The Social Animal (23 page)

The summer after high-school graduation should have been a time of ease and celebration, but Erica would forever after remember it as the Summer of “Authenticity.” Her friends called her “Poindexter” or just “Denver”—as in “Hey, here comes Denver! Isn’t she late for her foursome?”

So of course she smoked more weed that summer than ever before. Of course she hooked up with more guys. Of course she listened to more Lil Wayne and more Mexican music and did everything to rebut the neighborhood impression that she’d been whitewashed. Things became bad at home with her mother. She’d be out until 3 a.m., sleeping over unannounced at other people’s homes, and showing up at noon the next day. Her mother didn’t know if she even had the right to control her anymore. The girl was eighteen. But she worried more than ever. Her dreams for her daughter were suddenly in peril. Something terrible could happen—a shooting, a drug arrest. It was as though the culture of the street had reached out from beyond the grave and was pulling her daughter back in.

One Sunday afternoon, Erica came home and found her mother dressed, angry, and standing by the door. Erica had promised to be home early so they could go to a family picnic together, but Erica had forgotten. She got angry when her mother reminded her of it all, and grumpily stormed off to her room to get dressed. “Too busy for me!” her mother screamed. “Not too busy for the gangbangers!” Erica wondered where her mom got that word.

There were about twenty aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents at the picnic. They were delighted to see Erica and her mom. Hugs all around. One man handed her a beer, which had never happened before. The picnic was fun. The loud ones talked and talked. Stories were told. As usual, Erica’s mom sort of faded into the background. She was the disappointment in the family, and so she was relegated to a silent corner of family life. But she seemed to be following along and soaking up the company.

Around about hour three, the older folks were sitting around some tables while the kids were still running around. Some of the uncles and aunts began talking about Denver. They told her about the other kids her age who were going to local colleges. They told her about the Chinese way, the family businesses, the loans that went out from relative to relative. They told her about their own accomplishments and their own lives and as the minutes passed, they ratcheted up the pressure. Don’t go to Denver. Stay here. The future is bright here. They weren’t even subtle. They harangued and pushed. “It’s time to come back to your people,” an uncle said. Erica looked at her empty plate. Your family—they can get under your skin in a way no one else can. Tears began to well up in her eyes.

Then a quiet voice could be heard from the other end of the table. “Leave her alone.” It was her mother. The picnic table went silent. What followed wasn’t even a speech. Her mother was so nervous and yet so furious, she just issued a series of disjointed statements. “She’s worked so hard…. It’s her dream…. She has earned the right to go…. You don’t see her in her room night after night. You don’t see how much she has overcome, what has happened at home.” Finally she just looked around at her relatives. “I’ve never wanted anything so much in all my life, for her to go to that place and do this thing.”

The little speech didn’t stop all discussion. The uncles still thought she was wrong, and they still harangued. But the balance of forces had shifted in Erica’s head. Her mom had stood up for her in front of the family. Erica’s sense of conviction came back to her, and once she had dug into a position, there was no moving her.

Leaving was still not easy. Leaving your childhood home is never easy. In 1959, when the writer Eva Hoffman was thirteen, her family emigrated from Poland to Canada. Poland lingered forever after in the recesses of her mind. “The country of my childhood lives within me with a primacy that is a form of love,” she wrote years later. “It has fed me language, perceptions, sounds, the human kind. It has given me colors and the furrows of reality, my first loves. The absoluteness of those loves can never be recaptured. No geometry of the landscape, no haze in the air, will live in us as intensely as the landscapes that we saw as the first, and to which we gave ourselves wholly, without reservation.”

But Erica did go, and in early September, she found herself in a dorm in Denver.

Elite universities are great inequality machines. They are nominally open to all applicants regardless of income. They have lavish financial-aid packages for those who cannot afford to pay. But the reality is that the competition weeds out most of those who are not from the upper middle class. To fulfill the admissions requirements, it really helps to have been raised in the atmosphere of concerted cultivation. It helps to have had all the family reading time, the tutors, the coaches, and the extracurricular supervision.

Denver gave Erica a chance to be around affluent people and to see how they behaved with one another. She learned how they socialized, how they greeted each other, how they slept with each other, what a guy in that culture said when he wanted to get into your pants, and what a girl in that culture said to keep him out. Denver was like a cultural-exchange program. She didn’t know the phrase when she got there, but at Denver Erica acquired what the great sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called “cultural capital”—the tastes, opinions, cultural references, and conversational styles that will enable you to rise in polite society.

Actually, it wasn’t the students’ wealth that shocked Erica and shook her confidence. She found she could easily look down on the guy who wrecked his
BMW
one day and had his family drop off a Jaguar the next. It was the knowledge. She’d worked hard at the Academy to prepare herself for Denver. But some of these kids had been preparing their whole lives. They’d been to where the Battle of Agincourt had taken place. They’d been to China and spent a summer in high school teaching kids in Haiti. They knew who Lauren Bacall was, and where F. Scott Fitzgerald went to school. They seemed to get every reference the professors threw out. A professor would make some reference to Mort Sahl or Tom Lehrer, and they’d all chuckle knowingly. They knew how to structure papers in ways that she had never been taught. She took a look at those kids and thought about her friends back in the neighborhood who were still working at the mall or hanging out on the street. Her friends back home weren’t just four years behind these Denver kids. They were forever behind.

Erica took econ, poli-sci, and accounting classes. She hung around the business school and sat in when visiting lecturers stopped by. She was very hardheaded and practical. But something bothered her about these classes. In many of them, Erica was taught by economists and political scientists who assumed that human beings are pretty much the same. You put some incentives in front of them, no matter what their cultural differences, and they will respond in predictable, law-governed, and rational ways.

