Poor Sonia Sotomayor. David Brooks writes a sympathetic piece about her this morning, focusing on the fact that she has worked hard her entire life, sacrificed relationships and family, all in chasing the comfort of work. 

In Brooks' picture of Sotomayor, her loss of her father at nine took something away from her, and she's been on a quest to fill that hole ever since. She works. All the time. And has 'failed' relationships and no children to show for it. 

But let's think about this for a moment, shall we? If I were reading this as a work of fiction, I would recognize all the tropes of a moral story. Ebenezer Scrooge perhaps, who loses his humanity, works too many hours chasing the almighty dollar, and then finally, at the end of his life, finds empathy and the company of his fellow humans...? 

So, now, I'm really confused. Because aren't we told that Sotomayor has too much empathy for her fellow humans, that that quality will make her a terrible judge because she won't rule by some philosophical-historical construct of objectivity?

Capitalism thrives on the emotionally "crippled," on those who are unable to form relationships with their fellow people, who retreat to their work and work and work and contribute to capitalist growth. That's one story. The other story is that capitalism thrives on those who are so dedicated to their work out of love and passion that they spend hours and hours doing it until they find what it is they're chasing -- and then bring home the bacon, long after their families have fallen asleep, to fund their subsistence.

But it seems those characteristics only apply to men. It's easy to imagine a man being too busy to get married, or loving his work so much that he can never come home for dinner or be there before the kids go to bed. He has a wife who makes up the slack. But a woman who loves her work that much? Sssssh. There's something wrong with her. 

 As Brooks quotes:

As an adult, the profiles describe her as upbeat and social, leading walks to Brooklyn, hosting poker parties, serving as godmother to many children. Yet over the years, she has been remarkably honest about the costs of her workaholism.

Her marriage broke up after two years. She was quoted as saying, “I cannot attribute that divorce to work, but certainly the fact that I was leaving my home at 7 and getting back at 10 o’clock was not of assistance in recognizing the problems developing in my marriage.”

Later, during a swearing-in ceremony in 1998, she referred to her then-fiancé, “The professional success I had achieved before Peter did nothing to bring me genuine personal happiness.” She addressed him, saying that he had filled “voids of emptiness that existed before you. ... You have altered my life so profoundly that many of my closest friends forget just how emotionally withdrawn I was before I met you.”

That relationship ended after eight years, and her biographers paint a picture of a life now that is frantically busy, fulfilling and often aloof. “You make play dates with her months and months in advance because of her schedule,” a friend of hers told The Times.

This isn’t the old story of a career woman trying to balance work and family. This is the story of pressures that affect men as well as women (men are just more likely to make fools of themselves in response, as the news of the last few years indicates). It’s the story of people in a meritocracy that gets more purified and competitive by the year, with the time demands growing more and more insistent.

Okay. So Brooks backs off for a moment, and says there are plenty of men and women like Sotomayor--the elites, driven by their work (who, by the way, are not having babies)--whose relationships at work become a pale shadow of a real emotional relationship. 

He continues:

These profiles give an authentic glimpse of a style of life that hasn’t yet been captured by a novel or a movie — the subtle blend of high-achiever successes, trade-offs and deep commitments to others. In the profiles, you see the intoxicating lure of work, which provides an organizing purpose and identity. You see the web of mentor-mentee relationships — the courtship between the young and the middle-aged, and then the tensions as the mentees break off on their own. You see the strains of a multicultural establishment, in which people try to preserve their ethnic heritage as they ascend into the ranks of the elite. You see the way people not only choose a profession, it chooses them. It changes them in a way they probably didn’t anticipate at first.

My impression is that judges feel the strain between their social roles and their social lives more acutely than anybody. They are often outgoing people who, because of their jobs, cannot freely socialize with lawyers and others who share their deepest interests. But Sotomayor’s life also overlaps with a broader class of high achievers. You don’t succeed at that level without developing a single-minded focus, and struggling against its consequences.

Brooks is undercutting the whole notion that judges should be in positions to make decisions about "real" American life. After all, so many of them fail to live that life (unless they're traditionalists like those male judges whose faithful wives stand next to them on the podium as they're introduced.) Judges are disconnected from what real Americans feel, so how can they possibly judge us? 

But it's not just judges. I have two male friends who have both opted not to marry or have children because of their work. I know men in marriages who are workaholics and ignore their families. No one seems to pay much attention to them, until the day their wives walk out on them after the kids have been raised and gone and there's no one there. My point is, many, many families are like this. This is more the real America than what Brooks somehow thinks. Many people are cut off from the most basic of human emotions. 

No wonder the word "empathy" scares the crap out of so many of Sotomayor's critics. 

But life is not just about relationships. May Sarton has written poignantly about the life of solititude, not loneliness. Rainier Maria Rilke insists:

What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude. To walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours - that is what you must be able to attain. To be solitary as you were when you were a child, when the grown-ups walked around involved with matters that seemed large and important because they looked so busy and because you didn't understand a thing about what they were doing.

We cannot grow without being able to embrace our solitude. While most of us grow within "traditional" relationships, not all of us do. The construction of the family is meant to discipline us for civic life, as well as to comfort us. Yet, to the confusion of some, there are those of us who do not want to live within that discipline. 

Finally. Brooks speaks of the "elite woman" once again, who has given up love for work. Never, never does he talk about the low-income women who are working three jobs and have no time for love. Or the middle class man or the homeless person. Forgoing love is not just for the elites. Sometimes, forgoing love is forced upon us. 

I just wish sometimes that Brooks could walk among the real people, see that there is not this world of happy workers who love God, their spouses, and their (even unwanted) babies and their jobs versus a world of high-achieving over-educated miserable elites who complain about everything. 

The world is just not that Manichean, David. These issues are not "black and white." Or did you not learn that when you read Augustine--the original who struggled with the life of solitude (which he thought would bring him closer to God and to agape) versus the life of the family (which gave him sensual pleasure and human love)?