The Social Animal

by David Brooks

  The unconscious is a natural explorer. Whereas conscious thought tends to march step by step and converge on a few core facts or principles, unconscious thought tends to spread out through a process of associations, venturing into what Dijksterhuis calls the “dark and dusty nooks and crannies of the mind.” Level 1 therefore produces more creative links and unlikely parallels. Unconscious thought can take in many more factors. It naturally weighs the importance of various factors as they come into view. It restlessly scurries about—many parallel processes at a time—as the conscious mind is busy with other things, trying to match new situations with old models or trying to rearrange the pieces of a problem until they create a harmonious whole. It chases vibes and metaphors in search of connections, patterns, and similarities. It uses the whole panoply of psychological tools—emotions as well as physical sensations.

  We tend to think of Level 1 as the early part of the brain, which we share with the animals, and Level 2 as the evolutionarily recent part of the brain that distinguishes us as human. But back in 1963, Ulric Neisser made the intriguing suggestion that it might be the sophistication of our unconscious processes that make us human:

  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 humans and of lower animals lies not in the existence of consciousness but in the capacity for complex processes outside of it.

  Epistemological Modesty

  Intuition and logic exist in partnership. The challenge is to organize this partnership, knowing when to rely on Level 1 and when to rely on Level 2, and how to organize the interchange between the two. The research doesn’t yet provide clear answers about that, but it does point to an attitude—an attitude that acknowledges the weaknesses of the mind while prescribing strategies for action.

  When Harold tried to use his research into the British Enlightenment to help Erica think about her problems, he emphasized a concept that was central to British Enlightenment thought: epistemological modesty. Epistemology is the study of how we know what we know. Epistemological modesty is the knowledge of how little we know and can know.

  Epistemological modesty is an attitude toward life. This attitude is built on the awareness that we don’t know ourselves. Most of what we think and believe is unavailable to conscious review. We are our own deepest mystery.

  Not knowing ourselves, we also have trouble fully understanding others. In Felix Holt, George Eliot asked readers to imagine what a game of chess would be like if all the chessmen had their own passions and thoughts, if you were not only uncertain about your opponent’s pieces but also about your own. You would have no chance if you had to rely upon mathematical stratagems in such a game, she wrote, and yet this imaginary game is far easier than the one we play in real life.

  Not fully understanding others, we also cannot really get to the bottom of circumstances. No event can be understood in isolation from its place in the historical flow—the infinity of prior events, minute causes, and circumstances that touch it in visible and invisible ways.

  And yet this humble attitude doesn’t necessarily produce passivity. Epistemological modesty is a disposition for action. The people with this disposition believe that wisdom begins with an awareness of our own ignorance. We can design habits, arrangements, and procedures that partially compensate for the limits on our knowledge.

  The modest disposition begins with the recognition that there is no one method for solving problems. It’s important to rely on the quantitative and rational analysis. But that gives you part of the truth, not the whole.

  For example, if you were asked what day in the spring you should plant corn, you could consult a scientist. You could calculate the weather patterns, consult the historical record, and find the optimal temperature range and date at each latitude and altitude. On the other hand, you could ask a farmer. Folk wisdom in North America decrees that corn should be planted when oak leaves are the size of a squirrel’s ear. Whatever the weather in any particular year, this rule will guide the farmer to the right date.

  This is a different sort of knowledge. It comes from integrating and synthesizing diverse dynamics. It is produced over time, by an intelligence that is associational—observing closely, imagining loosely, comparing like to unlike and like to like to find harmonies and rhythms in the unfolding of events.

  The modest person uses both methods, and more besides. The modest person learns not to trust one paradigm. Most of what he knows accumulates through a long and arduous process of wandering.

  The modest person is patient. His method is illustrated by the behavior of the little gobiid fish. This is a little fish that lives in shallow water. At low tide, its habitat is reduced to little pools and puddles. Yet the gobiid fish jump with great accuracy over rocks and dry ridges from pool to pool. How do they do it? They can’t scope out the dry patches before they jump, or see where the next pool is. If you put a little gobiid fish in an unfamiliar habitat, it won’t jump at all.

  What happens is that during high tide the gobiid fish wander around absorbing the landscape and storing maps in their heads. Then when the tide is low, they have a mental map of the landscape, and they unconsciously know what ridges will be dry at low tide and what hollows will be full of water.

  Human beings are good at accumulating this sort of wanderer’s knowledge as well. For ninety thousand generations our race has been exploring landscapes, sensing dangers and opportunities. When you explore a new landscape or visit a new country, your attention is open to everything, like a baby’s. One thing catches your eye. Then another.

  This receptiveness can happen only when you are physically there. Not when you are reading about a place, but only when you are on the scene, immersed in it. If you don’t actually visit a place, you don’t really know it. If you just study the numbers, you don’t know it. If you don’t get used to the people, you don’t know it. As the Japanese proverb puts it: Don’t study something. Get used to it.

