ONE

THE FALL OF MAN

A humankind abandoned in its earliest formative stage becomes its own greatest threat to its survival.

 MARIA MONTESSORI, M.D.

Holding in mind the well-known and well-worn issue of Charles Darwin’s first opus, The Origin of Species, based on genetic mutation, selectivity, and survival of the fittest of those mutations, we will here consider his equally great second, ignored, and almost unknown work, The Descent of Man. In this second work, representing the later and more mature half of Darwin’s life, he shows how humankind arose through the “higher agencies” of love and altruism. Selectivity and survival, being foundational, are retained, but in service of this higher and more complex life-form.

The issue of this higher evolutionary cycle found in The Descent of Man (hereafter referred to as “Darwin II”) lies with nurturing, which instinct gives rise to, fosters, and allows love and altruism. This aspect of Darwin’s life-work, as clearly articulated by David Loye’s excellent little volume, Darwin’s Lost Theory of Love, has been grievously ignored. Consider some of Darwin’s essays and interests of this later period, such as “Selectivity in Relation to Sex and Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animal,” and his interest in the work of Ernest Haeckel, Lamarck, and Goethe. And how does one account for such ignored sentiments found in Darwin II as, “. . . aiding the weak to survive . . . the instinct of sympathy, the noblest part of our nature . . .”? Where now a species of tooth and claw, and why have such negative myths been accepted while ignoring the deeper, more spiritually inclined aspects of Darwin’s genius?

Nurturing proves to be not only the way by which this human species arose out of its animal ancestry; it proves to be the only way by which we evolved creatures can then be fully developed, from conception to maturity. Nurturing is the staff and stuff of human life, the one indispensable necessity, yet now having become so rare.

Our most ancient origins, as found in The Origin of Species (hereafter, “Darwin I”), can be graphically traced in the parade of skulls preceding us (see figure 1.1). We were announced quite visibly, so to speak, some brief forty to fifty thousand years ago, by the appearance of a brain case with an abnormally large area directly behind the orbit of the eyes, in the frontal-most part of our skull. (Observe the striking difference of profiles of the earlier Neanderthal and later Cro-Magnon, assumed to be the first fully human creature.) This bulging forehead houses a prefrontal cortex setting us off quite markedly from all our forebears. This particular neural grouping constitutes the high point of evolution to date, a large addition to the threefold structure found in the heads of our nearest evolutionary kin, such as the Neanderthals.

Darwin II attributes this addition to the nurturing of love and altruism.

Nurturing both gave rise to, and is the combined effect of, love and altruism—which in this book we will come to understand as a typical “mirroring” or “strange loop” effect. Whatever its roots, nurturing sustained us for millennia and what should have been human life thereafter, with the sky the limit to what such a system could do.

Paradise Lost

Somewhere along the way, however, nurturing was compromised. It was diluted and adulterated to the point of being sidetracked, insignificant to the point that it finally lost out to survival concerns, to varying extent and in different climes and times. Today, nurturing, as needed by our species and the Earth, has all but disappeared. Pockets of nurturing remained, even into the mid-twentieth century, in a few remote and isolated human groups.1 The societies they depict offer us critically needed models to study and examples to emulate, if we are to recoup our loss of this major evolutionary tool, as nurturing proves to be.

Figure 1.1. Updated variation of Ashley Montagu’s profiles of skulls. The profiles show the shift of a hind-brain to prefrontal cortex, through major evolutionary periods, culminating in Cro-Magnon man 40,000 to 50,000 years ago. Note the difference between Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon, whose appearance was short-lived but gave rise to a far more permanent and stable form in modern humans. The most recent expanded skull houses the prefrontal cortex—evolution’s highest point of neural development and her jumping-off point for the mind’s expansion into worlds beyond. (Line drawing by Eva Casey)

Mirror to Mirror

Which Reflection Comes First?

