A Lorenzian Tale

Intriguing, is Konrad Lorenz' study of the schooling behavior of minnows, as he relates: "A fish which begins, for any reason, to swim in a certain direction cannot avoid leaving the school and thus finding itself in an isolated position. Here it falls under the influence of all those stimuli calculated to draw it back into the school. . .the bigger the school and its counterattraction, the less far its members will swim before they return to the school, drawn as by a magnet. A big school of small and closely herded fish thus presents a lamentable picture of indecision. . .Watching these indecisive actions, one almost begins to lose faith in democracy and to see the advantage of authoritarian politics."
"However," continues Lorenz, "it can be shown by a very simple experiment how little justified this standpoint is. Erich von Holst removed, from a common minnow, the forebrain, which in this species, is the site of all shoaling reactions. The pithed minnow sees, eats, and swims like a normal fish, its only aberrant behavior property being that it does not mind if it leaves the shoal unaccompanied by other fishes. It lacks the hesitancy of the normal fish, which, even when it very much wants to swim in a certain direction, turns around after its first movements to look at its shoalmates, and lets itself be influenced according to whether any others follow it or not. This did not matter to the brainless fish: if it saw food, or had any other reason for doing so, it swam resolutely in a certain direction and–the whole shoal followed it. By virtue of its deficiency, the brainless animal had become the dictator!"1
This raises the question of whether a dictator (or, perhaps, any leader of a group, country, company, stock market, school, scientific community, news medium) is just a "pithed" human being, dangerous merely because he is devoid of sympathetic ties to his fellows.
To assert that this country has been led by some pithed humans for the past 8 or more years will no doubt garner epithets from the loyalists, yet it is surely possible to see the consequences of having taken the road we did in 2000. But, since I can show no evidence that humans have changed in any fundamental way within the past 5 to 6 thousand years of recorded history–oral or written, reasons for our behavior perhaps have not yet been found. If these reasons have not been discovered in a structured, empirically proven way, maybe it is because we have looked for them in the wrong place. Questions that arise from observations of the behavior of groups, responding both to leaders and to the sundry influences that impinge upon them, probably have no simple answers. Most likely it is the manifestation of a pre-wired, somehow genetically underwritten, internal and inaccessible manner of conducting oneself.
I suspect that the study of humanity, the human animal, has been impeded by tendencies inherent in that animal. We, if I may hereafter substitute the pronoun for human beings of all flavors, suffer from Platonic idealism and from our willingness to accept Cartesian dissection, extraction and reduction as a means to understand the whole entity under study. Then, too, there is the all too obvious matter of our not having a clear understanding, nor definition, of "self," "mind," "think," "feel," "imagination," and any and all other words that are applied to humans.
I blame Platonism, for I suspect we are influenced by our "mind's" ideals and perfect versions of everything. Despite the amazing track record of science, small "s," as a means to "know" something, we have usually used methods we borrowed from Descartes: breaking an entity into parts, studying those parts and then convincing ourselves that a synthesis, (our own) derived from experiments done on the parts, generates a true picture of the whole entity.
We do this because it is easier to study, say, the isolated neuron of the squid, than to come to understand the billions of neurons and their vast arrays interconnections within the human brain. Therefore in our academies we are presented with a large array of subjects reflecting the ‘Cartesian' divisions which have been (arbitrarily) made. We are thereby urged to make choices fairly early in the educational process, choices which by their nature and by the nature of time–which is limited–result in a strange hobbling of the understanding humans have of their world. Choice of an arts and letters pathway tends by its nature to restrict access to and knowledge of the scientific path. We break the study of "mankind" into segments, as an orange is conformed, and give them lofty names: psychology, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, economics, geography, history, ancient history, and on and on. This is what we do, and there seems little possibility that we can do anything to change that–"education" is nowadays a growth industry. It is my opinion, however, that we do have a fine and quite complete mechanism of gaining knowledge about humanity, and it does not lie within the purview of usual and customary education. I have come to see humanity as a spectrum of behavior, one bounded on both ends by extremes, to be sure, but these extremities also are manifestations of ourselves. I term this spectrum: "isness," and find its finest, most apt, descriptions in literature, novels and drama, poetry, the plastic arts, cinema, and cartoon humor rather than the partial list of "ologies" noted above.
