If it’s indeed an ‘unconsummated desire,’ does that mean that these idealistic young people are not actually sacrificing or doing service?

David Brooks misspelled “Mistake”.

‘Sept. 11th really did leave a residue — an unconsummated desire for sacrifice and service.’

…applies equally well to the jihadis, does it not?

And Brooks isn’t talking about the level of involvement, but the style. The contrast is between chaotic gatherings of dirty hippies activists and orderly lines of nearly-identical young men with close-cropped hair and jackets and ties politely expressing their collective commitment to something “bigger” than themselves, preferably the interests of the local nation state.

There is proverbially an enormous amount of room to disagree about good taste. And even when I question tastes and goals, I tend to somewhat impressed by execution. E.g., I don’t see *why* people want to make long open-water swims, but I can still be impressed. So setting aside questions of taste and color in your over-the-top art examples, I can still be impressed by their craftsmanship.

There’s admittedly some room to sincerely disagree about what works. (And there’s always unlimited room simply to disagree. E.g., speaking of being impressed by execution, it is no great feat to invoke China’s economy as an example of Communism, but quoting Chinese economic growth figures to fractional percentage points so shortly after the recent revisions left me in flabbergasted awe.:-) But I think there’s distinctly more agreement among reasonable people about what works than about what’s tasteful.

So generally I think you could get broader and more heartfelt agreement by appealing to analogies like the battlefield failings of armies optimized for parades or ideology, or the limitations of big thinkers fondly imagining planning econonomies or software engineering processes down to the last interchangeable humanoid unit; or the realities of working aristocracies or spacecraft or plantations or armies vs. Hollywood or whitewashed fantasies.

(Of course, to the extent that there’s overlap between what works and what’s elegant and tasteful — as argued off and on throughout history, recently by Paul Graham in “Taste for Makers” — it’s a poorly defined question which kind of analogy is more convincing.)

Kevin, I promise, I’ll stop!

Presumably, one can be an individualist and have bad taste!