The reason such an evolutionary setback as loss of nurturing became near-permanent wherever it occurred, is simple, ironic, and can happen rapidly. A prime example is Jane Goodall’s account of a rogue ape, victim of a failure of nurturing, who upset the social structure of his whole ape-troop.2 In the case of our unnurtured humankind, and in spite of our vastly superior brain, we were caught up in a deluge of self-inflicted disasters of every description, multiplying at every level, that followed on the heels of our nurturing failure. The irony is that the intensity of our crisis and its near-permanent status thereafter arises from, and can be attributed to, our very “superior brain.” It takes some extraordinary brilliance and creativity to make the incredible mess we have made on this good Earth.

Precisely as Maria Montessori warns, we were so immediately absorbed in surviving the results of our own reactive patterns—brought on by failure of nurturing—that we had no time, energy, or interest to reflect on how or what happened, or was happening, to us. This is our condition today, where such loss and projection onto others “out there” of the causes of such loss, have been replicated age by age. Our survival concerns have greatly expanded and changed with the times, since the sharper this new intellect of ours, the deeper our crisis.

And we are getting correspondingly smarter intellectually while less intelligent. Intellect, a head-based operation incorporating ever more complex variations and applications, each needing further explications and qualifications, has become separated from intelligence—the automatic and natural state of the heart that brings coherence.

The Cultural Counterfeits

A counterfeit is a duplication of an original, from crude resemblance to those so nearly exact as to defy all but the trained observer. But no matter how apparently perfect the counterfeit is, minor, near-insignificant differences are always present, and will eventually bring ever greater problems in application. Meanwhile, the most minor miss in the fit multiplies into a major one through continual use.

To grind on this a bit, failure to nurture expresses in such a myriad of constantly branching critical problems that all objectivity suggesting a possible cause is lost in the mounting dysfunction. This leaves us aware only of the dysfunction, which by then is considered natural, or “the human condition.” I spelled this out in the chapter, “Time Bomb in the Delivery Room,” in my 1977 book, Magical Child. This effort did nothing to counter the effects of that delivery room, or time bomb, years down the road, culture being the power it is.

The importance and significance of nurturing as a survival response has, on its loss, brought in its place a mass of cultural counterfeits of nurturing. These counterfeits are “head-based” intellectual conclusions bringing roughly approximate solutions for the missing intelligence; consequently, the inevitable problems inherent in counterfeits eventually appear and absorb our attention. Origins are forgotten. And, though these counterfeits continually betray us, we are constantly seduced by them because of our fundamental needs for nurturing, with which these counterfeits have some vague resonance. Virtual reality, in its myriad of current expressions such as television, computers, and electronic stimuli of endless variety, has almost completely replaced reality as the state of live, direct biological awareness and experience as developed over millennia.

Caught up in trying to make these counterfeits work, such attempts sustain and increase the counterfeit incentives and their power. And those counterfeits, products of our ever-new and ever-sharper intellect, can border on genius itself, although always causing problems at some point, spinning our webs of error and production of counterfeits ever tighter.

Even if these counterfeit structures are analyzed and brought to light, such analyses can only be interpreted through our cultural mind-set. This mind-set automatically counters any possible conflict to itself by its own cultural counterfeit of the analysis itself. This is a largely nonconscious response on our part, simply our mind-set interpreting the information—as it must, in order to maintain itself. We, with a sigh of relief, thankfully accept our culture’s counterfeit as the obvious solution for us, thus nullifying any threat of change to the culture or to our mind-set, while locking us into ever deeper disaster. In just such ways, culture is a self-sustaining field-effect with our rationale at its service.

Continually lost in making corrections in our counterfeit world, we cannot regain that benevolence-driven mind-set, which was and is our greatest survival asset and most important feature of being human. In our compulsion to right a fundamentally flawed logical worldview, we lose our connections with and ability to open to the intelligence called for—which is heart-based, not head-based. Long repetitive usage of a flawed logical approach can change brain organization to the point we can become neurally insufficient to the task of seeing the errors in our preoccupation with our counterfeits. Losing access to intelligence, we are left with plenty of “smarts” to maintain the counterfeits, none for opening to the intelligence that could reveal them for what they are.

