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| Artwork painted by Justin Sweet for Prince Caspian. |
"If he has not experienced, at least a few times in his life, this cold shudder down his spine, this confrontation with an immense, invisible face whose breath moves him to tears, he is not a scientist. The blacker the night, the brighter the light." ― Erwin Chargaff, Heraclitean Fire (1978)
"The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall." ― Edward O. Wilson (2009)
"Every animal, in order to survive, has to solve a conundrum: how to eat without being eaten." ― Iain McGilchrist (2021)
Very large, or at any rate intimidating, creatures feature prominently in myth. They became symbols and metaphors fertile with meaning, and not too infrequently, as well as somewhat controversially, referred to as "monsters". For Bayo Akomolafe, to take one example, monsters are able to open up "cracks in the order of things through which new systems might be glimpsed" and thereby liberate us from "the tyranny of a particular plot". Here I want to look at another role that these monsters may have at one time filled. I think that monsters teach us about humility. Our environment used to provide us with stark emotional contrast in the form of natural sources of fear, and these undermined any false sense of confidence we might've entertained. This is probably a fairly straightforward interpretation of the folklore and mythologies in which monsters figure - they remind us that we are not the most powerful residents of the field and dark forest (Liu Cixin). Today, modern lifestyles have insulated us from confrontation with existential threats, and as a result many people seem unable to appreciate these.
Prideful boasting of one's strength and skill is generally discouraged in hunter-gatherer societies. Instead, a more humble disposition is encouraged. Why? This is not to enforce some abstract ideal of egalitarianism for its own sake, rather it has roots in the pragmatic understanding that everyone is vulnerable and survival depends on both cooperation and vigilance against threats. And notably, those external threats dwarf any individual differences in skill among group members. It's simply counterproductive to engage in internal strife when one is keenly aware of the broader context of survival challenges. (Awareness of a broader context, threat detection, and other features of psychology within an evolutionary context are correlated with the right hemisphere.)
"Yes, when a young man kills much meat he comes to think of himself as a chief or a big man, and he thinks of the rest of us as his servants or inferiors,” one Kalahari hunter told the anthropologist Richard B Lee in 1968. “We can’t accept this. We refuse one who boasts, for someday his pride will make him kill somebody. So we always speak of his meat as worthless. This way we cool his heart and make him gentle.” Some lucky hunters don’t wait to be ridiculed, choosing instead to disparage the meat they have acquired as soon as they arrive back at camp." (Humans Were Not Centre Stage, Barbara Ehrenreich)
Early human evolution was a far more precarious existence at times, and situations could rapidly change. It was a world of megafauna, literal giants. (Satirized in many films, including "The Croods".) In the dialectical dance between man and nature, we were not the main characters. This, Ehrenreich suggests, provided us with a palpable sense of humility, which of all virtues mitigates the excesses of the left hemisphere, supplying the negative feedback we needed: "Our Paleolithic ancestors... seem to have known something we strain to imagine. They knew where they stood in the scheme of things, which was not very high." The ecological release of humans following the subjugation of these "monsters", may have then led to a growth in hubris and the subsequent phenomenological inversion that McGilchrist describes. Ehrenreich quotes one observer who noted: "Man had just emerged from a purely zoological existence, when instead
of being dominated by animals, he began to dominate them."
The idea that we need a powerful adversary to learn humility, one of the greatest of virtues, is not new. It's implicit within many lines of thought. McGilchrist remarks how friction, "the very constraint on movement is also what makes movement possible at all". SC Hickman would write "Both Heraclitus and Blake surmised that without conflict or oppositional thought there is no forward movement in life or experience. We need challenges to overcome our essential stasis, our narcissistic enclosure as humans and societies." And evolutionary psychologists might argue that, insofar as we are reliably good, virtuous, and cooperative, it is not merely because we want to be, but because we had to be good. (Elevated to the notion of an eternal punishment, in some religious contexts.) If that is the case, then our restraints and frictions cannot be internally motivated alone; there must be an external environmental component as well. A lot of ink has been spilled praising the value of self-restraint, and the "enabling constraints" we can control, but who is praising the external constraints that we have little to no power and control over? We need these monsters. Where are they?
"Humans coevolved with other species in Africa, and evolved as relatively insignificant components of African ecosystems. Their numbers were kept in check by predators and diseases. However, when they invaded other ecosystems - Eurasia, Australia, the Americas and New Zealand - they had devastating effects, leading in each case to vast numbers of extinctions. The only real opposition to humans came from other humans." (The Semiotics of Global Warming, Arran Gare)
With our tools in hand and our predators vanquished or subdued, we allowed
ourselves to fall under the spell of the emissary, and we've forgotten
the Faustian bargain that attends such acts of self deception. Gare's observation was anticipated by Robert Heinlein: “By the data to date, there is only one animal in the galaxy dangerous to man – man himself. So he must supply his own indispensable competition. He has no enemy to help him.” If Gare and Heinlein are right, this would be very bad news for us, just as it would've been for early hunter-gatherers. They knew that we cannot become our own monsters, political monsters, corporate monsters, without destroying ourselves in the process. In fact, it may be that we have these today precisely because we've either lost (or can no longer see) our original adversaries. We are inadequate to the task of restraining our ambition, overcoming narcissistic enclosure, and restoring a sense of humility. Sebastian Junger, author of Tribe, went as far as to predict that a nation will implode into internecine strife without an external enemy. The first anthropogenic crisis, the extinction of megafauna that were sources of totemic power, food, and even shelter (mammoth bone architecture), all but eliminated the original monsters. But they have passed into myth and come to represent far more fundamental aspects of life. Tolkien describes the qualities of the universal solvent (time) as a monster to which all eventually fall victim:
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| Bear (Emma Powell) |
There is a spectrum of these modern day monsters that still remain with us, from age, infirmity, and death, to lack of food, shelter, and other environmental constraints, to loneliness and depression, and all physical, emotional, and mental limitations. They are simultaneously our friend and foe, and come uninvited. We must look to these today and not ignore them, not necessarily with the aim to eliminate them (though many certainly should be mitigated), but to see these uncelebrated burdens as the "thorn in our flesh" that leave us "utterly undone", like the Biblical Job. Nietzsche famously wrote: "To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities... the wretchedness of the vanquished... I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not — that one endures." These are the safeguards of humility and appreciation of life, in place of the predators we have lost. And like those predators, one of them will eventually catch each of us.
Humility appears to be a disposition that one must learn or acquire
through a certain quality of experience; it must be cultivated and
nurtured if it is to be sustained. Few want to be humble for its own
sake. Consider that evolution has created robust organisms that are
healthy and fit because they encounter friction and constraints that
must be overcome or otherwise evaded in order to survive. These come in the form of
environmental hardships, predators, and intraspecific competition that
often keeps us restless and ever on the move. Evolution will utilize all the information it has access to, but once exhausted chaotic saltation takes over, in the desperate hope of hitting upon a solution "good enough" to allow continued persistence. Some people may always appear busy for such reasons; it can be a useful strategy at times, while at other times it is less effective (cf. the idiom "run around like a chicken with its head cut off"). We are svelte and strong because
we are never allowed to be fully satisfied. Likewise it may be that we become humble,
and not hubristic, for the same reason. Hence, ethical systems that invert Scheler's pyramid and place hedonism and gluttony at the highest level will clearly not be very conducive to an ethos of humility (cf. Isaiah 22:13, which contrasts with 腹八分目). This is not a path that is
easily followed, so it requires significant extrinsic support if one is to
persist and not deviate from its adherence. In the mind all things are possible. It is only once you try to do them that you discover the supreme resistance with which the world responds to your efforts. It is only in such exertions that we discover our humility. Being inclined toward hubris and ego gratification, we may find it preferable to remain within the confines of the mind and nurse our illusions of omnipotence. But being inclined to humility, one must escape from that prison.
Monsters teach us that nothing can be held onto forever, despite the best attempts of the grasping left hemisphere to do so. Today we hoard belongings, memories, money, knowledge, and chase after new highs and experiences, ticking these off a bucket list. “He (or she) who dies with the most wins.” That is the ethos of power, control, greed, hubris, and projecting our legacy beyond the grave. Donna Haraway famously wrote "we have never been human", an adaptation of Latour's "we have never been modern". But still more fundamentally, we have never escaped limitation. The conceit is that somehow we have. We cannot let go of that which we never had, but we can give up the deluded belief that we, or anyone else, were ever able to hold onto anything to begin with. Letting go implies the choice is ours. But history tells us that letting go wasn't always our choice. It certainly wasn't our choice before ecological release. (Imagine what the prey of some of the most fearsome predators must consider each day.) Monsters made learning humility de rigueur for survival. (Ecclesiastes 9:11 says "The race doesn't go to the swift, nor the battle to the strong.") Should we thank them for liberating us from delusion? Because that in turn, ironically, makes it easier to live the life we are given.
