Book of the week: The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement by David Brooks

(Random House, $27)

David Brooks has gotten more serious than he ought to be, said Michael Agger in Slate.com. In his “strangely fascinating” new book, the New York Times columnist who once labeled himself a “comic sociologist” proselytizes for the idea that the power of cognition is no match for deeper impulses that lie beyond every individual’s conscious control. To illustrate his point, he constructs two fictional strivers, Harold and Erica, whom he follows from birth to death while showing how neuroscience explains most every choice they make. But you won’t laugh at these two yuppies the way you laughed at 2000’s Bobos in Paradise. Instead, you may wonder how a leading conservative thinker could decide that life in America is unfair—and that government ought to do something about it.

Brooks isn’t proposing anything truly radical, said Thomas Nagel in The New York Times. While he “seems willing to take seriously any claim by a cognitive scientist, however idiotic,” he’s essentially using neuroscience to bolster a concept of human nature that dates to 18th-century thinkers like David Hume and Edmund Burke. Hume, too, “denied the dominance of reason,” claiming that our passions ruled. “Brooks is right to insist” that we’re also greatly shaped by instinct, perception, and the cultural norms we each learn from the families and communities we’re raised in. But beyond suggesting that schools need to stress good working habits when parents fail to, he says little about the shifts in public policy he’d like to see. Delineating such goals would require conscious reasoning, and “reason is not Brooks’s thing.”

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To a point, humor still is, said Susan J. Gilman in NPR.org. His story about Harold and Erica opens as “a wicked parody of cultural elitism” before the pair “devolve from protagonists to mouthpieces.” The satire also “muddies” the thrust of Brooks’s argument. As “a sort of theory of everything,” The Social Animal is intellectually engaging on “a dizzying range of philosophy and research,” from the Hamiltonian ideal of democracy to theories of attachment parenting to how pheromones affect who we marry. “But it’s also messy.” Brooks “has done well to draw such vivid attention to the wide implications of the accumulated research on the triggers of human behavior,” said The Economist. It’ll fall to future books—“preferably without Harold and Erica”—to map out how society should respond to what neuroscience now knows.