Pop Sociology

The odds were .5:1 that this post is about David Brooks. And it is. Today's lesson is about "spreadsheet people" versus "paragraph people."

This kind of thing tastes great and is less filling:

Why have the class alignments shaken out as they have? There are a couple of theories. First there is the intellectual affiliation theory. Numerate people take comfort in the false clarity that numbers imply, and so also admire Bush's speaking style. Paragraph people, meanwhile, relate to the postmodern, post-Cartesian, deconstructionist, co-directional ambiguity of Kerry's Iraq policy.

I subscribe, however, to the mondo-neo-Marxist theory of information-age class conflict. According to this view, people who majored in liberal arts subjects like English and history naturally loathe people who majored in econ, business and the other "hard" fields. This loathing turns political in adult life and explains just about everything you need to know about political conflict today.

Just to be sure, I think there's more than a kernel of truth to this. And it's more substantive than anything MoDo's ever written.

If Brooks is right, where are philosophy students left? We are rejected by the humanities departments for our insistence on precision and analyticity, and we are scoffed at in the "hard" fields for our object-less intellectual meanderings.