Homework Check for #8
No homework for 3-28:
Essay #3 Options with 3 Sources Due 4-23-18
One. Develop a thesis that analyzes the human inclination for staying within the tribe of sameness as explained in David Brooks’ “People Like Us” (very popular with students).
Consider these counterarguments:
David Brooks speaks the truth, but his thesis is overreaching. Tribalism takes second seat to the following:
Money, luxury
Education opportunities (good schools)
Safety
Privileges
Good Technology (cable, data speed)
Two. Develop a thesis that compares “People Like Us” (525) and J.D. Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy” (531).
Three. Based on your reading of Harriet McBryde Johnson’s “Unspeakable Conversations (93),” write an argument that addresses Peter Singer’s philosophy of euthanasia.
Four. Defend, refute, or complicate Steve Almond’s thesis from his essay “Is It Immoral to Watch the Super Bowl?” (125)
Five. Develop a thesis that compares Barbara Ehrenreich’s “How the Poor Are Made to Pay for Their Poverty” (364) and Linda Tirado’s “You Get What You Pay For” (370).
"People Like Us" by David Brooks
Maybe it's time to admit the obvious. We don't really care about diversity all that much in America, even though we talk about it a great deal. Maybe somewhere in this country there is a truly diverse neighborhood in which a black Pentecostal minister lives next to a white anti-globalization activist, who lives next to an Asian short-order cook, who lives next to a professional golfer, who lives next to a postmodern-literature professor and a cardiovascular surgeon. But I have never been to or heard of that neighborhood. Instead, what I have seen all around the country is people making strenuous efforts to group themselves with people who are basically like themselves.
Human beings are capable of drawing amazingly subtle social distinctions and then shaping their lives around them. In the Washington, D.C., area Democratic lawyers tend to live in suburban Maryland, and Republican lawyers tend to live in suburban Virginia. If you asked a Democratic lawyer to move from her $750,000 house in Bethesda, Maryland, to a $750,000 house in Great Falls, Virginia, she'd look at you as if you had just asked her to buy a pickup truck with a gun rack and to shove chewing tobacco in her kid's mouth. In Manhattan the owner of a $3 million SoHo loft would feel out of place moving into a $3 million Fifth Avenue apartment. A West Hollywood interior decorator would feel dislocated if you asked him to move to Orange County. In Georgia a barista from Athens would probably not fit in serving coffee in Americus.
It is a common complaint that every place is starting to look the same. But in the information age, the late writer James Chapin once told me, every place becomes more like itself. People are less often tied down to factories and mills, and they can search for places to live on the basis of cultural affinity. Once they find a town in which people share their values, they flock there, and reinforce whatever was distinctive about the town in the first place. Once Boulder, Colorado, became known as congenial to politically progressive mountain bikers, half the politically progressive mountain bikers in the country (it seems) moved there; they made the place so culturally pure that it has become practically a parody of itself.
But people love it. Make no mistake—we are increasing our happiness by segmenting off so rigorously. We are finding places where we are comfortable and where we feel we can flourish. But the choices we make toward that end lead to the very opposite of diversity. The United States might be a diverse nation when considered as a whole, but block by block and institution by institution it is a relatively homogeneous nation.
When we use the word "diversity" today we usually mean racial integration. But even here our good intentions seem to have run into the brick wall of human nature. Over the past generation reformers have tried heroically, and in many cases successfully, to end housing discrimination. But recent patterns aren't encouraging: according to an analysis of the 2000 census data, the 1990s saw only a slight increase in the racial integration of neighborhoods in the United States. The number of middle-class and upper-middle-class African-American families is rising, but for whatever reasons—racism, psychological comfort—these families tend to congregate in predominantly black neighborhoods.
In fact, evidence suggests that some neighborhoods become more segregated over time. New suburbs in Arizona and Nevada, for example, start out reasonably well integrated. These neighborhoods don't yet have reputations, so people choose their houses for other, mostly economic reasons. But as neighborhoods age, they develop personalities (that's where the Asians live, and that's where the Hispanics live), and segmentation occurs. It could be that in a few years the new suburbs in the Southwest will be nearly as segregated as the established ones in the Northeast and the Midwest.
Even though race and ethnicity run deep in American society, we should in theory be able to find areas that are at least culturally diverse. But here, too, people show few signs of being truly interested in building diverse communities. If you run a retail company and you're thinking of opening new stores, you can choose among dozens of consulting firms that are quite effective at locating your potential customers. They can do this because people with similar tastes and preferences tend to congregate by ZIP code.
