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

My point is that, despite a superficial resemblance between the hypothetical meme and the hypothetically “selfish” gene, owed no doubt to their shared intellectual paternity, each theory obviates the other, or at best creates any number of disputed boundaries between them. This would be interesting and nothing more than interesting if the neo-Darwinism of Hamilton, Dawkins, Dennett, and others did not offer itself as a monism, as the one thing needful, the one sufficient account for literally everything. If altruism has seemed to be the ragged edge of Darwinism, a worry to T. H. Huxley, finally tucked out of sight by Hamilton’s formula, why should they be so unperturbed by the fact that these mighty memes, granting their existence here for the purposes of argument, provide an alternative account for the whole of human behavior? Why war? Dulce et decorum est . Why altruism? It is more blessed to give than to receive. Whence the bonds of family? I love all the dear silver that shines in her hair, and the brow that is wrinkled and furrowed with care.

Ah, but what is the origin of these memes? Once a shaman was right about where game was to be found, and religion was up and running. But a good many human behaviors and cultural patterns run counter to religion or have no clear source in it. In any case, a stickler might wonder whether some crude metaphysics would not have lurked behind the role of shaman and the idea of consulting him, if shamanism itself ought not to be called a meme. For that matter, one might wonder if some unacknowledged metaphysics lurks behind the parascientific positing of these immortal, incorporeal destinies that possess us to their own inscrutable ends, rather in the manner of the gods of Greek mythology. The question of origins bears a certain similarity to the questions raised by E. O. Wilson’s remarks on altruism. What is the nature of the reality we inhabit if we have to conceal self-interested motives? If nature runs on self-interest to its own ultimate enhancement and ours, where is the shame in it? Isn’t shame as extraneous to the workings of the world, understood from a Hamiltonian perspective, as generosity itself would be? We might be tempted to patch in a meme here — I was hungry and you fed me, I was naked and you clothed me — but if we did, then we would have proposed a sufficient account of altruism, making Hamilton’s equation entirely unnecessary. And, since the benefactor would have been acting purely at the behest of the meme, we would also have excluded deception and self-deception as factors in the altruistic act.

The neo-Darwinism of Hamilton and others shares one consequence with meme theory: both of them represent the mind as a passive conduit of other purposes than those the mind ascribes to itself. It reiterates that essential modernist position, that our minds are not our own. The conviction so generally shared among us, that we think in some ordinary sense of that word, that we reason and learn and choose as individuals in response to our circumstances and capacities, is simply — the one, crucial point of agreement between these otherwise incompatible theories — a persisting illusion serving a force or a process that is essentially unknown and indifferent to us.

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The comparison that is salient here is between the accidental and the intentional in terms of their consequences for the interpretation of anything. In the course of my reading, I have come to the conclusion that the random, the accidental, have a strong attraction for many writers because they simplify by delimiting. Why is there something rather than nothing? Accident. Accident narrows the range of appropriate strategies of interpretation, while intention very much broadens it. Accident closes on itself, while intention implies that, in and beyond any particular fact or circumstance, there is vastly more to be understood. Intention is implicitly communicative, because an actor is described in any intentional act. Why is the human brain the most complex object known to exist in the universe? Because the elaborations of the mammalian brain that promoted the survival of the organism overshot the mark in our case. Or because it is intrinsic to our role in the universe as thinkers and perceivers, participants in a singular capacity for wonder as well as for comprehension.

The anomalies that plague accident as an explanatory model — the human mind, most notably — are no problem at all if it is assumed that accident does not explain us, that we are meant to be human, that is, to be aware and capable in the ways the mind — and how else to describe the mind? — makes us aware and capable. And what are those ways? Every poem, theory, philanthropy, invention, scandal, hoax, and crime of violence tells us more. No aspect of reality, from this point of view, need be simplified or limited to fit an explanatory model. One would think that the inadequacy of any model to deal with the complexity of its subject would make its proponents a bit tentative, but in fact the tendency of the kind of thought I wish to draw attention to is to deny the reality of phenomena it cannot accommodate, or to scold them for their irksome, atavistic persistence.

This is surely an odd way to proceed, especially in light of the fact that these schools of thought regard themselves as scientific, or as accepting of certain scientific insights that must lead any honest and enlightened person to embrace their view of things. The Berkeley philosopher John Searle objects to the commonly held conception that “suggests that science names a specific kind of ontology, as if there were a scientific reality that is different from, for example, the reality of common sense.” He says, “I think that is profoundly mistaken.” And he says, “There is no such thing as the scientific world. There is, rather, just the world, and what we are trying to do is describe how it works and describe our situation in it.” 18This seems to me so true that I would consider the statement obvious, or, as the philosophers say, trivial, if it did not make a claim, necessary in the circumstances, for the relevance to the study of mind of the fullness of mental experience.

John Searle is no transcendentalist. I do not wish to seem to recruit him in support of the religious position I have just declared. I do, however, take comfort in the fact that his objections to contemporary philosophic thinking about consciousness and mental phenomena are very like mine. He says of certain arguments offered by philosophers of the materialist school, “What they suggest is that these people are determined to try to show that our ordinary common-sense notions of the mental do not name anything in the real world, and they are willing to advance any argument that they can think of for this conclusion.” 19This is not a new state of affairs, nor one limited to Searle’s colleagues or to writers in fields related to his. The subject that interests me is in fact the persistence, through the very long period we still call “modern” and into the present, of something like a polemic against the mind — not mind as misnomer, nor as the construct of an untenable dualism, but mind in more or less the fullest sense of the word.

The resourcefulness Searle speaks of, the recourse to “any argument they can think of,” seems to me sometimes to be the unifying principle behind an apparent diversity of important schools and theories. Anthropology, positivism, Nietzscheanism in its various forms, Freudian and behaviorist psychology have all brought their insights to bear on this subject.

The word “modern” is itself a problem, since it implies a Promethean rescue from whatever it was that went before, a rupture so complete as to make context irrelevant. Yet if one were to imagine a row of schoolroom modernists hanging beside the schoolroom poets, Marx, Nietzsche, and Wellhausen beside Bryant, Longfellow, and Whittier, one would notice a marked similarity among them of pince-nez and cravat. The modern has been modern for a very long time. As a consequence of its iconic status, the contemporary remains very much in its shadow. Little that is contemporary is not also modern, and little that is modern departs as cleanly from its precursors as myth would have us believe. In one important particular, however, there seems to have been an authentic modern schism whose consequences are persistent and profound. Our conception of the significance of humankind in and for the universe has shrunk to the point that the very idea we ever imagined we might be significant on this scale now seems preposterous. These assumptions about what we are and are not preclude not only religion but also the whole enterprise of metaphysical thought. That the debate about the nature of the mind has tended to center on religion is a distraction which has nevertheless exerted a profound influence on the more central issue. While it may not have been true necessarily, it has been true in fact that the renunciation of religion in the name of reason and progress has been strongly associated with a curtailment of the assumed capacities of the mind.