David Brooks 2010 Commencement Speech

Occidental College Commencement
May 16, 2010
Address of David Brooks

Thank you. Hello, Class of 2010. And hello, parents of 2010, and sisters and cousins and brothers. It is obviously a great honor for me to be here. And I say that even though I don't look good in orange. It's a great honor for me as a student of Barack Obama to visit campus. I got to see the water he walked on as an undergraduate. I got to see where he parked his cherubs - a thrilling day for me. And I got to see the spirit of Occidental. I told some folks last night that one of the things President Obama brought to Washington is a code of niceness. Usually when you attack the president, or criticize, I should say, a president or a candidate or a senator, they call you the next morning and they scream at you at 7 a.m., "David, you are a complete and total idiot." When you criticize President Obama, they call you the next day and say, "David, we really like you and respect your work, it's so sad you're a complete and total idiot." And so that's nice. That makes you feel a little better.

It's a great honor to see the students promenade. It's going to be a great honor to see them accept their degrees. I always think it's a good idea when you shake the hand of President Veitch to give him a tip, 10, 20 bucks, maybe a Starbucks gift card - he's worked very hard on behalf of you guys. And it's most inspiring to think about the future. If present trends continue, the Catholics and Jews in this audience can join the Supreme Court, and the rest of you can do Lady Gaga parodies on YouTube. Now as I said, I come from Washington, and when people in my world think about Occidental, we think about Jack Kemp and Barack Obama. It's natural to ask what do these two men have in common, and what does that say about Oxy. Obviously what they have in common is that they were both fabulous looking. Jack Kemp had historically important hair. President Obama's grace and elegance is only marred by his complete inability to throw a baseball properly during first-pitch ceremonies. But of course, both of them had a fierce commitment to the power of ideas. That part of the Occidental legacy was evident when I spoke to President Veitch in preparation for this event, and he told me to be intellectually ambitious and a little political.

There's a standard formula for commencement talks. The college or university invites a person known for his or her career success to come to campus and that person is supposed to tell the students that having a successful career is not really that important. I was hoping to reverse that and just give you some secret tips on how to be shallow and happy. To that end, I watched an entire season of "Jersey Shore," and I have to say The Situation changed my life. But as I say, President Veitch wanted me to do something intellectually ambitious. So I wrote to Glenn Beck and asked him what to say. He didn't write back, but I did read the following sentence that was in the Princeton Review of colleges in their section on Occidental: "Most students agree that the one thing most everyone has in common at Oxy is their left-leaning political views." My first thought was, "Uh-oh." My second thought was I actually don't believe that sentence. My third thought was they've only invited me to give this commencement speech because of my disturbing resemblance to Al Franken. They got us confused. But then I figured, what the heck, I might as well talk about the elephant in the room, or the elephant in the Greek theater here.

You should know that I grew up as a staunch liberal. I grew up near Greenwich Village in Manhattan, and in 1965 my parents who were somewhat left took me to a Be-In in Central Park, where hippies would go just to be. As part of their being, they set a garbage can on fire and threw their wallets into it to demonstrate their liberation from money and material things. I was five and I saw a five-dollar bill on fire in the garbage can, so I ran up to it, grabbed the money, and ran away. That was sort of my first step over to the right. But it actually took a little while to take. In the late sixties a group called the Weathermen accidentally blew themselves up a block from my school. I participated in the revolution of the 1960s by writing nasty things about Julie Nixon, the president's daughter, on the chalkboard in fourth grade, and I was paddled for that. In high school I volunteered for many Democratic candidates, I had a big Hubert Humphrey poster on my wall with the caption. "Some talk change, others cause it," because even then I knew I wanted to become the kind of person who only talks change. I considered myself a democratic socialist while in college, and I went to the University of Chicago, when fun goes to die. The other saying about Chicago is that it's a Baptist school where Jewish professors teach atheist students St. Thomas Aquinas. And I went to classes a bit, but I really hung out in the library reading old issues of some liberal magazines, including The New Republic, and a communist magazine, The New Masses, and I dreamed of revolution.