In The Master and His Emissary, McGilchrist cites research which shows that people with "right-brain deficit disorder... act fearless because they overlook the dangers inherent in the situation". And in The Matter with Things he notes that certain forms of parasitic infection can cause animals to "lose their fear" of predators the parasite must be transmitted to in order to reproduce. "Not to be astonished is not to be truly alive... to be filled with a healthful fear and awe; fear in the sense of reverence, not timidity.” The Master and His Emissary again: Plato “thought that theios phobos (sacred fear) was so profoundly moving and life-altering that the arts, which could summon it up, ought to be under strict censorship to preserve public order.” What is not a part of this? The paranoia, suspicion, and mistrust associated with schizophrenia. In a subsection titled "The Uncanny" within The Master and His Emissary, McGilchrist refers to the highly relevant work of Terry Castle. The uncanny can and should be distinguished as separate:
“Terry Castle explores the elements of phantasmagoria, grotesquerie, carnivalesque travesty, hallucinatory reveries, paranoia, and nightmarish fantasy which accompanied Enlightenment. There is an important common element to the classic loci of the uncanny. Citing Freud's famous essay of 1919, ‘The “Uncanny"’, Castle refers to: "doubles, dancing dolls and automata, waxwork figures, alter egos, and ‘mirror selves’, spectral emanations, detached body parts (‘a severed head, a hand cut off at the wrist, feet that dance by themselves’), the ghastly fantasy of being buried alive, omens, precognition, déjà vu..." I would argue that these phenomena are related to the experiences of subjects with schizophrenia – living things experienced as mechanisms, or as simulacra of living beings, the living body become an assemblage of apparently independently moving fragments, the self losing its intuitive ipseity, no longer self-evidently unique, but possibly copied, reproduced, or subtly altered; and that, accordingly, the phenomena exemplify the disengaged workings of the left hemisphere, attempting to make sense in its own terms of what comes to it from the right hemisphere, from which it has become alienated.”
Shaun Chamberlin recently facilitated a discussion with McGilchrist as part of the "Surviving the Future" online course. Shaun's background has included work on the "Dark Mountain Project" and "Dark Optimism", the name of which suggests a sort of coincidentia oppositorum aspect. During their talk Iain McGilchrist said "We've come to a point where we depend on machines for a whole host of reasons. One is that some of the problems that we've got ourselves into are so technical we will need machines to help get out of them, and another is that we have systematically de-skilled ourselves and blunted our senses, blunted our intuitions, and made ourselves literally stupider than our ancestors were by relying on machines to the extent that we have. So if machines go down we're more or less hopeless. I mean we're like a newborn infant. We have no way of sustaining ourselves. We've gotten ourselves into a mess. I'm not holding myself up here as any kind of paragon. Like everyone else, I love the fact that I can rely on machines to do things, but I think that therein lies the problem. We have moved ourselves away from the immediacy of contact with the material world. The more we rely on machines, the less we're actually simply touching things, feeling the breath of the outside air on us, looking at things, smelling things, being with things. There are certain kinds of work where one works with one's hands and with one's whole body which I think are particularly fulfilling."
Chamberlin responded "My friend Mark, for much that reason, has given up on electricity. One of the things that he really focuses on is how the dominant culture is so obsessed with comfort and how we can make ourselves more comfortable. He doesn't ask himself "How can I make myself more comfortable?" He asks himself "What would make me feel more alive?" or "What might be a more beautiful path?" McGilchrist replied: "This takes us to an important question, which is "What is our life for?" If it's only a matter of acquisition of things, then obviously one of the first things one wants to acquire is comfort, to exert oneself less. But it's actually in exerting oneself that one becomes more alive, not only physically, but also exerting oneself morally and intellectually." McGilchrist isn't a Luddite or primitivist, but he does recognize the devil's bargain we seem to have made. Relatedly, Brad Stulberg wrote, "One of the main reasons people pursue education, financial security, and solid employment is to create comfortable lives. But for some, this can begin to feel like too much of a good thing." According to Dave Proctor, a participant in "Big Dog's Backyard Ultra", one of the toughest endurance races around: "We live in a perfect world where you can go to a grocery store with 20,000 food items. And we're going to complain about what's hard? I want to go to a place where I strip everything away. That's the moment when you find out most about yourself." Proctor is seeking a kind of transcendence through extreme physical exertion. That seems to be the appeal of extreme endurance sports for many people. But more generally, he's in pursuit of experiencing life, raw and unvarnished.
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| 'Scary Wolves' by Ramona Kaulitzki |
"I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path." ― Frank Herbert, Dune
"Fly, you fools!" ― Gandalf (Tolkien)
"Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise." (Proverbs 6:6) "Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth." (Matthew 5:5)
Consider the Argentine ant, Linepithema humile, whose name literally means “humble” or “weak.” (About this ant was written a paper titled "The global expansion of a single ant supercolony.") Ants can be voracious predators, but they also have many predators of their own to look out for... The "ecology of fear" is a conceptual framework describing predator-prey relationships and the psychological impact that predator-induced stress experienced by animals has on populations and ecosystems. In "Fear of the human super predator far exceeds the fear of large carnivores", Clinchy et al. write that it "has been the subject of ever more research since this phrase was coined in the late 1990s, and numerous experiments have tested the reactions of prey to predator cues of every kind: auditory, visual, and olfactory. Audio playbacks provide the most reliable and readily interpretable means of testing the reactions of free-living wildlife to predator cues, and a 2014 review identified 180 such experiments on everything from toads to elephants."
The "landscape of fear" model derives to some extent from the ecology of fear. It asserts that the behaviour of animals that are preyed upon is shaped by psychological maps of their geographical surroundings which accounts for the risk of predation in certain areas. Or as Ed Yong put it, sounds and smells create a “landscape of fear” where "the fear of death can shape the behavior of animals more than death itself". This can produce several different kinds of effects. Oswald Schmitz wrote that “sit-and-wait ambush predators cause largely behavioral responses in their prey because prey species respond strongly to persistent point-source clues of predator presence.” This matched with his findings from earlier studies of web spiders that lurked in the grass, waiting to ambush the grasshoppers and thus scaring them into the forbs for refuge. In contrast, “widely roaming, actively hunting predators may reduce prey density, but they produce highly variable predation risk cues and are thus unlikely to cause chronic behavioral responses in their prey.” So for example, mountain lions ambush prey from specific locations like steep, rocky cliffs. Prey learn to avoid the lions’ hunting spots. But wolves hunt all over the landscape, continually moving from place to place. As Matt Kauffman noted, “Elk can’t know where wolves are, so they don’t have this preemptive behavior of avoiding areas where wolves are going to attack them. Wolves are sort of everywhere, so for an elk they are nowhere.”
How has this changed for humans? We have essentially removed ourselves from the ecology of fear. Substantially, our fear is either nonconsentually inflicted upon each other, or sought out in controlled amounts in the form of stimulating entertainment and activities. In 1979 Yi-Fu Tuan wrote Landscapes of Fear. Can his work be incorporated with that of McGilchrist to help uncover the changing ecology of fear for anthropos, how this in turn might affect our cultural psychology, and what (if anything) we can do in response to these changes? For example, escapism into hedonic pursuits (such as supernormal stimuli) may be characterized as a dysregulated response. We are selectively ignoring long term costs, perhaps not only because there are no immediate consequences, but also because the ecologically evolved contexts associated with danger, and the cultural mythos that has grown up around these, no longer accompanies contemporary sources of risk, and so we fail to respond with appropriate respect to novel sources of danger. We have, in other words, removed the old monsters and preemptively declared ourselves free to indulge in whatever we like, however new monsters have replaced the old ones, and we have failed to recognize this. So we need to understand, attend to, and appropriately appreciate a new "ecology of fear". We need a new ecology of theios phobos in response to the external limits that we ignore at our peril.
"While the left hemisphere facilitates acquiring material possessions, the right hemisphere comprehends the bigger picture, including awareness of surroundings and relationships... the appreciation for nuances beyond human control. This imbalance, favouring left hemisphere dominance, leads to a lack of humility and awareness of our limitations..." (McGilchrist, 2024) And that's also important given that "happiness actually comes from a sense of.. partly humility about what a human being can know and be." (McGilchrist, 2022)
What can be said about other contemporary external limitations, such as climate change? Do lessons from trophic interactions (such as predation) translate to the context of mitigation and adaptation, or RAD (resist, accept, direct) management frameworks? After all, behavioral responses can mitigate predation pressure, and animals can also make physiological adaptations to survive extreme conditions. Recall that the paradigm here is one of humility before forces we can never completely harness. So our ability to reduce negative effects by any means is intrinsically limited. The monsters are always there; the dark forest is everywhere. In this context, survival is not so much about preferentially choosing one approach over another as realizing that, given our inherent vulnerabilities and limitations, and our contemporary psychological disposition to ignore the same (LH capture), all of these possible responses may be harder to implement than we currently appreciate. So the real challenge of climate change is to see the monster for that which it is, a threat that is more than capable of exacting a terrible toll, one to be measured in lives lost prematurely.