Our razor-sharp intellect can create and build atom bombs and destroy the very atmosphere of our Earth, but the basic intelligence needed to grasp this fundamental problem of loss of nurturing is gained only by brain-heart development itself. And brain-heart development is a major thrust of the nurturing function itself, which is, in turn, dependent on brain-heart development. In this reciprocal and recursive movement, we find a “strange loop” in which nurturing and brain-heart give rise to each other.

Nurturing should have opened ever-new evolutionary pathways— and still could. Instead, we have locked into a survival mode, which is now considered to be not just the norm, but the “human condition” and/or “human nature.” Around and through our automatic survival response we invent an incredibly complex and nonviable environment we must then attend with our whole being, both to survive in such an environment individually, and to maintain that very counterfeit environment itself, whose loss is sensed as a major threat to that world-view we share as our cultural basis, trapping ourselves at every turn.

The failure to nurture results in serious brain-mind alterations, such that any moral-ethical persuasions concerning nurturing become useless, since not really heard. We can hear only that for which we have a receptive capacity. We have had love preached to us for at least two thousand years with virtually no appreciable decrease in violence nor increase in love. Only the state of love can hear that with which it is resonant. This is a classic double bind, a Catch-22. An alternate approach—one I have long promoted—is a straight biological-neurological one that arises from a Darwin II position. In such an approach, the starting point lies in grasping the fourfold nature of our “evolutionary” brain.

History of Our Internal Civil War

One of the earliest neuroscientists to realize that this complex brain structure of ours had evolved out of and from earlier creatures was Paul MacLean, more than half a century ago. MacLean paved the way for our discovery that we have within our skull not one, but four distinct and essentially separate, interactive neural systems, developed over four distinct evolutionary periods. Through the appropriate integration, possible only through nurturing, these four neural systems cooperate as an integrated function in alignment with the heart. Should this fourfold integration fail, we become not only a seriously split system, but brain’s intimate connection with heart is seriously compromised—resulting in the aforementioned “human condition.”

Split between these basic evolutionary drives, and largely isolated from the intelligence of the heart, we do indeed end up at war with ourselves, individually and socially, each of us with self, split between the intelligence of the heart and a fragmented brain-mind. Self, identified with mind-brain, locks into its most primary survival systems, with culture and its violence reigning supreme.

Figure 1.2. Reptilian brain without mammalian brain. Both within neo-cortex, along with prefrontal cortex. (Line drawing by Eva Casey)

The Four Evolutionary Stages

In briefest brief, the four evolutionary neural systems in our head, in their respective evolutionary order (see figures 1.2 and 1.3) are as follows: First is the so-called reptilian or hind brain, most powerful biologically since the oldest and most firmly entrenched through usage. Karl Pribram described this sensory-motor system as the “world-brain,” the primordial capacity to sense our physical world and the ability to respond to that world intelligently enough to survive in it.

The next evolutionary step up the ladder was the “old mammalian” brain, built “on top of ” and thus outside of our sensory-motor foundation. Through this second brain humankind could be aware of, “witness,” and interpret the nature of relations between us sensing creatures and the objects or events encountered by our “world-brain” as “out there.” Otherwise, we could only react to such physical events to avoid or devour them, as would the older reptilian “hind” brain on its own. This old mammalian capacity to interpret gave rise to evermore sophisticated forms of relating. For, as this book attempts to illustrate throughout, all creation is relational. Nothing stands alone. Everything is, only through relationship with something other-to-it.

So the reptilian brain gave content to which the “old” mammalian system could relate, and out of such a relationship evolved an emotional (relational) structure giving rise to relations with meaning and significance and group or herd experience—a new mammalian brain that could project beyond the sensory brain entirely. This “new mammalian” brain gave the foundation for the eventual rudiments of thought and speech through which we could reflect on an event in an abstract way; that is, extract out of direct sensory contact a mental and objective viewpoint of such relations.