My political philosophy in those days was based on a few common things. First, social identity. At the time I was better educated, more sophisticated, and more enlightened than the average American, and I thought most of the people around me were too, and I thought we should have more power. The second thing, and more deeply, is I grew up as many of us do with a certain story about the world and how it works. That story began with the idea that deep in the human past, there was prejudice, superstition, and ignorance. But there have been certain moments when people used reason, the faculty that makes us human, to lift themselves up. In ancient Athens, philosophers like Plato believed that reason is like a charioteer who can be used to subdue the passions. In the Renaissance and the Enlightenment science advanced and reason progressed. Great figures like Bacon and Descartes not only embraced the scientific advance but also created a new way of thinking: the scientific method. Descartes aimed to begin human understanding anew: he'd start from scratch and work logically through progressions to figure out what was certain and true. During the French Revolution, philosophers tried to organize human knowledge and reorganize society on rational grounds. In the centuries since, many of us have become the children of the French Enlightenment. We armed ourselves with certain methodologies to help us understand human behavior and events, methodologies from modern economics, modern social science, and modern public policy analysis.

So I guess you could say when I graduated from college I was optimistic that we together with government could solve most of our problems, if only we could get smart, compassionate people in office and greedy self-interested people out of office. I thought that solving social problems would be straightforward and relatively easy.

But then I went out into the world. After college I worked as a reporter on the south and west sides of Chicago. I did reporting from places like Cabrini Green, which was a big housing project in Chicago. That was created by smart and compassionate government planners who saw poverty-stricken, rotten old neighborhoods and decided we can give these people nice new buildings with parks and life can be better. But when the planners tore down what they saw as rotten old neighborhoods, they destroyed something they couldn't even see: ways of feeling and coping and relating that the people who lived there had created, and these relationships were destroyed along with the tenement houses. As a result, people's material lives were briefly better, but their emotional lives were worse, and before long those housing projects were horrible and nearly uninhabitable. So you had smart people creating awful results.

Then I covered education reform, albeit in 1983, and in those days reformers on the right and left came up with great ideas, mostly how to reorganize schools. Whether you favored small schools, small classes, charter schools, vouchers, local control, national control, or national standards, we spent trillions of dollars and we've had a hard time until recently getting graduation rates to budge and closing the achievement gap. It became clear over the course of that policy debate that the problem wasn't the structure of the educational delivery system, the real problem was in the intangible realm: the culture of the neighborhood, which either fostered achievement or did not; the relationship between the individual teacher and the individual student, which was either based on love and trust or was not; and the emotional conditions in which the children have been raised, which were marked either by security or stress, order or chaos.

My favorite social science experiment of all time was conducted by a guy named Walter Mischel who was at Stanford and is now at Columbia and some of you probably know it as the famous marshmallow experiment. Mischel took a bunch of four-year-olds, put them in a room, and put a marshmallow on the table in front of them. He said, you can eat this marshmallow now, but I'm going to leave the room, and I'll come back in 10 minutes, and if you haven't eaten the marshmallow, I'll give you two marshmallows. You can go on YouTube and watch videos of kids of trying not to eat that marshmallow. There's a video Mischel showed me of a little girl banging her head on the table trying not to eat the marshmallow. One day Mischel was using an Oreo cookie and a little guy carefully picked up the Oreo, carefully ate out the middle, and carefully put it back. That kid is now a U.S. senator. But the scary thing is, 20 years later, the kids who could wait 10 or 12 minutes have much higher college completion rates, and 30 years later, much higher incomes. The kids who could only wait a minute have much higher drug and alcohol addiction problems and much higher incarceration rates. That's because some kids are lucky to grow up in homes where actions have consequences, and they can learn strategies to control their impulses. If you do that, you'll get through school. Some kids are not as fortunate. They have trouble controlling their impulses, and if you don't have that ability, if you don't have those strategies, school will be frustrating. This experiment highlights what a thousand other studies have highlighted, that we are comfortable talking about economics, but people learn from people they love, and people learn when they walk into a room on the assumption that they can control their own destiny. People learn when they have the emotional prerequisites for learning, and no amount of bureaucratic restructuring can alter those things.

A few years later I went off to cover Russia and the fall of the Soviet Union. Western nations, again thinking always of money and material things, sent in privatization plans. But here, too, that wasn't the important thing. What the Russians were missing was social trust. You'd walk into a Russian apartment and everything was really nice. Then you'd walk out into the vestibule or hallway between the apartments - there might be four apartments opening up on the hallway - and it would smell of urine, it had never been cleaned, and the light was out. And you'd ask, why don't you get together to clean up the vestibule? They would say, I don't like so-and-so, so-and-so's drunk, but I think the real reason was after 70 years of soviet rule, they didn't know who was KGB, and they didn't have social trust in their neighbors. Without social trust, this intangible thing, it doesn't matter what material incentives you create, you won't get job creation, and you won't get growth.

