baltic states, bill rose, ukraine and most of poland. so what this means as of all of the killing that took place, organized by both hitler and stalin from the atlantic to the pacific, the tremendous majority of this mass murder was concentrated in this relatively small territory. .. >> and to wrap up our prime time

programming tonight, "after words" with ken walsh, author of "family of freedom." and now, david brooks looks at how our unconscious mind shapes our character, intelligence and biases. this is just under an hour. >> it's a great pleasure to be here more or less in my hometown. went to rutger high school about 13 miles west of here. so it's always good to be back in this area. i know you didn't come to hear me speak, you came here to hear yourselves speak. [laughter] and so i'll try to be brief. [laughter] get out of your way. [laughter] it is a pleasure to be back. i tried to think of what my high

school teachers would have thought if they could see me addressing crowds in philadelphia. there'd be widespread shock. [laughter] i was not a big man on campus at radner though i was stuffed into lockers by some of the big men on campus. [laughter] actually, one of my debate partners -- i was on the debate team, needless to say. one of my partners was tom wilson who played bif in the back to the future movies, and another was one of the subjects of the movie "twister" years ago. so they went on to lead exciting lives, and i went on to talk. [laughter] and now a lot of the people i talk with now are politicians. and so when i was given my current job at the times, i was given a good piece of advice which was to interview three politicians every day, and from spending that much time around them, i can tell you they're emotional freaks of one sort or another. they talk so much they drive

themselves insane. [laughter] but they do have incredible social skills. when you meet them, by and large, they will stand real close to you, they'll invade your personal space, they'll rub the back of your head and caress your cheek -- [laughter] dinner with a republican senator a couple years ago, he kept his hand on my thigh the whole meal. [laughter] one several years ago i was up in the press gallery, and i'm watching dan quayle and ted kennedy greet each other in the well of the senate, and they give each other these big hugs, and their faces are so far apart, and they're laughing and groping, and their hands are rubbing up and down each other's backs, and i'm like, get a room, i don't want to see this. [laughter] another story i tell which is a bit of name dropping, but you'll forgive me -- i call it reporting. i'm going through a hotel in boston a couple years ago, and bill clinton comes out of one of the elevators, and he starts praising me for a column i'd

written praising him which -- [laughter] he thought was particularly astute column. [laughter] but as he's talking, people see bill clinton in the lobby, and he starts backing up. and so they can all here what he's -- hear what he's saying. within a few minutes he's, like, 80 feet away, but he's just talking to me. [laughter] another case i was following mitt romney around while he was campaigning in the last election cycle, and he was campaigning up in new hampshire with his five perfect sons. [laughter] and so he goes into a diner, and he starts going around to the tables of the diner and introducing himself to the families and asking what village in new hampshire they're from and describing the home he owned in their village. [laughter] and then he would go around from table to table, and he meets like 30 people, and then on the way out he first names just everybody he's just met. i'm like, okay, that's a

profession i won't be going into. and finally, i was just a few weeks ago at the national institutes of health, and i was shown a video of a young girl with williams syndrome. it looks from the outside like reverse autism. she's with the sonover the researcher, and she only wants to look into her eyes. and the boy's juggling, she has no interest in the physical objects, she only wants that social connection, so she gets close to him and just stares right into his eyes minute after minute, and i was thinking, this is every senator i've ever interviewed. [laughter] and so they're socially attuned creatures. the odd thing is that when they turn their minds to policy, all that social sophistication vanishes, and they start thinking like cbo reports, like computer models. and i've covered a series of failures in my life, a lot of which have to do with the overly simplistic view of human nature.

so i covered the decline of the soviet union, and we sent economists in with privatization plans, but what they really lacked will was social trust, and we were blind to that. and as a result they really stole everything in the country because they had no social trust. then i covered the war in iraq. we sent the military in, and our leaders were unprepared for the psychological realities of that. we had a regulatory regime based on the fact that bankers wouldn't do anything stupid en masse, and that turned out not to be true. [laughter] most importantly, for 30 years i've covered education trying to understand why 30 % or 20% of kids drop out of high school. and we've tried for 30 years to try to raise high school graduation rates, and most of those efforts have been disappointing because we rearrange the bureaucratic boxes, big schools, little schools, charters, vouchers

while skirting the central issue which is the individual relationship between a teacher and a student. [applause] and people learn, people learn from people they love. but if you talk about love at a congressional here hearing, they look at you like you're oprah. they just don't talk in that language. so why to the most socially attuned people on earth, why are they completely dehumanized when they think about policy? i came to the conclusion this was not simply a political problem, but a broader cultural problem. we have, in our society, this inherited view that we're divided cells, that we have reason over here and emotion over here, and the two are at war with one another. they're, like, on a seesaw. if you're emotional, you're not rational, if you're rational, you're not emotional. and society progresses to the extent that reason which is trustworthy can suppress the passions which are untrustworthy. and so this bias has led to a view of human nature that we are fundamentally rational

individuals who respond in straightforward ways to incentives. it's led to a lot of our academic disciplines that try to study human behavior using the meths of physics -- methods of physics, emphasizing what they can count and model and sort of ignoring all the rest. and i think it's led to an amputation where we emphasize things that are rational and countable but ignore and are inarticulate about the things down below. so it's created a culture in which we're really good at talking about material things but bad at talking about emotions. really good at talking about health and safety and professional skills, but the most important things like character and integrity, we often have very little to say. alistair or mcintyre said we live in a system where we still have the words for the important things like virtue and honor and vice, but we don't have a basic understanding of how they all fit together. we had some science words like neutron or gravity, but we didn't understand how physics

work so how they all fit together, that's where we are. and so i do think we have this amputation which blows us in a certain way. and it blows us in the direction, this sort of prevailing breeze that we're not always satisfied -- satisfied with. i mentioned i went to high school and my folks still live in wayne, pennsylvania, just west of here, and you see the parents there and in many places sort of trapped in a certain style of raising their kids. so you go to an elementary school out there, and they're waring these 80-pound backpacks. the wind blows them over like beetles stuck on the ground because we want them to study and do homework and get ready for the harvard admissions tests. they get packed up -- picked up by saabs and audis because in that town it's socially acceptable to have a foreign car so long as it comes from a country hostile to foreign

