The Social Animal

by David Brooks

  He didn’t quit drinking, but now he never drank until after eleven p.m. What really changed was his shrivel instinct. Somehow over the course of his life he had become hypersensitive to emotional turmoil. He would recoil at the first sign of emotional pain. He avoided situations that might cause him inner suffering. He fled from confrontations that might arouse anger, hurt, and unpleasantness. Now he was a little less afraid. He could look at these hidden phantoms squarely. He didn’t have to live in fear of sadness and hurt. He knew he could face it and survive.

  Camp

  His commitment to Incarnation Camp came about accidentally. A friend was going up to Connecticut to visit his daughter, a counselor there, and asked Harold if he’d like to come along for the ride. They pulled off a road in rural Connecticut and went over a long dirt driveway past tents and fields and ponds. Along the driveway, they came across a group of nine-year-old girls holding hands. Harold looked at them with soft fascination, the way he often looked at children these days. His friend parked near a cabin and he and Harold walked down the hill to a beach by a mile-long lake, surrounded by wooded hills. There was not a house or a road in sight. The camp was its own world, eight hundred acres of wilderness.

  The camp served the rich and poor. Some of the kids were from Manhattan prep schools, and others were there on scholarship from Brooklyn and the Bronx. As time went by, Harold would come to see the camp as the only truly integrated institution he had ever known.

  The first thing he noticed was that the physical equipment seemed worn and old. General-purpose camps like this faced grave challenges during the age of specialization, when most parents preferred resume-notching specialty setups—computer camp, music camp, baseball camp.

  The zeitgeist seemed countercultural, too. There was almost a hippie spirit about the place. During that first day Harold saw counselors and children singing the old folk songs from the sixties—“Puff the Magic Dragon” and “One Tin Soldier.” Harold also saw some amazingly good basketball games. Mostly he saw physical contact. The campers and the staff frolicked like bonobos. They lounged all over one another. They braided one another’s hair and wrestled in playful piles. They played Marco Polo in the lake.

  He met the camp director, who saw the gleam in Harold’s eye and asked him if he’d ever have time to volunteer at the place. Twice more that summer, Harold visited the camp and helped do a few odd jobs, like supervising some teenagers during a square dance. Over the winter, he raised money for a swimming dock. The next summer, he visited on the weekends and helped repair the walking trails. One day, he saw a softball game. The kids were great at basketball, but absolutely terrible at softball. Some of them had never been taught to throw. Harold organized a softball program and even put together an instructional league for it.

  In early August, the director asked if he could spare five days to help lead a canoe trip down the Connecticut River. There were fifteen teenagers; two counselors, who were college kids; and Harold. He was three decades older than anybody else on the trip, but he fit right in.

  As they were paddling down the river, he’d organize trivia contests. He taught them songs, and learned about Katy Perry and Lady Gaga. At nights, they came to call him Daddyo, and in the earnest, heavy-but-open manner of teenagers, they told him about their problems—about their love lives, their parents’ divorces, their confusion about what was expected from them. Harold was so touched that they trusted him. He listened with rapt attention. The kids seemed desperate for authority figures. He supposed the teachers and other professionals knew what to say when the kids told them about their problems and fears. He sure didn’t.

  The last full day of the canoe trip was arduous. They paddled all day, against a strong wind. Harold told the kids that, when they made it to their destination, they could take all the remaining supplies and have a food fight. When they made it to the final campground, the kids seized the supplies, and within minutes they began splattering them on one another. Great blobs of peanut butter were flying through the air. Everybody had jelly smeared across their shirts. Cake mix was gooped up into thick batter and rolled into sloppy warm snowballs. The kids, the counselors, and Harold hid behind trees, organized meatloaf ambushes, and warded off snow showers of powdered orange juice.

  When the battle was over, they were all a mess, coated from head to shoes with gunk. They held hands and ran in a big line into the river to wash off. Then they came out, changed, and had their final campfire. Harold had brought no booze on the trip, and retired late that night to his tent sober and happy. He lay in his sleeping bag, feeling exhausted and lucky. It’s interesting how fast a mood can change. In an instant something turned in him. Suddenly, he felt like weeping.

  He had never cried in his entire adult life, except occasionally in the dark at the end of a sad movie. And he didn’t actually cry this time. He felt tremors in his gut. He felt a pressure at the back of his eyes. But nothing actually came out. Instead, he had this weird sensation of imagining himself crying: He was floating above and got a glimpse of himself in a crouch heaving with sobs in his sleeping bag.

  And then it passed. He thought about the life he had constructed and the life he would have constructed, if he had been a little more open and possessed a little more emotional courage. Eventually, he fell asleep.

  CHAPTER 18

  MORALITY

  ERICA HAD NEVER SEEN A HOTEL CORRIDOR LINED WITH sleeve talkers before. She got to the top floor of the Parabola overlooking Central Park in New York, and as she left the elevator she saw bodyguards astride doorways up and down the hall, looking apathetically at one another and occasionally talking into their sleeves for scheduling updates. Inside the suites there were Saudi princes, Russian oligarchs, African despots, and Chinese billionaires, and each had a retinue of jar-headed muscle types waiting outside the room for prestige and protection.