Then finally a few years ago I went to a village in Namibia where all the parents had died of AIDS. There were grandparents in the village, and there were children in the village, but there was nobody between. The children had nursed their own parents to their deaths. Yet a lot of grandparents told us that those children were now engaging in some of the same risky behaviors that had led to their parents' deaths and would someday lead to their own deaths. There were great western aid officials who brought in condoms and anti-retroviral drugs, God bless them, but it was proving very difficult for western technicians to change behavior, no matter how irrational that behavior might be. The only people who could do it didn't come with technical knowledge, they came with spiritual knowledge. They were religious people who tried to save souls, and out of that safer sexual behavior emerged.

I could tell you a dozen different stories of this sort, but they would all have the same theme, which is that many of the policies that didn't work, or only partially worked, relied on a truncated view of human nature. They relied on the view that we are autonomous, rational decision-makers who respond in straightforward ways to incentives. And that's just not true. So over the course of the years I switched from being a child of the French Enlightenment to being a child of British and Scottish Enlightenment, people like David Hume, Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, Edward Gibbon. To put it simply, if the French Enlightenment held up reason as the most noble of our faculties, the Scottish Enlightenment believed that reason is relatively weak, and is often a slave to our passions. The members of the Scottish Enlightenment had a higher regard for our sentiments, our social emotions, our desire to be admired by our fellows and our desire to be worthy of their admiration.

In college I was assigned a book by Edmund Burke called Reflections on the Revolution in France, and in those days I loathed it. I was excited by the promise of taking new things and beginning things anew, and here came a guy who said the world is too complex for us to understand and master and we should fall back on traditions and just prejudices that have endured the test of time. Burke stood for a proposition that has since been called epistemological modesty - the belief that we should be aware of the limitations of what we know and what we can know, and we should proceed cautiously through life. It's not an ideology, it's a disposition. It's not what the Republican party stands for, all of even much of the time these days, but I think it is the core of conservatism, or should be. American conservatism starts with the promise of this country, the promise that we can make the world a better place, that we can progress, and this makes it different than European conservatism. But the essence of conservatism is to be restrained by the sense that we have limits on what we know and what we can know.

There are hidden layers of emotions and sentiments within each of us formed over eons of time. A person's behavior is shaped by the informal constitution of our mind, by the habits, etiquette, norms, values, moral and unconscious assumptions that loop from our mind to other minds and back again. These things shape how we perceive the world, how our emotions value the world, how our affections pre-consciously organize our thinking, and how our longing for admiration, harmony and spiritual goals find expression in the concrete circumstance of our lives. I came to believe it is impossible to de-moralize and de-emotionalize behavior. You amputate reality if you try to imagine social problems can be solved through material forces. So I came to think that everything comes down to character and culture, and that's the reason life is so hard. Daniel Patrick Moynihan is the author of one my favorite quotations, which is that "The central conservative truth is that culture matters most. The central liberal truth is that government can change culture." The best liberalism pushes us to change culture, to change these emotions. The best conservatism warns us that this change is hard, and in the long run, if we're not careful, will accidentally destroy the social relationships we may not even see or be aware of.

Now, this has been a high-falutin' political talk for a little while, but to rudely honest, if there are liberals in the audience I don't expect to convert you. I explain my affinity for the Scottish Enlightenment of Burke, Hume and Smith for deeper reasons that transcend politics and which touch our private lives. I have tried to make the point that in politics, we're experts at economics, and inarticulate about emotion. And the same holds true in private life. We've been a giant apparatus in this life for the cultivation of success. You guys who are graduating from Occidental have thrived in that apparatus. It involves getting good grades in high school, taking SAT prep courses, thinking carefully about what college you want to go to, and studying certain technical skills and building your resume. The apparatus got you here and it will greet you tomorrow when you begin the rest of your lives. It will offer you technical knowledge, fashion advice, skills on how to present yourselves, network, manage, and lead. That apparatus is necessary and important, but it is narrowing. In the first place, it induces you to think very hard about your public success, what college sticker you can put in the window of your car, and let's face it, the most important decision you will make in your life will be over who to marry. If you have a happy marriage and an unsuccessful career, you'll still have a fulfilling life. If you have an unhappy marriage, no amount of professional success will be able to make you feel satisfied. So think carefully about that one.

