In his NY Times op-ed The Social Animal, David Brooks writes that the “individualist description of human nature seems to be wrong. Over the past 30 years, there has been a tide of research in many fields, all underlining one old truth — that we are intensely social creatures, deeply interconnected with one another and the idea of the lone individual rationally and willfully steering his own life course is often an illusion.”

He goes on to say that the Republican party hasn’t kept up with science: “Recent Republican Party doctrine has emphasized the power of the individual, but underestimates the importance of connections, relationships, institutions and social filaments that organize personal choices and make individuals what they are.”

Brook then declares this worldview the main impediment to modernization of the Republican party: “These problems straining the social fabric aren’t directly addressed by maximizing individual freedom. And yet locked in the old framework, the Republican Party’s knee-jerk response to many problems is: ‘Throw a voucher at it’.”

Brooks misses two crucial points in his op-ed, as he does in most of his recent op-eds covering similar “human nature” issues. He does not get “culture” and he does not get “power and inequality.”

We are not just social animals, we are cultural animals! But the Republican party does not get this fundamental fact of human nature. For the Republicans, there is one set of values that matter, and we can impose those values on others. It’s not just an ideology of individualism, it’s an ideology of culture.

Continue reading “David Brooks and the Social Animal”

The female is softer in disposition, is more mischievous, less simple,
more impulsive, and more attentive to the nurture of the young;
the male, on the other hand, is more spirited, more savage,
more simple and less cunning. The traces of these characteristics are
more or less visible everywhere, but they are especially visible where
character is more developed, and most of all in man.

from Aristotle’s Historia Animalium,
in Barnes, J. Complete Works of Aristotle, Volume 1: The Revised Oxford Translation, Princeton University Press, 1984.

Continue reading “Sex and Gender”