Social animal David Brooks
and I got my current job I was given a
good piece of advice which was to
interview three politicians every day
and from that much contact with
politicians I can tell you they’re all
emotional freaks of one sort or another
they have what I call logorrhea dementia
which is they talk so much they drive
themselves insane
but what they do have is incredible
social skills when you meet them they
lock into you they look you in the eye
they invade your personal space they
massage the back of your head I had
dinner with a Republican senator several
months ago who kept his hand on my inner
thigh throughout the whole meal
squeezing it I once this was years ago I
saw a Ted Kennedy and Dan Quayle meet in
the well of the Senate and they were
friends and they hugged each other and
they were laughing and their faces were
like this far apart and they were moving
and grinding and moving their arms up
and down each other and I was like get a
room I don’t want to see this but they
have those social skills at another case
last election cycle I was following Mitt
Romney around New Hampshire and he was
campaigning with his five perfect sons
bit chip rip zip lip and dip and and
he’s going into a diner and he goes to
the diner introduce himself to a family
and says what village are you from in
New Hampshire and then he described the
home he owned in their village and then
he so he goes around the room and then
as he’s leaving the diner he first names
almost everybody he’s just met I was
like okay that’s social skill but the
paradox is when a lot of these people
slip into the policy-making mode that
social awareness vanishes and they tart
talking about like accountants so in the
course of my career I’ve covered a
series of failures we sent economists in
the Soviet Union with privatization
plans when it broke up and what they
really lacked was social trust we
invaded Iraq with the military oblivious
to the cultural and psychological
realities we had a financial regulatory
regime based on the assumptions that
traders were rational creatures who
wouldn’t do anything stupid for 30 years
I’ve been covering school reform and
we’ve basically reorganized the bureau
edek boxes charters private schools
vouchers but we’ve had disappointing
results year after year and the fact is
people learn from people they love and
if you’re not talking about the
individual relationship between a
teacher and a student you’re not talking
about that reality but that reality is
expunged from our policymaking process
and so that’s led to a question for me
why are the most socially attuned people
on earth completely dehumanized when
they think about policy and I came to
the conclusion this is a symptom of a
larger problem that for centuries we’ve
inherited a view of human nature based
on the notion that were divided selves
that reason is separated from the
emotions and that society progresses to
the extent that reason can suppress the
passions and it’s led to a view of human
nature that were rational individuals
who respond and straightforward ways to
incentives and it’s led to ways of
seeing the world where people try to use
the assumptions of physics to measure
how human behavior is and it’s produced
a great amputation a shallow view of
human nature we’re really good at
talking about material things but we’re
really bad at talking about emotions
we’re really good at talking about
skills and safety and health were really
bad at talking about character Allister
McIntyre the famous philosopher said
that we have the concepts of the ancient
morality of virtue on or goodness but we
no longer have a system by which to
connect them and so this has led to a
shallow path and politics but also in a
whole range of human endeavors you can
see it in the way we raise our young
kids you go to an elementary school at
3:00 in the afternoon and you watch the
kids come out and they’re wearing these
eighty pound backpacks that if the wind
blows them over they’re like beetles
stuck there on the ground you see these
cars that drive up usually it’s sobs and
Audi’s in Volvo’s because in certain
neighborhoods it’s socially acceptable
to have a luxury car so long as it comes
from a country hostile to US foreign
policy that’s fine
they get picked up by these creatures
I’ve called uber moms who are highly
successful career women who’ve taken
time off to make sure all their kids get
into Harvard and you can usually tell
the uber moms because they actually
weigh less than their own children so at
the moment of conception they’re doing
little butt exercises the babies plop
out they’re flashing Mandarin flashcards
with the things driving them home and
they wanted to be enlightened so they
take them to Ben & Jerry’s ice cream
company with its own foreign policy and
one of my books I joke that Ben and
Jerry’s should make a passive his
toothpaste doesn’t kill germs just ask
them to leave be a big seller and then
they go to Whole Foods to get their baby
formula and you know Whole Foods is one
of those progressive grocery stores
where all the cashiers look like they’re
on loan from Amnesty International they
buy we buy these seaweed based snacks
they’re called veggie booty with kale
which is their kids at home home and say
mom mom I want to snack that a whole
prevent colon rectal cancer and so the
kids are raised in a certain way jumping
through achievement hopes are the things
we can measure SAT prep OBO soccer
practice they get into competitive
colleges they get good jobs and
sometimes they make a success of
themselves in a superficial manner and
they make a ton of money and sometimes
you can see them at vacation places like
Jackson Hole or Aspen and they’re
they’ve become
elegant and slender they don’t really
have thighs they just have one elegant
calf on top of another they have kids of