policy. love laugh and they get raised by ubermoms who are taking time off to get make sure their children get into harvard. and they weigh less than their children. in the delivery room, cutting the umbilical cord themselves. [laughter] and so they turn them into little achievement machines, sat prep, and they're not really happy with it. they don't think this is the most important thing, but the tiger mom down the street is doing it, and they feel sort of trapped into a system which they ridicule, but they actually can't renounce. and they're often in a system where they sort of spew wit that morality and character matters most, but they don't have a vocabulary for it. often we end up talking about shopping. and so we have the ben and

jerry's ice cream. i joked many in win off my books that ben and jerry should make a pacifist, toothpaste doesn't kill germs, just ask them to leave. [laughter] there's a whole foods market, one of the enlightened grocery stores where all the cashiers look like they're on loan from amnesty international. we buy their seaweed-based snacks with kale for kids who come home and say, mom, mom, i want a snack that'll help prevent colorectal cancer. [laughter] and so, you know, i think, though, this is sort of the world we're sort of trapped in. but we realize that that's actually not all there is, and there's more. to life. and more that we should be experiencing. and so i was thinking about this problem and gradually i became aware of this other atmosphere of life where -- sphere of life where they were looking into some of the deeper things. and oddly, it wasn't three low

jans, it wasn't really philosophers but people who study the human mind. we're in this incredibly exciting period in the study of the mind, and it's being done across a wide range of atmospheres, cognitive science, psychology, behavioral economics. people are looking into the human mind, and really it's a revolution in consciousness if you want to put t it that way because when you synthesize their findings across these many different spheres, you really start with three key insights. and the first insight is that while the conscious mind writes the autobiography of our species, most of the action and most of the most impressive action is happening unconsciously below the level of awareness. and one way to think about this is that the human mind can take in roughly 12 million pieces of information a minute of which it can consciously process about 40. and all the rest is being done, really, without our being aware of it. and a lot of the things that are going on are somewhat odd, and my favorite research finding

from a university of buffalo scholar is people named dennis are disproportionately likely to become dentists. unconsciously, we gravitate toward things that are familiar which is why i've named my daughter president of the united states brooks. [laughter] and then some of the things that are going on unconsciously are sort of impressive. it's not the tangled web of sexual urges that freud imagined. some of it, the unconscious is really just a different way of understanding the world. and often yielding superior results. so one of the tips i read about was if you have a tough decision, you can't make up your mind, tell yourself you'll decide it by a coin flip, and then flip the coin, but don't go by how the coin comes up, go by your emotional reaction to the coin flip. are you happy or sad it came up that way? that's your unconscious mind having made the decision and telling you what it thinks. and can then the third area that happens unconsciously is really the most important; how do we

relate to people? how do we understand situations? how do we perceive the world? these are the fundamental factors in whether we're going to have a successful or unsuccessful life, fulfill or or unfulfilling life, and a lot of that action is happening unconsciously. emotions aren't the enemy of thinking, they're at the center of thinking. people who have strokes and lesions are not supersmart, they're superdumb. because the emotions assign value to things. they tell you what you want, what you value, what you don't value, and if you don't have that device, you cannot make rational decisions. emotions are not separate from reason, they are the foundation of reason. now, i'm a middle-aged guy, i'm not comfortable talking about emotion particularly. one of the scientific experiments i ran into which is they took a bunch of middle-aged guys, they put them in these brain scan machines and had them watch a horror movie, and then

they had them describe their feelings towards their wives, and the brain scans were the is same in boast both circumstances. [laughter] sheer terror. my wife says me writing a book about emotion is like gandhi writing a book about gluttony. [laughter] and yet emotions really are the center of how we perceive the world, how we value the world, the center of how our brain organizes ourselves. in 1945 there was an orphanage out west. a psychologicallist named renee spitz, at this orphanage they decided to keep the kids germ-free. so they gave them food and good health care, but they did not handle them, and they separated them. and those kids died by age 2. they had a 37% mortality rate. and they stopped naming the kids because they just weren't living long enough. and so that's a sign of how emotion is literally, physically necessary. and so emotion is something you just have to get comfortable

with. and the third insight a is that we're not primarily self-contained individuals. we're social animals with deep inner penetrations to each other. you're not only seeing me, we are reenacting what we see or deeply interpenetrated. and there are all sorts of communications methods through which we are communicating in ways we're not even aware. so there was one story about a psychological professor who wandered up and down the stage from side to side, and his class played a atlantic at him and said when he's over here, we'll look at him, and when he's over there, we won't. he just felt better over there. another experiment done in germany, they took gauze pads, had some people watch a horror movie, some people watch a comedy, they got other people to sniff the gauze pads and and say did they watch a comedy or horror movie? and people could tell way above

average than chance who saw what. women, by the way, were much better at this than men. we are deeply interpenetrated. so these findings give us a different story of how life works and who we are. so we're, in many ways, children of the french enlightenment believing that reason is the highest of our faculties. but this research confirms some of the british or scottish enlightenment that reason is weak and sentiments are quite strong, our most important faculty. and it gives us a different view of who we are and, i think, a different view of human capital, of what it takes to lead a fulfilling life. when we talk about human capital, we often talk about the things we can measure -- grades, degrees, sat scores, igs, all that's important. but there are other qualities which, i think, are more important which are both emotional and rational and make a hash of these two categories. and so one of these talents i would say is this thing called

mind sight, the ability to enter other minds and learn and download what their, what those minds have to teach you. babies come equipped with this to a great degree, to a research er at the university of washington leaned over a baby, wagged his tongue at the baby, and she wagged her tongue back. that's because babies even at this phenomenally early age are built to merge with the minds they come into contact with and really absorb models for understanding the world from who they come in contact with. now, by 18 months about 55% of american babies have established a two-way relationship with mom primarily, but also with dad. and those kids have what they call secure attachments. they really know how to build relationships with parents and with adults. and those kids have a huge leg up. and so researchers can take a look at kids who are 18 months old, look at how they attach to mom and predict with 77% accuracy who's going to graduate

