The Little Red Blog

Saturday Lecture: More Ado About Bacon

{Among his other accomplishments, Francis Bacon identified several widespread cognitive “idols,” each of which, he claimed, interfered with rational thought, thus limiting, and distorting, our understanding of reality.} 

Richard Foster Jones, from Ancients and Moderns:

The Idols of the Tribe are those mental characteristics common to all men: proneness to suppose more order and regularity in the world than exist; the tendency of mental prepossessions to bend all things into conformity to themselves; and the influence which the will and affections, such as pride, hope, impatience, and the like have upon the mind, but particularly the part which desire plays in determining thought. The greatest hindrance to learning associated with the mind is the dullness, incompetency, and deception of the senses, which without the proper aids are infirm and erring, and instruments can do little to assist them. The defects inherent in the senses can be remedied only by the senses themselves assisted by experiments.

The Idols of the Cave, or of individual men, refer to the bias which education and environment impose on the variable and erratic spirit of man, and later are frequently cited as the reason for the obstinacy with which many men still cling to the past. The Idols of the Theater represent the circumscription of the mind by philosophical dogma and received systems, which represent nothing real in nature because they are based upon insufficient observations and experiments, as with Aristotle's philosophy, which Bacon calls sophistical, or are based upon too highly specialized fields of experimentation, as with the theories of the alchemists, which he calls empirical.

The Idols which Bacon considered the most troublesome of all, and which in his eyes had rendered philosophy sophistical and inactive were those of the Marketplace. These refer to the reaction of the understanding to words, and Bacon's recognition of them marks the beginning of a movement that is one of the characteristic features of early English science. Bacon believed that words filled the understanding with misapprehensions because, being invented to accommodate vulgar minds, they were defective. He cites as evidence the fact that when superior wits engage in argument the discussion often becomes a mere dispute over words. He did not have faith in definitions, because in natural and material matters, definitions consist only of words, which beget other words, and so the problem is not solved. The express fault which he finds with words is that they either represent things which do not exist in nature, or else convey very confused ideas of things. In short, language does not impart to the mind a true or accurate picture of material reality but fills it with more or less fantastic ideas of nature. ¹

That he particularly had traditional philosophy in mind is revealed in the remedy proposed for this evil, namely, that all theories be dismissed, and recourse be had to individual instances or direct observations. He reveals the same linguistic attitude in his discussion of syllogistic logic. Syllogisms consist of propositions, and propositions of words, which in turn are only "marks of popular notions of things," so that if these notions have no relation (or only a confused one) to the material world, the whole logical edifice crumbles. This linguistic view had two marked effects upon later scientists. First, it determined the most consistent charge which they brought against the philosophy of the past, namely, that it was merely verbal, with no counterpart in reality; and second, it influenced them to consider a reformation in language and style as essential as one in science, to formulate their linguistic and stylistic ideals, and to try to make them operative.

Reason, or logic, says Bacon, has for so long been divorced from facts that it has fixed errors rather than discovered truth, and, therefore, the important step is to return to a purely sensuous knowledge of natural things, and from that foundation to work slowly upward, constantly guiding and controlling the mind by observations and experiments.

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¹ Bacon’s mistrust of language and his preference for “individual instances” rather than abstract generalizations echoed William of Ockham’s nominalism. It also foreshadowed Ludwig Wittgenstein’s concerns with “the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.”   

 

Wednesday with Pascal: "Question Reality"? Really?

{Pascal the existential Russian blue cat’s head is spinning these days. Between diving into the political philosophy (and theology) of Eric Voegelin, and learning from Donald Hoffman that reality isn’t what we think it is, Pascal is increasingly experiencing existential nausea—and that’s not good for anyone’s carpet.}

“Is there any world out there at all?” (Philip K. Dick)

T.S. Eliot wrote that “Humankind cannot bear very much reality,” which observation, if true, would explain why in this life we only see things “through a glass darkly.” Perhaps a merciful God is letting us off the hook, shielding us from reality the way we shield children from sights we deem inappropriate for them.

On the other hand, Eliot’s observation also happens to cohere with the thinking of cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman, who claims, in his book The Case Against Reality, that “If our perceptions were shaped by natural selection then they almost surely evolved to hide reality.” More precisely, Hoffman says that our perceptions evolved (through natural selection) to relay to us only as much reality as we can bear; the point was never to give us the ‘truth’ about the world, but to help us survive.

Our perceptions, of course, are always mediated, first through our senses, then through our brains, and finally through our consciousness. We understand a good deal about the first of those mediators (our senses); we understand less about the second (the brain); and we understand nothing at all about consciousness. As Donald Hoffman admits:

We have no scientific theories that explain how brain activity—or computer activity, or any other kind of physical activity—could cause, or be, or somehow give rise to, conscious experience. We don’t have even one idea that’s remotely plausible. If we consider not just brain activity, but also the complex interactions among brains, bodies, and the environment, we still strike out. We’re stuck. Our utter failure leads some to call this the “hard problem” of consciousness, or simply a “mystery.”

But are there not theories? Isn’t consciousness (or the mind) merely an “emergent property” of brain activity? Isn’t it simply the brain at work? What about the mind being the product of angels, demons, or nanobots? Hoffman doesn’t buy any of that:

If we propose that brain activity is identical to, or gives rise to, conscious experiences, then we want the same kind of precise laws or principles—that link each specific conscious experience, such as the taste of a tomato, with the specific brain activities that it is identical to, or with the specific brain activities that give rise to it. No such laws or principles have been offered. If we propose that conscious experience is identical, say, to certain processes of the brain that monitor other processes, then we need to write down laws or principles that precisely specify these processes and the conscious experiences with which they are identical. If we propose that conscious experience is an illusion arising from some brain processes attending to, monitoring, and describing other brain processes, then we must state laws or principles that precisely specify these processes and the illusions they generate. And if we propose that conscious experiences emerge from brain processes, then we must give the laws or principles that describe precisely when, and how, each specific experience emerges.

