Midway through David Brooks’s new book, The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement (Random House), Erica, a fictional character, writes a memo to herself about the relationship between culture and success. She notes that the traditional view of society as a collection of rugged individualists is wrong. Instead, Erica, an anthropology student, pictures society as an intricate web, and she resolves to position herself at the intersections of peoples and cultures. From there she can yoke together disparate insights and ideas, making the connections that fuel creativity. Her mantra: “Be the glue.”
Erica’s memo can be read like a blueprint to Brooks’s own success. The New York Times columnist is a fixture on the pundit circuit. He is the author of best-selling works of—his words—"comic sociology,” Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There and On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (and Always Have) in the Future Tense. Brooks, however, cuts a curious figure for a political journalist. He interviews three politicians a day, but spends much of the rest of his time talking to anthropologists, behavioral economists, geneticists, neuroscientists, psychologists, and sociologists. He reads widely—currently a book about how ancient Polynesians, without a compass, managed to sail across the Pacific. This eclecticism explains why his twice-weekly op-eds are as likely to tackle the federal deficit as they are to ruminate on cultural trends or speculate about how advances in cognitive science will remap our understanding of ourselves.
In The Social Animal, Brooks announces: “We are living in the middle of a revolution in consciousness.” This revolution will remove the conscious mind from the center of our understanding of human behavior. The real action, Brooks insists, takes place below the level of awareness in an inner realm of unconscious and intuitive emotional responses that, Brooks writes, contain “the seedbeds of accomplishment.” With Rousseau’s Émile as his model, Brooks invents two characters, Harold and Erica, and follows them from birth to death, drawing on reams of scholarly research to highlight how genetics, brain chemistry, family structure, and cultural norms interact to create a successful life.
“I’m a synthesizer, a generalist,” Brooks says. We’re sitting on “Murderers’ Row"—the hallway of columnists’ offices at the Times’s Washington bureau. His digs are modestly sized and moderately disheveled. There’s a desk, a small table, overfull bookshelves, and a low-slung, weathered brown leather chair for a visitor. Brooks is dressed for television: deep blue shirt, sensible yellow tie. In a few hours he’ll throw on a suit jacket and tape his weekly appearance on the PBS NewsHour.
After taking a sip of coffee from a white paper cup, he continues. “I’m able to bring together lots of academic work, make it more accessible, hopefully without simplifying too much, and then add a gloss of observation or theory on top.” The gloss of theory in The Social Animal is really an old idea about human nature: that of the Scottish Enlightenment, which emphasized the impact of sentiments and passions. Put another way, David Hume, Edmund Burke, and Adam Smith are the big winners of the cognitive revolution. Descartes and his faith in pure reason is the big loser. “This fundamentally changes the social-science model of humanity,” Brooks says. “The idea that man is a rational actor is 80 percent wrong.”
The intellectual roots of The Social Animal can be traced back to Brooks’s time as a cub reporter in the Cabrini-Green housing projects in Chicago in the early 1980s. Struck by the inefficacy of poverty-reduction programs, he came to believe that the problem was primarily cultural, especially the dissolution of family structures. As Brooks writes in the book, “You can pump money into poor areas, but without cultures that foster self-control, you won’t get social mobility.” His skepticism deepened in the early 90s while reporting on the post-Soviet Russian economy. Western economists arrived armed with intricate ideas about how to spur investment and entrepreneurship. But none of the privatization schemes worked, Brooks believes, because after 70 years of Soviet rule there was no foundation of social trust on which to build a successful market economy.
Those experiences helped cement Brooks’s conservative disposition—he describes it as epistemological modesty—but it wasn’t until 2003 that he began to seriously explore the science underpinning his worldview. Reporting a column on high-school dropouts, he stumbled on the work of James J. Heckman, a Nobel laureate and economist at the University of Chicago who specializes in early-childhood development. “I sensed the hotness of this area,” Brooks says. He quickly branched out, seizing in particular on the work of three psychologists at the University of Virginia—Jonathan D. Haidt, Eric Turkheimer, Timothy D. Wilson—whose names soon began appearing in Brooks’s columns.
A few years ago, Hazel Rose Markus delivered the keynote address at the annual conference of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. She lamented how the field’s greatest insights remained locked within the pages of journals and textbooks. Asked about Brooks’s impact, the Stanford University psychologist calls him a “brilliant social theorist” who has been able to convey the importance of social psychology to the general public. Haidt is even more effusive. “I love Brooks,” he tells me. “We do work that we think is of great importance to the public and public policy, yet, unlike economists, we’ve had little access to politicians and policy makers.” Brooks, along with Malcolm Gladwell, has begun to change that. And Brooks, moreover, is good for business. Whenever he mentions Haidt’s work, his Amazon ranking shoots up. “Being cited by Brooks is like getting on Oprah for social scientists.”
Brooks always thought he’d become a college professor. He graduated in 1983 from the University of Chicago—"a Baptist school where Jewish professors teach atheist students St. Thomas Aquinas.” It was, he says, “the height of jargon.” He remembers attending a conference sponsored by Critical Inquiry. The academic superstars of the day were present: Wayne C. Booth, Edward W. Said, Ronald Dworkin. “I sat there for 22 hours, and I didn’t understand a word,” Brooks says. He ditched academe for journalism, but he has been back as a visiting professor at Duke and Yale.
He finds the atmosphere on campuses today more professional and less politically fraught. “The extreme ideological movements—deconstructionism and multiculturalism—have died off some,” he says. His face breaks into a toothy grin. “The largest schism on elite campuses now seems to be between those who go into investment banking and those who do Teach for America.”
I ask how the cognitive revolution might transform the academy. “Universities are structured in insane ways,” Brooks says, pointing to how neuroscience has already spread into almost every discipline. “I constantly meet people who tell me that they now realize that they need to learn about the brain to fully understand their own fields.” He predicts an erosion of disciplinary boundaries and the greater unification of knowledge. “These ideas will have a huge effect,” Brooks says. “We’re only at the beginning.”
