by David Brooks
The problem with this approach is that it has trouble explaining dynamic complexity, the essential feature of a human being, a culture, or a society. So recently there has been a greater appreciation for the structure of emergent systems. Emergent systems exist when different elements come together and produce something that is greater than the sum of their parts. Or, to put it differently, the pieces of a system interact, and out of their interaction something entirely new emerges. For example, benign things like air and water come together and sometimes, through a certain pattern of interaction, a hurricane emerges. Sounds and syllables come together and produce a story that has an emotional power that is irreducible to its constituent parts.
Emergent systems don’t rely upon a central controller. Instead, once a pattern of interaction is established, it has a downward influence on the behavior of the components.
For example, let’s say an ant in a colony stumbles upon a new food source. No dictator ant has to tell the colony to reorganize itself to harvest that source. Instead, one ant, in the course of his normal foraging, stumbles upon the food. Then a neighboring ant will notice that ant’s change in direction, and then a neighbor of that ant will notice the change, and pretty soon, as Steven Johnson puts it, “Local information can lead to global wisdom.” The entire colony will have a pheromone superhighway to harvest the new food source. A change has been quickly communicated through the system, and the whole colony mind has restructured itself to take advantage of this new circumstance. There has been no conscious decision to make the change. But a new set of arrangements has emerged, and once the custom has been set, future ants will automatically conform.
Emergent systems are really good at passing down customs across hundreds or thousands of generations. As Deborah Gordon of Stanford discovered, if you put ants in a large plastic tray, they will build a colony. They will also build a cemetery for dead ants, and the cemetery will be as far as possible from the colony. They will also build a garbage dump, which will be as far as possible from both the colony and the cemetery. No individual ant worked out the geometry. In fact, each individual ant may be blind to the entire structure. Instead individual ants followed local cues. Other ants adjusted to the cues of a few ants, and pretty soon the whole colony had established a precedent of behavior. Once this precedent has been established, thousands of generations can be born and the wisdom will endure. Once established, the precedents exert their own downward force.
There are emergent systems all around. The brain is an emergent system. An individual neuron in the brain does not contain an idea, say, of an apple. But out of the pattern of firing of millions of neurons, the idea of an apple emerges. Genetic transmission is an emergent system. Out of the complex interaction of many different genes and many different environments, certain traits such as aggressiveness might emerge.
A marriage is an emergent system. Francine Klagsbrun has observed that when a couple comes in for marriage therapy, there are three patients in the room—the husband, the wife, and the marriage itself. The marriage is the living history of all the things that have happened between husband and wife. Once the precedents are set, and have permeated both brains, the marriage itself begins to shape their individual behavior. Though it exists in the space between them, it has an influence all its own.
Cultures are emergent systems. There is no one person who embodies the traits of American or French or Chinese culture. There is no dictator determining the patterns of behavior that make up the culture. But out of the actions and relationships of millions of individuals, certain regularities do emerge. Once those habits arise, then future individuals adopt them unconsciously.
Poverty, the two Academy founders believed, is an emergent system, too. The people who live in deep poverty are enmeshed in complex ecosystems no one can fully see and understand.
In 2003 Eric Turkheimer of the University of Virginia published a study that showed that growing up in poverty can lead to a lower IQ. Journalists naturally asked him: What can be done to boost IQ development in poor children? “The honest answer to the question is that I don’t think there is anything in particular about the environment that is responsible for the effects of poverty,” he wrote later. “I don’t think there is any single thing in an impoverished environment that is responsible for the deleterious effects of poverty.”
Turkheimer had spent years trying to find which parts of growing up with a poor background produced the most negative results. He could easily show the total results of poverty, but when he tried to measure the impact of specific variables, he found there was nothing there. He conducted a meta-analysis of forty-three studies that scrutinized which specific elements of a child’s background most powerfully shaped cognitive deficiencies. The studies failed to demonstrate the power of any specific variable, even though the total effect of all the variables put together was very clear.
That doesn’t mean you do nothing to alleviate the effects of poverty. It means you don’t try to break down those effects into constituent parts. It’s the total emergent system that has its effects. As Turkheimer notes, “No complex behaviors in free-ranging humans are caused by a linear and additive set of causes. Any important outcome, like adolescent delinquent behavior, has a myriad of interrelated causes, and each of these causes has a myriad of potential effects, inducing a squared-myriad of environmental complexity even before one gets to the certainty that the environmental effects co-determine each other, or that the package interacts with the just-as-myriad effects of genes.”
For scientists, this circumstance leads to what Turkheimer calls the “Gloomy Prospect.” There is no way to pin down and clarify the causes of human behavior or trace the sources of this or that behavior. It is possible to show how emergent conditions, like poverty or single parenthood, can roughly affect big groups. It is of course possible to show correlations between one thing and another, and those correlations are valuable. But, it is hard or impossible to show how A causes B. Causation is obscured in the darkness of the Gloomy Prospect.
