Marilynne Robinson - Absence of Mind - The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self

This is one instance of the fact that possible altruism can be detected in many kinds of human behavior, and that where it is even apparently detected it is obviated by elaborations of theory that would have consequences for the understanding of important evolutionary issues — pair bonding, for example, or the early history of the animal brain — since animals supposedly had a capacity for manipulation until it was selected against. Charming as the notion is that our proto-verbal ancestors found mates through eloquent proto-speech — oh, to have been a fly on the wall! — it has very rarely been the case that people have had a pool of eligible others to select among on the basis of some pleasing trait. Endogamy or restricted exogamy among small groups, the bartering of daughters, and status considerations all come into play. It often seems that American anthropologists forget how fluid our culture is and how exceptional our marriage customs are, globally and historically. Pyramus and Thisbe, Eloise and Abelard, Romeo and Juliet, even if they had lived and were able to reproduce, would have been far too exceptional to have influenced the gene pool. And consider those animals who were capable of manipulation and then capable of indifference to it, so that the capacity for it faded away. How did this initial complexity arise? Do animals now have any comparable insight into the motives of others? These neuroscientists tend to say no, though such insight would seem to confer a marked survival advantage. There is more than a little of the just-so story in this theoretical patch on the cost-benefit problem supposedly posed by the phenomenon of human speech. In this way, the specter of altruism, like a lancet fluke in the brain of an ant, distorts Darwinian argument and carries it far beyond the conceptual simplicity for which it is justly famous.

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I am indebted to Daniel Dennett for the ant and the lancet fluke, a metaphor that comes to mind often as I read in his genre. For example, consider poor Phineas Gage, the railroad worker famous for the accident he sufered and survived more than 150 years ago, an explosion that sent a large iron rod through his skull. Wilson, Pinker, Gazzaniga, and Antonio Damasio all tell this tale to illustrate the point that aspects of behavior we might think of as character or personality are localized in a specific region of the brain, a fact that, by their lights, somehow compromises the idea of individual character and undermines the notion that our amiable traits are intrinsic to our nature.

Very little is really known about Phineas Gage. The lore that surrounds him in parascientific contexts is based on a few anecdotes of uncertain provenance, to the effect that he recovered without significant damage — except to his social skills. Gazzaniga says, “He was reported the next day by the local paper to be pain free.” Now, considering that his upper jaw was shattered and he had lost an eye, and that it was 1848, if he was indeed pain free, this should surely suggest damage to the brain. But, together with his rational and coherent speech minutes after the accident, it is taken to suggest instead that somehow his brain escaped injury, except to those parts of the cerebral cortex that had, till then, kept him from being “‘fitful, irreverent, and grossly profane.’” He was twenty-five at the time of the accident. Did he have dependents? Did he have hopes? These questions seem to me of more than novelistic interest in understanding the rage and confusion that emerged in him as he recovered. 6

How oddly stereotyped this anecdote is through any number of tellings. It is as if there were a Mr. Hyde in us all that would emerge sputtering expletives if our frontal lobes weren’t there to restrain him. If any kind of language is human and cultural, it is surely gross profanity, and, after that, irreverence, which must have reverence as a foil to mean anything at all. If to Victorians this behavior seemed like the emergence of the inner savage, this is understandable enough. But from our vantage, the fact that Gage was suddenly disfigured and half blind, that he suffered a prolonged infection of the brain, and that “it took much longer to recover his stamina,” according to Gazzaniga, might account for some of the profanity, which, after all, culture and language have prepared for such occasions. But the part of Gage’s brain where damage is assumed by modern writers to have been localized is believed to be the seat of the emotions. Therefore — the logic here is unclear to me — his swearing and reviling the heavens could not mean what it means when the rest of us do it. Damasio gives extensive attention to Gage, offering the standard interpretation of the reported change in his character. He cites at some length the case of a “modern Phineas Gage,” a patient who, while intellectually undamaged, lost “his ability to choose the most advantageous course of action.” Gage himself behaved “dismally” in his compromised ability “to plan for the future, to conduct himself according to the social rules he previously had learned, and to decide on the course of action that ultimately would be most advantageous to his survival.” The same could certainly be said as well of Captain Ahab. So perhaps Melville meant to propose that the organ of veneration was located in the leg. My point being that another proper context for the interpretation of Phineas Gage might be others who have sufered gross insult to the body, especially those who have been disfigured by it. And in justice to Gage, the touching fact is that he was employed continually until his final illness. No one considers what might have been the reaction of other people to him when his moving from job to job — his only sin besides cursing and irritability — attracts learned disapprobation. 7

I trouble the dust of poor Phineas Gage only to make the point that in these recountings of his afflictions there is no sense at all that he was a human being who thought and felt, a man with a singular and terrible fate. In the absence of an acknowledgment of his subjectivity, his reaction to this disaster is treated as indicating damage to the cerebral machinery, not to his prospects, or his faith, or his self-love. It is as if in telling the tale the writers participate in the absence of compassionate imagination, of benevolence, that they posit for their kind. And there is another point as well. This anecdote is far too important to these statements about the mind, and about human nature. It ought not to be the center of any argument about so important a question as the basis of human nature. It is too remote in time, too phrenological in its initial descriptions, too likely to be contaminated by sensationalism, to have any weight as evidence. Are we really to believe that Gage was not in pain during those thirteen years until his death? How did that terrible exit wound in his skull resolve? No conclusion can be drawn, except that in 1848 a man reacted to severe physical trauma more or less as a man living in 2009 might be expected to do. The stereotyped appearance of this anecdote, the particulars it includes and those whose absence it passes over, and the conclusion that is drawn from it are a perfect demonstration of the difference between parascientific thinking and actual science.

So complete a triumph of one mode of thought as the neo-Darwinists envision has the look of desolation to some writers in the field, the same desolation that Comte foresaw. He feared that a wholly rational and scientifical understanding would exclude from the world much that is best in it, and much that is essential to a humane understanding of it. As Comte did before him, E. O. Wilson, a well-respected exemplar of this genre, has proposed a new “consilience” that will enrich both science and the arts and humanities by integrating them, a treaty he proposes in the course of asserting a theory of the human mind that is notably unfriendly to his project. He says, “All that has been learned empirically about evolution in general and mental process in particular suggests that the brain is a machine assembled not to understand itself, but to survive. Because these two ends are basically different, the mind unaided by factual knowledge from science sees the world only in little pieces. It throws a spotlight on those portions of the world it must know in order to live to the next day, and surrenders the rest to darkness. For thousands of generations people lived and reproduced with no need to know how the machinery of the brain works. Myth and self-deception, tribal identity and ritual, more than objective truth, gave them the adaptive edge.” 8