The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement
David Brooks, 2011
Random House
448 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781400067602
Summary
With unequaled insight and brio, David Brooks, the New York Times columnist and bestselling author of Bobos in Paradise, has long explored and explained the way we live. Now, with the intellectual curiosity and emotional wisdom that make his columns among the most read in the nation, Brooks turns to the building blocks of human flourishing in a multilayered, profoundly illuminating work grounded in everyday life.
This is the story of how success happens. It is told through the lives of one composite American couple, Harold and Erica—how they grow, push forward, are pulled back, fail, and succeed. Distilling a vast array of information into these two vividly realized characters, Brooks illustrates a fundamental new understanding of human nature.
A scientific revolution has occurred—we have learned more about the human brain in the last thirty years than we had in the previous three thousand. The unconscious mind, it turns out, is most of the mind—not a dark, vestigial place but a creative and enchanted one, where most of the brain’s work gets done. This is the realm of emotions, intuitions, biases, longings, genetic predispositions, personality traits, and social norms: the realm where character is formed and where our most important life decisions are made. The natural habitat of The Social Animal.
Drawing on a wealth of current research from numerous disciplines, Brooks takes Harold and Erica from infancy to school; from the “odyssey years” that have come to define young adulthood to the high walls of poverty; from the nature of attachment, love, and commitment, to the nature of effective leadership. He reveals the deeply social aspect of our very minds and exposes the bias in modern culture that overemphasizes rationalism, individualism, and IQ. Along the way, he demolishes conventional definitions of success while looking toward a culture based on trust and humility.
The Social Animal is a moving and nuanced intellectual adventure, a story of achievement and a defense of progress. Impossible to put down, it is an essential book for our time, one that will have broad social impact and will change the way we see ourselves and the world. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—August 11, 1961
• Where—Toronto, Ontario, Canada
• Raised—New York City, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Chicago
• Currently—lives in Bethesda, Maryland
David Brooks is a Canadian-born political and cultural commentator. He was born into a Jewish family in Toronto, Canada and grew up in New York City in Stuyvesant Town. In 1979 he graduated from Radnor High School (a suburb of Philadelphia, Pa.) and, in 1983, received his B.A. in history from the University of Chicago.
He worked as an editorial writer and film reviewer for the Washington Times; a reporter and later op-ed editor for the Wall Street Journal; a senior editor at the Weekly Standard from its inception; and a contributing editor at Newsweek and Atlantic Monthly
Although Brooks considers himself a moderate, he currently writes for the New York Times as a conservative columnist. He is also a commentator on National Public Radio and the PBS NewsHour. Brooks was a visiting professor of public policy at Duke University, teaching an undergraduate seminar there in the fall of 2006.
He and his wife live in Bethesda, Maryland.
Books
In 1966 he edited an anthology of writings by new conservative writers, Backward and Upward: The New Conservative Writing. In 2000 he published his cultural commentary, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There, following it up four years later with On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense. The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character and Achievement came out in 2011.
Political views
Brooks describes himself as being originally a liberal before "coming to my senses." In 1983, he wrote a parody of conservative pundit William F. Buckley, Jr., which said "In the afternoons he is in the habit of going into crowded rooms and making everybody else feel inferior. The evenings are reserved for extended bouts of name-dropping." Buckley admired the parody and offered Brooks a job with National Review. A turning point in Brooks's thinking came later that year in a televised debate with Milton Friedman, which, as Brooks describes it, "was essentially me making a point, and he making a two-sentence rebuttal which totally devastated my point."
Before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Brooks argued forcefully for American military intervention, echoing the belief of commentators and political figures that American and British forces would be welcomed as liberators. In the spring of 2004, some of his opinion pieces suggested that he had tempered his earlier optimism about the war.
Brooks' public writing about the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq closely identifies him with the neoconservative political movement in the United States. His angry dismissal of the conviction of Scooter Libby as being "a farce" and having "no significance" was derided by political blogger and editor Andrew Sullivan.
On August 10, 2006, Brooks wrote a column for the New York Times titled "Party No. 3". The column proposed the idea of the McCain-Lieberman Party, or the fictional representation of the moderate majority in America.