Until then, these ideas aren’t even wrong. Hand waves about identity, emergence, or attentional processes that describe other brain processes are no substitute for precise laws or principles that make quantitative predictions. We have scientific laws that predict black holes, the dynamics of quarks, and the evolution of the universe. Yet we have no clue how to formulate laws, principles, or mechanisms that predict our quotidian experiences of tasting tomatoes or hearing street noise.

We can study everything in the universe, it seems, except ourselves—that is, literally, our “selves,” the conscious, self-aware entities that we are (or think we are, or imagine ourselves to be) but that we cannot explain. Some theorize that human knowledge may in this case have reached its limit:

Perhaps we were short-changed by evolution, and lack the concepts needed to understand the relationship between brains and consciousness. Cats can’t do calculus and monkeys can’t do quantum theory, so why assume that Homo sapiens can demystify consciousness? ¹

Hoffman, on the other hand, suggests an alternative: “Perhaps we possess the necessary intelligence and are hindered by a false belief. False beliefs, rather than innate limits, can stump our efforts to solve puzzles.” He recommends that we proceed from that latter perspective; that is, from the insight that we have been looking at this all wrong.

What false assumption bedevils our efforts to unravel the relation between brain and consciousness? I propose it is this: the assumption that we see reality as it is. The reality prompting you to create your experience of (say) a tomato is nothing like what you see and taste. We have been misled by our perceptions.

Hoffman then explains, “We naturally think that a tomato is still there—including its taste, odor, and color—even when we don’t look.” He notes, though, that great minds have disagreed with that assumption. Galileo, for instance, asserted, “I think that tastes, odors, colors, and so on are no more than mere names so far as the object in which we locate them are concerned, and that they reside in consciousness. Hence if the living creature were removed, all these qualities would be wiped away and annihilated.” If a tree fell in the forest and there was no one there to hear it—would there be a sound, a forest, or even a tree? What happens to the world when we’re not paying attention to it?

Galileo was by no means a thoroughgoing idealist; he did not claim that material reality was only a construct of mind. He believed, says Hoffman, “that the tomato is there, but not its taste, odor, and color—these are properties of perception, not of reality as it is apart from perception. If consciousness disappeared, so would they. But he thought the tomato itself would still exist, including its body, shape, and position. For these properties, he claimed, we see reality as it is.” This is common sense; as Hoffman says, most of us would agree that the world is composed of real objects, to which we attribute, according to the limits of our senses, various secondary qualities. Hoffman, however, begs to differ:

Evolution by natural selection entails a counterintuitive theorem: the probability is zero that we see reality as it is. This theorem applies not just to taste, odor, and color, but also to shape, position, mass, and velocity—even to space and time. We see none of reality as it is. The reality that prompts you to create an experience of a tomato, the reality that exists whether or not you see a tomato, is nothing like what you see and taste.

Samuel Johnson famously responded to George Berkeley’s radical philosophical idealism by kicking at a rock and proclaiming, “I refute Berkeley thus!”. I will not attempt to refute Donald Hoffman, for the simple reason that I don’t like tomatoes and don’t care whether they exist or not. If Hoffman tries to debunk the reality of potatoes, however, he’ll have to answer to me; potatoes exist, and they’re delicious.

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Donald D Hoffman, The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes (W. W. Norton & Company)

Donald D. Hoffman - Wikipedia

¹ On behalf of Pascal the existential Russian blue cat, I take exception to Hoffman’s belittling of cats, especially his likening them to monkeys.

Psychology and Its Discontents

At Big Think, Elizabeth Gilbert and Nick Hobson, having asked (rhetorically) “Is Psychology Good for Anything?”, inform us that “We are fish surrounded by so much psychological water, we don’t even notice it.” The implication is that human beings need the science of psychology as much as fish need water; human history would seem to refute that. Even so, the authors say, although “many published [psychological] studies fail to replicate, and influential research [psychologists] have admitted to wrongdoing, from engaging in questionable research practices to committing outright fraud,” we should not throw out psychology’s substantive baby with its methodological bathwater. Besides, they remind us, every science has a skeleton or three in its closet (especially the science of anatomy): 

While psychology needs to improve its reliability, it is worth highlighting that reproducibility issues and fraud are hardly unique to psychology. A 2021 study found that over half of preclinical cancer biology experiments published in leading journals failed to replicate. A recent superconductor “breakthrough” was probably fraudulent. Multiple studies from every major scientific field have been retracted due to researcher error or misconduct. Indeed, the majority of surveyed chemists, biologists, physicists, engineers, medical researchers, and environmental scientists report that they have attempted and failed to reproduce another scientist’s experimental results at least once. Yet, few would argue that these branches of science are worthless.

While it may seem odd to defend the integrity of one science by citing examples of failures in other sciences, Gilbert and Hobson go on to point out the many valuable things we have learned through psychological research:

Less than 50 years ago, economists assumed people were fully rational, juries assumed confident eyewitnesses were accurate, and news watchers assumed only evil people would do evil things. Only 20 years ago, most businesspeople believed that cultures from across the world made decisions in the same way, physicians assumed the brain and body were essentially independent, and politicians thought only young people and conspiracy theorists were particularly susceptible to misinformation.