This new capacity, in turn, made necessary and gave the foundation for a fourth, “governing” or coordinating brain to organize into a unit or single system these three independent foundational systems (reptilian sensory-motor, mammalian-emotional, and mammalian-rudimentary thinking brain.) This fourth, coordinating, and governing body of neurons (called the prefrontal cortex) emerged when conditions were right: sufficient maturity of the three preceding brains, and the appropriate nurturing. Once established, this new “governing” fourth brain could bring about adaptation to extremes of climate and physical conditions, and overcome the limitations and constraints that might arise. Evolution was taking wings.

Creation and the Prefrontals

Through this fourth, newest, largest, and superior brain, the prefrontal cortex, nature could organize all capacities inherent within the first three systems and bring them into a coherent, focused attention and response. Above all, this fourth brain was (is) capable of creation, in a literal sense: first creating internal images not present in the outer world (creative imaginations), then concretizing—making real—such inner images in the “outer” sensory world shared with others (Concrete Operational Thinking, to use Jean Piaget’s term).

Figure 1.3. Montagu’s developmental sketch shows new neural systems added to previously developed ones, illustrating how all new evolutionary systems are built on the primary “reptilian” brain. the older reptilian brain gives rise to newer formations, which then reincorporate the older brain structures. In like manner, each successive stage evolves to overcome the limitations and constraints of the earlier structure—on which the new is always built. In this incorporating process, the newer brain transforms and expands the older structures through bringing them into service to the newer brain itself. only through this incorporation process can the older brain rise to this function— it was not equipped to do so until the very moment of incorporation. the transformed older system thus augments the further transformation of the newer brain into its new evolutionary stature and capacity. this is a clear example of the “strange loop,” showing how old and new lift one another into higher creative capacities—the never-ending story of evolution.

This, in turn, prepared for, and brought about the possibility for, Formal Operations of mind, as Piaget called them, wherein we can think and imagine outside all concrete, material realms, and, in effect, operate on our very own brain structure, from which mind and such operations emerge. Nobel laureate Roger Sperry referred to this as mind emerging from its matrix—brain—and this emergent system can then bend back on, analyze, and change that very matrix giving rise to it. (A wild analogy might be of an automobile coming out of a complex assembly line and turning around to rearrange the complex of assemblies giving rise to itself.)

Transcendence, Incorporation, and Integration

So we humans evolved through a series of new neural-physical structures, each developed to go beyond the limitations and constraints of those coming before and giving rise to it. This is the essential meaning of the term transcendence in the present work. Yet each new system is critically dependent on the older as its foundation (a sensory-motor system is handy, after all). Though we transcend this older system we must utilize it, put it to work for us, to function at all. And in the process of utilizing any previous system, the earlier system is itself transformed by the higher system with which it must be integrated, in order for the lower to serve that higher system. This is surely both a “strange loop” and the last word in tautologies, but also allows us to say the “reptilian” or sensory-motor brain in our head is light-years beyond essentially the same component parts in the brain of blacksnake in our wood pile—while a spark plug that fires the Model T Ford is of the same general construction as that plug sparking a multi-cylinder Rolls Royce.

By this incorporation-integration, the older brain function becomes compatible with the newer, and then can serve that newer system into which it has integrated. Then the older serves the newer with those older functions, which the newer doesn’t have, except through such incorporation of the older. Nature established this strange loop as the basis of her creative system. This system of incorporation-integration carries right on up to that frontal and prefrontal cortex, our highest evolutionary brains. The transformation the new brain brings about in its older brain maintains, enhances, and completes the older, earlier foundational capacities, as needed by the newer system to complete its own structure.