The most famous of these precision marketing firms is Claritas, which breaks down the U.S. population into sixty-two psycho-demographic clusters, based on such factors as how much money people make, what they like to read and watch, and what products they have bought in the past. For example, the "suburban sprawl" cluster is composed of young families making about $41,000 a year and living in fast-growing places such as Burnsville, Minnesota, and Bensalem, Pennsylvania. These people are almost twice as likely as other Americans to have three-way calling. They are two and a half times as likely to buy Light n' Lively Kid Yogurt. Members of the "towns & gowns" cluster are recent college graduates in places such as Berkeley, California, and Gainesville, Florida. They are big consumers of DoveBars and Saturday Night Live. They tend to drive small foreign cars and to read Rolling Stone and Scientific American.
Looking through the market research, one can sometimes be amazed by how efficiently people cluster—and by how predictable we all are. If you wanted to sell imported wine, obviously you would have to find places where rich people live. But did you know that the sixteen counties with the greatest proportion of imported-wine drinkers are all in the same three metropolitan areas (New York, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C.)? If you tried to open a motor-home dealership in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, you'd probably go broke, because people in this ring of the Philadelphia suburbs think RVs are kind of uncool. But if you traveled just a short way north, to Monroe County, Pennsylvania, you would find yourself in the fifth motor-home-friendliest county in America.
Geography is not the only way we find ourselves divided from people unlike us. Some of us watch Fox News, while others listen to NPR. Some like David Letterman, and others—typically in less urban neighborhoods—like Jay Leno. Some go to charismatic churches; some go to mainstream churches. Americans tend more and more often to marry people with education levels similar to their own, and to befriend people with backgrounds similar to their own.
My favorite illustration of this latter pattern comes from the first, noncontroversial chapter of The Bell Curve. Think of your twelve closest friends, Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray write. If you had chosen them randomly from the American population, the odds that half of your twelve closest friends would be college graduates would be six in a thousand. The odds that half of the twelve would have advanced degrees would be less than one in a million. Have any of your twelve closest friends graduated from Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Princeton, Caltech, MIT, Duke, Dartmouth, Cornell, Columbia, Chicago, or Brown? If you chose your friends randomly from the American population, the odds against your having
Many of us live in absurdly unlikely groupings, because we have organized our lives that way.
It's striking that the institutions that talk the most about diversity often practice it the least. For example, no group of people sings the diversity anthem more frequently and fervently than administrators at just such elite universities. But elite universities are amazingly undiverse in their values, politics, and mores. Professors in particular are drawn from a rather narrow segment of the population. If faculties reflected the general population, 32 percent of professors would be registered Democrats and 31 percent would be registered Republicans. Forty percent would be evangelical Christians. But a recent study of several universities by the conservative Center for the Study of Popular Culture and the American Enterprise Institute found that roughly 90 percent of those professors in the arts and sciences who had registered with a political party had registered Democratic. Fifty-seven professors at Brown were found on the voter-registration rolls. Of those, fifty-four were Democrats. Of the forty-two professors in the English, history, sociology, and political-science departments, all were Democrats. The results at Harvard, Penn State, Maryland, and the University of California at Santa Barbara were similar to the results at Brown.
What we are looking at here is human nature. People want to be around others who are roughly like themselves. That's called community. It probably would be psychologically difficult for most Brown professors to share an office with someone who was pro-life, a member of the National Rifle Association, or an evangelical Christian. It's likely that hiring committees would subtly—even unconsciously—screen out any such people they encountered. Republicans and evangelical Christians have sensed that they are not welcome at places like Brown, so they don't even consider working there. In fact, any registered Republican who contemplates a career in academia these days is both a hero and a fool. So, in a semi-self-selective pattern, brainy people with generally liberal social mores flow to academia, and brainy people with generally conservative mores flow elsewhere.
The dream of diversity is like the dream of equality. Both are based on ideals we celebrate even as we undermine them daily. (How many times have you seen someone renounce a high-paying job or pull his child from an elite college on the grounds that these things are bad for equality?) On the one hand, the situation is appalling. It is appalling that Americans know so little about one another. It is appalling that many of us are so narrow-minded that we can't tolerate a few people with ideas significantly different from our own. It's appalling that evangelical Christians are practically absent from entire professions, such as academia, the media, and filmmaking. It's appalling that people should be content to cut themselves off from everyone unlike themselves.
The segmentation of society means that often we don't even have arguments across the political divide. Within their little validating communities, liberals and conservatives circulate half-truths about the supposed awfulness of the other side. These distortions are believed because it feels good to believe them.
On the other hand, there are limits to how diverse any community can or should be. I've come to think that it is not useful to try to hammer diversity into every neighborhood and institution in the United States. Sure, Augusta National should probably admit women, and university sociology departments should probably hire a conservative or two. It would be nice if all neighborhoods had a good mixture of ethnicities. But human nature being what it is, most places and institutions are going to remain culturally homogeneous.
