Science has finally figured out human nature! And omg, what a piece of work are we! Read all about the wonder that is us in a New Yorker article by the New York Times’s self-styled Burkean David Brooks. He’s taken the Malcolm Gladwell approach to “the new sciences of human nature”–you know, first telling you how the conventional wisdom (i.e., what you think, even if you didn’t know it) is wrong, and then setting you straight by leaping happily across the scientific pond, landing on the choicest lily pads and describing them as if each was a country and all taken together were a continent rather than an assemblage of tiny duchies presided over by whatever frog croaks the loudest (and the loudest one here, although Brooks doesn’t name him, is Marty “Professor Torture” Seligman).  At least Gladwell has the decency to limit his use of this method–which he has mastered as surely as Lay’s has figured out how to make potato chips–only to relatively insubstantial matters. But Brooks has gone whole hog, or maybe it’s whole frog, and evidently he has an entire book coming out to tell us who we really are.

Like I said, the news is good. It turns out that Freud was right about one thing, the happy thing–that “we are not primarily the products of our conscious thinking,” as Brooks puts it, which means that we are truly deep people–but not about the other thing, the unhappy thing: that the unconscious is a teeming chaotic font of bedevilment, that it is by its nature unknowable and that it can only be studied by a science of interpretation, like a text. In fact, say Brooks’s scientists, the unconscious, seat of emotion and intuition and perception is “supple” and smart, and “allows us to tell a different sort of success story” from the one that we, at least those of us who are successful (like, say, a New York Times columnist) tell about our lives.

The unconscious, pace Freud (and amazingly Brooks writes something like 5000 words about the unconscious as if it had been discovered in “the cognitive revolution of the past thirty years) is not the adversary within, not the Other, but the hitherto unexplored  source of our success. Brooks gives us an exemplar, Harold, a marathon-biking metrosexual who flies in private jets from corporate board meetings to Council on Foreign Relations events–a leading member, Brooks says, of the Composure Class. He has his shit together, does Harold, and right now he’s in Jackson Hole or Aspen or Vail, pausing over whether to get the cloudberry or the ginger pomegranate gelato, and Brooks freezes that moment of indecision to tell us how Harold got to this point in his life.

Which is where the scientists come in. “Brain science helps fill the hole left by the atrophy of theology and philosophy,” he writes, and   it tells us that Harold arrived on that lofty mountaintop because of all sorts of fortuitous occurrences in, and to, his unconscious. His mom nurtured him, which helped him maximize the number of synaptic connections he made as a child. In his fantasy life, no doubt encouraged by that same mom, he made unlikely connections, for instance, imagining himself to be a tiger, which made him not unlike “Picasso [who] could combine the concept of ‘Western portraiture’ with the concept ofr ‘African Masks.'” Harold thus developed the idea–deluded but necessary to success–that he has mastery over his life. He had teachers who modeled “the mental virtues that lead to practical wisdom” and inculcated them with love.” He learned that happiness is much more “It’s a Wonderful Life” than “On the Road,” more about looking back to the established truths than forging ahead into the unknown, and that what “the inner mind really wants is connection.” He makes that connection with a woman whom he marries after meeting her in front of Barnes & Noble, a decision that his Perfectly Cultivated Unconscious made in “the first tenth of a second.” His PCUC also allowed him, when it turned out that he and his bride differed over how to use the dishwasher, to negotiate his way back to happiness. Through it all he maintained his composure, whcih is to say he displayed the resilience that Seligman and the other positive psychologists say constitutes the good life. And all of this happened for reasons, reasons that scientists have come to understand as the laws of human nature.

