David Brooks is an op-ed columnist for the New York Times. He's one of the few conservative voices on the staff, although he's most concerned with traditional conservatism, i.e. the ethical project of taming the bad side of man's nature, than he is in parroting whatever it is that Fox News has to say at the particular moment. More often than I've ever actually sought out to read a David Brooks essay of my own free will, I've seen him quoted indignantly on my Facebook or Twitter timeline, with the caption, "Ugh, did David Brooks speak again?" 

​From the little that I've skimmed in the New York Times, he seems like someone with deep-held values who really knows what he's talking about when it comes to a traditional perspective on ethics, morals, and values. So, when it came time to select my fourth book from the Georgetown library, I thought, "Why not? Let's take the plunge."

"The Road to Character" is a collection of short biographies of people who have made a name for themselves in history in some way. Politicians, writers, Catholic saints. What they all have in common is that they lived pretty difficult lives and had to overcome very daunting obstacles. Brooks posits that it is the crucible of life's hardships themselves that is like a fire that burns away ethical flaws like materialism and selfishness. It is the crucible of life's hardships that inspires us to live a life that chases after higher goals and achievements that will leave a lasting positive impact on our lives and on the lives of the other people around us.

I like the fact that Brooks advocates for conservative values without ever invoking abortion, gun control, or any of the other hot-button issues that you might see on Fox News or CNN. Conservativism isn't about Fox News or CNN. Conservatism isn't about Donald Trump, or whoever the president is at any given time. Conservatism is not even necessarily about the Republican Party. Conservatism is about caution. It's about recognizing that together with man's potential for good, he is also born with something of a fallen nature: the yetzer hara in Jewish theology or original sin/ the natural man in Christian theology.

It's a good thing to promote freedom in society, and it's great that in America we have a society that is perhaps more free than any other society in human history. But freedom ought to be exercised with caution, recognizing that, left undisciplined, it's been the tendency throughout history for man's unpleasant nature to overpower and overwhelm his capacity for good. 

Society benefits, at the very minimum, from taking time to develop leaders who are willing to follow the path in Brooks' book--to follow the road to character. It would be ideal if everyone in society was committed to living "the good life," but that is not realistic or fair to expect. Part of living in a free sociey is recognizing and accepting that people are free to live whatever kind of lives they want to, whether or not you personally accept their values. 

Freedom is good. Freedom is okay. Still, a conservative is a conservative because he believes that, whatever the other classes of society may do, it is important for the leaders to follow certain timeless patterns of moral development to attain good moral character, so that they can go out and lead the others. Otherwise, the whole democratic experiment is going to fall apart. 

I definitely recommend reading this David Brooks book, "The Road to Character," or any of his others. It helps you to understand the intellectual context of his New York Times articles and what he's really talking about when he talks about being a conservative. He means something that may overlap with but is not necessarily synonymous with whatever comes out of the mouth of President Trump. For example, in his most recent NYT op-ed article, "The Third-Party Option," dated July 30, 2018, Brooks writes about ways that he currently sees other in society better exemplifying conservative values than President Trump is doing. 

He writes: "Across the country, power is being most-effectively wielded by civic councils--organically formed groups of local officials, business leaders, neighborhood organizations. The members may have different racial, class, and partisan identities, but they have one shared identity--love of their community." 

Brooks' observation is very similar to the conclusions that I have been forming in my twenties. As I get older, I care less and less about the drama of national politics and more about being a responsible member of my community. I try to be a good member of my house of worship, I try to vote in local elections for candidates I resepct, and I try to be involved in local nonprofits, time permitting. Sometimes I feel a bit lonely as a conservative who cares more about values than about talking points, but Brooks helps me realize that I'm exactly where I need to be and doing exactly what I need to do. 

My favorite part of this book was his discussion of the life of Frances Perkins, one of the members of President Dwight Eisenhower's cabinet. At one point in her life, Perkins was invited to become a Cornell University professor. "The job paid about $10,000 a year, scarcely more than she had earned decades before as a New York Industrial Commissioner, but she needed the money to pay for her daughter's mental health care.

