Excerpts from:

Part II Chapter Five:
Western Myth and Precept of Simple Cause: Reflections on Human Culture and Cognition
Go To Chapter Five
(Full Text) HTML

Return to Index

On the property of ‘consciousness’: “I would like to remind readers that the folk wisdom of an earlier age had no difficulty with the mysterious property of ‘consciousness’, attributing it (and indeed ‘mind’ itself) quite simply to nature in general. In this view - some would call it ‘primitive’ - conscious awareness was believed to run across the board. In my opinion this position - the ‘traditional’ human position if you will - is the far better one philosophically, even (and especially) for the investigator of the present day. It enables us, scientists and poets alike, to view the totality of living nature beneath a single lens. Such a perspective brings better consistency (and better conscience I would maintain) to our understanding of natural process.”

On myth - ‘mindless’ or ‘mindful’: “If, in the evolutionary perspective, intelligent action can be presumed to precede the emergence of ‘mind’, then it should be no great theoretical hurdle to see this intelligent (if ‘mindless’) action as inspired by myth. The impression of paradox may simply underscore a thought which instantly presents itself for consideration: in human biology, as in the formation of culture, myth does appear, at times, to be ‘mindless’ in the utter obliviousness with which it is typically employed; and in the relentless manner in which it pursues its ‘own’ purpose. Myth appears to depend, in the typical manifestation, precisely on that lack of ‘deliberation’ which characterizes reflexive actions of the most primitive kind! It is precisely the ‘mindless’ character of myth-inspired action which, in the evolutionary perspective, makes this phenomenon so beneficial (and, potentially, so deadly).”

On the function of the neocortex: “The developing hominid needed, it seems, this large chamber of the brain to hold the stupendous record of its assimilations; it needed adequate ‘housing’ for the complex structures we employ to compare, evaluate, and re-process a continuously expanding store of information. All this in the direct interest of coherence, to find connection between objects and events and establish identity with a diverse world. It goes without saying that long-term memory, which Lumsden, Wilson, and others insist is the primary function of the neocortex, is a big deal with humans. But it is merely the vehicle by which all of the above is accomplished... Assimilation is the method we employ to make sense of a multi-faceted reality, a means we share with other forms of life. But to an extent unknown in other animals, who tend, relatively speaking, to be locked in fixed relations to given environments (and who often languish if placed in unfamiliar settings), the human being has an astonishing ability to create new identity in the face of new experience and new surroundings; to incorporate, into its conception and awareness of the ‘self’, the environment in which it newly finds itself. For it is not just a figure of speech to say that the material world is an ‘extension of the mind’. External reality functions, for us, as the principal modeling factor in the way we think, in the way we construct and evaluate experience. This in addition to its obvious usefulness for the storage of important cultural information.”

A modest proposal: “...allow me to wander a bit further on the evolutionary terrain from which all of this springs. An event as mysterious, to my way of thinking, as the cortical expansion itself is the fact that it ceased at the approximate time when it did. The archaeological record appears to indicate that increasing human encephalization came to an end in the late Pleistocene, as recently as fifty-thousand years ago, the time of the vaunted ‘cultural explosion’ and, some say, shortly following the appearance of language... But I want to make an additional suggestion which may seem initially perverse: the same cluster of inchoate variables which induced (or, at least, worked in consort with) the cortical expansion originally, may have been the principal factors which brought it to a halt. These were... the emergence of modern language with its trenchant simplification of human experience; and, second, the growing importance of a material culture in human discourse. It should be obvious that with the adduction of these two possible causal factors we move the dialogue onto a plane which is most uncongenial to traditional inquiry, even hostile to certain of its primary assumptions.”

On the role of language in all this: “The erosive effects of language (or enhanced vocalization), on the size of the cortex, may be envisioned in a similar straightforward fashion: that is, the more rigid ordering of the practical rules of perception, which language helped institute and articulate through the extraordinary expansion of its lexical capability, had the inevitable effect of ‘streamlining’ the influx of stimuli to human perceptions, thus stripping experience of much of its lateral complexity... The upshot of what I have interpreted as a gross conceptual simplification is that language was able to mitigate significantly the pressures converging on the associative centers of the brain.”