Jack Kerouac observed "there are so many things because the mind breaks it up." This is a piercing observation, one whose choice of words is near perfect. The pronoun suggests there is only one thing, that Zen Buddhist perspective Kerouac gained in his study of humanity. It seems we do long for some kind of whole–holism of a kind.
If memory serves, though there is ample reason to distrust it, I have been a reflective and skeptical person all my life. A continuous line can be traced backward from today to my earliest school days which were filled with questions to my teachers asking how they knew what they were telling me was true. It must have vexed them but that's the way I am and have been; as the Japanese proverb goes: "The child never changes, sometimes for one hundred years."
It is sometimes startling to see one's notes and jottings after the passage of many years, but even more than startling, it has been for me a window to knowing that I have not fundamentally changed in the almost 60 years since I wrote it down. What I wrote was something like this: in size, man stands in the mid-position between the super-giant star and the elements of an atom–say a quark, and he knows more about that star and that quark than he does of himself. As a senior in High School, I was awarded a four year scholarship to MIT to study physics but chose medicine because I believed that it would be more important to me to have knowledge of the nature of humans than it would be to study theoretical physics.
This is not to say that I feel either quantum physics or astrophysics unimportant, indeed, of the hundreds of books I read each year, a large measure concern these two subjects. I spent the standard amount of time attempting to gain knowledge of humanity through the study of medicine, fifteen or more years of post-high school formal training and the subsequent continuing and focused attention to areas of particular interest, yet I cannot say that I have gained an understanding of what makes a human ‘human' through these studies. I eventually chose a specialty which examined all aspects of human existence, from before birth to after death: pathology. While I truly enjoyed exposure to the breadth of factual information, I cannot say I met my goal through this means. If the proper study of mankind is man, as Pope counseled, and, I did my best to "know thyself" through the study of man the animal, and I have failed, how then else could I have gained my goal?
Contemplation of the idea: "know thyself," presents an immediate problem. What is this "self,' separate from the contemplative "knower?" What does it mean to speak of oneself? What does "I" mean? Or, "you," for that matter? I consider Ludwig Wittgenstein one of my most significant influences. Of all the philosophers I have studied, I conclude that he has tunneled his way to the root of the problem with philosophy specifically, and to problems between humans in general. Wittgenstein recognized the duplicitous nature of language. He proposed that all human social problems arise from misunderstanding and mistakes in logical grammar. This became so fundamental to him that he realized there was nothing more to be said in ‘philosophy,' and simply left.
I just reminded myself (!) about one of my earliest influences in college: a professor of philosophy who taught a course in "Philosophy of Science." One of his main ideas was that scientists rarely "knew" what it meant to know something and that these scientists in effect left the study of this ‘philosophy of science' to the philosophers, ignoring the basic problems of knowledge and yet giving credence and power to the philosophical community over basic problems in science and its epistemology.
It is clear that many commonly held ideas about science, how it operates and how it achieves results are seriously wrong. Just why (small "s") science should be thought sacred, different from any other path humans take to answer questions about life is unknown to me. However, we are presently in a love/hate relationship with science, possibly because the public were promised so many things that never panned-out, from fusion to flying cars, or the other way around. The promise of the flying car is fixed in my memory of Popular Science and Popular Mechanics, back in the days when the magazines were a bit more interesting (to me). I can reconstruct in memory (!) images within articles I read back then–probably the late 1940's and early 1950's. Imagine a little car with wings stored at the airport. One drove to the airport, attached the wings and off they went. Can you imagine the aerial traffic madness were that dream/nightmare to have emerged. Fusion! That concept is like the predictions my physiologic chemistry professor gave: we are only ten years from curing cancer (knowing everything about everything)! The answer to everything lies in chemistry!
Yeah. "Ten years" rhetoric again.
Why do we publish and read these predictive pundits? The answer to that is also hidden in our isness; more and more the answer seems to be pointing at the bony thing that sits on our shoulders attached to the neck. It appears to me that many of the fundamental presumptions of psychology and philosophy are flawed; our emerging understanding of how the brain works shadows over the basic truths of both of these areas. From the dawning of molecular biology: the molecule as the basic unit of biology, came genetics and its amazing influences which are only starting to show themselves strongly.
