Two Misleading Intellectual Habits

Two misleading and persistent intellectual habits dominate thinking and much of politics:

1. The myth of the isolated mind and 
2. The legacy of the theological divide.

1. The myth of the isolated mind is the belief that human minds are purely private, locked within our skulls. Merlin Donald, neuro-paleontologist, demonstrates the flimsiness of the idea in his remarkable book, A Mind So Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness. (Here's a review.) He makes it clear that no human beings can develop their human cognitive potential in the absence of culture. Cognition and culture are mutually dependent. Their dependence raises some questions about ethical responsibility, personal freedom, freedom of speech and of other areas in which people are ineluctably interdependent actors whose sense of meaning and justice has changed throughout history and varied across cultures.

2. The theological divide separates heaven and earth. Here is how it looked before Nietzsche:

• Heaven | Earth
• Form | Matter
• Spirit | Nature
• Mind | Body
• Male ♂| Female ♀
• Order | Chaos
• Reason | Emotion
• Light | Dark
• Logos | Eros
• Transcendent | Immanent
• Active | Passive
• Eternal | Temporal (finite, changeable)
• Divine intellect | Randomness (unpredictability)

Here's how it looks now from the "secular" point of view: 

• Heaven | Earth
• Form | Matter
• Spirit | Nature
• Mind | Body
• Male ♂| Female ♀
• Order | Chaos
• Reason | Emotion
• Light | Dark
• Logos | Eros
• Transcendent | Immanent
• Active | Passive
• Eternal | Temporal (finite, changeable)
• Laws of (mechanical) Nature | Randomness (unpredictability)

Much of the ontological edifice of theology remains intact. It's basically a decapitated theology. 

But as thinkers such as Stuart Kauffman and Manuel DeLanda convincingly show (they each have many lectures, interviews and short talks on line if you're interested), there is now an approach that makes matter dynamic rather than a passive receptacle of form or logos or laws of nature and that reinstates the ontological status of virtual or potential. It looks more like this:

• Evolving Cosmos
• Self-organizing Matter
• Dynamic Nature
• Sentient, encultured Body
• Knowledge that reason cannot work without emotion
• Virtual and real complement each other 
• Chaos and complexity theories
• Intrinsic unpredictability in evolutionary biology (non-deterministic)

This new, emerging approach might help us feel at home in nature and on this planet in a more sustainable and responsible way.

Power and human instincts

 I'm reading "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" by Yuval Harari. He says

"how did humans organise themselves in mass-cooperation networks [a.k.a. Socioeconomic systems] when they lacked the biological instincts necessary to sustain such networks? The short answer is that humans created imagined orders and devised scripts. These two inventions filled the gaps left by our biological inheritance."

Turns out these scripts tend to invoke a divine decree as a warrant for legitimacy, as we know. But it's very doubtful that these hierarchical orders were planned and hammered out by Hammurabi and co. with many times the cunning of a modern PR consultancy or even fully consciously, as Harari insinuates.  Who is going to accept and carry out his social role no matter how lowly just because some clever storytellers concocted and disseminated the very story to organize hundreds of thousands into stable economic networks? Narratives probably emerged and evolved along with mass cooperation networks. The numinousness bestowed via divine blessing on the experience of the revelation of "justice" (which differs based on the socioeconomic organization in play) is a strong hint that there is indeed an instinctive aspect to human narratives supporting the social order. We don't get it yet because we're too focussed on discrete entities as ontically  "fundamental" (perhaps part and parcel of the individualist script in play today that has supported the socioeconomic order known as capitalism.)

Narratives can be concocted and are influential but the notion that the powerful can manage to manipulate the organization of whole civilizations by consciously concocting tales of divinely legitimated justice is utterly simplistic. Nevertheless this and similar explanations are advanced indirectly in works like Ian Morris's Why the West Rules for Now. One thing the historical supposition of a transcendental source of justice has left even non religious investigators today is the sense that we are above nature and that our various versions of narratives of justice are not instinctually rooted.