Science has finally figured out human nature! And omg, what a piece of work are we! Read all about the wonder that is us in a New Yorker article by the New York Times’s self-styled Burkean David Brooks. He’s taken the Malcolm Gladwell approach to “the new sciences of human nature”–you know, first telling you how the conventional wisdom (i.e., what you think, even if you didn’t know it) is wrong, and then setting you straight by leaping happily across the scientific pond, landing on the choicest lily pads and describing them as if each was a country and all taken together were a continent rather than an assemblage of tiny duchies presided over by whatever frog croaks the loudest (and the loudest one here, although Brooks doesn’t name him, is Marty “Professor Torture” Seligman). At least Gladwell has the decency to limit his use of this method–which he has mastered as surely as Lay’s has figured out how to make potato chips–only to relatively insubstantial matters. But Brooks has gone whole hog, or maybe it’s whole frog, and evidently he has an entire book coming out to tell us who we really are.
Like I said, the news is good. It turns out that Freud was right about one thing, the happy thing–that “we are not primarily the products of our conscious thinking,” as Brooks puts it, which means that we are truly deep people–but not about the other thing, the unhappy thing: that the unconscious is a teeming chaotic font of bedevilment, that it is by its nature unknowable and that it can only be studied by a science of interpretation, like a text. In fact, say Brooks’s scientists, the unconscious, seat of emotion and intuition and perception is “supple” and smart, and “allows us to tell a different sort of success story” from the one that we, at least those of us who are successful (like, say, a New York Times columnist) tell about our lives.
The unconscious, pace Freud (and amazingly Brooks writes something like 5000 words about the unconscious as if it had been discovered in “the cognitive revolution of the past thirty years) is not the adversary within, not the Other, but the hitherto unexplored source of our success. Brooks gives us an exemplar, Harold, a marathon-biking metrosexual who flies in private jets from corporate board meetings to Council on Foreign Relations events–a leading member, Brooks says, of the Composure Class. He has his shit together, does Harold, and right now he’s in Jackson Hole or Aspen or Vail, pausing over whether to get the cloudberry or the ginger pomegranate gelato, and Brooks freezes that moment of indecision to tell us how Harold got to this point in his life.
Which is where the scientists come in. “Brain science helps fill the hole left by the atrophy of theology and philosophy,” he writes, and it tells us that Harold arrived on that lofty mountaintop because of all sorts of fortuitous occurrences in, and to, his unconscious. His mom nurtured him, which helped him maximize the number of synaptic connections he made as a child. In his fantasy life, no doubt encouraged by that same mom, he made unlikely connections, for instance, imagining himself to be a tiger, which made him not unlike “Picasso [who] could combine the concept of ‘Western portraiture’ with the concept ofr ‘African Masks.'” Harold thus developed the idea–deluded but necessary to success–that he has mastery over his life. He had teachers who modeled “the mental virtues that lead to practical wisdom” and inculcated them with love.” He learned that happiness is much more “It’s a Wonderful Life” than “On the Road,” more about looking back to the established truths than forging ahead into the unknown, and that what “the inner mind really wants is connection.” He makes that connection with a woman whom he marries after meeting her in front of Barnes & Noble, a decision that his Perfectly Cultivated Unconscious made in “the first tenth of a second.” His PCUC also allowed him, when it turned out that he and his bride differed over how to use the dishwasher, to negotiate his way back to happiness. Through it all he maintained his composure, whcih is to say he displayed the resilience that Seligman and the other positive psychologists say constitutes the good life. And all of this happened for reasons, reasons that scientists have come to understand as the laws of human nature.
But Harold had no idea of these laws. He hadn’t done it on purpose. He had simply stumbled on happiness, and he might have stumbled onto somethign else, as many people with Harold’s basic pedigree do. But then one day he heard a neuroscientist give a talk in Aspen and heard that we swim in a “great river of knowledge” and that “flourishing consists of putting yourself in situations in which you lose self-consciousness and become fused with other people, experiences or tasks.” Whereupon it dawned on him that “the things that didn’t lead to happiness and flourishing had been emphasized at the expense of the things that did. The gifts he was most grateful for had been pased along to him by teachers and parents inadverently whereas his official education was mostly forgotten or useless.” He had no idea how lucky he’d been, how much his culture worked against the possibility that he would have turned out this way, and concluded that “It might be time for a revolution in his own consciousness–time to take the proto-conversations that had been shoved to the periphery of life and put them back in the center. Maybe it was time to use this science to cultivate an entirely different viewpoint.”
Which is no doubt what we can look forward to in Brooks’s book–a long panegyric, part half-assed social history, part full-assed self-help, to the new science of the mind and brain, and how it can help us make our unconscious conscious. Not of course for the purposes Freud had in mind when he came up with that idea–to clue us in to just how unreliable, how self-deluding, how downright dangerous we can be–but rather so that we can tap our unconscious and become intentionally what Harold became by accident: a flourishing human being who knows what he wants (cloudberry, it turns out) and how to get it. In case you’re worried that this might make him a narcissistic asshole for whom the choice of gelato and the choice of lifemate and the choice of political party are all equivalent kinds of choices, don’t worry: he’s learned how to make choices through love and connection, and his fine intersubjective skills will prevent that unhappy outcome because he will flowing in the great river of all minds, now and forever.
Just one question, though, David, at least for now: this fusion-of-unconsciousnesses thing–isn’t it just a little scary? I mean, have you ever seen Triumph of the Will?