"At first, she lived in residential hotels during her time in Ithaca, but she was then invited to live in a small bedroom in Telluride House, a sort of fraternity house for some of Cornell's most gifted students. She was delighted by the invitation. 'I feel like a bride on her wedding night" she told friends. While there, she drank bourbon with the boys and tolerated their music at all house. She attended the Monday house meetings, though she rarely spoke. She gave them copies of Baltasar Gracian's, 'The Art of Worldly Wisdom,' a seventeenth-century guidebook by a Spanish Jesuit priest on how to retain one's integrity while navigating the halls of power. She became close friends with Allan Bloom, a young professor who would go on to achieve fame as the author of 'The Closing of the American Mind.' Some of the boys had trouble understanding how this small, charming, and unassuming old lady could have played such an important historical role." 

This passage makes me again feel like I am right track -- on the road to character. I am very fortunate to have had the chance to live and work in the same Cornell frat house: Telluride House. My first job after college was to come to Telluride and help design a special Cornell summer course, hosted at the frat house, on the topics in black studies, art history, and modernism.

I should feel both humbled and honored that my path in life intersects so closely, so far, with the lives of the great people Brooks desribes in this book. I ought to appreciate and make good use of the special opportunities that I have been given, and I ought not to let other people's choices, good and bad, distract me from my own personal route on the road to character.

This was the third book that I read this summer. Understanding competing notions of wealth and class is especially important if I choose to pursue a career on the wealth management side of finance. A financial advisor or a private banker needs to understand what is at stake/ what is important in the lives of the families he is serving--as well as what is and stake and important in his own life and the life of his family.

Wealth management is a difficult task, if the goal is successful generation-to-generation wealth transfer, across multiple generations. It takes a very delicate combination of variables for a person to become rich in the first place, and preserving those variables into the second, third, and fourth generation is difficult, especially when the youth of younger generations become far-removed from the original social circumstances that made the ancestor so focused on success. It is the natural order of things for order to fade into chaos, industriousness to grey into sloth, and wealth to distill into poverty. 

As an example of the tendency for wealth to fall apart and decay across generations, Aldrich points out that "whatever wealth-generating enterprise it was that initially carried the family into history, the chances are that it did not continue under family management for more than the proverbial three generations. One study has shown that the attrition rate of family businesses in America -- enterprises, that is, for which there's evidence that the founder intended to pass them on to the next generation -- is about 80 percent in the first-to-second generation transfer, and again 80 percent in the second-to-third generation transfer." 

That is jarring. It means that only 4% of businesses started by a grandfather will successfully still be intact as a family possession by the time the grandson or granddaughter is ready to go and claim his or her inheritance. 

Old Money, as Aldrich defines it, is the collection of cultural practices visible and present among wealthy families who are trying to avoid the social casualty of business- and wealth-attrition from generation to generation within the family. Whether the family's wealth-preservation project fails or is successful, Aldrich classifies a family as Old Money simply for the fact of ever having once been wealthy and for trying, successfully or not, to preserve the financial and social legacy of that ancestor's success.

The principal difference between Old Money and New Money, according to Aldrich, is the presence or lack of a concern for planned cross-generational wealth transfer, as opposed to excessive or inappropriate focus on the present generation's success in the market of earning and consumption.

Whereas the key actor on the historical stage, for the New Money individual, is indeed he or she himself as an individual, the key world-historical actor for the Old Money individual is the family--deliberately engineered to stay healthy, functional, and successful in the generations to come. 

Quoting Charles W. Eliot, one of the past presidents of Harvard University, Aldrich writes: 

"The family, rather than the individual, is the important social unit. If society as a whole is to gain by mobility and openness of structure, those who rise must stay up in successive generations, that the higher level of society may be constantly enlarged, and that the proportion of pure, gentle, magnanimous, and refined persons may be steadily increased. New-risen talent should reinforce the upper ranks. … The assured permanence of superior families is quite as important as the free starting of such families." 

I think the understanding of wealth that this book presents is relieving, honestly. It takes some of the burden of achievement off my shoulders as an individual and distributes the load more fairly across the future generations of my family. After reading this book, I am increasingly less concern with finding the "perfect" job for myself. I'm more focused on finding a functional way to reach financial goals and benchmarks and then work with a financial advisor to set up financial and social instrument for the clean and effective transfer of that wealth to my children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.

