The Big Brain

Shorter David Brooks:

If you're an "18 year old kid with a really big brain," then you can qualify to do what I do! Studying "bobos" and "values voters by driving between counties in Maryland and Virginia.

The Big Brain pronounces:

Go into the field that barely exists: cultural geography. Study why and how people cluster, why certain national traits endure over centuries, why certain cultures embrace technology and economic growth and others resist them.

This is the line of inquiry that is now impolite to pursue. The gospel of multiculturalism preaches that all groups and cultures are equally wonderful. There are a certain number of close-minded thugs, especially on university campuses, who accuse anybody who asks intelligent questions about groups and enduring traits of being racist or sexist. The economists and scientists tend to assume that material factors drive history - resources and brain chemistry - because that's what they can measure and count.

Some would call that anthropology, I think, but then The Big Brain jumps from the study of traits that endure over centuries to like-minded modern extremists who forge a new identity. Which threatens him.

From Africa to Seattle, religiously orthodox students reject what they see as the amoral mainstream culture, and carve out defiant revival movements. From Rome to Oregon, antiglobalization types create their own subcultures.

The members of these and many other groups didn't inherit their identities. They took advantage of modernity, affluence and freedom to become practitioners of a do-it-yourself tribalism. They are part of a great reshuffling of identities, and the creation of new, often more rigid groupings. They have the zeal of converts.

I would probably argue, that in the case of Islamists, they imagine a very globalized caliphate, but I'll take his point. But "antiglobalization 'types'?" That seems a rather broad "group" in the context of a column on identity "reshuffling."

Whatever. But are we studying ancient cultures or 20th/21st centuries history and nationalist movements/religious identity politics?

Meanwhile, transnational dreams like European unification and Arab unity falter, and behavior patterns across nations diverge. For example, fertility rates between countries like the U.S. and Canada are diverging. Work habits between the U.S. and Europe are diverging. Global inequality widens as some nations with certain cultural traits prosper and others with other traits don't.

People like Max Weber, Edward Banfield, Samuel Huntington, Lawrence Harrison and Thomas Sowell have given us an inkling of how to think about this stuff, but for the most part, this is open ground. [emphasis c'est moi]

Let me get this straight. If I'm not mistaken, Brooks has described anthropology, sociology, political history, and a bunch of other fairly mainstream topics in the modern western university. Explain to me again, how these disciplines are now asking questions that are "impolite to discuss?" And who are these "close minded thugs" who will not allow a discussion of these topics? Sociology professors?

What Brooks really wants to say, is that someone with a "really big brain" (like him) could prove (like he most surely has) that his "values" are superior to those with different "values." And to liberals, as a group, who have none.