by David Brooks
In short, the rationalism method has yielded many great discoveries, but when it is used to explain or organize the human world, it does have one core limitation. It highly values conscious cognition—what you might call Level 2 cognition—which it can see, quantify, formalize, and understand. But it is blind to the influence of unconscious—what you might call Level 1 cognition—which is cloudlike, nonlinear, hard to see, and impossible to formalize. Rationalists have a tendency to lop off or diminish all information that is not calculable according to their methodologies.
Lionel Trilling diagnosed the problem in The Liberal Imagination when he noted that so long as politics or commerce “moves toward organization, it tends to select the emotions and qualities that are most susceptible to organization. As it carries out its active and positive ends it unconsciously limits its view of the world to what it can deal with, and unconsciously tends to develop theories and principles, particularly in relation to the nature of the human mind, that justify its limitation.” As a result, “it drifts toward a denial of the emotions and the imagination. And in the very interest of affirming its confidence in the power of the mind, it inclines to constrict and make mechanical its conception of the mind.”
Rationalism looks at the conscious mind, and assumes that that is all there is. It cannot acknowledge the importance of unconscious processes, because once it dips its foot in that dark and bottomless current, all hope of regularity and predictability is gone. Rationalists gain prestige and authority because they have supposedly mastered the science of human behavior. Once the science goes, all their prestige goes with it.
This scientism has expressed itself most powerfully, over the last fifty years, in the field of economics. Economics did not start out as a purely rationalist enterprise. Adam Smith believed that human beings are driven by moral sentiments and their desire to seek and be worthy of the admiration of others. Thorstein Veblen, Joseph Schumpeter, and Friedrich Hayek expressed themselves through words not formulas. They stressed that economic activity was conducted amidst pervasive uncertainty. Actions are guided by imagination as well as reason. People can experience discontinuous paradigm shifts, suddenly seeing the same situation in radically different ways. John Maynard Keynes argued that economics is a moral science and reality could not be captured in universal laws calculable by mathematics. Economics, he wrote, “deals with introspection and with values … it deals with motives, expectations, psychological uncertainties. One had to be constantly on guard against treating the material as constant and homogenous.”
But over the course of the twentieth century, the rationalist spirit came to dominate economics. Physicists and other hard scientists were achieving great things, and social scientists sought to match their rigor and prestige. The influential economist Irving Fisher wrote his doctoral dissertation under the supervision of a physicist, and later helped build a machine with levers and pumps to illustrate how an economy works. Paul Samuelson applied the mathematical principles of thermodynamics to economics. On the finance side, Emanuel Derman was a physicist who became a financier and played a central role in developing the models for derivatives.
While valuable tools for understanding economic behavior, mathematical models were also like lenses that filtered out certain aspects of human nature. They depended on the notion that people are basically regular and predictable. They assume, as George A. Akerlof and Robert Shiller have written, “that variations in individual feelings, impressions and passions do not matter in the aggregate and that economic events are driven by inscrutable technical factors or erratic government action.”
Within a very short time economists were emphasizing monetary motivations to the exclusion of others. Homo Economicus was separated from Homo Sociologus, Homo Psychologicus, Homo Ethicus, and Homo Romanticus. You ended up with a stick figure view of human nature.
The Disaster
Taggert and his team didn’t study intellectual history. Rationalism was just around them in the air they breathed, shaping their assumptions and methods in ways they did not appreciate. The rationalist mentality was in the economics courses they took in college, the strategy courses they took in business school, and the management books they read every day. It was the mentality that narrowed useful information down to the sort of thing that could be captured on PowerPoint slides.
As the recession deepened and lingered, Erica watched them make a series of disastrous moves that threatened to destroy the company. Forced to cut costs, they first cut every single practice that might have fostered personal bonds. For example, they took the company phone number off the Web site so it was nearly impossible for a customer with a problem to call and talk to a human being. They eliminated all the company gatherings that used to build camaraderie. They cut office space. Some people who had worked for decades to get a real office now found themselves in ego-destroying cubicles. The floor plan had looked so efficient when the management team had presented it.
Jim Collins argues that institutional decline is like a staged disease. Companies can look fine on the outside but already be sick within, and once they get sick, there is a certain progression they follow on the way to their doom. If that’s true, then the cable company went through all of the phases all at once.
At first, the Intercom executives were thrilled by the economic slowdown. “In China, the word for ‘crisis’ also means ‘opportunity’!” they would tell one another. They saw sliding revenues as a call to enact all their experiments. The launched off on a hyperactive process of reorganization and restructuring. They relieved division heads, and put in new people. They put out a new long-term strategy called Leapfrog Growth. They were going to grow the company at all costs, pour money into sectors that promised 10 percent growth, and get rid of divisions that were just crawling along. “We no longer have the luxury of doing what we’ve always done,” Taggert would bark out at meetings. “We have to rip up the playbook. Think anew.”