This assumption makes social science a science. If behavior is not governed by immutable laws and regularities, then quantitative models become impossible. The discipline loses its predictive value. It’s all just fuzzy, context-driven subjectivity.

And yet Erica grew up among many people who did not respond in predictable ways to incentives. Many of her friends had dropped out of high school when all the incentives pointed the other way. Many of them made decisions that were simply inexplicable, or they had not made decisions at all because they were in the grip of addictions, mental illnesses, or other impulsions. Furthermore, cultural differences simply played too large a role in her life. What really mattered, it seemed to her, was self-interpretation. The way people defined themselves had a huge impact on how they behaved and responded to situations. None of this seemed to have any role in the courses she was taking.

So Erica was drawn, despite her well-laid plans, in a different academic direction. She didn’t abandon all the pre-MBA-type courses. But she supplemented them. She found herself drawn, of all places, to anthropology. She wanted to study cultures—how they differed and how they clashed.

It was, at first blush, a wildly impractical subject for an aspiring mogul to study. But Erica, being Erica, quickly turned it into a strategic business plan. Her whole life had been about clashing cultures—Mexican/Chinese, middle class/lower class, the ghetto/the Academy, the street/the university. She already understood what it was like to merge different cultures. In a globalizing world this knowledge would probably come in handy. At college she would learn how some companies created successful corporate cultures and how some failed at this task. She would learn about how global corporations handled cultural diversity. In a business world filled with engineers and finance people, she would know culture. This would be her unique selling proposition. There would always be a market for skills like that. After all, how many female Chinese-Chicana workaholics from the ghetto does anybody know?

Millions of years ago, animals roamed the earth. As Michael Tomasello has argued, smarter animals such as apes are actually pretty good at coming up with innovative solutions to common problems. What they are not good at is passing down their discoveries to future generations. Nonhuman animals don’t seem to have the impulse to teach. You can teach a chimpanzee sign language, but the chimp won’t teach sign language to his fellows or to his children so that they might talk to one another.

Humans are different. Humans begin life far behind other animals. Humans have a diffuse set of genetic instructions, so when they are born, and for years afterward, they can’t survive on their own. As the great anthropologist Clifford Geertz put it, man is an “unfinished animal. What sets him off most graphically from nonmen,” Geertz continued, “is less his sheer ability to learn (great as that is) than how much and what particular sorts of things he
has
to learn before he is able to function at all.”

Humans succeed because they have the ability to develop advanced cultures. Culture is a collection of habits, practices, beliefs, arguments, and tensions that regulates and guides human life. Culture transmits certain practical solutions to everyday problems—how to avoid poisonous plants, how to form successful family structures. Culture also, as Roger Scruton has observed, educates the emotions. It consists of narratives, holidays, symbols, and works of art that contain implicit and often unnoticed messages about how to feel, how to respond, how to divine meaning.

An individual human mind couldn’t handle the vast variety of fleeting stimuli that are thrust before it. We can function in the world only because we are embedded in the scaffold of culture. We absorb ethnic cultures, institutional cultures, regional cultures, which do most of our thinking for us.

The human race is not impressive because towering geniuses produce individual masterpieces. The human race is impressive because groups of people create mental scaffolds that guide future thought. No individual could build a modern airplane, but modern companies contain the institutional knowledge that allows groups to design and build them.

“We build ‘designer environments’ in which human reason is able to far outstrip the computational ambit of the unaugmented biological brain,” the philosopher Andy Clark writes. Unlike other animals, he continues, humans have the ability to dissipate reasoning—to build social arrangements that contain the bodies of knowledge.

Human brains, Clark believes, “are not so different from the fragmented, special-purpose, action-oriented organs of other animals and autonomous robots. But we excel in one crucial respect: We are masters at structuring our physical and social worlds so as to press complex coherent behaviors from these unruly resources. We use intelligence to structure our environment so that we can succeed with less intelligence. Our brains make the world smart so that we can be dumb in peace! Or, to look at it another way, it is the human brain plus these chunks of external scaffolding that finally constitutes the smart, rational inference engine we call mind. Looked at that way, we are smart after all—but our boundaries extend further out into the world than we might have initially supposed.”

Erica took courses in sociology, psychology, history, literature, marketing, and behavioral economics—anything she thought might help her understand the shared scaffolding of the human mind.

All cultures share certain commonalities, stored in our genetic inheritance. Anthropologists tell us that all cultures distinguish colors. When they do, all cultures begin with words for white and black. If the culture adds a word for a third color, it is always red. All humans, for example, register the same basic facial expressions for fear, disgust, happiness, contempt, anger, sadness, pride, and shame. Children born without sight display emotion on their faces the same way as children born with sight. All humans divide time into past, present, and future. Almost all fear, at least at first, spiders and snakes, creatures that threatened their Stone Age ancestors. All human societies produce art. They all disapprove, at least in theory, of rape and murder. They all dream of harmony and worship God.

In his book
Human Universals
, Donald E. Brown lists traits that people in all places share. The list goes on and on. All children fear strangers and prefer sugar solutions to plain water from birth. All humans enjoy stories, myths, and proverbs. In all societies men engage in more group violence and travel farther from home than women. In all societies, husbands are on average older than their wives. People everywhere rank one another according to prestige. People everywhere divide the world between those inside their group and those outside their group. These tendencies are all stored deep below awareness.