The European Rationalist – In Reason We Trust

An overview of Ken Wilber’s book Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution (Shambhala, 1995) by Roger Walsh

Roger Walsh (MD) is a Professor of Psychiatry, Philosophy and Anthropology, Department of Psychiatry & Human Behavior, University of California College of Medicine, Irvine.

Scientific disciplines have been suffering from an embarrassment of riches. As data accumulate and disciplines fragment into subdisciplines, the search for some comprehensive synthesis seems both more appealing and more hopeless. Take psychology for example. From its humble beginnings at the end of the nineteenth century it has now exploded into a cacophony of competing schools and therapies. The cries and handwringing over the need for synthesis have grown increasingly distraught. Consequently it is not surprizing in that the appearance of a book in 1977, The Spectrum of Consciousness, which seemed to offer just such a synthesis, was greeted with great excitement–even though written by a young unknown author, Ken Wilber, who was not formally trained as a psychologist. Indeed, in some ways Spectrum did more than had been hoped for because it offered a synthesis of not only Western psychologies but Eastern ones as well.

Other equally encompassing books by Wilber soon followed, such as The Atman Project. Here, Wilber integrated diverse developmental theories, again of both East and West, into a unified view that traced development from infancy into normal adulthood and then into post conventional stages “beyond normality” described by diverse contemplative disciplines. In Up from Eden he used his developmental model as a framework to attempt to map the evolution of human cognition and consciousness. Other works on sociology, religion, philosophy and physics soon followed. By 1987, Wilber had created an interdisciplinary collection of rare scope and integrative power.

Then followed a painful silence of more than five years. These were hardly uneventful years for Wilber. Ten days after their marriage, his wife Treya discovered a breast cancer and the next five years were devoted to helping her manage the disease and eventually to die. A further two years were devoted to mourning and to writing a moving book Grace and Grit chronicling her life and death. Now Wilber has burst out with another major work, by far his largest to date, and what he describes as his first “mature work”.

The story of the book’s origins is amusing. In 1991 Wilber published a brief article on gender differences which evoked a critical letter from one woman. Wilber, in turn, began writing a letter to the editor in response. That opened the floodgates and the years of dammed up thinking poured out. Four years later, after reading more than 300 books on feminism, 300 on ecology, and more than another 400 on various topics such as anthropology, evolution and philosophy, Wilber offers Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution, a massive 800-page work which is volume one of a planned three volume series. Heaven help us if Wilber ever starts to write an article.

The aim of the book is to trace evolution–physical, biological and human–and to set it within the context of the perennial philosophy: the common core of wisdom at the heart of the great religious traditions.

The scope of the work is extraordinary. Only a handful of thinkers, such as Aurobindo in the East and Hegel in the West, have assembled such vast evolutionary visions. Yet Wilber’s view is unique in grounding that vision in contemporary research in fields such as cosmology, biology, anthropology, sociology, psychology, philosophy, and ecology.

This vast scope and scholarship comes at a certain cost. To say the least, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality is daunting to mere mortals. In addition, its scope makes it difficult to grasp and retain the gestalt. This is not because the book is obtuse or badly written. On the contrary, considering the profusion, and novelty, of the ideas, the writing is remarkably smooth and lucid. Rather, the problem is that the sheer number of novel ideas means that those early in the book tend to be pushed out of memory.

The major purpose of this article is therefore to offer an overview that may give a sense of the gestalt or vision and thereby provide a framework allowing easier and more retentive reading. Consequently this is more an overview than a detailed critical review.

The book covers so many topics that probably no one person could hope to give informed critiques on all of them. I suspect that this book will be the topic of specialized critiques by disciplinary experts for several decades. What follows, then, is the central thread, shorn of numerous intriguing offshoots.

Our Fractured Worldview

Wilber begins by drawing attention to our ecological crises. Ecological movements usually assume that these crises reflect a disastrously fractured worldview; a worldview often damned as dualistic, mechanistic, atomistic, anthropocentric, patriarchal and pathologically hierarchical; a worldview that fragments humans from nature, mind from body, and spirit from everything. Consequently, movements such as deep ecology and ecofeminism advocate a new worldview which is said to be more holistic, integrative and relational.

Wilber explores the nineteenth century scientific origins of this fractured worldview when the “two arrows of time” were first recognized. Paradoxically it was discovered that according to the second law of thermodynamics the physical universe seemed to be running down toward increasing entropy, whereas the discovery of evolution showed that life appeared to be moving toward greater complexity and differentiation (negentropy). The physiosphere and the biosphere, the physical sciences and biological sciences, therefore seemed irrevocably divorced and although there were a variety of theoretical attempts at integration–for example, materialistic reductionism, phenomenalism, epiphenomelanism–none were wholly satisfactory.

Only in the late twentieth century did science finally offer a firm basis for reunification when it was discovered that matter has a potential for producing greater order and complexity. For example, as the Nobel laureate chemist Ilya Prigogine discovered, certain biochemical systems called “dissipative structures” can grow in chemical complexity, in apparent defiance of entropy and the second law of thermodynamics. This defiance is thought to provide a possible basis for the origin of life.

From this reunification, in part, were born the various system sciences of complexity such as general systems theory, cybernetics, nonequilibrium thermodynamic systems theory, and evolutionary systems theory. Some of these, such as evolutionary systems theory, specifically claim that similar patterns of process and evolution can be identified across the physical, biological, and noetic spheres. The key point is that there is now significant scientific evidence for a self-organizing, self-transcending process in matter, life and mind.

Before he can proceed with developing his theory, Wilber needs to rehabilitate the concept of hierarchy, a concept central to his theory and that of many other evolutionary researchers. Hierarchy has become somewhat of a dirty word in some circles and critics claim that all hierarchy necessitates ranking or dominating that oppresses, marginalizes or destroys. It is not uncommon to hear that we need to do away with all hierarchies. However, as Wilber points out, this is not only impossible but an example of what philosophers call performative contradiction since the preference for nonheirarchies over hierarchies is itself a hierarchical value judgement. Qualitative distinctions are an inevitable part of human experience.

Moreover, systems sciences argue that hierarchy is essential for integration, wholeness and systems functioning. Understood in this context, hierarchy is simply a ranking of phenomena according to their holistic capacity. As such it does not necessarily entail value hierarchies, domination or oppression.

Having rehabilitated the concept of hierarchy, or holarchy as he prefers to call it (adopting Arthur Koestler’s term), Wilber next turns to the common principles and processes that hold for systems and phenomena across the three great realms: physical, biological and mental. For Wilber the fundamental category is the holon, a term introduced by Koestler, which implies that every entity and phenomenon in the universe it neither merely a whole nor a part but both simultaneously.

Using the concepts of hierarchy and holons, Wilber is able to clarify the nature of various hierarchies and their misuse. For example, most popular general systems theories of ecology and ecofeminism are based on some version of a holarchy of being, a kind of web of life. Humans are usually inserted into this web as one strand in or part of the biosphere or Gaia. At first glance this move seems very neat, organic and egalitarian.

However, in what is perhaps the most intellectually challenging part of the book, Wilber demonstrates that things are not quite this simple. Hierarchically ordered structures and emergents (properties or capacities that emerge de novo at certain levels of hierarchy) cannot be interpreted simply in terms of, nor considered as parts of, lower order phenomena. For example, when atoms of hydrogen and oxygen combine, the result is a molecule of water with novel emergent properties, such as wetness. These emergent properties are totally unpredictable from the properties of its constituent atoms and cannot be described in terms of atoms–and, of course, the water molecule is not contained within its atoms.

So too life, or the biosphere, is not simply contained in, reducible to, or explicable simply in terms of, the physiosphere: the realm of pure matter. Life has emergent properties not found in the properties of its chemical constituents. Life, in other words, has properties and capacities that seem to defy description in terms of the movements of the mere molecules. Likewise, the noosphere (the realm of sentient life) emerges from and is not simply in the biosphere. That is, the noosphere is not a component of the larger whole called biosphere but is an emergent that in some sense transcends it. Ontologically, the noosphere thus cannot be reduced to, or considered merely as, a strand of the biosphere. And humans are compound individuals comprised of all three “spheres” or levels; we cannot be regarded simply as strands of the biosphere which comprises only the physical and biological levels.

This is a difficult but important argument which can only be sketched briefly here. It appears to resolve a number of puzzles that have plagued ecological thinking such as how one can accord greater value to some forms of life, including humans, than others while simultaneously honoring all life. Wilber argues at length that this perspective is not antiecological, as it might appear at first glance. Rather, he insists that it naturally results in an enhanced concern for life and the environment which are now recognized as parts of one’s own compound individuality.

The Four Quadrants

The schemes and hierarchies considered so far all deal exclusively with exteriors since general systems theories try to be empirical. Hence they almost entirely overlook interiority or subjectivity. Systems theories are essentially theories of surfaces or exteriors.