It's probably better to think about diverse lives, not diverse institutions. Human beings, if they are to live well, will have to move through a series of institutions and environments, which may be individually homogeneous but, taken together, will offer diverse experiences. It might also be a good idea to make national service a rite of passage for young people in this country: it would take them out of their narrow neighborhood segment and thrust them in with people unlike themselves. Finally, it's probably important for adults to get out of their own familiar circles. If you live in a coastal, socially liberal neighborhood, maybe you should take out a subscription to The Door, the evangelical humor magazine; or maybe you should visit Branson, Missouri. Maybe you should stop in at a megachurch. Sure, it would be superficial familiarity, but it beats the iron curtains that now separate the nation's various cultural zones.
Look around at your daily life. Are you really in touch with the broad diversity of American life? Do you care?
Essay Option #Five.
Develop a thesis that analyzes the human inclination for staying within the tribe of sameness as explained in David Brooks’ “People Like Us” (very popular with students).
What do we mean by the "tribe of sameness"?
We're talking about people who share our values in regards to many things:
Politics
Childrearing
The kinds of foods we prepare and how we prepare them
Fashion and art
The way we consume popular culture in the realm of social media, television, movies, etc.
The way we use language in our speaking and writing
The value we place on education
The value we place on having a sense of irony
Brooks claims that Americans move to neighborhoods where they create enclaves of their own tribe based on the above.
America is divided by cultural wars, which are more rooted in personal identity than policy.
The Left sees the Right as white racists, homophobic, privileged, fanatical people who are devoted to helping the 1%.
The Right sees the Left as politically correct secular, anti-religious snowflakes looking for safe spaces, pushing mixed gender bathrooms on public schools, and being weak on terrorism, border protection, and national security.
In addition to giant political divisions, there are more granular divisions so that Americans find enclaves where people are their mirror reflection in terms of values.
Important Terms from Brooks' Essay
One. Characteristics of Tribalism:
Tribalism is the instinctive tendency to create tribes or cliques based on common values and beliefs of the tribe.
Tribalism contains implicit and explicit beliefs about the tribe's superiority to other tribes. Therefore, tribalism creates The Other and in doing so it creates a binary view of the universe: Us Vs. Them.
Tribalism sets apart its own group by denigrating other groups. This denigration is a method for making the tribe feel superior and entitled.
Tribalism sets itself apart from other tribes in the belief that it is preserving its purity and the integrity of its moral core. To allow "others" in is to make the tribe vulnerable to compromised or changed values. Therefore, tribalism tends to be exclusive.
Tribalism in its extreme form breeds excessive pride to the point of being narcissistic; the tribe believes the world revolves around the tribe's needs.
Tribalism relies on traditions, and over time these traditions gain a power. Questioning these traditions casts doubt on the loyalty of the person making the inquiries.
Tribalism values loyalty and conformity over critical thinking.
Tribalism is therefore breeding ground for Groupthink, which occurs when the desire to preserve harmony and coherence in a group is more important than critical evaluation.
Tribalism is resistant to change, either internally or externally. "Reformations" are often violent.
Tribalism encourages love matches to occur within the tribe. To date or marry outside the tribe is considered a betrayal.
Tribalism may teach fairness and equality, but see other tribes as either disdaining these values or teaching them inadequately, so that the tribe that deems itself morally superior does not grant fairness, necessarily, to other tribes.
Tribalism is understandable in the realm of intelligence. If your tribe reads real news and another tribe reads fake news, that's a non-starter.
Tribalism is healthy. We feel a greater sense of belonging and safety when we live among those who share our values.
Tribalism reduces stress. We are less anxious when we live among those who share our values.
Tribalism generates cooperation and reciprocity. We share and cooperate more when we live among those who share our own values.
Tribalism in its extreme form reinforces cognitive bias, the act of only taking in information that affirms our preconceived views. Facebook is an excellent example of tribalism creating cognitive bias.
Tribalism in its extreme fosters narcissism, the sense that you belong to the "special anointed" tribe and the other tribes are inferior.
Two. Types of Tribalism
Education Level
Zip Code
Sartorial (fashion)
Hipster
Racial Identity
Politics
Age or generation
Hobbits (comfort seekers who live in ignorance)
Hooligans (purveyors of fake news and fascist politics)
Vulcans (educated, rational thinkers)
Middle-Class Aesthetics and Values (neighborhood rules and regulations about house, lawn, decorations, etc)
Three. Cognitive Bias
People sacrifice their critical thinking skills and create a subjective social reality by filtering information based on pre-conceived biases.
Their biases compel them to seek evidence and reasoning that confirm and reinforce their biases while they avoid evidence that challenges and contradicts their biases. Over time, their subjective social reality crystalizes until it becomes almost impervious to any kind of challenges from the outside. They in effect live in an indestructible bubble.
Naturally, cognitive bias compels people to seek others who are like-minded. As a result, societies exist as tribalistic clusters instead of diverse groups.
One. What explains our hunger for sameness in terms of the people we surround ourselves with?
Anxiety and Disconnection Vs. Belonging
We’re anxious and alienated from “people who aren’t like us.” We’d rather feel connection and comfort from being with “members of our tribe,” be it in education, politics, class aspirations, etc. We want to be around people who share our values and our way of seeing the world.
