TOM PUTNAM: Good afternoon. I'm Tom Putnam, Director of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. On behalf of Tom McNaught, Executive Director of the Kennedy Library Foundation, and all of my Library and Foundation colleagues, I thank you for joining us today.
Let me begin by acknowledging the generous underwriters of the Kennedy Library Forums, including lead sponsor Bank of America, Boston Capital, the Lowell Institute, Raytheon, the Boston Foundation, and our media partners, The Boston Globe, WBUR and NECN.
It's fitting to gather at the Kennedy Library on St. Patrick's Day. We're well aware that there are other alluring ways in which to celebrate this holiday, and we're pleased that so many of you have come to drink from the fountain of David Brooks's insights, wisdom and knowledge. [Applause]
I confess to three rituals in my life. The first is my daily reading over lunch of The New York Times, made all the more thought-provoking on the days of David Brooks's column. The second is timing my Friday evening commute to catch him and E.J. Dionne discussing this week's news on NPR on my car radio, hoping that when I arrive home my teenaged son will not have made plans that involve me driving him about town during Jim Lehrer's weekly political roundup with Mark Shields and David Brooks.
In its recent review of his new book, The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character and Achievement, the Boston Globe reviewer described Mr. Brooks as "the amiable conservative columnist for The New York Times." [Laughter] Those happen to be our favorite kind of conservatives here at the Kennedy Library. [Laughter/applause] And while I may not always agree with David Brooks's stance on issues, I know I'm a better person and a more informed citizen for considering his views.
The last time he spoke here was in September 2000, just hours before the famous Presidential debate sponsored by the Kennedy Library and UMass Boston, the first between Al Gore and
George W. Bush. Who knows what might have happened had there been fewer sighs that evening, or more chads hanging in a different direction two months later. But all of us have been fortunate to have David Brooks as our guide during the political roller coaster that has defined this past decade.
For example, just this week he wrote a fascinating column entitled, "The Ike Phase," suggesting that in the first two years of his Presidency, Barack Obama caught the spirit of JFK's celebrated political courage and seize-the-moment style. Now, after what the President himself called his midterm shellacking, Barack Obama appears to be emulating Dwight Eisenhower's characteristic prudence and sense of balance. Hence, the column's title, "The Ike Phase."
Though he does not delve into this in that op-ed, if Joe Biden begins channeling Richard Nixon, we'll know this phase has gone a bit too far. [Laughter]
Mr. Brooks will speak to us this afternoon about his new book, and then bravely take your questions without the tempering presence of a moderator. So I ask you now that when the time comes, please ask questions and be concise with your observations.
At 6:30, we'll then have a book signing in the lobby outside this hall. And the book, of course, is on sale in our store. And nothing could say Happy St. Patrick's Day to friends and loved ones better than just such a gift. [Laughter]
"We're not rational animals or laboring animals," David Brooks writes at the heart of his new book, "we're social animals. We emerge out of relationships and live to bond with one another and connect to large ideas." And let me add, no more so than when we are in the presence of, or reading, or listening to the words and wisdom of David Brooks.
Please join me now and welcome him back to the Kennedy Library. [Applause]
DAVID BROOKS: Thank you. It's a great pleasure to be here on St. Patrick's Day. I myself got drunk; I don't know if you did. [Laughter] No, I'm not even wearing green, but I am going to do a little Riverdance sort of thing over here. [Laughter]
It's a pleasure to be here. I have a firm rule in punditry. I have two regular liberal counterparts,
E.J. Dionne and Mark Shields. So I'm willing to do television and radio so long as they're with liberals from Boston. [Laughter] And so long as they're Catholic, I make that clear. I was going to say Irish Catholic, but E.J. is actually Quebecois. Though I do recall watching C-SPAN one time during the Clinton years and E.J. was invited to the Italian state dinner, and President Clinton introduced him to the Italian prime minister as one of our leading Italian American citizens. [Laughter] He does have a vowel at the end of his name. [Laughter]
And then, the Fridays I do with Mark is really one of the highlights of my life. Mark has been doing it for a little while. Now it's called Shields and Brooks. We wanted to call it Brooks Shields. [Laughter] We'd get a little better rating. But they didn't go for that. And then before that, if you recall, it was Shields and Gigot. And before that it was Shields and Gergen. Then before that it was Shields and Coolidge, I think. [Laughter] I think it started as Shields and St. Thomas Aquinas; I think it started early on.
But it's just great to be with Mark, a Red Sox fan though he is, and I'm a Mets fan. But I don't know, he's just a wonderful guy. And his line– as you probably know, he was a consultant before he became a political commentator, and he worked for Ed Muskie. And he says he was the one who told Muskie to show a little emotion. [Laughter] Good strategy.
So I was given a good piece of advice in my first week on my current job, which was to interview three politicians every day. And I don't always fill that quota, but I try hard. I spend a lot of time around politicians. And I've learned from this contact that they're all emotional freaks of one sort or another. They have what I call logorrhea dementia, which is they talk so much they drive themselves insane. [Laughter] And when they stand next to you, they will invade your personal space, they'll rub your face, they'll rub the back of your head. I joked, several years ago
I had dinner with a Republican Senator who had his hand on my thigh throughout the dinner squeezing it for emphasis. [Laughter]
And so, these are sort of the intense social skills that they have. Actually, since I'm here, I should mention that the greatest Senator I ever covered was Ted Kennedy, just the most accomplished Senator that I ever covered. But I recall years ago, I was up in the Senate Press Gallery, and he greeted Dan Quayle at the well of the Senate. And they were friends. And I was up above. And they gave each other a big hug, and they stayed hugging, and they were laughing, and their faces were like this far apart, and their arms were rubbing up and down each other's backs, and they were sort of moving together. [Laughter] I was like, get a room, I don't want to see this! [Laughter]
But they had those political skills and social skills. Bill Clinton had them, famously; a little out of control sometimes. [Laughter] Actually, the story I tell about Clinton is – this is name dropping, but I call it reporting [laughter] – I was here in Boston, actually. I was in a lobby of a hotel downtown, and I'm walking through the lobby, and Clinton gets out of the elevator and he sees me and he starts praising me for a column that I had written praising him [laughter], which he thought was particularly astute.
