Review: Mr. Brooks's Miracle Elixir | The National Interest: No longer the most successful economy—Germany’s boom shows how a quite different version of market capitalism has adapted better to globalization, while China’s experiment in turbocharged state capitalism has produced over thirty years of fast growth—Americans cannot claim to enjoy the highest living standards. Worse, U.S. decline is not only relative but also absolute. Stagnant for decades, the incomes of the American majority are now falling, or else are maintained only by taking on multiple jobs in a depressed and insecure labor market. Worse yet, there is no prospect of this process ending anytime soon.
Freud never imagined that his research into the unconscious mind would open the way to happiness. Instead, it could be used to fortify the mind against unhappiness, which the founder of psychoanalysis accepted as the normal human experience.
In stark opposition to Freud, Brooks thinks he has found in the unconscious something like a technology of human fulfillment. “The central humanistic truth,” he writes, “is that the conscious mind can influence the unconscious.”
Here as elsewhere the illusion of novelty is kept alive by a loss of memory. No one who had read and digested Adam Smith or Edmund Burke—or indeed John Maynard Keynes—could possibly imagine that the life of man would ever be carried on by unaided reason, or believe that humans were anything other than quintessentially social. Only those who have forgotten most of the Western tradition could find Brooks’s propositions arresting or in any way instructive.
For Harris, the moral quandaries of the past were the result of ignorance; now that science has revealed the “moral facts” of human nature there is little room for doubt in ethics, since knowledge can replace faith and intuition in settling disputes about the essence of human well-being.
Even now, when global markets are falling apart under the strains of sovereign bankruptcy, currency wars and resource conflicts, our rulers continue to insist that there is no alternative. Rather than making the effort—intellectual as much as political—of deciding what can be entrusted to the market and what cannot, they look for gimmicks that will serve as proxies for new thinking.
Brooks’s readers can then turn their minds from the discomforting shifts that are under way—such as the palpable erosion of public infrastructure, which leaves the United States looking more and more like the third-world countries of a few decades ago—and seek refuge in an American pastoral.
The reality has long been a succession of dodges, slogans and ephemeral “initiatives” which serve to conceal the government’s inability to control—or for that matter understand—history as it happens.
The Social Animal is an exemplar of political discourse as we know it today; the chief function is to distract attention from intractable realities, which governments and those they govern prefer not to think about.