EDGE interviews MATTHEW D. LIEBERMAN
My ideas tend to all focus on what we call loosely the “social brain.” How is it that our brain evolved to make us social? How does it successfully make us social? What are its limitations? How does it lead to a context where we think we understand what’s going on, but we’re mistaken? That can lead to all sorts of interpersonal issues.
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We are a much more comfortable country than we were 50 years ago. When you’re multiple generations into immigrants in a country that the kids are more comfortable than the parents, who are more comfortable than their parents, there is an easing off. Perhaps maybe you start to emphasize personal happiness or your children’s personal happiness more than you emphasize more societally mandated metrics of success, which usually benefits society more than the individual, in my opinion a lot of the time. There’re a lot of doctors who do a lot of good for other people, and who aren’t very happy being doctors, and I think that’s part of what the social contract really is. You agree to do stuff that’s going to help us, and you’ll be compensated, but you might have made a different choice if you knew how all this was going to play out.
In a place like all the BRIC countries, and China, in particular, there’s so much aspiration, there’s so much expectancy that the next generation is going to take China to even greater heights than they already seem to be reaching. I don’t think we expect that of our children, and I don’t know that we should. I’m not sure that almost young adult adolescent phase of nationhood is necessarily the greatest thing. It does lead to, in America’s case, inventions and inventiveness. It doesn’t seem to be that way in China so much. It leads to a lot of activity, but it also leads to a lot of unhappiness. It leads to a lot of midlife crises and so on, and I’m not sure that’s the ultimate goal, to get the country to be the most productive. I’m not really interested in gross domestic product as a real indicator of how my family is doing.
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