But as people see Bill Clinton's in the lobby of the hotel, they start backing up– or, excuse me, they start gathering around so they can all hear him. He starts backing up. And so within a few minutes he's like 80 feet away from me, just talking to me, but just so the whole crowd can sort of be part of him. [Laughter]
Another great son of Massachusetts, an example of social skills. I was covering Mitt Romney in New Hampshire at the last election cycle, and he was campaigning that day with his five perfect sons – Bip, Chip, Rip, Sip and Lip. [Laughter] And he goes into a diner and he goes up to each family at each table of the diner and introduces himself and asks what village in New Hampshire they're from. And then he describes the home he owns in their village. [Laughter] And he's going around, sort of going around the room.
But then as we're leaving, he waves at everybody and he first-names almost everybody in the diner he's just met. I thought, wow, that's impressive.
And so these are incredible social skills. But the odd thing, as I've covered politics and government, is that these most socially attuned creatures, when they get to policymaking, a lot of that social awareness vanishes. And they adopt almost a dehumanized style of politics.
And so, I've covered a whole series of social failures or policy failures, starting with the fall of the Soviet Union. After that, we sent in these teams of economists, really oblivious to the lack of social trust, which was the real problem in Russia and caused a lot of the thievery we saw after.
In Iraq, we sent in the military but were oblivious to the psychological and cultural realities in Iraq.
We had a financial regulatory regime, all based on the supposition that bankers are rational, self- interested creatures who wouldn't do anything stupid en masse. That turned out not to be true.
And most dear to my heart, I've spent 30 years really covering education reform. And most of those reforms have been disappointing, or produced disappointing results because they've been a bureaucratic reshuffling of the boxes – big schools, little schools, charters, vouchers. And all these reforms have skirted the core issue, which is the relationship between a teacher and a student. [Applause]
People learn from people they love. But if you mentioned the word love at most Congressional hearings, they'd look at you like you're Oprah. It's just not accepted language.
And so, I became interested in this question, why are the most socially attuned people on earth often dehumanized when they think about policy. And so, upon reflection I decided that it's part of a broader cultural problem that we've inherited for hundreds of years, this emphasis on ourselves as divided creatures. We have reason over here, we have emotion over here, and we progress as reason conquers the passions.
And so, this has led to a view of human nature that we're primarily, at our best, rational individuals who respond in straightforward ways to incentives. It's led to the ways of many academic disciplines, where they study human behavior using the methodologies of physics, emphasizing the things they can count and measure and model, and sort of amputating all the rest.
And so, this amputation, I think, has led to a lot of political problems. There are a lot of biases in our culture. It means we're really good at talking about material things, but kind of bad at talking about emotions. It means when we raise our kids, we're good at emphasizing grades and safety and skills, but when it comes to things like character, we often have nothing to say.
And so, if you travel around the country, looking at the way kids are raised, for example, which is a great emblem of a culture, you see certain prevailing winds, people trapped in certain ways of living. And so, when we raise our kids, especially in middle and upper middle class families, there is just tremendous emphasis on one skill after another, this highly pressured life that many of us ridicule, but few can afford to renounce.
And so, if you go to a suburban elementary school as the 3rd-graders are coming out, they've got these 80-pound backpacks on their backs. When the wind blows them, they're like beetles, sort of stuck there on the ground, they can't get up. [Laughter] They get picked up, in certain more affluent towns by– there's a series of luxury cars lined up in front of the elementary schools to pick them up, usually Saabs and Audis and Volvos because in certain towns, like Brookline maybe, it's socially acceptable to have a luxury car, so long as it comes from a country hostile to US foreign policy. [Laughter] That's okay.
And then, in one of my books, I describe the creatures who come to pick up the kids, who I call uber-Moms, who are highly successful career women who have taken time off to make sure all their kids can get into Harvard. And you can usually tell the uber-Moms because they actually weigh less than their own children. [Laughter]
During conception, they're doing little butt exercises to stay fit and trim. During pregnancy, they're taking so many soy-based nutritional formulas that when the babies come out, they're these 13-pound monsters, like sort of toothless defensive linemen. [Laughter] And the uber- Moms are cutting the umbilical cord themselves, flashing little Mandarin flashcards at the things to get them ready for the experiments, Harvard admissions.
And so, then they go off to a life of SAT prep, oboe practice, constant driving around. They master obscure sports; upper middle class kids realized they couldn't compete in basketball and football, so they sort of stole lacrosse from the Indians to give them something to dominate. [Laughter]
So this is the sort of highly pressurized childhood that produced the Tiger Mom at the extreme.
And then the other thing you notice in our culture is that we have a sense of, we should care about morality and moral intuitions and moral senses, but are very inarticulate about it. The great philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre said we have the words of morality, words like honor and courage, vice, virtue, but we don't have an underlying system to organize these words.
And so, often, as I've been covering American society, when people start trying to express themselves morally, it often ends up as shopping. And so, people go off to Ben & Jerry's ice cream because it's the ice cream company with its own foreign policy. It makes them feel they're contributing something to society. [Laughter] I joke in one of my books that Ben & Jerry's should make a pacifist toothpaste – it doesn't kill germs, it just asks them to leave. [Laughter] It would be a big seller.
Or else sort of organic, locally grown grocery stores, the Whole Foods, Trader Joe's, the places where all the cashiers look like they're on loan from Amnesty International. [Laughter] What we get in there is the seaweed-based snacks. In my household we buy Veggie Booty with kale, which is for kids who come home and say, "Mom, Mom, I want a snack that will help prevent colon-rectal cancer!" [Laughter]
And so, this is sort of the prevailing breeze in our culture. And it's probably not the deepest life many of us would like to live. And as I say, I think it leads to some shortcomings, some shortcomings in understanding human nature, which get more serious in the policy front.