On the ‘progressive fallacy’: “Much of what science has to say about the human record proceeds from the assumption that the organism’s final social-biological condition (i.e. its present form) constitutes some kind of ‘goal’ toward which adaptive pressures, in apparent obliviousness to all else, have pushed it these hundred of thousands upon thousands of years. This is the unyielding framework within which everything of significance is seen to transpire... In the light of this refurbished ‘orthogenesis’ (which is, at the same time, neo-Darwinian in its mytho-political emphasis on the individual as the focus of natural process) the totality of the human past appears as a defective version of the present! Blind to nearly everything else, we rummage in the material residue of bye-gone millennia for anticipatory signs of the coming of ‘you-know-who’, the fulfillment of all natural process.”

A tentative suggestion: “Let us proceed from a point of view which ignores the usual assumptions of the evolutionary sciences. Let us consider, for a few moments, the ‘technical conservatism’ of early humans not as a cultural ‘defect’, waiting for the ‘ultimate coming’ of its evolutionary rationale and justification, but as the natural consequence (and probable affirmation) of a construction of the world which was complete in itself, a perception of ‘reality’ which modern specimens have lost as a result of a change in our mytho-psychological orientation.”

On the ‘unmediated technologies’ of our cultural-biological forebears: “Modes of fabrication in which intent and method appear at cross-purposes, may be drawn into useful contrast with weaving and tying, methods of production which, in their traditional applications, do away with secondary devices (and tools) altogether. Relying on materials which are immediately available and instantly responsive to the mere ‘touch’ of human hands and fingers, such modes of joinder have not lost their capacity to placate the ruffled sensory disposition. A direct relation is established between the producer and the primary materials of production. No alienating product (or process) intervenes. The mind of the producer remains in a high state of assimilation and repose. (Indeed, therapists who treat the emotionally troubled, have long recognized the efficacy of activities such as these in returning the disturbed patient to normal function.)”

On the degradation of touch: “But the experience of the world through direct touch would gradually lose status relative to other modes of ‘knowing’, especially vision of course, and would slip silently into a state of ignominy with the evolution of a highly elaborated inventory of specialized tools and the creation of new discursive arrangements by means of which all of nature would become a remote ‘object’ of human action and invention and, in the course of time, fundamentally degraded. Products of human ‘vision’ tended to challenge and eventually supplant most strictly tactile constructions of material reality. Touch, and direct reciprocal access to the essence (and feelings) of the ‘other’, would become now the special case, subject to severe limitations as to how and where the exercise of this ancient mode of discursive interaction was appropriate.”

On the Culture of Closure: “In the picture I have put together of the earliest period, one branch of developing humanity continued on the course of the geographic expansion initiated by homo habilis and homo erectus, remaining close to seashores and wooded river valleys, which appears to have been their ancestral home of preference. This, I would propose, is the cultural matrix of modern humanity, the place in the heart and mind where we grew to maturity... The world was complexly if still rather darkly assembled, a mytho-conceptual vestige of an ancient biological preference which the developing organism continued (conditionally) to affirm. The forest continued to be the stable ‘mother' and 'matter’ of human existence (English cognates from the common IE root *matér), a locus of protective vantage from which all of nature was constructed and validated. The forest was the physical setting for the ‘interior perspective’, now largely lost to human awareness. Animal husbandry was not yet practiced, though human community had likely entered, by this early date, into close domestic relationship with many animals of the forest: certainly pigs, dogs, and probably snakes, all despised by the culture which followed, a matter of immense relevance when it comes to reconstructing the mind-set of those on the far side of this mythic divide.”

On the Culture of the Open: “The unforested sub-glacial interior Eurasia would provide the landscape for a momentous change in consciousness, for a striking modification of the cognitive framework of human perception. The pursuit and killing of ungulates (and ultimately their herding and selective breeding) became the focus of a new system of values in which enclosure and complexity of life in the ‘abandoned forest’ became extensively devalued and ultimately rejected... In the imagination of virtue the ‘individual’ began to displace the ‘collective’. Systems of social hierarchy commenced to erode the complex lateral relations of human community. Diet underwent significant simplification with animal flesh emerging as a central component. And, to be sure, language ‘as we know it’ made its appearance in conjunction with the symbolic representation of human experience. For it happens that the discourse, of which we can now confidently begin to speak, was extensively symbol-dependent.”