Such tribalism is both comforting and effective in making us happy.
We're Attached to Our Cognitive Biases
Here’s the killer fact we don’t want to confront: We’re happier by remaining in our tribe. We don’t want to be around people who don’t share our values.
Why?
Because we are hard-wired to be self-segregating based on interests and values.
If we’re hipsters, we want to live in a community of hipsters.
If we’re suburban consumers, we want to be around suburban consumers.
If we’re creative, we want to be around a community of artists.
People who shop at Trader Joe’s are of a certain educated and political ilk.
People who shop at Whole Foods are of a certain educated and political ilk.
People who don’t vaccinate their children hang out with other likeminded parents.
People who watch Fox News hang out with Fox News viewers.
People who watch MSNBC hang with MSNBC viewers.
People who like luxury watches create online watch communities.
The Internet with its millions of blogs is all about consolidating people of common interests. The same can be said with YouTube and its over 500 million channels.
If you’re a college graduate the chances are your friends will be college graduates.
If you’re not college educated, the chances are your friends won’t be either.
If you’re fat, your friends probably are also.
If you’re skinny, your friends probably are also.
If you're beautiful, your friends probably also enjoy a fair amount of pulchritude.
If you’re an MMA fighter or enthusiast, your friends probably are also.
If you’re a vegan, so are your friends.
If you’re sympathetic to civil rights and equal justice, you probably don’t have friends who harbor racist views.
If you’re against guns, you probably don’t hang out with outspoken members of the NRA.
If you’re an atheist, especially an outspoken one, you probably don’t have a lot of Christian friends.
If you think skinny jeans on men look stupid, you probably don’t have a lot of male friends who wear skinny jeans.
Foodies hang out with foodies.
Coffee connoisseurs hang out with coffee connoisseurs.
Gamers hang out with gamers.
Sommeliers hang out with sommeliers.
If you're a gourmand who gorges on camembert, you probably hang out with other gourmands who wallow in camembert.
If you're a member of the cognoscenti, you probably hang out exclusively with other members of the cognoscenti.
If you're a Morrissey freak, you probably hang out with other Morrissey freaks.
We want to live in a bubble with people just like us. We feel comfortable being insulated from the “outside world.”
So let’s get real: There is no diversity. There’s only sameness.
Writing Option
One. Develop a thesis that analyzes the human inclination for staying within the tribe of sameness as explained in David Brooks’ “People Like Us” (very popular with students).
Sample Outline
Paragraphs 1 and 2, your introduction: For your introduction, get your reader's attention by contrasting your tribe with a tribe you would never belong to. You should be very specific and use humor to get reader's attention. You might write about hipsters, jaded millennials, yoga fanatics, foodies, survivors of some dysfunctional unit or other. You can come up with the term of the tribes involved.
You might even address our society's separation by looking at hooligans, hobbits, and Vulcans.
Or you might carve out a new tribe: Ashamed Rich Kids who wear hobo dreads and, avoiding bathing, pretend they're homeless even though you recently saw them driving a Mercedes to their palatial estate.
Paragraph 3, your thesis: Write a cause and effect thesis explaining why even well-intentioned, open-minded people tend to stick to their tribe. Come up with 5 causes.
Paragraphs 4-8 would be your supporting paragraphs. Since this is a cause and effect essay, you won't have a counterargument section.
Paragraph 9 is your conclusion.
Student Refutation of Tribalism as Evidenced in David Brooks' "People Like Us"
A student's best friend is not from her "tribe." Her friend is from a completely different tribe, and this makes the student reject the implication from Brooks' essay that we must "stick to our tribe" to maximize our sense of security, belonging, and happiness.
Argument
Tribalism, the instinct to "stick to one's kind," is a disease of the toothy, pinch-faced peasant doomed to a life of hyper-conformity, claustrophobic, oppressive traditions, close-mindedness, and blindness to the tribe's prejudices and other defects.
In contrast, a cosmopolitan, a student of the world, sees that integrity, values, and respect are not owned by one's tribe, but the individual. Therefore, we should value the individual, not the tribe.
Sample Outline for Refutation of Tribalism
Paragraph 1: Outline David Brooks' essay and explain the appeal of tribalism, that is to say living in communities of "people just like us."
Paragraph 2: Write about a close friend you have who is outside your tribe and explain the reasons for your closeness.
Paragraph 3, your thesis: Argue that while tribalism offers comfort and belonging, one must face that tribalism is larded with liabilities that compel us to reject tribalism in favor of cosmopolitanism, the belief that we are members of the world, not a closed tribe.
