“I am not going to Washington just to represent you. I am going there to make tough decisions, and yes, to compromise and reach across the aisle on a regular basis. So much of politics is local, and there is a lot of change that local people can make. I am going to the national level to work for the good of the country. This will almost certainly mean that I make votes and decisions that you will not like. They may even be unpopular in the country as a whole.

“Now, I do have things I believe in. Of course I do – if I didn’t, why would I be running for office? And we probably share most of those beliefs. And I will fight for my principles with every ounce of my energy, on the debating floor, in speeches and in those long committee meetings. But sometimes even my principles will lead me to come to agreements that you will not like. You want to vote for me because I’m an intelligent, reasonable, caring and wise individual, and I’d like to say because you sense I’m called to political leadership – which I believe I am. Now take that trust in me one more step, and let me get on with my work of not just being your representative, but a member of Congress which makes decisions that have a global impact. I am not trying to patronize you – I believe you are a reasonable human being who has thought through the issues. But your vote is ultimately one of trust that I will be making difficult decisions and contributing to the wider debate that goes beyond the campaign trail. I’m going to Washington to govern.”

David Brooks, signing my copy of On Paradise Drive in 2005

I was introduced to Brooks in my first semester at Covenant College where, in Dr. Green’s Christian Mind class, we read his excellent Atlantic Monthly article, “The Organization Kid.” It was a simultaneously bracing and humorous commentary on an undercurrent in American society that everyone knew was there but no one wanted to really talk about, or at least without equivocating: the misguided desire to create perfect adults out of perfect children in the incessant drive for material success and prestige.

I was hooked. I quickly began to take advantage of my dad’s Atlantic subscription and voraciously read his monthly column, plus my regular visits to Aunt Collyn’s allowed me to read his Weekly Standard articles – this was before the era of consuming all articles on the internet. I even tried to watch him every Friday night on PBS Newshour, if I had access to a TV, just to see what he had to say about that week in politics. It seemed there was no aspect of American society he couldn’t comment on, and comment on knowledgeably, with a healthy dose of wit.

In 2003 he came out with his first book, Bobos in Paradise, just in time for my parents to give it to me for my birthday. It quickly became one of my favorite books, and Brooks managed to turn “bobo” into a household word, even an answer to a Trivial Pursuit question. Bobo is short for bohemian-bourgeois – a new class of Americans, he argues, that try to meld conventional bourgeois values of upwardly mobile careers, polo shirts and middle-class sublimity with counter-cultural bohemian values of multiculturalism, organic food and ridiculously expensive eco-shower-heads. It was a brilliant read.

In 2004 I was doing an internship in Washington, D.C. and got to attend an invitation-only event where he was speaking at the White House. Not only did I get to meet my writing hero, but I even got my copy of Bobos signed and my picture taken. Exciting stuff for a college junior. Later that summer and onwards I went to different book signings, including ones for his second (not as successful, but still very good) book, On Paradise Drive, which told the story of future-focused life in the new American exurbs.

OK, by now you’re thinking: “When does Anna’s stalkerdom stop? Make it stop!” Don’t worry, it ended in 2005 – two years after Brooks began his full-time stint as columnist for the New York Times. I was surprised when he got that gig, but now it makes perfect sense. After all, he is labeled “every liberal’s favorite conservative.” And now, apparently, the White House phones him regularly to ask if they should be “worried.” That is how influential his column has become.

Six years and many columns later, he has finally come out with a much-anticipated new book: The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character and Achievement. This one is quite a departure from his previous two. What it loses in humor (and I was disappointed by the lack of this), it gains in the maturation of his social scientific understanding. His previous two books were works of “comic sociology” (his phrase), but this one is a culmination of all his reading into works of neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and the unconscious mind.

Quite heady stuff, and because of that I am not going to attempt an all-encompassing review of the book. Part of the problem is – and given my admiration of Brooks, I hesitate to write this – I am not entirely sure what the central point of the book is, except to say that modern science, economics and management principles are not sufficient in determining what causes and motivates human behavior. Less measurable things such as connection, relationships, culture, emotion and the human unconscious are just as, if not more, important. If that is all that politicians get out of this book (and apparently, “they” are reading it all over Westminster), then that can only be a good thing!

I did just want to pick up on a few elements in the book, and point out a few missing elements which others have picked up on as well.

Firstly, Brooks points out the lack of connection between material well-being and happiness, something that has been documented in many recent studies:

(p 196) Living standards in the United States have risen dramatically over the past fifty years. But this has produced no measurable uptick in happiness. On the other hand, the United States has become a much more unequal society. This inequality doesn’t seem to have reduced national happiness either, even among the poor.

