David Brooks on Mental Health

Let’s see. David Brooks has written a new book about being human, or some such. And he considers himself something of an authority on mental health issues. It’s good to work for the New York Times. You receive daily infusions of hybris-- that is of arrogance-- and pretend to be an expert about subjects you know nothing about.

Anyway, when it comes to staying sane in brutalizing times, the answer that comes to mind immediately is-- don’t waste your time reading David Brooks.

To answer the question that has just popped into your mind-- I read the column in order to spare you the indignity of reading. You should feel grateful. 

Brooks is slightly torqued over the fact that we live in a brutalizing time. He has little to say about the brutality that Hamas just visited on Israeli Jews. When he does allude to it, he unsubtly compares Hamas to Donald Trump.

Clearly, there is more to the media and even more to everyday life than mass savagery. Besides, the mass savagery perpetrated by Hamas has not been shown on the media.

Brooks prefers to limit his reflections to Americans, who might well be up in arms about each other, metaphorically, but who are certainly not behaving like Hamas terrorists. 

We’re living in a brutalizing time: Scenes of mass savagery pervade the media. Americans have become vicious toward one another amid our disagreements. Everywhere I go, people are coping with an avalanche of negative emotions: shock, pain, contempt, anger, anxiety, fear.

Perhaps Brooks should choose his friends better. If he had an elementary knowledge of therapy he would know that one of the most recent advances in the field has declared that people do better by being optimistic.

Associated with Martin Seligman, the field of happiness studies tries to enhance positive emotions. Otherwise, according to cognitive therapy, it emphasizes the virtue of balanced judgment. 

After saying that we are consumed by negative emotions, Brooks goes on to say that we Americans have much to be thankful for. Good point. Worth emphasizing.

The first thing to say is that we in America are the lucky ones. We’re not crouching in a cellar waiting for the next bomb to drop. We’re not currently the targets of terrorists who massacre families in their homes. We should still start every day with gratitude for the blessings we enjoy.

From there the splendidly unqualified Brooks offers his views about how you can stay mentally healthy and spiritually whole. As one might expect, this is vapid.

His first piece of advice is to see life as a Greek tragedy. As though Freud had not been there first. Yet, whereas Freud emphasized the tragedy to end all tragedies, that of Oedipus, Brooks chooses a tragedy by Euripides, one that no one has heard of.

Since you, as opposed to David Brooks, have read Aristotle, you know that tragic heroes are not role models. They are people who occupy a societal summit but who are brought down by arrogance, the Greek hubris.

When Aristotle explained that tragedies produce a catharsis he meant that the spectator first feels terrified at the chance that he might be just like the tragic hero, but that he eventually feels a relief when he recognizes that he is not a fictional character. Thus, terror is followed by pity. 

Too much self-esteem, too much arrogance, being full of oneself-- it destroys you. In truth, the tragic hero’s hybris shows him to be so full of himself that he detaches from reality. It is not about what Brooks calls the dark realities of life, but about a leader who becomes too full of himself.

You can try to avoid thinking about the dark realities of life and naïvely wish that bad things won’t happen. Or you can confront these realities and develop a tragic mentality to help you thrive among them. 

Perhaps Brooks has never read a tragedy, but tragic heroes do not thrive. They fall. They are destroyed. 

So, how badly does Brooks misunderstand tragedy? First, he says that tragedy teaches humility. In a sense this is true. In truth, tragedy shows what happens to leaders who lack humility. As for teaching you about the rigors of life, as Brooks has it, that is simply idiotic. Oedipus was not dealing with the rigors of life. He was dealing with a curse put on his father.

This tragic sensibility prepares you for the rigors of life in concrete ways. First, it teaches a sense of humility. The tragedies that populated Greek stages sent the message that our accomplishments were tenuous. They remind us that it’s easy to become proud and conceited in moments of peace. We begin to exaggerate our ability to control our own destinies. We begin to assume that the so-called justice of our cause guarantees our success. Humility is not thinking lowly of yourself; it’s an accurate perception of yourself. It is the ability to cast aside illusions and vanities and see life as it really is.

It’s really about the consequences of being too full of yourself, like Brooks thinking that he should be giving advice about how best to live one’s life.

Next, Brooks suggests, like many other measly cowards at the Times, that a tragic sensibility encourages prudence. Naturally, Brooks applies this to the Israeli invasion of Gaza, something that he considers imprudent and incautious.