An ecology of fear may be understood as a specific example of a broader idea described by psychologist Kurt Lewin, who had affordances and the adjacent possible in mind when he wrote "Even when from the standpoint of the physicist the environment is identical or nearly identical for a child and or an adult, the psychological situation can be fundamentally different." He was describing what became known as "psychological field theory". Lewin argued that where you are, who’s around you, the time of day, and your recent actions can form a constellation of forces, illuminating possible affordances that influence our behavior. We achieve situational control and sustain good behaviors not through willpower, but by finding ways to take willpower out of the equation by restructuring our environment and editing/shaping a complex set of networked affordances. Similar approaches might include Pietro Michelucci's "heterogeneous multi-agent distributed information processing systems" (Hcomp), N. Katherine Hayles' "cognitive assemblages", Alex Pentland's "computational social science", Hai Zhuge's "Cyber Physical Social Systems (CPSS), Jennifer Gabrys' "environmentality", and Jane McGonigal's "gamification" (with some reservations). And if we broaden our conceptual scope further still, it's arguable that all organized social structures and institutions (whether religion, mutual support groups, games, or social media) involve similar processes. But the question is really whether we can "achieve situational control" or not, and why recognizing our limitations in this regard is critical to understanding the evolutionary psychology of humility.
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| Stargazer (Will Soo) |
“The Ethiops say that their gods are flat-nosed and black, while the Thracians say that theirs have blue eyes and red hair. Yet if cattle or horses or lions had hands and could draw, and could sculpt like men, then the horses would draw their gods like horses, and cattle like cattle; and each they would shape bodies of gods in the likeness, each kind, of their own.” ― Xenophanes
"This human form is limiting." ― Anonymous
When we become our own monsters, we are "left hemisphere monsters".
Whereas the megafauna were not; those ancient beasts were in balance
with the paleolithic ecosystems they lived within. They did not share
any of our psychological pathologies, though we did share a distant common ancestor. When we become our own monsters,
we normalize abusive relationships and social systems, destroying
ourselves and our communities. The billionaire "doomsday bunkers" in vogue among super-rich "preppers" today are LH metastases of RH intuitions. Dictators deceptively promise protection
and liberation, but only seek their own benefit and use legal systems as
a tool toward that end. In a conversation with Ameer Shaheed, McGilchrist noted that “narcissistic and psychopathic, as well as probably borderline personalities (cluster B spectrum, the so-called 'dark triad'), can be enormously manipulative and deceptive. These people play an undue role in forming our society. They are effectively predators and they tend to prey on individuals from other categories (cluster C spectrum). There are far too many such people in positions of power today. Perhaps there always have been. And that's one of the problems about having systems of power. We can't trust them to mold our futures. They will always present something which is a disaster as something for our benefit.” When we lose a sensitive awareness to the deception and misdirection of monsters, of any kind, we more easily fall into their traps and snares.
This is in sharp contrast to the evolutionary context that Ehrenriech was describing, the context that had prevented us from having too much vain pride for millenia. The monstrous and imposing megafauna were legitimate, ecologically evolved sources of power, and they had something of the "sense of the sacred" about them. The difference is how power is acquired, how it is maintained, and to what ends it serves. Megafauna deserved our respect. People respect sources of power, even if this is only by necessity. But if we respect dictators, our modern LH monsters, and think that these are necessary, then we may never escape LH capture. Megafauna were a force of nature in a way that political and corporate monsters are not. In his article "What is it like to be a man?" Phil Christman wrote that 'protection' is central to the concept of masculinity, but this basic value has become twisted and deformed in a contemporary culture where the answer to the question "How does one actually protect?" is no longer as straightforward as the collective mythology we've inherited might suggest it should be. And as Pankaj Mishra pointed out, "The sad reality is that, by and large, the gravest forms of risk men face today are not the sort of threats that can be diffused with muscle strength... Risk management in the modern world takes brains, not brawn."
Veritasium (Derek Muller) made a short video about the most famous problem in game theory, the prisoner’s dilemma. He shows that in Robert Axelrod's computer simulation the most successful strategies were "nice" ones, like "tit for tat". And an additional small amount of generosity can potentially improve them still more. So being nice and forgiving, and clear when retaliation is called for, is consistently better than using a "nasty" strategy. Initially, the game assumes perfect information is available to all players after each round. But if players can be deceived for multiple rounds without their knowledge of the deception, this might benefit the "nasty" players. And without swift retaliation, nasty wins. So asymmetries in both information and power become a major concern, and significant resources are invested to overcome these. Since such asymmetries can never be completely eliminated, "nasty" players will always exist, or at least players who will on occasion opportunistically adopt nasty strategies. Geoffrey Hinton was quoted in a recent paper on AI deception: “If [artificial intellience] gets to be much smarter than us, it will be very good at manipulation because it would have learned that from us. And there are very few examples of a more intelligent thing being controlled by a less intelligent thing.” Now add to this what we know about game theory, where deception can become a valuable tool for "nasty" players. The conclusion that suggests itself is that we may be creating a highly intelligent and manipulative agent, effectively our own worst enemy, and this development seems to have been enabled by our own naiveté and blindness concerning the phenomenology of the human mind.
In general, most of the discourse on AI is confused. The saner voices seem to realize that it's not really the technology that's the problem so much as who is using it, and to what ends it is put. But technologies do come with biases. So our approach to AI design is critical. Here's a case in point: David Brin noted that the global financial market requires all their AI systems to be “predatory, parasitical, insatiable, amoral, and secretive”. Furthermore, given ‘affective computing’, such systems could psychologically manipulate anyone by feigning empathic human nature (as the AI deception paper points out). This shortsighted approach to design leads to AI agents that focus on winning without a proper appreciation for real constraints. A less pursued pathway (because it is harder and the initial payoff isn't as great) is to develop AI with an appreciation for failure modes that can result from the actual constraints we encounter. While it may be possible to find a (quantitative) equivalence relationship between these two design approaches (focused on either winning or losing), one is not simply an inverse of the other. There are usually many more pathways to failure than there are to success, so this shift in attention generates corresponding higher level (qualitative) phenomenologies that are distinct. And those then enactively feed back into the system, which produces very real material consequences. To borrow a biological analogy, for an organism to be capable of both predation and predator detection, these two very different forms of attention must be deployed simultaneously. If only one of these is used, it could lead to the sort of unbalanced results the researchers found. And in an organism that could lead to an early death. Given our current social and economic conditions, it seems that insufficient resources are being invested to establish a healthier dynamic. Some of the prevailing approaches to AI development, such as Friston's Active Inference Framework, while proficient at many of the lower level processes, appear largely blind to these higher level considerations.
To the extent we can speak of "attractors" we may also speak of "repellers", and contrast "landscapes of eros" and supernormal stimuli, characterized by food, shelter, and reproductive opportunities, with "landscapes of phobos", characterized by threats to, and loss of, the same. Such landscapes clearly overlap the same geographical space. For example in a marine environment the sounds of snapping shrimp may attract reef organisms to colonize a patch of seafloor, or freshwater turtles coordinating their emergence from the nest (see Karen Bakker), while the sounds of killer whales may cause great white sharks in the region to flee in terror. These semiotic landscapes, and how they are connected to processes such as "trophic cascades" where even monsters have monsters, have been the focus of work by biosemioticians like Yogi Hendlin and others.
Just as attractors may be revered and sacred, so too I think repellers are held in awe. The difference isn't always clear, as they can be united in a single being. Nietzsche famously wrote "He who fights with monsters should see to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you." Many contemplative religious traditions, in a similar vein of thought, urge practitioners to maintain an awareness of their "imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete" nature. These can be deeply troubling thoughts for children. But at some point each of us must face our mortality. It can be a shocking realization, but necessary for healthy psychological development (and approach-avoidance conflict). This, I think, is "theios phobos", which intersects with Hoffmeyer's notion of a semiotic web. It is a component of that web, and one that we have lately neglected. Instead of focusing on the rhetoric of self-restraint or positive goal achievement, this direct confrontation with reality can shock us, like the Zen katsu, out of our apathetic complacency. Zen masters sometimes use a loud shout to push a disciple beyond the web of discursive and analytical thought. As Linji said, "sometimes a shout is like the golden-haired lion crouching on the ground," lying in wait for its prey, a symbol of awesome strength and power. In Ch'an and Zen Teaching, Charles Luk explained that "all wild beasts are scared of the lion... likewise, Lin Chi's shout 'scared away' all perverted views held by his disciples."
The method of Katsu might be contrasted with something Denise Levertov wrote: "I do not believe that a violent imitation of the horrors of our times is the concern of poetry. Horrors are taken for granted. Disorder is ordinary. People in general take more and more “in their stride” — the hides grow thicker. I long for poems of an inner harmony in utter contrast to the chaos in which they exist. Insofar as poetry has a social function it is to awaken sleepers by other means than shock." Shock alone does not wake us up, it is the awareness of our limitations that does. So while a shock may help us to see these limitations, perhaps their realization only crystallizes when we are allowed a moment of quiet reflection. This is what Kepler aimed to do with his book "The Dream", where the awesome forces within the solar system, and our limited capacity to comprehend them, were simultaneously revealed through the poetics of science, aimed at awakening.