This apparatus doesn't really help you succeed in public life. We have a tendency to divide the world - the private world of homes and friends is a world of emotion and feeling, and the public world of politics and work is the home of interest and calculation. But nothing could be further from the truth. The move to an information economy means that to flourish in any profession, you have to know how to navigate a social environment. The average self-made millionaire in this country had a collegiate GPA of 2.75. These entrepreneurs may not be scholars, but they have the ability to perceive emerging patterns, to understand what they are good at and to work phenomenally hard to hone their capacities.

You don't find the best lawyers or politicians or teachers with an IQ test. You find the future superstars in these fields by asking the following question: Who is friends with who in this room? The people who can answer that kind of question, who have that kind of exceptional social awareness, will do phenomenally well in life. So people who do well professionally are the ones who know how to attach well with others, how to embrace contradictory evidence with an open heart, how to interpenetrate other minds and feel as they are feeling. They have taken the time to educate their emotions. The members of the Scottish Enlightenment wrote about these sentiments not only as a way to understand public life, and private life, but to understand everything. That's why a degree from a liberal arts college is actually the most practical degree you can possibly get, because that's how you educate your emotions.

Let me close by mentioning a few social science findings. First, unconsciously and emotionally we are subtly influenced by deep mental biases. People named Dennis are disproportionately likely to become dentists. People named Lawrence are disproportionately likely to become lawyers. This is true - we have a deep preference for things that are familiar. Second, our perceptions are shaped by factors deep in our evolutionary history. Men generally prefer women with a waist-to-hip ratio of 0.7. Women generally prefer men who are slightly taller than themselves - though a guy who is 5' 6" can get as many online date offers as a guy who is 6-foot, as long as he makes $172,000 a year more. (Don't ask me know I know that.)

But mostly everything is formed by emotions. Decades ago there were horrible Rumanian orphanages. Some kids were adopted from those orphanages by mothers outside the orphanage. Four years later, these adopted kids had IQs 40 points higher than the kids who remained in the orphanage. It wasn't the tutoring that improved their IQs, because the mothers themselves were mentally disabled and living in different institution. It was the love between a mother and a child. Now, I'm a middle-aged American man. We're not the most emotionally expressive creatures on the face of the earth. There's a great apocryphal story about a bunch of middle-aged men who were placed in a brain-scan machine, had them watch a horror movie, and then asked them to describe their feelings toward their wives. The scans were exactly the same: sheer terror in both cases. I have been talking about emotions a lot because when you're talking about policy, when you're talking about education, when you talk about any field of endeavor, what matters is how successfully you have educated their emotions. The process of educating your emotions is something you've done here, by reading the right books and listening to the right music, but it's crucially the thing you're going to be doing over the next 10 years.

When I graduated from college in 1983, there was some expectation that one should get on with adulthood right away. Most of us had, by age 30, achieved the accoutrement of adulthood: a marriage, a kid, and a home of one's own. That's no longer true. The majority of you will not have done these things by age 30. If sociologists are right, only a quarter of you will have done that. It's more likely that you will spend the next 10 years wandering from job to job, as your parents grow more and more nervous. It's more likely that you will take temporary jobs and feel insecure, you won't have a permanent perch, you won't know what the world expects of you, you won't know where your destiny lies, and the older people in those offices will regard you as one of many interchangeable interns useful for research assistance and sexual tension. But personally, I think it's worth taking the time to find your place, even if it takes 10 years - and parents, relax, it will all work out in the end. I do hope you use your odyssey years to educate your emotions through travel, art, love and the occasional misbegotten hookup, and I hope that you do it by chasing deep pleasure, by finding something that deeply pleases you and chasing it wherever it leads.

So I have tried, even as a middle-aged political pundit without Jack Kemp's hair, to give you a sentimental talk today, because my friends in the Scottish Enlightenment would have wanted me to do that, because that is the key to so much. I recommend sentimentalism even as you look at the most calculated issues of your life. And finally, just once in your life, for the perverse pleasure of the thing, vote for a damn Republican.

Thank you.