David Brook’s “The Social Animal” is an exploration of how the human brain works with emphasis on the vast quantity of thinking and emotions that takes place below our leve of cognition, which is to say our awareness. Although in a novel format, Brooks simply uses his characters as props for reporting on hundreds of research papers on the workings of the brain.
One can find revelations on almost any page. For example:
“Moreover, Green, Palmquist, and Schickler continue, when people do select their own party affiliations, they do not choose parties by comparing platforms and then figuring out where the nation’s interests lie. Drawing on a vast range of data, the authors argue that party attachment is more like attachment to a religious denomination or a social club. People have stereotypes in their heads about what Democrats are like and what Republicans are like, and they gravitate toward the party made up of people like themselves.
“One they have formed an affiliation, people bend their philosophies and their perceptions of reality so they become more and more aligned with members of their political tribe.”
(For decades the Watchdog has noted, to his irritation, that the conversation at Lancaster social events often is based, without attribution, upon a recent article or editorial in the Wall Street Journal, a periodical that his Republican friends read as devoutly and with equal or more credibility than their Bible. Those with more time also read Barrons [at least back then] and The Economist, the latter the equivalent of the Reader Digest for the college educated but otherwise diverted. Just because people are the likes of doctors, lawyers, bankers or scientists doesn’t mean they are necessarily any more aware of what is taking place outside their specialties than auto mechanics and construction workers.)
Alas, Brooks had a problem. The very exploration of how little rational thought goes into our view points and critique of ideologues implies criticism of the right wing of the Republican Party, Libertarians and Tea Partiers (as well as Knee Jerk Liberals). Yet Brooks must have assumed, as an ostensibly Republican columnist for the New York Times (perhaps an oxymoron), that conservatives would make up the bulk of his readers and he did not want to offend them.
He therefore included several pages under “Social Mobility” which is fraught with misleading statistics and questionable history. Raw meat for faithful conservative followers! He attributes much of the national problems of the past thirty years to the failure of the general population to properly educate themselves. . “The real engine of change, Harold believed was a change in the cognitive load. Over the past few decades, technological and social revolution had put greater and greater demands on human cognition…” Through his protagonist Harold, Brooks would have us believe that the reason for the geometric increase in earnings of the top ½ of one percent of our population is due to their superior skills. Brooks knows better than that
Furthermore, in the same effort, he distorts history, such as when he states that Alexander Hamilton’s father died when Alexander was ten years old. In fact, Hamilton likely was the bastard son of a wealthy Scotch merchant who later went bankrupt but who may have been a factor for some of Alexander’s youthful good fortune in employment and later sponsorship by clergy for a college scholarship in New Jersey.
As for Abraham Lincoln, he had more in common with Barack Obama than “W”, because both Lincoln and Obama were ardent supporters of government subsidy of business investments. Examples, Lincoln was counsel for a railroad company and as president, Lincoln pushed legislation for the transcontinental railroad. Obama is an advocate of government subsidy of investment in upgrading the electric grid. The same applies to the regulatory reform of business by Brook’s hero Teddy Roosevelt. (Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and Obama might fairly be described as Eisenhower Republicans! And perhaps the same could be argued for Hamilton.)
Perhaps this lapse from the quality of the rest of the book goes to show how Brooks also is a prisoner of his own subconscious. And if truth be told, it is a deeply buried and perhaps genetic anger within the Watchdog that drives him to be an advocate and supporter of the weak and the needy. The book turns our attention not just to others, but to ourselves.
If you read no other book in 2011, let the one be “The Social Animal” by David Brooks.