None of those notions are right, and these psychological corrections are now so well-established that they seem banal.

What makes that observation itself banal is that none of those notions were widely accepted in the first place, much less in the recent past. ¹ Psychologists tend to puff up the importance of their field by exaggerating the impact of their findings; to the untrained observer, an awful lot of psychological research has consisted of confirming things that everybody already knows. ²

While the authors declare that “cognitive biases have been replicated hundreds of ways and incorporated into our basic understanding of how people think and behave,” they don’t acknowledge that they are subject to cognitive biases of their own—Ms. Gilbert is a psychologist and Mr. Hobson is an expert consultant on “evidence-based behavior change strategies,” which sounds a lot like applied psychology to me.

Do research psychologists unconsciously (or consciously) design experiments to get the results they want? Do they interpret findings in a way that confirms what they already believe? Are researchers subject to peer pressure, to career imperatives, or to financial incentives?  Upton Sinclair once remarked, “It is difficult to get a person to understand something when their salary depends on their not understanding it.” No disrespect intended to either Gilbert or Hobson, but they may not be providing us with the most objective view on this subject.

My view is that, to the extent that psychology helps individuals to understand themselves, we should applaud it; to the extent that it helps various authorities (governments, marketers, propagandists of all kinds) to manipulate us, we should keep a watchful eye on it—after all, “it” is keeping an eye on us.

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Is psychology good for anything? - Big Think

¹ To address just one of Gilbert’s and Hobson’s claims: while I do not make a practice of defending economists, to say that they “assumed people were fully rational” is to mistake a theoretical assumption for a claim about human nature and to mistake a subset of economists for the entire field. Economists are aware of the role of “animal spirits” (that is, irrational human enthusiasms) in producing stock “bubbles,” “tulip mania,” and other irrational phenomena. They know that drunks spend their rent money at the bar, that gamblers throw away their life savings at the racetrack or the casino, etc. They also know that people lie, manipulate, cheat, and steal. Economists are not naïve; they can, of course, be dogmatic, and they are unquestionably susceptible to confirmation bias. What some of them believe (correctly or not) is that the Market, under “normal” circumstances, takes the non-rational phenomena into account, making a macro-economic silk purse out of the sows’ ears of individuals’ micro-economic choices.

² To be fair, psychological research sometimes produces interestingly counter-intuitive results, which the rest of us simply ignore.  

Rube Goldbert's Institute for Research Psychology

Wednesday with Pascal: Maps of Our Pain

{Pascal the existential Russian blue cat insists on leaping into the ongoing discussion of Gabor Mate’s ‘The Myth of Normal’. Pascal brings to the issue his usual feline sagacity and his own history of being decidedly not normal.}

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: “Neurotics build castles in the air, psychotics live in them, and psychiatrists collect the rent.” Or this one: I told my psychiatrist I’m thinking about suicide. He said from now on I’ll have to pay in advance.”

Now wait just a goldarn minute.

Aren’t we being unfair to the psychiatric profession and to mental health experts in general? How can psychiatry’s critics deny the substantial evidence that psychotropic medications work, that unruly kids calm down, and that depressed people recover their interest in life? What do those critics have against helping people feel better? Forget about, if you will (and as many clinicians do), the diagnostic categories themselves; but 50,000,000 Prozac users (more or less) can’t be wrong!

Or can they? Granting for the sake of discussion that the pills work; setting aside, for the moment, their common and undesirable side effects, both immediate and long-term; and overlooking for now the dangers of misuse and abuse of medications, of overdoses and addiction, and of withdrawal difficulties; even if you choose to frame the argument as favorably as possible to the medical approach, there remains, according to Gabor Mate, an inherent problem with it. Our overreliance on medications, he argues, not only encourages us to turn a blind eye to social and environmental factors, but it leads us to mistake symptoms for causes—because, although medications can certainly alleviate the former, that proves nothing about their relevance to the latter.

“We have to avoid the fallacy of inferring from medication’s (in some cases) observable benefits,” Mate explains, “that the proven origin of mental illness rests in the biochemistry of the brain, let alone that physiological disturbances are genetically caused. That a medication has a certain positive effect reveals nothing about the genesis of a symptom. If aspirin eases a headache, can the headache be explained by an inherited brain deficiency of acetylsalicylic acid, the pill’s active ingredient? If a shot of bourbon relaxes you, is your tense nervous system suffering from a DNA-dictated whiskey shortage?” ¹

Neurologists insist that the human brain is the most complex thing in existence; that may be a mere anthropocentric conceit, but, taken at face value, it suggests that perhaps we not jump to conclusions about how that admittedly complex organ works. After all, writes Mate, “There are numerous neurotransmitters in the brain whose complex interactions we are only now beginning to explore, not to mention the almost infinite possibilities inherent in the lifelong intersection of experience with the biology of body and brain. Once again, the physiology of the brain is a manifestation and a product of life in motion and in context.” ²

Further, as Bruce Perry writes, “The brain is a historical organ. It stores our personal narrative.” Since it does so in the form of its chemistry and its neural networks, it is no wonder that difficult experiences may result in disturbed neurobiology. Even when brain scans show certain abnormalities—as they do, for example, in many traumatized people—these do not prove that the “disorder” has a neurochemical source.

The brain is a scrapbook, a photo album, a treasure chest, and a junk drawer; things get lost, forgotten, misplaced. The recognition of “neuroplasticity”—the fact that the human brain changes and can even be intentionally changed with cognitive and behavioral (that is, non-chemical and non-surgical) techniques—complicates medical approaches to “mental illness”: are brain abnormalities the cause of mental disorders or are they the result of life experiences?

