To repeat the question I asked Glynis: Why are brain science pundits devoted to such a peculiarly pessimistic world view? Why the long face?
I think pessimism as an intellectual fashion among science writers can be blamed in part on Sigmund Freud’s General Introduction To Psychoanalysis. In this essay, Freud is the first to advance the following argument.
The three greatest scientific revolutions of all time each delivered a hammer blow to humanity’s naive self-love. Heliocentrism takes us from the centre of the universe to a remote speck. Evolution shows that we are made not in the image of God but orang-utang. Freud’s own psychoanalysis shows that far from being rational creatures, humans are at all times driven by dark irrational unconscious impulses – apart from him writing that then, of course. But everyone else? Mental!
Freud’s Theory That Great Scientific Revolutions Are Always Bummers, has never been more influential than it is today. And yet almost everything about Freud’s history of scientific ideas is false.
Take heliocentrism. Aside from a handful of professional theologians, did the discovery that the earth goes round the sun ever ruin anybody’s day? For a start, pre-Copernicus, nobody except an extreme heretic ever believed earth to be the most important place in the cosmos. That was heaven, God’s dwelling place. Between base, corrupt, contaminated earth down here and heaven up there stretched a linear hierarchy of celestial spheres and pristine stars, unchanging and perfect.
Dedicated to the Pope, Copernicus’s On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres isn’t put on the list of banned books, until well into the seventeenth century, which is when Protestant sects seize on heliocentrism as a liberating theology.
If the earth has a diurnal rotation and an annual orbit, they argue, that means that Christ’s illuminating light shines equally on us all. The light of divine inspiration touches the laity directly. What price linear hierarchies now? Who needs bishops, kings or priests? We are all saints. Pamphlets with titles such as More Light Shining In Buckinghamshire argue that heaven might not be a place up in the sky, beyond the Celestial Spheres, but instead heaven could be built in the here and now, and could actually be a place on earth. The Counter-Reformation suppresses this idea, but it resurfaces in the work of Belinda Carlisle.
When it comes to evolution, Freud is a notoriously unreliable witness. He goes to his grave arguing against natural selection because Darwinism contradicts Freud’s own theory of evolution: phylogenetic recapitulation. Freud’s theory of evolution deserves to be much better known because it is gloriously nuts. Each individual recapitulates in one lifetime the entire development of the human race. As babies we crawl on all fours like when we were monkeys come down from the trees. Then we learn to walk upright and develop rudimentary language just like our ancestors in the Pleistocene epoch.
Neurotics, says Freud, are people who have got stuck at a previous historical epoch – such as the last Ice Age, when a friendly world turned suddenly forbidding, and dwindling resources restricted sexual activity. Or the Bronze Age, when a tyrannical clan chieftain was slain by his sons who felt great elation and liberation but also terrible guilt at their bloody deed. ‘Triumph over his death’, writes Freud in Totem & Taboo: Some Points of Agreement Between the Mental Life of Savages and Neurotics (1913), ‘is then followed by mourning over the fact that they still revered him as a model.’
Freud offers his theory of evolution as a diagnostic tool. If you’re a psychiatrist and a patient presents with anxiety, paranoia and sexual impotence, you know they are reliving the Ice Age. If someone is suffering wild mood swings accompanied by terrible guilt, they are reliving the Bronze Age. If someone is singing ‘Land of Hope & Glory’ while stabbing their own genitalia, they are reliving the Brexit vote.
For what it’s worth, few of the great scientists considered their own work to be delivering a hammer blow to humanity’s naive self-love. Darwin concluded the Origin with the ringing declaration: ‘there is a grandeur in this view of life’.
Despite Freud’s shaky grasp on the history of ideas, his thesis has become a cliché of popular thought and set the tone for the nihilistic style in contemporary science writing. If the hallmark of great scientific advances is to make everyone feel worse about themselves, the science writer reasons, then if I tell people they are shit I’ll be hailed as a great scientist!’
Maybe that’s what they are thinking, maybe it’s not. But what is clear is that science writers now compete over who can say the most horrible thing about the rest of us.
‘The human race’, said Stephen Hawking, ‘is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies.’ Not to be outdone, Yuval Noah Harari would have you know that: ‘[t]he free individual is just a fictional tale concocted by a set of biochemical algorithms.’
This tough talk delivers cold hard reality for those who can handle the truth – which is ironic really, because Hawking’s picture is pure Alice In Wonderland because he hasn’t thought it through.
For us to look like scum to an alien observer then this alien has to know about scum. The alien has to have a concept of scum. It is impossible to have a concept of scum without knowing about living organisms. The aliens must be able to distinguish scum from organism. Scum is dead; organisms are alive. The spirogyra wiggles the scum. The scum does not wiggle the spirogyra. Spirogyra, water fleas and humans may swim through the layer of dirt or froth on a liquid but are not part of the scum. All of this must be known to the alien observer before that alien observer can know what scum is. If, however, these aliens persist in classifying us as scum on the grounds that they are so immeasurably superior to human beings as to make any distinction between life and death negligible, then I suggest that it is they and not us who are scum.
An argument about human insignificance that relies on anthropomorphism is surely self-defeating. The anthropomorphism is of course the term ‘outer suburb.’ But if we are the outer suburb, then where is the bustling downtown hub? The centre of the galaxy? But that is as dead. There is no life there. Hawking surely knows the Galactic Centre to be dead, and so it is hard not to question whether he really believes what he is saying.
