1993) [R]eason may not be as pure as most of us think it is or wish it were [...] emotions and feelings may not be intruders in the bastion of reason at all: they may be enmeshed in its networks, for worse and for better. The strategies of human reason probably did not develop, in either evolution or any single individual, without the guiding force of the mechanisms of biological regulation, of which emotions and feeling are notable expressions. Moreover, even after reasoning strategies become established in the formative years, their effective deployment probably depends, to a considerable extent, on a continued ability to experience feelings.

This is not to deny that emotions and feelings can cause havoc in the processes of reasoning under certain circumstances. Traditional wisdom has told us that they can, and recent investigations of the normal human reasoning process also reveal the potentially harmful influence of emotional biases. It is thus even more surprising and novel that the absence of emotion and feeling is no less damaging, no less capable of of compromising the rationality that makes us distinctly human and allows us to decide in consonance with a sense of personal future, social convention, and moral principle.

Nor is this to say that when feelings have a positive action they do the deciding for us; or that we are not rational beings. I suggest only that certain aspects of the process of emotion and feeling are indispensable for rationality. At their best, feelings point us in the proper direction, take us to the appropriate place in a decision-making space, where we may put the instruments of logic to good use. We are faced by uncertainty when we have to make a moral judgment, decide on the course of a personal relationship, choose some means to prevent being penniless in old age, or plan for the life that lies ahead. Emotion and felling, along with the covert physiological machinery underlying them, assists us with the daunting task of predicting an uncertain future and planning our actions accordingly. [...]

There has never been any doubt that under certain circumstances, emotion disrupts reasoning. The evidence is abundant and constitutes the source for the sound advice with which we have been brought up. Keep a cool head, hold emotions at bay! Do not let your passions interfere with your judgment. As a result, we usually conceive of emotion as a supernumerary mental faculty, an unsolicited, nature-ordained accompaniment to our rational thinking. If emotion is pleasurable, we enjoy it as a luxury; if it is painful, we suffer it as an unwelcome intrusion. In either case, the sage will advise us, we should experience emotion and feeling in only judicious amounts. We should be reasonable.

There is much wisdom in this widely held belief, and I will not deny that uncontrollable or misdirected emotion can be a major source of irrational behavior. Nor will I deny that seemingly normal reason by be disturbed but subtle biases rooted in emotion. [...] Nonetheless, what the traditional account leaves out is a notion that emerged from the study of patients [with frontal lobe damage who are incapable of emotional responses] [...]: Reduction in emotions may constitute and equally important source of irrational behavior. The counterintuitive connection between absent emotion and warped behavior may tell us something about the biological machinery of reason.

Antonio R. Damasio
Descartes' Error (1994)

1994) Among animals, from insects to mammals, there are unequivocal examples of successful coping with particular forms of environment on the basis of innate strategies, and no doubt these strategies often include complex aspects of social cognition and behavior, I never cease to marvel at the intricate social organization of our distant monkey cousins, or at the elaborate social observances of so many birds. When we consider our own species, however, and the far more varied and largely unpredictable environments in which we have thrived, it is apparent that we must rely on highly evolved genetically based biological mechanisms, as well as suprainstinctual survival strategies that have developed in society, are transmitted by culture, and require, for their application, consciousness, reasoned deliberation, and willpower. This is why human hunger, desire, and explosive anger do not proceed unchecked toward feeding frenzy, sexual assault, and murder, at least not always, assuming that a healthy human organism has developed in a society in which suprainstinctual survival strategies are actively transmitted and respected. [...]

A task that faces neuroscientists today is to consider the neurobiology supporting adaptive supraregulations, but which I mean the study and understanding of the brain structures required to know about those regulations. I am not attempting to reduce social phenomena to biological phenomena, but rather to discuss the powerful connection between them. It should be clear that although culture and civilization arise from the behavior of biological individuals, the behavior was generated in collectives of individuals interacting in specific environments. Culture and civilization could not have arisen from single individuals and thus cannot be reduced to biological mechanisms and, even less, can they be reduced to a subset of genetic specifications. Their comprehension demands not just general biology and neurobiology but the methodologies of the social sciences as well.