from high school. because if you can go into a school even at 3 or 2 or at 5 and you know how to relate the teacher, you just have a better shot of doing well in school. about 20% of the kids are what they call avoidantly attached, sending out signals but not much has been coming back at them. so a teacher described one of the ajoin dantley attached kids tacting like a sail boat into the wind. not knowing how to get close to teacher. and those kids have less activation of the reward areas of their brains during social interaction. they get less of a kick out of social engagement. by age 70 they'll have many, many fewer friends than others. something that happens at 18 months does not determine a life course, but it opens up a pathway which can be either confirms or disconfirmed by later experience. somebody can so far a mentor -- discover a mentor, and their lives can be changed.

but these are some of the skills you learn very early on. a second skill is the serenity and maturity to look inside your own mind and be aware of your own weaknesses. so, for example, the unconscious have many skills, but it has some weaknesses. we are overconfidence machines. 95% of college professors believe they have above average teaching skills. [laughter] 96% of college students have above average leadership skills. thyme magazine asks people, are you in the top 1% of everybodiers? 19% of americans are in the top 1% of earners. [laughter] they gave tests to executives about their own industry and asked them how confident are you you got your answers right? advertising executives got 60 percent of the answers wrong. computer executives, the most wherever confident industry, thought they got 95% of the answers right, in fact, they got 80% wrong. this is a strongly gender-linked trait.

so men drown at twice the rate as women -- [laughter] because men think they can swim across that lake, especially after they've been drinking. and so have the ability to correct for your own biases, you have the ability to be open minded in the face of ambiguity, to adjust the strength of your conclusion to the strength of your evidence, to be modest in the face of the things you don't know, to invent modesty devices for yourself. peter jerker had a great one. he said, when you make a decision, write down your reasoning, seal it in an envelope and open it in nine months. you'll discover a third of your decisions were right, a third were wrong, but in most cases your reasoning will be completely irrelevant. [laughter] and so these are all skills that are only tangent cially related to iq. it has to do with your emotional equilibrium. the third trait is a greek word which we might call street smarts, the ability to look across a complicated scene and

pick out a pattern, devief a gist. there was a great story in my newspaper about soldiers in iraq who could look down a street and sort of tell if there was a bomb buried on that street. and they couldn't exactly tell you why, they just felt a coldness inside. some people have the sensitivity to the landscape, and that's a skill that comes from practice. from close observation and practice. and that, most of that perception is unconscious. the fourth thing you might call sympathy. sensitivity to an emotional and social environment. can you pick out what other people are feeling and sensing? and this comes in extremely handy working in groups. most of us work in groups because groups function more effectively than individuals. you give a group a card test, the groups will solve it much better. and the capacity of a group to solve the card tricks or math problems is not related to the high iq or the median iq in the

group, it's related to how well do those people read each other's emotional signals? how often do they take turns while communicating? that's how well a group because. and face to face groups do a lot better than groups that communicate electronically, by the way. so the university of michigan, they gave some people math problems, gave one set of groups ten minutes to solve the problems face to face, and they did very well. gave another set of groups 30 minutes to solve them, but they had to communicate by e-mail, and those groups could not solve the problems. so beware teleconferencing. face to face is just a lot better. and some people have the ability to read those things, and some don't. the fifth trait i would list is called propriety. the ability to set up scaffolds to control some of your impulses. the most famous experiment in this whole field which many of you probably know is the marshmallow experiment. michelle took 4-year-olds, put

them in a room, put marsh marshmallows on a table in many front of them, said you can eat this now, i'm going to leave the room, and if you haven't eaten the marshmallow, i'll give you two. he showed me video of the kids trying not to eat the marshmallow, there's a little girl banging her head on the table. [laughter] one day he was using an oreo cookie. the little guy carefully eats out the middle, carefully puts it back. [laughter] that kid is now a u.s. senator. [laughter] and, but the scary thing is the kids who could wait ten minutes 20 years later had much higher college completion rates. thirty years later, much higher incomes. the kids who could only wait one minute, much higher drug and alcohol-related problems. and some kids grow up in homes where actions lead to consequences, and they develop strategies to control their impulses.

mostly by pretending the marshmallow's a cloud or not real, somehow pretending that temptation is not really there in front of them. and so the kids who can go to school with those control -- that self-control will find school a lot less frustrating than kids who cannot. and these are other traits baked in early and really happen unconsciously for the most part. now, the final trait is not so much a trait, it's more of a motivation. and i call it limerance. the conscious mind hungers for money, success, fame, recognition, but what the unconscious mind hungers for most, i think, is those moments when the self fades away and we find ourself lost in a challenge or a task or another. and it's those moments of transcendence when a craftsman is lost in, say, carpentry, when a naturalist feels at one with nature, when a believer feels

subsumed by god's love or most frequently for most of us, when we find it in love for one another and we lose the sense of self because of love for one another. now, this decision to fall in love is boast rational and emotional at the same time and makes a hash of those categories. so when we see somebody we might potentially fall in love with, one of the things we're doing unconsciously is measuring that person in all sorts of ways. we tend to marry people who have nose width similar to our own, eye width similar to our own, we tend to marry people with complementary immune systems which we can tell by smell, we tend to marry people who have the maximum status symbols that we can get. and so women, unfortunately, tend to marry or tend to admire men who are taller than they are because the average inch in height in america equals about clash 6,000 a year in annual -- $6,000 a year in annual salary.