Ottawa Citizen commentator David Warren has identified Brooks as the sort of conservative pundit that liberals like, someone who is "sophisticated" and "engages with" the liberal agenda, in contrast to a "real conservative" like Charles Krauthammer. Brooks has long been a supporter of John McCain; however, he did not show a liking for McCain's former running mate Sarah Palin, saying she represented a "cancer" on the Republican Party. He has referred to her as a "joke," unlikely to ever win the Republican nomination.
In a March 2007 article published in the New York Times titled "No U-Turns," Brooks explains that the Republican Party must distance itself from the minimal-government conservative principles that had arisen during the Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan eras. He claims that these outdated concepts had served their purposes and should no longer be embraced by Republicans in order to win elections.
Brooks has been a frequent admirer of President Barack Obama. In an August, 2009 profile of Brooks, the New Republic describes his first encounter with Obama, in the spring of 2005: "Usually when I talk to senators, while they may know a policy area better than me, they generally don’t know political philosophy better than me. I got the sense he knew both better than me. [...] I remember distinctly an image of—we were sitting on his couches, and I was looking at his pant leg and his perfectly creased pant, and I’m thinking, a) he’s going to be president and b) he’ll be a very good president.” Two days after Obama’s second autobiography, The Audacity of Hope, hit bookstores, Brooks published a column in the New York Times, entitled "Run, Barack, Run", urging Obama to run for president.
In writing for the New York Times in January 2010, Brooks described Israel as "an astonishing success story." He wrote that "Jews are a famously accomplished group," who, because they were "forced to give up farming in the Middle Ages...have been living off their wits ever since." In Brooks' view, "Israel’s technological success is the fruition of the Zionist dream. The country was not founded so stray settlers could sit among thousands of angry Palestinians in Hebron. It was founded so Jews would have a safe place to come together and create things for the world."
Social views
Brooks opposes what he sees as self-destructive behavior like teenage sex and divorce. His view is that "sex is more explicit everywhere barring real life. As the entertainment media have become more sex-saturated, American teenagers have become more sexually abstemious" by "waiting longer to have sex...[and] having fewer partners." He sees the culture war as nearly over, because "today's young people...seem happy with the frankness of the left and the wholesomeness of the right." As a result, he is optimistic about the US' social stability, which he considers to be "in the middle of an amazing moment of improvement and repair."
Brooks also broke with many in the conservative movement when, in late 2003, he came out in favor of same-sex marriage in his New York Times column. He equated the idea with traditional conservative values: "We should insist on gay marriage. We should regard it as scandalous that two people could claim to love each other and not want to sanctify their love with marriage and fidelity.... It's going to be up to conservatives to make the important, moral case for marriage, including gay marriage."
Regarding abortion, Brooks has advocated for pro-choice government regulations: abortion would be legal, with parental consent for minors, during the first four or five months, and illegal except in extremely rare circumstances afterward. (New York Times, April 22, 2002.) (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
The book is really a moral and social tract, but Brooks has hung it on the life stories of two imaginary people, Harold and Erica, who are used to illustrate his theory in detail and to provide the occasion for countless references to the psychological literature and frequent disquisitions on human nature and society.... One doesn’t care what happens to them because in spite of Brooks’s earnest attempt to describe their psychological depths, they do not come to life; they and their supporting cast are mannequins for the display of psychological and social generalizations.
Thomas Nagel - New York Times Book Review
[S]harp, clear and often very funny.... Many of us, Brooks believes, are in the grip of an outdated theory of human nature. We give priority to cold-blooded reason, to deliberative, conscious, logical and linear thought...but] Brain research, Brooks tells us, "reminds us of the relative importance of emotion over pure reason, social connections over individual choice, character over IQ." Brooks is right that many psychologists, philosophers and neuroscientists believe this to be true. The Social Animal is a savvy, accessible and enthusiastic defense of their position—they are lucky to have him on their side.
