1、Also by David BrooksON PARADISE DRIVE:HOW WE LIVE NOW (AND ALWAYS HAVE)IN THE FUTURE TENSEBOBOS IN PARADISE:THE NEW UPPER CLASS ANDHOW THEY GOT THERECopyright 2011 by David BrooksAll rights reserved.Published in the United States by Random House,an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group,a divi
2、sion of Random House, Inc., New York.RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATABrooks, DavidThe social animal: the hidden sources of love, character, and achievement / David Brooks.p. cm.eISBN: 978-0-679-60393-11. Man-w
3、oman relationshipsUnited States. 2. Social mobilityUnited States. 3. Social statusUnitedStates. 4. Elite (Social sciences)United States. 5. Character. I. Title.HQ801.B76 2011 305.5130973dc22 v3.1ContentsCoverOther Books by This AuthorTitle PageCopyrightINTRODUCTIONCHAPTER 1 DECISION MAKINGCHAPTER 2
4、THE MAP MELDCHAPTER 3 MINDSIGHTCHAPTER 4 MAPMAKINGCHAPTER 5 ATTACHMENTCHAPTER 6 LEARNINGCHAPTER 7 NORMSCHAPTER 8 SELF-CONTROLCHAPTER 9 CULTURECHAPTER 10 INTELLIGENCECHAPTER 11 CHOICE ARCHITECTURECHAPTER 12 FREEDOM AND COMMITMENTCHAPTER 13 LIMERENCECHAPTER 14 THE GRAND NARRATIVECHAPTER 15 MTISCHAPTER
5、 16 THE INSURGENCYCHAPTER 17 GETTING OLDERCHAPTER 18 MORALITYCHAPTER 19 THE LEADERCHAPTER 20 THE SOFT SIDECHAPTER 21 THE OTHER EDUCATIONCHAPTER 22 MEANINGACKNOWLEDGMENTSNOTESAbout the AuthorINTRODUCTIONTHIS IS THE HAPPIEST STORY YOUVE EVER READ. ITS ABOUT two people who led wonderfully fulfillingliv
6、es. They had engrossing careers, earned the respect of their friends, and madeimportant contributions to their neighborhood, their country, and their world.And the odd thing was, they werent born geniuses. They did okay on the SAT and IQtests and that sort of thing, but they had no extraordinary phy
7、sical or mental gifts. Theywere fine-looking, but they werent beautiful. They played tennis and hiked, but even inhigh school they werent star athletes, and nobody would have picked them out at thatyoung age and said they were destined for greatness in any sphere. Yet they achievedthis success, and
8、everyone who met them sensed that they lived blessed lives.How did they do it? They possessed what economists call noncognitive skills, which isthe catchall category for hidden qualities that cant be easily counted or measured, butwhich in real life lead to happiness and fulfillment.First, they had
9、good character. They were energetic, honest, and dependable. Theywere persistent after setbacks and acknowledged their mistakes. They possessedenough confidence to take risks and enough integrity to live up to their commitments.They tried to recognize their weaknesses, atone for their sins, and cont
10、rol their worstimpulses.Just as important, they had street smarts. They knew how to read people, situations,and ideas. You could put them in front of a crowd, or bury them with a bunch of reports,and they could develop an intuitive feel for the landscape before themwhat could gotogether and what wou
11、ld never go together, what course would be fruitful and whatwould never be fruitful. The skills a master seaman has to navigate the oceans, theyhad to navigate the world.Over the centuries, zillions of books have been written about how to succeed. But thesetales are usually told on the surface level
12、 of life. They describe the colleges people getinto, the professional skills they acquire, the conscious decisions they make, and thetips and techniques they adopt to build connections and get ahead. These books oftenfocus on an outer definition of success, having to do with IQ, wealth, prestige, an
13、dworldly accomplishments.This story is told one level down. This success story emphasizes the role of the innermindthe unconscious realm of emotions, intuitions, biases, longings, geneticpredispositions, character traits, and social norms. This is the realm where character isformed and street smarts
14、 grow.We are living in the middle of a revolution in consciousness. Over the past few years,geneticists, neuroscientists, psychologists, sociologists, economists, anthropologists,and others have made great strides in understanding the building blocks of humanflourishing. And a core finding of their
15、work is that we are not primarily the products ofour conscious thinking. We are primarily the products of thinking that happens below thelevel of awareness.The unconscious parts of the mind are not primitive vestiges that need to be conqueredin order to make wise decisions. They are not dark caverns
16、 of repressed sexual urges.Instead, the unconscious parts of the mind are most of the mindwhere most of thedecisions and many of the most impressive acts of thinking take place. Thesesubmerged processes are the seedbeds of accomplishment.In his book, Strangers to Ourselves, Timothy D. Wilson of the