There is research that suggests the latter:

A recently published thirty-year study followed people from early life to age twenty-nine. Poor quality of care in infancy was, nearly three decades later, associated with a higher volume of the emotionally key brain structure, the hippocampus, as well as with an elevated risk for “borderline personality” features and suicidality. In other words, the brain’s genetics did not “cause” either the “illness” or the neurophysiological differences: all were the result of life experiences.

Mate cites one of my favorite recent books:

In his work Lost Connections, Johann Hari relates his own experience of devastatingly low moods, followed by his initial elation at the depression diagnosis that, at last, “explained” his disturbing mind states. “This will sound odd,” he writes, “but what I experienced at that moment was a happy jolt—like unexpectedly finding a pile of money down the back of your sofa. There is a term for feeling like this! It is a medical condition, like diabetes or irritable bowel syndrome.”

Naming is power; naming demystifies (to some extent); naming offers hope. Christian exorcists have long known the efficacy of making demons reveal their names, the better to cast them out. Sometimes, though, the demons, even after being named, don’t leave:

Hari’s first experience of medications was positive. “It was only years later,’ he relates in Lost Connections, “that somebody pointed out to me all the questions the doctor didn’t ask that day. Like: Is there any reason you might feel distressed? What’s been happening in your life? Is there anything hurting you we might want to change?” The answers would have been yeses all around: Hari was carrying both past trauma and present stress that he took to be part of his “normal.” Over time, he came to recognize that the narrow medical model that had helped him manage his symptoms was also leaving him far short of healing. He is not entirely jaded about the biological approach, but he notes with sorrow that “it has crowded out the much more common-sense insights that people have about why they become distressed and how to resolve their distress. Really— how do I put it—it’s given us an inaccurate map of our own pain.” ³

There is nothing wrong with taking pills, but medication is merely and at best a stabilizer. For anyone looking for more than that, for anyone looking to go beyond tinkering with their brain chemistry, and for anyone looking to get at the roots of “mental illness”; Rainer Maria Rilke—a poet, not a psychiatrist—said it best: “You must change your life.”

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¹ Yes, almost certainly, and it’s about time someone pointed that out.

² Consider that statement: "The brain is a manifestation and a product of a life in motion and in context.” Thank you, Dr. Gabor Mate; you have made my day.

³ And thank you, Johann Hari; yes, the brain is also, among so many other things, a “map of our pain”.

Science Marches On: Demystifying the Brain

Send in the Canaries?

{We continue our focus on Mental Health Awareness Month and on what are now called “mental health conditions” or "mental health issues," previously known as “mental health disorders,” and before that just plain old-fashioned “mental illness”. Crazy, isn’t it?}

Although he is an outspoken critic of what he considers the over-diagnosing and over-medicating of children for mental health issues, Dr. Gabor Mate (The Myth of Normal) does not have his head in the sand. He does not dismiss contemporary children’s behavioral and learning difficulties. He does not say that the kids are alright; rather, he acknowledges that “We are witnessing a sea change in children’s mental well-being.” Unfortunately, however, our medicalized mental health system is ill-equipped to navigate, much less to alleviate, that sea change: “Diagnoses,” writes Mate, “reveal nothing about the underlying events and dynamics that animate the perceptions and experiences in question. They keep our gaze trained on effects and not their myriad causes. There could be multiple reasons why a child may have trouble paying attention or be restless, disengaged, and fidgety: anxiety, stresses at home, boredom with material she finds uninteresting, resistance to the constraints of sitting in a classroom, fear of bullying, an authoritarian teacher, trauma—even birth month, believe it or not.”

Mate concludes, “The world into which kids are being born these days might as well have been designed to promote disruptions of cognitive function and emotional self-regulation.” To paraphrase Cormac McCarthy, 21^st-century American culture is no country for children, whose behaviors reflect (as they have always done) the increasingly fragmented, lonely, and dysfunctional adult world around them.

Writes Gabor Mate:

Consider the DSM-5 diagnosis of oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), often tacked on to ADHD and other “diseases.” “If your child or teenager has a frequent and persistent pattern of anger, irritability, arguing, defiance or vindictiveness toward you and other authority figures, he or she may have oppositional defiant disorder,” advises the Mayo Clinic. The clue is in the word “toward”: oppositionality, by definition, can arise only in the context of a relationship. I can suffer symptoms of a cold in isolation or break my ankle on my own. I cannot oppose anyone or be angry or irritable with anyone unless that “anyone” is in some relationship with me.

In other words, it takes two to tango:

Given that a child develops in the context of relationships, her behavior will be intelligible to us only if we look at the relational environment. Seen this way, these so-called ODD kids turn out to be ones who lack sufficient connection with nurturing adults and have a natural resistance to being controlled by people they do not fully trust or feel close enough to. This aversion, furthermore, is only magnified by all attempts to shame or cajole it into submission. To call this “disordered” says nothing about the child’s inner experience; it reflects only the perspective of the ones who find her recalcitrance inconvenient. It is also completely obtuse about how emotional power dynamics work: there is nothing disordered in resisting authority figures with whom, for whatever reason, we do not feel confident in and safe.

If we are today seeing more youngsters in automatic resistance mode, the question we must return to is, how does this culture disrupt healthy adult-child relationships? Why are we diagnosing children with a disorder, instead of diagnosing—and treating—their families, communities, schools, and society?

