The Social Animal (49 page)

In short, Harold entered a public-policy world in which people were used to thinking in hard, mechanistic terms. He thought he could do some good if he threw emotional and social perspectives into the mix.

As Harold worked his way through the process of discovering how his basic suppositions applied to the world of politics and policy, he came to lament the fact that the word “socialism” was already taken. The nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinkers who had called themselves socialists weren’t really socialists. They were statists. They valued the state over society.

But true socialism would put social life first. He imagined that the cognitive revolution could foster more communitarian styles of politics. There would be a focus on the economic community. Did people in different classes have a sense they were joined in a common enterprise, or were the gaps between classes too wide? There would be a focus on the common culture. Were the core values of the society expressed and self-confidently reinforced? Were they reflected in the nation’s institutions? Did new immigrants successfully assimilate? In the political sphere Harold imagined, conservatives would emphasize that it is hard for the state to change culture and character. Liberals would argue that we still, in pragmatic ways, have to try. Both would speak the language of fraternity, and inspire with a sense that we are all in this together.

Harold didn’t really know whether he should call himself a liberal or a conservative at this point. One of his guiding principles was drawn from a famous quotation from Daniel Patrick Moynihan: “The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.”

He did know that his job in Washington was to show the locals that character and culture really shape behavior, and that government could, in limited ways, shape culture and character. State power is like fire—warming when contained, fatal when it grows too large. In his view, government should not run people’s lives. That only weakens the responsibility and virtue of the citizens. But government could influence the setting in which lives are lived. Government could, to some extent, nurture settings that serve as nurseries for fraternal relationships. It could influence the spirit of the citizenry.

Part of that is done simply by performing the elemental tasks of the state, establishing a basic framework of order and security—defending against external attack, regulating economic activity to punish predators, protecting property rights, punishing crime, upholding rule of law, providing a basic level of social insurance and civic order.

Some of this is done by reducing the programs that weaken culture and character. The social fabric is based on the idea that effort leads to reward. But very often, government rewards people who have not put in the effort. It does this with good intentions (the old welfare programs that discouraged work) and it does it with venal intentions (lobbyists secure earmarks, tax breaks, and subsidies so their companies can secure revenue without having to earn it in the marketplace). These programs weaken social trust and public confidence. By separating effort from reward, they pollute the atmosphere. They send the message that the system is rigged and society is corrupt.

But Harold thought government, properly led, could also play a more constructive role. Just as remote and centralized power creates a servile citizenry, decentralized power and community self-government creates an active and cooperative citizenry. Infrastructure projects that create downtown hubs strengthen relationships and spur development. Charter schools bring parents together. Universities that are active beyond campus become civic and entrepreneurial hot spots. National service programs bring people together across class lines. Publicly funded, locally administered social-entrepreneurship funds encourage civic activism and community-service programs. Simple and fair tax policies rouse energies, increase dynamism, lift the animal spirits, and encourage creative destruction.

Aristotle wrote that legislators habituate citizens. Whether they mean to or not, legislators encourage certain ways of living and discourage other ways. Statecraft is inevitably soulcraft.

Harold began writing a series of essays for policy journals on what his soft side approach might mean in the real world. All his essays had a common theme: How the fracturing of unconscious bonds was at the root of many social problems and how government could act to repair this tear in the social fabric.

He began in areas as far removed as possible from the gushy world of emotion and relationships. His first essay was about global terrorism. Many commentators had originally assumed that terrorism was a product of poverty and a lack of economic opportunity. It was a problem with material roots. But research into the backgrounds of terrorists established that, according to one database, 75 percent of the anti-Western terrorists come from middle-class homes and an amazing 63 percent had attended some college. The problem is not material but social. The terrorists are, as Olivier Roy argues, detached from any specific country and culture. They are often caught in the no-man’s-land between the ancient and modern. They invent a make-believe ancient purity to give their lives meaning. They take up violent jihad because it attaches them to something. They are generally not politically active before they join terror groups, but are looking for some larger creed to give their existence shape and purpose. That choice can only be prevented if there are other causes to give them a different route to fulfillment.

Then Harold wrote about military strategy, the essence of guns-and-mayhem machismo. Harold described how military officers in Iraq and Afghanistan had found that it was impossible to defeat an insurgency on the battlefield by simply killing as many of the bad guys as possible. The only route to victory, they had learned, was through a counterinsurgency strategy called
COIN
, which started with winning the trust of the population. The soldiers and marines discovered that it was not enough to secure a village; they had to hold it so that people could feel safe; they had to build schools, medical facilities, courts, and irrigation ditches; they had to reconvene town councils and give power to village elders. It was only when this nation-building activity was well along that the local societies would be strong enough and cohesive enough to help them provide intelligence about and repel the enemy. Harold pointed out that the hardest political activity—warfare—depended on the softest social skills—listening, understanding, and building trust. Victory in this kind of war is not about piling up dead bodies; it is about building communities.

His next essay was about global
AIDS
policy. The West had thrown great technical knowledge at this problem and produced drugs that could help treat this plague. But the effectiveness of these drugs was limited if people continued to engage in the behaviors that lead to the disease.