one study i came across said a guy who's 5-of can get as many online offers on a dating web site as a guy who's six foot as long as he makes $70,000 more. [laughter] some of it is quite deep and mystical. and be you would say enchanted. there was a great phrase called crystallization. and he described these salt miners in austria who would take branches and throw it into a salt mine. they'd come back a few weeks later and hold them up to sun, and the branches would glimmer in the sun. he said, that's what we do to our beloved. we sort of exaggerate their virtues. and we become sort of addicted to them. and the brain scientists say that love inside the brain looks very much like a cocaine addiction. it's not an emotion so much as a state of need, a desire to

become completely fused, one with another. and i tell high school students, though they don't believe me, that every course they should take in college should help them decide who to marry. that that is the only important decision they're probably going to make in their lives. [laughter] if you each -- a good marriage produces the same happiness gained as making $100,000 a year or more. if you have a good marriage and bad career, you'll be happy. if you have a bad marriage and a good career, you'll be unhappy. none of them believe me, none of them do it, but in those courses and in that desire to fuse with one another, we get the sense of essentially who we are. that we're divided by skull, we're twieded by consciousness, but deep could be we want to penetrate one to another, and that is the highest thing we long for. one of the beautiful examples i got, i found of that was i found in a book by a guy named douglas of steader who's a scientist who researches the mind.

and of stetter was married to a woman named carol. they lived in italy, and when their kids were 5 and 2, carol suddenly suffered a stroke and died very suddenly. and when carol was dead, he was still living over there. one day a few months later he was walking through his bedroom, and he had a picture of carol on the bureau in his bedroom and just, you know, as he'd done many days in a row, he just happened to glance at her face as he was walking through. and here's what he wrote in his book, "i am a strange loop," about that experience: i looked at her face, and i looked so deeply that i felt i was behind her eyes, and all at once i found myself saying as tears flowed, that's me, that's me. and those simple words brought back many thoughts that i'd had before about the fusion of our souls into one higher level entity, about the fact that the core of both our souls play our identical hopes and dreams for

our children, about the notion that those hopes were not separate or distinct hopes, but were just one hope, one clear thing that defined us both, that welded us into a unit. the kind of unit i had but dimly imagined before being married and having children. i realized that though carol had died, that core piece of her had not died at all but had lived on very determinedly in my brain. now, the greeks used to say we suffer our way to wisdom. and this man suffered his way to the wisdom which he confirmed as a scientist every day that there are shared loops that permeate our minds in ways that are much deeper than we are aware of. and in a shallow and less important way, i think the policy failures we've seen, the education, foreign failures, financial reform have, we have suffered our way to wisdom. but the shallow view of human nature is an insufficient view. and that it's important if we're going to design good policies,

lead good lives to have a much richer sense of who we are. and the good news is that we're in this incredible period where researchers from all these fields are really giving us a deep or view. and i -- deeper view. and i think their influence is going to pervade society year upon year, decade upon decade, and really remind us of a new humanism. not giving us a new view of human nature, but reminding us of some of the old philosophies, the old truth and the old depths that are there. and it's, for me, it's just been tremendously exciting to be around those people for the past few years and to look forward to all the things they're going to bring to our culture in the years ahead. so thank you very much. [applause]

>> i'm the directer. i think most of you know how this works. put your hand up, please, wait for the mic. [inaudible] >> two quick questions. your comments about children and many women work today, so when the child is six weeks or three month old, they go to daycare, how does that effect them? and the second thing is in schools, teachers especially with elementary and nurse si school, can't -- nursery school can't touch kid. and you made a comment about how emotionally tied children should be to these teachers, and yet they're not allowed to touch them. >> first on the daycare. the good part about this research is that you don't have to be superparent to be good

enough. if you establish good relationships with kids, if you listen to them, if you attune to their needs, if when they're nervous you sort of try to calm them down, when they're down, you try to bring them up, if you're sort of aware of who they are in just a very basic way, that is the threshold you need to cross. you don't need to be supermom or dad. in fact, most of the supermom or dad stuff doesn't do any good. and so you just have to be good enough. and so that's sort of relaxing, i think, for most parents. there's a guy named eric who's written quite a lot about this phenomenon, and so most parents whether they work or not who are listening or atubed, have good relationships, they've done what they need to do at least on that front. now as for daycare, the evidence is sort of mixed, and i guess it's mixed because the results are not that firm either way. it has an effect on kids. if kids who spend, well, the first thing to be said is

there's daycare, and there's daycare. some are very good, and some are not so good. and some are very individually attuned to kids, some are not. i remember i lived in belgium, and we were going to a club med, and they have in belgium at least in our neighborhood something called a crash where the kids would go in the day, young kids. and i asked the lady, she said, oh, we have a club med so you can relax. i said, the is it like the crash here? she said, oh, no, we do stuff with the kids. [laughter] i guess on average the study suggests on average, and this is not a strong effect, but that kids who spend a lot of time in daycare tend on average to be slightly more aggressive than those that don't. and so i think that's the research as i understand it. but it's not -- i wouldn't say it's a tremendously strong effect and would not be on the top of my list of social concerns. as for the touching, i've spent a fair bit of time in early childhood education, the good ones, and to be honest, i'm not sure what the rules are, but the parents touch the kids. i mean, the teachers touch the

kids. and as they should. but the main thing they do, the really good ones, is they just talk at them. they're just the flow of words is incredible. one of the differences in our society is between middle class kids who hear on average 480 words per hour, and lower class kids who hear on average 170 words per hour. and so that's over the course of a childhood, that's about 32 million words. and that has an effect. if you go to the really good early childhood programs, the teachers are just talking to try to compensate for that. and can that's one of the important things they do. >> [inaudible] and power have to be leveled in order for a lot of these social policies that you were talking about to be effective, ultimately? >> yeah. well, one of the things i think we need to acknowledge is we do have an unequal society. a woman who i highly recommend a great book called "unequal

