COGNITIVE INTRODUCTION: Unilateral or Interactive?

The human emotional and psychological make-up evolved over two million years in the food-sharing economy in hunter-gatherer bands of about two dozen. One part of the band would hunt meat, the other would gather plant foods, and both would take to proceeds back to camp to share.

Previously, animal eating had been almost entirely an individual affair. For food sharing to work, the members of the band had to develop sympathetic emotions to impel them to each other’s aid and aggressive emotions to deal with cheaters. Present-day hunter-gatherer bands erupt in unison against members caught in cheating and reduce the miscreants to tears.

See Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin, People of the Lake: Mankind and Its Beginnings, in particular, index entries under "altruism, reciprocal."

Figure the sympathetic and aggressive emotions were collectivized into the fertility and warrior cults of primitive religion. The primitive hunter-gatherer band could be run by collective emotion and group fiat. Within its limited resources, it could practice the Communist ideal, from each according to his ability, to each according to his need. And it could even keep track of inventory, contrary to socialism in the larger world. It seems no coincidence that Edmund Burke’s "small platoons," the groups in which we are most effective, are likewise about two dozen.

The primitive emotions have yet to cope, however, with wealth, time, people beyond the band, and the money economy. Hunter-gatherers only had the wealth they could carry, but agriculturalists had enough to fight over. It takes time for agriculture to produce crops, thus the capital needs for sustenance until harvest and seed to plant again. The far-flung money economy requires individual initiative far beyond that of the intimate hunter-gatherer band. F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, notes the common origins of the prejudices against Jews and money. The overseas Chinese are known as the Jews of southeast Asia and the Indians expelled by Idi Amin were the shopkeepers of the country. The Old Testament recorded the lament of the people who wanted a king, cited by Thomas Paine in Common Sense.

William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis, revived the notion of "second nature," the man-created world, as opposed to "first nature," the God-created world. We presumed moderns are coping with "second nature" about the way our pre-scientific forebears coped with "first nature." In the past century or so primitive religion has secularized into the welfare and warfare states of today. We have forsaken the parental approach to social institutions that would "ordain and establish" a Constitution for a child-to-parent relationship of dependence and suggestibility.

Here we are, then, five or ten millenia into the Agricultural Revolution and three centuries into the Industrial Revolution, and still trying to run things by fiat, as if they were a primitive hunter-gatherer band. Presumably modern humans still try to reduce cheaters to tears. The Communist Manifesto bemoans the "icy, egotistical calculation" of the money economy. Figure the primitive emotions are the source of social creationism, the notion that society can be run by fiat, whether sympathetic or aggressive, as opposed to an evolutionary approach that takes others’ motivations into account. Gustave Le Bon wrote tellingly of the intolerance and closed-mindedness of crowds in his 1895 classic, The Crowd, also of the similar sentiments which motivated both the reactionary Inquisition and the revolutionary Terror.

Such mental habits are as old as the human race. And "modern" mass society seems more receptive to and unified by lowest common denominator aggression than by diffuse, dreamy sympathy, although sympathy is nevertheless extremely useful in cultivating dependence and suggestibility.

Einstein famously said the bomb changed everything except the way we think. Indeed. The unilateral, one-way primitive emotions intrude into the personal and private as well political and public. Figure they account for the legions of people just trying to get their own way, keeping the divorce courts busy and the workplaces acrimonious, besides keeping political discourse chaotic.

Genuine interaction is a rarity. What the lawyers call "narrowing the question" is likewise, as each petulant side tries to overwhelm others with its mountains of truth, oblivious to any real areas of agreement. What the psychologists call the "false consensus effect" is rampant, however, as is "confirmation bias."

We have to come to terms with them, going along with them when appropriate, rising above them when not. We cannot go from the pleasure principle of Freud’s id, i.e., primordial moral aggression, to the moral principle of the super-ego without filtering through the reality principle of the ego. Otherwise pleasure and morality are too easily confused. De gustibus non disputadum est, goes the old Roman saying; there is no disputing taste. The new Roman saying for this day and age might be, Gustibus maximus disputadum gustibus.

We have to deal with realities beyond the primitive emotions. Wish fulfillment, individual or collective, is no approach to reality. We need a "good novel" approach to life that acknowledges the characters reshaping the plot to meet their needs, as opposed to the "bad novel" approach that bends and twists the characters to the needs of the plot. We need to acknowledge the separation of internal thought and external reality, the basis of science, according to Alan Cromer, Uncommon Sense: The Heretical Nature of Science. We must acknowledge the difficulties creationists have with evolution, per Paul Bloom, Descartes’ Baby: How the Science of Child Development Explains What Makes Us Human, but not merely religious creationists; there are untold secular varieties too.