To understand interiors–subjectivity, experience and consciousness–requires another approach, namely empathy, introspection and interpretation. In short, systems theories have given us a very valuable but very partial view of systems and evolution. This in itself is not bad. However, major troubles ensue when systems scientists claim, as all too many of them do, to be mapping, or at least capable of mapping, all domains of reality.

Wilber wants to expand this view. He argues that comprehensive approaches need to include objective studies not only of the external behavior of individual holons but also of social or group holons and, in addition, the interior or subjectivity of both individuals and groups. He therefore introduces what he calls “the four quadrants” model, with individual and social holons in the upper and lower halves respectively, and exterior and interior in the right and left halves respectively.

Reductionism can seem reasonable since all holons do in fact have both left- and right-hand quadrants and empirical data can be so obvious. However no quadrant is wholly reducible to another and both gross and subtle reductionism can be destructive. This can be insidious in the case of systems theorists, for example, because these people believe that they are truly embracing all reality in a holistic manner and seem quite unaware of just how much, and how much of value, is often missing from their worldview.

At this stage Wilber has laid the conceptual groundwork for tracing development and evolution, especially human evolution, across all four quadrants. This he proceeds to do.

Human Evolution

Wilber uses the maps devised by cognitive developmental psychologists, such as Jean Piaget, to trace the psychological development of individuals–which he ties to social and cultural evolution from early hominids up to present society. Wilber argues that through history there has been an evolution of both individual cognitive and cultural unfolding. Each evolutionary and historical epoch has been associated with a specific stage of individual cognitive development together with correlative socially shared worldviews and moralities.

The general idea is that cultural evolution and individual development go hand in hand. Societies tend to foster individual development up to their normal level and hinder development beyond it and there is a relatively close correlation between an individual’s expectable psychological development and a culture’s “developmental center of gravity”.

Wilber pays particular attention to the evolution of gender relations and the human relationship to the environment at each historical stage. In particular he points out, drawing on a significant body of feminist research, that, contrary to popular assumptions, the historical inequality of women cannot be attributed solely to male domination and oppression. Rather it is also attributable in part to biological factors such as differential strength, to economic-productive factors such as types of tools and modes of food acquisition, and to developmental stages and worldviews in which equality was not a salient feature or moral imperative. This allows him to view the emergence of liberation movements as a partial reflection of the emergence of rationality (and liberation from mere biological determinants of evolution), and to interpret the previous gender inequalities as a function of more than merely the male malevolence and female “sheepness” implied by some feminists.

It also allows him to draw some chilling conclusions about the possible nonegalitarian and gender divisive effects of new information technologies which are currently so male dominated. I had simply assumed that women’s liberation was a largely irreversible evolutionary dynamic. Wilber, however, points to the power of a culture’s techno-economic base in determining its social hierarchy, and argues that there is no guarantee that future technologies will necessarily foster equality, a concern which seems to have been largely overlooked by feminists.

Transpersonal Development

Piaget’s “formal operational” stage of individual cognitive development and the rational worldview are the highest individual and cultural levels that are widely recognized by conventional mainstream science. However, Wilber goes on to point to evidence for the existence of higher stages and potentials latent in each of us. The first of these he calls “vision-logic”, which is a kind of network logic able to envision multiple relationships among individual concepts simultaneously. Of course Wilber is not alone here; several developmental researchers–such as Brunner, Flavell, Arieti and Gebser–have suggested a similar stage. Wilber is unique, however, in recognizing a similar stage in the developmental maps offered by contemplatives such a Plotinus and the great Indian philosopher-sage Aurobindo.

Beyond vision-logic, for Wilber, lie a further four major stages which he calls psychic, subtle, causal and nondual. These are transpersonal stages inasmuch as the self sense now begins to expand beyond the personal–what Alan Watts so picturesquely called “the skin encapsulated ego”–to encompass aspects, or even the whole, of humankind, life, the internal and external universe, and consciousness itself.

Wilber associates his psychic, subtle, causal and nondual stages with four types of mysticism: nature, deity, formless and nondual, and suggests as exemplars of each of these Ralph Waldo Emerson, St. Teresa, Meister Eckhart and Ramana Maharshi.

“Psychic” seems an unfortunate choice of term, being loaded with so much semantic baggage. However, as Wilber uses it, it has nothing to do with ESP or other psi phenomena. Rather, it refers to an initial transpersonal stage at which experience is still largely somatically based, such as in the experiences of kundalini energy or of the divinity of nature.

By the time the subtle levels have emerged, experience is more interior and concerned with subtle experiences of light and sound (shabd and nad yoga) or archetypal imagery, for example, the shaman’s power animals, the Hindu’s Ishta Deva, the Christian contemplative’s sacred figures. At the causal level all form and experiences drop away leaving only pure consciousness, such as the Buddhist’s nirvana, the Vedantin’s nirvikalpa samadhi, the Gnostic’s abyss. Finally, at the nondual culmination, phenomena reappear but are immediately and spontaneously recognized as projections, expressions, or manifestations of consciousness and as none other than consciousness. This is the Hindu’s sahajsamadhi and Zen’s “form is emptiness”.

Thus far, Wilber has traced evolution from early humanoids to postmodernism, and individual development from infancy to the nondual, and has correlated these with the developmental/ evolutionary profiles of a host of related phenomena such as worldviews, morality, identity, gender relations and ecological relations, among others. Clearly it seems time to finish the book and have a beer. Not so! For Wilber this is only part one of the book and only half the picture: namely the ascending half or “the path of ascent”. In part two he traces another movement, “the path of descent”. And it is the divorce of these two that Wilber claims to be one of the most fundamental of all Western dualisms.

Ascent and Descent

For Wilber, the two Western exemplars of philosopher-sages who have integrated the paths of ascent and descent are Plato and Plotinus. Plato, for example, maps out a path of ascent toward “the Good” in The Republic and The Symposium. From this perspective the Platonic Good is a direct mystical experience of the causal realm–beyond qualities and manifestations, and therefore transrational and transverbal–beside which the physical world is merely a cave of shadows. This is a classical description, perhaps the classical Western description, of ascent to the causal level. And this ascent and escape from the world became the archetypal Western goal.

Many critics assume Plato was only an ascender. However, a more careful reading reveals that Plato maps out both the paths of ascent and of descent. Having ascended to the Good he then reverses course. The world is now seen as an expression or an embodiment of the transcendent and indeed at its consummation: “a visible sensible God”. The Self-sufficing perfection of the Good is also a Self-projecting, Self-emptying fecundity. The Good is therefore not only the summit and goal of life but also the source and ground of the world, with which it is co-essential. And the source is made “more complete” by manifestation. Plato therefore integrates ascent and descent in the classic nondual stance found in both East and West which Wilber summarizes as:

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Flee the many, find the One\r\nEmbrace the Many as the One

In the East, disentangling oneself from the world and realizing the One is equated with wisdom. Subsequently descending and returning to embrace the Many is equated with compassion, and the integration of ascent and descent is “the union of wisdom and compassion”.

From this nondual perspective, the world and the flesh are not evil or degraded. However, becoming entranced by them, that is, becoming entrapped in maya, illusion–what psychologist Charles Tart calls the consensus trance–and thereby losing awareness of the transcendental domains and our unity with them is disastrous. Once lost, the challenge is to regain this awareness through a discipline of “recollection” that opens “the eye of the soul” (Plato), “the eye of the heart” (Sufism) or “the eye of Tao” (Taoism). The goal is an illusion-shattering wisdom that recognizes our true transcendental nature and is variously known as Hinduism’s jnana, Buddhism’s prajna, Islam’s marifah and sometimes as Christian gnosis.

The Platonic integration of ascent and descent was continued by Plotinus, in whom, according to St. Augustine, “Plato lived again”. He created a vast synthetic vision drawing on diverse traditions and grounded in his own mystical experience. His was the first comprehensive version of the great chain of being, a view that sees the cosmos as a vast hierarchy of existence extending from the physical through various subtle mental realms to the realm of pure consciousness or spirit.

As Wilber makes clear, what is crucial is that the systems of Plato and Plotinus, and similar Eastern philosopher-sages such as Aurobindo, are not primarily philosophies or metaphysics. Rather they are descriptions of direct replicable, phenomenological apprehensions arising in people who have developed to requisite stages. However all too often they have been interpreted as “mere metaphysics”.

For Plato, Plotinus, and Aurobindo, during developmental ascent each stage subsumes or envelops lower stages. The process of ascent, according to Plato, is driven by eros, the drive to find greater and greater unions. Complementarily, for Plotinus, at each stage of ascent the lower has to be embraced so that eros is balanced with agape (love and concern for the lover). The vision of a multidimensional kosmos, as the Greeks originally called it, interwoven by ascending and descending currents of love, would be a central theme of all subsequent neo-Platonic schools and would exert a profound influence on thought up to an beyond the Enlightenment.