So I've been sort of frustrated with this amputation of the deepest realms of who we are and the ability to really talk about the things that matter the most. And in the midst of this frustration, I've stumbled across– really by starting to try to write about high school dropout rates, why so many kids drop out of high school and why we find it so difficult to do something about that problem– I stumbled into this world which was providing the answers to some of the answers to these deeper problems of who we really are.
And the odd thing is, the world that provided me with the answers was not the world of theology and philosophy, but it was the people who were studying the human mind. Over the last 30 years, we've just made tremendous strides, really exciting strides in studying who we are in fields like neuroscience, cognitive science, psychology, sociology, behavioral economics.
And when you synthesize their work, even though they speak in the language of science, what's been interesting to me is they don't produce a cold, mechanistic view of human nature. They produce a much more enchanted view of human nature, and remind us of some old philosophies that emphasized humanism and enchantment and emotion. And when you synthesize the work across all these many different spheres, you sort of congregate around a couple key insights that recur again and again.
The first insight is that while the conscious mind writes the autobiography of our species, most of our thinking is unconscious. And so, one way to think of this is the human mind can take in about 12 million pieces of information a minute, of which it can be consciously aware of 40. And so, all the rest is happening below the level of awareness.
And a lot of this thinking below the level of awareness is peculiar. I love– a University of Buffalo researcher discovered that people named Dennis are disproportionately likely to become dentists. [Laughter] People named Lawrence are disproportionately likely to become lawyers.
Because unconsciously we gravitate toward things that sound familiar. Which is why my daughter is named President of the United States Brooks. [Laughter]
Some of them are peculiar, but some are kind of impressive. The unconscious, Freud taught us the unconscious is sort of filled with sexual urges and it's sort of a dark jungle. But I think it's closer to the truth to say it's just another way of seeing the world. And often a more sophisticated way.
One of the things I read was that if you're having trouble making a decision, tell yourself you're going to settle it by flipping a coin. But don't go by how the coin flip goes, go by your emotional reaction to the coin flip. Are you happy or sad it came up that way? And that's your inner mind telling you what you really want.
But many of our most important functions happen below the level of awareness – how we relate to people, how we see ourselves, how we perceive the world. Perception is not a simple process. It's an act of creation. And how we see the world is really tremendously important, most of which is unconscious.
The second insight is that emotions are not separate from reason; emotions are the foundation of reason, that what emotions do is they value things. They tell us what we want, what we don't want, what we admire, what we don't admire. And that people who have suffered lesions in the parts of their brain involved in the processing of emotion are not super-smart, logical Mr.
Spocks. They're super-dumb and they make self-destructive decisions because they can't value anything. They can't make a decision because they don't know what they want.
And so, emotion really is like a GPS system telling you which way, or advising you which way to go, which way not to go. And it's not like a seesaw; if emotion is up, reason is down, vice versa. The smarter the emotion is, the smarter the reason is.
Now, I'm a middle-aged American guy. I'm not particularly comfortable talking about emotion. My wife's joke is that me writing a book about emotion is like Gandhi writing about gluttony. [Laughter]
There's another brain scan story, which is apocryphal, but gets at a truth. Which is, they took a bunch of middle-aged guys, put them in these fMRI brain scan machines. Had them watch a horror movie and then had them describe their feelings towards their wives. And the brain scans were the same, identical in both circumstances. [Laughter] Just sheer terror. And I sort of get that.
But the fact is, what emotion does is it tells us what we want. It tells us what we remember. It literally builds the brain. And so, there was a famous case of orphanages around 1945, studied by Rene Spitz. And in these orphanages they decided that, to protect the babies, they would keep them antiseptic, germ-free. So they fed them, they gave them great healthcare, but they didn't touch them, they didn't handle them. And so, the mortality rate by age two was 37% in these orphanages. And they stopped naming the babies because they were dying at such high rates.
You literally need the physical love to wire the brain. So the importance of emotion is the second.
The third insight is that we're not primarily self-contained individuals; we're social animals, who are deeply interpenetrated, one with another. When we look at each other, we're not only thinking about what the other person's doing, we are reenacting in our own minds what we see the other person doing. When you watch a car chase in a movie, your brain is reenacting a car chase. When you watch a foul shot in a basketball game, your brain is reenacting as if you were doing a foul shot.
And so, we're deeply interpenetrated, one with another. And we communicate with each other in all sorts of subtle ways. Some of it are visual clues that we're not aware of. Some of it’s smell. In one experiment in Germany, they took research subjects, taped gauze pads under their arms, had some people watch a horror movie, some people watch a comedy, got other research subjects who were presumably well paid, and had them sniff the gauze pads and asked them, did this person watch a comedy or a horror movie. And people can tell way above chance who was watching what movie. Women, by the way, much better than men at this facility.
But we're subject to these emotional contagions, which we see in Egypt and Tunisia now, but also in our own lives; how obesity can sweep through a population: depression, loneliness. And so how deeply interpenetrated we are.
And if you take these three foundations and then the research that really surrounds them, you get a different view of human nature. To some extent we are now, in our society, predominantly children of the French Enlightenment, of Descartes and others who thought reason was the highest of the faculties.
But at the same time, there was a different enlightenment, a Scottish or British Enlightenment, with people like David Hume and Adam Smith and Edmund Burke, who emphasized that reason is weak, and what they called the sentiments are strong. And their view of human nature was actually more accurate.
And so, what this research does, it doesn't give us new philosophies, but it reminds us of some old ones. And it reminds us of things that are profound in ourselves. And it gives us a different view, for example, of what it takes to lead a fulfilling life, what human capital is.
Now, in my world, when we use the phrase "human capital," we tend to refer to things that we can measure – things like GPA, SATs, the number of years in schooling, the degrees earned. And all that stuff is important. Things like IQ, that stuff is important. But this research points to other
skills and other talents which are more important, and which are half-emotional and half-rational, using both systems.
And so, you might think of a whole series of talents which this research really points to and makes us appreciative of. The first one, for example, is what you might call mindsight, the ability to enter into other people's minds and learn what they have to teach you. This is something babies come born with a great facility for.