But Harold had no idea of these laws. He hadn’t done it on purpose. He had simply stumbled on happiness, and he might have stumbled onto somethign else, as many people with Harold’s basic pedigree do. But then one day he heard a neuroscientist give a talk in Aspen and heard that we swim in a “great river of knowledge” and that “flourishing consists of putting yourself in situations in which you lose self-consciousness and become fused with other people, experiences or tasks.” Whereupon it dawned on him that “the things that didn’t lead to happiness and flourishing had been emphasized at the expense of the things that did. The gifts he was most grateful for had been pased along to him by teachers and parents inadverently whereas his official education was mostly forgotten or useless.” He had no idea how lucky he’d been, how much his culture worked against the possibility that he would have turned out this way, and concluded that “It might be time for a revolution in his own consciousness–time to take the proto-conversations that had been shoved to the periphery of life and put them back in the center. Maybe it was time to use this science to cultivate an entirely different viewpoint.”

Which is no doubt what we can look forward to in Brooks’s book–a long panegyric, part half-assed social history, part full-assed self-help, to the new science of the mind and brain, and how it can help us make our unconscious conscious. Not of course for the purposes Freud had in mind when he came up with that idea–to clue us in to just how unreliable, how self-deluding, how downright dangerous we can be–but rather so that we can tap our unconscious and become intentionally what Harold became by accident: a  flourishing human being who knows what he wants (cloudberry, it turns out)  and how to get it. In case you’re worried that this might make him a narcissistic asshole for whom the choice of gelato and the choice of lifemate and the choice of political party are all equivalent kinds of choices, don’t worry: he’s learned how to make choices through love and connection, and his fine intersubjective skills will prevent that unhappy outcome because he will flowing in the great river of all minds, now and forever.

Just one question, though, David, at least for now: this fusion-of-unconsciousnesses thing–isn’t it just a little scary? I mean,  have you ever seen Triumph of the Will?

who didn’t want to pay for the hardcover. Manufacturing Depression will  be out in paperback in two weeks. The publisher changed the cover, which makes me sad, although not depressed. Instead of that wonderful Magritte painting, there are pills, well actually one pill, on the cover. Seems that you can’t sell a book about depression without making it into a book about drugs. I’m not changing the cover that is on this site, but here’s what it looks like.

And speaking of Ted Kaczynski, it looks like Jared Loughner scored Judy Clarke as a lawyer. To judge from that mug shot, she’s not going to have any trouble convincing a jury that her client is a nut job and ought to have his life spared. Certainly, compared to her travails trying to convince Kaczynski to go along with that strategy–he refused to be evaluated by a psychiatrist, his lawyers insisted, he fired them, and the judge then ordered him to undergo a psych eval in order to prove that he could defend himself: check and mate–this should be easy. I’m betting Loughner is a coward, although probably not a looser or faggot tool.

The Loughner thing, and the handwringing that followed, reminded me of something that happened a few months ago when I went to get the mail. I live in a tiny New England village, where everyone knows your name, sort of like Cheers, but without the stools and beer. The post office is appropriately small, and the postmistress, Charlene, knows way more than your name, which means that a lot of other people do too. Charlene’s the kind of woman who will, as she did the other day, leave her post to help chase down an escaped pig that is trotting down the middle of the road, and then return to sorting the mail and selling stamps without missing a beat. She’s cantankerous and cutting and good at what she does, always willing to advise on the most efficient way to mail a package, and I think she’s great.

Every day at 2, Charlene closes the service window for an hour to eat lunch and take a constitutional. ON the day in question, I stopped in to get my mail during her break. (Access to boxes is available during her lunch.) I was separating the junk from the mere crap when a guy walked in, someone whose name I didn’t know and had never seen before. He was holding some envelopes. He pushed on the door to the service area, but it was locked. He gave the door a kick and said, “Goddam federal gummint.” He said it to no one in particular, but, like Travis Bickle, I was the only one there. I felt my gorge rising. I tried to restrain myself, I really did, but the words were out of me before I knew it.

“What’s the Federal government got to do with it?” I said. He was two days unshaven, dressed in the local regalia–flannel shirt, saggy jeans, filthy gimme cap–and his eyes were rheumy, I imagined, from watching toomuch Fox News. “She works from 8 to 2 and then takes a lunch hour.”

“Yeah, probably takes a fucking  two-hour lunch.”

“Actually,  she’s on her way back right now,” I said, pointing out the window to where she was walking across the Town Green toward the post office, “and I’m sure she’ll be glad to help you.”