But according to Wilber both eros and agape can go astray when they are not integrated in the individual, ideally by direct experience of the causal One.

Wilber suggests that the great Sigmund Freud represents a paradigmatic example of this divorce of eros and agape. Freud himself finally postulated two drives–eros and thanatos–and suggested that the aim of eros is “to establish unity.” For Freud much human misery results from the battle or conflict between the powers of ascent and descent. But Freud did not carry ascent to its transpersonal conclusions in union with the One. In fact he denigrated and pathologized such attempts as neurotic immaturities, thus confusing transpersonal progression with prepersonal regression, a confusion that Wilber calls the “pre/trans fallacy”. Hence he gave us a truncated vision of human possibilities and his prognosis for humankind was eternal conflict.

The misunderstanding or even pathologizing of development beyond conventional levels to transpersonal stages is tragically typical of the West. In much of the East, causal and nondual realization were recognized and acknowledged as the summit of psychological-spiritual development. Sages such as Nagarjuna and Shankara elaborated these realizations into highly sophisticated philosophies of madhyamika Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta respectively, which co-existed and harmonized with mythological interpretations. Individuals could thus draw inspiration from either philosophy or mythology or both according to their interests, capacities and development. However in the West, mythic-level Christianity became institutionalized and dominant as “The Church” which declared its own mythic-level interpretations alone as true, and higher transrational interpretations as blasphemous.

This is a specific example of the general principle that stages higher than one’s own tend to be misunderstood, pathologized and viewed as threatening. Wilber focuses on Christianity, but similar confusion and ambivalence toward mysticism seem characteristic of other traditions which fix final authority in a historical text and are therefore embarrassed by breakthroughs of new mystical insights. Thus Judaism has largely downplayed its mystical dimensions for centuries while there has long been tension between conventional Islam and its mystical wing of Sufism.

There are now growing efforts to revitalize contemplative practices and wisdom in each of these traditions. However, this revitalization comes at the end of a millennium in which the possibility of awakening was effectively blocked in the West and to this day mysticism remains widely misunderstood in Western culture.

Of course, the drive to transcendence could not be completely overwhelmed. Periodically there arose spectacular individuals–St. Augustine, Meister Eckhart, Dame Julian, St. Teresa, the Rhineland mystics and more–in whom transcendence triumphed over institutional barriers and who thereby faced themselves and the Church with the difficult and dangerous task of reconciling conventional mythology with transconventional realization. However, despite the profound insights of such mystics, the power of conventional myth (for example, Church dogma) largely reigned supreme until the rise of modernity and the empirical scientific outlook during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Ego and Eco Perspectives

For Wilber modernity is marked by two major trends which represent the good news and the bad news of this period. The good news, from the viewpoint of modernity, is the superseding of myths by rationality and the demand for empirical evidence. The bad news is that assent was equated with the mythic and the cry of “no more myths” became effectively “no more ascent”.

With the denial of the possibility of the developmental ascent, attention turned downward to the world; instead of an infinite above, there was now a horizontal infinite ahead. The universe was no longer seen as a great multidimensional holarchy of being. Rather it became an “ontological flatland” or great interlocking order, to be investigated by merely empirical (right hand) approaches only. This overlooking of the left-hand internal quadrants and reducing phenomena to their right-hand external dimensions alone constitutes what Wilber calls subtle reductionism. With the left-hand quadrants gone, so too are the grounding and validity of subjective phenomena such as values, meaning and purpose. The result is a barren meaningless flatland that has also been described as a “dedivinized”, “disqualified” or “disenchanted” world.

This worldview presented philosophers with a problem, the so-called central problem of modernity: namely the nature of human subjectivity and its relation to the world. The rational ego might say it was merely a strand in the great web of life, but that reduced the subjective to the empirical–reduced the left- to the right-hand quadrants. Now the question of the good life was whether to seek either autonomous agency of the rational ego generating its own morals and aspirations separate from the brute drives of nature, or on the other hand to seek communion with the natural world by connecting and communing with nature including its vital, sensual and sexual elements. This tension Wilber refers to as the conflict between the ego camp and the eco camp.

Immanuel Kant is the exemplar of the ego camp. For him the rational ego, the moral subject, is free only to the degree he or she disengages from the pulls of egocentric desire and of lower social forces, and becomes effectively autonomous. Thus arose the subjective part of the enlightenment paradigm, the so-called self-defining subject, the autonomous ego, disengaged self, philosophy of the subject, or self-sufficient subjectivity.

The problem with the cruder forms of the ego camp was their over-emphasis on the right-hand empirical representation of knowledge which focuses on surfaces, ignores interiority, and avoids dimensions of meaning, value and purpose.

The eco camp on the other hand felt, quite reasonably, that this paradigm of knowledge left the subject split from and alien, monochromatic world. The eco camp therefore argued for a return to nature so that the “living sources” of human existence could be recontacted and renewed. Consequently the appropriate mode of knowing was held to be not disinterested thought but powerful feeling, and the best means of expression and enhancing participation with nature were felt to be poetry and art.

The problem for the eco camp was just how to insert the self back into the stream of life without losing the benefits of reason. This proved particularly problematic since these thinkers tended to confuse differentiation and dissociation. Thus the developmental and evolutionary differentiation of the prerational fusion of self and world was seen not as a necessary development phase allowing subsequent higher order integration–but rather as a pathological process leading to paradise lost.

As with all things, both the ego and eco projects eventually faltered under the weight of their own limitations. The rational ego camp sought freedom from egocentric motives, natural impulses and conventional social domination. However, in doing so it often alienated, repressed and dissociated other goods including transpersonal experiences and the prepersonal domain of élan vital, body and sensuality.

The eco camp, however, sought freedom from excessive objectivity, autonomy and instrumentality. However, it ended up overvaluing emotional, irrational impulses and effectively saw nature as the source of sentiment rather than as the embodiment of Spirit as had Plato and Plotinus.

The Spirit of Evolution

The ego-eco conflict, expressed as absolute subject and absolute object, was a major intellectual project around the beginning of the nineteenth century. For Wilber, the resolution of this conflict was provided by the philosophy of Friedrich Schelling. For Schelling, the Enlightenment had differentiated mind and nature, but had largely forgotten the transcendental ground of both. Thus for Schelling, nature is objective Spirit, mind subjective Spirit. These two can be seen as totally unrelated, as the ego and eco camps had tended to do, but these two “apparent absolutes” are synthesized in the third great movement of Spirit.

According to both Schelling and Hegel, Spirit goes through three major phases. It first emanates or manifests as objective evolving nature. It then awakens to itself in subjective mind, and finally recovers its original identity in nondual awareness in which subject and object, mind and nature are unified. These idealists seem to have managed genuine glimpses of the nondual and some of its manifestations and implications. But the German idealism of Schelling and Hegel barely outlived its founders. Shortly after their deaths it was dismissed on logical and philosophical grounds as “mere metaphysics”.

However, Wilber suggests that its failure may lie more in practical than in purely philosophical causes. He emphasizes the enormous difference between obtaining spontaneous glimpses and securing sustained vision or even obtaining significant glimpses at will. Many contemplative traditions speak of two distinct tasks: first, of obtaining an initial, transient breakthrough glimpse–a “peek” experience–and second of being able to reproduce this glimpse at will and even stabilize it as an enduring vision. The challenge is to make a spontaneous experience a voluntary experience, to extend a peek experience into a plateau experience, or as the religious scholar Huston Smith put it so eloquently “to transform flashes of illumination into abiding light”.

This transformation requires a rigorous, authentic contemplative discipline and the German idealists had none. Consequently they were unable to offer a means by which other explorers could reproduce their insights which were thus largely unfalsifiable. By contrast, Asian idealists such as Shankara and Yogacara Buddhists offered both an art of transcendence by which practitioners could glimpse and then stabilize an experience of the nondual, and idealistic philosophies that have endured over centuries to articulate the insights that emerge.

Darwinian theory also exerted a chilling effect on the German idealist vision of evolution. Natural selection allowed science to deny any sort of eros or transcendent/emergent drive in nature. More recently this denial has been called into question because it is now apparent that although Darwinian natural selection may account for microevolution, it cannot account for macroevolution: the great evolutionary leaps and breakthroughs such as the production of eyes or functional wings.

In addition, the mind stretching investigations of the Big Bang are now pushing knowledge back to the absolute temporal limit dictated by Planck’s constant, which is the first 1043rd of a second. These findings indicate that the laws of physics were operative form the earliest conceivable instant. Materialistic explanations have a very hard time accounting for this, so the Big Bang has changed many reflective people into philosophical idealists. In light of all this, it is therefore not surprising that Wilber regards the creation of an adequate idealism as one of the essential challenges for the contemporary West.