For the founders of the Academy, the lesson was: Fixate on whole cultures, not specific pieces of poverty. No specific intervention is going to turn around the life of a child or an adult in any consistent way. But if you can surround a person with a new culture, a different web of relationships, then they will absorb new habits of thought and behaviors in ways you will never be able to measure or understand. And if you do surround that person with a new, enriching culture, then you had better keep surrounding them with it because if they slip back into a different culture, then most of the gains will fade away.
The founders figured they would start not just a school but a counterculture. Their school would be an immersive environment that would give lower-class kids access to an achievement ethos. It couldn’t be totally hostile to the culture in which they lived, or else they would just reject it. But it would insist on the sort of norms, habits, and messages that had allowed the founders, sons of doctors and lawyers, to go to college. Their school would bluntly acknowledge that we live in an unequal and polarized society. It would declare forthrightly that poor kids need different sorts of institutional support than middle-class kids.
Their school would be “parent neutral,” which was a polite way of saying they would blot out the culture the poor kids’ parents were unconsciously handing down. The sociologist James Coleman had once found that parents and community have a greater effect on achievement than school. The founders of the Academy decided that their school would not just be a bunch of classrooms where math and English were taught. It would also be a neighborhood and a family. The school the pair envisioned would train the kids to see childhood as a ladder to college, a ladder out.
The difficult thing about emergence is that it is very hard in emergent systems to find the “root cause” of any problem. The positive side is that if you have negative cascades producing bad outcomes, it is also possible to have positive cascades producing good ones. Once you have a positive set of cultu
ral cues, you can get a happy avalanche as productive influences feed on and reinforce one another.
There was no way Erica was going to not be in this school. By the time she was in eighth grade, Erica had grown taller and prettier but no less stubborn. Some deep dissatisfaction had crept into her blood. She screamed at her mother and loved her fiercely, a tangle too complex for anybody to understand. On the streets with her peers, she argued, overreacted, and sometimes fought. At school she was both an excellent student and a problem. Somehow it had gotten into her head that life is a battle, and she lived on a warlike footing, antagonizing people for no good reason.
She was sometimes a bitch to people who were trying to help her. She knew she was being a bitch, and she knew it was wrong, but she didn’t stop. When she looked in the mirror, her motto was “I am strong.” She persuaded herself she hated her school, which she didn’t. She persuaded herself she hated her neighborhood, which she sort of did. Here was her true genius. She somehow understood she couldn’t change herself on her own. She couldn’t remain in her current environment and just turn her prospects around by force of individual willpower. She would always be subject to the same emotional cues. They would overpower conscious intention.
But she could make one decision—to change her environment. And if she could change her environment, she would be subject to a whole different set of cues and unconscious cultural influences. It’s easier to change your environment than to change your insides. Change your environment and then let the new cues do the work.
She spent the first part of eighth grade learning about the Academy, talking to students, asking her mother, and quizzing her teachers. One day in February, she heard that the board of the school had arrived for a meeting, and she decided in her own junior-warrior manner that she’d demand that they let her in.
She snuck into the school when a group of kids came out the back door for gym class, and she made her way to the conference room. She knocked, and entered the room. There was a group of tables pushed toward the middle of the room, with about twenty-five adults sitting around the outside of them. The two Academy founders were sitting in the middle on the far side of the tables.
“I would like to come to your school,” she said loud enough for the whole room to hear.
“How did you get in here?” somebody at the table barked.
“May I please come to your school next year?”
One of the founders smiled. “You see, we have a lottery system. If you enter your name, there is a drawing in April—”
“I would like to come to your school,” Erica interrupted, launching into the speech she had rehearsed in her head for months. “I tried to get into New Hope when I was ten, and they wouldn’t let me. I went down to the agency and I told the lady, but she wouldn’t let me. It took them three cops to get me out of there, but I’m thirteen now, and I’ve worked hard. I get good grades. I know appropriate behavior. I feel I deserve to go to your school. You can ask anyone. I have references.” She held out a piece of binder paper with her teachers’ names on it.
“What’s your name?” the founder asked.
“Erica.”
“You see, we have rules about this. Many people would like to come to the Academy, so we decided the fairest thing to do is to have a lottery each spring.”
“That’s just a way of saying no.”
“You’ll have as fair a chance as anyone.”
“That’s just a way of saying no. I need to go to the Academy. I need to go to college.”
Erica had nothing more to say. She just stood there silently. She decided it would take some more cops to take her away.
Sitting across from the founders was a great fat man. He was a hedge-fund manager who had made billions of dollars and largely funded the school. He was brilliant, but had the social graces of a gnat. He took a pen from his pocket and wrote something on a piece of paper. He looked at Erica one more time, folded the paper, and slid it across the table to the founders. They opened it up and read the note. It said, “Rig the fucking lottery.”
The founders were silent for a moment and looked at each other. Finally, one of them looked up and said in a low voice. “What did you say your name was?”
“Erica.”
