The Social Animal (51 page)

The next great figure in this tradition was Theodore Roosevelt. He, too, believed in the character-building force of competition, its ability to produce people who possessed the vigorous virtues he lauded in his 1905 inaugural address—energy, self-reliance, and initiative.

Roosevelt, too, believed that government must sometimes play an active role in encouraging the strenuous life and giving everyone a fair chance in the race. “The true function of the state, as it interferes in social life,” he wrote, “should be to make the chances of competition more even, not to abolish them.”

This Hamiltonian tradition dominated American politics for many decades. But in the twentieth century, it faded. The big debate of the twentieth century was over the size of government. The Hamiltonian tradition sat crosswise to that debate.

But Harold came to believe it was time to revive that limited but energetic government tradition—with two updates. Hamiltonians of the past lived before the dawning of the cognitive age, when the mental demands on young strivers were relatively low. That situation had changed, and so a movement that sought to enhance social mobility would have to handle the more complicated social and information environments. Furthermore, Hamilton, Lincoln, and Roosevelt had been able to assume a level of social and moral capital. They took it for granted that citizens lived in tight communities defined by well-understood norms, a moral consensus, and restrictive customs. Today’s leaders could not make that assumption. The moral and social capital present during those years had eroded, and needed to be rebuilt.

Harold spent his years in Washington championing a Hamiltonian approach that offered second-generation human capital policies. He never developed what you might call an ideology, an all-explaining system of good government. The world was too complex an organism for that, too filled with a hidden tangle of latent functions for some hyper-confident government to come in and reshape according to some prefab plan.

Nor did he have a heroic vision of political leadership. Harold had a more constrained image of what government can and should do. The British philosopher Michael Oakeshott was issuing a useful warning against hubris when he wrote, “In political activity, then, men sail a boundless and bottomless sea; there is neither harbor for shelter nor floor for anchorage, neither starting place nor appointed destination. The enterprise is to keep afloat on an even keel; the sea is both friend and enemy; and the seamanship consists in using the resources of a traditional manner of behavior in order to make a friend of every hostile occasion.”

When thinking about government Harold tried to remind himself how little we know and can know, how much our own desire for power and to do good blinds us to our own limitations.

But he did, like most Americans, believe in progress. Thus, while he had an instinctive aversion to change that alters the fundamental character of society, he had an affection for reform that repairs it.

He spent those years writing his essays, peppering the world with his policy proposals. Not many people seemed to agree with him. There was a
New York Times
columnist whose views were remarkably similar to his own, and a few others. Still, he plugged away, feeling that he was mostly right about things and that someday others would reach the conclusions he had reached. Karl Marx once said that Milton wrote
Paradise Lost
the way a silkworm produces silk, as the unfolding of his very nature. Harold felt fulfilled during his think-tank years. He wasn’t always happy when Erica would disappear for weeks at a time, but he felt he was making some contribution to the world. He was confident that his “socialist” approach, in one guise or another, would someday have a large impact on the world.

THE
OTHER
EDUCATION

EVERY
WINTER
THE
GREAT
AND
THE
GOOD
MEET
IN
DAVOS
, Switzerland, for the World Economic Forum. And every night during that week at Davos, there are constellations of parties. The people in the outer-ring parties envy the people in the mid-ring parties, and the people in the mid ring wish they were invited to the ones in the inner ring. Each ring features a slightly more elevated guest list than the last—with economists and knowledgeable people on the outside and ascending levels of power, fame, and lack of expertise toward the center.

At the molten core of the party constellation, there is always one party that forms the social Holy of the Holies—where former presidents, cabinet secretaries, central bankers, global tycoons, and Angelina Jolie gather to mingle and schmooze. And this party is without question the dullest in the whole constellation. The Davos social universe, like social universes everywhere, consists of rings of interesting and insecure people desperately seeking entry into the realm of the placid and self-satisfied.

After a few decades of business success and eight years of ever more prominent public service—as deputy chief of staff during the first Grace term and commerce secretary in the second—Erica had gained entry to the Davos epicenter. She was the sort who got invited to all the most exclusive and boring parties.

In retirement, she now served on worthy commissions on intractable problems—deficit spending, nuclear proliferation, the trans-Atlantic alliance, and the future of global trade agreements. She was not one of those people whose face lights up at the sound of the words “plenary session,” but she had become a battle-hardened summiteer—able to withstand barrages of eminent tedium. She had become friends or acquaintances with the former world leaders who also sat on these commissions and who traveled during the year from Davos to Jackson Hole to Tokyo and beyond to express grave concern about the looming crises that people still in power were too shortsighted to solve.

At first, Erica had been anxious and self-conscious when chatting with former presidents and global celebrities. But the awe fell away pretty quickly, and now it was just like the same old knitting circle gathered once again at a different world resort. One former minister had resigned in disgrace, a president had been a complete flop in office, a former secretary of state had been gracelessly pushed from power. Everybody’s sore spots were avoided, and all was forgiven in the rough-and-tumble world they had endured.

And as for their conversation ... well, it was a conspiracy buff’s worst nightmare. It transpires that when the people in charge of the world’s great institutions get together, what they really want to talk about is golf, jet-lag remedies, and gallstones. The days were consumed with portentous concern over the threat of rising protectionism, and the nights by intense stories about prostates. The meetings operated on what was called the Chatham House Rule, which meant that nobody was permitted to say anything interesting. The highlight of the nightly conversations was the occasional tale of backroom idiocy.