All of these mental contortions to say that Israel should cease fire and allow Hamas to go unpunished. 

Second, the tragic sensibility nurtures a prudent approach to life. It encourages people to focus on the downsides of their actions and work to head them off.…

Third, this tragic mentality encourages caution. … So be careful of rushing headlong into maximalist action, convinced of your own righteousness. Be incremental and patient and steady. This is advice I wish the Israelis would heed as they wage war on Hamas.

Dare we mention that Brooks knows nothing about military strategy. 

And then, Brooks suggests that people should not act out of rage. He correctly applies this to the leaders of Hamas, who are consumed by rage. He does not apply it to the Jew haters who have been marching in Western streets these days.

The lesson is that rage might feel luxurious because it makes you convinced of your own rightness, but ultimately, it blinds you and turns you into a hate-filled monster. This is advice I wish the hard left would heed, the people who are so consumed by their self-righteous fury that they become cruel — desensitized to the suffering of Israelis, because Israelis are the bad guys in their simple ideological fables.

There is more to it than the simple insensitivity. Is he prescribing warm baths of empathy? 

But then, Brooks compares the Hamas rage to the rage expressed by one Donald Trump. It is an appalling analogy, especially when applied to our first Jewish president.

Analogies are dangerous, especially in mini-minds like that of David Brooks. He should have had something to say about the effort to downplay the Hamas atrocities by balancing them against Israeli or Trumpian atrocities. Whatever you think of Trump’s authoritarian instincts, the truth of the matter is that the October 7 horrors did not take place during the rule of Donald Trump.

Over time, I’d add, rage hardens and corrodes the mind of its bearer. It hardens into the sort of cold, amoral, nihilistic attitude that we see in Donald Trump and in many others who inhabit what the political sociologist Larry Diamond has called the “authoritarian zeitgeist.” This attitude says: The enemy is out to destroy us. The ends justify the means. Savagery is necessary. The only thing we worship is power.

Then, Brooks seems to imagine that reality causes us to find our common humanity. This is worthy of a high school student. Especially to a high school girl who is awash in empathy. On the battlefield or in the marketplace, empathy will get you killed.

Fifth, tragedies thrust the harsh realities of individual suffering in our faces, and in them we find our common humanity…. 

It teaches us to be empathetic to all those who suffer, not just those on our own side.

He opts for girl talk, and for compassion. Do you think that Eisenhower’s armies were compassionate? Did the British and the Russians show compassion when they fire bombed Dresden? Why is Israel being held to standards that are not applied to anyone else?

Nothing is quite as meaningless as the appeal to common humanity? Were the Hamas terrorists not human beings? Why do we not feel their feelings?

From this sort of work, we learn to have a contempt for sadism, for anything that dehumanizes, and to have compassion for the everyday people who pay the price for the designs of proud and evil men. That compassion is the noble flame that keeps humanity alive, even in times of war and barbarism. That compassion recognizes the infinite dignity of each human soul.

Keep in mind that many of those people are proud of their countries and are happy to fight to defend their countries. Evidently, this is beyond Brooks’ ken.

So, Brooks continues his paean to feminine virtues, the kind that will surely cause you to cower away from a fight. He says that one must lead with love.

Now I turn to a different mentality, a mentality that emerged among the great Abrahamic faiths, and in their sacred city, Jerusalem. This mentality celebrates an audacious act: the act of leading with love in harsh times….

That means adopting a certain posture toward the world. If you look at others with the eyes of fear and judgment, you will find flaws and menace; but if you look out with a respectful attitude, you’ll often find imperfect people enmeshed in uncertainty, doing the best they can.

And, because his readers count among the most gullible of souls, he trots out the example of a young woman who, during the Nazi era, became kinder and gentler:

But as the Nazi occupation lasted and the horrors of the Holocaust mounted, she became more generous, kind, warm and ultimately heroic toward those who were being sent off to the death camps. 

There she cared for the ill, tended to those confined to the punishment barracks and became known in the camp for her sparkling compassion, her selfless love. Her biographer wrote that “it was her practice of paying deep attention which transformed her.” It was her ability to really observe others — their anxieties, their cares and their attachments — that enabled her to enter into their lives and serve them.

Keep in mind, the armies that defeated the Wehrmacht were not suffused to the warmth of human kindness. As they were bombing Nazi installations, even at the risk of killing civilians, they did not feel the milk of human compassion.

In war victory does not go to the squeamish.

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