This is a procedure truly worth a bit of study because here we will find why a dysfunctional culture such as we suffer today cannot self-correct, or even be corrected, but always and inevitably replicates itself and all its errors in one form or another until finally self-destructing. In sum, the higher brain function enhances the lower with capacities, which complete the lower and enable it to work cooperatively with the higher; the higher brain must have those capacities the lower has then developed.

This incorporation-integration process plays a profound role in child development and could lead us into a rediscovery of our true nature, as co-creators in our life. Above all, here we find why abandonment of the infant-child in its earliest formative stage is such an ongoing disaster. A broken development on its own always replicates its own broken nature, in spite of all efforts to repair itself, or even attempts by others to repair it.

Strange Loops Looping

A critical series of interacting loops take place between these evolutionary brain parts—moving forward, doubling back to pick up elements or capacities needed—but unavailable until such movement forward and doubling back takes place. Follow this loop: the newer brain system incorporates the older into its service, giving the foundation on which the newer is built, and this incorporation transforms the nature of the older into enough resonance with the newer to function synchronously in coherence with that newer, while enhancing the original capacities of that older system. All of this reciprocal interaction is then integrated into the newer system and its supportive older system for a more advanced dual function—a new situation impacting the entire brain system developed to that point.

Our greatest great being said, “If I be lifted up I draw all mankind toward me,” a statement that is an ontological truth far transcending the petty religious applications that have so misconstrued most of that great being’s observations. As this “mythical He” draws all mankind toward him, he is himself transformed anew in typical symbiosis, and can thus quite truthfully state, “I am always becoming what you have need of me to be,” through just this continual growth-expansion of both “sides” of the loop. By the generational love and recognition that mythical figure generates in us, that mythical figure is, himself, continually “lifted up”—giving his mythical overlaid imagery greater power to attract and lift up, round and round.

The transformation of an older primary brain system into a newly emerging one, which is, in turn, dependent on the older for its own development and transformation, is not only an example of the strange loop phenomenon, but is a major key to our evolution. For this ongoing, continual evolutionary process moves to go beyond the limitations and constraints of any current state, as such limitations arise. This transcendent action itself gives rise to new states and evolutionary possibilities not necessarily even extant before, while eventually seeking out the limitations and constraints even then becoming apparent, and kicking off another round of evolution. Neurologist Frank Wilson’s brilliant analysis of the evolutionary implications of the human hand and brain shows a perfect symbiosis, each bringing more and more potential ability into and out of the other.3 The same is true of mind and heart, as we will see in subsequent chapters.

Herein the transformation of mind itself unfolds, and we see evolution as not only an ongoing, endless process, but always a win-win situation—or at least to the extent it is allowed to be, since designed to be so if allowed. It is up to us to allow, or to impede.

This highly condensed and abstract survey ignores, for now, among many issues, the intriguing aspect of selectivity out of a randomly produced profusion. Such selectivity out of random profusion is another hallmark of our open-ended evolutionary system. And, our reviewing of this reciprocal function (as in this chapter) in a continual doubling-back on-and-of this basic material, puts this basic material into a continually wider, more inclusive basis, relating it with other aspects of evolution.

Integration and Its Failure in Development

Large and critical overlaps take place between the appearance and full-scale development of each of these four neural systems, as we unfold from conception (see figure 1.2).

So development of the first, “reptilian” brain system continues, at a more relaxed pace, long after the next, old-mammalian brain begins its development. This overlap brings a period of integration of the two systems, each supporting and influencing the other in typical, strange loop reciprocal fashion.

That is why failure or compromise of development in one stage can damage or compromise subsequent development of both predecessor and successor stages. In sum, the first neural system, dependent on integration into the second for its own completion, will be faulty if the second is faulty; and, being the foundation on which the second is critically dependent, the two “go down together,” so to speak, another—and sobering—aspect of the mirroring-loop phenomenon. Failure within either system means both lose to some extent, the equivalent of a strange loop being prevented from completing its loop.