The chief downfall or flaw in the Old Money project is probably the low success rate of the project. I keep thinking of that statistic, quoted above, that only 4% of family businesses are still owned in the family's possession by the time the grandson or granddaughter is old enough to go and claim it. 

What combination of school, adventure, cultural experiences, outdoor experiences, etc., could give a descendant who grows up in relative comfort, with all of his or her needs accounted for, the same kinds of discipline and height of character that was necessary for the ancestor to be able to earn and manage his or her wealth in the first place? Aldrich spends the remainder of his book, "Old Money," trying to answer precisely this question.

Photo credit: "American Dream" by Sean Gale Burke.

This is the second book I read this summer. I was very excited to check it out from the Georgetown library.

"Jews Queers Germans" is arranged like a series of hundreds of short stories one after the other. I found it hard to keep track of all the characters' names, but to be honest, you don't need to know the characters' names in order to understand this novel. The point of the novel is to show you, beyond any point of possible doubt, that there is a period in history from about 1890 to 1945 called "modernism." And, during modernism, beyond any point of possible doubt, many, many men were bisexual and homosexual. Whether bi or gay, they were normal people just like you and me. They were educated and uneducated, athletic and nerdy, rich and poor, powerful and disenfranchised, ethical and unethical, heroic and villainous. And in case you don't believe me, here are hundreds and hundreds of pages of true historical stories to prove it. 

It was really important for me to read this book this summer. I've been in the process of realizing that I am bisexual, and I needed some kind of resource to help me understand what I was feeling. Utah has a very strong heterosexual culture due to the influence of the state's predominant religion--The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, also known as the Mormon church. Utah also has an unexpectedly strong gay culture because of all the gay Mormons who are struggling to express themselves and fight for their dignity in a political environment that very much resembles a theocracy or a religious ethno-state. When I was a college student at Brigham Young University, you could go to church any Sunday or even go to a religion class on campus during the week and learn the ins and outs of how to have a healthy straight marriage or relationship. You could also go to the university's gay-straight alliance and learn a lot about how to accept your gay identity, how to come out of the closet, and how to find a new sense of deeper meaning and purpose in life as you realize that Utah's dominant religion really does not have a healthy or psychologically-tenable place for you in its plan of salvation. There is a preponderance of gay and straight culture in Utah, and in the world as a whole. What you don't see so much of is the presence of a public bi culture, so that bisexuals can learn about themselves and live with as much confidence and cultural belonging as their straight and gay peers. So, books like "Jews Queers Germans," which devote hundreds of pages to giving the reader models and examples of bisexual thinking, are very important. 

A new term that I learned this summer is "biphobia." I was in a relationship, or a very special friendship, whatever you want to call it--Duberman's characters use both words--that struggled and ultimately failed because of a strong degree of internalized biphobia in both of us. I would like to see the world as a place where biphobia is just as unacceptable of a prejudice as anything else is. Hopefully this book review is a start.

I really like what Wikipedia has to say about biphobia, so I'm just going to do down the Wikipedia article on biphobia, paragraph by paragraph, and lay out some important points. 

First, the actual definition of biphobia: 
"Biphobia is aversion toward bisexuality and toward bisexual people as a social group or as individuals. It can take the form of denial that bisexuality is a genuine sexual orientation, or of negative stereotypes about people who are bisexual (such as the beliefs that they are promiscuous or dishonest). People of any sexual orientation can experience or perpetuate biphobia."

Second, there are multiple kinds of biphobia. Not everyone is biphobic in the same way, just like not everyone is bisexual in the same way. One form of biphobia is called "heterosexist biphobia." This is the view "that heterosexuality is the only true or natural sexual orientation. Thus anything that deviates from that is instead either a psychological pathology or an example of anti-social behavior." 

Another form of biphobia is called "binary biphobia." This "stems from binary views of sexuality: that people are assumed monosexual, i.e. exclusively homosexual (gay/lesbian) or heterosexual (straight). Throughout the 1980s, modern research on sexuality was dominated by the idea that heterosexuality and homosexuality were the only legitimate orientations, dismissing bisexuality as 'secondary homosexuality'. In that model, bisexuals are presumed to be either closeted lesbian/gay people wishing to appear heterosexual, or individuals (of 'either' orientation) experimenting with sexuality outside of their 'normal' interest. Maxims such as 'people are either gay, straight, or lying' embody this dichotomous view of sexual orientation."

