David Brooks: American Neurosymb-pologist

At the risk of further ramifying the already intimidating thicket of pseudo-academic jargon I like to dignify with the title "The Language of Symbology," I think that after Bremselhacker's extremely productive theorization of "symb-pology" and subsequent investigations in neurosymbology, we can hardly avoid the inevitable reality of neurosymb-pology.  David Brooks, may God have mercy on his soul, has offered what I predict will stand as the type and figure of this discourse for some time to the New Yorker today, entitled "Social Animal: How the new sciences of human nature can help make sense of a life."  I am going to attempt a brief analyisis in which I will not use the word "nauseating" once, less out of mere politeness than out of a sincere commitment to Bruno Latour's call to avoid accusations of fetishism and respond to the objects of critique "super-critically".

This is Brooks' argument, as I understand it:

Scions of the American upper-middle class "like many Americans generally," often experience a sense that their lives have been "distorted by a giant cultural bias."  His key example, which he returns to in the conclusion, is the anxious indecision provoked by being confronted with a choice between cloudberry and ginger-pomegranate flavored gelatos, and he takes this as emblematic of the ways in which we are conditioned by our culture into patterns of cognition which ill-equip us for the most important things in life.  "In short, these achievers have a sense that they are shallower than they need to be."  He clearly implies that this disconnect has occured because of "the atrophy of theology and philosophy," although he does not analyze this development in detail.  However, we are not to worry because (he says, adopting a tone which would bring a tear to Lynne MacTaggart's eye and I believe corresponds more or less exactly to one of the final lines of The Lost Symbol,) "we are living in the middle of a revolution in consciousness." 

Over the past few decades, geneticists, neuroscientists, sociologists, economists, and others have made great strides in understanding the inner working of the human mind.

This work, Brooks tells us, offers the corrective for our "giant cultural bias": "brain science helps fill the hole left by the atrophy of theology and philosophy." 

How does this work, exactly?

Brooks prefers to show rather than drily describe how "their work illuminates the rich underwater world where character is formed and wisdom grows" by telling the story of Harold, the child of a wealthy American family, as he grows into manhood and falls in love with his wife Erica.  This biography is a nearly comprehensive chrestomathy of neurosymbological techniques, and I will only draw attention to a few  since I can scarcely hope to do such a prodigious accomplishment justice in a reasonable space.

1) Killing the Father: It has been noted that neurosymbology appears to formally require the mechanical disavowal of psychoanalysis as a species of voodoo.  For Brooks, this gesture (whose Oedipal character was, I think, initially pointed out by Twinglebrook-Hastings) is so obvious as to have become implied.  We learn that "A core finding [of "the cognitive revolution of the past thirty years"] is that "we are not primarily the products of our conscious thinking."  The Unconscious, it seems, was discovered in 1980, probably by William Gibson.

2) Producing "Obviousness" from Basic Science: This is probably the basic neurosymbological maneuvre, corresponding more or less exactly to "ideological recontainment" in classical symbology (see Prandleforth, 2010d), and Brooks has learned it well (presumably from the NYT Science & Technology section.)  Consider one of many classic examples:

There's a debate in our culture about what really makes us happy, which is summarized by, on the one hand, the book "On the Road" and, on the other, the movie "It's a Wonderful Life."  The former celebrates the life of freedom and adventure.  The latter celebrates roots and connections.  Research over the past thirty years makes it clear that what the inner mind really wants is connection.  "It's a Wonderful Life" was right.

Nature has decided between Theadore Cleaver and William S. Burroughs, and The Beav won. Case Closed.

3) Justifying the Present with Teleological Evolutionary Psychology: Another basic neurosymbological strategy, which corresponds to the valorization of antiquity as a criterion of truth we have observed in Brown and other exponents of classical symbology, which consists in the assertion that human cognitive development essentially ceased developing or responding to its environment in the stone age, and that consequently it is to this period we must look for rationales for our behavior - as Cosmides and Tooby, the Directors of Anthropology and Psychology, respectively, at UC Santa Barbara put it in their Primer on Evolution Psychology, "our modern skulls house a stone-age mind":

Erica was impressed by him: women everywhere tend to prefer men who have symmetrical features and are slightly older, taller, and stronger than they are. But she was more guarded and slower to trust than Harold was. That’s in part because, while Pleistocene men could pick their mates on the basis of fertility cues discernible at a glance, Pleistocene women faced a more vexing problem. Human babies require years to become self-sufficient, and a single woman in that environment could not gather enough calories to provide for a family. She was compelled to choose a man not only for insemination but for continued support. That’s why men leap into bed more quickly than women. Various research teams have conducted a simple study. They hire a woman to go up to college men and ask them to sleep with her. More than half the men say yes. Then they have a man approach college women with the same offer. Virtually zero per cent say yes.

