David Brooks, the short version : Let's go back to the Leave It To Beaver fifties!. David Brooks, the long version (via Ezra Klein) :
the interplay between technology and hook-ups will be familiar to a wide swath of young Americans. It illustrates an interesting roadblock in the country’s social evolution.
Once upon a time — in what we might think of as the “Happy Days” era — courtship was governed by a set of guardrails. Potential partners generally met within the context of larger social institutions: neighborhoods, schools, workplaces and families. There were certain accepted social scripts. The purpose of these scripts — dating, going steady, delaying sex — was to guide young people on the path from short-term desire to long-term commitment.
Over the past few decades, these social scripts became obsolete. They didn’t fit the post-feminist era. So the search was on for more enlightened courtship rules. You would expect a dynamic society to come up with appropriate scripts. But technology has made this extremely difficult. Etiquette is all about obstacles and restraint. But technology, especially cellphone and texting technology, dissolves obstacles. Suitors now contact each other in an instantaneous, frictionless sphere separated from larger social institutions and commitments.
People are thus thrown back on themselves. They are free agents in a competitive arena marked by ambiguous relationships. Social life comes to resemble economics, with people enmeshed in blizzards of supply and demand signals amidst a universe of potential partners.
All of this might seem true to Brooks--after all he's probably at least twice my age (and I am on the old and Luddite side of this revolution). The truth, though, is that it simply isn't true that courtship (for lack of a better word) is "frictionless" and "without obstacles and restraint," or, for that matter, "etiquette."
Go, go gadget Ta-Nehisi Coates! (writing at The Atlantic) :
Do people mostly meet through texting today? Are schools, friends and work largely irrelevant? Is it true that there are no social scripts for young people? Or is Brooks merely unfamiliar with them? Did people not meet at jazz clubs back in the 50s, at the Drifters show, or at the beach? And taking Brooks' point, has the actual essence of dating changed that much? Are young people better or worse of for it?
[...]
This is a theme residing in the conservative soul--a professed, thinly-reasoned skepticism of the fucked-up now, contrasted against a blind, unquestioning acceptance of the hypermoral past. This is a human idea--most people, like those slaves, believe some point in the past was better. And indeed, in some case [sic] the past was demonstrably better. But the writer who would argue such has to prove it. He can't just accept his innate hunch. He has to bumrush and beat down his theories of the world, And should they emerge unbroken, that writer might have something to tell us. It's got to be more than justifying your prejudice. It's got to be more than those meddling kids.
That last part, I think, is the most disturbing--and revealing--part of Brooks. That is : I'm not surprised that Brooks doesn't get "the young people," and not, frankly, that upset that he doesn't. I am however, if not surprised, disturbed to see the myth of the "hypermoral" 50s so alive and well.
Was the world really better then? Was it good that the womenfolk stayed in the kitchen? That, I think, is the crux of Brooks's nostalgia : he longs for the malt shop and the subservience and separate, segregated gender spheres.
I might be too hard on Brooks. Nostalgia is a hard thing to break, and its possible that one's local moral judgment (young people text too much, and, thus, golly, what's up with feminism?) can be at odds with one's global moral judgment (I have nothing against "independent" women). But, if this the case, Brooks might do well to resolve that dissonance before he writes a column in the damn Times.
For my money, David's just been watching too much Mad Men. Zing!
On a completely unrelated note, keep scrolling, because Marc's second column ("An Episodic Life") is up.
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