Winning the lottery produces a short-term jolt of happiness, but the long-term effects are invisible. The happiness gain you get from moving from poor to middle class is greater than the gain you get moving from middle to upper class; the happiness curve flattens out…People who place tremendous emphasis on material well-being tend to be less happy than people who don’t.

So what is it that brings happiness? Brooks would argue that it’s a complex web of things which doesn’t exclude material well-being, but includes things such as secure human relationships, magnanimity, living with a purpose beyond self-service, and moral commitments. (Eat that, Ayn Rand.)

But what’s unique about Brooks’s argument is that he puts “emotion and unconscious intuition at the center of moral life, not reason.” Moral knowledge is not just about “manning up” and doing what’s right based on rationality and logic. Here he talks about rationalist v. intuitionist assumptions:

(p. 282) [The intuitionist account] stresses moral reflexes, alongside individual choice; it emphasizes the role perception plays in moral decision making, before logical deduction. In the intuitionist view, the primary struggle is not between reason and the passions. Instead, the crucial contest is within…the unconscious-mind sphere itself. This view starts with the observation that we all are born with deep selfish drives – a drive to take what we can, to magnify our status, to appear superior to others, to exercise power over others, to satisfy lusts. These drives warp perception…The unconscious has to first dehumanize the victim and change the way he is seen.”

Brooks is (possibly intentionally) borrowing from the Pauline and Augustinian doctrine of original sin when he uses the phrase “we are all born with deep selfish drives.” Brooks, perhaps because of his Jewish background, has no problem with the idea of human depravity. However, he believes it’s possible to overcome this drive by stepping outside of oneself for redemption – here he describes the protagonist Erica’s reaction to her one-night-stand affair, in a Jekyll-and-Hyde-like soliloquy:

(p. 293) In the weeks after, when she thought about the episode [of having the affair], she became newly aware that it really was possible to become a stranger to yourself, that you always have to be on the lookout, and to find some vantage point from which you can try to observe yourself from the outside. She told herself a story about herself. It was the story of drift and redemption – of a woman who’d slid off her path inadvertently and who needed anchors to connect her to what was true and admirable. She needed to change her life, to find a church, to find some community group and a cause, and above all, to improve her marriage, to tether herself to a set of moral commitments.”

Well, here we come to some of the things that are missing from this book. The book takes us through the entire lives of two fictional characters, Harold and Erica. They end up getting married, but they don’t have children, and they have very little interaction with organized religion. Lacking these two things, they live a lifestyle which is still in the minority in modern American society– maybe they would have fit better in France? Erica has some interaction with her extended family, but throughout the whole book the sense is that they have no real roots. They each pursue their individual dreams and their marriage suffers as a result. How is this “the happiest story you’ll ever read”? Maybe Brooks is trying to be ironic, showing that we don’t always act on what we know and believe to be true? I’m not sure. I found the narrative of these two people strange and prefer his old style of creating different characters for different scenarios (my favorite is the couple in On Paradise Drive who buy a grill from Home Depot – read it yourself for some real entertainment).

But this, while not unimportant, is a relatively minor gripe. The book is full of fascinating insights and ideas. One of the most intriguing concepts he writes about is “limerence”:

(p. 208) As we go through our days, the mind generates anticipatory patterns, based on the working models stored inside it. Often there’s tension between the inner models and the outer world. So we try to come up with concepts that will help us understand the world, or changes in behavior that will help us live in harmony with it. When we grasp some situation, or master some task, there’s a surge of pleasure. It’s not living in perpetual harmony that produces the surge. If that were so, we’d be happy living on the beach all our lives. It’s the moment when some tension is erased. So a happy life has its recurring set of rhythms: difficulty to harmony, difficult to harmony. And it is all propelled by the desire for limerence, the desire for the moment when the inner and outer patterns mesh…

(p. 213) The longing for limerence doesn’t automatically produce perfect romances or easy global harmony. We spend large parts of our lives trying to get others to accept our patterns – and trying to resist this sort of mental hegemony from others. On a broader scale, people don’t just connect; they compete to connect. We compete against one another to win the prestige and respect and attention that will help us bond with one another. We seek to surpass one another in earning one another’s approval. That’s the logic of our complicated game.

This is very true – we really do “compete to connect” with one another. I know I do. We want to be the best we can be in the eyes of other people, but to do that we not only have to be perceived as better than other people, we have to be perceived as better than the very person whose admiration we long for. This is an insidious form of depravity.