In human societies there are social conventions and ethical rules over and above those that biology already provides. Those additional layers of control shape instinctual behavior so that it can be adapted flexibly to a complex and rapidly changing environment and ensure survival for the individual and for others (especially if they belong to the same species) in circumstances in which a preset response from the natural repertoire would be immediately or eventually counterproductive. The perils preempted by such conventions and rules may be immediate and direct (physical or mental harm), or remote and indirect (future loss, embarrassment). Although such conventions and rules need be transmitted only through education and socialization, from generation to generation, I suspect that the neural representations of the wisdom they embody, and of the means to implement that wisdom, are inextricably linked to the neural representation of innate regulatory biological processes. I see a "trail" connecting the brain that represents one, to the brain that represents the other. Naturally, that trail is made up of connections among neurons. [...]

Does this mean that love, generosity, kindness, compassion, honesty, and other commendable human characteristics are nothing but the result of conscious but selfish, survival-oriented neurobiological regulation? Does this deny the possibility of altruism and negate free will? Does this means that there is no true love, no sincere friendship, no genuine compassion? That is definitely *not* the case. Love is true, friendship sincere, and compassion genuine, if I do not lie about how I feel, if I really feel loving, friendly, and compassionate. Perhaps I would feel more eligible for praise if I arrived as suchsentiments by means of pure intellectual effort and willpower, but what if I have not, what if my current nature helps me get there faster, and be nice and honest without even trying? The truth of the feeling (which concerns how what I do and say matches what I have in mind), the magnitude of the feeling, and the beauty of the feeling, are not endangered by the realizing that survival, brain, and proper education have a lot to do with the reasons why we experience such feelings. The same applies to a considerable extent to altruism and free will. Realizing that there are biological mechanisms behind the most sublime human behavior does not imply a simplistic reduction to the nuts and bolts of neurobiology. In any case, the partial explanation of complexity by something less complex does not signify debasement.

The picture I am drawing for humans is that of an organism that comes to life designed with automatic survival mechanisms, and to which education and acculturation add a set of socially permissible and desirable decision-making strategies that, in turn, enhance survival, remarkably improve the quality of that survival, and serve as a basis for constructing a person. At birth, the human brain comes to development endowed with drives and instincts that include not just a physiological kit to regulate metabolism but, in addition, basic devices to cope with social cognition and behavior. It emerges from child development with additional layers of survival strategy. The neurophysiological base of those added strategies is interwoven with that of the instinctual repertoire, and not only modifies its use but extends its reach. The neural mechanisms supporting the suprainstinctual repertoire may be similar in their overall formal design to those governing biological drives, and may be constrained by them. Yet they require the intervention of society to become whatever they become, and thus are related as much to a given culture as to general neurobiology. Moreover, out of that dual constraint, suprainstinctual survival strategies generate something probably unique to humans: a moral point of view that, on occasion, can transcend the interests of the immediate group and even the species.

Antonio R. Damasio
Descartes' Error (1994)

1988) In the past few years, the playing field of American intellectual life has shifted, and the traditional intellectual has become increasingly marginalized. A 1950s education in Freud, Marx, and modernism is not sufficient qualification for a thinking person in the 1990s. Indeed, the traditional American intellectuals are, in a sense, increasingly reactionary, and quit often proudly (and perversely) ignorant of many of the truly significant intellectual accomplishments of our time. Their culture, which dismisses science, is often nonempirical. It uses its own jargon and washed its own laundry. It is chiefly characterized by comments on comments, the swelling spiral of commentary eventually reaching the point where the real world gets lost.

John Brockman
The Third Culture (1995)

1989) Science is the only news. When you scan through a newspaper or magazine, all the human interest stuff is the same old he-said-she-said, the politics and economics the same sorry cyclic dramas, the fashions a pathetic illusion of newness, and even the technology is predictable if you know the science. Human nature doesn't change much; science does; and the change accrues, altering the world irreversibly.

Stewart Brand
quoted by John Brockman in
The Third Culture (1995)

1990) The universe is a difficult enough place to understand already without introducing mystical mysteriousness that's not actually there. [...] [T]he universe is genuinely mysterious, grand, beautiful, awe inspiring. The kinds of views of the universe which religious people have traditionally embraced have been puny, pathetic, and measly in comparison to the way the universe actually is. The universe presented by organized religions is a poky little medieval universe, and extremely limited.

