Common Grace and Amazing Grace: A Review of David Brooks's 'The Social Animal'
Brooks's portrait of human flourishing lacks the essential elements of rescue and redemption.
Review by Andy Crouch | posted 7/11/2011 09:57AM
The center of moral authority is shifting in Western culture. In the 20th century it shifted from clergy to psychiatrists, from Jonathan Edwards's followers to Freud's. Now the ground is shifting again, to neuroscientists, cognitive psychologists, and behavioral economists: the high priests of the brain. Try browsing any major news site without encountering a story about how our brains are primed for insider trading, serial monogamy, or Chipotle burritos.
These stories reflect real and remarkable progress. We understand more of the brain's biochemistry, the neurotransmitters and synapses that make it the most complex system known in the universe. Researchers have designed ever more clever experiments that tease out the complexities of human behavior. (Did you know that men who have just walked across a rickety bridge find a young woman more attractive than do men who have just been sitting on a bench?) The results have reaffirmed what the wise have always known: We know very little about ourselves—the habits and hunches that shape our choices before we know we are choosing. But can neuroscience offer insight into not just the way we are, but the way we ought to be?
To judge by The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement (Random House), David Brooks thinks so. Like Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There and Brooks's other forays into what he calls "comic sociology," this book is funny, frequently wise, and almost always spot on in its set pieces on the ways of cosmopolitan elites. But none of his past books were so packed with illuminating summaries of otherwise obscure and technical scientific findings, and none addressed so explicitly science's implications for "human flourishing"—a wonderful and resonant phrase that deserves wider attention.
Brooks believes earlier modernistic understandings of the good life have proven inadequate. For one thing, the "rational animal" of the Enlightenment is far less rational than it supposes. Emotion, peer pressure, past experience, stereotypes, and a thousand other hidden factors influence our reasoning. But in Brooks's telling, this is no great loss, because the good human life is less about thinking than relating. Our rationality comes and goes, but from conception to death we are social animals, thriving only when shaped by others: "Your unconscious wants to entangle you in the thick web of relations that are the essence of human flourishing."
And emotion, far from distorting reason, is actually a resource for reasoning, because emotion turns out to be an extraordinarily effective way to integrate and respond to complexity. "The human mind can be pragmatic," Brooks writes, "because deep down it is romantic." Without the guidance of our gut, we would be hopelessly overwhelmed with information.
A flourishing human being, then, is a relationally skilled, emotionally mature creature. This is a refreshingly holistic picture of the good life with which no Christian would disagree. We believe the very foundations of the cosmos are relational, that the world is the free outpouring of a triune God whose very being is love. It's no surprise that image bearers of a relational God would be hardwired for deep connections, right down to the "mirror neurons" that allow us to experience viscerally and directly what we see others experiencing. Nor should any Christian refuse the chastening discovery that we are mysteries to ourselves, susceptible to a range of unlovely subconscious motivations, and incapable—without discipline—of living virtuously and well.
July 2011, Vol. 55, No. 7, Page 69
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