Quip O’ The Day
“I’ll believe Brooks’ “end of individualism” schtick when he gives up his NYT byline and replaces his name with “Staff Writer.” —Professor Reynolds
Comment O’ The Day
“We are a nation of individuals with unique dreams and liberties. Stop it.”–Brian Gutherman
DAVID BROOKS IS PARTYING LIKE IT’S 1919!
Flashback to a century ago, when attacks on individuality were all the rage among collectivist-obsessed “Progressives:”
[Woodrow] Wilson was merely one voice in the progressive chorus of the age. “[W]e must demand that the individual shall be willing to lose the sense of personal achievement, and shall be content to realize his activity only in connection to the activity of the many,” declared the progressive social activist Jane Addams.
“New forms of association must be created,” explained Walter Rauschenbusch, a leading progressive theologian of the Social Gospel movement, in 1896. “Our disorganized competitive life must pass into an organic cooperative life.” Elsewhere, Rauschenbusch put it more simply: “Individualism means tyranny.”
Or as Mies van der Rohe, the last director of Weimar Germany’s socialist-oriented Bauhaus design school said in 1924:
The individual is losing significance; his destiny is no longer what interests us. The decisive achievements in all fields are impersonal and their authors are for the most part unknown. They are part of the trend of our time toward anonymity. Our engineering structures are examples. Gigantic dams, great industrial installations and huge bridges are built as a matter of course, with no designer’s name attached to them. They point to the technology of the future.
Curiously, Mies would have no problem building for wealthy individuals who wished to commission his work — not to mention having his name firmly associated with his designs — after he fled the Weimar Republic’s much more punitive successors for America.
Exit question:
Some of its shakier proponents fell in love with fine trouser creases over substance. As did others who knew better, but hated missing out on all the best cocktail parties on both ends of the Northeast Corridor. Not to mention, the green room at MSNBC.