17、University of Virginiawrites that the human mind can take in 11 million pieces of information at any givenmoment. The most generous estimate is that people can be consciously aware of fortyof these. “Some researchers,” Wilson notes, “have gone so far as to suggest that theunconscious mind does virtu
18、ally all the work and that conscious will may be an illusion.”The conscious mind merely confabulates stories that try to make sense of what theunconscious mind is doing of its own accord.Wilson and most of the researchers Ill be talking about in this book do not go so far. Butthey do believe that me
19、ntal processes that are inaccessible to consciousness organizeour thinking, shape our judgments, form our characters, and provide us with the skillswe need in order to thrive. John Bargh of Yale argues that just as Galileo “removed theearth from its privileged position at the center of the universe,
20、” so this intellectualrevolution removes the conscious mind from its privileged place at the center of humanbehavior. This story removes it from the center of everyday life. It points to a deeperway of flourishing and a different definition of success.The Empire of EmotionThis inner realm is illumin
21、ated by science, but it is not a dry, mechanistic place. It is anemotional and an enchanted place. If the study of the conscious mind highlights theimportance of reason and analysis, study of the unconscious mind highlights theimportance of passions and perception. If the outer mind highlights the p
22、ower of theindividual, the inner mind highlights the power of relationships and the invisible bondsbetween people. If the outer mind hungers for status, money, and applause, the innermind hungers for harmony and connectionthose moments when self-consciousnessfades away and a person is lost in a chal
23、lenge, a cause, the love of another or the loveof God.If the conscious mind is like a general atop a platform, who sees the world from adistance and analyzes things linearly and linguistically, the unconscious mind is like amillion little scouts. The scouts careen across the landscape, sending back
24、a constantflow of signals and generating instant responses. They maintain no distance from theenvironment around them, but are immersed in it. They scurry about, interpenetratingother minds, landscapes, and ideas.These scouts coat things with emotional significance. They come across an old friendand
25、 send back a surge of affection. They descend into a dark cave and send back asurge of fear. Contact with a beautiful landscape produces a feeling of sublimeelevation. Contact with a brilliant insight produces delight, while contact with unfairnessproduces righteous anger. Each perception has its ow
26、n flavor, texture, and force, andreactions loop around the mind in a stream of sensations, impulses, judgments, anddesires.These signals dont control our lives, but they shape our interpretation of the world andthey guide us, like a spiritual GPS, as we chart our courses. If the general thinks in da
27、taand speaks in prose, the scouts crystallize with emotion, and their work is bestexpressed in stories, poetry, music, image, prayer, and myth.I am not a touchy-feely person, as my wife has been known to observe. There is agreat, though apocryphal, tale about an experiment in which middle-aged men w
28、erehooked up to a brain-scanning device and asked to watch a horror movie. Then theywere hooked up and asked to describe their feelings for their wives. The brain scanswere the samesheer terror during both activities. I know how that feels. Nonetheless,if you ignore the surges of love and fear, loya
29、lty and revulsion that course through usevery second of every day, you are ignoring the most essential realm. You are ignoringthe processes that determine what we want; how we perceive the world; what drives usforward; and what holds us back. And so I am going to tell you about these two happypeople
30、 from the perspective of this enchanted inner life.My GoalsI want to show you what this unconscious system looks like when it is flourishing, whenthe affections and aversions that guide us every day have been properly nurtured, theemotions properly educated. Through a thousand concrete examples, I a
31、m going to tryto illustrate how the conscious and unconscious minds interact, how a wise general cantrain and listen to the scouts. To paraphrase Daniel Patrick Moynihan from anothercontext, the central evolutionary truth is that the unconscious matters most. The centralhumanistic truth is that the
32、conscious mind can influence the unconscious.Im writing this story, first, because while researchers in a wide variety of fields haveshone their flashlights into different parts of the cave of the unconscious, illuminatingdifferent corners and openings, much of their work is done in academic silos.
