The social animal : the hidden sources of love, character, and achievement / s.

David Brooks has always impressed me with his comments on the PBS show "Shields and Brooks," but I think this book is an intellectual mis-step.

Brooks creates a fictional couple into whose thoughts and motives he wields god-like insight. Everything they think and feel is perfectly explained through the theses of the past two decades' Business and Pop-Behaviorist best-sellers. It’s a frame that highlights that we’re not as rational as we think we are — there are lots of factors — psychological, biological, and sociological — that influence our behavior in predictable ways. When we are aware of these tendencies, we can make better decisions. The attempt to present realistic interpersonal dynamics don’t ring entirely true, as stories where a man writing the inner thoughts of a woman rarely can. This, however, is a narrative frame for his thesis and a sort of self-referential “proof.”

About halfway through the book, he leverages his constructed credential of "insightful observer of human nature" to attack rationalism; that it is reductive and thus necessarily misses emergent system properties. Brooks makes a case for sources of knowledge outside of rationalism, with proof by anecdote of people “knowing” things without having reasons for them. He constructs a straw man of rationalism, claiming that requiring evidence and analysis is “extremism” that is responsible for pogroms and other countless negatives in the modern world.

There are gaping holes in his supporting historical narrative, such as ignoring the 1500 year European Christian era between the Roman Empire and the Italian Renaissance, when Reason failed to take root in the culture. He ignores any possible negative outcome from religion, while zeroing in on the ones he attributes to “scientism,” a paper tiger indistinguishable from rationalism, and using that as justification for rejecting rationality as the sole judge of truth. His strong sense of dichotomies come off as sophomorically as a highschooler asserting you can either like art OR science, or that Classical music speaks to your mind while rock and roll appeals only to the flesh.

There are definitely some brain systems and social systems that store, preserve, and recall useful information -- discovered via rational science -- but there are also quite a few biases and assumptions that people have that are deleterious, and only cured with reason. Brooks bases his spirituality on this idea that irrational sources of information are valid, and that you can’t evaluate them with rational methods.

I understand what he’s trying to do here — break down your trust in rational thought, because people aren’t as rational as they think, and accept that irrational information is equal or perhaps superior in some cases — but this is a fundamental misunderstanding of what rationality is. It’s not a viewpoint or a philosophy; it’s a tool for determining whether our irrationally-sourced ideas could be True. No one has ever made the case that humans are naturally rational. It’s a tool we sometimes struggle to use because of our irrational natures.

David Brooks shouldn’t protect his faith by fleeing into irrationality; the fact that he goes this route make me think he believes his faith cannot be defended rationally.