The Social Animal

by David Brooks

  Scientists and writers have tried to impose certain schema to describe how life evolves. Abraham Maslow defined his hierarchy of needs—from the physical to safety, love, esteem, and self-actualization. But much recent research has cast doubt on the idea that human lives fall into such neat schemas—there are no simple progressions of the sort Maslow described. Some days Harold felt defeated, and concluded that life is unknowable. Take something as simple as buying a car. Did he choose his last car because of the shape of the body, the write-up in Consumer Reports, some vague image he had of the brand personality, how it felt in the test drive, some sense of the status it would give him, or maybe because of the dealer discount? All of those things must have played a role, but he couldn’t really define the proportions. There was a murky twilight zone between the factors that must have gone into his choice, and the actual choice as it had emerged at the dealership.

  “We can never, even by the strictest examination, get completely behind the secret springs of action,” Immanuel Kant had written. And if that is true of buying a car, how much more true must it be about pursuing the grand goals of a life. If Harold had a true understanding of himself, he would be able to predict what he would want from life in a year, but he had no confidence he could do that, or even in a month. If Harold had a true understanding of himself, he would be able to describe certain qualities he possessed, but he had no confidence he could do that reliably either. People vastly overrate and misapprehend their abilities. Numerous studies have shown that there is low correlation between how people rate their own personality and how people around them rate it.

  Harold would sit there trying to think about himself, but in seconds he found he was thinking about people he had known or things he had experienced. Sometimes he’d think about some project he’d done at work, or a fight he had had with a coworker. He had a sense of himself as a coherent presence in these dramas. But when he tried to think of himself in isolation—what he was and what he lived for—he could conjure up no clear concept in his mind. It was as if he were an optical illusion, visible when you weren’t looking straight at it, but invisible when you made it the object of your attention.

  Some of his friends had off-the-shelf narratives to tell about themselves. One was a poor boy who had risen from rags to riches. Another was a sinner who had been saved in an instant by God. Another had changed his mind about everything in the course of his life—he had started in the forest of error and emerged into the light of truth.

  In his book The Redemptive Self, Dan McAdams writes that Americans are especially prone to organize their lives into stories of redemption. Once upon a time, they had strayed on the path of tribulation, but then they met a mentor or found a wife, or went to work at a foundation, or did some other thing, and they were redeemed. They were delivered from error and put onto a proper path. Their life had purpose from that moment forth.

  As he reviewed his own life, Harold couldn’t see how his life fit into any of those narrative molds. And as this process of self-analysis went on, Harold grew intensely sad—plagued by the sense that there was an ultimate deadline he would not meet. Some psychologists urge patients to sit in a chair and look inside themselves. But there’s a great deal of evidence to suggest that this sort of rumination is often harmful. When people are depressed, they pick out the negative events and emotions of their lives, and, by fixing attention upon them, they make those neural networks stronger and more dominant. In his book Strangers to Ourselves, Timothy Wilson of the University of Virginia summarizes several experiments in which rumination made depressed people more depressed while distraction made them less depressed. Ruminators fell into self-defeating, negative patterns of thought, did worse in problem-solving tasks, and had much gloomier predictions about their own future.

  At times, the whole self-examination exercise seemed futile to Harold. “How pathetically scanty my self-knowledge is compared with, say, my knowledge of my room,” Franz Kafka once observed. “There is no such thing as observation of the inner world, as there is of the outer world.”

  The Final Day

  One afternoon in late summer, Harold was out on the porch of the Aspen house, watching the river go by. He could hear Erica in her office upstairs, tapping away at her keyboard. He had a scratched metal box on his lap, and he was leafing through some papers and photographs.

  He came across a picture of himself from long ago. He was about six when the photo was taken. He was wearing a navy-style peacoat, and he was atop a metal playground slide, about to come down, looking with intense concentration on the chute below.

  “What do I have in common with that boy?” Harold asked himself. Nothing, except that it was himself. The knowledge, the circumstances, the experience, and the appearance were all different, but there was something alive in that boy that was still alive within him now. There was a certain essence that had changed as he had aged, but without fundamentally becoming something other than itself, and that essence Harold chose to call his soul.

  He supposed that this essence was manifested in neurons and synapses. He had been born with certain connections, and since the brain is the record of the feelings of a life, he had slowly accreted new neural connections in his head. And yet Harold couldn’t help but think how enchanted it all was. The connections had been formed by emotion. The brain was physical meat, but out of the billions of energy pulses emerged spirit and soul. There must be some supreme creative energy, he thought, that can take love and turn it into synapses and then take a population of synapses and turn it into love. The hand of God must be there.

  Harold looked at the little boy’s hands clutching the railing of the slide and at the expression on the little boy’s face. Harold didn’t have to imagine what the boy’s affections and fears were, because at some level he could still experience them directly. He didn’t have to reconstruct the manner in which that boy saw the world because it was still, at some level, his own manner. That little boy was afraid of heights. That little boy felt light-headed at the sight of blood. That little boy was in love but often felt alone. That little boy already possessed a hidden kingdom, a cast of characters and responses that would grow, mature, assert themselves, recede, and regress at different times of his life. That hidden kingdom was he, then as now.