The answer is obvious: it is easier to diagnose, and to treat, “difficult” individuals, whatever their age, than to overhaul an entire culture. If x percent of children misbehave in school, it must be the children who are to blame and not the school, much less some unknown combination of social influences. Of course, today’s preferred option is to blame not the individuals themselves but their brains, their neural networks and neurochemistry, their flawed synapses, transmitters, and receptors. Put the blame on the brain, goes the conventional wisdom. Mental health professionals try to guess what's gone wrong inside our heads; meanwhile, as Bob Dylan put it, “Life outside goes on all around you.” Mate writes:

It is known beyond controversy that the greater the degree of childhood adversity, the higher the risk of mental disturbances, including psychosis. One study found that people who had suffered five types of maltreatment in childhood were multiple times more likely to be diagnosed with psychosis than those who had not experienced such traumatic events. A major review in 2018 in the Schizophrenia Bulletin concluded that the severity of childhood traumas was correlated with the intensity of delusions and hallucinations. Richard Bentall, a clinical psychologist, summed up the science a few years ago: “The evidence of a link between childhood misfortune and future psychiatric disorder is about as strong statistically as the link between smoking and lung cancer,” he wrote. “There is also now strong evidence that these kinds of experiences affect brain structure, explaining many of the abnormal neuro-imaging findings that have been reported for psychiatric patients.” This mirrored a Harvard study that concluded, “These brain changes may be best understood as adaptive responses to facilitate survival and reproduction in the face of adversity. Their relationship to psychopathology is complex.”

How can so many children of America’s affluent society have suffered “childhood adversity” and “childhood misfortune”? Is Gabor Mate trying to indict American culture as a whole? Maybe:

It is manifestly evident to many clinicians working with mental distress that overt maltreatment is not necessary to exert negative impacts on the neurobiology of the brain or the functioning of the mind. Neurobiology is a continuum, as are “mental illness” and health. Emotional injury during development can have physiological consequences, even without abuse or neglect. As Bruce Perry explains, adverse childhood experiences—of the big-ticket kind that merit the official ACE designation—are of consequence, but “not as determinative as your history in relationships. The most powerful predictor of your functioning in the present is your current relational connectedness and then the second most powerful component that we see is your history of connectedness.”

Think of our kids—kids in general, really—as canaries in our socio-cultural coal mine. If the canaries start to sicken and even to perish in droves, should we develop more ingenious medicines and mechanisms to help them survive; or should we shut down the damn coal mine?

Saturday Lecture: The Name Game

"Our inner lives are too important to leave in the hands of doctors: because they don’t know as much about us as they claim, and because a full account of human nature is beyond their ken." (Gary Greenberg)

Gary Greenberg (from The Book of Woe):

By the turn of the twentieth century, doctors were stalking disease like Sherlock Holmes stalked criminals. Under the magnification of their microscopes, syphilis, diabetes, and streptococcus, to name just a few, soon yielded their secrets and their terrifying hold on us. With their newfound ability to parse suffering, to track it down to the bodily processes causing it, and then to dispatch it with a potion or a surgery, doctors gained prestige—and with it, money and power. They were rewarded as much for their prowess in relieving suffering as for the promise they now embodied: that they could use science to give a name to someone’s suffering and then, having named it, to relieve it.

This revolution in medicine accounts in part for the immense appeal of considering craziness to be just another disease. If scientific understanding and cure were possible for the suffering of the body, then why not for the suffering of the mind? If a patient’s delusion is some kind of metaphor, if the content of his delusion brims with meaning, then it is out of reach of the microscope and the X-ray. It requires what ancient doctors offered: interpretation and the invocation of metaphysics, of something beyond the symptom. But if the delusion is only another symptom, if it is not, in principle, different from the malaise and relentless thirst of an untreated diabetic, or the narrowing of vision of a glaucoma patient, or the fever of someone with malaria, then it can be brought under the physician’s purview. It doesn’t need to be understood in itself any more than fever or thirst does. It can be explained, it can be treated, and it can be cured.

You know the lure of this promise. If you’ve watched your child descend into psychosis or your husband spin out into mania or if you have struggled to get out of the bed into which depression has laid you, you know it even better. On the other hand, if you’ve been involved with the mental health industry, then you probably also know that the promise is not always fulfilled. Even if doctors can settle on a name for an individual’s illness—and this is not a sure thing—they will not be able to scratch out a prescription, tell him to take two and call back in the morning. The person may end up taking a drug indicated for a different diagnosis, or a cocktail of pills—one to quell his hallucinations, one to temper his agitation, one to relieve his depression, and one to help him sleep—and the combination may change monthly or even weekly, or it may work for a while and then stop.

No one will be able to explain why that happened, any more than they will be able to explain why the drugs worked in the first place. No honest psychiatrist will claim that she cured anyone’s mental illness; and while she is being honest, she may acknowledge that, for the most part, her treatments are targeted at symptoms, not diseases, and that she selects those treatments as much by intuition and experience as by scientific evidence.

But psychiatry’s appeal is not just about the possibility of cure, which is why the profession continues to flourish even when it cures nothing and relieves symptoms only haphazardly. The appeal is in the naming itself. What Wallace Stevens called ‘the blessed rage to order’ is so deep in us that it is in our origin story: the first thing the Bible’s authors have Adam and Eve do to establish their dominion over Eden is to name its flora and fauna. That story doesn’t have a happy ending, but the rage itself is surely blessed, or as blessed as we humans can be, and as noble. Give a name to suffering, perhaps the most immediate reminder of our insignificance and powerlessness, and suddenly it bears the trace of the human. It becomes part of our story. It is redeemed.