He left, unimpressed, swinging the front door with just a little more mustard than was necessary for the job, and chirped his tires as he pulled out.

Now, this upset me in two ways. The first, which has to do with Jared Loughner, is that it clued me in to just how much  anger is floating around out there, ready to land at the first opportunity. (I probably should have figured this out a long time ago, but not having cable and really disliking spending much time online has protected me.) Anger like that has to be primed to find its grounding, just like lightning has to be charged to be attracted to a lightning rod. So too with Loughner’s craziness. Maybe forty years ago he shoots up a draft office or robs an armored car on behalf of the SDS or the YIP (although I doubt it; all this equivalence between the left’s and right’s fiery rhetoric strikes me as just so much ecumenical posturing and overlooks the  reality that from the get-go conservatism has been the movement of reaction and oppression, but I digress), but now a gathering around a congresswoman is where it comes to ground. Don’t bother counting how many hours he spent watching Glenn Beck or listening to Michael Savage–it doesn’t matter. The rage is in the air, contagious like the flu, and I don’t have any doubt he contracted it and that it mixed badly with whatever other illnesses he has.

The other thing that got me is that I actually found myself defending the federal government. Talk about your signs of the apocalypse!

at   http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/12/ff_dsmv

Probably been there for a couple of weeks. Which means posting this is ridiculously, perhaps insanely, late.

One of the things I learned in my long correspondence with the Unabomber is that in the olden days, when people put pen to paper to settle important affairs of state and the heart, which is sort of what Kaczynski and I are doing, we must have been a much more patient species. And less distractable, or at least surrounded by fewer temptations toward distraction.

Speaking of which, in looking up that link to those excerpts from the Unabomber article (the full version of which someday I’ll scan and put on this site), I discovered that the video Errol Morris made about my little Kaczynski caper is now online. Someone called OriginalMindTrick posted it there. It’s attracted some lovely comments. Stonerj0e2 thinks I’m a faggot tool, tranquilityjoe calls me a pitiful looser[sic], and badsign1980 says I’m a coward. I love the Internet.

And then there was the field trial idiocy.

To see whether or not new diagnoses and new diagnostic criteria really work, whether they are useful, whether they create unforeseen consequences like too-high rates of diagnosis, they are field tested. Mental health workers in hospitals and private offices use the new criteria and report back on how they worked, and based on their experience the criteria are tweaked.

Field trials were supposed to begin in May 2010. But the criteria weren’t ready by then, which gave the dissenters more ammunition, as one of their criticisms was that the process was hopelessly inefficient and behind schedule. Over the summer, little was heard of the field trials, but every time I asked a question about the vagueness of various criteria or the complexity of the process by which the APA wants to start specifying the severity of mental disorders, the answer was, Wait until the field trials. In the meantime, certain deadlines loomed that were out of th APA’s control, especially the deadline for the update of the World Health Organization’s International Classficiation of Diseases (too complicated to go into here, but trust me, if the APA doesn’t get their DSM shit together before the ICD goes to press, they’re gonnna be one sorry bunch). So the pressure was on to get the field trials under way.

Finally, in October, the APA announced in a press release that the field trials had begun. I emailed to get some details and quickly discovered that the trials had not begun at all, except for one–the pilot study, which had been under way for months and whose results would determine the final shape of the field trials. Near as I could make out, the real start date was at least two months away.

You can’t blame the APA for not wanting this information out there. But why in the world would they announce that the trials had started when they had not? Did they really think no one would ask? I can only think of two possibilities, besides the obvious, which is that they’re too arrogant to think anyone will notice or care. First possibility: it could have been a Freudian slip–an unconscious revelation of something that they did not want in the light of day, truth coming to light in the form of a lie. Second, it could have been an Orwellian assault on language, you know, when an institution has so much power that it thinks it can control the meaning of words, as in War is Peace. 

Of course, there’s a third possibility: rank incompetence. That’s the explanation I think dissenters would go with, but it just seems too simplistic to me.