The net result of these cosmological and evolutionary discoveries is that many philosophers of science now acknowledge some sort of self-transcendent drive in evolution. One of the major effects of Darwinian theory was thus not that it discovered a mechanism of macroevolution–it did not–but rather that for so long it obscured the recognition that an authentic evolutionary theory must acknowledge some self-transcendent drive akin to eros in the cosmos.

Wilber suggests that this self-transcendent drive is beginning to move increasing numbers of people beyond the conventional developmental level of rationality into transrational, transpersonal stages. He argues that the evolution of this process can be facilitated or hindered by the degree of sensitivity with which these intuitions of transpersonal stages are unpacked. All interiority and subjectivity must be interpreted, and the quality of this interpretation is vitally important to the birth of successive depths of that interiority. The types of error to which this unpacking and interpretation are prone can be categorized according to which of the four quadrants they emphasize or overemphasize.

Many people intuit higher stage experiences in purely upper left-hand quadrant (individual, subjective) terms. This interpretation focuses on subjective phenomena such as the “higher self”, “pure awareness”, omitting the lower left-hand and both right-hand quadrants–namely the cultural and social, and all objective manifestations. This effectively omits from consideration appropriate types of community activity and service demanded by higher stages and the appropriate techno-economic infrastructures necessary for supporting them.

A particularly unfortunate result can be the assumption that higher stage realizations free one from concern with the world. By contrast, deeper insights and understanding make clear that higher development necessarily entails embracing and serving the world which is no longer seen as separate from one’s Self. The challenge therefore is not just to contact the higher self but to see it “embraced in culture, embodied in nature, and embedded in social institutions”.

On the other hand, others interpret their higher stage intuitions primarily in objective terms, describing spirit as the sum total of all phenomena or the great web. This right-handed systems interpretation results in a descended flatland worldview that tends to ignore the left-hand quadrants of “I” and “we” dimensions. Consequently, while this view urges the embrace of all life, it usually does not understand the degree of inner transformation essential for this embrace, let alone the transformations required for union with the Good and the recognition of the world as “a living sensible God”. An unfortunate result is a descendent worldview that confuses Spirit with the sum total of shadows in the cave.

Thus for Ken Wilber, further individual development, cultural integration, ecological preservation and recognition of our true nature require appreciation of the possibility of development to transpersonal stages, a practice to realize them, and use all four quadrant to express them. Only by such a comprehensive vision, he says, can the spirit of evolution reach its fulfillment in us and through us. Though it will doubtless be amended and refined, Wilber’s vision seems a major contribution to this process.

Notes & References

1. K. Wilber, The Spectrum of Consciousness (Quest, 1977).

2. K. Wilber, The Atman Project (Quest, 1980).

3. K. Wilber, Up From Eden: A Transpersonal View of Human Evolution (Doubleday, 1981).

4. K. Wilber, A Sociable God (McGraw-Hill, 1983). K. Wilber, Eye to Eye: The Quest for the New Paradigm (Anchor Doubleday, 1983); K. Wilber, Quantum Questions: Mystical Writings of the World’s Great Physicists (Shambhala, 1984); D. Anthony, B. Ecker & K. Wilber (eds.), Spiritual Choices (Paragon House, 1987); K. Wilber, J. Engler, & D. Brown (eds.), Transformations of Consciousness (Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1986).

5. K. Wilber, Grace and Grit (Shambhala, 1991).

6. For another excellent discussion of contemporary criticisms of hierarchies and possible responses see D. Rothberg, “Philosophical Foundations of Transpersonal Psychology: An Introduction to Some Basic Issues”, Journal of Transpersonal Psychology 18(1986):1-34.

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If the entire human species were a single individual, that person would long ago have been declared mad. The insanity would not lie in the anger and darkness of the human mind-though it can be a black and raging place indeed. And it certainly wouldn’t lie in the transcendent goodness of that mind-one so sublime, we fold it into a larger “soul.” The madness would lie instead in the fact that both of those qualities, the savage and the splendid, can exist in one creature, one person, often in one instant.

We’re a species that is capable of almost dumbfounding kindness. We nurse one another, romance one another, weep for one another. Ever since science taught us how, we willingly tear the very organs from our bodies and give them to one another. And at the same time, we slaughter one another. The past 15 years of human history are the temporal equivalent of those subatomic particles that are created in accelerators and vanish in a trillionth of a second, but in that fleeting instant, we’ve visited untold horrors on ourselves-in Mogadishu, Rwanda, Chechnya, Darfur, Beslan, Baghdad, Pakistan, London, Madrid, Lebanon, Israel, New York City, Abu Ghraib, Oklahoma City, an Amish schoolhouse in Pennsylvania-all of the crimes committed by the highest, wisest, most principled species the planet has produced. That we’re also the lowest, cruelest, most blood-drenched species is our shame-and our paradox.

The deeper that science drills into the substrata of behavior, the harder it becomes to preserve the vanity that we are unique among Earth’s creatures. We’re the only species with language, we told ourselves-until gorillas and chimps mastered sign language. We’re the only one that uses tools then-but that’s if you don’t count otters smashing mollusks with rocks or apes stripping leaves from twigs and using them to fish for termites.

What does, or ought to, separate us then is our highly developed sense of morality, a primal understanding of good and bad, of right and wrong, of what it means to suffer not only our own pain-something anything with a rudimentary nervous system can do-but also the pain of others. That quality is the distilled essence of what it means to be human. Why it’s an essence that so often spoils, no one can say.

Morality may be a hard concept to grasp, but we acquire it fast. A preschooler will learn that it’s not all right to eat in the classroom, because the teacher says it’s not. If the rule is lifted and eating is approved, the child will happily comply. But if the same teacher says it’s also O.K. to push another student off a chair, the child hesitates. “He’ll respond, ‘No, the teacher shouldn’t say that,’” says psychologist Michael Schulman, co-author of Bringing Up a Moral Child. In both cases, somebody taught the child a rule, but the rule against pushing has a stickiness about it, one that resists coming unstuck even if someone in authority countenances it. That’s the difference between a matter of morality and one of mere social convention, and Schulman and others believe kids feel it innately.

Of course, the fact is, that child will sometimes hit and won’t feel particularly bad about it either-unless he’s caught. The same is true for people who steal or despots who slaughter. “Moral judgment is pretty consistent from person to person,” says Marc Hauser, professor of psychology at Harvard University and author of Moral Minds. “Moral behavior, however, is scattered all over the chart.” The rules we know, even the ones we intuitively feel, are by no means the rules we always follow.

Where do those intuitions come from? And why are we so inconsistent about following where they lead us? Scientists can’t yet answer those questions, but that hasn’t stopped them from looking. Brain scans are providing clues. Animal studies are providing more. Investigations of tribal behavior are providing still more. None of this research may make us behave better, not right away at least. But all of it can help us understand ourselves-a small step up from savagery perhaps, but an important one.

The Moral Ape

The deepest foundation on which morality is built is the phenomenon of empathy, the understanding that what hurts me would feel the same way to you. And human ego notwithstanding, it’s a quality other species share.

The deepest foundation on which morality is built is the phenomenon of empathy, the understanding that what hurts me would feel the same way to you. And human ego notwithstanding, it’s a quality other species share.It’s not surprising that animals far less complex than we are would display a trait that’s as generous of spirit as empathy, particularly if you decide there’s no spirit involved in it at all. Behaviorists often reduce what we call empathy to a mercantile business known as reciprocal altruism. A favor done today-food offered, shelter given-brings a return favor tomorrow. If a colony of animals practices that give-and-take well, the group thrives.

But even in animals, there’s something richer going on. One of the first and most poignant observations of empathy in nonhumans was made by Russian primatologist Nadia Kohts, who studied nonhuman cognition in the first half of the 20th century and raised a young chimpanzee in her home. When the chimp would make his way to the roof of the house, ordinary strategies for bringing him down-calling, scolding, offers of food-would rarely work. But if Kohts sat down and pretended to cry, the chimp would go to her immediately. “He runs around me as if looking for the offender,” she wrote. “He tenderly takes my chin in his palm … as if trying to understand what is happening.”

You hardly have to go back to the early part of the past century to find such accounts. Even cynics went soft at the story of Binta Jua, the gorilla who in 1996 rescued a 3-year-old boy who had tumbled into her zoo enclosure, rocking him gently in her arms and carrying him to a door where trainers could enter and collect him. “The capacity of empathy is multilayered,” says primatologist Frans de Waal of Emory University, author of Our Inner Ape. “We share a core with lots of animals.”

While it’s impossible to directly measure empathy in animals, in humans it’s another matter. Hauser cites a study in which spouses or unmarried couples underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) as they were subjected to mild pain. They were warned before each time the painful stimulus was administered, and their brains lit up in a characteristic way signaling mild dread. They were then told that they were not going to feel the discomfort but that their partner was. Even when they couldn’t see their partner, the brains of the subjects lit up precisely as if they were about to experience the pain themselves. “This is very much an ‘I feel your pain’ experience,” says Hauser.