  A hotel concierge led Erica from the elevator to her own head-of-state suite, oddly called the India Suite. In the manner of a eunuch crouching before divinity, he ushered her into a complex of rooms four or five times the size of her childhood apartments. It was like Ralph Lauren’s own personal heaven—a vast Anglophilic expanse with walnut paneling, various fireplaces with great stone hearths, English club chairs sprayed around alcoves, a large marble chess table in the corner, his-and-her showers in the bathroom suite in case you got the urge to shampoo in one and condition in the other. She wandered around the complex in a sort of wide-eyed disbelief, wondering things like “What? No trout stream?”

  The concierge was on the wrong side of the service Laffer curve. At certain top-end facilities, the waiters and concierge types are at such a heightened state of attending to your every need that the more they do for you, the less convenient your life becomes. They refill your coffee cup after every sip so you have to remix sugar and cream just to keep it even. They brush down your jacket just as you’re trying to put on your coat. In this case, the concierge insisted on trying to unpack Erica’s suitcase and get her wireless service for her computer. Erica practically had to Taser the guy to get him to go away.

  This was all the doing of her host, the man she called Mr. Make-Believe. She’d followed this guy’s career for years on the covers of business magazines, and when they’d met at a charity event he’d asked her to join his board of directors.

  Mr. Make-Believe took a special interest in Erica, summoning her frequently, consulting with her earnestly, and even putting her on his Christmas-box list. Every year he sent a giant box of goodies to his closest friends, including things like laptops, pretentious biographies, Moroccan duvet covers, antique Venetian prints, and whatever other lavish geegaws illuminated his eclectic good taste.

  Mr. Make-Believe operated on a world-historical scale. He’d started out with nothing in a dysfunctional southern Illinois suburb, and he’d turned himself into the perfect master-of-the-universe, graying-at-the-temples, polo-playing, charity-hosting, six-foot-one-inch executive man.

  His motto was Never Th
ink Like An Employee, and from some phenomenally early age he had just assumed he would own and run whatever organization he was a part of. He started his business career in college, busing students to Fort Lauderdale for spring break. Decades later, capping a long series of acquisitions, he had bought a major airline and put himself at the head, but he seemed to spend a good deal of his time posing for Christmas cards atop the Matterhorn, negotiating to buy prominent European soccer teams, making the society pages while attending charity performances of Dante’s Inferno on behalf of childhood-diabetes research, and attending Formula 1 races with his five perfect sons: Chip, Rip, Tip, Bip, and Lip.

  Mr. Make-Believe was incapable of sitting still. He performed the slightest gesture in the manner of one who believes he is being watched admiringly by God. He studied photographs of JFK, and had spent hours in front of the mirror perfecting the one-thousand-yards-in-the-distance Man-of-Destiny stare. Yet every few minutes, a sort of wide-eyed laugh would break out of him, as if he couldn’t quite believe the fantastic life he was leading. It was sort of like watching Dennis the Menace wake up every few minutes and discover that he’s the pope.

  He had a free day between meetings of the Aspen Strategy Group and the Trilateral Commission, so he’d invited Erica to come by for a consultation. Every year he put his goals for his airline on a single sheet of paper, and he wanted Erica to help him decide which priorities should make the list and which shouldn’t—improve online check-in or revamp employee–health benefit options; replace the CFO or reduce air slots to the upper Midwest. Getting her installed in this suite was one of his characteristic acts of oppressive hospitality.

  They lunched in her suite because Mr. Make-Believe thought he was too famous to dine uninterrupted in the restaurant downstairs. He ordered wine from the Russian River Valley and obscure crackers from Portugal, showing the kind of discernment that Erica found annoying—like a push-up bra of good taste. They talked about the corporate mission statement, but also Chinese currency values, wind energy, yoga, lacrosse, and his love for books about heroes who die at the end—the Robert Jordan canon, he called it.

  Erica had left the bedroom door open even though this was a business lunch. She let her shoes fall off her feet and moved them about on the carpet with her stockinged feet. She was sort of entranced by the guy. They both tapped their fingers nervously as they talked. And it really wasn’t the aridity of her own marriage at that point or her profound loneliness that made her sleep with him that day. It was mostly the novelty of having sex with a Forbes-cover boy and the excitement of having an experience she would always remember.

  If there was any deeper longing she felt toward Mr. Make-Believe, it was her old fantasy of being part of some headline-grabbing power couple—part of some dynamic tycoon duo who would complement each other’s skills—the F. Scott and Zelda of the corporate world.

  Their lunch meeting went on for about two hours. He finally put the moves on her with his piety. She was his most-valued advisor, he told her as they stood close in the living room. His second most-valued advisor, he continued, was the priest who had been ministering him for thirty-five years. Through him, Mr. Make-Believe had become active in Catholic Charities, the Knights of Columbus, the Papal Foundation, and various other bigwig Catholic groups. It was characteristic of this fellow that he would talk about his service to the Vatican in order to get between a married woman’s legs. He did not see himself as a guy who played by normal rules.