childhoods," and she says we have two entirely different systems of cheeld rearing. what i withdrew up with is what she calls concerted preparation for adulthood. the other is, basically, the attitude is life is hard, let the kids relax while they're kids. in some sense this is a more sane and healthy way to raise kids, but it doesn't prepare the kids as well for the world we now have as adults. so we've got to, frankly, acknowledge that. and then at the most disorganized homes we have kids who are just not getting those organized attachments. and we have to have schools, and i'm a big supporter of these kip academies which are around, some of these no-excuses schools where you go into the school, and they teach the kids how to walk down the hallway, how to look at the eye and nod when somebody's talking to them, they teach them how to say yes, excuse me, thank you, to smile. and in the morning they have these drums and channels, and the teachers chant out what is earned, and the kids have to chant back, everything is

earned. so they learn discipline and order and rigor, a lot of this stuff that middle class kids get naturally, these schools have to teach them. they are explicitly based on this marshmallow type experiment. but you have to acknowledge that we have an unequal society. we've got to have two different sorts of systems for kids who have certain advantages and some who lack them. >> another question. about five rows back, laidty with her -- lady with her hand up. >> has your awareness of this new humanism changed your political philosophies at all? [laughter] >> um, i just cry a lot more. [laughter] yeah, it has. you know, i guess i'd put it this way, we've been through two sort of individualistic revolutions in our lifetimes. in the '60s which was socially liberating the individual, be free to be you and me, find your

own truth, express yourself. and then in the '80s entrepreneurialism, reagan, one on the left, one on the right. so we've had two revolutions that have emphasized the individual, and i think this research emphasizes the community and emphasizes citizenship, and it emphasizes the relationship between people. and so i'm much more, i think, community oriented, what can we do to strengthen communities than maybe i used to be. i wrote a book about the fast growing suburbs out in the suburbs. face to face contact, really, is more innovative and more productive, and cities really have some advantages. and so there's a lot of areas like that where i guess i have changed my mind. and i guess i see everything now psychologically first. and so when i look at egypt and tunisia, i see an emotional contagion sweeping across a region. and i see the quest for dignity.

in the book i mention a greek virtue, the desire for recognition and dignity. and that's when you appreciate how fundamental a drive that is, then what happened in cairo doesn't really surprise you as much. so it's influenced me in all those ways. it hasn't made me like, you know, be closer to, i don't know, frank rizzo or rick santorum or, you know, anybody like that. [laughter] but it has pervasively had an influence on how i think. >> ten rows back, gentleman in the green. >> david, i believe it was said the most important decisions we we make in our lives are made from our values. and i'm wondering how that fits in with your book. and a follow up on your earlier

point, we're becoming more divergent politically. how do you see us solving the significant problems facing us as a country with this divergence politically? >> right. >> thank you. >> those are two big questions. first on the values, i mentioned the importance of unconscious processes. some of the things that influence our unconscious have to do with early childhood, but some of it have to do with things thousands of years ago, genetic biases, and some of them have to do with things that happened hundreds of years ago which are cultural biases. and whether it's the region we live in, we inherit certain ways of seeing the world. there's been a lot of research done on how chinese and americans look at the world, and one of the experiments they looked at the mona lisa. and the chinese eyes, they measured the eye movements were dancing all over the painting. and the american eyes were, basically, focusing on the eyes and the mouth of the lady. much more concentrated.

and another famous experiment was they asked chinese people to describe a fish tank, and they would describe the relationship between the fish, the plant life, the whole context. the americans would just pick out the biggest fish and describe that. [laughter] another example is they did research, they looked at people having coffee, and can they looked at how much they touched each other. and if i get the numbers right, i'll probably get them slightly off, but in rio there were about 170 touches an hour as people had coffee. in paris i think it was about 120, in london it was zero. [laughter] and so these are values we share not only this these things, but how we perceive justice. and some of our moral intuitions are universal. you don't need to tell any 2-year-old anywhere in the world what fairness is. we are born with a sense of fairness. we're born with a sense of pollution. we're born with a deference to authority, certain attitudes towards authority.

but within those value systems whether you're jewish or catholic or protestant or muslim, whether you're american or french, you come in with whole different categories, and you have to be aware of the negotiations of those things. but values can change over time. and so it's all a very complicated stew, but those things are, basically, fundamental. and when i look at why a country does well or why it doesn't, i think it's fundamentally a values thing. it's not natural resources. it's do you have these are two really crucial values; do you believe the future can be different from the present, and do you believe you can control your future? these are not universal. some places they have it, some places they don't. the u.s. we have exaggerated sense of how much control we have. [laughter] but it's good for us to have that. then finally on the polarization, just tying it into the theme, our brains register in group and out group very powerfully. so if i see somebody in my group punished, my brain reacts violently to that. if i see somebody in an out

group, not my group being punished, sort of callous about that. we have, essentially, a tribal nature. and in washington we have tribalism on stilts. we have mag magnified tribalism. i mentioned the effective groups where people took turns and communicated very well. if you want the definition of atist functional group, that would be the u.s. congress. they don't communicate, talk to each other, they don't really listen to each other. so the polarization that occurs in washington is in part caused by the fundraising, the media redistricting, but it's mostly caused by the psychological psychodynamics of tribalism, i think. and can good people stuck in those tribal hatfield and mccoy system. and so i see it primarily as a psychological and moral problem, less a fundraising problem. >> one political party? >> >> well, we need parties that actually have conversations with each other. >> oh, let's see. back here, lady with her hand up

on our right. >> in your column last sunday you spoke about how we americans overestimate our capabilities at every field. and i'm wondering if that is an unhealthy thing, an unrealistic. and how would you compare that to the opposite which is the tiger mom? >> right. >> well, i told this to a group earlier tonight, but i'm going to repeat it. a couple months ago i was driving listening to npr, and i happened to hear a show called command performance which was a rebroadcast of an old radio show. and the episode i heard was aired on vj day, the day we won world war ii. and all the big stars were on it, bob hope and marlene that dietrich. he got out there and said we've just learned we won world war