  Part of that kingdom grew out of his relationships with his parents. They weren’t the most profound people ever. They spent too much time in the world of commerce, focusing on appearances and vanities. They could never really answer his deepest needs, but they had been good people, who loved him. One of them had probably taken him to this playground, and stood behind the camera to take this picture, and had filed it away somewhere so Harold could see it now. There’d been an emotion when the picture was taken and an emotion when it was filed away, and there was an emotion when Harold looked at it now and imagined his mom or dad behind the camera pushing the button. The loops still reverberated across the decades, from generation to generation.

  The soul emerged from these loops of affection. The loops were momentary and fragile, also permanent and enduring. Even today, there were little sleeper cells lodged in his mind—affections and fears planted long ago which could lie dormant for decades and then suddenly spring to life in the right circumstances. The way his parents reacted to his small accomplishments—that delicious feeling motivated him his whole life. The way his working-class grandparents never felt truly accepted in middle-class America, as if their presence was contingent and peripheral—that insecurity lingered in him his whole life. The way his friends in school draped their arms around his shoulder and leaned against him in the cafeteria—that feeling of comradeship that strengthened him until his dying day. Social connections early in life predict longevity and good health at the end.

  Harold tried and failed to see into the tangle of connections, the unconscious region, which he came to think of as the Big Shaggy. The only proper attitude toward this region was wonder, gratitude, awe, and humility. Some people think they are the
dictators of their own life. Some believe the self is an inert wooden ship to be steered by a captain at the helm. But Harold had come to see that his conscious self—the voice in his head—was more a servant than a master. It emerged from the hidden kingdom and existed to nourish, edit, restrain, attend, refine, and deepen the soul within.

  For all his life until this period, he had wondered how his life would turn out. But now the story was complete. He knew his fate. He was relieved from the burden of the future. The cold fear of death was there in his mind, but so was the knowledge that he’d been extraordinarily lucky.

  He stepped back and asked some questions of himself, assessments of the life he had lived. And each question generated its own instant feeling, so he didn’t even have to put the answer into words. Had he deepened himself? In a culture of instant communication, in which it was so easy to live superficially, had he spent time on the important things, developing his most consequential talents? This question felt good to ask, because while he had never become a prophet or sage, he had read the serious books, engaged the serious questions, and had tried, as best he could, to cultivate a luxuriant inner realm.

  Had he contributed to the river of knowledge, left a legacy for future generations? This question he could not feel so good about. He had tried to discover new things. He had written essays and delivered lectures. But he had been an observer more than an actor. For too many years he had drifted, flitting from one interest to another. At other times, he had held back, unwilling to take the risks and suffer the blows that come from living in the arena. He had not done all that he might have to offer gifts to those who would live on.

  Had he transcended this earthly realm? No. He always had a sense there was something beyond life as science understands it. He had always somehow believed in a God who existed beyond time and space. But he had never fallen in with religion. He had lived a worldly life and, regretfully, had never tasted Divine transcendence.

  Had he loved? Yes. The one constant in his adult life had been his admiration and love for the good woman who was his wife. He knew that she did not reciprocate his love with the same strength and devotion. He knew that she had overshadowed him, and their life paths had followed her achievements. He knew that she had sometimes lost interest in him and there had been lonely years in the middle of their marriage. But that didn’t matter to him now. In the end, his ability to be with her and to sacrifice himself for her had been another of life’s gifts. And now, in his vulnerable final years, she was offering back everything that he had given. Even if they had been married only this month, with him immobile and her caring for him in a thousand ways, life would still have been worth living. As the hours ahead had shortened, his love for her had only grown.

  Just then, Erica came out onto the porch and asked him if he wanted some dinner brought out. “Oh, is it dinnertime already?” he asked.

  She said it was and there was some cold chicken in the fridge she could bring out, with some potato chips. She went back inside, and Harold was left to go back to his reverie. And as he reviewed different scenes from his life, the questions life asked of him—and his assessments of them—dissolved, and he was left with just sensations. It was like being in a concert or a movie. His sense of self faded away. It was like the way he had been in his room as a boy, moving trucks around while lost in some great adventure.

  Erica came back out onto the porch and dropped the tray she was carrying and screamed and rushed over to Harold and grabbed his hand. His body had sagged and was inert. His head was on his chin and drool was coming out of his mouth. She looked into his eyes, the eyes she had grown accustomed to looking into all these decades, and she could see no reaction there, though he was breathing. She made a move to run to the phone, but Harold’s hand tightened around hers. She sat back down looking him in the face and weeping.