This is a characteristic feature, by the way, of the whole sadistic, macho genre of modern science writing. The science writer only wants to be a little bit nihilistic, but never goes the whole Raskolnikov, which leaves him in a mealy-mouthed limbo land, insinuating that all is cold and hollow but not wanting to scare off the middle-England fan base, many of whom are members of the RAC.
Wearing a double-breasted blazer with brass buttons, Richard Dawkins announces that we are vehicles for genes, but then ducks the logical entailments. If genes are in control, then all emotion is not just contingent but illusory. One of the many nettles Dawkins never grasps is that this abolishes love. By his own logic love is no longer a contingent fact of natural selection, but illusory. And yet he would never do a book called the Love Delusion. That might upset Mrs Dawkins. * And it would come over as a little bit too nihilistic, and that would never do when one has tickets to sell to retired Rotarians at Hay-on-Wye. Now, me personally, I don’t believe in a loveless world, but that is the logical entailment of his hypothesis that clever genes get us to do things they need us to do, if you think it through.
* Thanks to Simon Munnery for this analogy.
Trash-talking the human race rides an executive car that whooshes through an automatically raised barrier with no inspection of documents necessary. You do not need to do anything so otiose as actually to prove that we are selfish sociopaths who live in a world of illusion. That’s axiomatic. That’s where you start from. Evidence that people are deluded in all but their reptile brains does not need to be proved yet again before theorising that smiling is snarling or any of the thousand other slanders and libels in any of the thousand other brain books currently sagging bookshop shelves. Why waste time proving what science has already established? Science has found people bad. Do we have to prove sea water to be salty each and every time we submit a paper on the Atlantic Ocean? No. It’s understood. Seawater is salty. People are bad. Science has proved it. Let’s not reinvent the wheel. Let us proceed from axioms. Let the burden of proof fall only on those with a good word to say about humanity. Let those Pollyannas who want to drag us back to a pre-empirical mysticism prove their case. Until then, contempt is the one and only scientifically correct position from which enquiries into the deluded human race should proceed.
This nihilistic turn in science writing has gravely damaged intellectual life by lowering the threshold of proof for any condemnatory claims about human nature, whilst at the same time raising the threshold of proof for anyone with a good word to say about us. Now all this damages more than just intellectual life, of course. To tell us we’re nothing, to say that everything we see is an illusion, disempowers and dismays us. It also affects how we look at each other. If we see people struggling to control their lives, they suddenly seem to be behaving more or less irrationally.
When it comes to scientific investigation, the nihilistic take pre-emptively shuts off interesting avenues of inquiry. A generation ago, for example, the Time and Motion Men swept through evolutionary biology subjecting all human experience to cost-benefit analysis.
The Time and Motion Men
In the early twentieth century, Time and Motion Men were sent into factories, warehouses and offices to rationalise every moment of the workers’ day to make it as cost-beneficial as possible. They measured the distance from lathe to toilet, counted how many seconds were unnecessarily wasted in reaching for hammer or in saying hello to colleagues. Everything superfluous had to go in the belief that this would produce a more efficient work place.
In the late twentieth century, the Time and Motion Men decreed that every evolutionary adaptation had to be shown to have passed a cost-benefit analysis. They tried to account for the selective advantage of everything under the sun. The mobula ray, a flying fish, seems to leap into the air for the sheer joy, the exuberance of taking it to the air and then landing with a big splash back down in the water. Sheer joy? No, every adaptation has to earn its keep. There has to be a practical reason. And so the Time and Motion Men argued that reason nature selects for mobula rays that leap into the air is because this activity makes them more athletic, and better able to avoid predators. But naturalists and logicians pointed out that they still had to account for why these mobula rays started leaping in the first place. Flying fish had to be flying already for flying to be selected for. How could nature select for mobula rays that leap into the air if mobula rays weren’t already leaping into the air? The problem of joy was a terrible headache for the Time and Motion Men. It made their lives a misery. No matter how far back they went an animal having fun had always got there first. An elephant was always to be found joyfully rolling in mud long before nature selects for the parasite repellent qualities of a mudpack. The sad truth was that the elephant was doing it because it felt brilliant. And thus the Time and Motion Men fell down the Well of Infinite Regress.
I want to emphasise that infinite regress is a problem only for the cost-benefit story of selection. It is not a problem for Darwinian natural selection. For Darwin, animals have a physical, emotional and psychological constitution. Mobula rays give full play to their emotional constitution when they break water and flap their fins in the sky. Elephants follow their pleasure when they roll in a mud bath. Nature selects for or against this constitution, for and against the entire the life cycle that goes with it.
If joy dismayed the Time and Motion Men, language completely tormented them. It was a standing provocation. Why would people just give away information for no immediate return? It didn’t add up. Where was the competitive advantage in that? Where was the cost-benefit? Extraordinarily convoluted reasoning tried to square the emergence of language with best economic practice. They embarked on a prolonged filibuster about game theory, but this seems finally to be petering out. In the last few years less narrowly dogmatic ideas about the origin of language are getting a hearing, ideas that take us back, in fact, to a long-neglected insight of Charles Darwin’s, which we will look at in the next chapter.