In 1979, a researcher at the University of Washington leaned over a baby who was 43 minutes old and he wagged his tongue at the baby, and she wagged her tongue back. Even at 43 minutes, babies are wired to connect with others because that's how they learn, that's how they download views of reality.
Babies are phenomenally good at reading faces. So if you take six-month-old babies and put them in an array of monkey faces, at six months old babies can discern one monkey from another. This is a level of observation that we tend to lose as adults; we can't tell one monkey from another. [Laughter] But they have phenomenally good face-reading skills.
And so, some babies in this culture, about 55% of the babies or infants have established two-way communication patterns with Mom and Dad; primarily with Mom. And researchers call these babies securely attached. And if you have this two-way communication system, when you go off to school, you have a model of how to attach to Teacher, how to learn from Teacher.
One study at the University of Minnesota looked at attachment patterns at 18 months old, relationship with Mom, and they found they could predict with 77% accuracy at 18 months who was going to graduate from high school. Simply because you have a leg up if you know how to attach to Mom.
Twenty percent of the kids in this country are what they call avoidantly attached, which just means they're sending signals out, but not much is coming back. And these kids look
independent at first and very mature, but they have trouble making attachments, building relationships and learning. One of the teachers in a book I read described a kid with avoidant attachment coming into the classroom like a sailboat tacking into the wind, wanting to get close to Teacher, but not knowing how to do it, and finally standing with his back to her, just hoping somehow an attachment could be made.
And people who have avoidant attachments have less activation in the reward areas of their brains during social interaction. They get less of a kick out of interacting with people. They have fewer memories of their childhood because there was less in their childhood that was emotionally arousing to them. Even at age 70, they have two-thirds fewer friends, on average, than people who are securely attached.
Now, things that happen in the first 18 months of life do not determine a life course. But they open up pathways which can either be confirmed or disconfirmed by later experience. And this is one of the skills that happens below the level of awareness based on how the relationships are.
A second trait you might call equi-poise. And that's the ability, the serenity and really the maturity to look inside your own mind and monitor your own biases and shortcomings, and correct for those biases and shortcomings.
So for example, we're overconfidence machines. Ninety-five percent of professors believe they have above-average teaching skills. Ninety-six percent of college students say they have above- average leadership skills. Time Magazine asked Americans, "Are you in the top 1% of earners?" Nineteen percent of Americans are in the top 1% of earners. [Laughter] And another 36% expect to be some day.
Some researchers, Paul Shoemaker and Edward Russo, gave tests to executives. They gave them tests about their own industries and then asked them "how confident are you you got the answers correct?" In the advertising industry, the executives were pretty confident they got 90% of the answers right. In fact, they got 60% wrong. The most overconfident industry is the computer industry; those executives thought they got 95% correct. In fact, they got 80% wrong.
This is another strongly gender-linked trait. [Laughter] Men drown at twice the rate as women because men have phenomenal faith in their swimming ability, especially after they've been drinking. [Laughter]
And so, there are other traits that go along with this, traits like, Are you curious? Are you open- minded? Do you adjust the strength of your conclusion to the strength of the evidence? Are you willing to tolerate ambiguity when nothing has been settled? These are traits that are very important, but they're scarcely related to IQ; they're more like mental character than IQ.
And some people have these traits, the ability to look inside and say, I'm biased in this direction. I'm biased in the direction of overconfidence. Or, more powerfully, I have a bias that says I'm going to divide people into in-group and out-group. I'm going to see prejudice. I'm going to see different groups as different from me, and therefore I'm going to counteract that. Some people have these skills and some people don't.
And I should emphasize that having these skills is not a question of nature, it's how you train yourselves, train the emotions.
The third trait is metis, which you might call street smarts, the ability to look across a complicated scene and detect physical patterns to create a gist, which is the essence of a situation, and to combine gists. Picasso took the gist, Western art, and the gist, African masks, and he combined them, and that was really the source of his genius, and created a third thing.
Some people have this facility to detect patterns, to know subtly, to appraise a situation. Our newspaper did a great story about people in Iraq, soldiers in Iraq who could look down the street and tell whether there was an IED, a bomb planted in the street. And when you asked them, "how do you do that?" they couldn't tell you. They would just say, "I feel a coldness." And there's something they're being aware of.
In chicken farms, they have what they call chicken sexers. They pull out the early chicks and they tell if they're male or female. And they can do it with great skill and reliability, but often if you ask them, "how do you tell the male chicks from the female chicks?" they couldn't tell you; just somehow they know. And this is the way you learn to see the world through observation and through a lifetime of sensitive perception.
A fourth trait is what you might call sympathy, the ability to see into other individuals and to communicate well with others. One of the really interesting things I think this research shows you is to beware of teleconferences. That most of our communication is done face-to-face and non-verbally.
So at the University of Michigan, they did a study where they gave groups of people a math test, gave them ten minutes to solve the problem, and the face-to-face groups did phenomenally well. Then they took other groups and they gave them 30 minutes to solve the problems, but they had to communicate by email, and those groups fell apart. Because most of our communication and most of our learning is face-to-face, and electronic communication is a very poor substitute.
Which is why cities are actually so valuable.
There was a study where they looked at– when inventors put their patent applications in, they have to list all the other patents that contributed to their innovation. Somebody looked at how many of those patents were invented by people who lived within 25 miles of that inventor. An astounding number were, because we learn most from people we know.
And the quality of a group is not determined by the IQ of the group; it's determined by how well does the group listen to one another, how often do they take turns in communications, what is the emotional sensitivity within the group.
These, too, are skills that are rational and post-rational. And they're skills you work on. Just to say something is an emotion is not to say it's beyond our control. We have the ability to train our emotions through art, by reading and participating along with literary figures, through music, through novels. These things refine the emotions.
