Gold Pins

In "Notes from Underground," Fyodor Dostoevsky writes:

They say that Cleopatra (excuse an instance from Roman history) was fond of sticking gold pins into her slave-girls' breasts and derived gratification from their screams and writhings. You will say that that was in the comparatively barbarous times; that these are barbarous times too, because also, comparatively speaking, pins are stuck in even now; that though man has now learned to see more clearly than in barbarous ages, he is still far from having learnt to act as reason and science would dictate. But yet you are fully convinced that he will be sure to learn when he gets rid of certain old bad habits, and when common sense and science have completely re-educated human nature and turned it in a normal direction. You are confident that then man will cease from INTENTIONAL error and will, so to say, be compelled not to want to set his will against his normal interests.

David Brooks could well be the "you" to whom Dostoevsky's apocraphyl speaker addresses this segment of his diary. In "The Sandra Bullock Trade," Brooks argues that "most of us pay attention to the wrong things," such as making money, even though tending to our social and spiritual careers is a far more efficient way to achieve happiness than focusing on our economic careers. Like Dostoevsky's narrator's audience, Brooks is confident in science's ability to turn human nature in a rational, "normal direction," namely, toward the productive pursuit of happiness. He calls those who would consider trading social welfare for economic welfare for "more than three seconds" "absolutely crazy."

As Dostoevsky points out, however, the columnist's rational, science-backed vision of how to produce prosperity makes some questionable assumptions, such as:

1. Happiness = prosperity.


2. People want to be happy.


3. People want to prosper.


4. People will rationally pursue what they want.

Cleopatra did some irrationally cruel things to make herself happy. I'm guessing that Brooks would label her as "absolutely crazy." If he could go back in time, he might even offer her some advice, like telling her that "being married produces a psychic gain equivalent to more than $100,000 a year." Or maybe he at least would have advised her not to marry her brother(s).

It is not that any of the advice Brooks gives is wrong, and I don't doubt the "impressive rigor" of the research on which it is based. But if Cleopatra were so crazy, why would she heed it? By the same token, why would people who are looney enough to choose an Oscar over a healthy marriage -- or commit themselves to a comparably irrational course of action -- take Brooks's recommendations to heart? As Dostoevsky suggests, creatures who err intentionally in the present have no reason to do otherwise in the future. If Brooks already thinks that we pay attention to the wrong things, could we "be compelled" by logical argument "not to want to set [our] will against [our] normal interests"?

This is not to stay that humans cannot put their gold pins in a drawer for a while and behave more in their self-interests and in the interests of others. Reforms like the Civil Rights Act can produce just this effect. In the end, though, any meaningful road to prosperous, rational human society must be paved by science that seeks to understand the proximate and ultimate foundations on which human behavior and psychology are built and by which they are constrained. The goal should not be Brooks's analysis, which tries to uproot "absolutely crazy" psychology; instead, we should endeavor to understand the biology from which constraints to rationality originate and work with the constraints toward psychological freedom, not against them or indifferently to them.

(Paradoxically, assuming irrationality, there's no good reason to expect anyone to take up this noble task, or that it is noble to begin with... though some already have.)

We'll always have gold pins. Let's learn how to use them right.