ii. but i guess we're not proud,'re just glad we got through it. and burr jess meredith read a passage that said we won this war because we have great allies, great soldierses, we have material abundance. we didn't win it because we're anything special, we should just be glad and be worthy of the peace. and that tone of humility was so striking to me on the day they won world war ii. then i get home, and i turn on the tv, and i'm watching football, and the cornerback tackles the wide receiver after a two-yard gain and does this victory dance to himself for his great achievement. [laughter] and it occurred to me i'd just seen greater self-puff ri after a two-yard gain than winning world war ii. and i do think this is a change of a culture from self-effacement to a culture of self-celebration. look at me, i'm pretty damn good. and the polling data i use to support this, my favorite one is

gallup asked high school seniors in 1950, are you a very important person? and 12% said, yes. in 2005 they asked again, are you a very important person, and it was 08%. and -- 80%. so that's just the change. and if you look at our math scores, we're 36th in the world in math performance, but we're number one in the world in thinking we're really good in math. [laughter] and so that, that's a change. and this expansion of the self, i think, has led to partisanship because i know the answers to everything, and everybody else who disagrees with me is just in the way. i think it's led to the expansion of debt because why should i save for future generations? i'm here. i feel less connected to the broad change. and i think if you, if you look at the societies that have done really well in math, they're the ones who have the least confidence in their own abilities. so i think the lesson from the research is that you should have a slightly above average view of

yourself. you should exaggerate your virtues a little to make sure you did go out and dare and try difficult things that are hard for you. but we've sort of taken it a bit to the extreme. and one of the phrases that i think is the core of my political philosophy is the phrase e epistemological study, and we should all be aware of how little we know about ourselves, how little we know about the world, and we should prepare ourselves for those weaknesses at all times and not think we're the bee's knees. [laughter] >> again, the center gentleman with his hand up. >> i should say, if you want a good recipe for modesty, write a column twice a week. [laughter] because you'll read in the paper, you'll think, oh, god, what was i thinking? [laughter] >> i've got a quick question for you. i believe it's the question on everybody's mind.

what do you believe -- can you name three thing our current president has done correctly and a dozen things, 20 things that he has not? [laughter] >> three things he's done correctly. one, he's the best education president we've had since i've been covering education. [applause] two, i disagreed with it at the time, but he was right to rescue gm. [applause] you know, i could list more, actually. there are some things i disagree with, but i do think, and i cover the president, i speak to him periodically, i certainly speak to people on his staff almost every day or several times a week, and i would say within the white house i'm to his right, but within the white house there genuinely is a culture of debate. they do try to find the right answers. they generally have the best interests of the country at

heart. they're very smart people there. they, half of them come from harvard, half from yale. if we're attacked during the harvard/yale game, we're screwed because they'll all be up there. [laughter] so i think generally there's an honest and be intellectual culture. as for the failure, you know, i thought when we did health care, i thought we had two central tasks. the first was to, to cover 39 million uninsured people, and the second was to get our cost inflation under control. we did one, i don't think we did the second. so that would be one thing i disagree with. i think he tried too much in the first few years and really, really polarized the country maybe more than it needed to be. i wish he would call some of the members of the opposing parties. someone i'm friendly with is a guy named paul ryan from wisconsin, a very smart chairman of the house budget committee.

they would really -- i know them both men, they would really get along, they'd have wonderful conversations about the future budget which could really lay the groundwork for some compromises, but obama has never called ryan and asked him over to the white house, he's never had a conversation with him, and i just think they should at least talk. and so that's just the function of the nature of washington. which he's, i think he's very well equipped to change but hasn't really taken the measures. i could go on, but i think ha's enough. that's enough. >> ah, let's see, there's a lady about four rows from the back in the center. you know what, sir? we have got other people with their hands up. further back? >> um, you spoke about how some variables of success are based on the 18 month old time period. in an effort to close the achievement gap, the educational achievement gap, would you be a

proponent of mandatory early childhood education? >> yeah. i wouldn't want to make it mandatory just because that gives you all sorts of political problems. and i still essentially think that the relationship between a parent and the child is better. than is going to happen at a public -- especially a state-supplied daycare center. so i wouldn't want to force people to do it. nonetheless, i do think there should be on the one hand, much more funding for early childhood education. it should be a rite of passage. we should do a lot better job of organizing our early childhood centers, our head start centers so the people there are actually teachers rather than just people we needed to give a job to. and we should not only -- we should start earlier. we should start with nurse/family partnerships and visits so nurses are coming into homes and giving how many help on how to coach n. the first year of life the average mother

loses 700 hours of sleep, gets interrupted every 20 seconds on average and sees a decline in marital satisfaction of 70%. it's tough. little babies are charming, but they've invading your brain. [laughter] and it's a brutal thing. and so people need help. and if you go to certain neighborhoods certain things i've seen, coca-cola in the bottle just to keep them quiet, locked in their car seat this front of the tv. and then you can't stop because even if you help kids at an early age, a lot of the help fades out, a lot of the benefits. so it has to be like nutrition, every day. you've got to have early childhood education, schools where teachers are able to connect with kids, you've got to have mentoring programs. they've got to go to college where they feel emotionally engaged with someone because if they think about dropping out, there's someone they care about they have to tell, i'm dropping out. so they're sort of engaged with

the campuses. all through life there has to be these concentrations of, really, relationships. so i would spend a lot more money on that, and i'm afraid in our budget straits the fact is the lobbies with the big guns are the k-12 lobby, the higher ed lobby and mostly the senior citizen lobby. and the 0-3 lobby is a pretty pathetic lobby. and so i'm afraid that's, that's very vulnerable in state after state. >> you could take us out with your predictions for 2012 since we're probably not going to see you before then. >> i could write another book, but it would kill me. [laughter] you know, i really wouldn't bet against president obama. he is a very -- [applause] he has an amazing ability, and i've seen him a few times since he lost the last election or the democrats did, an amazing ability to self-correct. he's a very complicated person with many different