In the film Everything Everywhere All at Once, the antihero Joy, having escaped embodied limitations, might be a kind of accidental LH monster. Having been pushed by Evelyn to become unlimited, and inhabit all multiverses simultaneously (which George Gillett, taking inspiration from Wendell Berry's "Why I Am not Going To Buy A Computer", suggests may metaphorically represent the virtual environments of the Internet generation) life is drained of meaning for Joy. Meanwhile, when "you are living your worst you", or in other words are extremely limited by comparison, you see meaning in the smallest acts of kindness. Eventually the lead characters "champion acceptance rather than limitless possibility, and belonging rather than unrestrained freedom. They find stability in unpredictability, and find meaning in an imperfect world." In the same way, the landscape of fear might remind us of our limitations and thereby awaken us to meaning when we are able to psychologically integrate these limitations rather than deny or try to escape them. By comparison, aspiring to have godlike powers for ourselves or others can drive us first to alienation and eventually to nihilism. Which isn't to say we shouldn't discriminate between which limitations are legitimate and which limitations are themselves illusory. The film Nyad is an excellent example of that latter category, and how it can be healthy to push ourselves past the limitations that only exist in our minds, or by convention, and do not exist in reality, while still recognizing the monsters, in this case sharks, jellyfish (not telescopefish), and vagaries of the weather, that must be respected along the way.
The Dark Forest
"A lack of fear leads to extinction. If your ancestors had followed the fearless, you would not exist. Humanity must learn to fear again." ― Trisolarans, Three Body Problem (season 1, episode 3)
"Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst / Das Rettende auch" (‘Where there is danger, that which will save us also grows’) ― Friedrich Hölderlin
"Πόλεμος πάντων μὲν πατήρ ἐστι πάντων δὲ βασιλεύς, καὶ τοὺς μὲν θεοὺς ἔδειξε τοὺς δὲ ἀνθρώπους, τοὺς μὲν δούλους ἐποίησε τοὺς δὲ ἐλευθέρους" ― Heraclitus
Robin Hanson, Anders Sandberg and Joscha Bach on The Three Body Problem: “Hunter gatherer groups are strongly constrained by their material circumstance. Once you become an Agricultural, Bronze Age, Iron Age, Industrial, and Post-Industrial civilization you have fewer constraints. Right now we're out of the Malthusian trap, and we can create all sorts of crazy ideas and views of the world. So we have to put some constraints about how resources are used if we want to maintain a cohesive society. We are all in this together. What is the prospect for getting people on Earth to see themselves as part of a civilization that lasts over a long time, and care about the trajectory of that? This is bigger than our nationality. It might even be that we don't regard Western Civilization and Chinese civilization as separate. We're now part of the same big global whatever. Call that ‘metacivilization’. But we seem to lack ways to connect people emotionally about that.
Liu Cixin’s “The Three Body Problem” succeeds somewhat in getting viewers or readers to identify with the Earth as a whole, with the long scope of Earth history, and with each other, via the mechanism of an alien threat that makes any of our disagreements appear trivial by comparison. Do we have other emotionally compelling approaches other than making up aliens and getting people scared of them? If we found that there was a planet killing asteroid that was going to whack us in 400 years I presume that we would come together well enough to stop that. But there aren't many natural threats in terms of other agents in the environment other than humans that we have to deal with on a day-to-day basis (maybe a spider, or a house fly, or a snake at most). We don't viscerally feel that there could be other agents out there that are very different from us, that have very different goals. But our ancestors may have. These sorts of things don't really present themselves as problems as much as they did in the past. And that is worth serious consideration.
The Three Body Problem gives you a reason not only to think of Earth as one, but also to think on a time scale of many centuries, and that's hard to do. If you can get people worried about global warming, then you might get them thinking about several centuries, but otherwise they just don't think about it. And even that is a weaker motivation than many think. Fear is a story about how we united, but of course it's also a classic trick of bad political leaders." Damien Walter has a critique of The Three Body Problem that warns about the threat of 'postmodern authoritarianism' and the use of the novel’s symbolism to justify such politics. That said, I think his prescription for what to do about this situation is maybe a bit naive. Powerful symbolism can be easily subverted and reimagined, and that may in fact be the case here.
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| Urutau (photo: Alessandro Abdala) |
"Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" — Mary Oliver
"Even death, which on an individual level is a supreme disvalue that brings an end to sentience and the actualization of values by the individual who succumbs to it, has value for the species, community, and, it has been argued, even for the individual." — Sanford Drob, Why Existence?
“For a good apple pie you need both tart apples and honey, both sourness and sweetness, not just apples that are bland.” — Iain McGilchrist (2021)
Any culture that recalls the early evolutionary context in which its phenomenology had its origin may preserve it through the prevailing folklore, ethos, and aesthetics, the song and dance. Various games and sports recapitulate trophic interactions (ie. sharks and minnows) and valorize the ability to quickly outwit and outmaneuver opposing players. The industry that has grown up around it with slogans like "just do it" reflect this as well (contrast with "analysis paralysis"). The Pamplona running of the bulls is famous the world over. As for songs, in his now timeless "Teddy Bears Picnic", Bing Crosby combined our fascination for bears with a sense of eerie otherness. We simultaneously love and fear them (a common aspect of our relationship to the monstrous). I remember how Jeff Verge described bears and the human imagination following his encounter in 2022, as an "ancient bond", a "spiritual connection", a "primordial eternity" in "shamanic union" among the grandeur of "stone cathedrals".
We might conceive of a spectrum of "astonishing agency" from that which exhibits union (reverence and humility, theios phobos) to that which exhibits division (fragmented, uncanny, delusional). Tolkien incorporated Norse folklore into modern classics of fantasy literature (as well as the disembodied Eye of Sauron), Lovecraft captured the sense of dread one feels when straying too far from the familiar in his Cthulhu Mythos, Edward Gorey's illustrations, like gargoyles adorning cathedrals, allowed imagination to take over, as Theodor Kittelsen's images of trolls (Skogtroll, 1906) did a generation before, and Erwin Chargaff wrote poetically of the “fertile night”. Some animals with raptorial appendages, such as the Amblypygi, or Phyllocrania paradoxa the ghost mantis, appear fantastic enough already, as does "ave fantasma". Another alternate title for this post is “Lion, and Tigers, and Bears, Oh my!” In C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia, the lion Aslan is an allegorical portrayal of the divine, much like Miyazaki's fully embodied Forest Spirit and 神獣 enchant us with magical realism. The Noh plays of Japan terrify audiences with hannya masks as much as the Godzilla franchise terrifies us in theatres. The Japanese idiom 弱肉強食 means "the weak are meat the strong do eat." Which of these invoke greater union, which invoke division?
In the film Rebel Moon the robot character JC-1435 (Jimmy) has shades of Hayao Miyazaki’s magical realism (itself derived from Japanese animism). Miyazaki's film Laputa: Castle in the Sky depicts Laputian robots as high-tech gardeners in deserted gardens. Jimmy ends up running into the woods to commune with nature after a violent confrontation. It's a metaphorical merger of the left hemisphere (his robotic form) and the right hemisphere (an emotional attachment to life, values, and a budding ecological awareness), a theme the film plays with less overtly in the contrast between primitive agrarianism and techno-despotism.
The modern entertainment industry has served up clever monster films like the Aliens, Predator, and Tremors franchises, and portrayed archetypal creatures such as the gmork of Die unendliche Geschichte. There is a real desire to hear and tell scary stories. The rugged primitivist or survivalist is an enduring aesthetic, more recently promoted in film and media by figures like Paul Hogan (Crocodile Dundee films) and Luke Nichols (Outdoor Boys channel). These aesthetics and motifs are worked and reworked to remind us not to become too proud, confident, and certain about anything. As Ehrenreich wrote of the early humans, "they knew they were meat, and they also seemed to know that they knew they were meat – meat that could think. And that, if you think about it long enough, is almost funny." ...How much emphasis we lay on "almost" is going to depend on the context, of course. In the film The Matrix, the character Morpheus talks about understanding the cause, the source of constraints, and not just remain perpetually stuck in crisis management addressing symptoms. "When you're ready, you won't have to", he says. One possible takeaway from this is that the meta-awareness of monsters, whose existence we've generally forgotten or can no longer see, has the capacity to enhance our overall evolutionary fitness. Recall the psalmist: "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death..."
