The Social Animal by David Brooks

DWill · Wed Apr 06, 2011 8:29 am

I'm well into Brooks' recent book, which is an interesting attempt to explore human nature and development through an extended, fiction-like case study of a man-woman couple. A big reason for his writing the book was to present the view that the unconscious is primary, the conscious mind secondary. I think he sees much recent writing by intellectuals and scientists as heavily favoring the conscious, rational mind as the one to place our bets on. To some extent, there has been a debate among these intellectuals and scientists about which aspect of mind guides us or should be our guide. Robert Burton, in On Being Certain emphasizes the unconscious, while Sam Harris in The Moral Landscape disputes Burton directly, saying we are not inevitably influenced in our thinking by the unconscious. It's a debate between rationalists and others who don't have a handy name, but who believe the scientific method that humans have invented isn't the best way to look at human beings.

Brooks quotes a scientist called Ulric Neisser , who thinks he has identified an anatomic distinction in humans that upends the more common view of what makes us unique:

"It is worth noting that, anatomically, the human cerebrum appears to be the sort of diffuse system in which multiple processes would be at home. In this respect it differs from the nervous system of lower animals. Our hypothesis leads us to the radical suggestion that the critical difference between the thinking of human beings and of lower animals lies not in the existence of consciousness but in the capacity for complex processes outside of it."

Saffron is also reading this book. Anyone else interested in reading and discussing?

Saffron · Wed Apr 06, 2011 8:11 pm

I have been enjoying The Social Animal. It is full of all sorts research and ideas from many different angles about the human being/condition. It has been fun to read because so many of the studies and theories included in the book are ones I've read about at some point over the past 20 years. David Brooks pulls them all together in an attempt to create a unified "picture" of what it all means.

Dexter · Wed Apr 06, 2011 9:37 pm

I've read a few scathing reviews of the book, and having read some of Brooks' columns, I'm inclined to stay away. He might be a slightly better writer than Thomas Friedman though, but that's not saying much.

http://www.salon.com/books/review/2011/ ... ial_animal

geo · Thu Apr 07, 2011 7:19 am

I'm tempted, but I have so many other books that have caught my eye in recent months. One of them, by the way, is Jared Diamond's The Third Chimpanzee. Brooks' view that the unconscious is primary, the conscious mind secondary, sounds plausible. I think almost everything we do is related to those needling prods that ultimately stems from our instinctive and animalistic wiring. Does Brooks mention Dawkins' selfish gene?

DWill · Thu Apr 07, 2011 8:22 am


	geo wrote: I'm tempted, but I have so many other books that have caught my eye in recent months. One of them, by the way, is Jared Diamond's The Third Chimpanzee. Brooks' view that the unconscious is primary, the conscious mind secondary, sounds plausible. I think almost everything we do is related to those needling prods that ultimately stems from our instinctive and animalistic wiring. Does Brooks mention Dawkins' selfish gene?

No, he never mentions Dawkins, and from my recollection he doesn't emphasize evolutionary psychology at all. That is actually a bit refreshing for me at this point. Brooks' appraisal of the unconscious seems to relate to Malcolm Gladwell's in Blink. He talks a lot about how our cognition--which we often like to think is mainly conscious reasoning--is built on the knowing of the unconscious, and how people who really know their own minds give their unconscious time and opportunity to work and don't jump in prematurely with rational judgment. They get truer results that way. Using the unconscious depends entirely on experiencing the territory, letting data sift into our brains and eventually be integrated into a solution (if we're talking in terms of problem-solving). He does also touch on the downside of unconscious influence, but it's the positive that he thinks hasn't been talked about enough.

I observed how his outlook in the book connects to his designation as a conservative thinker. I think I'm of a like mind. I'd insist on distancing myself from the current view of conservatism, though.

