Here's to hope

Brooks on Americans' erstwhile need "to be conversant in philosophy, theology and the great political events of the wider world": 

Magazines like Harper’s, Saturday Review, Time and Newsweek arose to satisfy this tide of cultural aspiration. For decades, Time and Newsweek devoted more space to opera and art and theology than to Hollywood or health. You may never have visited New York City, but to be a respectable figure in your town in Wisconsin or Arizona, it was helpful to know what operas were playing or what people were reading in Paris. The magazines supplied this knowledge....

About a generation ago, this earnest self-improvement ethic came under attack. People no longer believed that there was such a thing as a common culture that all educated Americans should study and know. The new ethos valued hipness, not class.

It's true that that earlier American media also fed the dilettantism of Mencken's booboisie and Lewis' Babbitry, but David Brooks' point is well taken: We were once a more serious, more thoughtful people -- before the consecutive ages of first "finding ourselves" and then escaping through TV dinners with "Roseanne" and evenings of Bristol's "Dancing."

Also culturally axiomatic is that each generation looks back on its perceived grounded predecessors and tsk-tsks its own irrecoverable failings -- I believe I recall once reading Socrates, no less, grumbling about "these kids today" -- yet this conservative act of solemnly looking backward seems to fulfill, however dramatically overdone, the invaluable service of drawing the younger generation forward, of binding the generations with some sort of sustaining, cultural glue.

Brooks embraces hope that we'll indeed find "a respite from," say, "the deluge of vapid social network chatter" that now distracts and trivializes our daily lives. And to that, after considering all the noses I see stuck in blackberries and ears mechanically attached to cell phones (to me reminiscent of an old Barsotti New Yorker cartoon: "Twisting paperclips, Ed," says one business executive on the phone to another, "how about you?"), I can only say, Here's to hope.