We've only begun to explore the art, music, and practices of a culture that dances with monsters. It's not just the music of Bing Crosby, Luke Combs (or Moniker's Ancient Stones), or the books of Tolkien and Maurice Sendak, or the Katsu of Zen, but also the art and traditions that we don't normally think of as addressing these themes, and yet somehow do anyway. What does yoga have to do with any of this, for example? Why might music, dancing, and mythic narratives mesmerize monsters, at least just long enough for us to live to see another day? Have we forgotten these metaphorical skills for navigating the approach-avoidance landscape of reality, a landscape that the hemisphere hypothesis itself offers a process-relational way of talking about? As the character Ian Malcolm says in Jurassic Park, “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” (Cue the Jurassic Park film score.) I would note that it was only after the dinosaurs were brought back did this even cross their mind. But whether or not they were brought back may be less important than whether or not the lesson is learned, and humans have shown via cultural evolution that we can learn vicariously from the past experiences of others.
I remember seeing the 1980 TV adaptation of James Clavell's Shogun,
and despite having a copy of the book, I never read it. Now a new (and
better) adaptation is on Netflix. I've seen the first few episodes and
one of my first thoughts is that perhaps the cultural psychology of
Japan and early Europeans isn't so different after all. There's a lot of
sensational depictions of honor and seppuku in Japan, and the overall
serious nature of social interactions, but I suspect that any culture
associated with a precarious existence would be equally serious, if only
by necessity. The fact that contemporary Western society is no longer
as precarious as it once was is perhaps why we are so shocked when we
see that, not too long ago, others have been or even might still be so
serious. Well, it's an idea anyway, and suggests we are not so different
after all, if placed in a similar situation. Is this "seriousness" that
emerges from having a precarious existence the true disposition of
theios phobos? How often am I not serious enough?
In the Hobbes classical view of the state of nature, organisms are in conflict with one another. Others have proposed that cooperation is the default starting point, and the challenge is to explain deviations or breakdowns from cooperation, rather than the other way around. But conflict or cooperation may be a false dichotomy. Life may not be exactly a hero's journey. Our journey may be to significant extent shaped by the need to realize our radical vulnerability to other agents in our environment (regardless of the default position), and simply avoiding the most menacing of them at all costs. In Life’s Hidden Resources for Learning (published in Arran Gare's journal Cosmos and History in 2008), Philip Henshaw argues that "resourceful avoidance of conflict is the dominant behavior of stable natural systems", that this has been the engine of evolution, and that avoidance can involve both questioning and redefining problems to allow us to better avoid a head-on confrontation, while never completely eliminating the (dis)advantages of our finite natures. As discussed, biologically evolved agents such as ourselves are incentivized to succeed and avoid failing, and this requires the deployment of asymmetric forms of attention. Asymmetric precisely because of the qualitative differences between the "pathways to success" versus the "pathways to failure" relative to the agency of the organism. If agents disproportionately attend to the "pathways to success", then they risk being blind to the more numerous "pathways to fail modes". One might recall that it is the apparent failure of life to permeate the cosmos (the "great silence") that has inspired numerous explanations including a "dark forest" (cf. dark ecology, dark mountain, dark optimism) and "great filter", two paradigms that make failure modes increasingly likely.
Causality "pulls" us ever toward the future. As John Deely wrote "the future beckons the present", or as Rosen said, models pull "the future into the present". The theoretical neuroscientist Karl Friston wrote that "beliefs about outcomes in the distal future influence beliefs about states in the proximal future and present. That these beliefs then drive policy selection suggests that, under the generalised free energy formulation, (beliefs about) the future can indeed cause the past." And so while values pulls us ever forward, the fear and anticipation of impending constraints that threaten their fragile realization pulls and pushes us to act as well.
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| Lair of the Sea Serpent, Elihu Vedder |
To restate what is probably the thesis behind the metaphor here, in an evolutionary context, humility means giving up the deluded belief that we, or anyone else, were ever able to hold onto anything to begin with. And furthermore, it involves realizing that whatever we do manage to hold onto can easily be taken from us, regardless of whether we choose to let it go or not. In short, we (the subject) never had it (the object), and moreover, it cannot be had by us. The conceit or delusion is that we do, or that we can. Disclosing the deception here is "thinking against thinking" (Heidegger), it is the realization of true humility, of the vicarity of our "one wild and precious life", to quote Mary Oliver's poem, The Summer Day. All is incomplete and impermanent, and all the more (not less) beautiful and precious because of this. We should value and listen to those messengers who are bringing this to our attention. And I believe that some of them are speaking to us from deep time through artistic expression, as those paintings preserved on the walls of Chauvet Cave, and many others, have for millennia.
The combination of environmental conditions capable of both conferring affordances and imposing limitations (trophic interactions that produce approach-avoidance landscapes), with an interpretive lens capable of contextualizing our relationship to these (neuropsychology of the hemisphere hypothesis), is critical to the balance of hubris and humility. The relationship between our minds and the predators and prey, external threats and resources, etc. within our environments produces the complex neurology, and consequences of that neurology, which we observe today. Constraint and interpretation needed to occur together in embodied forms to get us to where we are now. Having eliminated or domesticated the predators and tamed or ignored the remaining threats, such that all has become to us merely prey and resource, we easily become blind to the potential of higher constraints, risk forgetting the lessons they once taught, forget our humility, cease to be antifragile, and ultimately we are setting ourselves up for a much deeper and longer lasting collapse. So whether or not we can recover a sense of humility, of theios phobos to better sense the terrain of life, may have existential implications.Belonging to a cohesive social group, belonging in the natural world, and belonging in the spiritual world are the three things that make us fully human and fulfilled, per McGilchrist. And so these are the areas in which we must recover our humility. One might become something of a Walter Mitty, adopt some of the arts and customs of those who embody this best (Zak Stein's axiological design for theios phobos), tend to the fermentation of one's food, and recount the old myths (while leaning against a shillelah). ...We have never left the forest's edge, and the startling agencies that shaped our evolving psychology are still with us. This is the evolutionary context in which our sense of the sacred developed. How these sacred agencies are viewed, according to our bihemispheric psychology, may be a key implication of McGilchrist's hypothesis. He concluded his Epilogue with reference to the unique brand of crypto(zoological)-theology he developed: “It is our duty to do the more difficult thing: to find out the core of wisdom in [what cultures wiser than ours were trying to express by speaking of God].” Ehrenreich is pointing to the loci of this in the raw powers of implicit nature. And animistic cultures, such as those of contemporary Japan (in folklore, art, and cinema), as well as those who find their influence overwhelmed by the zeitgeist of our era (indigenous traditions both East and West) express these aspects well. I believe this is the evolutionary context in which our sense of the sacred developed, a topic McGilchrist seems to have left under explored within his work.
Antifragile
In The Tragic Mind, Robert D. Kaplan wrote: “While civilization is the culmination of our struggle to realize our humanity and to rid ourselves of our propensity for violence and the iron grip of fate, we can only achieve this by never losing sight of our origins. But that is only possible by deliberately cultivating insecurity, whose broad basis is a respect for chaos: something impossible unless one thinks tragically.” This is entirely consistent with the thesis being advanced here. Our origins, our insecurity, our humility... and chaos, at least insofar as this gestures to the unkown, and the uncontrollable, and therefore our limitations in the face of this.
McGilchrist writes about chaos in the context of ‘antifragile’ systems that have "inbuilt instability", what Kaplan might've called inbuilt insecurity, and exist on "just the right side of chaos". Perhaps our attention to, and responsiveness to insecurity, is seriousness, reverence, that sense of theios phobos. McGilchrist writes: “The so-called ‘edge of chaos’, where chaos and order are maximally present to one another, is the most fruitful condition of an open system, including the creative potential of the human brain. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb argues in his book Antifragile, a certain vulnerability is bound up with the potential to survive: the attempt to do away with it leads to extinction. However, these conjunctions of opposites are not expressive of symmetry, but of the complementarity of elements that are fundamentally asymmetrical.” He underlines this point: "by seeking to make a system less vulnerable, we succeed only in making it more so.” The implications for axiological design are apparent.
McGilchrist
quotes Stuart Kaufmann as further support: "genomic systems lie in the
ordered regime near the phase transition to chaos. Were such systems
deeply into the frozen ordered regime, they would be too rigid to
coordinate the complex sequence of genetic activities necessary for
development. Were they too far into the gaseous chaotic regime, they
would not be orderly enough. Networks in the regime near the edge of
chaos – this compromise between order and surprise – appear best able to
coordinate complex activities and best able to evolve as well.” Antifragility is important for physiological systems, and it's an idea that's popular with AI researchers for that reason. However McGilchrist is angling toward a sort of phenomenological antifragility with metaphysical foundations.
The edge of chaos. That's a metaphorically very rich line. I attended a graduation ceremony yesterday where JK Rowling was quoted: “It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all—in which case, you fail by default.” Failure is everywhere. It might be easier to forget this today, without imposing megafauna to humble us, living with relatively high levels of security (in the global north at least). Kaplan, Kaufmann, Taleb, McGilchrist, and of course Ehrenreich (among others) are right. We must never lose sight of our origins. I recently saw a video of baboons who needed to react instantly to an attack by a leopard. Was this what life might've been like for Australopithecus as well? Everything can change in a matter of seconds.
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| "There's always a bigger fish." - Qui-Gon |
"Tomorrow is promised to no one."
