What in the World is David Brooks Talking About?

In a recent article in the New York Times, David Brooks draws a distinction between a classical ethos, which he characterizes as "pagan" and "cruel," and a more contemporary "kinder," "christian" ethos. Entitled "How to Survive the Trump Years With Your Spirit Intact," the essay tries to link Trump to a pagan past, as though the Romans were to blame for him; as though Trump were an aberration in a string of christian presidents throughout American history.

The binarism pagan/christian is an interesting one, and like all binarisms is a useless, false reduction, and not only because christianity is itself pagan, meeting all the requirements of paganism, including: belief in a spirit suffusing all of nature, which most christians refer to as the holy spirit; the need for a sacrifice to appease an angry god, whether animal or first-born son, in the christian instance the lamb of god, or Jesus; the necessity of a demigod––half-god, half-human––who must descend to the underworld and cheat death; and so on. Basically the stock story of the ancient world in a different dress. The other way christianity mimics pagan faiths is in its development of a structure of enforcement, from fundamentalist, stand-alone churches to a behemoth like the papacy, groups that proselytize, police, and in some cases militarize the faith.

So the very notion of a pagan/christian binary Brooks gets wrong. Instead it would have been more accurate to say that neither "paganism" nor "christianity" has anything in common with itself, given the diversity in every group, not just in a single era, as haphazardly and randomly as we define it in a string of eras across time, but across space as well; so that there are countless paganisms, including christianities, which not only diverge in infinite disseminations but also overlap.

As for the "pagan" era, on the face of it Brooks has no idea what he's talking about. It's clear, for example, that he knows nothing about Latin literature; if he did it'd be impossible to make such a claim about Roman culture as a whole. To correct the problem he might want to read Ovid's Metamorphoses, the sole point of which was to take on the corruption of the emperor, Augustus, including his toadies. There are scenes in that work of almost unbearable sensitivity, kindness, gentility, and equality––in fact the stories in the epic, written by a skeptical, unbelieving author, create a discourse against the abuse of power in its many forms. Even if Brooks didn't want to read the entire book he might want to try the tale of Baucis and Philemon, a story about a marriage amid poverty, a union more egalitarian than the vast majority of marriages today. In order to enter their hovel the disguised gods, Jupiter and Apollo, two sex- and power-starved deities, must stoop––that is bow––to the impoverished couple, in order to get through the door.

Or Brooks might want to read the story of Arachne, a girl who challenges the goddess, Minerva, to a weaving context. In her tapestry Minerva tells of the gods' greatness and majesty, while in hers Arachne, a poor dyer's daughter, portrays the many abuses of the gods; she tells, basically, about their many types of corruption. For daring to unmask the truth, Arachne is turned by the angry goddess into a spider. The story is a self-reflexive gesture referring to Ovid's own epic, which is an almost aching pitch for decency, the very opposite of the way Brooks portrays the Romans. And like Arachne, Ovid was punished in real life for his truth-telling: he was exiled to an island in the Black Sea after the publication of the epic, where he died heartbroken, separated from his wife and farm.

In general Brooks' rhetorical method is that of an old-fashioned structuralist, always searching for some hidden binarism at work, X vs. Y––that is for some unseen structure. He's clearly uneasy with the sheer mess of things, the way life and its diversity isn't easily categorized. It's much more facile to say pagan/bad and christian/good than deal with the thousand-and-one, the endless exceptions to any broad brush of things. As a result we're left with crude reductions, including overly-generous, untrue statements about christian culture, another history Brooks romanticizes and seems to know little about. I could go on endlessly regarding that subject, and have; how it like any category is multiple, a mix of kindness and abject cruelty, niceish people and nastyish brutes.

The point is nothing is gained by simplification, by reducing the complex nexus not just of human but all relations to schemes of two, in which one term is negative and the other positive. Ancient writers going back to Homer were emphatic about the fact that everything in life is complicated: that is the very heart of our literary tradition. The thinking of ancient writers allows us to assert not that Trump is a throwback to some fictive pagan era that was uniformly cruel, but that a cruel strain has always characterized the many versions of christian faith over the last two millenniums, including christian versions of some god that despite the talk about love is only too eager to condemn the stray or the unbeliever to hell; a hopeless realm not unlike the gulag that the bible-thumping Trump has recently doomed two hundred immigrants without due process.