David Brooks on the decline of civility.

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David Brooks alerts us to the fact that a congressman said something rude at a presidential speech, and a musician interrupted an awards show. “This isn’t the death of the West,” he reassures us. Good to know! But what is it? Why, it’s the death of all that is good and humble in this world, and the subsequent rise of “expressive individualism.” At some point between 1945 and today, we have crossed “a sort of narcissism line.”

I’d like to know more about this line. Did we all walk across it together? Were we too self-obsessed to notice? Poor Ta-Nehisi Coates is so far over the line that he can’t even see it. “It's virtually impossible to be a black person,” he contends, “and believe that Americans were somehow more humble in the past.”

This may be the product of blinkered, post-1945 reasoning, but it seems to me that West’s sideshow and Wilson’s outburst together signify… nothing. There is nothing telling, interesting, or indicative about two men acting out at a couple of awkwardly staged performances. The way millions of people react to them, on the other hand, matters very much. And if you’re like David Brooks, you’ll see the attacks on West and Wilson as a collective outcry against the vulgar monstrosity that is our culture. If you’re like me, you’ll see this reaction as a collective insistence on deference to authority, a pathetic inability to tolerate the meekest of incivilities. Either way, whatever it might mean when 270 representatives spend valuable time excoriating a single man for a two-word declarative statement, it probably doesn’t have much to do with the triumph of individualism over conformity.

Photograph of Kanye West and Taylor Swift by Christopher Polk/Getty Images.

Tags: David Brooks, joe wilson, kanye west

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Kerry Howley is a contributing editor at Reason Magazine and an Arts Fellow at the University of Iowa's literary nonfiction program.

Comments

So, can we ban beckham_250 or

By: icpshootyz | Mon, 09/21/2009 - 12:59

So, can we ban beckham_250 or what? These spam posts are getting a little annoying!

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By: beckham_250 | Sun, 09/20/2009 - 07:58

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Sometimes noncomformity is just stupidity

By: Elle | Fri, 09/18/2009 - 10:07

Really -- Kanye West bursting on stage yet *again* is your idea of individualism? Wow, I have got to go study up on this. Next time someone stands in front of a movie screen talking loudly on his telephone you won't be even a teeny bit annoyed, will you? A lot of people simply got tired of him deciding to deliver yet another drunken tirade. (The one at Taylor Swift was relatively mild; he has been far worse in other venues). The person whose behavior was getting boring and predictable was him.

Here's a minor incivility: you sound like an twit. We all know that neither man's outburst was sufficient to tip the world off its axis. Joe Wilson is a jerk and Kanye needs to check out AA. Next time try your speeches about individualism with examples of people who made some sense.

Howley and Others Say Kanye's Rudeness Was So Wonderful

By: jcluma | Fri, 09/18/2009 - 02:44

Oh yeah, Mr. Cool Hip Hop was really gonna straighten out this Vanilla Chick and set her straight before the world -- such a necessary and artful rebellion against mass conformity by KW. And wasn't Hitler so individualistic and necessary and cool when he killed all those millions and showed all those passive conformists a thing or two about civility!

Yeah, civility and shared values be damned! Drunken egotism is the highest value now in America. You wanta live a really righteous life? Be an a-hole and be adored by the online literati!

I should have known!

By: youngjonesy | Fri, 09/18/2009 - 05:55

I thought the whole tone of this post was drenched in the moral autism of libertarianism! And there it is: Contributing Editor at Reason Magazine.

Libertarians as a group have an obsessive desire to drain the importance of race from any discussion of almost anything, because it so neatly destroys the central tenent of their philosophy: that government intervention is terrible and is irreducibly oppressive in nature. Peddle that Randian claptrap somewhere else, we African-American's are too busy remembering how we finally shamed the federal government into brutally curtailing the individual freedoms of white southerns to extralegally kill, terrorize and social and economically ostracize us...the triumph of individualism over conformity indeed! Confront that truth honestly and the whole libertarian proposition is fatally exposed for what it is: The Right's equivalent of Marxism: a hopelessly unrealizable utopia that fails because, like Marxism, it ignores the human capacity for greed, myopia, and our tendency toward excess (and a total obliviousness to the destruction our individual excesses wreak, when scaled to the level of a society or a civilization)

But I guess libertarians have now taken it to the next level, where even nongovernmentally-induced popular opprobrium against uncouth behavior is some heinous imposition on personal liberty.