Soon, there were even more acquisitions. Taggert, bored with running a cable company, bought a television network. Now he could hang around with the stars. He could go to dinner parties and talk about the prime-time lineup. He didn’t bother to think about whether a company providing a technical service could really mesh with a company providing artistic product.
There were other acquisitions—a biotech firm, an online appliance store. Erica watched her colleagues as they got swept up in the seduction of doing the deal. After each one, a triumphant memo would go around the executive suits. This deal allows us to “double our reach … transform our company.… In a single move we revolutionize the landscape.… This is an absolute gamechanger.… We now have a blockbuster product that will herald a new era.… Today we witness a new dawn and a new beginning.” Each deal was supposed to be the silver bullet that pulled the company out of its slide, but weeks and months later, the slide was still there, only with more debt.
As everything new was being polished, everything old was being squeezed. Old suppliers were squeezed, contractors were cut back, old employees were told to do more with less. A lifeboat mentality began to pervade the company—month by month, the weak were thrown overboard, and the survivors gripped the gunnels more tightly. Morale suffered. Customer engagement plunged. When bad news came in, there was a search for those responsible, but somehow responsibility could never be assigned. Each decision had been made by a layering of committees. When everyone was responsible, no one was.
Erica watched the debacle with grim disgust. She had withstood the death of her own company, which was more or less unavoidable. Now she was going to be part of one of the worst management fiascos in the history of capitalism. Who was going to hire her after that?
Month after month, the numbers got worse and worse. One day she was at a meeting when a new set of revenue numbers were announced. “You must have that wrong,” one of Taggert’s butt boys responded. Erica heard a spontaneous groan from the back of the room. No one else seemed to notice, but when propriety allowed, Erica
swiveled her head over to see who had made the noise. It was a jowly older guy, with white hair, wearing a white short-sleeve shirt, and a red and blue rep tie. She’d seen this guy at many of the bigger meetings, but she had never heard him say anything. She stared at him. He had his eyes down, staring at his meaty hands. Then he looked up and their eyes locked. He smirked, and she turned away.
After the meeting she followed him down the hallway, and eventually pulled up alongside him. “What did you think?” she ventured. He just looked at her suspiciously.
“Pathetic,” she finally whispered.
“Fucking pathetic. Unbelievably fucking pathetic,” he replied.
And so Project Valkyrie was born.
The guy’s name was Raymond. He’d worked for the company for thirty-two years. They couldn’t get rid of him because no one else knew the technology, but they put him in a job far away from decision making where he ended up cleaning up other people’s messes. Through him, Erica learned there were others in the company just as disgusted as she was—a lot of them, actually. They set up a dissident underground. They had a samizdat network on their private e-mail accounts. At first they just bitched and moaned, and then they planned. Erica persuaded them this action was a matter of survival. If the company went down, they’d all be destroyed. If the company went down, then an institution they had spent their lives building would be gone. Surely they weren’t going to just sit there and await their fates. Surely something could be done.
CHAPTER 15
MÉTIS
ERICA SPENT HER DAYS BEING APPALLED BY TAGGERT AND his minions. At night, sometimes late at night, she’d come home and vent to Harold. Harold couldn’t really help her with concrete business advice. He’d drifted away from the corporate world over the years. But he did try to give her some help on how to think about her problems.
Harold was now deeply ensconced at the Historical Society. He’d begun writing catalogue copy for the exhibitions, but he’d been promoted and now was a curator and helped organize exhibitions. The Historical Society was a sleepy old institution, started in the nineteenth century, with countless artifacts in its storerooms. Harold would spend spare hours down in the basement, poking through old boxes and files. Sometimes he’d go into the vault, where the Society’s most precious treasures were stored.
Foremost among these was a dress an actress had worn at Ford’s Theatre the day Lincoln was shot. Just after the assassination, she had rushed up to the presidential box and had nestled Lincoln’s head in her lap as people tried to treat his wound. The dress had a loud floral print, and Lincoln’s bloodstains splattered all over it.
One day, early in his tenure, Harold had gone down to the basement alone, put on white gloves, and slowly pulled the dress from its box. He laid it gently across his lap. It is hard to describe the feelings of reverence that swept through him at that moment. The historian Johan Huizinga came closest: “A feeling of immediate contact with the past is a sensation as deep as the purest enjoyment of art; it is an almost ecstatic sensation of no longer being myself, of overflowing into the world around me, of touching the essence of things, of through history experiencing the truth.”
When he was lost in his artifacts, Harold felt he had reached through time and entered another age. The longer he worked at the Society, the more he immersed himself in the past. He’d organize an exhibition on a certain period—the Victorian age, the American Revolution, or some time long before—and he’d go on eBay and purchase little prints, newspapers and knickknacks from the period. He’d hold them in his hands and imagine the hands that had held them. He’d stare at them through a magnifying glass and try to cross the centuries.
