The Social Animal

The Social Animal

The Social Animal

Introduction

Earlier revolutions in human understanding made their leaders and explicators world famous, even to those who had no idea what those leaders and explicators were talking about--think of Freud or Einstein. That fame has not yet come to the captains of the cognitive revolution, as cognoscenti sometimes refer to the transformation in scientific thinking about the human mind. The wider public, the same people who once tossed about the terms "Oedipus complex" and "theory of relativity" after reading about them in Time, is largely unaware of the cognitive revolution.

The core of Brooks' argument is his claim that the forces controlling human behavior are not just no rational, they are unconscious--and can be controlled. As he puts it, "The central evolutionary truth is that the unconscious matters most." Significantly, Sigmund Freud appears hardly at all in the four hundred or so pages of this treatise on the role of the unconscious in social life (Brooks, 2011).

Freud's view of the unconscious has been rendered obsolete by the new cognitive science: "Brain research rarely creates new philosophies, but it does vindicate some old ones." It is true that Freud's theorizing was not exactly scientific--as he accepted in some of his subsequent work. It is suspected that it is not because Freud's thinking has been scientifically superseded that Brooks is so quick to dismiss it. Rather, it is because Freud did not share Brooks' hopes of happiness. The greatest twentieth-century Enlightenment thinker had more than a little in common with the ancient Stoics.

Freud never imagined that his research into the unconscious mind would open the way to happiness. Instead, it could be used to fortify the mind against unhappiness, which the founder of psychoanalysis accepted as the normal human experience.

Discussion

David Brooks' new book, The Social Animal, tries to fill that gap and offer a thoroughgoing portrait of what brain science can tell us about contemporary American culture and politics. Brooks, the New York Times columnist and author of two previous books of "comic sociology" is not entirely successful at the hugely ambitious task he has set for himself; it is hard to imagine anyone who could be. Nevertheless, he has written a fascinating interpretation of a discipline with immense power over our current way of thinking.

Brooks is especially interested in what cognitive science can tell us about success and happiness in our own society. To explore that question--and to keep us scientifically challenged readers happy--he attempts his own experiment, a literary one. Rather than offering a straightforward exposition of cog-sci research, he provides us with a test ease in the upbringing, education, and development of a fictional couple named Harold and Erica, blessedly successful members of America's educated class (Brooks, 2011).

Harold grows up in a stable, loving home, gets a degree in global economies and foreign relations, runs a historical society, writes commercially successful biographies and histories, and works for a D.C. think tank. Despite a mentally unstable single mother, Erica will start her own consultancy business, become the ...