One can’t help but notice that the character of Harold is written from the perspective of David Brooks himself – I mean, he loves big ideas and works for a think tank. Harold’s dying thoughts at the end of the book are a sort of ode to the unconscious:

(p. 373) Harold tried and failed to see into the tangle of connections, the unconscious region, which he came to think of as the Big Shaggy. The only proper attitude toward this region was wonder, gratitude, awe, and humility. Some people think they are the dictators of their own life. Some believe the self is an inert wooden ship to be steered by a captain at the helm. But Harold had come to see that his conscious self – the voice in his head – was more a servant than a master. It emerged from the hidden kingdom and existed to nourish, edit, restrain, attend, refine, and deepen the soul within.

It’s almost scary to think that our conscious thoughts could be servants to our unconscious self, a self that seems so hidden to us. However, the research that has come out in the past few decades has shed some light on this part of our brains, and Brooks does a solid job of bringing it together into one very readable, if ambitious, book.

For those of you still reading, below is a great example of why I love David Brooks’s writing – a description of Harold’s high-school English teacher:

(p. 79) When Harold met her, she was in her late twenties and teaching English. She listened to Feist, Yael Naim, and the Arcade Fire. She read Dave Eggers and Jonathan Franzen. She was addicted to hand sanitizer and Diet Coke. She wore her hair too long and too natural, to show she wasn’t on the job interview/law associate career track. She loved scarves and wrote letters longhand…

Before long she became matchmaker. She decided it was her role in life to look deep into her students’ souls, diagnose their core longing, and then match that person with the piece of middlebrow literature that would uniquely change his life. She would stop her students in the hallway, and she would press a book into their hands, and with a trembling voice she would tell him, “You are not alone!”

It had never occurred to many of these kids that they were alone. But Ms. Taylor, perhaps overgeneralizing from her own life, assumed that behind every cheerleader, behind every band member, behind every merit scholar there was a life of quiet desperation.

And so she offered books as salvation. She saw books as a way to escape isolation and feel communion with Those Who Feel. “This book saved my life,” she would tell her students, one by one, in hushed whispers after class. She would invite them into the church of those who are redeemed by high-school reading lists.

Lovely.

Generous Justice: How God’s grace makes us just

New York pastor Tim Keller tries to address a wide range of audiences in his latest book, Generous Justice - suspicious orthodox Christians, passionate younger evangelicals, agnostics. To all he tries to make the case that the Bible is devoted to promoting justice and therefore is a key part of the Christian faith.

At points in the book Keller is too ambitious in trying to address all the concerns of these audiences. But upon finishing the book it would be hard for any reader to not be convinced of God’s concern for the poor as laid out in the Bible, and his commands for his followers to live Christ-like, sacrificial lives for those less fortunate.

Think: The life of the mind and the love of God

In Think John Piper sets out to “help Christians think about thinking”.  Piper successfully ties together thinking earnestly about God and treasuring and loving him, arguing that the mind and the heart are inextricably linked when it comes to worship, studying the Bible and how we treat others.

However, Piper has a tendency throughout the book to get caught up in stale agendas and arguments to combat what he sees as the rise of relativism both within Christianity and society in general. He thus devotes two entire chapters to the subject of relativism, which could have been better used to write positively about the rise of scholarship within the Christian community in the past few decades.

Next up: A more thorough review of Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy by Eric Metaxas.

Let me unpack that a little bit. Marilynne Robinson is already known for her outstanding achievement in writing sensitively from a man’s perspective in her novel Gilead. So perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise that she grapples with the heady issues surrounding philosophy, science, Darwinism, modernism, culture and Calvinism with verve and wit in The Death of Adam. Sayers was one of the Inklings, a group of men (save Sayers),  including Lewis and Tolkien, writing in the mid-20th century who met regularly to discuss literature. Sayers writes with authority on matters regarding the church’s move away from sound doctrine and society’s devaluing of good work, among other things. Of course, both Robinson and Sayers are known well for their fiction writing which is top-notch, but in their non-fiction writing they are not afraid to move beyond the expected “women’s issues” that so many Christian female (and also feminist!) writers feel they must write about. They also aren’t afraid to address the traditionally male areas of philosophy and science. And I am so grateful they weren’t, because we can inherit both their example and their work as a result.

Kristof, in his New York Times columns, has long been known for upholding the cause of women in the developing world. He takes it to a new level in Half the Sky, a vibrant, hopeful book which makes the case that the best way to lift the 2/3 world out of poverty is to help and educate women. In light of this, he is very careful to point out that he doesn’t think this is a “women’s issue” but in fact a general human rights issue that affects everyone, women and men. It is refreshing to read a book by a man that is so dignifying to women, and I credit him for it. In the process, however, he doesn’t bash men or preach at them, barking at them to take more responsibility, but makes his cause one in which everyone has a role to play, and points to both male and female heroes in his story. 

I would urge you to read all of these authors, not just because they are excellent writers, but because they are challenging the stereotypes of what women and men are “supposed” to write about. They show that anyone can be part of any conversation that society is having, as long as they have something worthwhile to say.

