The Social Animal

by David Brooks

  Some of the mistakes had emanated from the left. In the 1950s and 1960s, well-intentioned reformers saw run-down neighborhoods with decaying tenement houses, and vowed to replace them with shiny new housing projects. Those old neighborhoods may have been decrepit, but they contained mutual support systems and community bonds. When they were destroyed and replaced with the new projects, people’s lives were materially better but spiritually worse. The projects turned into atomized wastelands, ultimately unfit for human habitation.

  Welfare policies in the 1970s undermined families. Government checks lifted the material conditions of the recipients but in the midst of a period of cultural disruption, they enabled lonely young girls to give birth out of wedlock, thus decimating the habits and rituals that led to intact families.

  Other policy failures came from the right. In the age of deregulation, giant chains like Walmart decimated local shop owners, and the networks of friendship and community they helped create. Global financial markets took over small banks, so that the local knowledge of a town banker was replaced by a manic herd of traders thousands of miles away.

  Abroad, free-market experts flooded into Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. They offered mountains of advice on privatization but almost none on how to rebuild communal trust and law and order, which are the real seedbeds of prosperity. The United States invaded Iraq, believing that merely by replacing the nation’s dictator and political institutions they could easily remake a nation. The invaders were oblivious to the psychological effects a generation of tyranny had wrought on Iraqi culture, the vicious hatreds that lurked just below its surface—circumstances that quickly produced an ethnic bloodbath.

  Harold’s list of failed policies went on and on: financial deregulation that assumed global traders needed no protection from their own emotional contagions; enterprise zones based on the suppositions that, if you merely reduced tax rates in inner cities, then local economies would thrive; scholarship programs designed to reduce college-dropout rates, which pretended the main problem was lack of financial aid, when in fact only about 8 percent of students are unable to complete college for purely financial reasons. The more important problems have to do with emotional disengagement from college and lack of academic preparedness, intangible factors the prevailing mind-set found it hard to factor and acknowledge.

  In short, government had tried to fortify material development, but had ended up weakening the social and emotional development that underpins it. Government was not the only factor in the thinning of society. A cultural revolution had decimated old habits and traditional family structures. An economic revolution had replaced downtowns with big isolated malls with chain stores. The information revolution had replaced community organizations that held weekly face-to-face meetings with specialized online social networking where like found like. But government policy had unwittingly played a role in all these changes.

  The result was the diminution of social capital that Robert Putnam described in Bowling Alone and other books. People became more loosely affiliated. The webs of relationship that habituate self-restraint, respect for others, and social sympathy lost their power. The effects were sometimes liberating for educated people, who possessed the social capital to explore the new loosely knit world, but they were devastating for those without that sort of human capital. Family structures began to disintegrate, especially for the less educated. Out-of-wedlock births skyrocketed. Crime rose. Trust in institutions collapsed.

  The state had to step in in an attempt to restore order. As British philosopher Phillip Blond has written, the individualist revolutions did not end up creating loose, free societies. They produced atomized societies in which the state grows in an attempt to fill the gaps created by social disintegration. The fewer informal social constraints there are in any society, the more formal state power there has to be. In Britain you wound up with skyrocketing crime rates, and, as a result, four million security cameras. Neighborhoods disintegrated and the welfare state stepped in, further absorbing or displacing the remaining social-support networks. A careening market, unconstrained by the traditions or informal standards, required intrusive prosecutors to police them. As Blond observed, “Look at the society we have become: We are a bipolar nation, a bureaucratic centralized state that presides over an increasingly fragmented, disempowered and isolated citizenry.”

  Without a healthy social fabric, politics became polarized. One party came to represent the state. The other came to represent the market. One party tried to shift power and money to government; the other tried to shift those things to vouchers and other market mechanisms. Both of them neglected and ignored the intermediary institutions of civil life.

  In socially depleted nations, many people began to form their personal identities around their political faction. They had nothing else to latch on to. Politicians and media polemicists took advantage of the psychic vacuum and turned parties into cults, demanding and rewarding complete loyalty to the tribe.

  Once politics became a contest pitting one identity group against another, it was no longer possible to compromise. Everything became a status war between my kind of people and your kind of people. Even a small concession came to seem like moral capitulation. Those who tried to build relationships across party lines were ostracized. Among politicians, loyalty to the party overshadowed loyalty to institutions like the Senate or the House. Politics was no longer about trade-offs, it was a contest for honor and group supremacy. Amidst this partisan ugliness, public trust in government and political institutions collapsed.

  In a densely connected society, people can see the gradual chain of institutions that connect family to neighborhood, neighborhood to town, town to regional association, regional associations to national associations, and national associations to the federal government. In a stripped-down society, that chain has been broken and the sense of connection gets broken with it. The state seems at once alien and intrusive. People lose faith in the government’s ability to do the right thing most of the time and come to have cynical and corrosive attitudes about their national leaders.