Paul Bloom - Washington Post
Mr. Brooks is at his best as a social observer, documenting the changing patterns of contemporary life.... he shows genius in sketching archetypes and coining phrases. Here we learn of the "composure class" (who earn their money "by climbing the meritocratic ladder of success").... There is plenty of Mr. Brooks's vintage comic sociology here, too...[b]ut Mr. Brooks is after much more than witty aperçus about life's winners. He wants to explain what makes the "composure class" tick.
Chistopher F. Chabris - Wall Street Journal
The Social Animal is an odd beast of a book with a slightly arbitrary quality. It is never quite clear on what grounds Brooks has decided to explore the implications of some new ideas and not others, other than that they confirm his own views and can be worked into his narrative. Indeed, his rather casual use of academic research sits strangely with his avowed respect for science. There are other tensions. Brooks is impressed by the evidence marshalled in Wilkinson and Pickett's The Spirit Level, and elsewhere, that "the mere fact of being low on the status totem pole brings its own deep stress and imposes its own psychic costs". Yet he remains an almost unqualified meritocrat, arguing that the great challenge for government is not to promote greater equality but to make it easier for people to rise from one class to another.
Ben Rogers - Guardian (UK)
New York Times columnist Brooks (Bobos in Paradise) raids Malcolm Gladwell's pop psychology turf in a wobbly treatise on brain science, human nature, and public policy. Essentially a satirical novel interleaved with disquisitions on mirror neurons and behavioral economics, the narrative chronicles the life cycle of a fictional couple—Harold, a historian working at a think tank, and Erica, a Chinese-Chicana cable-TV executive—as a case study of the nonrational roots of social behaviors, from mating and shopping to voting. Their story lets Brooks mock the affluent and trendy while advancing soft neoconservative themes: that genetically ingrained emotions and biases trump reason; that social problems require cultural remedies (charter schools, not welfare payments); that the class divide is about intelligence, deportment, and taste, not money or power. Brooks is an engaging guide to the "cognitive revolution" in psychology, but what he shows us amounts mainly to restating platitudes. (Women like men with money, we learn, while men like women with breasts.) His attempt to inflate recent research on neural mechanisms into a grand worldview yields little except buzz concepts—"society is a layering of networks"—no more persuasive than the rationalist dogmas he derides.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) An uncommonly brilliant blend of sociology, intellect and allegory.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for The Social Animal:
1. What is David Brooks's over-arching argument in this book? What does he point to as the determinants of individual success or failure? Do you agree...or disagree with him?
2. Brooks writes that he wants to "counteract the bias in our culture":
The conscious mind writes the autobiography of our species. Unaware of what is going on deep down inside, the conscious mind assigns itself the starring role. It gives itself credit for performing all sorts of tasks it doesn’t really control.
Talk about that statement. First, what does Brooks mean? Second, how does he define the difference between the unconscious and the conscious? In what ways is the former more important than the latter? Finally, how would you write your own narrative—and would it be truly descriptive of your life—inner and outer?
3. What does Brooks mean when he says "the adult personality—including political views—is forever defined in opposition to one’s natural enemies in high school"? Does his statement have relevance to your own experience?
4. What does Brooks mean by his term, the "underdebates" in American politics?
5. To what does Brooks attribute the class divide? Given the Congressional Budget Office's 2011 findings regarding the top one percent of the income tier vs. the lower 99%, do his theories hold up? Can an economic view and a cultural-behavioral view both be correct? Or does one have precedence over the other?
6. What does Brooks point to as examples of our social policy failures? Why have so many well-meaning initiatives failed? What are his solutions? Are they workable?
7. Describe some of the findings by cognitive scientists, such as priming ... or framing? Have you experienced, or used, either mental phenomena?
8. Is this book funny? What does Brooks poke fun at? Does the book's satire capture the way we live and what we value as a society? Or is Brooks off base? Talk about his coinage of new words and phrases: "composure class," "sanctimommies," "extracurricular sluts," and "misbagged."
9. Do Erica and Harold work as fictional characters? Do they come alive for you? Do you care about them? Do they work well as the fictional embodiment of Brooks's theories? Or do they come off as clumsy and unworkable? (Critics are all over the map on this...so there is no "correct" answer.)
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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