Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
In Consilience Wilson makes the prediction that a lot of the disciplines we have separated human behaviour into are obsolete, and that we are on the verge of unifying knowledge in an inter-disciplinary way. And that is actually happening with neuroscience: there’s a field of neural economics, neural this and that, basically neural everything: literary critics, historians. People in many different disciplines are using this work on the brain to illuminate their thinking. I think what they’re finding in our unconscious mind will have the same sort of influence that Marx had, and that Sigmund Freud had, namely an entire new vocabulary, that will help define a lot of different fields.
Finally, Consilience, which was published in 1998 and is by the Harvard biologist and twice Pulitzer Prize-winning Edward Wilson.
Wilson makes the argument – or rather the prediction – that a lot of the disciplines we have separated human behaviour into are obsolete, and that we are on the verge of unifying knowledge in an inter-disciplinary way. And that’s important because if you look around at various fields, what Wilson predicted a decade ago is actually happening with neuroscience. There’s a field of neural economics, which is a combination of economics and neuroscience, there’s neural this and that, basically neural everything: literary critics, historians. People in many different disciplines are using this work on the brain to illuminate their thinking. And in this way, I think what they’re finding in our unconscious mind will have the same sort of influence that Marx had, and that Sigmund Freud had, namely an entire new vocabulary, that will help define a lot of different fields.
So this belief in the unity of knowledge, that there is one theory that will explain all we know and don’t know. Is this the return of the Renaissance man?
Well, except that in the Renaissance we thought we were masters of our destiny, and the whole idea was ‘what a glorious thing man is, with limitless capacities’. But here, each individual is not so special, we are shaped by genes, by social trends; individual decision-making is bounded. There are severe limits on free will.
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David Brooks is a columnist for the New York Times who writes about politics and American culture. He joined the Weekly Standard at its inception in 1995, and prior to that was op-ed editor at the Wall Street Journal. His books include Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There and On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (and Always Have) in the Future Tense. He argues that it will soon be hard to understand anything about the world around us without a knowledge of the unconscious workings of the brain. So we may as well make a start now, by reading the five books he recommends on neuroscience. The working title of his own book on the subject, due out in January 2011, is How Success Happens.