The point, Ms. Howley, was not that shoulting "you lie!" was some apocalyptic affront to the President that endangered life and limb, but it was unprecedented, and as such, it was appropriate to inquire as to why that had not happened in the previous two centuries-plus of our Republic. Likewise, West's behavior was outrageous, but cosmically meaningless. But now simply condemning boorish public behavior as boorish is somehow evidence of our despicably servile posture toward authority and conformity? Holy Jeez, that seems a little overheated. Checked out a townhall lately? There seems to be a healthy (?) disdain for the idea of deference to authority. Construct your straw men of sturdier stuff in the future.

Kayne West is a jackass, and, at the very least, Joe Wilson is a jackass. And no one is getting the gallows ready for either of them. And in much the same way if I violated some standard of behavior at my workplace, I would expect some form of adminstrative sanction, why should it be any different with a congressmen who violates the standard of behavior at their workplace...how much bitching is there by people (generally done by the people currently defending Joe Wilson, pseudo-ironically enough) that congress holds themselves to a different standard than us normal folk.

British Parliamentary Rudeness

By: qualitymaven | Thu, 09/17/2009 - 18:43

The so-called "prime minister's question time" in the British parliament actually follows rules of decorum, which the MPs pretty much stick to. They don't call their elected leaders liars or traitors.

And while the Brit politicians are as partisan as the US politicians, the Brit people aren't partisan. They are far more cynical and consider all politicians, including those of the party they vote for, unworthy of adulation or even, in most cases, of admiration.

Kanye clearly is the epitome

By: novusordo | Thu, 09/17/2009 - 05:56

Kanye clearly is the epitome of narcissism and his ego far outweighs his talents, but I think it's a big mistake to label Joe Wilson in the same category.

Anyone who has knowledge of political systems around the world will know this. In the United States it seems a lot more has to do with false niceties of convention trumping political reality, and it's an odd state of affairs. If a representative can't heckle the country's leader in the very place where legislation is debated, what is the world coming to?

The American media is awash with yellow muck raking analysis of politicians, down to Fox calling Obama unpatriotic for drinking a foreign owned beer (Budweiser), yet one man calls the President a liar in Congress during a speech and suddenly everyone is in shock that someone could be so 'rude'.

The double standards are almost unbearable, if they weren't so hilarious. A simple viewing of British or Australian 'Question Time' in their respective parliaments will show you how a healthy democratic system works (and also makes it more lively and entertaining for that matter..)

Tony Blair as Leader of the Opposition in Britain to the then Prime Minister Major: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QpZhugomNJE

Gordon Brown (PM) vs David Cameron: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAFumzu1eNo

and Paul Keating, Prime Minister of Australia vs John Howard in 1995, probably one of the best throwdowns in political history in this country.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roIeVEf5alk

Bring real debate back. It's what the American system needs.

It is an issue of respect.

By: PaulineB | Thu, 09/17/2009 - 03:03

It is an issue of respect. West didn’t respect the decision of the MVA’s jury and didn’t respect Swift at all, and putting her on a very awkward situation. For a person that doesn't write all his own music, Kanye West seems to think that he has more talent than he does, which is why he thinks that he can interrupt the Video Music Awards to announce that Beyonce Knowles had a better video than Taylor Swift, while she was accepting an award. ("All the Single Ladies" is a few women dancing around in leotards – it's boring, but they gave her a token award anyway.) Kanye West is an egomaniacal cad, and many would give payday loans to keep him off the MTV Awards for life after his outburst.

wait, what?

By: kate1981 | Wed, 09/16/2009 - 19:54

What authority was West not deferring to? People were outraged because West took away from a very young woman who is, by all appearances, one of the most likable people of her peer group, what was probably the most exciting moment of her life. "Jackass" seems quite apt. I'm all for defying the Man and all - but Taylor Swift is not the Man, and humiliating her in such a public way was not okay. As Pink herself pointed out - he'd probably have never done that to her. Not that I agree with Brooks - West's behavior was a timeless expression of the age-old instinct that it's okay to bully nice girls.

Nah

By: P Starling | Wed, 09/16/2009 - 14:50

We put up with--and applaud--all sorts of incivilities. Was it Barney Frank who asked some woman at a town hall meeting which planet she lived on? That was a great clip. And I have listened with deep appreciation to the President's less-than-polite comment on Kayne West, too. I won't even mention the Gosselins.

So I'm going to suggest that the problem is not incivility, it's the implied desire to shut up the other speaker (to squelch and contradict, in Wilson's case, and to hijack the proceedings, in West's) that we are so angry about. Because we do think that it's important not to shut others down. That argues a respect for free expression, not a fear of it.

Individualism Interrupted Your Speech, Taylor Swift!