"伝道者は言う、空の空、空の空、いっさいは空である。" — Ecclesiastes
An alternate title for this article might be "The Three Body Solution: Iain McGilchrist and Evolutionary Psychology". Here the "three bodies" refers to the trophic interactions between a species, that which it predates upon, and that which predates upon it. Somewhat relatedly, Stanley Salthe introduced an independent notion of the triadic system, where there is a focus on the system as both 1) a whole above the levels below and 2) a part belonging to another level above, while not forgetting 3) the level of the structure itself in between. In a food chain/ pyramid, that which targets me with its left hemisphere I am scanning for with my right hemisphere, while with my left hemisphere I am targeting something else, and the chain goes on. In just this way, while our distant ancestor Australopithecus afarensis may have occupied something like "position C", and thus had very clear environmental pressure to exercise the capacities of both hemispheres, today we might say we are in "position A", at the top of the food chain (see illustration), from which we can manipulate everything else. So while we have a lot of positive reinforcement for a hyper-developed left hemisphere mode of attention, where is the negative feedback needed to develop the sense of humility associated with the right? The answer, I fear, is that there isn't a whole lot; our monsters have been either tamed or exterminated. A relatively fast ascent up a trophic cascade may have led to an inversion of hemispheric priority with dramatic consequences for cultural psychology.
It may be objected that, due to extreme social inequality, the majority of humans may more accurately identify more with the 'worm' in the diagram than the apex predator at the top. And indeed Barbara Ehrenreich, who also wrote Nickel and Dimed, would entirely agree with this. There are several possible responses to this objection. The first is that we can further develop this simple model to suggest that all humans might be represented as the metaphorical ‘cells’ within the body of the ‘big fish’ (apex predator), with some cells occupying a more privileged position relative to others, yet all are still part of the same body at the top of the trophic hierarchy relative to other animals, who are our evolutionary cousins after all. And because we are all collectively at the top despite these differences, many people today see themselves as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" (John Steinbeck), while others have bought into some version of the "prosperity gospel". In other words, despite our differences, we identify with the most privileged members of our tribe, a tribe that is also thoroughly captured by the left hemisphere. And lastly, even if some of us are not deluded in this way, we are nonetheless the unwilling victims of social structures that are designed by those with a (necessarily) limited understanding, and sustained by those who may be deluded and/or motivated to perpetuate economic bias.
All this follows from a comparatively rapid evolutionarily ascent up ecological trophic levels. It was a process in which humans displaced the former keystone species to become a new "hyperkeystone species". This was an ascent that was much too fast for us to achieve ecological, psychological, or cultural balance in the same manner in which other species have (to the extent such a comparison is valid). Why did humans ascend so quickly? That's been addressed by anthropologists like Joseph Henrich (his book "The Secret of Our Success" is great on this topic). Our relatively immature stage of development explains most of the features displayed. It also suggests the possibility for growth and maturity with greater awareness. Yet here we are today. So what happens next? Either greater fragmentation, or greater integration of right hemisphere qualities including greater recognition of our limitations and that which is easily neglected (the shadow aspects). Contrary to the optimism that is sometimes displayed by Michael Levin, we cannot be sure which is more likely. One might point out that 'cosmic teleology' favors our response to values, and so we should be optimistic. But there is no timetable according to which this plays out, and so I do not think we can rely upon it to prevent a disaster on any scale from occurring. The existential stakes remain high.
Our intuitions regarding responsibility were articulated by my friend Yogi Hendlin in "I Am a Fake Loop", a paper he wrote several years ago: "in sociology, the term "responsibilization" captures the buck-passing that corporations and other entities commit, displacing their responsibility as producers and marketers of unhealthy things and ideas and instead shaming overly-indulgent consumers." Relative to the influence of entities such as these, we are the worm. Another possible way that we are worms has been frequently mentioned by Daniel Schmachtenberger and occasionally Jonathan Rowson: We are all caught in multi-polar traps set by the "game theory monster" termed "Moloch". What this points to is the possibly counter-intuitive conclusion that, while humans are a hyperkeystone species, each individual human is not responsible for this state of affairs (culpable may be a more accurate term here). This is the "part-whole relationship" McGilchrist references. If all of us are collectively responsible but none of us are individually responsible, what do we do? I think we have to be able to see both the parts and the whole at the same time. For example, Elinor Ostrum saw social-ecological wholes, and a way to tame Moloch. But if all we see are parts, then maybe monsters like Moloch will remain undefeatable, and largely invisible to us.
Systems thinkers should be able to see the wider implications. But anyone who considers the multiple definitions of monster can see that there's a lot to consider here. Today few people may have a phobia of being ambushed by a leopard at night, but many of our distant ancestors perhaps did (and justifiably so). Nonetheless there do remain many other things that could still disrupt our sense of equanimity. The problem is that whereas the leopard was palpable, contemporary threats are often more complex and less tangible. The challenge is to learn to sense these as clearly as we might've sensed a leopard hiding in the grass, and recover that humble self awareness in relation to such threats. This is individually and culturally protective, and has many co-benefits.
Virtual reality is similar to the metaphor of a "hall of mirrors". It is a model within which all one can see is what the model itself permits one to see; it is a tool that is limited by the approximation of reality upon which it is based. It is not itself reality, and thus it is not capable of disclosing the full truth. If one were to imagine that virtuality is reality, then one would be deluded. Here I'm suggesting that a relatively fast ascent up trophic levels can decrease our sense of humility, and thus lead to an inversion of hemispheric priority, with dramatic consequences for cultural psychology. And in contemporary society we've seen the effects of the distorting influence that a rapid "rise to the top" can have on psychology. Elizabeth Spiers, a former editor at the New York Observer, famously described Jared Kushner, son-in-law and former advisor to President Donald Trump, as someone unable to empathize or understand other people's grief. Recall McGilchrist noting that "narcissistic and psychopathic personalities play an undue role in forming our society; they are effectively predators. There are far too many such people in positions of power, and that's one of the problems about having systems of power." Now we can put the picture together: a rapid rise up the power hierarchy (trophic level) correlates with LH capture, which in turn correlates with mistaking the map (virtual reality) for the terrain (reality), and hence we would expect that a society living under the influence of a LH insurrection would be living more within maps and models (simulations) than attending to the living terrain of life. One might mention all the other consequence of LH capture as well, but we are familiar with many of these already.
It's been noted that domestication can result in both decreased brain size and less fear of predators and environmental threats. Have humans domesticated themselves? There might be some equivocation between domestication and what may otherwise be simply the evolutionary effects of an increasingly complex culture and society. There are many variables to consider, some drive a reduction in brain volume, while others (like greater access to easily digested food) may promote an increase. A recent study of domesticated dogs showed that changes in brain volume can partially reverse, at least in some situations. The thesis I'm advancing here is a further development of the hemisphere hypothesis proposed by Iain McGilchrist, which states that each hemisphere provides us with a unique perspective on the world, and we are more likely to preferentially attend to one or the other perspective according to the situation in which we find ourselves. So if we find that we are living a precarious existence, and have good reason to believe we may die tomorrow if we aren't aware of our vulnerabilities (whether these are related to food, shelter, or predation), then we will want to pay attention to the perspective that reminds us of our limitations. If extant hunter/gathers must likewise live with a constant awareness of their vulnerabilities, then they likely benefit from the other protective qualities provided by the same perspective. In the artificially controlled environments produced by contemporary globalized Western culture, those situations are encountered with less regularity, the corresponding perspective is generally derogated, and thus the protective qualities associated with it are largely lacking.
The lyrics to "Enter Sandman" by Metallica run "Hush little baby, don't say a word. And never mind that noise you heard. It's just the beasts under your bed. In your closet, in your head." A hungry crying baby might attract predators and put everyone in serious danger. And so it might seem like a poor adaptation for survival. But studies show that the loud squawks of a hungry young pied babbler (Turdoides bicolor) in the Kalahari Desert can effectively blackmail the baby bird’s parents into feeding it pronto, before predators also hear their cries. So basically, the young babblers intentionally put themselves at risk to force their parents to pay attention to them and get them some grub. The fledglings would even move from the trees to the ground when driven by hunger. (See Amotz Zahavi and "signal selection".) ...And so, while sometimes monsters are a "multispecies assemblage" (in the metaphor of Bayo Akomolafe), at other times they are just the beasts hiding in the grass, waiting for a hungry baby that tragically miscalculated the devotion or resourcefulness of its parents. When Simon says we have two years to save the world (Simon Stiell), maybe the metaphor to reach for is those fledglings squawking on the ground. Simon says be afraid. And if you are among those with the power or resources to act, that might not be a bad idea right about now. Note: the strategy doesn't work if the predators can't be unwittingly enlisted as accomplices of the baby birds.