  Instead of being bound by fraternal bonds, and occasionally responding to a call for joint sacrifice, a cynical “grab what you can before the other guys steal it” mentality prevails. The result is skyrocketing public debt and a public unwilling to accept the sacrifice of either tax increases or spending cuts required for fiscal responsibility. Neither side trusts the other to hold up their end of any deal. Neither party believes the other would honestly participate in truly shared sacrifice. Without social trust, the political system devolves into a brutal shoving match.

  The Soft Side

  Harold believed that the cognitive revolution had the potential to upend these individualistic political philosophies, and the policy approaches that grew from them. The cognitive revolution demonstrated that human beings emerge out of relationships. The health of a society is determined by the health of those relationships, not by the extent to which it maximizes individual choice.

  Therefore, freedom should not be the ultimate end of politics. The ultimate focus of political activity is the character of the society. Political, religious, and social institutions influence the unconscious choice architecture undergirding behavior. They can either create settings that nurture virtuous choices or they can create settings that undermine them. While the rationalist era put the utility-maximizing individual at the center of political thought, the next era, Harold believed, would put the health of social networks at the center of thought. One era was economo-centric. The next would be socio-centric.

  The socio-centric intellectual currents, he hoped, would restore character talk and virtue talk to the center of political life. You can pump money into poor areas, but without cultures that foster self-control, you won’t get social mobility. You can raise or lower tax rates, but without trust and confidence, companies won’t form and people will not invest in one another. You can establish elections but without responsible citiz
ens, democracy won’t flourish. After a lifetime spent designing and writing about public policy, the criminologist James Q. Wilson arrived at this core truth: “At root, in almost every area of public concern, we are seeking to induce persons to act virtuously, whether as schoolchildren, applicants for public assistance, would-be lawbreakers or voters and public officials.”

  On his wall, Harold had tacked another quotation, from Benjamin Disraeli: “The spiritual nature of man is stronger than codes or constitutions. No government can endure which does not recognize that for its foundation, and no legislation last which does not flow from this foundation.”

  Everything came down to character, and that meant everything came down to the quality of relationships, because relationships are the seedbeds of character. The reason life and politics are so hard is that relationships are the most important, but also the most difficult, things to understand.

  In short, Harold entered a public-policy world in which people were used to thinking in hard, mechanistic terms. He thought he could do some good if he threw emotional and social perspectives into the mix.

  Socialism

  As Harold worked his way through the process of discovering how his basic suppositions applied to the world of politics and policy, he came to lament the fact that the word “socialism” was already taken. The nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinkers who had called themselves socialists weren’t really socialists. They were statists. They valued the state over society.

  But true socialism would put social life first. He imagined that the cognitive revolution could foster more communitarian styles of politics. There would be a focus on the economic community. Did people in different classes have a sense they were joined in a common enterprise, or were the gaps between classes too wide? There would be a focus on the common culture. Were the core values of the society expressed and self-confidently reinforced? Were they reflected in the nation’s institutions? Did new immigrants successfully assimilate? In the political sphere Harold imagined, conservatives would emphasize that it is hard for the state to change culture and character. Liberals would argue that we still, in pragmatic ways, have to try. Both would speak the language of fraternity, and inspire with a sense that we are all in this together.

  Harold didn’t really know whether he should call himself a liberal or a conservative at this point. One of his guiding principles was drawn from a famous quotation from Daniel Patrick Moynihan: “The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.”

  He did know that his job in Washington was to show the locals that character and culture really shape behavior, and that government could, in limited ways, shape culture and character. State power is like fire—warming when contained, fatal when it grows too large. In his view, government should not run people’s lives. That only weakens the responsibility and virtue of the citizens. But government could influence the setting in which lives are lived. Government could, to some extent, nurture settings that serve as nurseries for fraternal relationships. It could influence the spirit of the citizenry.

  Part of that is done simply by performing the elemental tasks of the state, establishing a basic framework of order and security—defending against external attack, regulating economic activity to punish predators, protecting property rights, punishing crime, upholding rule of law, providing a basic level of social insurance and civic order.

  Some of this is done by reducing the programs that weaken culture and character. The social fabric is based on the idea that effort leads to reward. But very often, government rewards people who have not put in the effort. It does this with good intentions (the old welfare programs that discouraged work) and it does it with venal intentions (lobbyists secure earmarks, tax breaks, and subsidies so their companies can secure revenue without having to earn it in the marketplace). These programs weaken social trust and public confidence. By separating effort from reward, they pollute the atmosphere. They send the message that the system is rigged and society is corrupt.

