Does David Brooks know why we do what we do? No.

Image by Getty Images North America via Daylife

David Brooks deserves an A for effort for his column last Monday, “Where the Wild Things Are, even though he probably deserves no higher than a gentleman’s C for the final grade. A really unnecessary mistake marred the column, but it was his deeply interesting failure to consider the implications of  his topic that I want to get to (so please bear with me while I summarize the piece and take the irresistible easy shot).

Brooks, continuing his post-Bush interest in social science research, took up nothing less than the enduring moral question of why do we do what we do. He starts by presenting two answers.

The first says behavior is an expression of enduring character, virtuous good people do virtuous good things. Evil acts come from, well, evil people. A great example of this way of thinking comes from an earlier David Brooks (2006) defending the Iraq invasion,

We have all been raised on stories in which good triumphs over evil, and in these stories good does not triumph by chance. It triumphs because honesty, virtue and decency pay off in the long run. Evil, meanwhile, contains the seeds of its own destruction. Those who lie, torture and kill eventually become entrapped by their own sins.

via Savagery’s Stranglehold – New York Times.

The second answer comes from what he says is 100 years of research. This model maintains there is nothing like an essential unitary character driving behavior.

In this view, people don’t have one permanent thing called character. We each have a multiplicity of tendencies inside, which are activated by this or that context. As Paul Bloom of Yale put it in an essay for The Atlantic last year, we are a community of competing selves. These different selves “are continually popping in and out of existence. They have different desires, and they fight for control — bargaining with, deceiving, and plotting against one another.”

via Op-Ed Columnist – Where the Wild Things Are – NYTimes.com.

Seeing multiplicity discussed intelligently in the paper of record makes this psychologist very happy. Unfortunately, Brooks made the unnecessary mistake of mapping these two story-lines for being human onto a difference between philosophy and psychology and that distinction is false. In fact, in the article Brooks cites Paul Bloom writes,

The notion of different selves within a single person is not new. It can be found in Plato, and it was nicely articulated by the 18th-century Scottish philosopher David Hume, who wrote, “I cannot compare the soul more properly to any thing than to a republic or commonwealth, in which the several members are united by the reciprocal ties of government and subordination.” Walt Whitman gave us a pithier version: “I am large, I contain multitudes.”

via The Atlantic Online | November 2008 | First Person Plural | Paul Bloom.

Roger Frie, a professor at Simon Fraser University who hit the intellectual trifecta by being a philosopher, psychologist, and psychoanalyst, wrote on a listserv in response to Brooks:

It makes a questionable distinction between philosophy and psychology. Prior to the emergence of modern psychology, numerous philosophers wrote about multiplicity. It’s not a new concept; nor is it limited only to psychology or psychoanalysis.

Perhaps the most interesting among the philosophers are Friedrich Nietzsche and William James (also a psychologist). Each wrote about multiple selves. Nietzsche provided Freud with inspiration for his early concept of dissociation, and later, repression. A similar link can be made in Sullivan’s work, between his fascination with the process of dissociation, and the American pragmatists of the Chicago School.

Continental philosophers and American pragmatists have often sought to elucidate the nature of experience by using the notion of multiplicity. At the same time, they provide a means to balance the current emphasis on multiplicity, dissociation, and discontinuity, with an appreciation of the importance of coherence and continuity.

via The William Alanson White Institute Psychoanalytic Program listserv

Apparently, Brooks was not even close to accuracy with his dichotomy. Clearly, he is struggling, and I commend him for wrestling in public with thorny intellectual issues. But painting the notion of a single enduring character organizing what we do and who we are with the validating brush of philosophy is not true, however much he needs to say it as a step in his own intellectual evolution.

The deeply interesting mistake

Finally! The deeply interesting mistake is in what he ignores.  If, as he writes “We each have a multiplicity of tendencies inside, which are activated by this or that context” then we have to consider the implications of radical changes in context.

Given my topic here at Simu-Nation, I do not mean changes in politics and economics, nor changes in surprisingly powerful social networks. Rather, I mean the technological contexts within which we live today.  The point being that our tools very well may be profoundly changing what it means to be human.

If context activates one among multiple tendencies to be this or that person, and technological advances are radically altering the contexts within which most of us function, then are we being far too passive in response to technological change? Market forces drive which technologies succeed, and as a consequence creates the techno-context that will give shape to our lives. But do we really want engineers and marketers deciding who and what we will be based primarily on what sells, on what increases quarterly profit?

Some, like the cognitive scientist Andy Clark who study what is called “situated cognition,” point out that being remade by the tools we make is the very definition of human nature. To use the title of his 2004 book, we are all natural born cyborgs, the implications of which are tremendous. We are not just choosing which new gadget to buy or service to use, we are deciding basic existential questions such as who we want to be and how our life will feel.

So, at the end, when Brooks says “… we’re in one of those periods when words like character fall into dispute and change their meaning” I want to shout at him, NO! It is not about the meaning of a word. We are in one of those periods when being a character, being human, is in dispute and is changing.