personalities, and the downside of that is he rarely commits all out. he's always a one step back observing. the upside of that is he tends to look at himself and say, how do i need to change, what do i need to do? so he does have ability to adjust. and he just has political skills. when i look at politicians, it's like a scout looking at pictures, who has the best stuff? and i remember when i saw him in 2005, long time ago i thought, he has the best stuff. he's probably going to be president someday, and i wrote a column in 2006 on him called run, barack, run, urging him to run because i thought he had the best stuff. so i still wouldn't bet against him. that said, i'm not quite sure what he's going to run on. i don't think he can run the sort of campaign he ran last time, the big transformational hope and change thing. can't do that anymore after these four years. can't run on health care, can't run on the stimulus package, and his administration has been slow to come up with a new big agenda for what to do in the next four

years. in this a country that is still -- in a country that is still furiously concerned about national decline and furious at government for screwing things up. so that'll be a big challenge. on the republican side, the person i would like to see get the nomination -- i've sort of been up front about this, i'm not supposed to root for one candidate or another -- but it's the governor of indiana, mitch daniels. he's 5-6, low to the ground. [laughter] in touch with the people. i think you've got to be low down there to see things. [laughter] no, i think he's been an extremely effective governor at a time when state budgets have ballooned and debt on average has gone up 40%, state after state, in indiana the debt has gone down 40%. at the same time, a lot of the programs that really matter have been improved. even wait times at the department of motor vehicles have dropped from 60 minutes to 8 minutes. i'm sort of impressed by that. so i think he's opinion a very effective governor. i think the republicans would do well to counterprogram against

this graceful and elegant and brilliant democrat with a guy who may not be charismatic, but just knows how to run things. and so i like daniels. i think the two other two serious candidates are mitt romney and tim pawlenty. again, managers. i'm a little less enamored with them, i haven't seen -- pawlenty was a good governor can, but i haven't company the excellence of management that i saw with daniels. and they would be fine. i guess i would like to see -- i think the republicans have two problems. the first is they, to their credit and this is to obama's deficit, they are saying we have to tackle entitlements. and that is a courageous step because the country wants more government than it's willing to pay for. and somebody has to call 'em on that. and being willing to tackle entitlements is the right thing to do and say we have to adjust some of these benefit levels. a, they politically don't know how to el sell it and, b, i don't think the republicans quite understand not only do we

have a recession, we have structural problems in our economy which have hurt the middle class decade upon decade, and i don't think there's a republican answer to that problem. so i think they face some challenges, and they face sort of a talent deficit. so i wouldn't bet against obama. but it'll be -- we'll eventually get to have the fight which we need to have is here's the money, here's the national wealth, here are programs, here's our debt. how are we going to figure this thing out? and i'd love to think we're going to have that really serious debate and then to end on a pessimistic note -- [laughter] i really don't think we're going to have that debate. [laughter] thank you very much. [applause] >> you're watching booktv on c-span2. 48 hours of nonfiction authors and books every weekend.

well, after 27 years of operation, the well known washington, d.c. independent bookstore, politics and prose, has been sold. and we're taking this opportunity on booktv to talk with the new owner, co-owner is bradley graham, formerly of "the washington post." mr. graham, congratulations to you. what made you buy an independent bookstore in 2011? >> well, thanks very much. listen, we're very excited about taking over at politics and prose, you know, as journalists and authors and in lisa's case a former senior government staff member, we are very, we've been very involved in contributing in various ways to the washington community, and we see this move to politics and prose as part of the same sort of thing. it's another way for us to

continue to contribute to the, to the community. beyond that we really believe in what the store's mission has been. you know, it's much more than a bookstore. it is, it is a community institution, it is a forum for debate and discussion, and we believe very much in the need for such forums. >> and, of course, mr. graham is referring to his wife who also is the new co-owner of politics and prose. mr. graham, what changes do you think p and p needs to make in order to stay competitive? >> you know, there's a lot about politics and prose that is very strong. and the sales are very strong, it has a very loyal customer base at a time when the industry has been facing threats from ebooks and declining readership

generally, sales at p and p have continued to rise. so first and foremost, we want to preserve everything that has made politics and prose a success. that said, in order for the store to remain relevant and influential and technologically up-to-date, there are going to have to be some changes. carla and barbara have recognized that over the years. the store has, it's evolved under their leadership. but just what additional directions lissa and i hope to move the store in, we're still formulating. we are only now beginning the process of talking to the staff, getting some of their ideas. we'd like to survey opinion among, among politics and prose's customers. so this will be an evolving process for us in terms of

deciding what, what new directions and what initiatives to undertake. .. >> bookstores have survived. i visited a number around the country. i found common threads. i found that those that are continuing to succeed have very strong community roots, they have very dedicated owner, operators who are -- who have

been trying a number of initiatives. i have not found that anybody anywhere has hit on a home run solution to keeping their store successful. it's more a matter to borrow a baseball analogy of hitting singles and doubles and getting on base. in looking at politics and prose, i came away reassureed that this store has many of the attributes for success that other stores around the country have particularly that very loyal customers base, a large number of avid readers, and great reputation that still has a lot of unrealized value in it. >> now, barbara meade and the

late barbara were well known for working at politics and prose. booktv that has come to p & p that have seen it on the channel, come to visit politics and prose, will they be able to meet you. will you be on the floor? >> sure. listen, i intend to be at the store full time. but, you know, one of the other great strengths of politics and prose is it's staff. we are inheriting a tremendously talented, very deep bench of experts about books of all kinds. and they have participated in introducing a number of the authors. they are the reason that so many customers come to the store seeking their advice. we are counting on many of them if not all of them to remain and carry on. now mr. grimm, do you see a need

for politics and prose perhaps to move into the selling of digital books and enhancement of the web site. >> we are looking at enhancing the web site. i think that will be important. we realize the threat from ebooks, but it's not a threat we are going to run away from. we are hoping to provide an opportunities for self-publishing and we're looking at print on demand machine like a number of other stores that have acquired around the country. there are other -- a host of initiatives that i think that you'll see beginning to take shape at politics and prose. >> well, bradley graham is the new co-owner along with his wife, alyssa muscatine of the well known washington bookstore, politics and prose. good luck to you, book tv looks

