"The Fundamental Pivot of Humanity"
by Paul Rosenberg
"At some point, someone must have considered the things we’ll start to cover today, but I haven’t found any evidence of it. It’s also ironic that I should be the person introducing this subject, because it involves evolutionary science, with which I’ve had a difficult relationship.
On one hand, there’s no question about genetic (DNA) inheritance and that certain traits displace others over time; the evidence for that is overwhelming. Natural selection, or something that looks like it, has been occurring. On the other, evolutionary scientists can be remarkably unscientific and rigidly dogmatic, lashing out at unbelievers and heretics with vehemence. I’ve learned to turn away from such people and their dogmas. As Goethe noted back in his time, “Distrust those in whom the desire to punish is strong.” If you want more detail on this, you can find it in our book on Post-Primate Society, but that will have to be something you seek out.
What Happened Two Million Years Ago? Two million years ago, give or take, there was a fundamental and unexplained change in the archaeological record. Since then our progress has come far faster than it should have according to evolutionary theory, leaving scientists perplexed. Here, for example, are two passages from Carel P. Van Schaik’s highly regarded textbook, "The Primate Origins of Human Nature": "Whatever made us human must have been something very unusual. Even some non-cultural features of humans are sufficiently unique to leave our usual approaches to understanding their evolution close to ineffective.
Something special has been happening in us; something with no real analogs among other species. You can see this yourself if you examine ancient skulls and their reproductions at Natural History museums. You’ll see that the pre-2 million BC skulls (homo habilis and prior) have ridges at the eyebrow level, and that the skulls go directly backward from there. That is, they have no forehead.
Beginning at homo ergaster and homo erectus, however – that being roughly two million years ago – the skulls begin to rise in their fronts. The image below displays the change well. Notice the low skulls turning into the modern skull at the top, featuring a high, spacious forehead.
Now, please refer to the graph. You’ll see that the long, slow increase in brain size takes off in a “hockey stick” pattern at 2 million years ago. But there is one more crucial detail here, and that is the way human brains became bigger: They changed not only in size, they changed in shape. Human brains feature an enormous prefrontal cortex. This is the structure that allows us to do all the massively advanced things we do. And this structure could not fit into our skulls without that high forehead; the prefrontal cortex fills precisely that new space.
So, please understand that this is the fundamental fact of human evolution and human behavior. Any explanations of human development that do not feature this fact are missing their core. Thus, they are likely to wander into unmoored speculation. (And generally into speculation that preserves and expands pre-existing assumptions.)
Two Primary Posits: A posit, of course, is a statement that we propose for consideration... a statement that we we intend to support and/or prove. The two posits we make here seem sensible. Sensibility isn’t proof, of course, and properly proving things that began thousands or millions of years ago can be difficult, but this or something very much like it did occur and is occurring. And so, here they are; our two primary propositions:
Humans behave precisely like primates who had a pre-frontal cortex dropped into them.
From this, we can identify human institutions and actions, strengths and weaknesses, as direct effects of posit number one. This illuminates not only a great deal of our history, but our future as well.
Primates With Superpowers: Our bodies share a tremendous amount of chemistry and form with primates (baboons, bonobos, chimps, etc.). Scientifically we are classed as, and old primate routines still run in us... a lot of them. But we are also incredibly different, and the seat of that difference is our prefrontal cortex, which I’ll abbreviate as PFC. And if there’s anything in nature that might be called “superpowers,” we are the ones who have them, and the thing that makes them work is our PFC.
The standard description of the PFC (again, prefrontal cortex, the very front of our brains) is that it “makes executive decisions.” That’s true enough, but it’s also a thin description. The PFC allows us to conceive of ourselves. That is, it opened up our internal universe. The prefrontal cortex gives us the ability to orchestrate thought and action in accordance with internal goals, not just in reference to external things. It allows us to be conscious of ourselves. And that turned us into advanced beings.
Now, before I begin explaining precisely what our new brains have opened up to us, I want you to see what the two scientists we’ll be quoting today, Van Schaik and Robert Sapolsky (in his book "Behave"), note as uniquely human characteristics: "The prefrontal cortex gives us the ability to orchestrate thought and action in accordance with internal goals. The first [major difference between the cultures of humans and great apes] is that human culture is characterized by extensive use of symbols... use of symbols among humans is incomparably richer than among great apes. Humans are hypervariable.”