Now we can grasp the full insight in Maria Montessori’s statement about abandonment in the earliest development period. An infant born and not nurtured, particularly in that most critical first year, will remain largely locked into his primary defensive sensory-motor brain, since his emotional system is then truncated, and events in his environment cannot be fully integrated. Instead, these events bring further retreats into his defensive system. He “armors” against his world from the beginning, and development will be slow and faltering. Rather than relating to the events of his world—the only way brain-mind can develop—he defends against those worldly events, increasing his isolation.

Sketching In This Fall of Man

Though many underlying factors are involved, a single major cause lies behind the mishap: our undeveloped emotional system remains embedded in and compromised by the survival system on which the emotional system depends for its own development. This survival system is still trying to establish its genetically determined functions, which it can only do through a developed emotional system, and this emotional system itself can only be completed by a functional survival system—a typical double bind. Even after the second neural system (the old mammalian or emotional) opens for its development, most of the infant’s energy-attention defends against such openness.

Instead of transforming that reptilian survival instinct into a preliminary form of emotional intelligence, the higher system (the intended emotional intelligence) will be incorporated into the lower and become, in effect, a part of that lower defense system. With a compromised or damaged reptilian and old mammalian system, the third evolutionary system—the new mammalian brain—on its opening for development, will face an obvious double or triple jeopardy.

We can follow such a stage-by-stage compromise-breakdown, as it has indeed taken place historically and within us individually, until we finally get to the point where the highest, fourth brain is incorporated in whole or in part into the first, sensory-survival mode, the whole evolutionary movement thereby inverted, turned upside down, with humankind the greatest danger to humankind.

This fourth and latest brain, the prefrontal cortex, is designed to be the “governor” of the whole system—to organize the whole array into concentrations of attention-force that can carry an experience of self beyond its limitations and constraints, and move on into new evolutionary levels. But, should these ongoing and progressive compromises of nature’s plan as noted here take place (which is the general case), the “human condition” becomes this compromised and crippled system, the “governor deposed,” riffraff in charge, wherein our highest evolutionary potential is bent back into the service of the lowest in a de-evolutionary setback—which well describes our current massive pileup of global-social chaos.

The Breakdown of Reason

Once this reversal happens, we, still locked into our survival system, automatically employ the logical reasoning capacities of our highest brain to rationalize the violent behaviors continually erupting out of our incomplete and unintegrated survival brain. We generally defend, with all logic available to us, such destructive actions on our part as critically necessary, and such necessity is surely the mother of our demonic inventions.

Thus, as our history shows, there is nothing more dangerous and destructive than a brilliant, genius-level reptile, of which we seem to breed quite a number, from heads of state and industry on down the social scale to the all too similar but unsuccessful criminal behind bars. That is to say, our successful criminals are behind the corporate, political, social-scheming desks ruling our world. And therein they can justify any atrocity as deemed necessary to their success, though always cloaked as supposedly for our survival—individually or nationally. The reason we must batten on our brother’s blood, imprison more and more of our fellows each year, build more bombs, go to war on and on, is “perfectly clear and logical”—over and over, blood bath after blood bath ad infinitum and nauseam. Necessity and pragmatic common sense demand it! (And, lest we forget, author and reader alike participate in this very process to varying degrees.)

Modern Man, Reptilian Hybrid

Thus, we come to our present self-destructing and nonviable devolutionary state. As inheritors of the highest brain, which evolution has produced, this lofty point is generally incorporated, unbeknownst, into the service of our lowest, sensory-motor survival system. We then function as the highest in service of the lowest, instead of being the highest, served by the lowest, as nature intended. Further, we then identify with these lower functions by default, and compulsively rationalize the irrational and destructive actions of these primal base reactions of ours, in an attempt to justify and maintain our mind-set, “worldview,” identity, and self-esteem, thereby assuming some quasi-coherence in a most incoherent mental turmoil. The “fall of man” becomes instinctual, repetitive, circular—a demonic tautology. Or, as Walt Whitman put it, the murder comes back most often to the murderer.