We have the ability to choose what environment we want to live in, whether we join the Harvard College or the Marine Corps. Those environments will have pervasive influences on who we are. I went off to a college called the University of Chicago, where fun goes to die. [Laughter] The other saying about Chicago, if I can remember this, is it's a Baptist school where atheist professors teach Jewish students St. Thomas Aquinas. [Laughter]
And I'm sure you've all had this experience. That school had a profound effect on who I am. And I couldn't really tell you how it happened, but it sent all sorts of cues into me which linger forever. And so, a lot of the ways we educate our emotions is through art and music, through the soft, squishy things, which often get dismissed and often get cast out when the budgets are being cut.
And then the final trait I'll mention I call limerence. It's not really a trait, it's a drive, it's a motivation. And what the conscious mind hungers for is sort of success and fame and money, and all the things on the surface. But what the unconscious mind hungers for are those moments of transcendence, when sort of the skull line disappears, you lose your awareness of yourself, and you're lost in something larger – whether you're lost in a task, a carpenter working with wood; whether you're lost, if you're a naturalist, in nature; whether you're a believer, lost in God's love; or most frequently of all, when you're lost in love for another person.
And those moments are the prime driver of what most people seek. And the decisions of love, like all decisions, are not either emotional or either rational; they are both. And they start out, and many of the unconscious things that join us, one to another, are unconscious but extremely logical.
We tend to marry people with complementary immune systems to our own, which we detect by smell. We marry people with similar nose widths to our own. We marry people with similar eye width, eye separation to ourselves. We tend to marry people with as high a status level as we can get. And so, unfortunately women tend to like men who are taller because the average inch is equal to about $6,000 in annual income in this society. [Laughter]
But I did read a great study, I think by Dan Ariely up here, who surveyed online dating sites. And he found that a guy who's five-foot-six can get as many online date offers from women as a guy who's six-foot, so long as he earns $172,000 a year more. [Laughter]
So some of these are sort of rational, even though we're not aware of it, are sort of very logical and almost ruthless. But within that decision and the way we choose mates, there are also our emotional processes, what we would call emotional processes.
Stendhal had a great line, or a great description of what he called crystallization. And he described miners in Austria who would throw branches into a salt mine. And then they'd retrieve the branches weeks later and they'd be covered by crystals and they'd shimmer beautifully in the sunlight. And he said that's what we do to our beloved, we surround them by crystals and we exaggerate all their virtues when we're in the height of love. And this is part of the emotional process. It serves an evolutionary purpose, but it really is one of the poetic and enchanted things which the science really illuminates.
And when you're in love, one of the things it emphasizes is the interpenetration of minds. And so, this state sort of exemplifies all the things that I've tried to talk about – the role of unconscious processes, the role of emotion, and the interpenetration, which really emphasizes the level on which all the action, or most of the action of human life is really occurring, in ways we're sometimes blind to.
In the course of doing work for this book, I came across a passage, which I think encapsulates all these things. And it was written by a great scientist at Indiana University named Douglas
Hofstadter who studies the workings of minds and the interrelationship of minds. But the passage concerned a personal experience he had. He was a great scientist. He'd written a book on mathematics. He was in Italy on sabbatical, and he went there with his wife, Carol, and their two kids. And at the time when their two kids were very young, five and two, Carol suffered from a stroke and died very suddenly.
And months later, he had a photo of Carol in his bedroom on the bureau. And one day he was just walking through the bedroom, as he had many times before, and he happened to look at the picture of his late wife. And here's the passage he wrote on that occasion. This is from his book I Am a Strange Loop:
"I looked at her face and I looked so deeply that I felt I was behind her eyes. And all at once, I found myself saying, as tears flowed, 'that's me, that's me.' And those simple words brought back many thoughts that I’d had before about the fusion of our souls into one higher level entity, about the fact that at the core of both our souls lay our identical hopes and dreams for our children, about the notion that those hopes were not separate or distinct hopes, but were just one hope, one clear thing that defined us both, that welded us into a unit, the kind of unit I’d but dimly imagined before being married and having children. I realized that though Carol had died, that core piece of her had not died at all, but that it had lived on very determinedly in my brain."
Now, the Greeks used to say we suffer our way to wisdom, and Hofstadter suffered his way to the wisdom that we are deeply interpenetrated in ways that sometimes only come out in times of tragedy.
And in a shallower way, I think, through the policy failures of the past several years, I think we've been reminded of the wisdom, that the shallow view of human nature really deprives us and really amputates the most important parts of us. And policies based on that shallow, rationalist view of human nature ignore some of the prime drives of who we are. And that if we're going to develop good policies on education, on poverty and foreign policy, it's important to have that deeper view of human nature.
And the good news is we're living in a moment when researchers in all these fields, using science, using technology are really reminding us and giving us a much clearer picture of how the underside of our mind is working.
And so, of all the reasons to be pessimistic about the country, there are many reasons to be optimistic. And one of them is that when Freud had his view of the unconscious, it had a pervasive cultural effect. Now I think we're having a more accurate view, and I think it's going to have a pervasive cultural effect across many spheres and give us a better understanding of who we are, and give us greater tools to solve some of the problems that bedevil us.
So thank you very much. [Applause] And now, questions?
QUESTION: My name is Roy Freed. I live in Canton. I'm long retired. I've been thinking about the human mind on my own. And I appreciate your ideas. You seem to be thinking primarily on the basis of what other people have done research on. Do you have any suggestions for us, how we individually can learn about our minds, how they function? I think it would be interesting to know, in a practical manner, how we can participate in a thinking process and interacting with other people to create societies.
DAVID BROOKS: That's a good question. I emphasize the research others have done because I'm really a journalist, I'm just a reporter. I cover politicians in my day job, but in this sphere, I cover the researchers who are doing this research. And there are ways we can discover more about who we are, some are sort of shallow but I found interesting. If you're beginning a relationship, one thing you can do is sneak up behind your partner and startle them. Because the startle response turns out to be a very accurate predictor of underlying temperament. [Laughter] So that's just a very simple, practical thing. Not to be done with anybody with a cardiac problem.
The other thing that's been of interest to me is a lot of the, especially the neuroscientists that I've been talking with, they tend to be pretty materialistic, but they have tremendous respect for meditation, because what meditation attempts to do, and I think they believe does effectively, is it quiets the conscious mind and makes you more aware of the unconscious mind.
