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| 'Scary Wolves' by Ramona Kaulitzki |
"Every animal, in order to survive, has to solve a conundrum: how to eat without being eaten." ― Iain McGilchrist
"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
"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)
Monsters are a very fertile metaphor, and potentially controversial as well, depending on our associations. For 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 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 seem unable to appreciate them.
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, 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.
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. 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.”
Ecology of Fear
"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)
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.
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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."
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.
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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, TMWT
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". The Noh plays of Japan terrify audiences with hannya masks as much as the Godzilla franchise terrifies us in theatres, while Miyazaki's fully embodied Forest Spirit and 神獣 enchant us with magical realism. 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?
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 and Luke Combs, 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.
Life may not be exactly a hero's journey, or more precisely, that journey may be more about realizing our radical vulnerability to other agents in our environment, 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) 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, those paintings preserved on the walls of caves 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.
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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 (I would suggest) from an evolutionarily rapid ascent during which we displaced the former keystone species to become a new "hyperkeystone species". An ascent 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. 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. 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. 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?
Addenda:
• 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." [link].
• 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.
• 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.
• 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".)
• 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?)
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