At TED last week, maestro Chris Anderson introduced conservative columnist David Brooks as "a truly brilliant synthesizer of knowledge," and he proved it in his interesting (if largely unoriginal) tour of the intuitive mind, which he described as fundamental, not incidental, to our decision-making. The social skills of politicians seem to disappear when they step into policy mode, he announced. Witness the feeble way we often approach educational reform: "If you're not talking about the individual relationship between a teacher and student you're not talking about reality."Forget about the "shallow," centuries-old "view of human nature that we're rational individuals who have responded in straightrforward ways to oncenteives," the view that has given rise to a class of "uber moms" who throw their kids through hoops and produce families in which "the grandmas look like Gertrude Stein and the kids look like Halle Berry."Though we've grown up as children of the French enlightenment, fed on the power of reason, Brooks proclaimed that "emotions aren't separate from reason; they tell us what to value." But, he cautioned, "me talking about emotion is like Gandhi talking about gluttony."The policy failures of the past decades—from Iraq to Wall Street—along with a more complex understanding of the mind, have shown us what we need: "A deeper sense of what it actually takes for us to thrive in this life. We think about what we can measure easily, but what it really takes to lead a meaningful life are things that are deeper; things we don't have words for." We need to cultivate what he called "our first gift or talent: mindsight, the ability to melt into other people's minds."This is all part of a vision for life outlined by Brooks in his new book, The Social Animal, an apparently overwrought fictionalization of a pile of recent findings in neuroscience, sociology, and economics. And as liberal as all the touchy-feelyness may sound, it’s in service of a conservative world-view: if you think the free-roaming unconscious mind is crucial for individual progress, government should be set up accordingly to foster that, not repress it with laws, regulations, and know-it-all policy. This would be fairer: a government that provides an equitable intellectual and cultural foundation for everyone.My mindsight says that sounds like a very good thing; if only we could intuit it into blissful existence.
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