So Daniel Siegel, one of the researchers in this field, says, imagine you have a searchlight looking out on a specific spot in a dark night. That's what the conscious mind does. It gives you a very bright illumination of a specific spot. But if you can quiet the conscious mind, it's like turning off the searchlight. And suddenly your eyes adjust and you see the area around you. It may be less brightly, but you become aware of a much wider area.
And so, they have tremendous respect for that. I myself am not loosey-goosey enough to do meditation. So despite their advice, I'm just not going to do it. Some of you can, some of you can't.
But I think the final thing to be said, and this is really what the research has done for me, it's given me– because I spend so much time reading about emotion, psychology, now when I look at everything I see it through that prism. It's really a question of selecting a different viewpoint. So when you see what's happening in Egypt and Tunisia, you see an emotional contagion sweeping through people. You see what the Greeks call the thymotic urge, the desire for dignity and recognition. And really what the research does, it gives you a different viewpoint on everything. And that's a valuable thing in and of itself.
QUESTION: Getting back to politics, I think the biggest question today, and probably for the past 20 years, is what's happened to the moderates in politics? When Tip O'Neill and Reagan didn't like each other's votes, they got together and they decided something, and one gave a little here and one gave a little there, and they passed legislation. What's happening in this Administration?
DAVID BROOKS: Well, I guess I would say a couple things. First, there has been a weakening of the moderates, not in the polity, but in government. That if you look at the issues and the polls on issue after issue, we're still a bell curve country; there's still a big middle out in the country.
It's not reflected in Washington.
Now, why is that? Some of the reasons are structural – redistricting, fundraising, the primary system. But to me, the fundamental reason is intellectual. If you go to a conservative dinner, there's academics with plans and ideas. If you go to a liberal dinner, there's academics with plans and ideas. If you go to a centrist dinner, it's just a bunch of lobbyists. And so, there has been less– people in the center have not developed a positive intellectual system.
I gave a talk recently at a group that I support called No Labels. But it starts with the word No. What do moderates actually believe in? Now, I have a belief system that I believe in, and it sort of puts me in the more moderate camp, though I don't believe in it because it makes you moderate; I believe in it just because I think it's right for the country. And that belief system is this, in one minute:
We have liberalism that believes in using government to enhance equality; conservatism that believes in limited government to enhance freedom. And then there's a third tradition in American history that believes in limited, but energetic government to enhance social mobility. And this movement starts with Alexander Hamilton, who goes up through the Whig Party, through the early Republican Party, giving people the tools to compete in a capitalist economy. So in the early Republican Party they created land-grant colleges, the Homestead Act, the railroad legislation, giving people the tools to compete.
And that tradition, that sort of Whig tradition, if you want to put it that way, petered out in the 20th century. But there are six of us who still believe in it. [Laughter] And I think it's a real tradition.
And I would say that if you want to believe in social mobility, we do a great job now of getting kids into high school and into college. We do a pretty crappy job of getting them through and giving them the tools. And to get them through, some money is necessary, great teachers are necessary, but it's necessary to have a second generation of capital policies emphasizing the things that I've been talking about, giving them the emotional resources to attach to school, to become emotionally involved in school. And that includes early childhood education, nurse/family partnerships, mentoring programs. Those are the things that are actually very important, and that's part of what my imagined third tradition would do.
But we're not there yet because we don't have the ideas, we don't have the leaders. And so we're stuck in a more polarized politics than we need.
QUESTION: Thank you very much. I'm interested in what you're saying, and I've been trying to think about how it might help me understand how do we deal with the issue of climate change, which is so big and so emotional and now so politically divisive. Have you thought about that, and could you share your thoughts?
DAVID BROOKS: Yeah, well, the one thought I would have is that– I mentioned the groups that work well together, that take turns while conversing. Well, if you want a picture of a dysfunctional group, I suggest the US Congress is that group. And so, Evan Bayh, Senator from Indiana, just retired after 12 years in the Senate, and he said there were only two times during his tenure as a Senator where the whole Senate got together and had a conversation about something – after impeachment and after 9/11. And so, those conversations never happen.
The leading Republican on budget issues is a guy named Paul Ryan from Wisconsin. He and Barack Obama have never had a conversation. Obama's never called him down to the White House. They've never had a chance to actually talk. And so, what you get is a much more tribal mentality: "if the other side is for it, then I'm against it." And I think that's what's happened to climate change. So the evidence doesn't really matter; if one party's for it, the other party's going to be against it.
And so, that's one of the many problems I think we're not going to address. Fiscal matters we're not going to address simply because we can't just have normal conversations about these things. And the spirit of teamism or tribalism is just tremendously powerful and is not to be underestimated.
QUESTION: Hi, I'm wondering if either in your book or in your scholarship or reporting and other ways, have you looked at the ways in which different subcultures in America or modern culture – so, not looking at historical tradition or pre-Enlightenment rationalism tradition, so current cultures who maybe aren't majority culture, white, educated – understand the influence of emotional and rational.
DAVID BROOKS: I have some cultural work in the book, but it's not so much domestically, I confess, it's more internationally. Researchers have done a lot more work comparing different cultures around the world and how they perceive these things.
One little experiment, they looked at people having coffee for an hour and they observed how many times two people having coffee touched each other, just touched each other's hands. So I'm going to get the numbers slightly wrong, but in Rio, for example, I think there were 180 touches an hour. I think there were in Paris, there were 120 touches an hour, and in London, there were zero touches an hour. [Laughter]
Another thing is the Chinese and American– this is very famous research. There's a famous study where they asked Chinese people and Americans to describe a fish tank. And the Chinese people described the vegetation, the relationship between the fish. And the Americans just described the biggest fish.
Another study, they had them look at the Mona Lisa. They tracked their eyes, saccades is what they're called. And the Chinese eyes were moving all over the painting. The American eyes just looked at the eyes and the mouth of the woman.
And so, that's the sort of stuff. Within this country, say, on ethnic grounds, or African Americans, whites, Latinos, I haven't seen studies. I bet there have been studies, but I haven't seen them. But it would be very interesting to look at those studies. So I apologize. I don't know that exact answer.