I realize I may sound self-contradictory by emphasizing these sub-units of scientific knowledge, but that is how things are. Perhaps by specializing we plumb the limits of human ability to contain factual information. We are incapable of understanding the whole. Whatever the reason, people do specialize and progress seems to happen. Certainly, the most powerful of all of the movements in biological science is centered upon what is called, broadly, neuroscience. Already, there are subdivisions: molecular, bio-genetic and cognitive. Yet, to me they are all of a piece. Also corralled here is the changing area of linguistics, which takes for its domain, philosophy, language, and mathematics, those departments influenced by the work of George Lakoff, Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker.
The neuroscience study field is burgeoning. Universities are faced with the dilemma of what to call their new buildings. What is in a name becomes extremely interesting when it is found that we hardly have a definition of many of the words we take for granted and use every day, such as "mind," "self," "I," "myself," etc. Is mind the brain? Do we have a proper word for "mind" that describes what it is? This is not the Wittgenstein matter showing itself, it is more fundamental than that. Our sloppy use of language for what we wish to be defined exactly is part of the problem. For a detailed and thoughtful review of the history of the word mind, its existence (or non-existence) in other languages, and is connection to the errors made by psychiatry or another fields which claim to concern "the mind" see below3.
Departments of psychology are finding themselves on a limb. Psychiatry finds itself muddled in a kind of antiquated dualism: employing a wonderbook of hubris, the so-called DSM-IV, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, a book created by a committee, whose chairman (Dr. Allen Frances) has acknowledged (in a New Yorker magazine interview) that the DSM IV categories are neither valid nor reliable and don't describe (in his words) "reality."2 The manual is used to place patients into synthetic pigeon holes from which they may never emerge; the practitioners employ usually one or both of theological or witchcraft-like methods of "treatment." The use of the word treatment itself is a problem. The drug companies generate a laundry list of expensive medicines whose raison d'etre is dependent upon a seal of approval by a Federal Government agency whose head is chosen by the current president! Good luck on that score. Not lost on thoughtful observers is the current marketing methods used by drug companies. They now inform the lay public about a disease, one which often has a long list of non-specific, common symptoms and for which they have an expensive new drug! They counsel the layperson to ask for the drug from her/his doctor. Thereby, we have a great circle of improbable consequences: the clearly written DSM manual defines diseases that exist only because they are so defined as such in the manual! The FDA approves a drug FOR that same disease (which only exists as a disease in the manual) and we find, for example, the incidence of "mental disorders" in children has risen from an absolute 7,500 diagnoses in 1950 to 8 million today. Does anyone really believe that children are now different than they were in 1950? Most of those 8 million now receive some sort of medication. Andrew Weiss, PhD asks whether this is progress or child abuse!4 Rather than accept the spectrum of childhood behavior as it is, teachers can influence parents, who in turn influence their physicians who are influenced by the drug companies and a child is turned into a medicated zombie in the process. How is it that ADD* and ADHD*, diseases that did not exist only a few decades ago, are defined by symptoms which tend to resemble behavior least tolerated by teachers in a classroom; by and large, 90 or more per cent are boys?
Then there is the effect upon insurance companies. They now have the ability to generate a list of "diseases" for which they will support "treatment." If a drug company claims their drug will "treat" that DSM-manual-defined disease, the insurance carrier can include it or deny it from their list of approved drugs. If there is a "scientific" report that a given drug "treats" a "disease" as well as one-on-one "therapy," they can refuse to pay for talk therapy. The list of possible consequences of such a scheme is long. Always controversial to the middle of the road psychiatrists, Dr. Thomas Szasz offers very thoughtful alternative views of so called mental illness. He notes that by mis-defining the mind/brain as causal for behavioral aberrance, just as if it were a diseased heart, lung, liver or other organ, the medical community has ignored human beings as moral agents, responsible for their actions. This gives people a ready opportunity to "blame" their lack of self-control upon a diseased mind/brain. In this way, misuse of alcohol or drugs becomes a disease and the individual can seem appropriately irresponsible for the behavior. It is another version of the "the devil made me do it." 3
Yet, in keeping with the concept of "isness" then, I am logically forced to accept this aspect of humans; as Bacon counseled: "We believe to be true what we prefer to be true." I suppose I would rather be appropriately irresponsible than simply, reckless or thoughtless.
