David Brooks: preference

Transcript context

…But it would be an Airbnb culture then? Can I take that metaphor that far on the way? [laughter] That gives me hope. Yeah, it bothers me that a lot . . . [laughs] It doesn’t bother me, but a lot of the really big social technologies are designed to make human relationships friction free and temporary: Airbnb, Tinder, even Facebook to some degree. There has to be some other way to solve the problem for long attention span. And the one thing I’d love to do is demote how we think about high tech and especially social media. I think our smartphones do a lot of great stuff for me. I can find my way anywhere in the world now because of my smartphone. So that’s a great tool, but I don’t expect it to lead to a new consciousness or solve my emotional problems. My car is a great tool, the wheel is a great tool, electricity a great tool I don’t expect to spiritually deliver the society. But somehow we got in the business of expecting tech to deliver a new consciousness and a new social order. That’s just asking too much of a tool. And so I doubt it’s going to come through some technology. Yeah, hi. I have a question about foreign policy, which is a subject you write quite a lot about in your columns. Earlier in this conversation, you mentioned that you share with Edmund Burke epistemological modesty. I’m wondering how you square that with being a Reaganite. It seems to me that in order to run a successful foreign policy of the sort that America wants to run that you have to know quite a lot about the world, and how can you know enough?…

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