QUESTION: Thank you. I'm Ed Tronick. I'm a professor of psychology here at UMass, and I study infant social/emotional development, and direct a program in infant mental health. And infants are all emotions, as you would say, and they're largely unconscious in the way we typically think about consciousness. And they do the things that you talk about. We have, for example, Dan Siegel, come to our training program.
But your characterization, for example, of the planners who forget about emotions once they start doing the policies. I would suggest, having looked at infants, that they're just as motivated emotionally. It's just that they have a set of emotions that don't fit to this kind of perspective that you're putting, about how we should always, always be sympathetic, limerent, and the like.
Emotionally, that is not the makeup, at least that I see in the infants that I have when things start to go wrong and they get aggressive, when children get aggressive. So there are these other feelings around as well.
DAVID BROOKS: I didn't mean to downplay sort of the darker aspects of who we are, the in- group/out-group. And you can correct me if I'm wrong, but I read one study that suggested people are at their most violent around age three or so; they just don't have the physical strength to hurt each other as badly.
If you're saying that there are aggressive tendencies which I'm sort of downplaying, I agree with that; in this little talk I did downplay those tendencies. Is that essentially the point?
QUESTION: And your point about policy, when we seem to forget that Iraqis have feelings and that they care about one another. There are other feelings that are motivating, I think, those planners which have to do with some fairly crude emotions, like greed and that real in-group, we'll foster our development at the sacrifice of everyone else.
DAVID BROOKS: Right. Just to pick up on that, there's a researcher, a psychologist, Jonathan Haidt, who you probably know, at University of Virginia. He talks about moral intuitions. And he says we come with all sorts of moral intuitions, some of them, like fairness; very early on we know, we have a sense of what's fair. But one of those intuitions surrounds attributes of dominance and hierarchy, and the desire to exercise power over others, and sometimes the desire to defer to power.
And so, I would say those are certainly, if you cover politics, the desire to exercise authority over others and dominate others is something you can't miss. But I still would say, in our decision- making process, that economics is the gateway between research and policymaking. And if you want to know which social scientists have influence on policymaking, I guess I would say in my observation psychologists have relatively little, sociologists relatively little. Economists, especially classical economists, based on their model of human nature, have a tremendous influence. And along with that, political scientists and international relation game theorists. And that prism is often how policymakers see the world.
So I'm agreeing with you that there are these dominance urges, and all that other stuff, greed, but I do think there's a prism which is used, that the CBO uses, the Congressional Budget Office, and other people use to model behavior, and that that does amputate a lot of the things that you would talk about in your classes.
QUESTION: Like probably everybody in the room, I've been following what you've had to say on things for a number of years. And I sense that some of the roots of what have led to your book go back to six, seven, eight years when I found you writing some books on exurbanism very unjudgmentally, which I found rather curious. But now I see that it's all coming together.
And I have a question. You ended up with a fairly upbeat assessment, that these insights might help us to deal with the problems that the nation and the world are facing a bit better than we have been. But without asking you tell me what the outline of your next book is, could you give us a few insights on what you think those are? Because I don't see them.
DAVID BROOKS: You don't see the product of our knowledge?
QUESTION: Yeah, I mean, how understanding these interactions, and emotion often out- dealing reason, how, by understanding this, we can start making better decisions. We're not doing very well.
DAVID BROOKS: Right. First, I'd written this book on exurbanism, and I've sort of changed my mind on that. I wrote about these fast-growing suburbs, sort of celebrating them, because people were really mobilized to dream for a better life, and they moved out to Douglas County, Colorado, or Mesa, Arizona. But I've really sort of, because of this research, more or less changed my mind on the virtues of that, because you really do see, as I mentioned, the power of density. The reason people live in cities and people in cities are paid more than people in suburban areas is in part because the cost of living is higher, but in part because their productivity goes up more quickly. Because when you're surrounded densely by face-to-face conversations, you just learn a lot faster.
And so, I've become much more suspicious of those fast-growing suburbs. Great research by Danny Kahneman and Alan Krueger asked, what are the daily activities that contribute most to happiness, and what are the daily activities that take away from happiness. And the daily activities that contribute most to happiness were having sex, but also eating with friends. The daily activity that is most deleterious to happiness was commuting. Because it's often done alone in a car. And so, I've sort of changed my mind on the benign nature of these far-flung suburbs.
Now, as for the upbeat nature, well, let's start with the one field, as I keep mentioning, care about the most. I have a friend who served in the Clinton administration and then went to work in the New York City schools. And he sent me an email saying, "I've never been so optimistic about education reform as I am right now. And I've never been so pessimistic about government as I am right now." And that's about where I am.
But why be optimistic about education? Because we are beginning to emphasize the teacher/student relationship. We are beginning to design programs, like the KIPP academies which are around, which are based on this research into these traits, like self-control.
Very quickly, I didn't mention this, Walter Mischel's marshmallow experiment which is sort of the core of this, I'm sure most of you know it. I didn't mention this, right? I sometimes mention it. So Mischel took four-year-olds, put them in a room, put a marshmallow on a table in front of them. Said, "You can eat the marshmallow now. And when I come back in 15 minutes, if you haven't eaten the marshmallow, I'll give you two marshmallows." And you can go online and see the videos of a four-year-old little girl banging her head on the table, trying not to eat the marshmallow. [Laughter]
Mischel one day used an Oreo cookie. The kid carefully picked up the Oreo, carefully ate out the middle, carefully placed it back on the table. [Laughter] Kid is now a US Senator. [Laughter]
But the significance of the findings were that 20 years later, the kids who could wait 10 minutes had much higher college completion rates, much higher incomes. Thirty years later, the kids who could not wait, much higher drug and alcohol addiction rates, incarceration rates. And it emphasizes the importance of self-control. Growing up in homes where actions lead to consequences and you develop strategies for self-control.
And so, we now have these KIPP academies, Harlem Children's Zone, all these programs really designing curriculum around that kind of research.