Edward O. Wilson and Bert Hölldobler recently wrote a book entitled "The Superorgansim," describing the makeup of insect societies and colonies, a book which promotes and expands upon Wilson's ideas embodied in the word "Sociobiology." Since its origins in studies from the 1960's, sociobiology has irregularly morphed into evolutionary genetics and related arenas. In the course of the field's maturation, odd, factually unsupportable, concepts have become associated with it. In a related article, Wilson and David Wilson rethink the science of sociobiology attempting to make manifest and to remove these errors.5 In short, a selfish behavioral phenotype (presumably underwritten by a selfish genotype a la Richard Dawkins, 1976 5 wins over altruism within a group, but between groups, the altruistic group beats the selfish one. While the behavior of groups is subject to a very large number of elements subtending the outcome and the factors influencing group behavior are in the earliest stages of elucidation, there is something apparently non-genetic about how this occurs. In the case of ants, within the first several days, newborn ants "learn" to recognize the scent of the colony, one that is unique to each colony. No matter how it comes about, in insect societies, which can reach astounding sizes and which can last for decades, over-all altruistic behavior beats selfishness within inter-societal (inter-group) competition.
It was remarkable that just preceding an NPR segment on Wilson and Hölldobler7, there appeared an apparently unrelated focus upon social behavior: "Happiness is contagious, according to a new study published in the British Medical Journal. James Fowler, political scientist at University of California, San Diego, explains how happiness spreads through social networks ." This episode8 describes a social outcome: people who surround themselves with happy friends and co-workers experience increased happiness! Wilson himself commented upon the report suggesting that here indeed was an example of what can happen within human societies.
I am drawn to this because of something I noticed in myself perhaps 25 or more years ago. It was obvious to me that the overall tenor of so called news reporting was dark and depressing. Of the hundreds or thousands of "newsworthy" events that happened in a given day, it seemed to me that only the darkest and most depressing were chosen. This was having a dark effect upon me, so I decided to stop reading the newspapers and also the monthly magazines which are news-related (Time, Newsweek, etc). I noticed the improvement immediately. In the recent (late 2008) economic alterations, I have noticed the same quality of reporting, that is, emphasis on the dark side of the moon and gloom mongering. I have attempted to avoid, in my daily hour or so of television watching, both the sensational stuff of the networks and have tried to accept that National Public Radio is immune to this. However, this is not so. The Lehrer report is as gossipy and willing to celebrate the current delusion as the rest. When the digital age comes to TV in February of next year, I intend to celebrate by permanently shutting off my television.
Thinking back to the beginning of this essay, it is possible to recognize in the behavior of minnows, their natural tendency to follow the brain damaged minnow. In 1841, Charles Mackay published a book entitled "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds," chronicling human minnow-like delusional behavior in areas of economics, religion, investment, crusades, personal conflicts and duels. The story of John Law and his role in unbuckling paper money from a base in gold has surely led us to our current state where now our paper and digital money is based only upon fiat–that is to say, confidence, agreement, willingness. Do you see the circle of unreason here? Happy surroundings and friends generate happiness; brain damaged leaders propel us into whirlpools of depressive activity. One quote from Mackay may be worthwhile: "Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one!"9 Thus, men and minnows think and act in schools.
Not long ago, an excellent example of delusional and truly stupid human behavior was reported nationally. It concerned a report found by querying "Google" about United Airlines. The report was false, an undated story from 2002, but it was reported on September 8, 2008 following which the price of the UAL stock dropped 76%!10 In Mackay's book, the price of tulip bulbs rose to incredible levels by means of a similar delusional thought process: the price for a single tulip bulb reached the equivalent of $30,000.00!11 Of course, it collapsed to real value eventually (and quickly) ruining many investors.
I first noticed the tendency to anthropomorphize the stock market in the 1980's when my medical partner began having in interest in investing, especially commodity investments. I was regaled by daily reports of the market behaving as if it were alive: the market went up or down because A happened, or B happened. Not that this tendency is unusual for humans. In fact what characterizes humans most is the tendency to weave causality from randomness. This quality of the brain was described first by Michael Gazzaniga, neuroscientist and split-brain experimenter, who found its location and ascertained its nature in the 1990's. The left hemisphere of the brain contains what Gazzaniga calls "the interpreter," which makes logical and convincing explanations for events that are often simply random occurrences.12 This "interpreter" also influences the quality and accuracy of memory--humans are poor at accurately recalling past events. A cottage industry has grown-up around attempting (probably unsuccessfully!!) to convince readers, governmental and organizational employees that it is a human quality to be swayed by the irrational.13 I watched in dismay as several of my fellow physicians invested in a local energy scam, a variant of perpetual motion in the form of a "black box," from which one got more energy out than one put in!! Incredible, but true.