The brain works harder when the threat gets more complicated. A favorite scenario that morality researchers study is the trolley dilemma. You’re standing near a track as an out-of-control train hurtles toward five unsuspecting people. There’s a switch nearby that would let you divert the train onto a siding. Would you do it? Of course. You save five lives at no cost. Suppose a single unsuspecting man was on the siding? Now the mortality score is 5 to 1. Could you kill him to save the others? What if the innocent man was on a bridge over the trolley and you had to push him onto the track to stop the train?

Pose these dilemmas to people while they’re in an fMRI, and the brain scans get messy. Using a switch to divert the train toward one person instead of five increases activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex-the place where cool, utilitarian choices are made. Complicate things with the idea of pushing the innocent victim, and the medial frontal cortex-an area associated with emotion-lights up. As these two regions do battle, we may make irrational decisions. In a recent survey, 85% of subjects who were asked about the trolley scenarios said they would not push the innocent man onto the tracks-even though they knew they had just sent five people to their hypothetical death. “What’s going on in our heads?” asks Joshua Greene, an assistant professor of psychology at Harvard University. “Why do we say it’s O.K. to trade one life for five in one case and not others?”

How We Stay Good

Merely being equipped with moral programming does not mean we practice moral behavior. Something still has to boot up that software and configure it properly, and that something is the community. Hauser believes that all of us carry what he calls a sense of moral grammar-the ethical equivalent of the basic grasp of speech that most linguists believe is with us from birth. But just as syntax is nothing until words are built upon it, so too is a sense of right and wrong useless until someone teaches you how to apply it.

Merely being equipped with moral programming does not mean we practice moral behavior. Something still has to boot up that software and configure it properly, and that something is the community. Hauser believes that all of us carry what he calls a sense of moral grammar-the ethical equivalent of the basic grasp of speech that most linguists believe is with us from birth. But just as syntax is nothing until words are built upon it, so too is a sense of right and wrong useless until someone teaches you how to apply it.It’s the people around us who do that teaching-often quite well. Once again, however, humans aren’t the ones who dreamed up such a mentoring system. At the Arnhem Zoo in the Netherlands, de Waal was struck by how vigorously apes enforced group norms one evening when the zookeepers were calling their chimpanzees in for dinner. The keepers’ rule at Arnhem was that no chimps would eat until the entire community was present, but two adolescents grew willful, staying outside the building. The hours it took to coax them inside caused the mood in the hungry colony to turn surly. That night the keepers put the delinquents to bed in a separate area-a sort of protective custody to shield them from reprisals. But the next day the adolescents were on their own, and the troop made its feelings plain, administering a sound beating. The chastened chimps were the first to come in that evening. Animals have what de Waal calls “oughts”-rules that the group must follow-and the community enforces them.

Human communities impose their own oughts, but they can vary radically from culture to culture. Take the phenomenon of Good Samaritan laws that require passersby to assist someone in peril. Our species has a very conflicted sense of when we ought to help someone else and when we ought not, and the general rule is, Help those close to home and ignore those far away. That’s in part because the plight of a person you can see will always feel more real than the problems of someone whose suffering is merely described to you. But part of it is also rooted in you from a time when the welfare of your tribe was essential for your survival but the welfare of an opposing tribe was not-and might even be a threat.

In the 21st century, we retain a powerful remnant of that primal dichotomy, which is what impels us to step in and help a mugging victim-or, in the astonishing case of Wesley Autrey, New York City’s so-called Subway Samaritan, jump onto the tracks in front of an oncoming train to rescue a sick stranger-but allows us to decline to send a small contribution to help the people of Darfur. “The idea that you can save the life of a stranger on the other side of the world by making a modest material sacrifice is not the kind of situation our social brains are prepared for,” says Greene.

Throughout most of the world, you’re still not required to aid a stranger, but in France and elsewhere, laws now make it a crime for passersby not to provide at least the up-close-and-personal aid we’re good at giving. In most of the U.S., we make a distinction between an action and an omission to act. Says Hauser: “In France they’ve done away with that difference.”

But you don’t need a state to create a moral code. The group does it too. One of the most powerful tools for enforcing group morals is the practice of shunning. If membership in a tribe is the way you ensure yourself food, family and protection from predators, being blackballed can be a terrifying thing. Religious believers as diverse as Roman Catholics, Mennonites and Jehovah’s Witnesses have practiced their own forms of shunning-though the banishments may go by names like excommunication or disfellowshipping. Clubs, social groups and fraternities expel undesirable members, and the U.S. military retains the threat of discharge as a disciplinary tool, even grading the punishment as “other than honorable” or “dishonorable,” darkening the mark a former service person must carry for life.

Sometimes shunning emerges spontaneously when a society of millions recoils at a single member’s acts. O.J. Simpson’s 1995 acquittal may have outraged people, but it did make the morality tale surrounding him much richer, as the culture as a whole turned its back on him, denying him work, expelling him from his country club, refusing him service in a restaurant. In November his erstwhile publisher, who was fired in the wake of her and Simpson’s disastrous attempt to publish a book about the killings, sued her ex-employer, alleging that she had been “shunned” and “humiliated.” That, her former bosses might well respond, was precisely the point.

“Human beings were small, defenseless and vulnerable to predators,” says Barbara J. King, biological anthropologist at the College of William and Mary and author of Evolving God. “Avoiding banishment would be important to us.”

Why We Turn Bad

With so many redundant moral systems to keep us in line, why do we so often fall out of ranks? Sometimes we can’t help it, as when we’re suffering from clinical insanity and behavior slips the grip of reason. Criminal courts are stingy about finding such exculpatory madness, requiring a disability so severe, the defendant didn’t even know the crime was wrong. That’s a very high bar that prevents all but a few from proving the necessary moral numbness.

With so many redundant moral systems to keep us in line, why do we so often fall out of ranks? Sometimes we can’t help it, as when we’re suffering from clinical insanity and behavior slips the grip of reason. Criminal courts are stingy about finding such exculpatory madness, requiring a disability so severe, the defendant didn’t even know the crime was wrong. That’s a very high bar that prevents all but a few from proving the necessary moral numbness.Things are different in the case of the cool and deliberate serial killer, who knows the criminality of his deeds yet continues to commit them. For neuroscientists, the iciness of the acts calls to mind the case of Phineas Gage, the Vermont railway worker who in 1848 was injured when an explosion caused a tamping iron to be driven through his prefrontal cortex. Improbably, he survived, but he exhibited stark behavioral changes-becoming detached and irreverent, though never criminal. Ever since, scientists have looked for the roots of serial murder in the brain’s physical state.

A study published last year in the journal NeuroImage may have helped provide some answers. Researchers working through the National Institute of Mental Health scanned the brains of 20 healthy volunteers, watching their reactions as they were presented with various legal and illegal scenarios. The brain activity that most closely tracked the hypothetical crimes-rising and falling with the severity of the scenarios-occurred in the amygdala, a deep structure that helps us make the connection between bad acts and punishments. As in the trolley studies, there was also activity in the frontal cortex. The fact that the subjects themselves had no sociopathic tendencies limits the value of the findings. But knowing how the brain functions when things work well is one good way of knowing where to look when things break down.

Fortunately, the overwhelming majority of us never run off the moral rails in remotely as awful a way as serial killers do, but we do come untracked in smaller ways. We face our biggest challenges not when we’re called on to behave ourselves within our family, community or workplace but when we have to apply the same moral care to people outside our tribe.

The notion of the “other” is a tough one for Homo sapiens. Sociobiology has been criticized as one of the most reductive of sciences, ascribing the behavior of all living things-humans included-as nothing more than an effort to get as many genes as possible into the next generation. The idea makes sense, and all creatures can be forgiven for favoring their troop over others. But such bias turns dark fast.

Schulman, the psychologist and author, works with delinquent adolescents at a residential treatment center in Yonkers, New York, and was struck one day by the outrage that swept through the place when the residents learned that three of the boys had mugged an elderly woman. “I wouldn’t mug an old lady. That could be my grandmother,” one said. Schulman asked whom it would be O.K. to mug. The boy answered, “A Chinese delivery guy.” Explains Schulman: “The old lady is someone they could empathize with. The Chinese delivery guy is alien, literally and figuratively, to them.”

This kind of brutal line between insiders and outsiders is evident everywhere-mobsters, say, who kill promiscuously yet go on rhapsodically about “family.” But it has its most terrible expression in wars, in which the dehumanization of the outsider is essential for wholesale slaughter to occur. Volumes have been written about what goes on in the collective mind of a place like Nazi Germany or the collapsing Yugoslavia. While killers like Adolf Hitler or Slobodan Milosevic can never be put on the couch, it’s possible to understand the xenophobic strings they play in their people.

