Reading David Brooks is irritating.  And his essay in The New Yorker is no exception.  He makes some great points about the weakness of our assumptions of individuality, but then he goes and embeds them in a silly pop-sociology discourse about the "Composure Class."  We'll just focus on the good parts…

His main argument is that recent scholarship by psychologists, economists, sociologists and others undermines overly simplistic understandings of individuals and rationality.  Persons are not  solitary rational agents carefully calculating on their own their paths through life.  Perhaps sometimes we are like that but to dwell on that image too long is to miss a much more fundamental sociality of humanity.  We are, from the very beginnings of our lives and consistently throughout our lives, social beings, constantly forging our identities and actions in intense interactions with others.  Brooks sums it up like this:

A core finding of this work is that we are not primarily the products of our conscious thinking. The conscious mind gives us one way of making sense of our environment. But the unconscious mind gives us other, more supple ways. The cognitive revolution of the past thirty years provides a different perspective on our lives, one that emphasizes the relative importance of emotion over pure reason, social connections over individual choice, moral intuition over abstract logic, perceptiveness over I.Q. It allows us to tell a different sort of success story, an inner story to go along with the conventional surface one.

There are various resonances here with ancient Chinese philosophy.  The dividing line between consciousness and unconsciousness is challenged by Zhuangzi.  His various statements about dreaming – how we can know what is a dream and what is not – foreshadows our contemporary concern with the unconscious.  We may think we are in control of our actions at any given moment, but there can be myriad unconscious mental and biological processes at work that shape our behavior.  And the role of intuition over abstract logic is certainly something familiar to Zhuangzi as well.

But the point about social connections and individual choice is perhaps the most deeply rooted in Chinese thought.  Confucians and Daoists alike would agree that individuals are not nearly as autonomous as some Western philosophies might suggest.  Confucians emphasize our embeddedness in social and family networks.  We cannot craft our Humanity in isolation; we can only be fully human in interaction with others.  Daoists broaden the scope to remind us of our dependence on the natural cycles and spontaneous changes of Dao (which, for them, is something like the totality of natural experience unfolding altogether now). 

It is tempting, therefore to make the obvious point (and I will give in to that temptation): contemporary social and psychological science is finally catching up to the assumptions about human personhood articulated by ancient Chinese thinkers.  I know, that is somewhat unfair. There have been many Western thinkers, ancient and modern, who would reject the methodological individualism of so much of twentieth century social science.  But to see the science come around to the ancient understandings is, well, rather amusing…

Brooks ends his piece with an imagined statement by a neurosceintist, who is trying to understand the personal implications of the new brain science:

I believe we inherit a great river of knowledge, a flow of patterns coming from many sources. The information that comes from deep in the evolutionary past we call genetics. The information passed along from hundreds of years ago we call culture. The information passed along from decades ago we call family, and the information offered months ago we call education. But it is all information that flows through us. The brain is adapted to the river of knowledge and exists only as a creature in that river. Our thoughts are profoundly molded by this long historic flow, and none of us exists, self-made, in isolation from it.

None of us is self-made: a central premise of Confucianism and Daoism.  And that image of a river, flowing on, shaping our lives, is pretty much what Confucius himself was getting at in Analects 9.17:

The Master standing by a stream, said, "It passes on just like this, not ceasing day or night!"

子在川上，曰：“逝者如斯夫！不舍晝夜。”