Richard Dawkins
interviewed by John Brockman in
"A Survival Machine" in
The Third Culture (1995)

1991) There's only one general principle in biology, and that, of course, is Darwinism.

Richard Dawkins
interviewed by John Brockman in
"A Survival Machine" in
The Third Culture (1995)

1992) I have a problem with scientists who spend most of the time looking at their own navels, trying to define what it is they're supposed to be studying. It's like a game where both teams stand around arguing about what the rules are supposed to be. [...[ There's a disease of middle-aged literary men called Hearty Degeneration of the Fat; when you get old, you boom about Big Issues. G.K. Chesterton was a classic example. Scientists, I guess, have a related problem - Anguished Uncertainty of the Elderly is probably a better term. All of a sudden you forget that science is the art of the answerable and you begin to speculate about things that basically lie outside science altogether.

Steve Jones
interviewed by John Brockman in
The Third Culture (1995)

1986) [W]hatever can be isolated, looked at, inspected, should be. We need not be obscurantist. I do not wish to say or hint, as some romantic thinkers have, that something is lost in the very act of investigating, analyzing, and bringing to light, that there is some virtue in darkness as such, that the most important things are too deep for words, and should be left untouched, that it is somehow blasphemous to enunciate them. This I believe to be a false and on the whole deleterious doctrine. Whatever can be illuminated, made articulate, incorporated in a proper science, should of course be so. "We murder to dissect," wrote Wordsworth - at times we do; at other times dissection reveals truths. There are vast regions of reality which only scientific methods, hypotheses, established truths, can reveal, account for explain, and indeed control. What science can achieve must be welcomed. In historical studies, in classical scholarship, in archaeology, linguistics, demography, the study of collective behavior, in many other fields of human life and endeavor, scientific methods can give indispensable information.

I do not hold with those who maintain that natural science, and the technology based upon it, somehow distorts our vision, and prevents us from direct contact with reality - "being" - which pre-Socratic Greeks or medieval Europeans saw face to face. That seems to me an absurd nostalgic delusion.

Isaiah Berlin
"On Political Judgment"
New York Review of Books (10/3/1996)

[Note: The William Wordworth quote – We murder to dissect. – is from "The Tables Turned" (1798)]

1987) As a public service [...] we are pleased to provide some guidelines for deconstructing your favorite futurologists.

• Beware of those who make projections based on statistics. [...]



• Do not be blinded by the prestige of the source. [...]



• Optimistic predictions should be viewed with special suspicion. [...]



• Ditto for pessimistic predictions. [...]



• "Fads" have a way of sticking around long after those who call them that are gone. [...]



• Career counseling is one thing, but career prediction is something else entirely. [...]



• There is no accounting for taste.



• And finally, watch out for futurists who proclaim the end of the future.

Victor Navasky
"Tomorrow Never Knows"
New York Times Magazine (9/29/1996)

1983) [By] [s]ome definitions [...] occultism [is] the belief that nature possesses secret properties contradicting the presumed laws of science; a dedicated occultist believes that those properties can be manipulated through adept exercises of magic. Esotericism is the broader project that weds occultism to self-transformation. Spiritualism is the attempted practice of communicating with the dead through seances. Mysticism purports to bring the seeker into direct experience of, even merger with, a transcendent deity. Gnosticism, broadly conceived, is the intuitive apprehension of deep truth without a felt need for corroborating evidence. Theosophy, uncapitalized, is gnostic and esoteric lore that relates human destiny to speculation about the origin, nature, and governance of the universe. Finally, in its capitalized form Theosophy refers to the specific theosophical doctrines and organizations launched by Madame [Helena Petrovna] Blavatsky.

