Global capitalism might well enclose us in a self-contained system whose antinomies only appear to be substantially different but are actually just arbitrary terms that keep the drama moving. But capitalism is just one particular system that happens to transform the world into one vast commodity: a quantity, an abstraction, a phantom. Obviously, other ways of seeing preceded capitalism, and even now there are premodern cultures untouched by Adam Smith. In addition, one can imagine other systems, such as Marxism, that value objects for their intrinsic worth and thus might bring us closer to palpable reality.
What if, however, our very mental makeup, our cognitive equipment, entraps us, regardless of ideology or even language, in a prison of our own perceptions? In Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, from 1973, Hayden White argues that the study of history is driven by a desire to organize what happened—rife with accident, contradiction, confusion, mystery—into a cogent, meaningful linear narrative that reinforces the historian’s current idea of reality. White believes that one of four basic narrative forms organizes historical accounts: romance, tragedy, satire, comedy. Each bears a political ideology. Romance expresses anarchy; tragedy, radicalism; satire, the liberal sensibility; comedy, the conservative one.
(For White, intensely ethical [after discovering policemen going undercover as students to monitor professors at UCLA, he successfully sued the LAPD on behalf of the university in 1972], the recognition of the fictional nature of history writing is a positive, because the awareness can serve “as a potent antidote to the tendency of historians to become captive of ideological preconceptions which they do not recognize as such but honor as the ‘correct’ perception of ‘the way things really are.’ By drawing historiography nearer to its origins in literary sensibility, we should be able to identify the ideological, because it is the fictive element in our own discourse.” Such “self-consciousness” of the artistry of our own historical discourse should encourage us to ask: What presuppositions are organizing my narrative? Are these presuppositions on the side of oppression or democracy? How can I change my narrative to one that urges justice? Behind these inquiries is the assumption that we are free to transform time’s randomness into meaningful morality.)
Thomas Kuhn is to science what White is to history. In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn claims that the paradigms of different cultures fashion different objective “truths.” Ptolemaic astronomers really saw, given the assumptions of their culture, a geocentric universe. They found what they were looking for. Then, as in any compelling narrative, in which an antagonist and a protagonist tussle, Copernicus countered old Ptolemy’s spirit—the man had been dead for centuries—by asserting that the sun is in the center. Liking this idea, Galileo a little later scanned the heavens for the central sun, found it, and thus “proved” that Copernicus was “right.” (However, Galileo, poor man, faced a Catholic Inquisition prepared to burn men alive for challenging the geocentric Christian orthodoxy. He went on trial for heresy, and wishing, understandably, to avoid the fate of Giordano Bruno, burned a decade or so earlier for maintaining that the universe is infinite—not contained within concentric spheres—he, Galileo, renounced his theory of a solar core and so also of a moving earth, even if under his breath, apparently, he whispered, just after his retraction, Eppur, si muove: “Still, it moves.”)
Galileo was able to release into the world an elegant analogy. Contrary to medieval theologians who envisioned the universe as a vast book written by God, interpretable in the light of his other luminous tome, the Bible, Galileo announced that the universe is a massive mathematical treatise. Isaac Newton, a century later, agreed, and proceeded to describe the cosmos as a gathering of indestructible atoms moving in a void, by gravity pulled and pushed, behaving with gorgeous mathematical regularity, as would a machine. And so began the Enlightenment, an age in which men looked for cogs and levers and perceived levers and cogs.
Charles Darwin, wallowing in the exotic messiness of the Galápagos, retorted: the universe is composed not of mechanistic atoms but of random genetic strands accidentally blending in response to unpredictable, perpetually shifting environments. Behold now, chaos cohering into temporary orders, which dissolve into chaos again. Look at consciousness around this time, too—late 1800s, early 1900s—and you’ll see the brain itself not as a rational contraption but as a globular foam jostling on an inscrutable sea, Freud’s deep. And so on, history-of-science-wise. The point is not that there’s no such thing as matter or natural law but that the material and its principals take the shape that we mentally impose upon them.
Michael Gazzaniga, a leading neuroscientist, has discovered the cognitive mechanism behind the meaning-making activities White and Kuhn describe. In one experiment, Gazzaniga showed a series of pictures to a split-brain patient—an epileptic whose nerves between left and right hemispheres have been surgically severed. (He focused on this patient because the poor man’s right brain couldn’t communicate with the left, and vice versa.) Gazzaniga presented to the right visual field an image of a chicken claw. The optic information ran to the left brain, responsible for reasoning and speech. To the left field, Gazzaniga showed a snow scene; these data rushed to the right brain, specializing in sensation, intuition. Gazzaniga then directed the patient to look at an array of pictures with each of his eyes and to pick those connected with the claw and the snow. With his left hand, controlled by the right brain, the patient chose a shovel, thinking of the snow; with his right, left brain–guided, he appropriately pointed to a chicken.
When asked why he had chosen the chicken, the man, activating his speech-producing left side, said that he had connected, obviously, the claw with the chicken. But when queried about the shovel, he stated, still stoked by his reasoning left side, that the shovel was connected to the chicken as well, since one requires such an implement to clean out the coop.
Gazzaniga explains: “Immediately, the left brain, observing the left hand’s response without the knowledge of why it had picked that item, put it into a context that would explain it. It knew nothing about the snow scene, but it had to explain the shovel in front of his left hand. Well, chickens do make a mess, and you have to clean it up. Ah, that’s it! Makes sense.”
This is what the left brain in all of us automatically does: it forms causal explanations for the right brain’s sensations, and always after the fact, engaging in the post hoc, ergo propter hoc in earnest. There is no conscious perception that isn’t fallacious, and the fallaciousness is “fudging” (Gazzaniga’s peachy mot): the left brain torques data into a “makes-sense story.” Of course, if lefty were honest in the chicken claw, shovel, snow, guano experiment (a surrealist fantasia of sorts), he would have said that he didn’t really know why righty chose the shovel. But the left-brain man can’t stand not knowing, and will “confabulate” in the face of ignorance, “taking cues” from what he does know to piece together a cogent, meaningful, causal narrative.
Gazzaniga calls the left brain the interpreter because it “engages in the human tendency to find order in chaos, that tries to fit everything into a story and put it into a context. It seems driven to hypothesize about the structure of the world even in the face of evidence that no pattern exists.”