A third form of biphobia is called "bisexual erasure." This includes the belief that people have to be equally attracted to one gender as much as the other in order to be bisexual. This erases probably 90% of the bisexual population, who actually do prefer men or actually do prefer women. Bisexual erasure also includes the idea that only women can be bisexual, but men cannot be. Bisexual erasure further includes the idea that "that bisexual behavior or identity is merely a social trend – as exemplified by 'bisexual chic' or gender bending – and not an intrinsic personality trait. Same-gender sexual activity is dismissed as merely a substitute for sex with members of the opposite sex, or as a more accessible source of sexual gratification."

In "Jews Queers Germans," men from all walks of European society participate in all kinds of variations of bisexual friendships and relationships imaginable, while their society around them struggles to keep up. Through the voice of the law, the military, the government, the scientific community, the academic community, and the religious community, the protagonists encounter each of the three forms of biphobia that I have described above: (1) heterosexist biphobia, (2) binary biphobia, and (3) bisexual erasure. 

The novel doesn't really have a happy ending. Out of the 500 pages, I can't remember any of the friendships or relationships that actually worked out in a long-term way, like a heterosexual marriage--"till death do us part," or, in Mormon culture, "for all time and eternity." Dealing with loss and with separation is a part of human life. We ought not focus on fear of an end, missing all the beauty of the beginning and the middle.

I used to believe in marriage for time and all eternity as the model for what perfect love looks like. I am a bisexual guy, who like many gay guys at BYU, came to realize that this story doesn't quite describe what I believe about the world. Most gay Mormons become secular, atheist, and agnostic, fed up with religion altogether because of the way they've been treated in Mormon culture. I am a religious person by nature, so it was important for me to find a healthy religious community when my Mormonism fell apart. I converted to Judaism this spring, after a year of study with my rabbi, and I've found עם ישראל to be a healthy, nourishing, supportive community in which to live my adult life going forward.

Judaism is a pretty tolerant culture. I guess that explains why "Jews" appears in the title of this book. During the modernist period of history, from 1890 to 1945, some Germans believed that Judaism was promoting a too-tolerant view of love, sexuality, gender, and life in general. Various conservative German thinkers became to use Jews as a scapegoat for what they believed was the financial and moral degeneracy of their society. Judaism has been a part of my life informally since I was about twelve, so at this point, sixteen years later, Judaism means way, way more to me than just a safe place to be bi. But Judaism is a topic for another essay. Right now I'm more interested in talking about bisexuality and biphobia. If you could take one thing away from this book review, I would ask you to please realize that biphobia is a thing and to recognize that biphobia is hurting a lot of people's lives.

"Jews Queers Germans" is a really hard book. It's not for everybody. But if you're interested in learning more about bisexual culture, maybe this is the right book for you. 

Oh, and since I always like to include at least one quote from the book, here is my favorite paragraph from the book: 

"His friendship with Rathenau having weathered assorted storms, Kessler calls on him at his house in Grunewald. He finds Rathenau sunk in gloom and attributes it in part to the Grunewald home itself, which he's always detested, once describing its décor--with more than a hint at his view of Rathenau's sexual proclivities--as a mix of 'petty sentimentality and stunted eroticism…as if a banker and a masturbating boy thought it up together.' 

But as Kessler well understands, Rathenau's depressed isolation is due to much more than the surrounding décor."

The first book that I read this summer was "Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street." An ethnography is a first-person analysis of some group's culture, or subculture. To write an ethnography, you would enter the social group, hopefully in the most honest, straightforward, and polite way possible, and, with the group's consent, spend a couple months or years living among them and observing and participating in their habits and their overall culture. 

You're writing down the things you see and do. You're writing down how you felt as you said and did these things. You're interviewing other people in this group to see how they felt as they said and did the things. You're maybe throwing in a bit of history, where that context is relevant. And overall, most importantly, you're making connections between the different parts of the culture, drawing connections, identifying contradictions, and ultimately saying, "Hmm, well this makes a lot of sense," or maybe, "Hmm, this actually doesn't make that much sense to me." 

