By now close readers of David Brooks know quite well that he cannot praise the rich enough. The rich are the best people in the world as far as he is concerned. But we have also learned that Brooks is enamored of traditionalist religion in the guise of Conservative values. When these two existential philosophies collide, the result is this equivocating article. As the article’s title indicates, Brooks sees “talent” in a very circumscribed manner. There is never any sense that gains might be ill-gotten; that the link between “talent” and “achievement” might not actually be as iron-clad as Brooks would like to make it. “Talent” for Brooks is a product of success and not the other way around. But it is altogether possible for a person …show more content…
What the article neglects to say is that those who succeed these days more often than not do so because of their fidelity to a status quo elite cadre that sets arbitrary rules not based on civic needs but on greed. They can create financial havoc with our economic system in order to feed their own personal voraciousness. This makes them richer than the rest of us, but it does not make them more talented. What is strange here is the muted manner in which Brooks treats the issue of the nuclear family and the way it has been decimated by his “talented” elite. Like some episode from a Dickens novel, Brooks asserts that the Scrooges of the world – those who live outside the social order – are superior to the Bob Cratchits because they are less encumbered and thus better equipped to handle the complexity of a social order based on cleverness and “Might Makes Right.” It is not necessarily that people want to evolve from having stable nuclear families, it is that the Scrooges of Brooks’ new order – those he identifies as “talented” – have made such stability that much more difficult. Keeping a job, saving income, and conserving resources are ideals rarely possible when Brooks’ “talented” elites are sucking out all the value from our economy and holding their jackboots on the necks of those they see as beneath them who are not as clever or as maliciously aggressive as they