The hyper-cooperation that characterizes humans. Language is the most obvious difference between humans and all other animals, and arguably the most consequential one. When we humans think – when we converse within ourselves – “we” are seated in our PFC. From there we refer to both our interior selves and the outer world at the same time. It is in this condition, and only in this condition it seems, that we can do things like recall on demand and imagine with detail and depth.
This ability to think – our superpower – has brought humans to the place where we have no natural predators. More or less every other creature on this planet has some natural predators, but we don’t. There are the occasional “bear in the woods” stories, but those happen when we purposely leave our intelligently structured environments, and infrequently at that. And this, our elevation above predation, stands in spite of the fact that, unlike nearly all other creatures, we are bereft of natural weapons: no claws, no fur, no teeth suited to fighting, and so on.
Our Interior Universe: It would be hard to over-state the importance of this interior universe that is opened by our new PFC. This is a basic structural adaptation to consciousness. Our PFC, by being connected to the rest of our brain and yet separating itself from it, is able to use the rest of the brain as a partner and as a tool. What I’ll do now is start listing some of the things that became possible to us with the PFC. I’ll start with a very simple one.
Deferred gratification. We can imagine the scenario that will come to us if we bypass the moment’s pleasure and work with no immediate reward. Then we can order our actions accordingly. This was essential, for example, for farming. The seed corn had to be set aside, even when the family was hungry and low on food. It’s also necessary for thrift, exercise, education and a thousand other things. Some creatures (notably those who hibernate) do something like this. At best, however, these are one-trick operations; sharply limited actions spurred by instinct rather than decided upon by deliberation. Our delayed gratifications are chosen, adaptable and limitless.
Morality. As we’ve noted before, self-reference – the internal standards, recall and imagination rooted in the PFC – made us inherently moral beings. Humans run facts through their minds “in the first person;” from a purely self-interested view. Thus we form decisions on what we believe to be the best available evidence. By assuming others to be like ourselves and running “as if” experiments (how would it feel if this was done to me?) we extend our pure decisions to others, treating them as fairly as we treat ourselves. This is morality, and we alone seem to possess it.
Furthermore, this is the engine that drives our massive cooperation. Just as a base-level proof, consider the things humans complain about: They cluster strongly around people doing to others what they wouldn’t like themselves.
We are infinitely creative beings. This is true only because our PFCs have opened an internal universe to us. As I’ve noted before, humans, alone in the known universe, are able to reverse entropy willfully. That’s such an important concept that I’m ready to put it on billboards.
Like you I sometimes hear people who are trying to sound smart or enlightened, recounting all the ways in which humans are deficient, even comparing us negatively with animals. A rough response that sometimes runs through us is “Let me know, please, the next time a team of dolphins builds a hospital or a chimp writes a symphony.” And while harsh, such a response illustrates the immense benefit we gained with our superpowered brains. The rest of our brain is now open to training, communication and we don’t know what else. This is an area where I believe a great deal lies in front of us. Our relative lack of progress in this area is likely the result of two things:
We generally had little reason to dig into this, being overburdened (as most of us were for most of our history) with our daily work, raising our children, dealing with difficult relatives, a lack of rain or shipments, and so on. Those of us who spent a good deal of time in spiritual endeavors may have occasionally stumbled upon this, but indirectly.
Over the past few centuries, we’ve been led to fear our own minds. The phrase, “the depths of the subconscious,” leads most people to expect dark, animalistic, horrifying and embarrassing things. (A greatly exaggerated concept.) That said, we have learned to train our subconscious mind. Everyone who has created a new habit has done so. By making a habit, we use our PFC to train the rest of our mind to do this a new way, which will no longer require conscious thought.
We also see this in creativity. Creative people learn, mainly by accident, that if they feed needs to their subconscious properly (usually meditatively and or just before sleep), a solution will tend to appear in their minds, unbidden. Again, this is a use of the subconscious, initiated by the PFC. And so I say again, a great deal of fallow ground lies here.
The Hybrid Characteristics: More or less everything we covered above has been introductory: setting a base of understanding and alignment. Now we can move forward into the really interesting things. And since the best way is probably to start with the process of abstraction, we’ll do just that.
