War of the Worlds

Photo of David Brooks by Josh Haner/the New York Times

David Brooks in an Op-Ed column entitled “How People Change” (NYT, 11/26/12) inveighs against negative criticism. A psychoanalyst named Heinz Kohut believed in the virtues of supportive behavior. Hopefully the recipents of such behavior, let’s call them Kohutians, would be happier than those poor souls who’d spent their lives being chastised. Still Brooks seems to derive some glee in recounting the story of one of Britain’s most recent culture heroes, Nick Crews. Crews sent a negative e-mail to his disappointing brood of children which has gained notoriety in England as the “Crews Missile.” Brooks quotes from the finale of the e-mail, which Crews’s daughter “released …to get publicity for a book she is translating,” thusly, “I want to hear no more from any of you until, if you feel inclined, you have a success or an achievement or a REALISTIC plan for the support and happiness of your children to tell me about.” This philosophy of child rearing is what is also known as tough love and it’s probably been embraced by Crews’s crew out of frustration with the touchy feely school of child rearing, a kind of permissiveness that reached it’s epitome in the England’s famed experiment in teaching,  A. S. Neill’s Summerhill School. But will the average individual brought up like Pip or David Copperfield rise from the harsh conditions of their upbringing to become productive members of society? Are not characters like these the stuff of fiction precisely because they’re so unlikely, albeit Copperfield being a sit in for the author himself. Brooks concludes his piece by saying, “You can tell people that they are fat and that they shouldn’t eat more French fries, but that doesn’t mean they will stop... Don’t try to bludgeon bad behavior.” And he carries the notion into the political sphere too. Thus the reader of Brooks’s column might ask, if Kim Jong-un is acting up in the international sandbox, is a swift and severe punishment the only way to treat his misbehavior?

Moebius Strip

There is a certain type of person who is trapped in a perpetual withering glare. Sufferers from Moebius Syndrome lack the ability to show any expression, and their seeming lack of responsiveness is frequently misinterpreted as a lack of empathy. Kathleen Bogart, a one-time social worker who is now studying the syndrome from which she suffers, has described how her condition made it difficult for her to help clients (“Seeking Emotional Clues Without Facial Clues,” NYT, April 5, 2010). Ms. Bogart represents an extreme example, but there are many people whose seeming indifference to life is actually a selling point. When you come across a person who is expressionless and doesn’t seem to react to your presence, you immediately assume something is wrong with you, not them. How much more powerful is this than the people-pleaser, the unctuous soul, the Uriah Heep who fawns over you with false praise, the person who has a goal in sight and is trying too hard? The gregarious nurse in Ingmar Bergman’s Persona is frantic to make some sort of contact with the psychotic actress who has withdrawn from the world, until the tables are turned and the actress desperately tries to pierce the nurse’s now stolid exterior. In the case of Moebius, a physical abnormality creates a chasm. In the case of Persona, it’s psychiatric. In everyday encounters that don’t approach these kinds of physical or mental extremes, there tends to be an amalgam in which a posture of indifference is an outgrowth of a so-called passive aggressive propensity. Conversely, social anxiety creates a chaotic exterior filled with involuntary muscular movements. Naturally the cool, silent type gets a certain degree of reinforcement for the malady, to the extent that he or she is likely to have the upper hand. James Dean was the epitome of the cool, silent type. The frantic character Jim Carrey has created in so many of his films is the diametric opposite. Carrey’s persona is the paradigm of the dejected figure who has little of what sociologists terms “social capital.” Stripping your character down to basics, into which category do you fall?