33、Im goingto try to synthesize their findings into one narrative.Second, Im going to try to describe how this research influences the way weunderstand human nature. Brain research rarely creates new philosophies, but it doesvindicate some old ones. The research being done today reminds us of the relat
34、iveimportance of emotion over pure reason, social connections over individual choice,character over IQ, emergent, organic systems over linear, mechanistic ones, and theidea that we have multiple selves over the idea that we have a single self. If you want toput the philosophic implications in simple
35、 terms, the French Enlightenment, whichemphasized reason, loses; the British Enlightenment, which emphasized sentiments,wins.Third, Im going to try to draw out the social, political, and moral implications of thesefindings. When Freud came up with his conception of the unconscious, it had a radicali
36、nfluence on literary criticism, social thinking, and even political analysis. We now havea more accurate conception of the unconscious. But these findings havent yet had abroad impact on social thought.Finally, Im going to try to help counteract a bias in our culture. The conscious mindwrites the au
37、tobiography of our species. Unaware of what is going on deep down inside,the conscious mind assigns itself the starring role. It gives itself credit for performing allsorts of tasks it doesnt really control. It creates views of the world that highlight thoseelements it can understand and ignores the
38、 rest.As a result, we have become accustomed to a certain constricted way of describing ourlives. Plato believed that reason was the civilized part of the brain, and we would behappy so long as reason subdued the primitive passions. Rationalist thinkers believedthat logic was the acme of intelligenc
39、e, and mankind was liberated as reason conqueredhabit and superstition. In the nineteenth century, the conscious mind was representedby the scientific Dr. Jekyll while the unconscious was the barbaric Mr. Hyde.Many of these doctrines have faded, but people are still blind to the way unconsciousaffec
40、tions and aversions shape daily life. We still have admissions committees thatjudge people by IQ measures and not by practical literacy. We still have academic fieldsthat often treat human beings as rational utility-maximizing individuals. Modern societyhas created a giant apparatus for the cultivat
41、ion of the hard skills, while failing todevelop the moral and emotional faculties down below. Children are coached on how tojump through a thousand scholastic hoops. Yet by far the most important decisions theywill make are about whom to marry and whom to befriend, what to love and what todespise, a
42、nd how to control impulses. On these matters, they are almost entirely ontheir own. We are good at talking about material incentives, but bad about talking aboutemotions and intuitions. We are good at teaching technical skills, but when it comes tothe most important things, like character, we have a
43、lmost nothing to say.My Other PurposeThe new research gives us a fuller picture of who we are. But I confess I got pulled intothis subject in hopes of answering more limited and practical questions. In my day job Iwrite about policy and politics. And over the past generations we have seen big polici
44、esyield disappointing results. Since 1983 weve reformed the education system again andagain, yet more than a quarter of high-school students drop out, even though all rationalincentives tell them not to. Weve tried to close the gap between white and blackachievement, but have failed. Weve spent a ge
45、neration enrolling more young people incollege without understanding why so many dont graduate.One could go on: Weve tried feebly to reduce widening inequality. Weve tried to boosteconomic mobility. Weve tried to stem the tide of children raised in single-parenthomes. Weve tried to reduce the polari
46、zation that marks our politics. Weve tried toameliorate the boom-and-bust cycle of our economies. In recent decades, the world hastried to export capitalism to Russia, plant democracy in the Middle East, and boostdevelopment in Africa. And the results of these efforts are mostly disappointing.The fa
47、ilures have been marked by a single feature: Reliance on an overly simplisticview of human nature. Many of these policies were based on the shallow social-sciencemodel of human behavior. Many of the policies were proposed by wonks who arecomfortable only with traits and correlations that can be meas
48、ured and quantified. Theywere passed through legislative committees that are as capable of speaking about thedeep wellsprings of human action as they are of speaking in ancient Aramaic. Theywere executed by officials that have only the most superficial grasp of what isimmovable and bent about human
49、beings. So of course they failed. And they willcontinue to fail unless the new knowledge about our true makeup is integrated morefully into the world of public policy, unless the enchanted story is told along with theprosaic one.The PlanTo illustrate how unconscious abilities really work and how, under the rightcircumstances, they lead to human flourishing, Im going to walk, stylistically, in thefootsteps of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In 1760 Rousseau completed a book calledEmile, which was about how human beings could be educate