Abstraction is the process of creating mental categories and fitting things into them. It’s one of the most common things humans do. Telling a child, “Don’t throw balls in the house,” uses “ball” as an abstraction. We don’t want to specify each type, and the kid is more than able to extend “ball” to include everything from the tennis ball in his hand to the basketball across the room. That’s abstraction.
And while humans are the only known creatures to use abstraction widely, there is at least some root for abstraction in primates. In specific, they identify us-them divisions very well. I’ve yet to see a study that defines this one way or the other, but so it appears.
It is interesting that the us-them abstraction of primates is a binary: An extremely easy to process division between categories of things. It is further interesting to notice that the simplest, most primitive and easiest abstraction for us to make is the binary opposite. We see this very clearly in word association tests, where the fastest and most common answers tend to go like this:
Hot. Cold.
Happy. Sad.
Hard. Soft.
Left. Right.
Wet. Dry.
Apparently this is circuitry we inherited. With a PFC, however, we became able to use abstractions profligately. And here we begin to see primate circuitry mingling with advanced human circuitry. Consider this: Male primates get a testosterone boost from dominating other primates, and, for better or worse, we share a lot of that chemistry. But with us, it’s not just direct dominance that raises our testosterone: abstract dominance does the same thing. Success in everything from athletics to chess to the stock market boosts our testosterone levels. Even our favorite sports team winning raises our testosterone levels.
So, by merely watching images on a television screen, we get the same effect that baboons do from winning a direct, physical contest. In us, then, mere abstraction triggers physical effects. That is, our dominance circuits (the ones that trigger testosterone when victorious) also interact with our advanced circuits. We, then, are hybrid creatures, running primate impulses through more evolved systems.
And it goes still farther. Consider this notation (based upon a study) from Sapolsky: Testosterone more closely tracks winning through skill. (Rather than through luck). What we see here is our primate impulses being run through (or otherwise being affected by) not only abstraction, but our morality mechanism. Winning by skill deserves the full testosterone boost, winning by accident doesn’t. It wouldn’t be fair.
This is also why people turn into petty tyrants once they’re ensconced in homeowners’ associations and rules committees: “Punishing norm violations,” Sapolsky notes, “is satisfying.” This again is abstracted dominance. Here people who wouldn’t be able to assert physical dominance get in on the hormone-boost game.
There are many more examples of this type, and we’ll be covering some below, but I want you to notice the key point in all of this, which is that we are operating in a hybrid way, partly as primates and partly as higher beings. If this is even half-way true, we have found a crucial point of reference… a type of landmark, and a very potent one.
On one hand, this seems degrading, that we have so very much monkey circuitry in us. But on the other, it is massively elevating: If we can understand what’s really going on in us, we can move forward much better, becoming advanced creatures far more quickly than we had imagined. And while we won’t have space to establish the fact in this issue, the clear fact is that we’ve been evolving faster and faster over the past several millennia. Humanity is not the same as we were even a few thousand years ago. We are becoming better. And please note that we’ve made significant progress in establishing our two posits:
Humans behave precisely like primates who had a pre-frontal cortex dropped into them. From this, we can identify human institutions and actions, strengths and weaknesses, as direct effects. And again, this is very good news.
Planet Primate: I frequently divide the world (and human action in general) between production and plunder. Like any “two kinds of people” reference it’s rough, partial and not entirely fair, but it remains a useful generalization. And we’ll see almost precisely this division as we continue these studies: Primate characteristics and primate behavior are necessary for the continuance of the ruling models of this planet... and are enforced by the ruling models of this planet. A very easy way to begin this conversation, and an entirely fitting one, is with a comment from Van Schaik’s book: "Among non-human primates, skew [in access to resources] arises because dominants take larger shares, either by force or by threat of force. In humans, similar processes ensue."
In another place, he gets specific on primate dominance: "When a dominant and subordinate both arrive in a fruit tree, the dominant will have priority seating, picking a rich branch and thus forcing a subordinate to settle in at a less rich part of the tree. If the subordinate reads the dominant’s plans wrong and enters the branch earmarked by the dominant it will be threatened or attacked."
I’ve not sure there could be any better illustration of this in human life than an explorer planting a government’s flag in a new territory. (Even on the moon!) The primate model is used all day, every day, in human governments. All penalties accrue to the dominant band of rulers. And a larger percentage of human production is taken by human rulership than could be taken by an alpha gorilla.
