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

When exactly did the mind begin to be aided by “factual knowledge from science”? Where is the evidence that prescientific people see the world “only in little pieces”? Is he speaking of Herodotus? Dante? Michelangelo? Shakespeare? Does knowing “how the machinery of the brain works”—and, in fact, we still do not know how it works — have any implication for the effective use of the mind? Unlike science, the arts and humanities have a deep, strong root in human culture, and have had for millennia. Granting the brilliance of science, there are no grounds for the notion that in its brief history it has transformed human consciousness in the way Wilson describes. The narrowness of Wilson’s view of human history seems rather to suggest a parochialism that follows from a belief in science as a kind of magic, as if it existed apart from history and culture, rather than being, in objective truth and inevitably, their product.

*

For this reason there is in his proposal the implicit assumption that science in its present state is less deeply under unacknowledged cultural influences than it has been historically, as if there were not a history behind his own world view, one that deeply informs his writing. Granting that Wilson’s qualifications vastly exceed Spencer’s and those of many writers in this genre, the stretch from entomology to human nature is long enough, and his faithfulness to parascientific conventions is close enough, that I feel no hesitation in placing On Human Nature and Consilience in the same company with The Data of Ethics and The Descent of Man , rather than with, say, Discourse on Method or The Origin of Species . The cultural contamination to which science is most vulnerable is the kind that seems to the writer not to be cultural at all, to be instead commonsensical, for instance the very Western, very modern exclusion of subjectivity from the account to be made of human nature.

William James proposed an open epistemology, using the kind of language available to psychology before the positivist purge, appealing to experience, to subjectivity. He said,

Whoso partakes of a thing enjoys his share, and comes into contact with the thing and its other partakers. But he claims no more. His share in no wise negates the thing or their share; nor does it preclude his possession of reserved and private powers with which they have nothing to do, and which are not all absorbed in the mere function of sharing. Why may not the world be a sort of republican banquet of this sort, where all the qualities of being respect one another’s personal sacredness, yet sit at the common table of space and time? … Things cohere, but the act of cohesion itself implies but few conditions, and leaves the rest of their qualifications indeterminate…. The parts actually known of the universe may comport many ideally possible complements. But as the facts are not the complements, so the knowledge of one is not the knowledge of the other in anything but the few necessary elements of which all must partake in order to be together at all.

9

This is consilient language, too, and aware that it is. Explicitly religious and political language of a kind that would be familiar to a nineteenth-century American audience is a weight-bearing element in the architecture of experience he proposes. He says we know anything in the way and to the degree that we encounter it, and not otherwise. To claim more is to trench upon a deeper identity that is unknowable by us, a system of contingencies that inheres in the object of encounter and cannot be excluded from its reality, and which will not be reached by extrapolation from what we know about it through our experience. Nor may the observer himself be absorbed into this universe, as if in accepting definition it must necessarily define him. This is language that accords uncannily well with the idea of indeterminacy in modern physics, in integrating what we know about reality with the awareness that unknowability is the first thing about reality that must be acknowledged. James published the essay in which it appears in 1882.

*

In his book On Human Nature , published in 1978, E. O. Wilson does at one point acknowledge the great complexit of human behavior. He says, “Only techniques beyond our present imagining could hope to achieve even the short-term prediction of the detailed behavior of an individual human being, and such an accomplishment might be beyond the capacity of any conceivable intelligence.” 10Fair enough. These comments on complexity have the smack of actual science about them because they acknowledge the impact of strategies of measurement and of the interests as well as the mere presence of an observer. He is in error when he associates these things with the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, but for one paragraph he does acknowledge the world of scientific awareness we have lived in for the last century.

Still, here is how he interprets a specific kind of behavior he calls “soft-core” altruism, that is, the kind whose benefits redound to the altruist and near kin rather than to his tribe or nation. That he chooses to give this subject a chapter in a book on human nature is itself a cultural choice, one made by Spencer before him, since the possibility of truly selfless behavior has been a point of dispute in this genre since well before Auguste Comte. Wilson says, “Soft-core altruism … is ultimately selfish. The ‘altruist’ expects reciprocation from society for himself or his closest relatives. His good behavior is calculating, often in a wholly conscious way, and his maneuvers are orchestrated by the excruciatingly intricate sanctions and demands of society. The capacity for soft-core altruism can be expected to have evolved primarily by selection of individuals and to be deeply influenced by the vagaries of cultural evolution. Its psychological vehicles are lying, pretense, and deceit, including self-deceit, because the actor is more convincing who believes that his performance is real.” Michael Gazzaniga has translated this insight into sophomore-speak: “Everyone (except for me, of course) is a hypocrite. It apparently is just easier to see from the outside than the inside. As we just learned, to pull this of, it helps not to consciously know that you are pulling a fast one, because then you will have less anxiety and thus less chance of getting busted.” Steven Pinker takes a different view. There is a book, he says, that “complains that if altruism according to biologists is just helping kin or exchanging favors, both of which serve the interests of one’s genes, it would not really be altruism after all, but some kind of hypocrisy. This too is a mixup…. Genes are a play within a play, not the interior monologue of the players.” So for him our conscious motives are entirely distinct from the biological reality that actually prompts behavior. This is a high price to pay for exculpation, in its way the ultimate statement of the modernist impulse to discredit the witness of the mind. 11

For Wilson, despite his mention of maneuvers and excruciatingly intricate sanctions and vagaries of cultural evolution, complexity is all forgotten. It seems a sociobiologist can bring his perspective to bear on hypothetical actions of a particular kind, without reference to the circumstances in which they might occur, and without what in the circumstances must be called the observer prejudicing the results of his hypothetical observations. No point inquiring of an altruist, should some individual instance of the general phenomenon be found. Should he report other motives than the sociobiologist observed in him, we have already been cautioned against the lying, pretense, deceit, and self-deceit to which his kind — the world over, apparently — are prone. Every seemingly selfless act is really a matter of quid pro quo, whether it occurs in ancient Mesopotamia or modern Japan. We must all know this, since according to Wilson we all use strategies of deception to conceal our true motives from one another. But if we do all know it, how can it be that we expect to deceive one another? What accounts for the impulse to conceal a calculus of fair exchange — the generous act and its socially determined reward — assuming this is what altruism really amounts to?