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Gary Greenberg, The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry (2013)

Gary Greenberg (psychologist) - Wikipedia

Alien Nation (Part Five)

“In the nineteenth century the problem was that ‘God is dead’. In the twentieth century the problem is that ‘Man is dead.’” (Erich Fromm)

C.S. Lewis described the denizens of modernity as “men without chests.” T.S. Eliot wrote about the “Hollow Men”. Similarly, Erich Fromm, with whom neither Lewis nor Eliot had much in common, lamented the emergence in the 20th century of “men who act like machines,” men whose “schizoid self-alienation leads to an ever-increasing insanity.” The danger in previous eras, claimed Fromm, had been that men would become slaves; the danger in the postwar West was that they would become “robots”. Moreover, speculated Fromm, since such robotic humans “could not live and remain sane,” they would necessarily “become Golems [who] will destroy themselves and their world because they cannot stand the boredom of a meaningless life. Our dangers,” Fromm concluded, writing in the first decade of the nuclear-powered Cold War, “are war and robotism.”

Though he considered himself a Marxist, Fromm denied that economics alone could provide the answer, nor could politics; more essential, he held, was cultural and spiritual transformation. Man, in Fromm’s opinion, needed to be rehumanized:

“The ideals of the Judeo-Christian tradition cannot possibly become realities in a materialistic civilization centered around production, consumption, and success in the market. On the other hand, no socialist society could fulfill the goal of brotherliness, justice, and individualism unless its ideas are capable of filling the hearts of men with a new spirit.”

A spiritual awakening—how difficult could that be? After all, Fromm wrote, “The great teachers of the human race have postulated the norms for sane living. We are not in need of new knowledge, but in bitter need of taking seriously what we believe, what we preach, and what we teach. The revolution of our hearts,” he concludes, “does not require new wisdom—but new seriousness and dedication.”

Millennia of increasing alienation can be undone by seriousness and dedication—just make it so! “To feel at home in the world, man must grasp it not only with his head, but with all his senses, his eyes, his ears, with all his body. He must act out with his body what he thinks out with his brain. Body and mind cannot be separated in this, or in any other aspect.” We will put poor Mr. Dumpty back together again! We will create civic rituals and civic art, civic music and civic dance, and we will do it collectively, just as soon as we outgrow our stubborn individualism. In a fit of enthusiasm reminiscent of Anatoly Lunacharsky, the utopian Bolshevik whose ideas drew contempt from Lenin, Fromm grew almost giddy: 

Our modern ritual is impoverished and does not fulfill man's need for collective art and ritual, even in the remotest sense, either as to its qualitative or its quantitative significance in life. Once one recognizes the need for collective art and ritual, once one begins to cultivate them, seeds will grow, and gifted people will come forth who will add new forms to old ones, and new talents will appear which would have gone unnoticed without such new orientation.

Collective art will begin with the children's games in kindergarten, be continued in school, then in later life. We shall have common dances, choirs, plays, music, bands, not entirely replacing modern sport but subordinating it to the role of one of the many nonprofit and non-purposeful activities.

At this point, Fromm restated, in his own words, the Bolshevik slogan of “All power to the soviets”. “The decisive factor is decentralization,” he wrote, “concrete face-to-face groups, active responsible participation. In the factory, in the school, in the small political discussion groups, in the village, various forms of common artistic activities can be created; they can be stimulated as much as is necessary by the help and suggestion from central artistic bodies, but not "fed" by them.”

New-fangled communications media, suggested Fromm, would elevate popular taste, so long as the media are insulated from the corruptions of Mammon:

Modern radio and television techniques give marvelous possibilities to bring the best of music and literature to large audiences. Needless to say, it cannot be left to business to provide these opportunities; they must rank with our educational facilities which do not make a profit for anybody.

There will be naysayers aplenty, Fromm admitted, but don’t say it won’t happen just because it hasn’t happened yet:

It might be argued that the idea of a large-scale revival of ritual and collective art is romantic; that it suits an age of handicrafts, and not an age of machine production. But this objection is not any more compelling than the objections made to the "possibility" of railroads and heavier-than-air flying machines.

On the other hand, “If this objection were true, we might as well resign ourselves to the fact that our way of life would destroy itself soon, because of its lack of balance, and sanity.” Which observation brings us back, I believe, to our beginning:

How then shall we live?

Alien Nation (Part Four)

“Man is a creature that can get used to anything.” (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)

Is there no way out of here? Does our evolved adaptability enable us to tolerate the intolerable, including our own dissatisfaction, and to live our lives in ways which we know, deep down, make no sense?

In “Freedom and Autonomy,” Paul Goodman wrote:

There are outrages that take me by the throat, like anybody else, and I lust to be free of them. Insults to humanity and to the beauty of the world that keep me indignant. An atmosphere of lies, triviality, and vulgarity that suddenly makes me sick. The powers-that-be do not know the meaning of magnanimity, and often they are simply officious and spiteful; as Malatesta used to say, you just try to do your thing and they prevent you, and then you are to blame for the fight that ensues. Worst of all, the earth-destroying actions of power are demented; and as in ancient tragedies and histories we read how arrogant men committed sacrilege and brought down doom on themselves and those associated with them, so I sometimes am superstitiously afraid to belong to the same tribe and walk the same ground as our statesmen.

But no. Men have a right to be crazy, stupid, and arrogant. It's our special thing. Our mistake is to arm anybody with collective power.

What is to be done?