“Listen, Erica, at the Academy we have rules. We have one set of rules for everybody. Those rules we follow to the letter. We demand discipline. Total discipline. So I’m only going to say this to you once. If you ever tell anybody about bursting in here and talking to us like that, I will personally kick you out of our school. Are we clear about that?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then write your name and address on a piece of paper. Put it on the table, and I will see you in September.”
The fat man heaved himself up out of his chair and handed Erica his pen and a little pad. She had never seen a pen like that, except on TV. She wrote out her name and address and her Social Security number, just to make sure, and she left.
When she was gone the members of the board just looked at one another. Then after a few seconds, everybody was sure she was out of earshot. The hedge-fund guy broke out into a grin. The room erupted in a wave of joyful laughter.
CHAPTER 8
SELF-CONTROL
THE ACADEMY CERTAINLY WAS A SHOCK FOR ERICA. IN THE FIRST place, it went on forever. School at the Academy lasted from eight in the morning until five in the evening. Erica also had to go on Saturday and for several weeks over the summer. Students who were performing below grade level spent twice as much time in school as other American students, and even students performing at grade level spent 50 percent more time there. Second, the school provided everything. There were the usual English and math classes—actually she took two separate English classes every day. But there was also a health clinic, psychological counseling, full meal services, and evening activities.
But the biggest shock was the emphasis on behavior. The Academy started from the ground up. It taught its students to look at someone who was talking to them, how to sit up in class, how to nod to signal agreement, how to shake hands and say hello on first meeting. Erica and her classmates spent the entire first session of her music class learning how to file into the room and take their seats. During the first weeks of school, they were taught how to walk down the hall, how to carry their books, how to say, “Excuse me,” if they bumped into one another. The teachers told them that, if they did the small stuff right, the big stuff would be much easier to master later on. Middle-class kids may have learned these lessons automatically, but many of the kids at the Academy had to be taught.
Another big shock was the chanting. Every school day began with what they called “school-wide circle time.” Every student gathered in the gym and they performed raps and chants together. They had a Respect Chant. They had a Knowledge-Is-Power call-and-response. They had a College Chant, in which they screamed out the names of prominent universities and vowed to make it to one of them. At the end of each rally, a gym teacher asked them the Questions: Why are you here? To get an education! How do you get it? Hard work! What do you do? Work hard! What do you use? Self-discipline! Where are you going? College! Why? To be master of my own destiny! How are you going to get there? Earn it! What is earned? Everything is earned!
Each class had its own graduation date. But the year was not the year they would graduate from the Academy. It was the year they would graduate from college four years later. Each classroom had an identity, but it was not Room 215 or Room 111. It was the name of the college the teacher who taught in it had attended: Michigan, Claremont, Indiana, or Wellesley. College was the Promised Land. College was the elevated circle these students would someday join.
In class, Erica learned about things she had never even heard about—life in Thailand and ancient Babylon. She was tested and assessed every six weeks, and the tests were used to mark her progress. If she surpassed expectations, she earned Scholar Dollars, with which she could buy privileges like free time and field trips. Her favorite cl
ass was orchestra, where she was taught to read music and started to play the Brandenburg Concerto. She made the honor roll her second term, which meant she could wear a blue shirt to school, instead of the white ones that were the standard uniform. Putting on that shirt for the first time, at an assembly in front of the whole school, was the single proudest event of her life up until that moment.
After school, she played tennis. Erica had never played an organized sport before. She had never so much as picked up a racket. But a few years earlier, two African American tennis stars had come to the school and donated money to build four tennis courts out back. A coach came in every day to teach the game. Erica decided she wanted to be on the team.
Erica became a much more serious student at the Academy, but there was something ferocious about the way she took up tennis. She became obsessed by it. She spent hours every afternoon pounding a ball against the wall. She put tennis posters on the walls of her room at home. She learned the geography of the world by learning about where tennis stars were born and where the tournaments were held. During freshman and sophomore years, in particular, she organized her life around the little yellow ball.
Tennis was serving some larger cosmic purpose in her mind. Walter Lippmann once wrote that “above all the other necessities of human nature, above the satisfaction of any other need, above hunger, love, pleasure, fame—even life itself—what a man most needs is the conviction that he is contained within the discipline of an ordered existence.” For a few years tennis organized Erica’s identity.
Erica was strong and fast, and though she never admitted it to anyone, she became convinced, even for just these two years, that tennis could be her path to fortune and fame. She saw herself at Wimbledon. She saw herself at the French Open. She saw herself back at the school telling future students how it had all begun.
Her e-mail address was tennisgirl1. Her online passwords had to do with tennis. The doodles on her notebooks were about tennis. Day after day, she picked up tips from the coach, read the online tennis sites, and watched tennis on TV. And day after day, her tennis improved. But there was an anger in her game that scared everyone around her. She was a determined and somewhat serious person in most of the realms of her life, but not an angry one. On the court, she was driven by impatience for everyone and everything. She never talked on the court or bantered with her partners. When she was winning, people relaxed around her, but when she was losing, they kept out of her way. If she had a bad practice session on the court, it ruined the rest of her day, and she went home foul and cranky.