Former world leaders inevitably have a repertoire of backroom stories that they use to entertain people at dinner parties. One former president told the story of the time he made the mistake of bragging about his dog to Russian leader Vladimir Putin. During the next Moscow summit, Putin entered at lunch with four Rottweilers, and bragged, “Bigger, faster, and stronger than yours.” That led a former National Security Advisor to tell the story of the time Putin stole his ring. He’d been wearing his West Point graduation ring at a meeting. Putin asked to see it and put it on his own finger, and then deftly slipped it into his pocket while they were talking. The State Department raised a ruckus trying to get it back, but Putin wouldn’t give. Another prime minister told of the time he snuck out of a cocktail party at Buckingham Palace to snoop around the private quarters and got caught and screamed at by the queen. Stories like those were always delicious and left the impression that world affairs are controlled by third graders.

Erica nonetheless enjoyed this whirl. She thought the commissions did some good, despite their insipidness. And she enjoyed her continued glimpses into the inner workings of world affairs. She often would sit back in the middle of some long meeting and wonder how it was that these men and women had risen to the top of the global elite. They weren’t marked by exceptional genius. They did not have extraordinarily deep knowledge or creative opinions. If there was one trait the best of them possessed, it was a talent for simplification. They had the ability to take a complex situation and capture the heart of the matter in simple terms. A second after they located the core fact of any problem, their observation seemed blindingly obvious, but somehow nobody had simplified the issue in quite those terms beforehand. They took reality and made it manageable for busy people.

As for herself, Erica had reached a status plateau. She had reached a certain eminence. She was treated as a significant person wherever she went. Strangers would approach and say they were honored to meet her. This didn’t make her feel happy by itself, but it did mean that she was no longer gnawed by the sort of ambition anxiety that had driven her through much of her life. Recognition and wealth, she had learned, do not produce happiness, but they do liberate you from the worries that plague people who lack but desire these things.

In outer appearance, Erica still thought of herself as the pushy young girl. She experienced those moments of shock, when she came upon her own face unexpectedly in the mirror and was stunned to find it was not the face of a twenty-two-year-old woman. It was the face of an older woman.

Now, she had trouble hearing women with high voices, and she had trouble hearing anyone at loud parties. She sometimes could not get out of low chairs without pushing herself up with her arms. Her teeth were darker than before and her gums had shrunk, leaving more of her teeth exposed. She had shifted to softer foods (the muscles around the jaw lose 40 percent of their mass over the course of a normal life).

In addition, she had begun holding the handrails when she descended a staircase. She heard stories of more elderly friends who had fallen and broken hips (of those who do, 40 percent end up in a nursing home and 20 percent never walk again). She had also begun taking an array of pills each day, and had broken down and bought one of those pill organizers.

Culturally, Erica felt mildly out of it. There were now a couple of generations of young movie starlets who she could not tell apart. Pop music trends had come and gone without really attracting her notice.

On the other hand, Erica felt that in her later years she had arrived at a more realistic appraisal of herself. It was as if she had achieved such a level of worldly security that she now could look realistically at her shortcomings. In this way, success had brought a humility that she had never felt before.

She had read the books and plays that treated old age as a remorseless slide into decrepitude. In
As You Like It
, Shakespeare’s morose character, Jaques, calls old age “second childishness and mere oblivion.” In the middle of the twentieth century developmental psychologists, when they treated old age at all, often regarded it as a period of withdrawal. The elderly slowly separate themselves from the world, it was believed, in preparation for death. They cannot be expected to achieve new transformations. “About the age of fifty,” Freud wrote, “the elasticity of the mental processes on which treatment depends is, as a rule, lacking. Old people are no longer educable.”

But Erica did not feel any of that, and indeed more-recent research has shown that seniors are completely capable of learning and growth. The brain is capable of creating new connections, and even new neurons, all through life. While some mental processes—like working memory, the ability to ignore distractions, and the ability to quickly solve math problems—clearly deteriorate, others do not. While many neurons die and many connections between different regions of the brain wither, older people’s brains reorganize to help compensate for the effects of aging. Older brains might take longer to produce the same results, but they do tend to get the problems solved. One study of air traffic controllers found that thirty-year-olds had better memories than their older colleagues, but sixty-year-olds did just as well in emergency situations.

A series of longitudinal studies, begun decades ago, are producing a rosier portrait of life after retirement. These studies don’t portray old age as surrender or even serenity. They portray it as a period of development—and they are not even talking about über-oldsters who take their coming mortality as a sign they should start parachuting out of airplanes.

Most people report being happier as they get older. This could be because as people age they pay less attention to negative emotional stimuli. Laura Carstensen of Stanford has found that older people are better able to keep their emotions in balance, and bounce back more quickly from negative events. John Gabrieli of
MIT
has found that in older people’s brains the amygdala remains active when people are viewing positive images but is not active when people are viewing negative images. They’ve unconsciously learned the power of positive perception.

Gender roles begin to merge as people age. Many women get more assertive while many men get more emotionally attuned. Personalities often become more vivid, as people become more of what they already are. Norma Haan of Berkeley conducted a fifty-year follow-up of people who had been studied while young, and concluded that the subjects had become more outgoing, self-confident, and warm with age.

There’s no evidence to suggest that people get automatically wiser as they get older. The tests, such as they are, that try to assess “wisdom” (a combination of social, emotional, and informational knowledge) suggest a kind of plateau. People achieve a level of competence on these tests in middle age, which holds steady until about age seventy-five.