Going into his office was like going into a lost age. Save for his laptop and his books, there was nothing at all made in Harold’s lifetime—the furniture, the pens, the prints, the busts, and the carpets. Harold wouldn’t have wanted to actually live in an age of warriors or an age of aristocrats, but he was stirred by old ideals—classical Greek honor, Medieval chivalry, the Victorian code of the gentleman.
After one exhibit, a publisher noticed Harold’s catalogue copy and asked him to write a book about Samuel F. B. Morse. After that, Harold churned out mid-list history books and biographies at the rate of about one every two years. He never became a David McCullough. For some reason he never took on the really big figures—Napoleon, Lincoln, Washington, Franklin Roosevelt. But he focused on admirable, accomplished men and women, and in a quieter way gave his readers models of how to live.
At the time Erica was struggling with Taggert, Harold was working on a book about the British Enlightenment. He was doing a group portrait of David Hume, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, and some of the thinkers, politicians, economists, and conversationalists who had dominated eighteenth-century British thought. One evening he told Erica about the difference between the French and British Enlightenments, because he thought it might be useful to her at work.
The French Enlightenment was led by thinkers like Descartes, Rousseau, Voltaire, and Condorcet. These were philosophers who confronted a world of superstition and feudalism and sought to expose it to the clarifying light of reason. Inspired by the scientific revolution, they had great faith in the power of individual reason to detect error and logically arrive at universal truth. Taggert and his team were the dumbed-down children of the French Enlightenment.
But, Harold told her, there was a different Enlightenment going on at roughly the same time. Leaders of the British Enlightenment acknowledged the importance of reason. They were not irrationalists. But they believed that individual reason is limited and of secondary importance. “Reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them,” David Hume wrote. “We are generally men of untaught feelings,” Edmund Burke asserted. “We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason, because we suspect that this stock in each man is small.”
Whereas the leaders of the French Enlightenment spoke the language of logic, science, and universal rules, the leaders of the British Enlightenment emphasized the power of the sentiments and the affections. In effect, members of the British Enlightenment based their view of human nature on the idea that behavior is largely shaped by the unconscious, Level 1 cognition. Early in his career, Edmund Burke wrote a book on aesthetics called A Philosophical Inquiry into Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. He had noticed that there is a great deal of commonality in what people find beautiful. Human beings are not blank slates to be filled in by education. They are born and raised with certain preferences, affections, and aversions. The “senses and imagination captivate the soul before understanding is ready either to join with them or to oppose them,” he wrote.
Whereas the members of the French Enlightenment imagined a state of nature in which autonomous individuals formed social contracts for their mutual benefit, members of the British Enlightenment stressed that people are born with a social sense, which plays out beneath the level of awareness. People are born with a sense of “fellow feeling,” a natural sympathy for other people’s pain and pleasure. They are guided by a desire to be admired and to be worthy of admiration. Morality, these writers argued, flows from these semiconscious sentiments, not from logical deductions derived from abstract laws.
Whereas the children of the French Enlightenment tended to see society and its institutions as machines, to be taken apart and reengineered, children of the British Enlightenment tended to see them as organisms, infinitely complex networks of living relationships. In their view, it’s often a mistake to dissect a problem into discrete parts because the truth is found in the nature of the connections between the things you are studying. Context is crucial. Abstract universals are to be distrusted. Historical precedents are more useful guides than universal principles.
The members of the British Enlightenment made a distinction between change and reform. Change is an engineering process that replaces the fundamental natu
re of an institution. Reform is a medicinal process that preserves the essence while repairing wounds and reviving the essence. Harold tried to explain how the methods of the British Enlightenment might help Erica understand Taggert’s failings and think about alternative ways of proceeding.
The Next Question
And in truth, this debate between pure reason on one side and intuition and affection on the other is one of the oldest. Intellectual history has oscillated between rationalist and romantic periods, or as Alfred North Whitehead put it, between eras that are simpleminded and those that are muddleheaded. During simpleminded periods, rationalist thinkers reduced human behavior to austere mathematical models. During muddleheaded eras, intuitive leaders and artists guide the way. Sometimes imagination grows too luxuriant. Sometimes reason grows too austere.
The cognitive revolution of the past thirty years has provided a new burst of insight into these old questions. The new findings strongly indicate that the British Enlightenment view of human nature is more accurate than the French Enlightenment view. Thinkers from the French Enlightenment imagined that we are Rational Animals, distinguished from other animals by our power of logic. Marxists and others in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries imagined that we are Material Animals, shaped by the physical conditions of our lives. But the thinkers from the British Enlightenment were right to depict us as Social Animals.
But this raises new questions: Level 1 processes are important, but exactly how smart are they? How much should we trust them?
These were not issues in the old days when the passions and sentiments were thought to be brutish, unruly, and primitive—Dr. Jekyll’s Mr. Hyde. But now we know they are more subtle and sophisticated than that. What we don’t have is a consensus description of our unconscious strengths and weaknesses.