Saffron · Sat Apr 09, 2011 6:21 am

One of the concepts that David Brooks alludes to early in the book is Attachment Style Parenting, a concept near and dear to my heart. Brooks has a whole chapter call Attachment in which he describes the importance of attachment to the normal development of a child. The basic idea is that if a child feels attached then she feels safe to explore her environment, which aids brain development. Brooks describes the benefits of attachment as supported by research. Children who are ranked as firmly attached fare better in school and have fewer behavioral problems. Erik Erikson is never mention in the chapter but, attachment fosters trust, which is the first step or task in Erikson's psychosocial developmental model en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erikson%27s_stage ... evelopment. In a later chapter Brooks comes back to the idea of trust and how trusting a society is predicts a few important societal behaviors. I believe Brooks make an error at this point in the book, one that I think he would not have made if he had explore what Attachment Style Parenting looks like in practice. In the early chapter he addresses the results of being attached, but never describes the particular parenting practices that produce secure attachment. In fact, as he describes a situation a few pages into the chapter, he actually describes a situation that goes against the principles of building a firm attachment. The seven year old child in the story he is telling is left each week so Mom & Dad can go out on a date. Each week he dread this event and knows that he will cry and carry on when they leave. In my experience and based on much reading the situation Brooks is describing is already outside of normal behavior for a 7 year old. At seven a child should trust that the parents will come back and have very little trouble being left with a babysitter. The fact that the parents keep going each Saturday night with out regard for the trauma their child is clearly experiencing is counter productive to developing trust and attachment. There was a cross cultural study done back in the 1980's where different cultural groups were shown video of mothers and babies from other cultural groups than their own. Many groups considered American mothers to be abusive because they let their babies cry, did not spend much time holding them and did not respond quickly to their infants. The basic idea of attachment style parenting is that an infant has no way to know that it is safe other than being in close physical contact with its primary caregiver (mother) and to have its cries responded to quickly. In fact the less crying the infant does the better. Americans bristle at the idea of responding to each cry or carrying the child around, as many mothers around the world do for the first year or so of life. T
In the cross cultural study I mention American mothers response to African cultures parenting practices was that the mothers were spoiling their babies by picking them up all the time.

I want to get back to the error I believe Brooks made. In a later chapter he is discussing corruption and community participation. Based on research he asserts that some societies are more trusting and therefore less corrupt and have a higher rate of participation in community organizations. Here is where I think he makes the mistake. He says that Americans have a high level of trust of each other, think they are individualistic, but act like a collective society when you look at behavior. I do not think we trust that we will be taken care of, in fact we do not think it is the roll of anyone to take care of anyone else -- hence the "we think we are individualistic." I have not read the new this morning, so I don't know yet if our government is shut down or not, but the very fact that it might be, because a large group of our legislators wanted to cut spending to the most impoverished and most vulnerable people in our country tells me that we are not collective in our behavior. We do not feel responsible to one another.

DWill · Sat Apr 09, 2011 10:28 am


	Saffron wrote: I want to get back to the error I believe Brooks made. In a later chapter he is discussing corruption and community participation. Based on research he asserts that some societies are more trusting and therefore less corrupt and have a higher rate of participation in community organizations. Here is where I think he makes the mistake. He says that Americans have a high level of trust of each other, think they are individualistic, but act like a collective society when you look at behavior. I do not think we trust that we will be taken care of, in fact we do not think it is the roll of anyone to take care of anyone else -- hence the "we think we are individualistic." I have not read the new this morning, so I don't know yet if our government is shut down or not, but the very fact that it might be, because a large group of our legislators wanted to cut spending to the most impoverished and most vulnerable people in our country tells me that we are not collective in our behavior. We do not feel responsible to one another.

I think DB notes the paradox that has always been at the center of American life: the mythic attachment to rugged individualism coinciding with historically strong civic and community relationships (of course weakened since the latter part of the 20th Century). We've also believed in strong central government; the fight over health insurance shouldn't obscure that fact. Are we a collective society, in relative terms? I don't know. I think I'd have to experience other cultures to know. But I accept his claim that low corruption depends on trust of a certain kind, a trust that can be hard to see unless it goes away. DB does have a semi-conservative view of government, which he gets more into later in the book, but it's not what our current conservatives are pedaling. He would say that our sense of being taken care of shouldn't be supplied by the government in any case, but that government ideally does things to create conditions that promote citizens' exercise of essential freedoms, while not disincentivizing citizens through the wrong kind of direct subsidies.

Brooks has praised Rep. Paul Ryan's plan to reduce the national debt, as an act of political courage and the only serious plan yet to emerge. I think that Obama and the Democrats are in the same position with regard to real debt reduction as the Republicans were regarding national health insurance. They have too much baggage to get a needed job done, apparently. This isn't to say that Ryan's plan has no major problems, just that he has been constructive while the Democrats haven't been.

Saffron · Sun Apr 10, 2011 7:23 am


	DWill wrote: I think DB notes the paradox that has always been at the center of American life: the mythic attachment to rugged individualism coinciding with historically strong civic and community relationships (of course weakened since the latter part of the 20th Century). We've also believed in strong central government; the fight over health insurance shouldn't obscure that fact. Are we a collective society, in relative terms? I don't know. I think I'd have to experience other cultures to know. But I accept his claim that low corruption depends on trust of a certain kind, a trust that can be hard to see unless it goes away. .

