NYT's David Brooks: Meaning Is For Losers!

Did David Brooks teach his Yale students -- his course is called Humility --
that meaning is overrated? Of course, he may just be being humble.

Brooks' recent column, "The Problem with Meaning," prompts one to warn him not to quit his day job, but writing for the NYTimes is his day job, so we're boxed in there.

So I'll just give you shorter David Brooks:

Meaning is just secular code for spirituality, but it's weak tea, so knock it off. Have some real gonads and get yourself a religious moral code instead doing mushrooms and thinking you've found a substitute for the nuns wacking your knuckles with a brass ruler. You know you'll eventually have to bite the bullet and forget this meaning shit. Your moral compass will thank you, you spineless heathen. Meaning! Ha.

Of course, his prose is a little squishier. Read Brooks here. Notice that he takes a perfectly nice notion -- a search for meaning -- and rips it apart while planting plenty of buzz words for his conservative readership to chew on before actually revealing his agenda, which in his recent philosophical haze comes down to "stop daydreaming and get a job, liberal hippie."

I blithely refer to his conservative readership but hasten to add that the comments to his column are filled to the brim with people who think he's huffing paint again.

Wait, I have to clue you to this line:

Real moral systems are based on a balance of intellectual rigor and aroused moral sentiments.

Did he just say he has a morality boner? Hard to tell. Is that an elite trait?