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.