  When you are out there on the scene, you are plunged into particulars. A thousand sensations wash over you. In ancient times a human wanderer would see a stream in a new landscape, and the sight would be coated with pleasure. He would see a dense forest or a craggy ravine, and a little marker of fear would lodge with the image in his brain.

  The mind wants to make instant judgments about all the sensory details it receives, file new data away with some theory. People hate uncertainty and rush to judgment. Research by Colin Camerer has found that when people play card games in circumstances that don’t allow them to calculate the odds of success, the fear-oriented centers of their brains light up. They try to end the fear by reaching a conclusion, any conclusion, about the pattern of the game, just to end the fear.

  But the wanderer endures uncertainty. The wise wanderer holds off and restrains, possessing what John Keats called negative capability, the ability to be in “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

  The more complicated the landscape, the more the wanderer relies on patience. The more confusing the scene, the more tolerant his outlook becomes. He not only has an awareness of his own ignorance, but of his own weakness in the face of it. He knows that his mind will seize on the first bit of data it comes across and build a universal theory around it. This is the fallacy of anchoring. He knows that his mind will take his most recent experience and try to impose the lessons of that case onto this one. This is the fallacy of availability. He knows that he came onto this scene with certain stereotypes of how life works in his mind, and he will try to get what he sees here to conform to them. This is the fallacy of attribution.

  He is on guard against his weaknesses. He pays attention to the sensations that come up from below. He makes tentative generalizations and analyses and focuses on sensations a
new. He continues to wander and absorb, letting the information marinate deep inside. He is playing, picking up this and that. He sees a section of the landscape and slowly feels his way to another side. He meets people in this new landscape, and he reenacts pieces of their own behavior and thinking in his own mind. He begins to walk the way they walk, and laugh as they laugh. He sees the patterns of their daily existence, which they are no longer even aware of. His mind naturally oscillates between the outer texture of their lives—their jewelry, clothes and mementoes—and what he intuits of their inner hopes and goals.

  Meanwhile, Level 1 is churning away, blending data, probing for similarities and rhythms in its own ceaseless way. It is working up a feel for this new landscape: How does the light fall? How do the people greet one another? What is the pace of life? It’s not only the individuals the unconscious is trying to discern, but the patterns between them. How closely do these people work together? What is the common unspoken conception of authority and individuality? The point is not just to describe the fish in the river, but the nature of the water in which they swim.

  At some point there is a moment of calm, and disparate observations integrate into a coherent whole. The wanderer can begin to predict how people will finish their sentences. He now possesses maps in his mind. The contours of his brainscape harmonize with the contours of reality in this new place. Sometimes this synchronicity will be achieved gradually. Sometimes there are bursts of inspiration, and the map comes into focus all at once. After these moments, the mind will reinterpret every old piece of data in a radically new way. What seemed immeasurably complex will now seem beautifully simple.

  Eventually—not soon, not until after many months or years of arduous observation, with dry spells and frustrating longueurs—the wanderer will achieve what the Greeks called métis. This is a state of wisdom that emerges from the conversation between Level 1 and Level 2.

  Métis is very hard to put into words. A person with métis possesses a mental map of her particular reality. She possesses a collection of metaphors that arranges an activity or a situation. She has acquired a set of practical skills that enable her to anticipate change.

  She understands the general properties of a situation but also the particulars. A mechanic may understand the general qualities of all cars, but is quick to get a feel for each particular car. A person with métis knows when to apply the standard operating procedure but also when to break the rules. A surgeon with métis has a feel or a knack for a certain sort of procedure, and she senses what can be about to go wrong at what stage. In Asian cooking there are recipes that ask the chef to add ingredients when the oil is about to burn. A chef with métis knows the quality the oil takes on just before something else is about to happen.

  During his discussion of Tolstoy in his famous essay “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” philosopher Isaiah Berlin comes close to describing a conception of métis. It is achieved, he writes, “not by a specific inquiry and discovery, but by an awareness, not necessarily explicit or conscious, of certain characteristics of human life and experience.”

  We humans, he continues, live our lives in the midst of a specific flow of events, the medium in which we are. “We do not and cannot observe [this flow] as if from the outside; cannot identify, measure and seek to manipulate; cannot even be wholly aware of it, inasmuch as it enters too intimately into all our experience.” It is “too closely interwoven with all that we are and do to be lifted out of the flow (it is the flow) and observed with scientific detachment, as an object. It—the medium in which we are—determines our most permanent categories, our standards of truth and falsehood, of reality and appearance, of the good and the bad, of the central and the peripheral, the subjective and the objective, of the beautiful and the ugly, of movement and rest, of past, present and future.…

  “Nevertheless, though we cannot analyze the medium without some (impossible) vantage point outside it (for there is no ‘outside’), yet some human beings are better aware—though they cannot describe it—of the texture and direction of these ‘submerged’ portions of their own and everyone else’s lives; better aware of this than others, who either ignore the existence of the all-pervasive medium (the ‘flow of life’) and are rightly called superficial; or else try to apply to it instruments—scientific, metaphysical, etc.—adapted solely to objects above the surface, the relatively conscious, manipulable portion of our experience, and so achieve absurdities in their theories and humiliating failures in practice.”

