Over the next few months I’m hoping to write several columns on why modesty and moderation are superior to the spiraling purity movements we see today. It seems like a good time for assertive modesty to take a stand.
Of course, for Brooks to say this is dog-bites-man. When Paul Krugman says it, it will be news.
I remain extremely pessimistic about the political outlook.
I’d be happy if they just prohibited the leftist mob from wearing masks.
Paul Krugman likely already has said it; the problem is, he may consider Lenin to be more moderate than Mitt Romney.
These calls are meaningless absent a coherent and agreed upon definition of moderation. They just invite people from either side to chime in that *the real problem* is the other side going insane, while their side enjoys a monopoly on common sense.
But Brooks does explain what he means. He defines modesty as, “It means having the courage to understand that the world is too complicated to fit into one political belief system. It means understanding there are no easy answers or malevolent conspiracies that can explain the big political questions or the existential problems.” And presumably he means by moderate, a position that is posited from a position of modesty. So from from Brooks’ perspective, extremist views are over-confident and overly simplistic.
I don’t think moderation and intellectual humility are the same thing though. The former to some extent implies defaulting to the status quo, favoring only mild tinkering with it; but there’s nothing intellectually humble or modest about assuming the status quo in necessarily preferable to the alternative under consideration.
That’s what Mao said right before the Great Leap Forward.
Sorry, I see what you’re saying. I would say intellectual humility actually does suggest moderation . . . for the Chesterton’s Fence reason. There are a lot things we don’t intellectually understand about the status quo, which suggests intellectual humility, not just moderation. I’m not an IT person but I’ve read that every programmer wants to start from scratch . . . until he realizes how more complex the problem is than he first realized, and why the old system had to use so many kludges.
Moderation is like gun control: It’s a boon to those who don’t practice it.
Over the next few months I’m hoping to write several columns on why modesty and moderation are superior to the spiraling purity movements we see today. It seems like a good time for assertive modesty to take a stand.
In general that has been his theme since the end of the Bush administration to be honest so I not sure what he is doing differently. Actually I find his ideas fine but he comes extremely smug conservative who considers himself Head Bobo to the rest of the upper and middle classes!
Look at his ridiculed article, Inequality comes for signals of ethnic sandwich ingredients. Being on the lower end of the Bobo I rarely eat out and don’t shop Whole foods or Trader Joes so the article was a bad self projection on the reader.
Although he has great ideas, Tyler Cowen is almost as insufferable smug ‘conservative’ as Brooks.
Read the entire column. You will discover that Brooks agrees with Krugman more than you think, and the message is as anti-Trumpism as is warranted by any informed, thinking person. The “fanatics” being targeted are probably someone you know – very well.
Well, this is a guy who thought Barack Obama was conservative, so what can be expected.
One should note that this is part of Brooks’ shtick going way back in his career, though I’m not sure exactly when it started. He uses the word conservative to mean things he wants right-leaning people to support, whether or not they are conservative, while using some facially neutral term with positive cultural valence – the one he happens to be promoting as desirable at the moment – to mean, “conservative.”
I wouldn’t be surprised if he starts doing the same thing with “moderate” in this coming series.
I remember when ‘radical centrism’ was all the rage. ‘Moderation’ seems like a similar fad. Trouble is the typical isn’t a moderate or a centrist even if the median is.