When one thinks of moments of peak experience, our best memories, surely these involved as Matthew Olzmann wrote in his poem "Letter to the Person Who Carved His Initials into the Oldest Living Longleaf Pine in North America", such things as standing "on the precipice of some wild valley". (In fact, this morning I dreamt of standing on the edge of Waipi‘o valley.) And, if prompted, most people would probably not conjure images of disembowelment by a fearsome predator, or seeing family members swept away by a sudden tsunami, or any such similar confrontation with the more fearsome and uncontrollably animistic side of nature, those aspects that civilization has sought to tame and subdue first. Surely nature doesn't need to actually kill us in order to be, as Olzmann wrote, "primordial and holy". But an awareness that we have not always been an exception to the same constraints and trophic interactions that dominate the lives of the other beings with whom we share the planet, that was at one time extremely important to us. Our daily concerns, and our awareness of our vulnerabilities, have changed dramatically since then with perhaps far reaching impacts. One might note here that the awareness of value, such as surveying miles of verdant forest, soft beaches, and azure sky and ocean while standing above a valley, and the awareness of disvalue, such as capture by some agency capable of ending our life, are not actually exclusive. Nor must the potential for disvalue be actualized to confer the proposed benefit, but it must be somehow psychologically salient. As I've suggested elsewhere, it may be that our capacity for appreciation of what others have called "positive value" is actually increased by, or indeed enabled by, an awareness of our vulnerability. Protection, love, and the ethics of care may all be intrinsic to a humble awareness of our vulnerability, a fear of being alone, and a corresponding empathic response for others who are vulnerable or alone. As Friedrich Hölderlin wrote, "The heart’s wave would never have risen up so beautifully in its cloud of spray, and become spirit, were it not for the grim old cliff of destiny standing in its way..." Love and fear of loss are somewhat inseparable. This is related to the sort of existentialist gravitas captured by concepts like mononoaware, the pathos of things, and dukkha, the unease of life, although the possibility of sudden death (especially when premeditated by a predator) can elicit a far more visceral and sobering reaction that is almost impossible to deny or rationalize away. ...What does it mean to be humble?
Throughout this article, my focus on humility has been anchored in that line from The Matter with Things: "Every animal, in order to survive, has to solve a conundrum: how to eat without being eaten." These two very different sorts of tasks require two very different hemispheres. "How to eat" correlates with the left hemisphere, and the vice of hubris, while "without being eaten" correlates with the right hemisphere, and the virtue of humility. The implication I'm drawing is this: to the degree we are aware of our vulnerability to those "astonishing agencies" who have the potential to harm us, to the same degree we are exercising the right hemisphere capacity for humility. (There is a corollary for the left hemisphere.) Now, is this a valid conclusion to draw? I am not sure. These may be only correlational relationships, not causal, just tendencies that involve more than a little contextual nuance. But I've found enough support from others, such as Ehrenreich, to suggest this has at least some merit. And of course McGilchirst mentions humility so often in his interviews it's impossible to ignore its significance to him:
Nate Hagens: "If you could wave a magic wand, what is one thing that you would do to improve human and planetary futures?
McGilchrist: "I think bringing back into our lives those things that I talked about, humility and awe, if people could experience those things on a daily basis. As William James said, ignorance is an ocean, what we know is just a drop. That's how we are. If we had that sense before the world, if we had the sense of awe and wonder in it, we would behave well to it and to one another in that aspect of love that I've described. That's all I can say."
McGilchrist: "If we adopt a different, less arrogant, less hubristic attitude to the world, if we incorporate some sense of the limitations as to what we know and can do, if we have some humility, then we might rekindle in ourselves a sense of awe and wonder before what is still there in this beautiful world, and with it bring some compassion to our relations with other people."
Strife is unavoidable regardless of whether we want it or not. We are limited by nature - incomplete, impermanent, and imperfect (wabi-sabi). We are fallible (CS Peirce). And without an appreciation of our fallibility and acceptance of our imperfection we cannot have moments of awe, nor do I think we could really experience love. Humility has always been personally relevant to me, as it is relevant to anyone raised within a religious context. Jesus, for example, is above all else a figure who humbles himself. In particular, the Sermon on the Mount has the lines "Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth." (Matthew 5:5). Later I became familiar with the philosophies of the Far East (India, China, and Japan) whose esoteric teachings eschew the hubris of the left hemisphere, in so many words. In all wisdom traditions humility is a common refrain, whose foundations are only expanded by McGilchrist's work in neuroscience and evolutionary psychology.
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| Medea hypothesis |
• During Ask Iain Q&A #9 (2021) Susan asked: "Is there a reason you don’t attribute more of the diminishment of the right hemisphere’s influence on us to the absence of human predators? We no longer need to take in what is happening around us, the Gestalt, or the context. Nothing is out there that we have to be vigilant or aware of. Have those faculties have consequently atrophied, and clutching, grasping filled the void left from the absence of that acute heightened awareness?" McGilchrist responded in part: "It's a good point, I haven't really focused on that. People might say 'there are plenty of threats today,' but of course they're of a quite different kind. They are abstract and somewhat removed from the immediacy of perception. We need resistance, we need opposition, we need to be on our guard, to be aware of what's going on in a broader context. Our existence no longer demands an immediate response to an alert assessment of the whole physical situation in which one finds oneself. There is evidence that humans respond to pictures of animals that are predators as our mammal ancestors would have done, so we haven't entirely lost that."
• Movies such as "Godzilla: King of the Monsters" (2019) have used some of
these ideas, such as the evolution of trophic cascades, as plot
devices. Dialogue from the film: "Titans and others like them provide an
essential balance to our world... They are part of the Earth's natural
defense system. A way to protect the planet, to maintain its balance...
We will return to a natural order. A forgotten order where we coexisted
in balance with the Titans. The first gods."
• Lynn Margulis employs Gaia theory to drive home the relative unimportance of humans from an ecological perspective (Symbiotic Planet, 1998), and this may be used to explain our humble status. But her tendency for hyperbole verges on being overly reductive and nihilistic. Peter Ward's more recent notion of Medea may be better, insofar as it drives home the numerous threats we face to our existence. He highlights the many extinction events that have occurred in the past, but without unnecessarily derogating humans in the process. See also speculation about the role of an "apex predator" in Adam Lipowski's paper "Periodicity of mass extinctions without an extraterrestrial cause".
• Note that the right hemisphere's "broad, open, sustained attention for what's going on around you" isn't solely on the lookout for predators, but is also looking out for kin (offspring, mates, etc.). More generally, it is associated with receptivity to the unknown, to that which we cannot be certain about and cannot predict. And often it is those highly animate "astonishing agencies" that are the least predictable. In the case of "sexual cannibalism", sometimes the predator and mate are the same agent. A femme fatale. (Contrast with semelparous species, where parents simply die of their own exertions soon after reproducing.)
• McGilchrist with Alastair McIntosh: "The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote wonderfully about wildness and wilderness and how important it is to us. And I don't think we understand this. Being wild, untamed, undominated by the human spirit is very, very important." Giorgos Kallis says we must "degrow". He's right, but "rewild" is orthogonal and perhaps qualitatively better.
• In "Human vulnerability and the experience of being prey" (1995), Valerie Plumwood described how she survived an attack by a saltwater crocodile on 19 February 1985, and the radical change this experience brought about in her view of the world, from what she called the "individual justice universe", where humans are always the predators, to the "Heraclitean universe", where we are just another part of the food chain. She wrote: “This concept of human identity positions humans outside and above the food chain, not as part of the feast in a chain of reciprocity but as external manipulators and masters of it: Animals can be our food, but we can never be their food.”
• Here be megafauna. Paleoburrows with branching tunnels altogether tallying about 2,000 feet in length, originally more than six feet tall, three to five feet wide, with an estimated 4,000 metric tons of dirt and rock dug out of the hillside, and dug at least 8,000 to 10,000 years ago, when South America’s giant ground sloths and armadillos vanished. Heinrich Frank and his colleagues consider as possibilities several genera that once lived in South America and whose fossil remains suggest adaptation for serious digging: Catonyx, Glossotherium and the massive, several-ton Lestodon. Until the early 2000s hardly any burrows attributed to extinct megafauna had been described in the scientific literature.
• In "Humans as a Hyperkeystone Species" Robert Paine points out that "clearly, the human hyperkeystone role is not new, but reaches back at least to the Pleistocene Overkill and resulting megafaunal collapse, which brought about novel vegetative states and altered fire regimes that profoundly changed landscape structure. What is new is the planetary nature of our hyperkeystone role in a globalized economy." According to him, we assumed the role of the former keystone species, placing ourselves as the dominant influence in trophic cascades and other ecological processes. With this great power comes great responsibility. Recall how, in her article "Humans Were Not Centre Stage," Barbara Ehrenreich suggests the importance of not forgetting our humble origins, which were not so long ago geologically speaking. (See also Ed Yong's article "In a Few Centuries, Cows Could Be the Largest Land Animals Left".)
• "There is a deep and ancient connection between humans and large animals (megafauna), which persists to this day. This relationship has at times been adversarial, at others reverential, and at all times, due to the reliance of humans on animal-based resources, practical. Respect for and value of the largest fauna by modern humans (Homo sapiens) is evident in prehistoric art across the world, which often predominantly depicts the largest animals that humans would have encountered." (The late-Quaternary megafauna extinctions, 2024) Keyword: "defaunation".