Why are we alienated? We are alienated because we are surrounded by, and embedded within, “systems” over which we have no control. Modern “progress” has consisted of designing such systems; modern education has consisted of training young people to obediently accept their place in them; modern culture keeps us immersed in the assumptions, values, and goals of those systems; and modern politics offers us nothing but more of the same.

We are free to choose, say the existentialists, but we are not free to choose the circumstances under which we make our choices. We are constrained by biology, by history, by society, by luck, and by—especially in these modern times—the way in which everything is connected. We live now in Max Weber’s “iron cage” of rationalized bureaucracy and hierarchical management, abetted by Rene Guenon’s “reign of quantity” and Marx’s “cash nexus”: we have commodified ourselves nearly to death. Late-stage capitalism is now treated as (to borrow a phrase from James Russell Lowell) “a machine that would go of itself.” ¹ You couldn’t shut it off if you tried. Even if there were some way out of here, there is no place else to go.

In the Sixties, we chanted “Power to the people”; now, all these decades later, we find ourselves with less power than ever. “Power to the people” became “power to the politicians”; the politicians took the power and the rest of us went back to our lives—which, in fairness, is the way most of us wanted it and the way most of us want it now. Yet we are haunted by the possibility that, as Joni Mitchell wrote, “[We] could have been more.” We could have been, I don’t know—persons?

What would that even look like? We have no idea. Paul Goodman pointed out that “The pathos of people lusting for freedom is that, if they break free, they don't know what to do. Not having been autonomous, they do not know how to go about it, and before they learn it is usually too late. New managers have taken over, who may or may not be benevolent and imbued with the revolution, but who have never been in a hurry to abdicate.” ²

We don’t know who we are, we don’t know who we might become, and we have little say in the matter anyway. And, as W.H. Auden noted: “In the meantime / There are bills to be paid, machines to keep in repair, / Irregular verbs to learn, the Time Being to redeem / From insignificance.”

What we are calling “alienation” may be nothing more than the recognition of our insignificance and of our frustrating inability to redeem ourselves from it. 

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¹ Lowell was referring to what he considered an outmoded view of the U.S. Constitution.

² “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”

The Man in the Iron Cage of Instrumental Rationalism

Wednesday with Pascal: Alien Nation (Part Three)

{For reasons that should be obvious, the concept of alienation is right up Pascal the existential Russian blue cat’s alley, so to speak. He is therefore adding his feral sagacity to my ongoing meditation on whatever this is on which I’m meditating.}

“The fact that millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane.” (Erich Fromm)

What if, as Maria asked in West Side Story, the problem isn’t us, but everything around us?

In The Sane Society (1955), Erich Fromm went there:

The countries in Europe which are among the most democratic, peaceful, and prosperous ones, and the United States, the most prosperous country in the world, show the most severe signs of mental disturbance. The aim of the whole socio-economic development of the Western world is that of the materially comfortable life, relatively equal distribution of wealth ¹, stable democracy, and peace; and the very countries which come closest to this aim show the most severe signs of mental disturbance! This raises the question of whether there is something fundamentally wrong with our way of life and with the aims toward which we are striving.

Could it be that the middle-class life of prosperity leaves us with a feeling of intense boredom? Could it be that modern civilization fails to satisfy profound needs in man?

Could it be we are slowly driving ourselves crazy? Are the chronically disturbed among us—the addicts, the suicidal, the clinically diagnosed mentally ill, and the countless numbers of “worried well”—canaries in our culture’s coal mine? Can society bring out the worst in us rather than the best? Have we unwittingly created a living environment unsuited to the needs of evolved Homo sapiens?

It is not out of the question. “Human nature and society can have conflicting demands,” wrote Erich Fromm, “and hence a whole society can be sick.” Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents was explicitly based on the idea that “social neurosis” was the inevitable result of “the pressure of civilizing trends.” If the civilizing pressures of a given society are such that most members of the society have no significant difficulty adapting to them—that is, if the social pressures cause only an insignificant number of individuals to go awry mentally, emotionally, or physically—then all will seem well; but if more and more people begin to crack, to break, to show visible and tangible signs of strain, then…The problem isn’t us. It’s everything around us!

According to Fromm, “A sane society is that which corresponds to the needs of man—not necessarily to what he feels to be his needs, because even the most pathological aims can be felt subjectively as that which the person wants most; but to what his needs are objectively.” But, as we have established, the notion of an “objective” “human nature” is elusive at best and delusional at worst; human beings are extraordinarily and gloriously adaptable creatures capable of surviving (if not of thriving) under almost unimaginably bad circumstances (e.g., Auschwitz and the gulag). ² Moreover, one shudders to contemplate a society in which well intentioned “experts” dismiss our subjective desires in favor of what they have determined to be our objective needs.

T.S. Eliot wrote, “There is one question that we need to ask ourselves every day and about whatever business; to what purpose were we born? What is the end of Man?” ³ It is not implausible to suggest that Modernity’s madness consists of persuading ourselves that we can go smugly about our lives—love, work, play, rest—without ever addressing, much less answering Eliot’s question.

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¹ Keep in mind that Fromm was writing in 1955, at the midpoint of what economists now call “The Great Compression,” the postwar era in which numerous factors combined to bring about a gradual—and, in America, temporary—equalizing of income between the rich and the non-rich in Western capitalist countries.

² Auschwitz and the gulag provide us with conflicting stories of human strength and of human weakness, of courage and of timidity, of docile conformity and of spirited resistance. Which behaviors should we consider “characteristic” of our species? Who shall we posit as the embodiment of “human nature”: the guard at Auschwitz who terrorizes the helpless prisoners? The prisoner in the gulag who shares his meager ration with a weaker comrade? Adolf Eichmann? Oskar Schindler? Albert Speer? Jesus of Nazareth? Lawrence of Arabia? Mother Theresa?