Primordial moral aggression is a frame of reference unto itself. It approaches anything outside its orb like a sumo wrestler trying to push his opponent out of the ring, as opposed to a judo practitioner using his opponent’s strength against him, It reduces controversies, large and small, to the blind men arguing whether the elephant is like a tree, wall, rope, snake, etc. Then its practitioners constantly wail the world is going to hell in a handbasket.

Overcoming it will be a multi-front struggle:

from the unilateral to the interactive,

from the extractive to the cultivational,

from the self-referentially "correct" to the other-addressing credible,

from the presumptuous to the exploratory,

from social creationism to social evolution,

from wish fulfillment (individual or collective) to consequentiality,

from monomania to integrative intelligence (below),

from first person to third person orientation (per Robert Fritz, Creating),

from eisegesis, reading pre-absorbed notions into a text, to exegesis, trying to discern the writer’s intent, both broadly considered, not restricted to Scripture or even writing.

In pagan, polytheistic, pre-Genesis Mestopotamia there was "no correlation between right conduct and individual or national well-being," according to Rabbi Nahum Sarna’s exquisite essay on the "original intent" of Genesis (quoted at length below).

Ancient Mespotamia? How about here? And now?

A more deliberate and effective frame of reference is the Abrahamic or monotheistic ethic, which proclaims belief in human dignity and free will, in turn, a belief in an orderly, rational universe. It distinguishes between "vertical" religion, dealing with God, and "horizontal" religion, dealing with our fellow man, citing Jewish and Christian scriptures on the necessity, even primacy, of "horizontal," or "natural," religion. See Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf (an American immigrant), What’s Right With Islam: A New Vision for Muslims and the West. Unlike private and personal "vertical" religion, "horizontal" religion describes duties we all owe each other and which necessarily have to be discussed and enforced in public. Without using the same language, Brian McLaren, The Secret Message of Jesus: Uncovering the Truth that Could Change Everything, can be taken as "horizontal" Christianity. Both are compatible with the better grades of secularism. Both are incompatible with primordial wish fulfillment.

We might even try to explain the sudden inexplicable wave of sanity on election night, and after all the attack ads, when defeated candidates concede and wish the victors well, instead of breaking out the ammunition.



The sign of a high intelligence is the ability to dissociate ideas which are traditionally bound together and to separate truths from the emotions they become wrapped up in over the years. Our tragic incapacity to make this dissociation is responsible for almost all the wars and social catastrophes of mankind.

Sydney J. Harris, Strictly Personal, p219



Appendix I

If the shoe fits, wear it. A marvelously reflective exploration of "original intent" in the Book of Genesis shows it was written as a rebuttal to chaotic pagan creation myths, showing the universe was created by a pre-existing God in an orderly fashion. In one of the most beautiful things yours truly has ever read, Rabbi Nahum Sarna wrote,

"It is not to be wondered at that Mesopotamian society suffered from a malaise which scholars have characterized as ‘overtones of anxiety.’ The nature of the gods could give no feeling of certainty and security in the cosmos. To make matters worse there were also environmental factors that had to be taken into account. Man always found himself confronted by the tremendous forces of nature, and nature, especially in Mesopotamia, showed itself to be cruel, indiscriminate, unpredictable. Since the gods were immanent in nature, they too shared these same harsh attributes. To aggravate the situation still further, there was always that inscrutable, primordial power beyond the realm of the gods to which man and gods were both subject.

"Evil, then, was a permanent necessity and there was nothing good in the pagan universe. In such circumstances there could be no correlation between right conduct and individual or national well-being. The universe was purposeless and the deities could offer their votaries no guarantee that life had meaning and direction, no assurance that the end of human strivings was anything but vanity. History and time were but a repeating cycle of events in which man played a passive role, carried along relentlessly by the stream of existence to his ineluctable fate." Nahum Sarna, "Understanding Creation in Genesis," Roland Mushat Frye, ed., Is God a Creationist?; Sarna, Understanding Genesis.

After three millenia of Judiasm, two of Christianity, and one and a half of Islam, what have we really accomplished? Isn’t this a marvelous description of the mentalities underlying both the welfare and warfare states?



Appendix II

Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Mate`, Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers, describe a supreme act of exegesis, one important key to a larger frame of reference:

"Students need an integrative intelligence for the kind of learning that is more than rote memory and regurgitation. To solve problems, a student needs to process more than one-dimensionally. Beyond mere facts he needs to discover themes, discern deeper meanings, understand metaphor, uncover underlying principle. A student has to know how to distill a body of material to the essence or to put the pieces together into a harmonious whole. Anything more than concrete thinking requires an integrative mind. Just as depth perception requires two eyes, depth learning requires the ability to see things from at least two points of view. If the mind’s eye is singular, there is no depth or perspective, no synthesis or distillation, no penetration to deeper meaning and truth. Context is not taken into consideration, figure and background lack differentiation."