I suspect that to explain some of the behavior we have, one should investigate the effects of daily, weekly, or regular repetitive, chanting, such as one sees in religions, for example religious catechism, repetition of prayers, bed-time acts, pledges of allegiance, national anthems, jingles, advertising sound or video bites. Religions and nations have learned these lessons pretty well. Who else but a young person would join the military? The young brown shirts of Hitler were very young. The actions that take place around puberty in religious sects, such as "confirmation," "bar and bas Mitzvahs," tend to cement in place a self-fulfilling prophecy from which many children never escape. Were it not for this kind of child abuse–we call it Sunday school, or Christian School, or Muslim School, Temple School–perhaps the scourge of religion would not be as rampant and overbearing as it is, but, it certainly is. All one need do it look about and note the irrational acts of "true believers." It escapes my kind of reasoning why humans who blow up themselves and others with bombs strapped to their bodies are called terrorists rather than insane. For, isn't the quality of having a belief in most aspects of religion, bizarre and far fetched stories taken as truth, a kind of delusion, a certifiable kind of insanity? Does anyone really believe that an angel dropped-in on Joe Smith? Or, that he saw what he called god at age 14? What kind of apparition appeared in the mind of Mohammed at age forty, while hanging out in a cave, that started what now confronts the world as a threat? Mary a virgin? Give me a break! That fiction became a religion old men, not allowed to marry, in costumes that resemble dresses, preaching about birth control, and sanctifying real marriages! 14 The left-hemisphere in all its glory is the weaver of all this madness and yet madness is the one word we cannot call it. Unless of course, under certain circumstances, someone reports that he speaks to god and then god speaks to him, then we call it madness. Don't we? Maybe not.
I step on toes. Sorry if you are offended, yet everything I say is verifiable, true, if you will. Indeed, if one individual can exemplify the experience of what "could" be, it might be myself. I was raised in a family devoid of any evidence of religion. No church services, no bibles, no homey homilies in needlepoint on the walls. My grandfather read a lot of Schopenhauer, Mencken, Hubbard, Balzac and the classics. Similarly so, my father. My grandmother was a social "worker" before there was such a thing–she did it naturally and from her kindness–her altruism. We were friends of the LaFollettes, that family of political Progressives–even my grandfather and uncle ran for Congress on the Progressive ticket. Milwaukee was a socialist city with a socialist mayor for more than thirty years. My home was middle class Milwaukee, an ethnic mix, mainly German or Russian and thus mainly Jewish, Catholic or Lutheran. My friends were all these, and these were all my friends, until I achieved age 12 or so. Suddenly the Catholics, who distinguished themselves by wearing uniforms to school, the Lutherans and the Jews became each a member of a specific and exclusive sect. My friends became parts of things I was not a part of. I was not a part of anything. I was just me. On a few occasions, I went with a friend to a temple or church but found the experience very uncomfortable, for it was as if my friends had learned new tongues, words, chants, songs, foreign to me.
Based upon these differences, the Catholic kids hated the Lutheran kids, the Lutherans hated the Catholics, and both hated the Jews. And, so it goes.
One must be carefully, carefully taught to hate, goes the libretto in some musical theatrical. I suspect this is true; we are taught, in the guise of love, to hate. And, while in the process of researching a book (Songs My Father Never Sang, 1995) I discovered that Owen Barfield had traced the origin of the word "hate" to Greek, as h'eke, which until the 12th century meant fear!15 That sort of did it for me. The standard etymological sources, by the way, trace the word to Middle English and I believe are on the wrong course. For even in casual usage, the word belies the underlying emotion felt when the word is used. We say we hate what it is that we fear. Think about that.