The end of my post was too simplistic. Forgive me, I was typing in the dark on a laptop and I am horrible at typing on a laptop. By mid-post I just wanted to be finished or get enough of my thought down to continue later.

The most important omission on my part is that he three societal traits I was discussing trust, corruption and collectivism are on a continuum. I am not sure exactly where the US would fall on the continuum for trust, corruption and collectivism; somewhere in the middle I would expect. I also fell short on making and supporting the claim I was trying to make between the connect between our (broad generalization coming, cover your eyes) parenting practices, i.e. babies sleeping in their own rooms, letting them cry it out, scheduling, believe that picking them up too much will spoil them and our "pull yourself up by your own bootstrap" thinking. I think as a culture we underestimate and undervalue the interconnectedness that really exists in society. I think that attitudes like this get in the way of being happy, based on what I've read on research on happiness.

DWill · Sun Apr 10, 2011 8:27 am


	Saffron wrote: I think as a culture we underestimate and undervalue the interconnectedness that really exists in society. I think that attitudes like this get in the way of being happy, based on what I've read on research on happiness.

I'm not as savvy about parenting topics as you and didn't have anything to say about DB's thoughts on attachment. I was glad, I have to say, that he didn't trace the maturation process as a matter of stages, a la Erickson or Piaget, because that would have drained my interest. He wanted to report new discoveries or at least findings of enduring significance (such as attachment), and he believes--I think rightly--that stages and hierarchies (e.g., Maslow) don't offer a flexible enough way to look at lives. He does a good job of conveying the cyclic, never-completed nature of becoming ourselves in the old-age portrait of Harold. I found the end of the book extremely moving, by the way, and I perhaps have never read a NF book with this much heart.

Brooks says he wishes the word "socialism" had not already been taken, because it describes his social/political philosophy. He would agree completely with your statement and would say that government needs to protect and promote interconnectedness in any way possible. He laments the way ideologies have trampled social connections in the name of progress. For example, urban neighborhoods were replaced with high-rises and jobs that sustained neighborhoods were shipped overseas.

Did DB's approach in this book remind you just a little of Berry's in Jayber Crow?

Saffron · Sun Apr 10, 2011 8:45 am


	DWill wrote: Brooks says he wishes the word "socialism" had not already been taken, because it describes his social/political philosophy. He would agree completely with your statement and would say that government needs to protect and promote interconnectedness in any way possible. He laments the way ideologies have trampled social connections in the name of progress. For example, urban neighborhoods were replaced with high-rises and jobs that sustained neighborhoods were shipped overseas. Did DB's approach in this book remind you just a little of Berry's in Jayber Crow?

I have not finished the book yet. Yes to the Jayber Crow comparison. And yes to the word "socialism" for DB's philosophy - I like it. I once lamented that the word "conservative" had already been taken. I thought it fit my own ideas of conserving and using carefully the resources that we have -- kind of on the order of selecting carefully how resource were used and exploited so as to avoid problematic dependencies and preserve flexibility.

tbarron · Sun Apr 10, 2011 11:36 am

I'm on page 67 and really enjoying the book so far.

The connection I see between attachment styles and social policy is this:

Brooks makes the point that a child raised in a web of predictable, stable relationships is more likely to develop a secure attachment style and have fewer difficulties in life than children raised in webs of unstable relationships. Children who develop secure attachments grow into engaged, responsible adults who know how to lead satisfying lives, contribute to society, and take care of their loved ones.

Children who develop the less functional attachment styles (avoidant or ambivalent) are more likely to have difficulties later in life. They're the ones who depend on the social safety nets. They're not as able to take care of themselves and others because their cognitive development is lacking. It's not that they don't want to be responsible. They don't have the wherewithal to do it.

Of course, the more children develop secure attachment styles, the better off society will be. However, there will always be some who don't function as well and will need the societal safety nets our government seems to be in the process of dismantling. Of course, the "conservatives" (I like Saffron's definition better than the one normally understood in the political context) who are driving the dismantling process are just responding to their programming in the same way that individuals with less than functional attachment styles do.

