual needs) still use the word as an insult for arguments they dislike...

8/ See how he demonizes the idea of social justice by capitalizing it, and presenting it as a priori false--that quasi-ness, and the pejorative modified "religion." No reasoning person could possibly see merit in the concept or goal of social justice...

9/Those who value, or want to think about social justice, are, according to the authoritative Brooks, "acolytes"--not scholars, students, analysts, activists, but blind dupes of a false god. Any insights gained aren't historical insights, but an ideology, and so on...

10/ And through it all, that anonymizing, agentless maneuver again. Brooks doesn't (and doesn't dare, and is too clever to) name names. He won't ID anyone who partakes of this religion. Because they'd eat his lunch--& his liver. (I'm thinking of several writers now. You can too.)

11/ And look at his objection: a reading of the historical record as power struggles between groups, those with power and those with less, or none. And inquiry that identifies how cultural power--words--are weapons in such struggles.

I mean, seriously. That's his complaint?

12/To make it personal. I write about the history of science and connections between the scientific enterprise of particular times and places to broader cultural and social life. I've been reading lately primary documents about skin color and the early Royal Society...

13/Those words matter; they're important to understanding how that particular society understood its place an a world its naval power was increasingly connecting.

No accident, that is, that this natural philosophizing was happening as the British slave trade was taking off...

14/ I guess that makes me an acolyte of a quasi religion. And here I thought I was doing what one is supposed to do in trying to understand the roots of social structures (good or bad) that may bear on our own times.

Silly me....

15/ IT gets worse. As noted above, Brooks, having touched on a national public health disaster, imminent economic misery, the collapse (may it be so!) of the Republican party, and the horrors of whites in the US having to confront the consequences of racism for Black Americans...

16/..concludes that the Robespierran terror of Social Justice faith folks is the real disaster. He helpfully tells his unnamed foes that worrying about language won't fix housing policy, e.g. But his real pt? The true crisis comes when a white man has to think before he speaks...

17/I've long felt that @nytdavidbrooks is the most meretricious of @nytopinion columnists, because he's so much better than, say, Bret Stephens, in masking the false timbers at the foundations of his arguments. I'm guessing Stephens will be gone in a year. Brooks is forever. /fin