“Yugoslavia is the great modern example of manipulating tribal sentiments to create mass murder,” says Jonathan Haidt, associate professor of psychology at the University of Virginia. “You saw it in Rwanda and Nazi Germany too. In most cases of genocide, you have a moral entrepreneur who exploits tribalism for evil purposes.”

That, of course, does not take the stain of responsibility off the people who follow those leaders-a case that war-crimes prosecutors famously argued at the Nuremberg trials and a point courageous people have made throughout history as they sheltered Jews during World War II or refuse to murder their Sunni neighbor even if a militia leader tells them to.

For grossly imperfect creatures like us, morality may be the steepest of all developmental mountains. Our opposable thumbs and big brains gave us the tools to dominate the planet, but wisdom comes more slowly than physical hardware. We surely have a lot of killing and savagery ahead of us before we fully civilize ourselves. The hope-a realistic one, perhaps-is that the struggles still to come are fewer than those left behind.

What Makes Us Moral, By Jerry Kluger, published in Time Magazine, 2007

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I recently went and gave a talk at a modern comprehensive about what it means to be a rationalist and how that differs from being an atheist or a person of faith. I got quite a few letters back, including the following one from a girl that is just 12?. I thought that it merited the attention of all (European) Rationalists. The language is a bit strong in some places, but it shows the tremendous resentment that many (young) people feel and show towards the corruption of European politics. 

Dear Mr Blair,

People talk about the great sea change from the sleaze and political corruption that you ushered in. You went by what people thought was honest, integrity and a new vision.

I am 12 years old, and I was born just about when you became the Prime Minister and lead the Labour Party to victory. I have started to understand something about politics now. I wanted to be a great person and save the planet – perhaps even become a great leader. I have my views on ethics and morality. Until recently, I wanted to be everything that you appeared to be.

You stood alone when all around you were telling that you were wrong. You were convinced about your faith and about the steadfast relationship with the American Political elite.

You sent our troops into Iraq. You refused to talk about your faith in case people thought you were a bit nutty. You refused to come out openly with your convictions in case they collided with the expectations that people may have had of you.

Unlike you with your Father in heavens, I am a committed rationalist like my father on earth. I do not hear any voices that you seem to have heard together with your friend, George Bush.

Having thought about what you said and what you have done, I have come to the following incontrovertible conclusion. You were a psychopath. You said things that enabled you to hold on to power at whatever cost. Your faith was as fragile as your reasoning and words – your public change of your faith was only announced when it would have no impact. You read the intelligence reports that only furthered your prejudices, and you incorporated as much sleaze in your politics as the best of them.  You furthered the interests of your close friends at the expense of impartiality and meritocracy. You made Great Britain an insignificant and political convenience of the United States of America. My opinion of politics and of you as a leader is the same as that of a judge for a convicted criminal. I understand that politics can be dirty, but you’ve brought the name of political policy of our country to the same level as sewers. You stink, and so does everything that you touch and do. I am a non-believer, but I hope you rot in the hell of your faith. Your ego and self-conceited nature has made mockery of the lives of so many innocent peoples who have sacrificed their lives for their countries; and you took these lives as a tribute to you stupidity and your God.

I hope that our leaders in the future will listen to evidence and reason rather than mysterious voices. I hope that they will be honest rather than just pretending to be so. It will take a great deal for someone like me to start believing that being in a position of power can be consistent with honesty, integrity, and a deliverable vision.

Yours forever disillusioned,
[Name withheld by the Editor to ensure privacy of the child]
Age 12?

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There are major differences between the way many of us would like societies to function and their current function and form. Indeed, at the founding of this society, my main thrust was to look at processes that we can ‘rationally’ use to get away from a purely GDP-driven world dynamics. It is worth a quick look at the current model of democracy that we live in. For those that want a more basic introduction, please see a previous article and  The Challenge of Democracy.

The competitive élitist and the pluralist models of democracy were conceived between the end of the XIX century and the first half of the XX. The latter wouldn’t have been born without the former, in that obviously bearing similarities with it, and didn’t stop to develop into neo-pluralism until recent decades, in that marking significant differences with competitive élitism and even pluralism itself in its original form.

The aim of this discussion will be to elaborate on these similarities and differences. In doing so, before reaching conclusions it seems appropriate to summarise the two models with the help of the philosophers, sociologists and economists who best represent them: among élitists, Gaetano Mosca (1858-1941), Max Weber (1846-1920) and Joseph Alois Schumpeter (1883-1950); and among pluralists Robert Dahl (1915-).

According to the competitive élitist theory, every political system is ruled by a political élite or élites. It was Sicilian social scientist Gaetano Mosca who first introduced this model, along with his fellow Italian contemporary sociologist, neo-Machiavellian Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923), whose work was later developed by Schumpeter and Dahl into the pluralist model. Mosca defined democracy as a system in which competing élites are formally chosen or rejected by electors. However, he was convinced that members of Parliament were not actually elected by the people, but rather by their friends who arranged for them to be elected.

This is, in short, Mosca’s concept of élitism, a competition heavily relying on the nature of an organisation (the “friends”) which is nothing less than the bureaucracy described by one of the founding father of sociology, Max Weber, in what is perhaps his most important theory. Weber was the first to introduce the idea that modern political systems are becoming more and more similar among them because they all endure a process of bureaucratisation.

Bureaucracy’s special features include storing information on a vast scale and the fragmentation of functions according to the specialised abilities of experts. In this respect it is worth to recall the work of Roberto Michels (1876-1936), another Italian sociologist, who developed Weber’s thoughts on bureaucracy into the “Iron Law of Oligarchy”: if a form of organisation is necessary for effective action in society, that organisation unavoidably demands a bureaucracy and those bureaucracies, again unavoidably, concentrate power at the summit of a hierarchy, where few people control information, communication and finances. It is a fascinating theory about the civil servants controlling a given organisation ignore or distort the wishes of its membership. It basically is a development of Weber’s account of bureaucracy, and to Weber we go back in our discussion.

Another interesting theory derived from Weber’s work and relevant to our discussion on élitist bureaucracy is that on the “convergence thesis”, claiming that systems apparently very different such as those of the Soviet Union and the United States become increasingly similar because of the expansion of bureaucracy. This is a concept shared by Schumpeter in analysing how the huge size of modern industry determines a convergence between socialism and capitalism because of the need of bureaucratic management in both models of society.

Schumpeter’s pessimistic view of democracy (he didn’t trust humans as being able to act rationally) was that the ordinary citizen should not have any further role in the decision-making process other than taking part in periodic elections to choose between political parties, one or other team of competing leaders. In reinterpreting democracy as a system in which rival élites of party leaders vied for power through election, Schumpeter was to become the link between Weber and Dahl (see below), between the competitive élitist and the pluralist models.

Indeed, his thought could well be seen as the common ground between the two models of democracy we are examining here: we begin to see what in my opinion is the most important similarity between the competitive élitist and the pluralist model (which follows): differently from previous models such as, for example, the Marxist one, they do not tend to describe what would be the best model, nor to construct an example of what they wish to be the model, but they rather take a photograph of the existing model. As David Held explains in his Models of democracy:

Like Weber and Schumpeter, their [the pluralists'] goal was to be “realistic” and “objective” in the face of all those thinkers who asserted particular ideals without due attention to the circumstances in which they found themselves. Since the pluralists’ critique of such thinkers is similar in many respects to the critical treatment offered by Montesquieu, Madison, Mill, Weber and Schumpeter, the focus below will be on the pluralists’ positive understanding of democracy.

Among the many pluralist thinkers, each with his version of the pluralist model, Held chooses as the most representative a political scientist, Robert Dahl, who has in the last five decades dominated the international discussion on democracy for making its definition closer to the Western political system by developing the idea of polyarchy.

The root of this word is Greek, meaning the rule of the many, rather than the rule of the people as in democracy. It is a concept invented in order to describe the conditions of modern democracies, in which society is managed by interest and pressure groups with common goals and the government merely plays the role of mediator among them.

By studying the dynamics of power and influence in small American communities, Dahl came to the conclusion that a pluralist political system has several centres of power and sources of authority, rather than a single regulator. The government shares power with several other entities such as trade unions, industrial associations and business organisations, the administrative bureaucracy, interest groups and pressure groups (based on gender, class, religion, ethnicity…), and non-governmental organisations lobbying for the environment, human rights and civil liberties, etc.

Another original feature of pluralist theory derived from the study of community power is that a low rate of participation in democratic process is not necessarily regrettable. On the contrary, apathy in political involvement could even be seen as healthy in meaning trust by the people in those who govern them, while history shows that excessive participation often coincided with undesirable phenomena like fanaticism in Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and communist Soviet Union.

David Truman (1913-2003), who shares with Dahl one of the longest ever memberships of the American Political Science Association, adds to the theory the explanation on how stability can be achieved in such a dispersive decision-making system: actually, “only the highly routinized governmental activities show any stability”, he writes in The Governmental Process, while organised interest groups may only play segments of the whole structure, each of them being too weak to impose its “Tyranny” (a concept of society fragmentation that Truman owes to Madison).