And so, that's emphasizing these things which used to be dismissed as soft. And I could go down issue after issue and describe to you how the research is beginning to penetrate. I think in economics that behavioral economics have had a very good effect on economics, giving people a more accurate view of human nature, including some of the decision-making foibles we have.
Things like priming, that if I mention to you the words bingo, Florida and shuffleboard, you'll all have the concept of elderly primed in your head and you'll walk out of this room more slowly. [Laughter] And so, there are all these concepts that behavioral economists have come up with, and I think that gives us a better view and allows us to create better policies.
Even, finally, in counterinsurgency warfare. The military really had a sense that the way you win wars is to kill a lot of people. But through what they call the COIN doctrine, now they realize you have to build social trust within villages to get information. And so, that's really appreciating the other side. And I can go down many different policy areas where I think we're beginning to understand that, and moving in the right direction, in a slow manner.
QUESTION: Thank you for sharing the interesting thoughts and provocative ideas today and in your columns. I'm curious in understanding whether your insights about the unconscious and the brain suggest any differences as we age. You did not prime me with what you just said. I was intending to ask that question. [Laughter]
DAVID BROOKS: You think you were, but you were wrong. [Laughter]
QUESTION: Maybe. But maybe you were looking inside of me as you were coming up with your examples and you knew what I was going to ask. I'm interested in understanding this because of the potential implications that the longevity revolution, the fact that our lifespans are longer, as well as the demographics of different proportions between different age groups now, whether insights about the changes in unconscious would lead us to expect some different things in the decades ahead.
DAVID BROOKS: There are a couple things to be said. One, I just came across a study today where they gave people videos of people committing faux pas and asked younger people and older people to accurately describe what they were seeing. And the younger people were much more socially sensitive, which surprised me. It's only one study so we should be careful.
But I would say that the main thing that is emphasized in the research is that the brain is much more plastic later on than we anticipated. And the brain is much more plastic than we thought in general. And so, if you do something called a hemispherectomy in the very early part of life, which is really taking out a hemisphere, a very young child, the brain is so unformed, the brain can evolve. It doesn't retain full capabilities, but it's very powerful at evolving. And so, even half a brain can function at some level.
But most importantly, the mind continues to evolve, continues to create neurons, continues to make connections through life. And so, it creates a much rosier picture of people in their 80s and 90s still capable of learning, still capable of new things.
And the other thing it emphasizes is this sort of activity has some effect – the effect isn't as strong as one would think – on prolonging life itself. That some of the studies show that if you're involved in artistic endeavors, activities of that sort, it prolongs life.
But the main effect is there's just the tremendous plasticity through life. Which is sort an upbeat conclusion.
And while I'm on the upbeat, I just want to say one thing, maybe in response to the last question, which was that another cause for optimism, and this may be my parochial bias– in my world of politics, the thought that somebody would be persuaded by evidence, it almost never happens.
But if you spend time with a neuroscientist, they think they're all filled with intellectual foibles, but I find them models of intellectual honesty in comparison to my world.
And it's kind of inspiring to enter this world where people really are persuaded when evidence changes, and where the fields are moving so fast that if you stayed still, rigid in your beliefs, you'd just be left behind. And so, it's kind of inspiring to see all that, compared to where I go home and the people I talk to in my day jobs.
Anyway, final question.
QUESTION: I wanted to ask if you could comment on putting Eric Holder's famous comments about "We've become a nation of cowards when it comes to discussing race," whether equi- poise, as a societal aspiration, can be superimposed to reduce the differences in perceptions, or if that conversation, the impetus has to come on a micro-personal level.
DAVID BROOKS: Well, it has to come at all levels, but the research paints sort of a warning picture to us on race and racial issues. So there's something called Project Implicit, which I think Harvard and a bunch of schools are a part of. And you can go online and it'll give you very quick glimpses of people of different races and force you to do a mental test. And so, it's a very clever of gauging your reaction to looking at people of different races, and trying to tell if you react more suspiciously to people of different races, people of different races other than your own.
And the results of this test suggest that vast, vast, vast majorities of us pick up race very quickly, and that we react in ways that we would not be proud of. And so, that doesn't determine you're going to be racist. It means you have to be aware of these predilections and have to combat it.
We have strong in-group biases.
Another research I saw at NYU, they gave people videos of– I think this was Chinese Americans looking at another Chinese American getting hurt, and then somebody from another ethnic group getting hurt. And the Chinese Americans reacted in the fMRI, in the scans, very powerfully when they saw a member of their own group getting hurt, very callously when they saw members of another group getting hurt. And these in-group/out-group things are just strong.
And so, that doesn't mean we're sentenced to be that, but it means we have to be aware and combat against it. And one of the ways one does that is not through moral sermonizing, to say racism is bad. That's probably important, but the most important way is to remind people of commonality.
So in the book a have a story about this woman, Rene Lindenberg, I think her name was. She was a child in Poland in the late 1930s. And she was Jewish. Some of the Polish villagers were going to throw her down a well and kill her. And another villager came up to them and said, "Well, you know, she's not a dog, she's a girl." And they stopped.
And that wasn't a strong moral argument against murder. What she had done with that one sentence "she's a girl," she had really aroused a different frame to see the girl. She had aroused a different way of seeing the same scene and changed their perceptions of who this girl was. And she lived to tell this story.
And so, one of the things you can do is you can (a) adopt certain habits; (b) adopt certain behaviors that will allow you to see people in a different way. And another aspect of the research, a guy named Timothy Wilson at the University of Virginia emphasizes, to change your mind, you have to change your behavior. Behavioral change precedes mental change. And so, the Alcoholics Anonymous have a great phrase, fake it until you make it. Which is, behave in a certain way and then the belief will come later. And so, that's how we have the power to change our behavior and rewire ourselves that way.
Anyway, thank you very much. [Applause]
TOM PUTNAM: I think we can all agree that we've experienced the luck of the Irish to spend such a fascinating hour with such a humorous, thoughtful and amiable fellow. So David Brooks, thank you very much. [Applause]