Government, then, is almost entirely a primate-style operation, expanded with advanced human abilities. But likewise are the justifications and supports for rulership. The dominance hierarchies of this planet (and that’s the current scientific term for both primate and human power systems) reproduce their primary characteristics in the populace. Sapolsky notes the results of one study: "Countries with more brutal socio-economic hierarchies produce children who enforce their own hierarchies more brutally. The key training grounds for this, of course have been government schools, where children are forced into relationships, with a strong and even dangerous dominant directly above them (the teacher), and further dominants above them."
Contrast that with the ad hoc relationships we choose in our non-ruled life. Those relationships are guided by our internal morality systems. In our families, small businesses and Little Leagues, we operate mainly by the golden rule, which is a direct use of our PFC-enabled morality mechanism. Enforcement of hierarchy-generated demands (edicts, rules) is a displacement of the golden rule; a triumph of the primate over the human. The uncritical enforcement of legislation is primate stuff, no matter how creative and thick are our justifications.
And yet, this occurs endlessly, and among humans who are nearly always decent and reasonable people. But this, too, is explicable by our theory. Humans are easy to mislead because of their internal references. We are complicated beings, struggling to make our way (so to speak) from the kingdom of monkeys to the kingdom of heaven. And so we carry a great number of vulnerabilities within us. As Solomon Ashe showed, we are massively vulnerable to conformity pressures, and this is but one of many. Those seeking the dominant position take power precisely by using such vulnerabilities, and they’ve been quite successful at it.
As we all know, elections – a modern path to power – don’t revolve around reason, they revolve around emotion, and generally around fear. The reason, of course, is because emotions provide the most direct paths to the best vulnerabilities. And so it continues. The operators of social media corporations, the new leading powers of our era, know very well that they are taking advantage of human weaknesses, and hire psychiatrists to make the most of it.
Moreover, our past errors defend themselves. Humans, after all, are intelligent, self referential and possess fine memories. You’ve doubtless seen and felt this: For a person to change his/her mind on a hotly debated issue is to condemn his or her self as having erred in the past. More than that, they can be confident that they’ll be called out for hypocrisy, and quite possibly made to suffer for it.
Changing our minds, then, carries both internal and external costs. And if the new opinion has opponents, suffering is likely via both avenues. This is a primary reason why people are afraid to change their minds and afraid to speak their minds. In far too many cases, they simply stop thinking along one line or another, once they can see they could be made to suffer for it.
And so we see that the human, carrying both primitive, primate circuitry and advanced, PFC-based abilities, is in a difficult position. He and she are at the same time far better and far more vulnerable. They also learn (and usually quickly) that they are the primary targets of the least ethical humans, who make use of them in their struggle for dominant positions. And all this rests on top of the fact that they are buffeted by circumstances in the physical world: sickness, loss, the immense labor of family, the uncertainty of life and so on. And yet, we rise.
The Road To Homo Novus: We are, and quite clearly in my view, on the road to homo novus, the new man. It is, perhaps, a confirmation of this that some of the most forward thinking humans – St. Paul and Friedrich Nietzsche among others – have tried to create a “new man” or a “superior man.” These theorists weren’t wrong that humans could and should become much better, but they were consistently wrong about the nature of the superior man, and how contemporary man would rise to his future position.
In particular, the theorists nearly always claimed that the path to the superior being involved conformity to an external standard of some type. That is, they took obedience, conformity and an assumption of personal inadequacy as a starting point. They were, however, wrong.
The path to the superior man, as it happens, involves using what is already in us, not seeking something from outside or convincing some super-dominant entity to elevate us. The correct model, as Jesus worked so hard to establish, is to grow into it. I’ve always loved this passage from the Torah that makes the same point:
For this commandment is not too hard for you, neither is it far off. It is not in heaven, that you should say, ‘Who will go up for us to heaven, and bring it to us, that we may hear it and do it?’ Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, ‘Who will go over the sea for us, and bring it to us, that we may hear it and do it?’ But the word is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart, so that you can do it.
There is a great deal more to say about this, but I’ll leave you to seek it out. I’ll close with this: Our ascent is actual, it’s well underway, and we’re finding new tools to distinguish between that which helps our development and that which hinders it. Our path may be slow and at times difficult, but we are ascending like nothing else we’ve ever seen."
No comments:
Post a Comment