Empowering Nature
David Brooks has another piece up in the Times today. It is, as Brooks has often been these past couple of weeks, dyspeptic and pessimistic, but on the whole, I don't want to argue with him. Instead, I'd like to attend to something he says in the middle:
Bringing this back to Brooks, what's striking is Brooks' appeal to biology as a way to argue that profound social changes are afoot. We are who we are, he might say, by virtue of our biology, and he goes on to argue that Obama's team has erred in approaching the financial crisis as an economic one (in which economists' models of markets explain the world) and not as a behavioral crisis (not just our savings at stake, but our bodies).
Brooks, then, is empowering nature by arguing that there's an actual physiological change in people. He doesn't extend his argument - indeed, I think his point is mostly to show the limits of economic modeling - but I wonder, then, what kind of power he's naturalizing by empowering nature in this way. Brooks tends to position himself as the last of the intellectual conservatives, and it's worth thinking about the body he has in mind: A body politic? His body? How does he - do we - negotiate between the two?
Essentially, Americans had migrated from one society to another — from a society of high trust to a society of low trust, from a society of optimism to a society of foreboding, from a society in which certain financial habits applied to a society in which they did not. In the new world, investors had no basis from which to calculate risk. Families slowly deleveraged. Bankers had no way to measure the future value of assets.We read a piece (Anna Tsing's "Empowering Nature; or, Some Gleanings in Bee Culture") for class the other day in which Tsing has an absolutely stellar phrase: "Naturalizing power requires empowering nature."
Cognitive scientists distinguish between normal risk-assessment decisions, which activate the reward-prediction regions of the brain, and decisions made amid extreme uncertainty, which generate activity in the amygdala. These are different mental processes using different strategies and producing different results. Americans were suddenly forced to cope with this second category, extreme uncertainty.
Bringing this back to Brooks, what's striking is Brooks' appeal to biology as a way to argue that profound social changes are afoot. We are who we are, he might say, by virtue of our biology, and he goes on to argue that Obama's team has erred in approaching the financial crisis as an economic one (in which economists' models of markets explain the world) and not as a behavioral crisis (not just our savings at stake, but our bodies).
Brooks, then, is empowering nature by arguing that there's an actual physiological change in people. He doesn't extend his argument - indeed, I think his point is mostly to show the limits of economic modeling - but I wonder, then, what kind of power he's naturalizing by empowering nature in this way. Brooks tends to position himself as the last of the intellectual conservatives, and it's worth thinking about the body he has in mind: A body politic? His body? How does he - do we - negotiate between the two?
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