Reading the thread on whether Christianity is letting people down, my thought was that it's more our tribe-oriented hunter gatherer wiring that is letting us down by fostering xenophobia, intolerance, aggression, and political polarization.

tbarron · Tue Apr 19, 2011 5:41 am

It has been interesting to read The Social Animal alongside The Blank Slate by Stephen Pinker. I realized Brooks was in agreement with Pinker when, in the description of Howard's English teacher, Ms. Tyson, that schools mistakenly believe that children are like empty crates and the function of schools is to fill them.

I especially enjoyed the description of Ms. Tyson and her perspectives.

Saffron · Sat Apr 23, 2011 6:34 am

Excerpts from The Social Animal, Chapter 20, The Soft Side
Brooks makes interesting and bold claims in this chapter. I'd like to hear what other people think.

I need to set-up to the excerpts I want to post. In the paragraphs that precede the quoted passage, Brooks is talking about what he calls the thinning of society. Which he defines as the weakening of the social connections that keeps us as individuals and society functioning well. He gives the example of how when a large big box store comes to town, the locally owned smaller shops that have traditionally lined the Main Streets of American towns, go under. This in turn weakens or completely breaks down the social networks that existed in that downtown community. In this book Brooks is trying to argue that we are who we are as individuals due to our relationships in our world and that ignoring this fact gets us (Americans) into all kinds of trouble. He goes on to ague that we as a culture tend to look at individuals as autonomous actors in the world, we under value and under estimate the roll of social connectedness. A logical assumptions form this world view is that freedom of choice is a primary value, above social connections and sometimes even the general good of society.


	David Brooks wrote: p. 314-15 Conservative activist embraced the individualism of the market. They reacted furiously against any effort by the state to impinge upon individual economic choice. They adopt policy prescriptions designed to maximize economic freedom: lower tax rates so people could keep and use more of their money, privatized Social Security so people could control more of their own pensions, voucher programs so parents could choose schools for their children. Liberal embraced the individualism of the moral sphere. They reacted furiously against any effort by the state to impinge upon choices about marriage, family structure, the role of women, and matters of birth and death. They embraced policies designed to maximize social freedom.

On page 317 Brooks presents the argument that the government has spent the last several decades trying to solve social problems by throwing money at the material indications of the problem rather than the, in his opinion, the real underlying problem of disrupted or weakened social networks/relationships. An example he gives is increasing federal financial aid to low income students in an attempt to increase college completion rates. Brooks states that this solution ignores the fact that students from low income backgrounds are not prepared for the rigors of college and no amount of financial aid will change that fact.


	David Brooks wrote: p. 315 Both liberals and conservatives gravitated toward economic explanations for any social problem and generally came up with solutions to this problem that involved money….Both sides neglected matters of character, culture, and morality. p. 318-19 Without a healthy social fabric, politics became polarized. One party came to represent the state. The other came to represent the market. One party tried to shift power and money to government; the other tried to shit those things to vouchers and other market mechanisms. Both of them neglected and ignored the intermediary institutions of civil life. p. 320 The cognitive revolution demonstrated that human beings emerge out of relationships. The health of a society is determined by the health of those relationships, not by the extent to which it maximizes individual choice. Therefore, freedom should not be the ultimate end of politics.

Anybody read The Politics of Happiness by Derek Bok? Brooks is starting to sound like Bok.

BretAM5 · Tue Jul 19, 2011 10:43 pm


	Dexter wrote: I've read a few scathing reviews of the book, and having read some of Brooks' columns, I'm inclined to stay away. He might be a slightly better writer than Thomas Friedman though, but that's not saying much. http://www.salon.com/books/review/2011/ ... ial_animal

Tom Friedman does not write so much as scribble his notes down in paragraph form. Not a fan of his.

Saffron · Wed Jul 20, 2011 5:57 am

BretAM5 wrote:


	Dexter wrote: I've read a few scathing reviews of the book, and having read some of Brooks' columns, I'm inclined to stay away. He might be a slightly better writer than Thomas Friedman though, but that's not saying much. http://www.salon.com/books/review/2011/ ... ial_animal

Tom Friedman does not write so much as scribble his notes down in paragraph form. Not a fan of his.

I read the Salon review. I know the book has problems, but I really admire what Brooks tries to do in the book. I would argue, contrary to the reviewer, that Brooks is somewhat successful in his attempt to illustrate with fiction some of the research on happiness. The characters in the fiction are somewhat flat and it is way too yuppie. In Brooks' defense, he was not writing a novel, the characters were invented to show how the individual areas of research on happiness connect and play out over a person's lifespan.

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