their own and they’ve sort of achieved a
genetic miracle by marrying beautiful
people so their grand moms look like
Gertrude Stein their daughters look like
Halle Berry
I don’t know how they’ve done that they
get there and they realize that they
it’s fashionable now to have dogs 1/3 as
tall as your ceiling heights so they’ve
got these furries 160 pound dogs look
like velociraptors all named after Jane
Austen characters and then when they get
old they haven’t really developed a
philosophy of life but they’ve decided
that I’ve been successful at everything
I’m just not going to die and so they
hire personal trainers they’re popping
cialis like breath mints you see them on
the mountains up there they’re
cross-country ski
up the mountain with these grim
expressions that make Dick Cheney look
like Jerry Lewis and sort of as they
whizzed by you it’s like being passed by
a little iron raisinet going up the hill
and so this is part of what life is but
it’s not all of what life is and over
the past few years I think we’ve been
given a deeper view of human nature and
a deeper view of who we are and it’s not
based on theology or philosophy it’s in
the study of the mind across all these
spheres of research from neuroscience
the cognitive science behavioral
economists psychologists sociology we’re
developing a revolution in consciousness
and when you synthesize it all it’s
giving us a new view of human nature and
far from being a coldly materialistic
view of nature it’s a new humanism it’s
a new enchantment and I think when you
synthesize this research you start with
three key insights the first insight is
that while the conscious mind writes the
autobiography of our species the
unconscious mind does most of the work
and so one way to formulate that assists
the human mind can take in millions of
pieces of information a minute of which
can be consciously aware of about 40 and
this leads to oddities one of my
favorite is that people named Dennis are
disproportionately likely to become
dentists people named Lawrence become
lawyers because unconsciously we
gravitate toward things that sound
familiar
which is why I’ve named my daughter
President of the United States Brooks
another finding is that the unconscious
far from being dumb and sexualized it’s
actually quite smart so one of the most
cognitively demanding things we do is
buy furniture it’s really hard to
imagine a sofa how it’s gonna look in
your house and the way you should do
that is sort of study the furniture let
it marinate in your mind distract
yourself and then a few days later go
with your gut because unconsciously
you’ve figured it out the second insight
is that emotions are at the center of
our thinking people with strokes and
lesions in the emotion processing parts
of the brain are not super smart they’re
actually quite sometimes quite helpless
and the giant in the field is in the
room tonight and is speaking tomorrow
morning Antonio Damasio
and one of the things he’s really shown
us is that emotions are not separate
from reason but they are the foundation
of reason because they tell us what to
value and so reading and educating your
emotions is one of the central
activities of wisdom now I’m a
middle-aged guy I’m not exactly
comfortable with emotions one of my
favorite brain stories described these
middle-aged guys they put him into a
brain scan machine this is apocryphal by
the way but I don’t care
and it and they have them watch a horror
movie and then they had some them
describe their feelings toward their
wives and the the brain scans were
identical in both activities it was just
sheer terror so me talking about emotion
is like Gandhi talking about gluttony
but it is the central organizing process
of the way we think it tells us what to
imprint a brain is the record of the
feelings of a life and the third insight
is that we’re not primarily
self-contained individuals we’re social
animals not rational animals we emerge
out of relationships and we are deeply
interpenetrated one with another and so
when we see another person we reenact on
our own minds what we see in their minds
when we watch a car chase in a movie we
it’s almost as if we are subtly having a
car chase when we watch pornography it’s
a little like having sex though probably
not as good and you see this in when
lovers walk down the street when a crowd
in Egypt or Tunisia gets caught up in an
emotional contagion the deep
interpenetrate
and this revolution and who we are
gives us a different way of seeing I
think politics a different way most
importantly of seeing human capital we
are now children of the French
enlightenment
we believe that reason is the highest of
the faculties but I think this research
shows that the British enlightenment of
the Scottish enlightenment with David
Hume Adam Smith actually had a better
handle on who we are that reason is
often weak our sentiments are strong and
our sentiments are often trustworthy and
this works corrects that bias in our
culture that dehumanizing bias it gives
us a deeper sense of what it actually
takes for us to thrive in this life when
we think about human capital we think
about the things we can measure easily
things like grades SATs degrees the
number of year and for schooling what it
really takes to do well to leave a
meaningful life are things that are
deeper things we don’t really even have
words for and so let me list just a
couple of things I think this research
points us toward trying to understand
the first gift our talent is mind-sight
the ability to enter into other people’s
minds and learn what they have to offer
babies come with this ability meltzoff
who’s at the University of Washington
leaned over a baby who was 43 minutes
old he wagged his tongue at the baby the
baby wagged her tongue back babies are
born two interpenetrating two moms minds
