What would it be like, I can only wonder, to be eighteen or twenty-one today (instead of sixty-three), and to have just read “Social Animal,” David Brooks’s little fable in this week’s New Yorker. Even harder to grasp is what it is going to be like for my grandson, who is going to grow up in the aftermath of the cognitive revolution that forms the backbone of Brooks’s tale.

A core finding of this work is that we are not primarily the products of our conscious thinking. The conscious mind gives us one way of making sense of our environment. But the unconscious mind gives us other, more supple ways. The cognitive revolution of the past thirty years provides a different perspective on our lives, one that emphasizes the relative importance of emotion over reason, of social connections over individual choice, moral intuition over abstract logic, perceptiveness over I.Q. It allows us to tell a different sort of success story, an inner story to go along with the conventional surface one.

I’m wholly on board with this new story; I’ve spent the past ten or fifteen years coming to understand it — and experience that has oddly reminded me of Plato’s theory of knowledge. Plato thought that learning was actually a form of remembering (he believed in reincarnation), and the new story that Brooks outlines seems more familiar to me with every time I learn a new detail. I say “oddly,” though, because the new story reduces Plato’s intellectual accomplishment to rubble. What a waste of time it was, laboring under the notion that “man is a rational animal.” The notion, rather, that man’s “rationality” is what’s important and distinctive about him. How typical of the old story to talk of “man” in the singular, and to compare him to other creatures. The new story compares people, asking, earnestly, “Who’s happy?”

Plato’s ideas about human nature may range from the mistaken to the bizarre (they are certainly misanthropic), but it is in his methods that the seeds of his undoing lie. It is not hard to imagine the appeal of his teaching, at least in ancient times. Irrationality is frightening and painful, as anyone in the throes of unrequited love can attest. And it is thanks to the tradition of systematic clear thinking that Plato began that today’s researchers are able to study the unconscious: the cognitive revolution is nothing but the deployment of what we call “science” to the study of its place of origin, the human mind.

Off all the things that the cognitive revolution is bound to change, education comes in at the top of the list, or very near it.

Scientists used to think that we understand each other by observing each other and building hypotheses from the accumulated data. Now it seems more likely that we are, essentially, method actors who understand others by simulating the responses we see in them.

It doesn’t sound very interesting to say that man is a social animal (one of many), but it’s going to be the cardinal virtue to bear that in mind. We’re going to be more vitally conscious that happiness is mediated by society — by civilization, itself — and that it is for most post people wholly unobtainable in solitude. (Even in solitude, men and women keep company with the society of ideas that they’ve acquired at other times.) The model of education that is centered on a periodic examination of individual skills will be seen to be as intrinsically useless as most people instinctively think that it is. What fun it will be, at last, to go to school!

 

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 12th, 2011 at 3:00 pm.