The liabilities of tribalism you might cover in your thesis' mapping components:
One. blind conformity
Two. complacency
Three. blindness to the tribe's flaws
Four. narcissism
Five. close-mindedness
Six. closed-off effect to rest of the world
Seven. diminished value of the individual in favor of the tribe
Eight. Traditional fallacy: valuing tradition for tradition's sake but no real justification
Counterarguments: Legit Reasons for Staying Within the Tribe
One. Being with people who share our values is our natural default setting.
Two. Being with people who share our values gives us a sense of belonging and greater happiness.
Three. Being with people who share our values gives us more communal trust and less stress.
Four. It's futile to exist with people who are our antithesis. For example, if you're an intellectual, do you want to associate with anti-intellectuals? If your a feminist, do you want to break bread with misogynists? If your passionately anti-racist, do you want to hang out with racists?
Fiction that refutes tribalism: H.G. Well's "The Country of the Blind"
Movie that refutes tribalism: The 1998 film Pleasantville.
Body Paragraphs 4-7
Counterargument-Rebuttal, paragraph 8
Conclusion, paragraph 9
Thesis statements or claims go under five different categories:
One. Claims about solutions or policies: The claim argues for a certain solution or policy change:
America's War on Drugs should be abolished and replaced with drug rehab.
A critical thinking professor seen gorging shamelessly at one of those notorious all-you-can-eat buffets should be stripped of his accreditation and license to teach since such a display of gluttony evidences someone whose lifestyle contradicts the very critical thinking skills he is supposed to embody, such hypocrisy has no place in higher education, and educators in such high-profile positions must be sterling role models for their students and the public at large.
Two. Claims that critique the success, failure, or mixed results of a thing that is in the marketplace of art, ideas, and politics: a policy, dietary program, book, movie, work of art, philosophy, to name several.
In her book iGen: Why Today's Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy--and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood--and What That Means for the Rest of Us, author Jean Twenge attempts to analyze the causes of a dysfunctional generation, but her analysis lacks rigorous support, is larded with over simplifications, and ignores economic factors that are afflicting our youngest generation.
Three. Claims of cause and effect: These claims argue that a person, thing, policy or event caused another event or thing to occur.
Social media has propelled the spread of fake news so that Americans not only disagree on political points; they disagree on the core reality from which these disagreements stem.
Passive use of social media, not engaged use, has turned our generation into a bunch of depressed zombies with limited attention spans, an inflated sense of self-importance, and a shrinking degree of empathy.
We have come to believe, erroneously, that our smartphone addiction is normal because everyone is zombied-out on their smartphones, our smartphones give us a delusion of social esteem, and our skills for living off the smartphone grid have atrophied, resulting in our sense of helplessness and interminable addiction.
In spite of being proven grossly ineffective and even harmful to education, standardized testing remains the darling of administrators and politicians because it makes billions of dollars for the test makers, it provides a false bandage hiding deeper, systemic problems of structural inequality in education, and it makes know-nothing administrators and politicians feel like they doing something valuable when in fact the contrary is true.
Four. Claims of value: These claims argue how important something is on the Importance Scale and determine its proportion to other things.
Global warming poses a far greater threat to our safety than does terrorism.
Passive use of social media is having a more self-destructive effect on teenagers than alcohol and drugs.
Five. Claims of definition. These claims argue that we must re-define a common and inaccurate assumption.
In America the notion of "self-esteem," so commonly taught in schools, is, in reality, a cult of narcissism. While real self-esteem teaches self-confidence, discipline, and accountability, the fake American brand of self-esteem is about celebrating the low expectations of mediocrity, and this results in narcissism, vanity, and immaturity.
"Connecting" and "sharing" on social media does not create meaningful relationships because "connecting" and "sharing" are not the accurate words to describe what's going on. What is really happening is that people are curating and editing a false image while suffering greater and greater disconnection.
Narrowing Your Thesis
We need to write an analytical thesis with specific language, not broad.
General Thesis
Giving first graders homework is bad.
Specific Thesis
Giving first graders homework violates the spirit of education when the homework is simply busy work designed to make the teacher and parents feel less guilty, when the homework has no logical connection to what the children are learning in school, and when the amount of homework given puts undue pressure on overworked parents and sleep-deprived children.
General Thesis
Standardized testing is horrible.
Specific Thesis
Standardized testing must be abolished because it does not give an accurate measure of student learning outcomes, the tests are biased based on race and class, and because the profit motive continues to be more important than high standards and accountability.
Apply the Thesis Principles to David Brooks Essay Option
Essay Option Develop a thesis that analyzes the human inclination for staying within the tribe of sameness as explained in David Brooks’ “People Like Us” (very popular with students).
One. Claims about solutions or policies: The claim argues for a certain solution or policy change:
While we are more comfortable mingling with people who are in our own tribe based on shared values, we must force ourselves from time to time to engage with those who have contrary views in order that we don't get lost in our bubble, that we don't fall prey to complacency, and that we can better test our opinions.
Two. Claims that critique something in the marketplace of ideas, politics, and art.