and to download what they find they’re
models of how to understand reality in
the United States fifty-five percent of
babies have a deep two-way conversation
with mom and they learn models to how to
relate to other people and those people
have models of how to relate have a huge
head start in life scientists at the
University of Minnesota did a study in
which they could predict was 77 percent
accuracy at age 18 months who was gonna
graduate from high school based on who
had good attachment with mom 20 percent
of kids do not have those relationships
they are what we call avoidant lis
attached they have trouble relating to
other people they go through life like
sailboats tacking into the wind wanting
to get close to people but not really
having
models of how to do that and so this is
one skill of how to Hoover up knowledge
one from another a second skill is
equipoise the ability to have the
serenity to read the biases and failures
in your own mind so for example we are
overconfidence machines 95% of our
professors report that they are above
average teachers 96% of college students
say they have above-average social
skills
Time magazine asked Americans are you in
the top 1% of earners 19% of Americans
are in the top 1% this is a gender
linked trait by the way men drown at
twice the rate as women because men
think they can swim across that lake but
some people have the ability and
awareness of their own biases their own
overconfidence they have a pistola
logical modesty
they are open-minded in the face of
ambiguity they are able to adjust
strength of the conclusions to the
strength of their evidence they are
curious and these traits are often
unrelated and uncorrelated with IQ the
third trade is Metis what we might call
street smarts it’s a Greek word it’s a
sensitivity to the physical environment
the ability to pick out patterns in an
environment derive a gist one of my
colleagues at The Times did a great
story about soldiers in Iraq who could
look down the street and detect somehow
whether there was an ie D Al and mind in
the street they couldn’t tell you how
they did it but they could feel cold
they felt a coldness and they were more
often right than wrong the third is what
might call sympathy the ability to work
within groups and that comes in
tremendously handy because groups are
smarter than individuals and
face-to-face groups are much smarter
than groups that communicate
electronically because 90% of our
communication is nonverbal and the
effectiveness of a group is not
determined by the IQ of the group it’s
determined by how well they communicate
how often they take terms and
conversations then you could talk about
it Oh trait like blending any child can
say I’m a tiger pretend to be a tiger it
seems so Elementary but in fact it’s
phenomenally complicated to take a
concept I and a concept tiger and
them together but this is the source of
innovation what Picasso did for example
was take the concept western art and the
concept African masks and blend them
together not only the geometry but the
moral systems entailed in them and these
are skills again we can’t count and
measure and then the final thing I’ll
mention is something you might call
limerence and this is not an ability
it’s a drive and a motivation the
conscious mind hungers for success and
prestige the unconscious mind hungers
for those moments of transcendence when
the skull line disappears and we are
lost in a challenge or a task when a
craftsman feels lost in his craft when a
naturalist feels at one with nature when
a believer feels at one with God’s love
that is what the unconscious mind
hungers for and many of us feel it in
love when lovers feel fused and one of
the most beautiful description I’ve come
across in this research of how Minds
interpenetrate was written by a great
theorist and scientist named Douglas
Hofstadter’s at the University of
Indiana he was married to a woman named
Carol and made a wonderful relationship
when their kids were five and two Carol
had a stroke and a brain tumor and died
suddenly and Hofstadter wrote a book
called I am a strange loop in the course
of that book he describes a moment just
months after Carol has died he comes
across her picture on the mantle or on a
bureau in his bedroom and here’s what he
wrote I looked at her face and I looked
so deeply that I felt I was behind her
eyes and all at once I found myself
saying as tears flowed that’s me that’s
me and those simple words brought back
many thoughts that I had had before
about the fusion of our souls into one
higher-level entity about the fact that
the core of both our souls they are
identical hopes and dreams for our
children about the notion that those
hopes were not separate and distinct
hopes but were just one hope one clear
thing that defined us both that welded
us into a unit the kind of unit I had
but dimly imagined before being married
and having
children I realized that though Carol
had died that core piece of her had not
died at all but had it lived on very
determinately in my brain the Greeks say
we suffer our way to wisdom through his
suffering Hofstetter understood how
deeply interpenetrated we are through
the policy failures of last 30 years we
have come to acknowledge I think how
shallow our view of human nature has
been and now as we confront that
challenge us and the failures that
derive from our inability to get the
depths of who we are comes this
revolution in consciousness these people
in so many fields exploring the depth of
our nature and coming away with this
enchanted this new humanism and when
Freud discovered his sense of the
unconscious it had a vast effect on the
climate of the times now we are
discovering a more accurate vision of
the unconscious of who we are deep
inside and it’s going to have a
wonderful and profound and humanizing
effect on our culture thank you