Christopher Ryan (Civilized to Death) says this: “To ask ‘What is human nature?’ is like asking ‘What’s the natural state of H₂O?’ So much depends on conditions.” And “conditions” encompasses a multitude of factors, some known and many unknown, interacting in a multitude of ways. Human beings’ combination of adaptability, on the one hand, and unpredictability, on the other, may be what scriptural writers meant by the phrase “in the image of God”; Israel’s God, after all, famously identified himself with the enigmatic tetragrammaton, “I will be what I will be.” In that sense, “human nature” is not something fixed and given to us at birth; it is something we are in the process of creating.

³ Or, as Wendell Berry put it, “What are people for?”

Alien Nation (Part Two)

The most popular explanations of Man’s alienated state are: Original Sin—we are estranged not only from God but from our originally created nature, i.e., we are literally not what we were before the Fall; Civilization—as we have read from the likes of Stanley Diamond and Christopher Ryan, we sold our birthright as wild and free foragers in exchange for the (alleged) security of permanent settlements and a (supposedly) reliable source of food; and Capitalism, of course, Karl Marx’s bete noire, if you will, or his bogeyman, if you won’t.

As to that last: Marx was not so naïve as to believe that alienation began with capitalism. Erich Fromm, in his invaluable Marx’s View of Man, points out that “For Marx the history of mankind is a history of the increasing development of man, and at the same time of increasing alienation. His concept of socialism is the emancipation from alienation, the return of man to himself, his self-realization.” Capitalism did not invent alienation; rather, as it did with so much else, it merely commodified it, thus providing a lucrative market for a variety of panaceas (including, to be sure, Existentialism). Alienation was a byproduct of the assembly line and the office cubicle, of repetitive piecework and monotonous paperwork, but although capitalism certainly mass- produced alienation, the thing itself pre-existed capitalism by millennia.

Or so Erich Fromm claimed on Marx’s behalf, and I will quote Fromm at length:

The whole concept of alienation found its first expression in Western thought in the Old Testament concept of idolatry. The essence of what the prophets call "idolatry" is not that man worships many gods instead of only one. It is that the idols are the work of man's own hands -- they are things, and man bows down and worships things; worships that which he has created himself. In doing so he transforms himself into a thing. He transfers to the things of his creation the attributes of his own life, and instead of experiencing himself as the creating person, he is in touch with himself only by the worship of the idol. He has become estranged from his own life forces, from the wealth of his own potentialties, and is in touch with himself only in the indirect way of submission to life frozen in the idols. 

Paul, in his letter to the Romans, had a slightly different take—“Men worshipped and served created things rather than the Creator” (by which Paul, of course, meant God)—but he was nonetheless talking about estrangement and alienation. Like Paul, Fromm condemned idolatry (“The deadness and emptiness of the idol is expressed in the Old Testament: ‘Eyes they have and they do not see, ears they have and they do not hear’ etc.”) but his concern, and Marx’s, was not to reconcile man to God but to reconcile man to himself. From the dawn of human history, things have somehow acquired totemic status, or have had such status attributed to them; as Emerson phrased it, “Things are in the saddle, and ride mankind.” If Narcissus saw his reflection in the water and fell in love with himself, Homo faber (“Man the creator”) gazes upon the work of his own hands and promptly becomes smitten, not with himself, but with it. Nor does that apply only to material objects; man idolizes ideas and institutions of his own devise, submitting himself to them as though they possessed power of their own.

Fromm elaborates:

“The more man transfers his own powers to the idols, the poorer he himself becomes, and the more dependent on the idols, so that they permit him to redeem a small part of what was originally his. The idols can be a godlike figure, the state, the church, a person, possessions. Idolatry changes its objects; it is by no means to be found only in those forms in which the idol has a so-called religious meaning. Idolatry is always the worship of something into which man has put his own creative powers, and to which he now submits, instead of experiencing himself in his creative act.

Here is where Fromm offers the most acute insight (whether his own or taken from Marx, I do not know):

Among the many forms of alienation, the most frequent one is alienation in language. If I express a feeling with a word, let us say, if I say "I love you," the word is meant to be an indication of the reality which exists within myself, the power of my loving. The word "love" is meant to be a symbol of the fact love, but as soon as it is spoken it tends to assume a life of its own, it becomes a reality. I am under the illusion that the saying of the word is the equivalent of the experience, and soon I say the word and feel nothing, except the thought of love which the word expresses.”

The word is not the thing; the map is not the territory. We live under what Wittgenstein called “the bewitchments of language,” so smitten by them we forget that words are only words and have, again, no power that we do not give them.

Fromm:  

The alienation of language shows the whole complexity of alienation. Language is one of the most precious human achievements; to avoid alienation by not speaking would be foolish -- yet one must be always aware of the danger of the spoken word, that it threatens to substitute itself for the living experience. The same holds true for all other achievements of man; ideas, art, any kind of man-made objects. They are man's creations; they are valuable aids for life, yet each one of them is also a trap, a temptation to confuse life with things, experience with artifacts, feeling with surrender and submission.

As someone who loves words—reading them, writing them, speaking them, listening to them—but who has spent a good deal of his lifetime failing to connect with other people or with the world around me, I can vouch for both the allure and the danger of words. The map is not the territory, but it may be the only world that the mapmaker knows.

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Marx's Concept of Man by Erich Fromm 1961 (marxists.org)