Harold pointed out that technical knowledge alone would not change behavior. Raising awareness is necessary but insufficient. Surveys show that vast majorities in the most severely afflicted countries understand the dangers of
HIV
, but they behave in risky ways anyway. Providing condoms is necessary but insufficient. Most people in these countries have access to condoms. But that doesn’t mean they actually use them, as rising or stable infection rates demonstrate. Economic development, too, is necessary but insufficient. The people who most aggressively spread the disease—often miners or truck drivers—are relatively well off. Providing health-care facilities is also necessary but insufficient. Harold described a hospital in Namibia where 858 women were receiving treatments. After a year of effort, they could get only five of their male partners to come in for testing. Though it meant a death sentence, the men would not come to the hospital. In their culture, men did not go near hospitals.

Harold visited a village in Namibia where all the middle-aged people were dead from
AIDS
. The children had nursed their parents into their graves. And yet, against all the most primal incentives of survival, the children were replicating the exact same behaviors that had led to their parents’ deaths. He pointed out that the cause of this behavior defied all logic, as well as the principle of rational self-interest as commonly understood. The programs that actually changed behavior did not focus primarily upon logic and self-interest. The programs that worked best tried to change an entire pattern of life. They didn’t merely try to change decisions about safe sex. They tried to create virtuous people, who would not put themselves in the path of temptation. These programs were often led by religious leaders. These men and women spoke in the language of right and wrong, of vice and virtue. The people leading these programs spoke the language of “ought.” They talked about salvation and biblical truth, and safer sexual activity was a byproduct of a much larger change in outlook.

This is a language unaddressed by technical knowledge. It’s a language that has to be spoken by an elder, a neighbor, by people who know one another’s names. Harold pointed out that the West has thrown a tremendous amount of medical and technical knowledge at the HIV/
AIDS
problem, but not enough moral and cultural knowledge, the kind of knowledge that changes lives, viewpoints, and morality, and through those larger patterns alters the unconscious basis of behavior.

Then Harold got closer to home. He described how suburbia had strained community bonds across modern America. He pointed out that, in the 1990s, developers built vast, exurban housing developments. In those days if you asked home buyers what they wanted in their development, they said a golf course—the sign of status. But if a decade later you asked people what they wanted, they said a community center, a coffee shop, a hiking trail, and a health club. These folks had overshot the mark. They moved out to far-flung suburbs to get their piece of the American dream, which they equated with big property, but they missed the social connections that come from living in more densely populated areas. So the market had partially responded, with pseudourban streetscapes in the middle of the sprawl—dense downtown areas where people could stroll and eat at sidewalk cafés.

Harold’s biggest research project was about social mobility. His basic premise was that over the past few decades scholars had spent too much time thinking about globalization, the movement of goods and ideas across borders. Globalization, he thought, was not the central process driving change. For example, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, offshore outsourcing was responsible for only 1.9 percent of layoffs in the first decade of the twenty-first century, despite all the talk and attention. According to Pankaj Ghemawat of Harvard Business School, 90 percent of fixed investment around the world is domestic.

The real engine of change, Harold believed, was a change in the cognitive load. Over the past few decades, technological and social revolution had put greater and greater demands on human cognition. People are now compelled to absorb and process a much more complicated array of information streams. They are compelled to navigate much more complicated social environments. This is happening in both localized and globalized sectors, and it would be happening if you tore up every free-trade deal ever inked.

The globalization paradigm emphasizes the fact that information can travel 15,000 miles in an instant. But the cognitive-load paradigm holds that the most important part of the journey is the last few inches—the space between a person’s eyes or ears and the various regions of the brain. Through what sort of lens does the individual perceive the information? Does the individual have the capacity to understand the information? Does he or she have the training to exploit it? What emotions and ideas does the information set off? Are there cultural assumptions that distort or enhance the way it is understood?

This change in the cognitive load has had many broad effects. It has changed the role of women, who are able to compete equally in the arena of mental skill. It has changed the nature of marriage, as men and women look for partners who can match and complement each other’s mental abilities. It has led to assortative mating, as highly educated people marry each other and less-educated people marry each other. It has also produced widening inequality, so that societies divide into two nations—a nation of those who possess the unconscious skills to navigate this terrain and a nation of those who have not had the opportunity to acquire those skills.

Over the past decades there has been a steady rise in the education premium, the economic rewards that go to people with more education. In the 1970s it barely made economic sense to go to college, some argued. There wasn’t a big difference in the income levels of college grads and non-college grads. But starting in the early 1980s, the education premium started to grow and it hasn’t stopped. Today, money follows ideas. The median American with a graduate degree is part of a family making $93,000 a year. The median person with a college degree is in a family making $75,000. The median person with a high-school degree is in a family making $42,000 and the average high school dropout is in a family making $28,000.

Moreover, there is a superstar effect, even at the top. People who possess unique mental abilities become prized; their salaries soar. People with decent education but fungible mental traits become commodities. Their salaries trudge slowly upward or even stagnate.

These mental abilities tend to get passed down in families, and so you get an inherited meritocracy. It doesn’t matter as much as it did in the 1950s whether you were born into an old Protestant family whose ancestors came over on the
Mayflower
. But it still matters a great deal what family you were born into, maybe more than ever. A child born into a family making $90,000 has a 50 percent chance of graduation from college by age twenty-four. A child born into a family making $70,000, has a one-in-four chance. A child born into a family making $45,000 has a one-in-ten chance. A child born into a family making $30,000 has a one-in-seventeen chance.