Frederick Crews
"The Consolation of Theosophy" in
New York Review of Books (9/19/1996)

1984) [We should never] be surprised when occultism [...] links arms with reactionary ideologies. Sooner or later, the gnostic habit of thought battens upon vitalism, the belief in a life force that cries out to be unshackled from convention. And fascist doctrine stands ready to give vitalism a nationalistic and nostalgic twist: we must inhale the spirit of our warrior ancestors, who knew no democratic legalism and harbored no pity for the unfit and the foreign. [...] [W]e should not overlook the broad epistemic likeness between Theosophical dreamers and the ideologues who smoothed the way for the terroristic Nazi state. The common factor was their shared rejection of rational empiricism. By pretending that reliable knowledge can be obtained through such means as clairvoyant trances and astrological casting, the original Theosophists encouraged their German colleagues to "uncover" in prehistory just what they pleased: and the resultant myth of how Aryan hegemony was broken by quasi-simian races formed a template for the infectious post World War I story of betrayal by Jewish materialists and the vindictive Allies. The whole visionary apparatus - the vitalists sun cult, the mystic brotherhood, the pygmy usurpers, the lost ancient continents, the millennial cycles, even the idea of a conspiracy by a cabalistic "Great International Party" of diabolical anti-traditionalists - was already there in [Madame Blavatsky's] The Secret Doctrine. There needed only a specific historical grudge and a fevered demagogue to set in motion the march toward paranoid eugenics and actual extermination of the "polluting" social elements.

We need to remind ourselves, after such an example, that esoterically acquired convictions are not always and everywhere a menace. In a stable democracy such as our own, manifest occultism tends to produce more amusement than terror. And, in fact, a direct line of descent connects Theosophy to an array of ludicrous and generally harmless New Age practices that now surround us, from astrology, crystal gazing, homeopathy, and pyramid power to Wicca nature worship, prophecy, channeling, past-life regression, goddess theology, belief in extraterrestrial visitation, and obeisance to self-designated gurus and ascended masters. [...] Although one can agree with Carl Sagan's contention, in his recent book The Demon-Haunted World, that such fads reflect a popular revolt against science and a lamentable resurgence of superstition, it would be perverse to mention them in the same breath with Nazi ideology.

Frederick Crews
"The Consolation of Theosophy II" in
New York Review of Books (10/3/1996)

1985) [O]ne occult atavism [...] can bear deadly consequences: it is the psychotherapeutic practice [...] Although many tend to assume that psychotherapy rests on authenticated discoveries about the mind, the talking cure was actually born in a climate of occultism, retained its gnostic affinities in the anni mirabili of its modern flowering, and has yet to make an altogether clean break from those affinities. Contemporary therapists who are struggling to render their profession more accountable to ethical and empirical norms may not realize it, but they are at war with an irrationalist legacy that deserves to be identified as such. [...] [This does not mean] that psychotherapy is doomed to be a hermetic art or that it serves no useful function, nor even that contemporary Freudians and Jungians ... retain Freud's and Jung's own predilictions for the paranormal. [...] All such pronouncements on the basis of origins alone must be resisted as illogical and anti-historical.

At the same time, an awareness of the gnostic strain in Freud and Jung does cast a suggestive light on the central issue that now confronts, and radically polarizes, the therapeutic community throughout the West: whether caregivers should address themselves to helping clients cope with their current dilemmas as they perceive them or, rather, send those clients on a regressive search for a hypothetical early past and initiate them into "knowledge" of repressed traumas and interjected personages. There is all the difference in the world between "taking a history" - investigating the relationships and vicissitudes that have predisposed the patient to act in self-defeating ways - and producing a previously unsuspected, artifactual history that is dictated by boilerplate diagnostic expectations. The cabalistic penchant lingers precisely insofar as therapists insist that true healing must entail a confrontation with some predetermined class of memories, powers, insights, buried selves, or former incarnations. And it is no coincidence that the dangers of drastic harm are all clustered at that end of the therapeutic spectrum.

[...] [W]e might venture to hope that psychotherapy, as an institution that likes to maintain good-neighbor relations with science, will someday make a full reckoning with its gnostic component. All those therapists who acquire "knowledge" by first applying suggestive pressure and then disregarding its influence on their findings are more akin to mediums than to physicians. Do they really want to continue down the yellow brick road that leads from Mesmer and Puysegur through Freud and Jung to the latest promises of cure via channeling, rebirthing, and past-life regression? And will their guides never tire of issuing discreet caveats about "going too far" with diagnostic procedures that actually go in circles?