Pluralists like Dahl and Truman agreed with Schumpeter that the distinctive feature of democracies is the method of selection of politicians, but here ends the similarity and begins the difference: in fact, they broadened Schumpeter’s and Weber’s ideas to apply them to a multiplicity of social actors, using the same conceptual framework to show how the concentration of political power in the hands of competing élites was not inevitable.

What follows is a summary of other similarities and differences that I have noticed between the two models, in David Held’s presentation of them.

Similarities:
Both models find their principle of justification in the need to obstruct the emergence of exceedingly powerful political factions and leadership.
Among their key features, the two models share the principle of a healthy electoral competition between rival political élites and at least two parties.
Again among their key features, both models value the independence of a well-trained bureaucracy as a fourth pillar along the classical tripartition of the legislature, the executive and the judiciary (and the system of checks to balance their powers).

Differences:
On an eminently philosophical dimension, pluralist Dahl maintains that the legitimacy of a political system ought to originate from “the depths of political culture”, while according to Schumpeter the simple acceptance of a competitive electoral system means a belief in its legitimacy.
Analogously, together with fellow pluralists Dahl insisted that democracy is firmly berthed in the harbour of society’s consensus, hence no politician would be successful in leaving a lasting impression unless in tune with a nation’s political culture; on the other hand, before him Schumpeter stressed instead the profound impact on democratic politics made by the direction given by competing (and competent) élites.
Last in this list, but probably the most noteworthy, is a feature of polyarchy limpidly explained by Held:
The democratic character of a regime is secured by the existence of multiple groups or multiple minorities. Indeed, Dahl argued that democracy can be defined by “minorities government”. For the value of the democratic process lies in rule by “multiple minority oppositions”, rather than in the establishment of the “sovereignty of the majority”. Weber’s and Schumpeter’s scepticism about the concept of popular sovereignty was justified, albeit for reasons different from those they themselves gave.

In conclusion, and as an attempt to answer the assessment’s second question, on which of the examined models I consider to provide the more convincing picture of contemporary democracy, it is quite obvious to point at the more recent and developed model, in its neo-pluralist version, because it is easy to recognise in it an important element which in our era of globalisation we have grown used to: the increasing influence of corporate capitalism over the other actors of pluralism. This represents another difference between the competitive élitist model and pluralism in its newer, neo-pluralist variant. Neo-pluralist author Charles Lindblom (1918-) writes:

Because public functions in the market system rest in the hands of businessmen, it follows that jobs, prices, production, growth, the standard of living, and the economic security of everyone all rest in their hands. Consequently, government officials cannot be indifferent to how well business performs its functions. Depression, inflation, or other economic disasters can bring down a government. A major function of government, therefore, is to see to it that businessmen perform their tasks.

Therefore, a government will follow a political agenda that is polarised towards corporate business, causing erosion of parliamentary politics and the marginalisation of those excluded from the political agenda itself. This is, in extreme synthesis, what neo-pluralism represents or, better say, what neo-pluralism differentiates itself from earlier pluralism. It is somehow ironic, although hardly surprising in consideration of the foreseeable counterattack of conservative forces, that the dissolution of pluralism into crystallised schools of neo-pluralist thought was the consequence of the 1968 social movement and the political polarisation subsequent to it, for it was precisely the 1968-69 social unrest in Europe and North America to highlight all the limits of a pluralist theory which reached its climax of popularity between the 1950s and the 1960s.

Neo-pluralist thinkers adjusted their theories. For example, in spite of being an admirer of free market economy, Lindblom himself grew increasingly uncomfortable in respect of the asymmetries of power that he witnessed in favour of big corporate business. Remedies to this unbalance are to be found in the future models of democracy which David Held delineates in conclusion of his book – democratic autonomy and cosmopolitan democracy – but are not the subject of this essay.

The competitive élitist and the pluralist models 
by Londradical

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Over the next set of articles (and iterations thereof) we want to cover the structure of financial and world markets, models of democracy, and look at rationality of such endeavours so as to try to make some sense of world dynamics. We welcome articles and comments from all those who want to contribute to this dialogue, debate, and understanding in the context of rationality. 

As the dominant discourse would have it, the economic world is a pure and perfect order, implacably unrolling the logic of its predictable consequences, and prompt to repress all violations by the sanctions that it inflicts, either automatically or -more unusually – through the intermediary of its armed extensions, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the policies they impose: reducing labour costs, reducing public expenditures and making work more flexible. Is the dominant discourse right? What if, in reality, this economic order were no more than the implementation of a utopia – the utopia of neoliberalism – thus converted into a political problem? One that, with the aid of the economic theory that it proclaims, succeeds in conceiving of itself as the scientific description of reality?

This tutelary theory is a pure mathematical fiction. From the start it has been founded on a formidable abstraction. For, in the name of a narrow and strict conception of rationality as individual rationality, it brackets the economic and social conditions of rational orientations and the economic and social structures that are the condition of their application.

To give the measure of this omission, it is enough to think just of the educational system. Education is never taken account of as such at a time when it plays a determining role in the production of goods and services as in the production of the producers themselves. From this sort of original sin, inscribed in the Walrasian myth (1) of “pure theory”, flow all of the deficiencies and faults of the discipline of economics and the fatal obstinacy with which it attaches itself to the arbitrary opposition which it induces, through its mere existence, between a properly economic logic, based on competition and efficiency, and social logic, which is subject to the rule of fairness.

That said, this “theory” that is desocialised and dehistoricised at its roots has, today more than ever, the means of making itself true and empirically verifiable. In effect, neoliberal discourse is not just one discourse among many. Rather, it is a “strong discourse” – the way psychiatric discourse is in an asylum, in Erving Goffman’s analysis (2). It is so strong and so hard to combat only because it has on its side all of the forces of a world of relations of forces, a world that it contributes to making what it is. It does this most notably by orienting the economic choices of those who dominate economic relationships. It thus adds its own symbolic force to these relations of forces. In the name of this scientific programme, converted into a plan of political action, an immense political project is underway, although its status as such is denied because it appears to be purely negative. This project aims to create the conditions under which the “theory” can be realised and can function: a programme of the methodical destruction of collectives.

The movement toward the neoliberal utopia of a pure and perfect market is made possible by the politics of financial deregulation. And it is achieved through the transformative and, it must be said, destructive action of all of the political measures (of which the most recent is the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI), designed to protect foreign corporations and their investments from national states) that aim to call into question any and all collective structures that could serve as an obstacle to the logic of the pure market: the nation, whose space to manoeuvre continually decreases; work groups, for example through the individualisation of salaries and of careers as a function of individual competences, with the consequent atomisation of workers; collectives for the defence of the rights of workers, unions, associations, cooperatives; even the family, which loses part of its control over consumption through the constitution of markets by age groups.

The neoliberal programme draws its social power from the political and economic power of those whose interests it expresses: stockholders, financial operators, industrialists, conservative or social-democratic politicians who have been converted to the reassuring layoffs of laisser-faire, high-level financial officials eager to impose policies advocating their own extinction because, unlike the managers of firms, they run no risk of having eventually to pay the consequences. Neoliberalism tends on the whole to favour severing the economy from social realities and thereby constructing, in reality, an economic system conforming to its description in pure theory, that is a sort of logical machine that presents itself as a chain of constraints regulating economic agents.

The globalisation of financial markets, when joined with the progress of information technology, ensures an unprecedented mobility of capital. It gives investors concerned with the short-term profitability of their investments the possibility of permanently comparing the profitability of the largest corporations and, in consequence, penalising these firms’ relative setbacks. Subjected to this permanent threat, the corporations themselves have to adjust more and more rapidly to the exigencies of the markets, under penalty of “losing the market’s confidence”, as they say, as well as the support of their stockholders. The latter, anxious to obtain short-term profits, are more and more able to impose their will on managers, using financial directorates to establish the rules under which managers operate and to shape their policies regarding hiring, employment, and wages.

Thus the absolute reign of flexibility is established, with employees being hiring on fixed-term contracts or on a temporary basis and repeated corporate restructurings and, within the firm itself, competition among autonomous divisions as well as among teams forced to perform multiple functions. Finally, this competition is extended to individuals themselves, through the individualisation of the wage relationship: establishment of individual performance objectives, individual performance evaluations, permanent evaluation, individual salary increases or granting of bonuses as a function of competence and of individual merit; individualised career paths; strategies of “delegating responsibility” tending to ensure the self-exploitation of staff who, simple wage labourers in relations of strong hierarchical dependence, are at the same time held responsible for their sales, their products, their branch, their store, etc. as though they were independent contractors. This pressure toward “self-control” extends workers’ “involvement” according to the techniques of “participative management” considerably beyond management level. All of these are techniques of rational domination that impose over-involvement in work (and not only among management) and work under emergency or high-stress conditions. And they converge to weaken or abolish collective standards or solidarities (3).

