For some reason I woke up this Christmas morning thinking about “embeddedness.”  It might have something to do with the fact that for the first time in years the three grade-school-aged grandsons are with the other side of the family and we will have a small and relatively quiet Christmas.

People vary a lot in how much they depend on their interaction with others, although none of us becomes human without a group around us.  And, age researchers claim that positive social interaction is the best predictor of a long and happy old age.  So why the variation?

It has been popular for the last century to speak of the “nature-nurture” controversy.  In the usual modern formulation “How much do we owe to our genes and how much is imposed by our environment?”  Nowhere does this dichotomy seem more foolish than in this question of embeddedness:  how embedded are we in a web of relationships seems hardly explainable solely by environment and genetics.  The dichotomy has always neglected one of the most human elements which shapes us: Personal Choice.

At some other point I may talk about why the hypothesis of strict determinism is, as Richard Feynman points out in his freshman physics lessons, unnecessary to Newtonian science, much less to quantum mechanics, and certainly useless in taking responsibility for our actions.  Thus, belief in strict determinism is as much a matter of personal choice as is belief in free will.   Needless to say, I am a believer in the latter.

Indeed, I doubt that any human being can seriously believe that every act of their life is completely determined.  If you think you can, I suggest you take up the matter with Dostoevsky (Notes from the Underground) and Viktor Frankl (Man’s Search for Meaning).  In my more theological moments I describe myself as a Wesleyan Arminian, which means that I learned not to argue with predestinarians, since they are forced to argue and I am not.

What got me to thinking about embeddedness is that I found out this week that I am committed to working for another two years, even though I have been old enough for Medicare for three years and for Social Security for six.  I say “found out” because, even though I am the President, Chairman of the Board, and CEO of the Environmental Management Institute, my training manager came in and told me that we needed to go for another two years.  The reason: We needed better DSL service in the office.   Now she is probably right, although I am not at my computer in the office long enough each week to notice the difference.  The catch: AT&T would only upgrade our business DSL if we agreed to a two-year extension.  So I said I would sign it. 

So who decided that I would be working another two years?  AT&T when they made the policy?  My training manager when she decided the DSL was too slow?  Me, when I agreed?  

The opposite error to strict determinism is unrestricted free will.  On my most generous days I believe that I make significant choices (even in what I eat and wear) in no more than about 1% of all cases.  The more embedded you are, the fewer you get to make (and, it seems, paradoxically the more choices you have).  I could have said “no,” that I wouldn’t have gone for a two year agreement.

But, perhaps my not choosing “no” was simply because I couldn’t think of a single reason that I shouldn’t keep working for two more years and I respect my training manager’s views enough to believe that she needed faster DSL.  Who knows?  By the end of the week we had also told our other vendors to write the contracts for two years.  So again this year I will train a few hundred folks, some new, some returning, and I will be embedded in their lives a little longer. 

My wife and I still disagree about who finally proposed marriage and neither of us could tell you why we adopted a racially mixed child at a time when it was still not allowed in some states of the U.S.  We just did.  Nature, nurture, and a modicum of free personal choice resulted in a greater embeddedness in things that led to us having a quiet Christmas, waiting for the grandsons (and their parents of course) to be home later in the week.

Book Review: David Brooks, The Social Animal

I am seldom surprised by the layout of a nonfiction book, but in this work Brooks interweaves a novella of the lives of two people from very different socioeconomic backgrounds with reports of the people and ideas of recent social science research.  Thus, how we interact as persons is carried forward as we watch Harold and Erica (sp?  I listened to the audiobook) are born into families, get educated, begin careers, marry, and age together.

Along the way we discover many things about the way we consciously and unconsciously make choices and the ways we are shaped by our physical and – especially – our social environment.   He details on the demise of Homo economicus, the rational decider of classical economics, by reporting on the people and the social experiments that have undermined the concept.  Harold and Erica live out their entire lives with interludes for the all-seeing narrator to fill us in on the latest findings of social psychology.  He reveals the deeply social aspect of our very minds and exposes the bias in modern culture that overemphasizes rationalism, individualism, and IQ.

Curiously, for a book on the “social animal” are characters are relatively isolated DINKs (double-income, no kids) who lack any significant nonwork social affiliation (such as church, fraternity, club, musical group, political activity, or neighborhood association).  They are rootless and don’t have to care for an aging parent or an autistic child.  There is no focus on the process of socialization (other than seen be H & E as children) and while they
have hopes and expectations for their own lives, they have no dreams of a better world for a coming generation.

When Aristotle declared that man was a “political animal,” he meant it in the peculiar Attic Greek sense of a person ideally suited to living as a free man in a democratic society, engaged daily in commerce and governance with his fellows.  Yet Brooks’ vision of the social animal, society is in the background rather than the foreground of the good life.

Because of other reading, much of the social science research was familiar, but the format was interesting and the writing engaging.

Worth a read despite my puzzlement about the characters.