The Social Animal: A Story of How Success Happens, by David Brooks

David Brooks’ The Social Animal aims to be a user-friendly guide to all the latest scientific research on the brain and the mind. The book takes the novel approach of explaining neuroscience and psychology through the creation of two fictional characters, which are followed through life to old age. The result is an interesting mess of a book, lacking both unity of theme and direction.

David Brooks is a columnist for The New York Times, and is a socially progressive, economically liberal conservative. I must confess to trying his previous work, Bobos in Paradise (2000), but found its glibness too much to bear after a hundred pages or so. (The word 'bobo', created by Brooks, is a contraction of bourgeois and bohemian.) In Bobos in Paradise Brooks took delight in cataloguing the conspicuous consumption of the middle and upper-middle classes, while also endorsing the contemporary capitalist structure that got people aspiring to such fatuous lifestyles. Brooks seemed certainly clever, but whether he had any intellectual ideas to offer was hard to determine.

His latest book, The Social Animal, I did get right through to the end. The aim of the book was to bring together Brooks’ reading on all the latest neuroscience and psychology, distilling it into a user friendly format. As Brooks says, “It’s an attempt to integrate science and psychology with sociology, politics, cultural commentary and the literature of success.”

The odd thing about The Social Animal is the way Brooks has gone about presenting it. Instead of organising his ideas into a unified theme, he creates two fictional characters, Erica and Harold, and follows them through life to old age. As the characters and their lives are described, the narrative is interrupted with asides from the author, filling in the reader on the latest scientific research on the brain and mind. Studies, up to the minute research papers and famous authors are referred to in an attempt to balance out the fictional part with non-fiction.

The book has its interesting moments, but is not really successful. The basic theme of the book is that the subconscious is more powerful than the rational, conscious part of the brain. Our subconscious brain always makes decisions before our rational brain ‘thinks’ out a decision. In essence, we’re all ruled by this vast, yet invisible, inner world, and this has dramatic effects on how successful we are in life.

In all of this, its tempting to think that Brooks is merely following a new area of study called behavioural economics, which aims to show that humans do not act rationally when it comes to money. That’s all fine and good, but Brooks doesn’t reach any conclusions, nor does he shape an argument in any particular direction. It’s hard to figure out what the take-away from The Social Animal is. The subtitle, ‘A Story of How Success Happens’, is completely baffling, because it’s hard to figure out how his two characters, Erica and Harold, achieve success at all. One becomes an alcoholic, and the other has a checkered corporate career that is hardly an inspirational model. If Brooks wanted to add to the literature of success (one of his stated aims), he should have shown readers what he meant by success, and how to achieve it.

David Brooks is no fiction writer, but the good news is there are plenty of excellent novels, plays and poems that can provide wisdom and awe inspiring insights about the human condition. Push aside all the latest science on the mind, and instead reach for Shakespeare, Dickens, Jane Austen and a host of other classic authors who can do a better job of explaining our subliminal selves.

The Social Animal: A Story of How Success Happens, by David Brooks. Published by Short Books. ISBN: 978-1-907595-44-8