While it is true that in "Naturalist," E. O. Wilson described himself as the kind of naturalist who simply observes a creature in place and attempts to arrive at a description of the creature from the study.16 It implies the kind of naturalist I urge-on to the study of humankind, one who chronicles the entire spectrum of behavior and being–the isness. But we seem not be willing to accept that method. Indeed, Wilson himself becomes a kind of advisor of human behavior in his book, Consilience.17 A nice idea, but one which has no precedent in observed behavior amongst humans. In short, we seem to be wired to tend towards a set of (apparently) genetically moved characteristics called ‘human nature.' When Wilson wrote the book: "On Human Nature,"18 doing so perhaps in reaction to the lambasting he took after his book, Sociobiology, The New Synthesis19 came upon the scene at the same time that feminism was emerging, he concluded that there was a fairly small group of qualities that could be generally applied to the human species: genetic diversity, implying a spectrum of physical, mental and social behavior, a tendency to group others in friend and foe, to elevate some (our loves, children) beyond reality and as well to lower others into unacceptable classes–these qualities somehow conferring genetic advantage to the individual! He sees our species as self emergent, aggressive, sexual, altruistic and superstitious (religious),all these arising from the sociobiological mix that is ours. In the guise of an entomological naturalist, Wilson has played the role I most passionately seek for the type who studies humanity as it is, not how it could or should be. His clarion call, however, seems not heard by many. Undoubtedly one of the major biologists of his time, yet he is as in the case of Darwin, the depth of his observations has not been reached. Returning once more to the image of minnows in a school, starlings in a flock, buffaloes in a herd, and through the magic of Gary Larsen's mind coming to see ourselves from this slant, we must come to the conclusion that this is the way we are, the way we have been, and unfortunately for our children's children, the way we shall be.
I have gathered-together a number of relevant facts and wish to complete this with a few conclusions and observations. It is clear that humans do indeed form groups similar in kind to flocks of birds, schools of fish. I have not included the seminal and germane work of Claude Levi-Strauss whose studies of human tribal roots and configurations add even more data to the weight of evidence. Humanity's tribal character takes the form of a triangle, one point occupied by a tribal chief, a Shaman or a similar figure. Even our auditoriums, lecture halls, city council meetings, classrooms, cinema and television viewing rooms, and family dinner tables have this effective triangular shape, again with the figurehead, device, or image at a point. Since this is how we conform ourselves, it should not surprise that we are influenced by what is at the point of our attention. When a retrospective view shows us that the world regularly goes through cycles of unusual confidence (bubbles) followed by periods of usual diffidence and distrust (recessions), one can be quite sure there is a leader lurking in the mix. I assert, without assigning blame, by merely pointing out the origin, our tendencies to find ourselves in wars, in disputes, in periods of economic recession, depression and in periods of increase can be traced to our sources of chatter and gossip: the news media, news magazines, radio babble, television talking heads, current cinema, even the manufacturers of our mechanical devices. As an example of the latter, consider the emergence of the "GM Hummer," which happened under a leader bent upon war. My personal filter sees gas-guzzling automobiles of that kind as weapons, the drivers of them behaving as surrogate warriors. Our tendency towards mimesis allows the spread of that aggressive urge Wilson shows us is common to humanity. War becomes acceptable; for a while. Still harkening back to "issness" and the teachers of that, I cannot recall a thoughtful novelist, playwright or poet who ever saw anything acceptable about war.
I see myself so far off the mid-position of the bell-curve characterizing humanity that interpreting things as I do shows a nature disparate from the usual. It is, in part, for this reason, I suppose, I distrust democracy and plebiscites–the propositions we face at every election in California. I much prefer the republic as our forefathers imagined it. The statistical curve reflecting humanity has the great mass of mankind smack in the middle. Anyone nearer the ends is in potential danger from the acts of fellow humans. Our history of xenophobic racial hatred (fear), anti-Semitism, war–all wars are religious wars–crusades, inquisitions, anti-intellectualism, anti-science (small s–the root of the word means ‘to know') tells us we are not much changed from our historical origins. Reflect upon the message of, say, "Lord of the Flies," and you see the chrysalis of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, of Racial prejudice in Montgomery, Alabama, of the rise of Nazi-ism and Fascism.