(For those of you who think that I am going a little heavy on the non-fiction, don’t worry, I’ve been reading plenty of fiction as well.)

On day 2 of Ragbrai. Love this pic.

Belz family reunion at Cono, July 2010

Now I’m no economist, and I hesitate to make sweeping statements about what works best for a national economy, particularly in a recession. But I’ve been thinking a lot about what a Christian approach to equality should be. Let’s first consider the model of Jesus: “who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness.” (Philippians 2:6-7)

This seems to me to be a model of radical inequality. Christ made himself unequal to God so that we could become children of God. And because of this God exalted Christ to the highest place and he will one day return to earth to rule forever. What a grand example of humility and submission that we should emulate, and indeed Paul exhorts us to do so.

Christians often call for equality and fairness in society, whether it is to protect the rights of Christians or to uphold the cause of the disadvantaged and marginalized, both noble goals. But the question is, do we love our  neighbor? If we are rich, do we give generously, beyond what is “fair”? If we are poor, like the woman with her last coin in Jesus’s parable, do we use what little we have for the kingdom of God? I’ve not often come in direct contact with poverty in the UK, but I have done a few service projects for people living on the dole. Each flat I’ve visited to do painting or gardening has been bigger and more spacious than the one I currently live in. In each case it was very easy for me to build a grudge against the people I was helping, as if somehow just because I live in a smaller flat I shouldn’t “qualify” to help these people! As if “fairness” should even come into the equation. What we were doing was loving our neighbors, regardless of circumstances. One woman we helped was a widow and an African immigrant, which automatically makes her at a disadvantage in Western society. Yet she was one of the most generous people I’ve met here in London, keeping us hydrated with bottles of water and feeding us a big lunch during the day we spent with her.

When it comes to poverty in the UK, I don’t think the African widow who is trying to build a life here, or the Polish woman who works day and night in the laundromat just to support her family, should be in the same category as the unemployed person who spends their weekly government allowance on lottery tickets and junk food. While there are systemic issues here that obviously need to be addressed, personal responsibility should also be taken into account. But what about instead of seeing the poor as mere recipients of other people’s help, we saw them as contributors to society, just like everyone else? What if true “fairness” means that everyone loves their neighbor, regardless of circumstances? What if we measured equality not by how much each person “gets” but by how much each person gives? This is radical stuff, but it is worth thinking about how we as Christians should model Jesus in going beyond what society expects, and not settling for simple equality.

But there are certain elements that would always constitute a perfect day for me, regardless of my age or change in tastes. And I think yesterday included most, if not all, of those elements.

1. Good food: It was my turn to cook last night so I grilled some lamb chops with a little garlic, rosemary and olive oil, and served them with couscous mixed with red onions, green olives, and basil, with green beans on the side. We washed it down with an excellent Australian shiraz and the result was an immensely satisfying meal.

2. Good music: I’d been introduced to the local band Flight Brigade this week after being invited to go to their gig at the Half Moon Putney on March 20th, so I checked them out on myspace and enjoyed what I heard. Looking forward to hearing them live. Incidentally, the Half Moon in its day has hosted The Rolling Stones and Natasha Bedingfield, among others. Bodes well for these guys.

3. Talking with family: Other than getting to spend most of the day with my husband, I also got to talk over Skype with my sisters. Keeping in touch with my family back in the U.S. is an important part of every day, so of course it would have to be included in my perfect day. And of course spending quality time with my husband is essential.

4. A good dose of exercise: Of course sledding would be the ideal form of exercise in my perfect day. Walking up those hills burns a lot of calories, and then you get the fun of flying down them. But in lieu of that, I did an exercise DVD at a friend’s house. OK, it was indoors, but at least it got me movin’.

5. Good entertainment: Yesterday I was catching up on some Olympics action that I’d missed during the week. I absolutely love BBC iPlayer and it has been my lifeline for staying on top of all that’s happening in Vancouver. And when it comes down to it, there’s not much that’s more entertaining than sports.

6. Spending time with friends: After dinner was over last night I went over to my friend’s house to hang out and watch a DVD with her and another girl. She’s going to North America for four months during the summer so we went through her itinerary and I gave her some helpful pointers.

7. Something a little…unusual: OK, so this was a planned unusual thing, but it’s something that happens very rarely so it was special. I booked our tickets to travel to America in the summer and it was amazing how much it brightened up my day. The perfect day always has to include the anticipation of something exciting happening in the future.

8. A good night’s sleep: I don’t think I need to point out why this is essential. Thankfully last night I slept like a rock until the morning, perhaps because my day was perfect?

So what’s your perfect day?