  Wisdom, Berlin concludes, “is not scientific knowledge, but a special sensitiveness to the contours of the circumstances in which we happen to be placed; it is a capacity for living without falling foul of some permanent condition or factor which cannot either be altered or fully described and calculated; an ability to be guided by rules of thumb—the ‘immemorial wisdom’ said to reside in peasants and other ‘simple folk’—where rules of science do not, in principle apply. This inexpressible sense of cosmic orientation is the ‘sense of reality,’ the ‘knowledge’ of how to live.”

  Harold actually read this passage from Berlin to Erica one night, even though the passage is abstract and she was tired, and he wasn’t sure how much she really absorbed.

  CHAPTER 16

  THE INSURGENCY

  RAYMOND AND ERICA STARTED EATING LUNCH TOGETHER AT the cafeteria at 11:45 (Raymond got up early but agreed to push back his normal lunch hour at least 45 minutes for Erica’s sake). Soon, other like-minded people were lunching early so they could join them. Within a few weeks, there were twenty or thirty people having lunch together before noon in one corner of the cafeteria.

  It was an odd mix of generations. There were a bunch of Erica’s friends—people in their thirties—and there were a bunch of Raymond’s old cronies, in their fifties and sixties. Most of the time they would just kibbitz about the latest Taggert stupidity. One day, the company announced a hiring freeze. “That’ll never work,” Raymond observed with a smile. “People will just hire temps and interns and keep them on. We used to have interns working with us who’d been here five or ten years. If you hire them as interns you can keep them on salary without having to send up another form, so the hiring freeze doesn’t apply.”

  Raymond had been born on a ranch in northern Minnesota and had missed a lifetime of fashion trends. If they made a movie of his life, Gene Hackman would have been called in to play him.

  He and Erica quickly formed a division of labor between them. Raymond would make observations about how Taggert and his team were screwing up, and she would plot revolution. Left to his own devices, Raymond would have been content to make sardonic comments about the passing scene, but Erica wanted to take action. Taggert was destroying everything others had built. She still had decades ahead of her and did not want to see her life blotted out both by her own business failure and the collapse of a major corporation she had been hired to help grow. And there was something else driving her. From girlhood, she knew what it was like to feel that, no matter what room she and her mom walked into, they would be deemed unworthy of whatever they found there. The thought of being condescended to by this team of overeducated nitwits produced a righteous anger that woke her up in the middle of the night.

  Day after day, she would push Raymond: “We’ve got to do something! We can’t just sit here talking.” Finally he agreed, to a point.

  Raymond was eating the tongue sandwich he brought every day, with a Dr. Brown’s cream soda. He agreed they would put together a proposal, a different set of strategies the company might explore. But Raymond had a few stipulations: “First, no covert ops. We do everything aboveboard and out in the open. Second, no coup. We are not targeting personnel. We are offering suggestions about policy. Third, always helpful. We will never challenge anybody’s ability. We will just try to provide them with constructive alternatives.”

  Erica thought he was making a distinction without a difference. It was inconceivable Taggert could turn into the sort of person who could adopt the sor
t of policies Raymond would come up with. Changing policy would mean changing personnel. But if Raymond had to have these stipulations so he could stay true to some ancient loyalty code, then that was fine with Erica.

  They began putting together a group of proposals to save the company. They did it right there in the open, in the cafeteria, as members of what they came to call the Brunch Club, in honor of Raymond’s early dining schedule.

  They worked on their proposals for several weeks, and Erica was fascinated by how Raymond led the group. First, he seemed to spend most of his time talking about what he was not good at. “Sorry, I don’t handle distraction very well,” he would say as he turned off his cell phone before every discussion. The fact is, no human brain handles distraction very well, but Raymond was wise enough to know it. “Sorry, I’m not real good with generalizations,” he interrupted one day. The fact is, most minds are more supple at handling visual images than abstract concepts, but Raymond was sensible enough to acknowledge it. “Could we lay out an agenda here?” he would say. “My mind is just wandering from subject to subject.” The fact is, most people can hold a thought for only about ten seconds at a time, but Raymond was smart enough to see that he needed an external structure to keep himself on track. At the start of each lunch he’d write down a list of things to talk about, and he’d keep glancing down at the list.

  Raymond’s knowledge of his own shortcomings was encyclopedic. He knew he had trouble comparing more than two options at a time. If you gave him three, he got confused, so he would build brackets and move from one binary comparison to the next. He knew he liked hearing evidence that confirmed his own opinions, so he asked Erica and the others to give him the counterevidence first, and not bury it away. He knew he had a bias for the cautious course in any situation, so he would always force himself to summarize the case for the riskiest course before making the argument for the cautious one.