• Sleep is a time of extreme vulnerability to predation. To reduce the risks of sleeping, the sentinel hypothesis
(Frederick Snyder, 1966) proposes that group-living animals share the
task of vigilance during sleep, with some individuals sleeping while
others are awake. New research suggests variation in chronotypes, or
sleep and wakefulness patterns, gave our ancestors an evolutionary
advantage by helping them survive the dangerous hours of darkness. [Discover, Royal Society]
• The telescopefish (Gigantura) lives in the mesopelagic to bathypelagic zones of the ocean. It evolved highly modified eyes to detect the bioluminescent glow of prey items. Dante Fenolio wrote that "what is really cool is that the stomachs of these fishes are lined with a black, deeply pigmented tissue. This 'cloak' helps to hide bioluminescent organisms that the fishes have recently eaten. Nothing gives away a fish to potential predators like having something glowing in its stomach in the dark depths." After you eat an animal that had foolishly broadcasted its presence to everyone in the area, you immediately shut off the signal. Because there are always bigger fish in the sea (as the gooberfish pursuit sequence in Star Wars fancifully illustrated). Sure, Luke 11:33 reads "No man, when he hath lighted a candle, putteth it in a secret place, neither under a bushel, but on a candlestick, that they which come in may see the light." But if "they that come in" want to eat you, then under the bushel it goes! The Dark Forest doesn't operate by Biblical guidelines. (And the hypothesis has been applied to AI. Would Roko's Basilisk, for example, have reason to intentionally conceal its presence or capabilities?)
• Thomas Babington Macaulay’s lines from Lays of Ancient Rome: "Then out spake brave Horatius, The Captain of the Gate: “To every man upon this earth death cometh soon or late. And how can man die better Than facing fearful odds, For the ashes of his fathers, And the temples of his gods?" (See also Nemean lion.)
• “In Republican Rome, starting with Sulla, the Senate struggled to keep the popular Roman generals in check. The Senate and other political entities were very concerned with the possibility of a powerful general, who might start considering himself superior to everyone else on earth, taking over the state and declaring himself king. It was in this context that the Romans came up with an idea, and the phrase 'memento mori' came into being to keep his ego in check. So while he marched in a chariot amidst a cheerful crowd, a slave sitting right behind him would whisper in his ear "memento mori" to remind him from time to time of his own mortality or prompt him to "look behind". All of that fame and honor was temporary, and death was inevitable even for those who are at the height of their power and career. This was recently recalled by Walter Isaacson toward the end of an interview: In ancient Rome there was a person who walked behind the general and said "memento mori, remember you're gonna die." We could probably use a bit more humility of this sort today as well. McGilchrist: "For example it would be normal for a scholar like me (certainly in the 16th or 17th century) to have a skull sitting on my desk. Nothing morbid about it, but to remind me that I'm not here forever. And another way of remembering death is through religion and its rituals, which do remind one that one is mortal."
• Peter Corning, who frequently writes on the topics of evolution, synergy, and survival, recently wrote: "To paraphrase Samuel Johnson’s famous line, nothing concentrates the mind like the prospect of being hanged in the morning. It’s time for us all to look ahead and concentrate our minds on this life-and-death challenge." I'd argue that, in most cases, our confrontation with impermanence provides strong encouragement for the left hemisphere to heed what the right hemisphere has been trying to tell us: we are not "centre stage", as Ehrenreich wrote.
• Bret Devereaux described what he called the "Fremen Mirage", that “Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And weak men create hard times”. He writes that "we are conditioned to think in terms of stories, and as a story, the Fremen Mirage, which turns all of history into a morality play wherein wealth and greed lead to defeat while austerity leads to victory – is a very attractive story." But it is wrong. And so it may be worth comparing with the story of hubris and humility laid out here. If those qualities replaced strength and weakness, the saying might be more valid. But unlike strong and weak men, who apparently both want good times, humble humans recognize the virtue in the hard times that created them, and so (conceptually at least) they wouldn't seek to artificially isolate good times to begin with. But accidents happen, and hubris can enter into the breach.
• Bernardo Kastrup: "Tony Robbins and a lot of the self-help literature, and a lot of the New Age and spiritual literature, it's all about consolation by creating the illusion that your ego is in control of the world, and that the universe is some kind of menu, and you can just place your order, and if you place your order in just the right way by thinking the right thoughts and applying the right techniques then you get everything your ego wants. I personally think that's bullshit. Utter, complete, unhelpful, demeaning bullshit. I don't think that's the way to go. It elevates the ego to the position of king of an illusory reality, and it will hurt you ultimately, although it may give you a sense of comfort in the beginning. And it will wreck the planet if everybody tries to do that. So, look, when I told you don't take yourself too seriously, I didn't mean not to take life seriously. On the contrary, I think life is to be taken very seriously, but the way to go about it is to not try to wrestle control of it and make it about yourself."
• Theodicy. In "A Happy Death" Camus wrote: "to be afraid of this death he was staring at with animal terror meant to be afraid of life". In "Fifty Entries Against Despair" Christian Wiman writes "Humans are not separate or different from nature". In "The Love of God and Affliction" Simone Weil wrote "In the beauty of the world brute necessity becomes an object of love." We are not separate from the brute necessity of nature, where life and death commingle. Isaiah 11:6 "The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together." This might say something about how theodicy is understood. Rather than try to resolve the problem of evil (or lack of justice) in the world, we should take a cue from Nicholas of Cusa, Gerard Dorn, and the coincidence of opposites, from nature itself, and understand that good and evil are coextensive. We cannot eliminate the one without also eliminating the other. Instead of trying to exculpate Deus absconditius for this apparent oversight via the numerous attempts at articulating a theodicy, we need the wisdom for how to navigate within a world that contains both.
• What is humility if it isn't humbleness before something which is greater? God may be that "astonishing agency" to which this article refers, in so many words, though I complicate this with reference to the numerous ways in which that agency becomes manifested in the animate world around us, for example using Ehrenreich's megafauna descriptions and Lewis' allegorical portrayals. It may be a truism or tautology, but without humility neither theios phobos, nor valueception of any sort, seems possible. "Only the penitent man, humble before God, will pass." ― Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)
• The titles I have considered for this post, which provides both an evolutionary story (the modern myth) for who we are along with pathways for moving forward, include: "A Theory of Monsters" (a general, but also somewhat misleading title owing to multiple definitions), "Forest Spirits" (with reference to animism and Miyazaki's magical realism), "The Three Body Solution" (a tribute to Liu Cixin's Three Body Problem), “Lions, and Tigers, and Bears, Oh my!” (a tribute to L. Frank Baum's Wizard of Oz), or "The Lion, the Mammoth, and the Moa: Iain McGilchrist and Evolutionary Psychology" (a tribute to C.S. Lewis' "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe"). The jury is still out, but the last of these combines both literary allegory and megafauna together nicely.
• Random ideas (that may elicit trepidation): the visage of dunkleosteus, a hare defending its leverets against a raptor, Terunobu Fujimori's yakisugi (shō sugi ban) clad buildings, how humility is opposite the Silicon Valley fascination with Harari's “Homo Deus”, "There but for the grace of God go I" (proverbial saying). "The brighter the light, the darker the shadow" is often attributed to Carl Jung.
• Project ideas (change happens through radical engagement):
- Design with a proper appreciation for theios phobos (see Zak Stein's axiological design), not just an increase or decrease in friction (proximity and time delay) but with an understanding of "psychological field theory". Our ability to attend to the landscape of fear is underwritten by this theory, and they are mutually reinforcing. That said, understanding both distance and asynchrony (aspects of friction) is critical to the hierarchical ontology of theios phobos, because that minimizes dangerous confrontations with other agents. (The gestalt of those agencies which belong to our evolutionary kin, having unique and specific embodied phenomenologies, is at a level above the agentic thrust or gestalt of vital materialism, with its more general frictions and constraints.)
- Develop a "landscape of fear" approach to language learning, indeed to the entirety of one's work and play, and the interpersonal relations through which these are constituted. Learn how to imaginatively inhabit, or permeate this sort of perspective from the inside, via an active, lived process. (Might this subvert George Berkeley's philosophy, to read instead esse est non percipi?)
- Adopt the custom and habits, the food, shelter, and dress, of this imaginal genre/ aesthetic of theios phobos. Extend it to art, to how one draws people, buildings, emotions, and scenic landscapes. Keep a theios phobos journal (diary, log, or otherwise some form of a record book) about living on that antifragile edge of chaos.
- Try being a survivalist/prepper/etc. similar to Luke Nichols, make a "wilderness survival kit", and build a short term bivouac shelter.
- Build cozy and camouflaged longer term shelters, a modular trestle frame permaculture greenhouse, and an ice house or root cellar.
- Learn how animals perceive astonishing agency using indoor and outdoor stimulating settings.
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