Tuesday, March 30, 2010 at 11:19AM | in Governance Our spiritual blindside
David Brooks on happiness and modernity:
Most of us pay attention to the wrong things. Most people vastly overestimate the extent to which more money would improve our lives. Most schools and colleges spend too much time preparing students for careers and not enough preparing them to make social decisions. Most governments release a ton of data on economic trends but not enough on trust and other social conditions. In short, modern societies have developed vast institutions oriented around the things that are easy to count, not around the things that matter most. They have an affinity for material concerns and a primordial fear of moral and social ones.
Tuesday, March 30, 2010 at 11:19AM | in Governance 
Reader Comments (1)
Bobby 1968
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But Kennedy went to extraordinary lengths to define what was wrong and what needed to be done. He attacked the national obsession with economic growth, a statement Hayden cited for its similarity to the Port Huron Statement:
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"We will find neither national purpose nor personal satisfaction in a mere continuation of economic progress, in an endless amassing of worldly goods. We cannot measure national spirit by the Dow Jones Average, nor national achievement by the Gross National Product. For the Gross National Product includes air pollution, and ambulances to clear our highways from carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and jails for the people who break them. The Gross National Product includes the destruction of the redwoods and the death of Lake Superior. It grows with the production of napalm and missiles and nuclear warheads.... It includes.... the broadcasting of television programmes which glorify violence to sell goods to our children.
And if the Gross National Product includes all this, there is much that it does not comprehend. It does not allow for the health of our families, teh quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It is indifferent to teh decency of our factories and the safety of our streets. It does not include the beauty of our poetry, or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials.... the Gross National Product measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile, and it can tell us everything about America --- except whether we are proud to be Americans."
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Bobby Kennedy in his 1968 presidential campaign.
Could a man who said such revolutionary things actually get to the White House? Yes, it was possible, because this, after all, was a Kennedy.
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Mark Kurlansky in "1968: The Year That Rocked the World" pages 140 to 141.
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QED! (I rest my case!)