Now it would seem that studies of group behavior (Wilson and Hölldobler) tell us that the selfish, aggressive, superstitious traits of individual humans which offer individual advantage are not beneficial for group (societal, national) advantage. In short, national kindness and altruism win over selfishness and aggression by nations: speak softly and do NOT carry a big stick. I am loath to preach, and I do accept the isness of myself and my fellow humans. Yet studies from our farthest living ancestors, the insects, having a history going back perhaps 250 million years or more, tell us that successful insect societies thrive by emphasizing altruistic actions. We also know that important characteristics, such as group recognition, are learned, not inherited.
We must know that as the world becomes a superorganism, there are traits common to us that are not of value to this unified society. It may be time to re-evaluate the obviously dangerous tendencies seen flourishing during the George Bush years from 2000 to today: the rise in anti-intellectualism, the rise of fundamentalist religious behavior, the focused restriction placed upon reason, the promotion of individual gains obscenely out of proportion to individual activity, the decline of the middle class, the reliance upon innuendo, lies and catastrophic events (whether promoted by the administration or not) as a basis for carrying out aggressive actions by our society. Since we all do contain the same seed tendencies as those I am flouting, the likelihood of this happening easily would seem slim. But, we are, as an international superorganism, approaching matters of pollution and global warming in a less selfish manner than we have; there may be a chance we will shove more destructive tendencies aside one day.
As I reflect upon what I seem to heading towards, I cannot help but see within it the seeds of "1984," and "Brave New World." I fear the excesses of both of the societies described in these novels. We have already seen that attempts by the "state" to disallow human behavior are not generally successful. China has made great strides, but is loath to give-up overbearing control of its people; the Soviet experiment was not a success, yet there seems a drift backward in an attempt to overwhelm the excesses of selfish individuals.
One phrase observed by Charles Mackay may be the only escape we have: "Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one!"
"And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins "When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins ..." Rudyard Kipling
One by one, recover our senses, darken our televisions, silence our radios; use the newspaper for wrapping fish and starting fires.
Think about that.
________________________________________________ *ADD = Attention Deficit Disorder *ADHD = Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder
1. Ref: Horizon, Volume IX, Number 2, 1967, Page 64
2. http://www.amazon.com/review/R17AFLXM3JVJT2)
3. The meaning of Mind, Language, Morality and Neuroscience," Praeger Publishers, 1996)
4. Skeptical Inquirer, Vol 32, issue 6, p 31, 2008
5. Rethinking Sociobiology, David Wilson, Edward O. Wilson, The quarterly Review of Biology, V. 82, #4, 2007 p.327
6. Dawkins, Richard, The Selfish Gene, bah, 1976
7. www.sciencefriday.com, Friday, December 8, 2008, The Superorganism.
8. www.sciencefriday.com, Friday, December 8, 2008, Smiling in Groups
9. Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, with a foreword by Andrew Tobias, 1841; New York: Harmony Books, 1980. Note: this short version extracts from the whole text only the economic bubbles.
10. CNNEWS--NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) First Published: September 8, 2008: 11:44 AM EDT
11. http://en.wifipedia.org/wiki/ Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.
12. Michael S. Gazzaniga, The Mind's Past, University of California Press, 1998, P. 157-8
13. Sway, the Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior, O. Brafman and R. Brafman Doubleday, NY, 2008)
14. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=95210724; This reference concerns an interview by Terry Gross of Bill Maher, Producer of the Film "Religulous," during which Maher described his research for the film. He interviewed highly placed, older Vatican priests who told Maher they did not, of course, believe in the silly stories and superstitions surrounding the supernatural birth of Christ. The interview is worth listening to. This tends to support a view that an organized religion does not much differ from any corporate business entity. Its origins may be found in idealized imaginary lore that eventually become ‘transmogrified' into power and money. And, so it goes.
15. Owen Barfield, History in English Words, Lindisfarne Books; 2nd edition (March 1, 2002). Note, my reference is to an earlier edition (same text). This is an available printing.
16. Edward O. Wilson, Naturalist, Island Press; 1 edition, 2006.
17. Edward O. Wilson, Consilience, The Unity of knowledge, Vintage. 1999.
18. Edward O. Wilson, On Human Nature, Harvard University Press, 1978.
19. Edward O. Wilson, Sociobiology, The New synthesis, Belknap Press; 25 Aniv edition, 2000.
(c) copyright J.C. Leissring 2009