  But Harold thought government, properly led, could also play a more constructive role. Just as remote and centralized power creates a servile citizenry, decentralized power and community self-government creates an active and cooperative citizenry. Infrastructure projects that create downtown hubs strengthen relationships and spur development. Charter schools bring parents together. Universities that are active beyond campus become civic and entrepreneurial hot spots. National service programs bring people together across class lines. Publicly funded, locally administered social-entrepreneurship funds encourage civic activism and community-service programs. Simple and fair tax policies rouse energies, increase dynamism, lift the animal spirits, and encourage creative destruction.

  Aristotle wrote that legislators habituate citizens. Whether they mean to or not, legislators encourage certain ways of living and discourage other ways. Statecraft is inevitably soulcraft.

  Experiments in Thinking

  Harold began writing a series of essays for policy journals on what his soft side approach might mean in the real world. All his essays had a common theme: How the fracturing of unconscious bonds was at the root of many social problems and how government could act to repair this tear in the social fabric.

  He began in areas as far removed as possible from the gushy world of emotion and relationships. His first essay was about global terrorism. Many commentators had originally assumed that terrorism was a product of poverty and a lack of economic opportunity. It was a problem with material roots. But research into the backgrounds of terrorists established that, according to one database, 75 percent of the anti-Western terrorists come from middle-class homes and an amazing 63 percent had attended some college. The problem is not material but social. The terrorists are, as Olivier Roy argues, detached from any specific country and culture. They are often caught in the no-man’s-land between the ancient and modern. They invent a make-believe ancient purity to give their lives meaning. They take up violent jihad because it attaches them to something. They are generally not politically active before they join terror groups, but are looking for some larger creed to give their existence shape and purpose. That choice can only be prevented if there are other causes to give them a different route to fulfillment.

  Then Harold wrote about military strategy, the essence of guns-and-mayhem machismo. Harold described how military officers in Iraq and Afghanistan had found that it was impossible to defeat an insurgency on the battlefield by simply killing as many of the bad guys as possible. The only route to victory, they had learned, was through a counterinsurgency strategy called COIN, which started with winning the trust of the population. The soldiers and marines discovered that it was not enough to secure a village; they had to hold it so that people could feel safe; they had to build schools, medical facilities, courts, and irrigation ditches; they had to reconvene town councils and give power to village elders. It was only when this nation-building activity was well along that the local societies would be strong enough and cohesive enough to help them provide intelligence about and repel the enemy. Harold pointed out that the hardest political activity—warfare—depended on the softest social skills—listening, understanding, and building trust. Victory in this kind of war is not about piling up dead bodies; it is about building communities.

  His next essay was about global AIDS policy. The West had thrown great technical knowledge at this problem and produced drugs that could help treat this plague. But the effectiveness of these drugs was limited if people continued to engage in the behaviors that lead to the disease.

  Harold pointed out that technical knowledge alone would not change behavior. Raising awareness is necessary but insufficient. Surveys show that vast majorities in the most severely afflicted countries understand the dangers of HIV, but they behave in risky ways anyway. Providing condoms is necessary but insufficient. Most people in these countries
have access to condoms. But that doesn’t mean they actually use them, as rising or stable infection rates demonstrate. Economic development, too, is necessary but insufficient. The people who most aggressively spread the disease—often miners or truck drivers—are relatively well off. Providing health-care facilities is also necessary but insufficient. Harold described a hospital in Namibia where 858 women were receiving treatments. After a year of effort, they could get only five of their male partners to come in for testing. Though it meant a death sentence, the men would not come to the hospital. In their culture, men did not go near hospitals.

  Harold visited a village in Namibia where all the middle-aged people were dead from AIDS. The children had nursed their parents into their graves. And yet, against all the most primal incentives of survival, the children were replicating the exact same behaviors that had led to their parents’ deaths. He pointed out that the cause of this behavior defied all logic, as well as the principle of rational self-interest as commonly understood. The programs that actually changed behavior did not focus primarily upon logic and self-interest. The programs that worked best tried to change an entire pattern of life. They didn’t merely try to change decisions about safe sex. They tried to create virtuous people, who would not put themselves in the path of temptation. These programs were often led by religious leaders. These men and women spoke in the language of right and wrong, of vice and virtue. The people leading these programs spoke the language of “ought.” They talked about salvation and biblical truth, and safer sexual activity was a byproduct of a much larger change in outlook.

  This is a language unaddressed by technical knowledge. It’s a language that has to be spoken by an elder, a neighbor, by people who know one another’s names. Harold pointed out that the West has thrown a tremendous amount of medical and technical knowledge at the HIV/AIDS problem, but not enough moral and cultural knowledge, the kind of knowledge that changes lives, viewpoints, and morality, and through those larger patterns alters the unconscious basis of behavior.