While David Brooks' analysis of the psychological factors that incline us to gather into like-minded enclaves is somewhat convincing, his overall thesis collapses under the weight of his over generalizations, his failure to clarify if our tribalistic impulses are good or bad or both, and his failure to incorporate the role of structural inequality in the self-segregation that occurs in America.
Three. Claims of cause and effect: These claims argue that a person, thing, policy or event caused another event or thing to occur.
We stick to our tribe of people who share our values because shared values promote communal cooperation, trust, belonging, and increased overall happiness.
While David Brooks is correct in making the claim that a lot of Americans self-segregate based on shared values, his thesis is inaccurate and misleading when see that the real causes for segregation in America are not so much a personal choice but the result of structural inequalities that deny most Americans the option to choose where they live. It is structural inequalities, more than the desire to live with like-minded people, that determine where a person lives.
Four. Claims of value: These claims argue how important something is on the Importance Scale and determine its proportion to other things.
Richard Florida, author of The New Urban Crisis, makes a convincing claim that the kind of self-segregation that David Brooks is addressing is a growing existential threat to America as this segregation points to civil unrest, growing disparities of wealth, and a failed democracy.
Five. Claims of definition. These claims argue that we must re-define a common and inaccurate assumption.
Brooks makes the claim that personal choice determines where people live, but more often than not where a person lives is determined by structural inequality, a condition defined by disproportionate resources for a small number of Americans in areas of housing, education, and healthcare that reinforce the disparities between the haves and the have-nots.
In the Reader Comments section of The Atlantic where Brooks' essay was originally published, a reader, Natalie, writes the following:
He begins this essay with an admission of “the obvious,” Americans “don’t really care about diversity all that much... even though we talk about it a great deal” (331). Brooks asserts, “the United States might be a diverse nation when considered as a whole, but block by block and institution by institution it is a relatively homogenous nation” (332). Brooks’ opening statement takes us aback. Most readers will not expect such an immediate, candid judgment in the first sentence of an Atlantic.
Indeed most of us do not appreciate being identified as ‘careless.’ But Brooks,
an experienced writer, is probably not directly insulting or type-casting his
readers so much as he is priming us, initially shocking us in order to teach us
something by the end. His opening sentences make us eager to read on and see if
he really can prove our apathy. And if he is right that we do not care, we expect he will tell us why we should.
Brooks tell us that our communities lack diversity. He loads his short essay with
anecdotes, fresh analogies, statistics and other research data, to support his
claim that “people [make] strenuous effort to group themselves with people who
are basically like themselves” (331). Yet, Brooks does not seem sure whether he
believes that the lack of diversity within our lives is a result of “strenuous effort”
involving “rigorously segmenting” ourselves off from difference or “human
nature,” our natural tendency to “flow” towards others like ourselves because,
“people want to be with others who are roughly like themselves” (332, 5). Initially,
Brooks supports both interpretations, but as his essay progresses he
increasingly cites human nature as the source of our corruption. Yet, citing
“human nature” as the reason for everything from the failure to eradicate
housing discrimination to the lack of political diversity among university professors
is a somewhat dismissive oversimplification of one of the greatest issues of
our time. Brooks’ essay, which at times reads more like a research summary than
an essay, fails to persuade us that there is anything really wrong with
surrounding ourselves with “people like us” or that diversity is something we
should care about. In fact, Brooks doesn’t return to the theme of ‘caring’
until his final sentences in which he addresses his readers directly, asking,
“Are you really in touch with the broad diversity of American life? Do you
care” (336)? Despite these initial and final invitations for self-reflection,
he doesn’t make us care. Ultimately, Brooks’ essay acknowledges and illustrates
our country’s shocking lack of diversity within its communities, but by
ascribing this to “human nature” Brooks takes on a passive, almost defeatist
tone. Furthermore, his essay lacks positive examples of the value of diversity
and therefore fails to encourage his readers to action or even to prompt them
to meaningful reflection. It is only at the close of his essay, in his final
few sentences that he invites his readers to confront diversity. But he
devalues his own advice, saying, that even if we make small steps outside of
our own communities into other, different communities, the knowledge of
diversity that we gain will only be a “superficial familiarity” (336).