forward to continuing. >> we do too. thanks very much. >> define nation building. >> nation building is one of the those tricky terms. that's one the reasons that i'm using in the political science of the development sense. i'm using it in the way that people like george w. bush, barack obama and even david petraeus would have used it. it is the way of describing the mission of armed nation building that we are involved in and it's been described in some ways as armed social work. i'm trying to describe this phenomenon to the ordinary reader who might have this idea when they look at the news and they see lots of what journalist call the bang, bang, and show

them another picture of what goes on. that's what the military calls the nonkinetic side. the experience of people that are getting their hands dirty and doing the kinds of things, digging wells and nonmilitary. >> so is the u.s. military currently building schools and building roads, doing nonmilitary functions? >> you'd be surprised too see the extent to which they have embraced. especially in place like afghanistan that we are doing the nation building missions is the corner stone, creating a capable local government that's capable of delivering things like criminal justice, the big concern in a place like afghanistan that the taliban could out govern. that's civilian who have nonmilitary expertise need to be able to step in. >> where did nation building come from?

>> nation building is woolly. it's sort of very unsatisfying. precisely why i wanted to dig into it. back in the 1990s, there was a lot of hand wringing in the national security that the u.s. military was too tied down in nation building. it's going to -- in fact, when he was running for office in 2000, george w. bush said he didn't believe we needed a nation building and the u.s. military shouldn't be involved in this kind of thing. but the end of the term, he had embraced it to the extent which he had called for the creation of a sort of a civilian nation building response core in the state of the union address. it was really a dramatic turn around. part it was just because this kind of armed humanitarianism was the scene of the way of getting out of the mess that we had gotten into in iraq. >> how is that nation building became a political term. george w. in 2000 said we are not -- we don't nation build. >> right. or barack obama in december of

2009 saying that he wanted to send more troops to afghanistan. but with the caveat that the nation that he wanted to do -- the nation that he wanted to build is our own. nation building in some circles is kind of a dirty word. it's sort of -- it's not what the military is supposed to be doing. they are supposed to be training for the high end force on force conflict that's sort of the conflict in a lot of ways that the military organized and equipped around. and in some ways, kind of pines for in a way. it's a simple and direct. your opponent wears a uniform. they have formations that you can count. this is a lot more difficult, and it involves navigating a lot of tricky cultural differences, linguistic barriers. trying to get at the problems has proven harder in practice than theory. >> so what's been the reaction of the pentagon to the new rule. >> interesting if you see some of the more recent remarks by secretary of defense robert gates.

he talks about the worries that the military can become the 19th century. it's not at that point yet. but the military is trying to master a lot of those chores, those fundamental nation-building tasks. but there's a worry, i think, within the military establishment that the pendulum may have swung too far in that direction. there's a need to go back and concentrate on the basic fundamentals. get back to sending tanks down the range. that kind of thing. there's a reasonable argument. these are not military missions. these are for the agencies of development and diplomat workers aren't trained to operate in the hostile environment while being shot at. there's been the sort of very difficult transformation for agencies like the department of state for usaid to try to send the people who are built around

the embassy. that's kind of the all of the organizations, and get people to be willing to go out and volunteer on those sort of frontier in afghanistan, for instance. >> so nathan hodges, does this diminish the role of the state department in our foreign policy? >> really, what i try to raise in the book, there's kind of a fundamental disconnect between the ambition, that is to send the sort of -- put more wings on the ground so to speak and the ability of, you know, agencies like the state department to do it. it's a simple matter of math. the department of defense at this point spends somewhere north of around 700 billion a year. look at the japan relief operations. they have the personnel, equipment, and training to get the places in a hurry. i saw it and describe it a little bit in the book from the haiti relief on the military as well. part of the effort under way, it's put into bureaucrat speak. we need the interagencies, we

need to get the diplomats to get out there and all be together in the back of the humvee, going to drink three cups of tee. -- tea. it's not as simple as that. what happens if you are getting shot at along the way? >> has it been an effective foreign policy tool? >> i would argue it sends mixed messages about who we are as a nation. >> that we are armed? >> it's a contradiction. it sends the signal that, you know, for instance, if we are talking about in parts of the developing world that we think an important principal of civilian control is the military, yet, it's our military people who are doing it and doing the training. it says something a little bit interesting about kind of who we are. and i worry as well especially when it comes to operating in places like that that we adopt a little bit of a fortress america

mindset. i talk a lot in part of what they call force protection on the military. and inevitably, sometimes it ends up putting because of the risk in some of the situations putting barriers between you and the people that you are trying to reach out to and help. >> you have referenced greg mortenson three cups of tea, and thomas barnett. who is he? >> thomas barnett was the guy that's best known for the briefing called "the pentagon's new map." he's in the early 2000s was a guy that captured for the department of defense. he had a couple of famous briefings that he would go out and deliver to military audience. which really explained how the post 9/11 world had shifted. i drilled more into what he was arguing and part of what he was also getting at was there needed to be something like kind of a nation building cadre available and ready to address what he

wanted the gap states, the failing states. i think he called it the -- his idea was you got the army, and the big forces that go in and kind of do regime change fundamentally. i think knocked over the nations if called on to do so. then you need people who are on call. there are a mix of diplomat aid worker boy scout, u.s. marines, you know, kind of the mishmash of different things. he was one the early people who kind of articulated in a lot of ways and sort of tried to explain what the new reality was to people in the department of defense. he's a character definitely in the book. >> how does the center for new american security play into your book? >> well, they became the locust of the -- they sort of became the home for the counterinsurgency set. really the counterinsurgents in washington started the

insurgence. it was rebellion within the military establishment, intellectual. not anything more than that. by people who had experienced their first tours in iraq and afghanistan and came back and were groping for answers as to why the u.s. military was failing and why we were losing in iraq. they reached back and found sort of these intellectual french counterinsurgency theory that did talk about the roles and missions and how you needed to refashion government to get at the really tricky problem. they played an interesting role. they have become in some way the administration. >> what's your day job? >> i write for the "wall street journal" and cover national security. >> finally, nathan hodge, what is the image on the front of your k?