A Nation of Effete Intellectuals

Something is wrong with America. David Brooks suggests that we have lost: "the hardheaded practical mentality that built the nation's wealth in the first place." Link here.

Yet, when Brooks says that we, as a nation, have become too "genteel," I prefer to say that we have become too effete. We no longer want to make things; we are no longer capable of putting things together and repairing things; we no longer want to earn our way by the sweat of our brow. We all aspire to be intellectuals.

We expect to be rewarded for thinking, not doing. We are cultivating our aesthetic sensibilities, not our gardens.

Whether we overdosed on affluence or suffered the unfortunate influence of the counterculture, we as a nation became more effete. Worn out by overindulgence, we are depleted, exhausted, and decadent.

As Brooks explains: "America's brightest minds have been abandoning industry and technical enterprise in favor of more prestigious but less productive fields like law, finance, consulting, and nonprofit activism."

He adds: "But the value shifts are real. Up and down society, people are moving away from commercial, productive activities and toward pleasant, enlightened but less productive ones."

As I say, the value shift makes us all aspire to become effete intellectuals. I think that this was what Brooks was trying to say when he declared that we became too genteel.

Of course, genteel means polite and well mannered. Those are not terms that I would use to describe today's America. We are more likely to revel in our rudeness than to aspire to proper etiquette.

After all, we elected a president who is the very model of the modern effete intellectual.

The mayor of New York, a tycoon if ever there was one, has morphed into a schoolmarmish scold, lecturing the citizens of his city as though they were a bunch of errant schoolchildren.

And hedge fund billionaire George Soros has taken to calling himself a political philosopher.

People with wealth and power are not satisfied with their achievements; they do not want to keep managing things; they want to be effete intellectuals.

Hidden in Brooks' analysis is another irony. A nation that prefers mental to physical labor is suffering from a surfeit of condo and McMansion construction. We have a housing bubble because building became an end in itself, without any real connection to what people could afford.

The housing bubble fulfilled people's wishes and aspirations. It did not offer habitations that were commensurate with the value of their labor.

The housing bubble was not the apotheosis of the work ethic. It was self-indulgent to the point of decadence. It enacted an idea, a dream. You could even say that it was built on a field of dreams. The slogan that seemed to direct it must have been: "If you build it, he will come."

So they built it, and he didn't come.

When reality failed to respond follow everyone's dreams and ideals, the housing market collapsed and nearly destroyed the financial system.

Our effete intellectuals do not just avoid hard labor and the verdict of the marketplace. Many of them have also lost the will to fight.

What else could it mean when politicians routinely declare that we can win wars by occupying the moral high ground? Do they think that we can fight and win wars without breaking a sweat, without getting our hands dirty... by sending in a brigade of lawyers from the ACLU?

What else could it mean when politicians like Michael Bloomberg  intone that if an Islamic Culture Center is not built at Ground Zero the terrorists will have won.

Will have won what, exactly? By what twisted values did we come to believe that appeasement equals victory?

Brooks is somewhat optimistic about our ability to get through our current values problem, but he is not sure how it is going to happen.

The question is not too difficult to address. If, as Brooks suggests, the greatest advance in past centuries was the propagation of the free market principles that sustained the Industrial Revolution, then perhaps the free market is going to solve our problems.

Given the chance the free market will come riding to the rescue. The only thing is, it is not going to be a fun ride. The market will deal with our values deficit and with our misallocations of labor and capital "without fear or favor."

Case in point. Yesterday I read the story of a recent graduate of Fordham Law School, surely an excellent school, who had lost her job and was now hiring herself out to clean apartments. Link here.

Unfortunately, the market is not designed to fulfill your wishes or to enhance your self-esteem.