It's a cool way to kind of tell the story of a social group. You could write an ethnography about your college, an ethnography about your hometown, a ethnography of your lacrosse team, an ethnography of whatever. In this case, the author, Karen Ho, is trying to write an ethnography about Wall Street. She got a job as an employee at an investment bank on Wall Street, and, with their consent, she began writing down what she saw, finding connections and themes in the behaviors she was observing, and ultimately trying to decide whether Wall Street does or does not make sense, from her perspective.

Her most memorable argument was the idea that many investment banking analysts are actually producing BS work, not real financial analysis. She includes, for example, the chart that I've copied here to this article, comparing the correct technical way to build a financial model and the actual way that she observed investment banking analysts producing models--as lazily and sloppily as possible. She writes: 

"While investment bankers certainly recognize that they do, in fact, bullshit their clients, they usually view such practices as justified by the hard work they genuinely put in, their superior knowledge of the market, and the financial good they are sure their interventions ultimately accomplish."

Having never actually worked on Wall Street, it's difficult for me to agree or disagree with her statement about whether the work investment bankers do is actually BS. There's a big finance meme culture on Instagram and other social media forums, where you can see people making fun of the BS work that investment banking interns do seem to produce during their summer internship. But the general idea there is that it's only the interns, greenies, newbies who are doing the BS. The people making fun of them are the established associates, vice presidents, etc., who are actually producing real work and often correcting the mistakes and the BS that they observe the analysts putting forth.

I would guess that Ms. Ho is of a left-leaning orientation. Her critique of Wall Street seems to be that, in contrast to Main Street, where people work 9 to 5, and put in a good, honest day of labor, Wall Street seems to be a place where BS, covered by elitism and fancy college degrees, passes for hard work and justifies a sense of cultural condescension toward Main Street American middle-class workers. 

How do I feel about this? Well I think Ms. Ho is mistaken. I think that finance is real, hard work, as I'm learning in my Georgetown finance program, and as anyone who tries to number-crunch a financial statement also knows. I think the best way to understand the financial world is not through a qualitative analytic method, like ethnography, but rather by quantitative methods, like getting in there and learning how to produce a multi-tab Excel spreadsheet valuation analysis, the same way Wall Street analysts might do. 

Once you get in there and learn how to work with the numbers as a financial analyst, I think you might have a little more respect for Wall Street and its parallels in other cities, and I think you might be a little more inclined to say that finance industry professionals do actually deserve to get paid the kinds of salaries they do. Finance is hard work. 

I can't pretend that I'm not haunted, sometimes, by the ghost of Karen's whisper, her suggestion that everything I might possibly do in my finance career is BS. Some finance roles and projects do seem more intellectually intense than others, and some roles and projects do seem closer on the spectrum to BS. But at the end of the day, I reject her claim that finance altogether is a BS industry, and I would argue pretty confidently that finance is just as hard or as valid of an industry as anything else anybody might choose to do.

I read five books this summer. I read more than five books this summer, but these are the five books that I checked out from the Georgetown library. I like Georgetown a lot, and I like Washington DC, so these books are very important to me. They are like a piece of Washington DC out here for me in Utah. I had six things on my list to bring back from Washington DC, on my most recent trip. Five of them were these books, and the sixth was a bowtie for my ex-boyfriend from the Georgetown Brooks Brothers. Brooks Brothers is very, very important to me, but that is a topic for another time. Right now, the topic at hand is the five books that I read this summer.

I read five books this summer. The first book was "Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street" by Karen Ho. The second book was "Jews Queers Germans" by Martin Duberman. The third book was "Old Money: The Mythology of America's Upper Class" by Nelson W. Aldrich, Jr. The fourth book was "The Road to Character" by David Books. And the fifth book was "Financial Derivatives and the Globalization of Risk" by Edward LiPuma and Benjamin Lee. They were very good books.

I tried to read in the hot tub at least once per week. I had a six pack that I was very, very proud of. It's fading away, but it'll come back. I'll write more about each book, later.