Tuesday, March 23, 2004
(7:17 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Charting the Decline of the New York Times
This week's David Brooks column, entitled "One Nation, Enriched by Biblical Wisdom," starts off by making some points about the civil rights movement, in response to the Supreme Court's upcoming decision on the Pledge of Allegiance:
Chappell argues that the civil rights movement was not a political movement with a religious element. It was a religious movement with a political element.
If you believe that the separation of church and state means that people should not bring their religious values into politics, then, if Chappell is right, you have to say goodbye to the civil rights movement. It would not have succeeded as a secular force.
Who believes that? Who? Furthermore, who even thinks it's possible? And finally, since Brooks is bashing the naive liberal Northerners for their insufficient grasp of human nature and their ineffectiveness -- who actually, you know, passed the laws? It wasn't like Martin Luther King just prayed really hard and all the sudden blacks had the vote.
Now he broadens it:
Whether you believe in God or not, the Bible and commentaries on the Bible can be read as instructions about what human beings are like and how they are likely to behave. Moreover, this biblical wisdom is deeper and more accurate than the wisdom offered by the secular social sciences, which often treat human beings as soulless utility-maximizers, or as members of this or that demographic group or class.
Whether the topic is welfare, education, the regulation of biotechnology or even the war on terrorism, biblical wisdom may offer something that secular thinking does not — not pat answers, but a way to think about things.
Right, because some of the "pat answers" -- institutionalized forgiveness of debt, etc. -- would be pretty inconvenient. It's better to have some vague "values" that we can later "act out." And here's the final insult:
For example, it's been painful to watch thoroughly secularized Europeans try to grapple with Al Qaeda. The bombers declare, "You want life, and we want death"— a (fanatical) religious statement par excellence. But thoroughly secularized listeners lack the mental equipment to even begin to understand that statement. They struggle desperately to convert Al Qaeda into a political phenomenon: the bombers must be expressing some grievance. This is the path to permanent bewilderment.
Wait -- but didn't the civil rights movement itself call into question the tidy distinction between religious and political movements? And didn't the civil rights activists have some pretty definite, and overwhelmingly justified, grievances? Can't you write one column without shifting into "party hack mode"?
But he does redeem himself here:
The lesson I draw from all this is that prayer should not be permitted in public schools, but maybe theology should be mandatory. Students should be introduced to the prophets, to the Old and New Testaments, to the Koran, to a few of the commentators who argue about these texts.
From this perspective, what gets recited in the pledge is the least important issue before us. Understanding what the phrase "one nation under God" might mean — that's the important thing. That's not proselytizing; it's citizenship.
I actually agree with this in the abstract. The fact that he's putting the Koran on the syllabus makes me agree even more. The simple fact that he's putting primary texts of any kind on the syllabus warms my heart -- the thought of all the time I wasted reading bland, expensive, useless textbooks saddens me.
David Brooks isn't all bad, just like 95% bad.