If I remain pessimistic about the thoroughgoing reform of psychotherapy, it is because of a powerful factor [...]: the unquenchable human thirst for meanings that can ease our doubts, sanction and regulate our urges, and flatter our self-conception. Established religion, Theosophy, and psychotherapy as it is often - by no means always - practiced have all plied the same trade, and with degrees of success that owe nothing to the demonstrable cogency of their assertions. [...] The gods, Jung told the dissatisfied and yearning Western bourgeoisie, already reside within our heads, they find us quite interesting and lovable, and they are eager to imparts their secrets to us. Does mere empirical rationality stand a chance against an appeal that speaks so directly to our needs?

Frederick Crews
"The Consolation of Theosophy II" in
New York Review of Books (10/3/1996)

1981) At the recent wedding of my stepson, my husband sat companionably between his former wife (the mother of the groom) and me. The groom, in his toast, warmly acknowledged the bride's ex-husband (the father of her son), who was there with his longtime partner, who sat next to the lesbian couple with their new baby. The new husband of my husband's ex-wife introduced us to the daughters of his two previous marriages, one of whom described the difficulties of living with your ex-husband in the apartment right above you. All in all, a typical post-modern family - one typical of Republicans as well as Democrats, conservatives as well as liberals, rich as well as poor and, in this case, England as well as America.

Carol Tavris
"Goodbye, Ozzie and Harriet" in
New York Times Book Review (9/22/1996)
[review of She Works/He Works by
Rosalind C. Barnett and Caryl Rivers and
In the Name of the Family
by Judith Stacey]

[Note: See Don Delillo's surreal comic novel White Noise (1984) for a good fictional example of a "postmodern family" - a disparate group of people loosely held together by bonds of blood, marriage and propinquity.]

1982) Like Reagan's trickle-down economics, trickle-down culture was supposed to help deliver the goods to the masses. With a little help from "Masterpiece Theatre" broadcasts, Book-of-the-Month-Club subscriptions and endless museum reproductions of Van Gogh's "sunflowers," cultural missionaries like Mortimer Adler and Will and Ariel Durant were going to make us a more civilized nation. Unfortunately, something else has happened. We've somehow slipped into a Classic Comics limbo, where it's hard to tell what's parody, what's rip-off and what's just user-friendly adaptation.

In the process, stylistic innovations have been divorced from the artistic visions that begot them. Form is wrenched apart from function, and the shock of the new is diluted by imitations. [...] If familiarity does not exactly breed contempt, it does breed indifference and impatience.

Entropy, of course, is a fact of life in the realm of popular culture. Even things without pretensions get homogenized and softened. Over the years, Mickey Mouse evolved from a roughneck sort of rat into his current amiable self, and Columbo, too, evolved from an irascible maverick into an avuncular snoop. Hitchcock gave way to De Palma, and Marilyn to Madonna. [...]

To understand why the trickle-down process has accelerated so swiftly, it's useful to go back to the critic Dwight Macdonald. In a famous 1960 essay, Macdonald identified three sorts of culture: High Culture (think Cezanne and Eliot), which articulate's an artists' idiosyncratic and often demanding vision; Masscult (Norman Rockwell and Erle Stanley Gardner), which tries to "Please the crowd by any means," and Midcult (Pearl Buck and Thorton Wilder), which disguises Masscult's reliance on formula with pretentious allusions.

Back then, high culture stood smugly apart, secure in its elitism. In today's marketplace, however, elitism has no value - money has become the only yardstick. Thus High Culture lusts after the market share of Masscult. [...] In a world where alienation is stylish, Masscult has also discovered the profit in co-opting the avante-garde. Music video makers routinely lift poses from obscure movies and photography books, while smoothing away the rough edges. And by appropriating a few anti-establishment gestures, advertisers (like Benneton) and performers (like Dennis Rodman) have found that they can enjoy the publicity value of controversy, while posing no real threat to the status quo. Indeed, Dadaist highjinks are now the province of David Letterman and Howard Stern.

Michiko Kakutani
"Culture Zone: The Trickle Down Theory"
New York Times Magazine (9/22/1996)