  Erica let it be known by her body language that she was his for the taking, and as a matter of principle, Mr. Make-Believe could not let any opportunity for taking go unseized.

  Shame

  Years after, when she’d see his face on the cover of Forbes she’d allow herself a smile at her one episode of adultery. But on the night after it happened, her feelings were different.

  The sex itself was nothing. Literally nothing. Just motions without any reverberations. But an hour or so after he left, she felt a strange sensation. It felt as though her insides were collapsing in on themselves. It came across her slowly at a business dinner as a background ache and then sliced sharpest, like being punctured by a blade, when she was alone back in the suite. She literally doubled over in pain, sitting there in a chair. She eventually realized it was self-hatred, shame, and revulsion. That night, she felt rancid in every way. Thoughts and images swarmed across her brain, not only of that afternoon’s event, but also randomly associated terrible moments from her past. Her remorse seethed, and she could do nothing to will it away.

  Brain-befogged, in the darkest hours of the night, she found herself thrashing in bed, punching the pillow, sitting up, and then throwing herself back down with a thump. She found herself groaning out loud in a sort of foggy-headed agony. She found herself on her feet, walking around the rooms, rushing over to the minibar in the kitchen and opening little bottles of scotch, which had no soothing effect, since they were so small. She wasn’t really afraid of getting caught. She wasn’t even afraid of any possible consequences. At this stage in her life, she didn’t feel God’s presence or God’s judgment. She didn’t even think the word “guilt” applied to this storm. It was just pain, which would be replaced the next day, after a few hours of sleep with a dull lassitude and a general feeling of vulnerability. For the next several days, her emotions were all on the surface. She listened to depressing Tom Waits music. She couldn’t concentrate on work during the plane ride home but read a Faulkner novel instead. She was bruised and tender for weeks, and slightly different forever. She never committed adultery again, and the mere idea of it filled her with an intense and unthinking aversion.

  Moral Sentiments

  The traditional thing to say about this episode is that Erica had succumbed to selfish and shortsighted lust. In her passion, in her weakness, she betrayed the vow she had made to Harold on her wedding day.

  This traditional understanding is based on a certain folk wisdom about the human mind. This folk wisdom presumes that there is a power struggle at the core of our moral decisions. On the one side there are the selfish and primitive passions. On the other side there is the enlightened force of reason. Reason uses logic to evaluate situations, apply relevant moral principles, resolve moral quandaries, and deduce a proper course of action. Reason then uses willpower to try to control the passions. When we act admirably, reason subdues passion and controls will. In Nancy Reagan’s phrase, it just says no. When we act in selfish and shortsighted ways, then we either haven’t applied reason, or passion has simply overwhelmed it.

  In this approach, Level 2 consciousness is the hero. Level 1 instincts are the villains. The former is on the side of reason and morality; the other, on the side of passion, sin, and selfishness.

  But this folk metaphor didn’t really jibe with the way Erica experienced her escapade with Mr. Make-Believe. When Erica slid into sex with him and then suffered agony because of it, it wasn’t because she had succumbed in a moment of passion and then realized calmly afterward that she had violated one of her principles. In fact, she was more passionate the night after, while in pain thrashing around in her bed, than she had been during the seduction and the sin. And it certainly wasn’t because she later consciously reasoned her way through a quandary and then coolly came to rethink her decision. That’s not how it felt at all. The regret had snuck up on her just as mysteriously as the original action.

  Erica’s experience didn’t feel like a drama between reason and passion. Instead it seemed more accurate to say that Erica had felt her situation one way with Mr. Make-Believe, while he was in the room in front of her and she had acted in a certain way, and then later that night a different perception of the situation had swept over her. Somehow one emotional tide had replaced another.

  She almost felt as if she were two different people: one of whom had seen the seduction in a mildly titillating way, and the other who had seen it as a disgrace. It was as it says in Genesis, after Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden. Their eyes we
re opened up, and they saw that they were naked. Later, she looked at herself and was unable to explain her own actions: “What in God’s name was I thinking?”

  Furthermore, the mistake with Mr. Make-Believe had left some sort of psychic scar. When similar circumstances arose in the years that were to follow, she didn’t even have to think about her response. There was no temptation to resist because the mere thought of committing adultery again produced an instant feeling of pain and aversion—the way a cat avoids a stove on which she has been burned. Erica didn’t feel more virtuous because of what she had learned about herself, but she reacted differently to that specific sort of situation.

  Erica’s experience illustrates several of the problems with the rationalist folk theory of morality. In the first place, most of our moral judgments, like Erica thrashing about that night in agony, are not cool, reasoned judgments, they are deep and often hot responses. We go through our days making instant moral evaluations about behavior, without really having to think about why. We see injustice and we’re furious. We see charity and we are warmed.

  Jonathan Haidt of the University of Virginia provides example after example of this sort of instant moral intuition in action. Imagine a man who buys a chicken from the grocery store, manages to bring himself to orgasm by penetrating it, then cooks and eats the chicken. Imagine eating your dead pet dog. Imagine cleaning your toilet with your nation’s flag. Imagine a brother and sister who are on a trip. One night they decide to have protected sex with each other. They enjoy it but decide never to do it again.