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. 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 Ted Kennedy and Dan Quayle meet in the well of the Senate, and they were friends. 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. 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. He's going into a diner, and he goes to the diner and introduces 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. 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 start talking about like accountants. So in the course of my career, I've covered a series of failures. We sent economists into 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. 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?

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 we're divided selves; that reason is separated from the emotions and that society progresses to the extent that reason can suppress the passions. It's led to a view of human nature that we're rational individuals who respond in 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. 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; we're really bad at talking about character. Alisdair MacIntyre, the famous philosopher, said that we have the concepts of the ancient morality of virtue or goodness but we no longer have a system by which to connect them. This has led to a shallow path in 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 80-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 Saabs and Audis and Volvos because in certain neighborhoods it's socially acceptable to have a luxury car, so long as it comes from a country hostile to U.S. 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. 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.

In 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!" It'd be a big seller. 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 these seaweed-based snacks; they're called veggie booty with kale, which is their kids at home.

"Mom, mom, I want a snack that'll help prevent colon-rectal cancer!" And so the kids are raised in a certain way, jumping through achievement hoops — 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. Sometimes you can see them at vacation places like Jackson Hole or Aspen, and 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 grandmoms 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 it's fashionable now to have dogs one-third as tall as your ceiling heights, so they've got these furry 160-pound dogs that look like velociraptors, all named after Jane Austen characters.

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." So they hire personal trainers; they're popping Cialis like breath mints. You see them on the mountains up there, they're cross-country skiing up the mountain with these grim expressions that make Dick Cheney look like Jerry Lewis. As they whizz by you, it's like being passed by a little iron raisinet going up the hill.

This is part of what life is, but it's not all of what life is. 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. It's not based on theology or philosophy; it's in the study of the mind across all these spheres of research — from neuroscience to cognitive science to behavioral economics, psychologists, sociology — we're developing a revolution in consciousness.

When you synthesize it all, it's giving us a new view of human nature. Far from being a coldly materialistic view of nature, it's a new humanism; it's a new enchantment. 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.

One way to formulate that is to say the human mind can take in millions of pieces of information a minute, of which it can be consciously aware of about 40. This leads to oddities. One of my favorites 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, is actually quite smart. One of the most cognitively demanding things we do is buy furniture. It's really hard to imagine a sofa and 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 sometimes quite helpless. The giant in the field is in the room tonight and is speaking tomorrow morning: Antonio Damasio. 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. 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 them into a brain scan machine — this is apocryphal, by the way, but I don't care — and they have them watch a horror movie. Then they had some of them describe their feelings toward their wives, and 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. 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.

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, 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. 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.

This revolution in 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, the Scottish Enlightenment with David Hume and 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.

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 years in schooling. What it really takes to do well, to live a meaningful life, are things that are deeper, things we don't really even have words for.

So let me list just a couple of things I think this research points us toward in 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 to interpenetrate their moms' minds and to download what they find. They're models of how to understand reality.

In the United States, 55% of babies have a deep two-way conversation with mom, and they learn models of how to relate to other people. Those kids who 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 with 77% accuracy at age 18 months who was gonna graduate from high school based on who had good attachment with mom. 20% of kids do not have those relationships; they are what we call avoidant, less 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.

This is one skill of how to Hoover up knowledge from one another. A second skill is equipoise: the ability to have the serenity to read the biases and failures in your own mind. 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 the strength of their conclusions to the strength of their evidence. They are curious, and these traits are often unrelated and uncorrelated with IQ.

The third trait 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 IED, a landmine 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 fourth is what you might call sympathy: the ability to work within groups. 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. 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 turns in conversations.

Then you could talk about a 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 meld them together. This is the source of innovation. What Picasso did, for example, was take the concept of Western art and the concept of African masks and blend them together, not only the geometry but the moral systems entailed in them.

These are skills again we can't count and measure. 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.

One of the most beautiful descriptions I've come across in this research of how minds interpenetrate was written by a great theorist and scientist named Douglas Hofstadter 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. 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. 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 lived on very determinately in my brain. The Greeks say we suffer our way to wisdom through suffering. Hofstadter understood how deeply interpenetrated we are. Through the policy failures of the last 30 years, we have come to acknowledge, I think, how shallow our view of human nature has been.

Now, as we confront that challenge and the failures that derive from our inability to grasp 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. 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.