Brooks later characterizes criteria of discrimination in Erica's selection of sexual partners which are not obviously Pleistocene as "idiosyncratic" (e.g. her rejection of Burberry, although presumably this is referable to the fact that plaid would obviously compromise one's camouflage while hunting antelope on the savannah.)

4) The Production of VED from Basic Science:  This is clearly a subset of 2), but given recent discussion on the subject in the forum I must present this example on its own:

Of course, there are less noble calculations going on as people choose their mates. Like veteran stock-market traders, people respond in predictable, if unconscious, ways to the valuations of the social marketplace. The richer the man, the younger the woman he is likely to mate with. A man’s job status is an outstanding predictor of his wife’s attractiveness. Without being aware of it, Harold and Erica were doing these sorts of calculations—weighing earnings-to-looks ratios, calculating social-capital balances. Every signal suggested that they had found a match.

The body of the story contains numerous further instructive examples which immediately require further elucidation, but in the interest of time and faced with such a Herculean task (I have the Aegean Stables in mind,) I must move on.

Towards the end of the piece, Harold and Erica go to see Harold's parents at their house in Aspen. 

They went riding and rafting and they attended an ideas festival. They sat through panel discussions on green technology and on how to adopt a charter school, and they spent a few hours immersed in the “China: Friend or Foe?” debate. One morning, they attended a talk by a neuroscientist. He was a young man in black jeans and a leather jacket, and he came to the session carrying a motorcycle helmet, as if he’d just escaped from a Caltech revival of “Grease.”

Although the allusion is clearly to to Pirsig, the simultaenous evocation of Tom Robbins' oeuvre is probably more apposite to the tissue of New Age platitudes which follows.  The alternative to theology, philosophy and "giant cultural biases" in general offered by this avatar of the Cognitive Revolution turns out to be an unexamined fusion of some particularly jejune strains of late-twentieth century American mysticism which is basically uninformed by anything any of the laundry list of disciplines he cited at the outset would admit to producing, mainly relating to the profound interconnection of all people and the "rush he got from riding his motorcycle in the mountains".

However, his testimony sparks a "life-altering epiphany" in Harold (Erica, presumably, is already Orthognostic and thus does not require such intervention,) who resolves to "use this science to cultivate an entirely different viewpoint" and, sure enough, returns to his favorite gelato shop and "confidently" chooses the cloudberry.

These moments in Brooks analysis evince a thorough internalization of the principles of neurosymbology, but there is more here than that:  Brooks' apologia roundly confirms the centrality what I had previously postulated as the main aporia of neurosymbology (Prandleforth, unpublished manuscript 2010),

1) The mind is a messy tissue of evolutionary contingency without a self-evident relationship to reason
And,
2)The mind orders the messy contingency of evolution through its self-evident investment by reason

and it even does so in order. The biographical narrative consists of a collage of claims all purporting (after the demise of "theology and philosophy," - and by "philosophy" I assume we are to understand "all the disciplines traditionally associated with humanism") to fill the explanatory void with neurosymbology (viz. "discourse about the mind which demands that phenomenological expeirence subsist in, and be sufficiently accountable for by, anatomo-physiological mechanisms in the brain and that hermeneutic discrimination privilege indexically correlative relations, univalence and antiquity").  But the motorcycle-riding, fMRI loving neuroscientist who transforms Harold's life and makes him a whole person insists precisely that:

"...though history has made us self-conscious in order to enchance our survival prospects, we still have deep impulses to erase the skull lines in our head and become immersed directly in the river.  I've come to think that flourishing consist of putting yourself in situations in which you lose self-consciousness and become fused with other people..."

Moreover, Brooks' piece makes blindingly obvious the ideological mechanics which are to some extent implicit but not articulated in my original formulation in ways which should be obvious to the most casual student of symbology; it is precisely the engagement of neuroscience as an object potentially challenging to VED, bourgeois subjectivity, hegemonic ideology or whatever you want to call it which enables one's original complex of unexamined predjudices and half-assed naturalizations of historical phenomena to be reconsolidated. 

Just as symbology invests recycling, feminism and the patronage networks of the Federal Government with an appealingly vague air of transcendental magic, Brooks asks us to celebrate neurosymbology's ability to re-package vulgar economic determinism, twentieth-century American gender stereotypes and the war of the sexes as features of a newly sacralized Nature, unpolluted by "giant cultural bias". 

Have a pomegranate-ginger gelato, Mr. Brooks, and pat yourself on the fucking back.