Beatrice Marovich has a fine review of The Social Animal by David Brooks over at Religion Dispatches. According to Marovich, Brooks argues that the unconscious is the social glue that marks out humans as a species different from the animals. Marovich criticizes the failure of Brooks to absorb the preemption of his message by the feminist literature and she objects to the the privileging of those who achieve power as living the good life.
Even more interesting I think is the fact that at the level of political theory, Brooks joins the rationalists by conferring dignity on humans by differentiating them from the animals. Marovich objects to the differation from animals as the grounding for his argument. Marovich argues instead for "less of a myopic focus on imagining ourselves—as we have, for so long, in the Western philosophical tradition—as the noble specie, so grandly alienated and abstracted from all other animals. Researcher and author Temple Grandin delves into biological research on animal life in order to propose that it’s actually our social relationships with animals that turn us into more effectively humane, caring, and nurturing creatures. This seems, to me, a more productive path toward understanding our social animality—one with plenty of political, and even spiritual, implications."
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