  Harold had lost consciousness but not life. Images flowed into his head the way they do in the seconds before one falls asleep. They came in a chaotic succession. In his unselfconsciousness, he didn’t regard them the way he would have at an earlier time. He regarded them in a way that was beyond words. We would say he regarded them holistically, somehow feeling everything at once. We would say he participated in them impressionistically, rather than analytically. He felt presences.

  As I put them down on this page I have to put them in one sentence after another, but this is not how Harold experienced them. There were images of the paths he used to ride his bike on as a boy and the mountains he looked out upon that day. There he was doing homework with his mother, and also tackling a running back in high school. There were speeches he had made, compliments he had received, sex he had had, books he had read and moments when some new idea had broken over him like a wave.

  For a few moments, consciousness seemed about to flicker back. He could sense Erica weeping out there and compassion enveloped him. Inside, the swirls in his mind were still interlooping with hers. They were shared swirls that leaped across from her conscious world to his unconscious one. Categories fell away. Tenderness was out of control. His ability to focus attention ended and at the same time his ability to interpenetrate the souls of others increased. His relation to her at this moment was direct. There were no analytics, no reservations, no ambitions, no future desires or past difficulties. It was just I and Thou. A unity of being. A higher state of knowledge. A merger of souls. At this point his questions about the meaning of life were no longer asked, but were answered.

  Harold entered the hidden kingdom entirely and then lost consciousness forever. In his last moments there were neither boundaries nor features. He was unable to wield the power of self-consciousness but also freed from its shackles. He had been blessed with consciousness so that he might help direct his own life and nurture his inner life, but the cost of that consciousness was an awareness that he would die. Now he lost that awareness. He was past noticing anything now, and had entered the realm of the unutterable.

  It would be interesting to know if this meant he had also entered a kingdom of heaven, God’s kingdom. But that was not communicated back to Erica. His heart continued to beat for a few minutes, and his lungs filled and emptied with air and electrochemical impulses still surged through his brain. He made some gestures and twitches, which the doctors would call involuntary but which in this case were more deeply felt than any other gesture could be. And one of them was a long squeeze of the hand, which Erica took to mean good-bye.

  What had been there at the start was there at the end, the tangle of sensations, perceptions, drives, and needs that we call, antiseptically, the unconscious. This tangle was not the lower part of Harold. It was not some secondary feature to be surpassed. It was the core of him—hard to see, impossible to understand—but supreme. Harold had achieved an important thing in his life. He had constructed a viewpoint. Other people see life primarily as a chess match played by reasoning machines. Harold saw life as a neverending interpenetration of souls.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  YOU NEVER KNOW HOW THINGS ARE GOING TO COME TOGETHER. Ever since college I’ve been interested in research about the mind and the brain. But this had been a sidelight as I went about my normal work—writing about politics and policy, sociology and culture. But as the years went by, the same thought kept recurring. The people studying the mind and brain are producing amazing insights about who we are, and yet these insights aren’t having a sufficient impact on the wider culture.

  This book is an attempt to do that. It’s an attempt to integrate science and psychology with sociology, politics, cultural commentary, and the literature of success.

  No one needs to remind me that this is a perilous enterprise. The study of the mind is still in its early stages, and many findings are under dispute. When a journalist tries to apply the findings from a complicated discipline to the wider world, it is easy to miss nuance, and the distinctions that the specialists hold dear. Moreover, there is a natural resentment of people like me, who have platforms like The New York Times
, PBS, and Random House, and who often try to capture the gist of a lifetime’s worth of research in a paragraph or a page.

  Nonetheless, I thought this enterprise was worth undertaking, because the insights gained over the past thirty years really are important. They really should reshape the way we think about policy, sociology, economics, and life in general. I’ve tried to describe these findings while playing it safe scientifically. I’ve tried to describe the findings that are reasonably well established, even if there is still some disagreement about them (there always will be). I’m aware that I am not a science writer. I have not tried to describe how the brain works. I almost never venture into the complexities of which brain region is producing which behavior. I have merely set out to describe the broad implications of this work.

  There is no way to do this in a manner that satisfies all the researchers all the time. I have at least tried to give credit to the original scientists as often as possible. I have tried to direct readers to sources where they can read about the original work and draw their own conclusions about its implications. I have also incurred debts to many people who helped me with substance and style.

  Jesse Graham of the University of Southern California policed the book for scientific errors. His wife, Sarah Graham, provided a sensitive literary reading. The psychologist Mindy Greenstein, author of The House on Crash Corner, read most of the manuscript, and Walter Mischel of Columbia read a part. Both offered crucial suggestions. Cheryl Miller, formerly of The New York Times and now of the American Enterprise Institute, did a superlative job of research, copyediting, and fact checking. Her intelligence and competence are legendary among those who have been fortunate enough to work with her. My parents, Lois and Michael Brooks, read the book, offering large thoughts and careful editing suggestions. They applied their usual high standards. My Times colleague David Leonhardt also offered invaluable feedback.