Brooks argues that homogenous communities are a poor reflection of a country that
actually is a “diverse nation when considered as a whole” (332). Brooks invites us to consider our own lives. First, he asks us to consider our group of close friends. He points out that “people with similar tastes and preferences tend to congregate by ZIP code” (332). He guess that if we looked around at our own friends we likely wouldn’t see the diversity of the American population reflected in our friend groups. But he doesn’t propose that there is anything wrong with that. On the contrary,
Brooks seems fascinated by the statistics offered by the marketing firm,
Claritas, which enables retailers to target their customers by breaking the
U.S. into “sixty-two psycho-demographic clusters” (332). For an essay whose first sentences boldly proclaim our country’s lack of diversity, Brooks spends paragraphs painting a reinforcing picture of America’s cult of sameness. He cites multiple examples of the abilities of a firm such as Claritas. For example, Claritas’ ‘suburban sprawl’ cluster comprises young families making about $41,000 a year, living in fast-growing places such as Burnsville, Minnesota” (333). There are “‘town and gowns’” clusters as well -- towns such as Berkley, California and Gainesville, Florida, where “big consumers of DoveBars and Saturday Night Live” reside (333). Brooks doesn’t stop there. He rattles off the names of cities with the largest numbers of imported wine drinkers and tells us where a motor-home dealership is most likely to thrive. He spends more illustrating the sickening sameness that can be found within many of America’s neighborhoods than he does giving examples of places where diversity does exist or even making suggestions for how it could exist. Moreover, he cites reputable statistics, but he fails to draw meaningful conclusions from it. Should we be concerned that a marketing firm can map out our lives? Might the small-families of Burnsville, Minnesota benefit if some of the recent college graduates from Gainesville, Florida moved to Burnsville, Minnesota? They might at least be thankful for an influx of potential babysitters. Indeed Brooks lays out research, but he doesn’t engage us with it.
Instead of holding individuals, communities, or institutions accountable for hindering
the spread of diversity, Brooks makes all the homogeneity easier to swallow. Brooks
may begin his essay by confronting us with own hypocrisy -- the way we
constantly talk about and praise diversity but practice it so little in our own
lives – but instead of revisiting this point or offering us a way out of this
hypocritical situation, he paints a picture of the lives we all know too well.
And shouldn’t we be shocked that such a diverse country comprises so many homogenous communities? “People love it” Brooks says (332). “We are increasing our happiness” by grouping ourselves with “people like us” (332). But is it so
simple? Is there nothing sinister about this tendency? Brooks tells us we all
have a tendency to segment ourselves and even says we do it because we profit
from it. And after all, if achieving diversity is so obviously difficult, why
wouldn’t we just keep things the way they are?
Brooks claims that he has never “been to or heard of” a “truly diverse neighborhood” (331). In his opinion, a “truly diverse” neighborhood would include people of different racial, ethnic, socio-economic, religious and cultural backgrounds. He attributes the
absence of such neighborhoods to “people making strenuous efforts to group
themselves with people who are basically like themselves” (331). Yet, despite
the lack of evidence Brooks provides, it would be ridiculous for any reader to conclude that diverse communities do not exist (331). Perhaps Brooks has never heard of such a neighborhood because his imagined, “truly diverse” neighborhood comprises a “black Pentecostal minister,” a “white anti-globalization activist,” an “Asian short-order cook,” a “professional golfer,” a “post-modern literature
professor,” and a “cardiovascular surgeon” (331). Indeed such a neighborhood
probably doesn’t exist. Brooks’ example is improbable for many reasons. For
example, a professional golfer likely makes millions of dollars a year whereas
a “short-order cook” or even a “post-modern literature professor” likely
doesn’t make more than $50,000 a year. These people don’t necessarily live in
different neighborhoods because they don’t care for diversity; they live in
different neighborhoods because their economic situations are dramatically
different.
One reason Brooks’ essay may fail to persuade us of the value of living a life
informed and influenced by a variety of perspectives is because he does not
address a diverse audience. He assumes a narrow audience and his arguments are often one-sided. As his title, “People Like Us” suggests, Brooks assumes he is
writing for an audience of white, upper class Americans like himself. In one
thought experiment, Brooks invites us to confront the rigidity of our own
communities and asks us to consider how a family in a $750,000 home in
Bethesda, Maryland would react to moving to a home of the same price in Great
Falls, Virginia. Or how the owner of a $3 million dollar soHo loft would feel about
being asked to move to a $3 million fifth avenue apartment. Most Americans do
not live in $750,000 dollar houses. An even smaller segment of the population
can afford $3 million dollar lofts. In another example, Brooks tries to reveal
to us the homogeneity of our friend groups. He invites us to, “think of your
twelve closest friends,” and he assumes the group we picture will be comprised
of graduates from the most elite colleges (“Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Princeton”
(334)…etc). In the last paragraph of his essay Brooks suggests several ways to
improve the diversity in our lives, suggesting, “take out a subscription to The Door, the evangelical humor
magazine” or “visit Branson, Missouri” and “stop in at a megachurch” (336). Brooks
doesn’t just make assumptions about his audience’s social class; he also, in
his discussion of the lack of politically conservative university professors, assumes
we’re all Democrats. By choosing to address a highly educated, elite, white,
liberal audience Brooks fails to implicate the general population in his
argument. The article did, after all, first appear in the Atlantic, a magazine with an elite literary reputation whose founders
included great thinks such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Oliver Wendell Holmes.
Brooks calls today’s society “segmented” and points out that we “often don’t even have arguments across the political divide;” he identifies the lack of politically
conservative professors at elite universities as one source of this intolerance
(335). He attributes this deficiency to the hiring committees that “screen out”
people different from them such as “pro-life” individuals and “evangelical
Christians” (335). Yet placing all the blame on the institutions themselves ignores
the fact that evangelical Christians might be absent from the faculty of
schools such as Harvard and Brown for a number of reasons; for example, evangelicalChristians may not be applying for jobs at Ivy League schools because they have their own evangelical universities. The absence of evangelical Christians in
academia does not shed light on workplace discrimination. Instead, it
highlights a very specific sect of society that likely avoids certain
professions and institutions for religious reasons. For example, evangelical
Christians are strong proponents of the traditional definition of marriage and
many choose not to be involved in organizations or institutions that support
gay marriage. Moreover, Brooks concludes his discussion of academia’s
“appalling” lack of diversity with a large generalization: “brainy people with
generally liberal social mores flow to academia, and brainy people with
generally conservative mores flow elsewhere” (335). Not only does this kind of
generalization detract from his argument because it is an obvious over
simplification, this also smacks of pure opinion. Moreover, Brooks’ use of the
passive verb “flow” absolves people of responsibility for their decisions. Furthermore, his suggestion that liberals are the ones responsible for reaching across the aisle ignores the responsibility of conservatives to do the same within the
organizations they dominate.
Brooks’ essay would be more persuasive if he took a firmer stance on the diversity
issue. For example, he could actually discuss the ugly reality of housing and
workplace discrimination. He only briefly acknowledges the existence of housing
discrimination and the value of this acknowledgment is undermined by Brooks’
hypothesis that efforts to eradicate housing discrimination have failed because
“our good intentions seem to have run into the brick wall of human nature”
(332). Such a statement makes it seem as if residential segregation is a result
of personal, even unconscious preferences, rather than external, actively
discriminatory laws and practices. Indeed many African-Americans would probably
like to live in more integrated communities or in wealthier zip codes, but they
are prevented from moving out of largely black, often poor neighborhoods
because they are actively discriminated against through practices such as
redlining. Furthermore, Brooks’ use of the verb “congregate” to describe how
many middle-class African-Americans come to live within communities of other middle-class African-Americans makes it seem as if this phenomena is a product purely of their volition and natural desires.
Like the American public Brooks describes, his essay is segmented. Although he makes a variety of observations and cites multiple studies and scholars, he doesn’t
draw connections between his pieces of evidence. He might have reflected upon
how workplace discrimination perpetuates economic inequality, which helps
neighborhoods remain homogenous, with dominant groups residing in the
wealthiest zip codes. This would have enabled him to discuss how cultivating
communities of “people like us” is not merely an innocuous act of “human nature”
and can actually be labeled an act of discrimination. And this doesn’t just
affect minorities; these actions harm the dominant group as well. Cultural
diversity and diversity of thought enriches our interactions with one another
and can enable each one of us to envision possibilities and solutions we
couldn’t previously have even imagined. Furthermore, if Brooks had provided
just one example of the benefits of diversity –- how one company diversified
their staff and was able to come up with more innovative, profitable ideas or how
a bilingual education can help young children develop superior communication
and problem solving skills –-he might have inspired his readers to seek more
diversity in their lives. Had he done this, his readers would be able to answer
his final question,” do you care?,” in the affirmative.
You Need 3 Sources
One. David Brooks' essay
Two. "Is Tribalism the Worst Idea in History?"
Three. "You're More Biased Than You Think--Even When You Know You're Biased"
Four. "The Country of the Blind"
Five. Pleasantville
Six. "We're Not in a Civil War, But We Are Drifting Toward Divorce"
Tribalism Is Shrinking in Favor of Casual Nihilism
In 1999, the movie The Matrix prophesied that the entire world would succumb to The Blue Pill, a form of brainless intoxication in which people disappeared into a cocoon of blissful ignorance.
2011 a Turning Point in History as Tribalism Shrinks in the Face of Casual Nihilism
The prophecy became evident in 2011 when the smartphone, an opium drip machine hooked to the brain 24/7, started to build critical mass.
Now people are losing their tribal roots in favor of Casual Nihilism, the narcissistic exercise of curating fraudulent facsimiles of one’s existence, of fragmenting one’s brain, and of being ignorant of the insidious despair that ensues.
Casual Nihilism is poison for the human individual to blossom and find the real bliss: focusing for long periods of time and working hard on one’s craft.
That Casual Nihilism has replaced Meaningful Work as the paradigm of modern life is a tragedy that will ensue unspeakable disasters, including the failure to detect fake news, the failure to know how to repel marketing and government manipulation, and the general failure to grow up and be a fully realized human being.
The Assignment:
The assignments gives you a lot of flexibility for your thesis. You're being asked to analyze the human inclination for staying within the tribe of sameness as explained in David Brooks’ “People Like Us.”
Your analysis can be expressed through five categories.
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