In this way, a Darwinian world emerges – it is the struggle of all against all at all levels of the hierarchy, which finds support through everyone clinging to their job and organisation under conditions of insecurity, suffering, and stress. Without a doubt, the practical establishment of this world of struggle would not succeed so completely without the complicity of all of the precarious arrangements that produce insecurity and of the existence of a reserve army of employees rendered docile by these social processes that make their situations precarious, as well as by the permanent threat of unemployment. This reserve army exists at all levels of the hierarchy, even at the higher levels, especially among managers. The ultimate foundation of this entire economic order placed under the sign of freedom is in effect the structural violence of unemployment, of the insecurity of job tenure and the menace of layoff that it implies. The condition of the “harmonious” functioning of the individualist micro-economic model is a mass phenomenon, the existence of a reserve army of the unemployed.

This structural violence also weighs on what is called the labour contract (wisely rationalised and rendered unreal by the “theory of contracts”). Organisational discourse has never talked as much of trust, co-operation, loyalty, and organisational culture as in an era when adherence to the organisation is obtained at each moment by eliminating all temporal guarantees of employment (three-quarters of hires are for fixed duration, the proportion of temporary employees keeps rising, employment “at will” and the right to fire an individual tend to be freed from any restriction).

Thus we see how the neoliberal utopia tends to embody itself in the reality of a kind of infernal machine, whose necessity imposes itself even upon the rulers. Like the Marxism of an earlier time, with which, in this regard, it has much in common, this utopia evokes powerful belief – the free trade faith – not only among those who live off it, such as financiers, the owners and managers of large corporations, etc., but also among those, such as high-level government officials and politicians, who derive their justification for existing from it. For they sanctify the power of markets in the name of economic efficiency, which requires the elimination of administrative or political barriers capable of inconveniencing the owners of capital in their individual quest for the maximisation of individual profit, which has been turned into a model of rationality. They want independent central banks. And they preach the subordination of nation-states to the requirements of economic freedom for the masters of the economy, with the suppression of any regulation of any market, beginning with the labour market, the prohibition of deficits and inflation, the general privatisation of public services, and the reduction of public and social expenses.

Economists may not necessarily share the economic and social interests of the true believers and may have a variety of individual psychic states regarding the economic and social effects of the utopia which they cloak with mathematical reason. Nevertheless, they have enough specific interests in the field of economic science to contribute decisively to the production and reproduction of belief in the neoliberal utopia. Separated from the realities of the economic and social world by their existence and above all by their intellectual formation, which is most frequently purely abstract, bookish, and theoretical, they are particularly inclined to confuse the things of logic with the logic of things.

These economists trust models that they almost never have occasion to submit to the test of experimental verification and are led to look down upon the results of the other historical sciences, in which they do not recognise the purity and crystalline transparency of their mathematical games, whose true necessity and profound complexity they are often incapable of understanding. They participate and collaborate in a formidable economic and social change. Even if some of its consequences horrify them (they can join the socialist party and give learned counsel to its representatives in the power structure), it cannot displease them because, at the risk of a few failures, imputable to what they sometimes call “speculative bubbles”, it tends to give reality to the ultra-logical utopia (ultra-logical like certain forms of insanity) to which they consecrate their lives.

And yet the world is there, with the immediately visible effects of the implementation of the great neoliberal utopia: not only the poverty of an increasingly large segment of the most economically advanced societies, the extraordinary growth in income differences, the progressive disappearance of autonomous universes of cultural production, such as film, publishing, etc. through the intrusive imposition of commercial values, but also and above all two major trends. First is the destruction of all the collective institutions capable of counteracting the effects of the infernal machine, primarily those of the state, repository of all of the universal values associated with the idea of the public realm. Second is the imposition everywhere, in the upper spheres of the economy and the state as at the heart of corporations, of that sort of moral Darwinism that, with the cult of the winner, schooled in higher mathematics and bungee jumping, institutes the struggle of all against all and cynicism as the norm of all action and behaviour.

Can it be expected that the extraordinary mass of suffering produced by this sort of political-economic regime will one day serve as the starting point of a movement capable of stopping the race to the abyss? Indeed, we are faced here with an extraordinary paradox. The obstacles encountered on the way to realising the new order of the lone, but free individual are held today to be imputable to rigidities and vestiges. All direct and conscious intervention of whatever kind, at least when it comes from the state, is discredited in advance and thus condemned to efface itself for the benefit of a pure and anonymous mechanism, the market, whose nature as a site where interests are exercised is forgotten. But in reality, what keeps the social order from dissolving into chaos, despite the growing volume of the endangered population, is the continuity or survival of those very institutions and representatives of the old order that is in the process of being dismantled, and all the work of all of the categories of social workers, as well as all the forms of social solidarity, familial or otherwise.

The transition to “liberalism” takes place in an imperceptible manner, like continental drift, thus hiding its effects from view. Its most terrible consequences are those of the long term. These effects themselves are concealed, paradoxically, by the resistance to which this transition is currently giving rise among those who defend the old order by drawing on the resources it contained, on old solidarities, on reserves of social capital that protect an entire portion of the present social order from falling into anomie. This social capital is fated to wither away – although not in the short run – if it is not renewed and reproduced.

But these same forces of “conservation”, which it is too easy to treat as conservative, are also, from another point of view, forces of resistance to the establishment of the new order and can become subversive forces. If there is still cause for some hope, it is that forces still exist, both in state institutions and in the orientations of social actors (notably individuals and groups most attached to these institutions, those with a tradition of civil and public service) that, under the appearance of simply defending an order that has disappeared and its corresponding “privileges” (which is what they will immediately be accused of), will be able to resist the challenge only by working to invent and construct a new social order. One that will not have as its only law the pursuit of egoistic interests and the individual passion for profit and that will make room for collectives oriented toward the rational pursuit of ends collectively arrived at and collectively ratified.

How could we not make a special place among these collectives, associations, unions, and parties for the state: the nation-state, or better yet the supranational state – a European state on the way toward a world state – capable of effectively controlling and taxing the profits earned in the financial markets and, above of all, of counteracting the destructive impact that the latter have on the labour market. This could be done with the aid of labour unions by organising the elaboration and defence of the public interest. Like it or not, the public interest will never emerge, even at the cost of a few mathematical errors, from the vision of accountants (in an earlier period one would have said of “shopkeepers”) that the new belief system presents as the supreme form of human accomplishment.

UTOPIA OF ENDLESS EXPLOITATION: The essence of neoliberalism. What is neoliberalism? A programme for destroying collective structures which may impede the pure market logic. Pierre Bourdieu

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Book Review: Cognitive Neuroscience of Emotion, edited by Richard D.  Lane, M.D., Ph.D., and Lynn Nadel, Ph.D. New York, Oxford University Press, 2000, 431 pp., $60.00; $35.00 (paper).

Evidence linking specific psychological faculties to localized brain areas has been available for only 150 years, yet distinctions among the features of mental life have been made for thousands of years. Aristotle, for example, divided brain function into cognitive, emotive, and willful processes. This ancient distinction between cognition and emotion is reflected in the structure of the various DSMs of APA, which begin with a section on the disorders of cognition and distinguish them from disorders of mood, and in most training programs, where psychiatrists receive little training in the disorders of cognition and neurologists receive little or no training in the disorders of emotion.

The utility of the distinction between cognition and emotion and questions about its grounding in the brain’s neural substrate are explored in Cognitive Neuroscience of Emotion.  This volume is the product of a meeting held at the University of Arizona and is to be commended for presenting a variety of viewpoints on this fascinating question.

Is an alternative view viable? Does research support the view that the distinction between emotion and cognition is artificial? The book addresses these questions by beginning with overviews by Damasio and by Clore and Ortony. They review studies in which techniques used by cognitive scientists have been applied to the study of emotion. Damasio concludes that emotions and feelings should be distinguished and that the failure to make this distinction lies behind the paucity of studies in the brain basis of emotion. The evidence that he offers to support his view is weak, but he does demonstrate the value of studying both emotion and cognition with the same neuropsychological and imaging methods.  The distinction between emotion as an externally observable state and feelings as an internal experiential state could be validated if distinct physiological substrates were found for the two. Even if the distinction cannot be supported, it may serve a utilitarian purpose because physiological responses are easier to study. At this point in history, claims that the internal experience of feelings (or emotions) will yield to the methods of neuroscience are similar to the claim that the neural basis of consciousness will be discovered-promises rather than results.  Nevertheless, data-based approaches to these issues are the only way to move beyond the realm of rhetoric. 

The second section of this book reviews the potential role of the amygdala in the genesis, persistence, and interpretation of emotion. The demonstration that emotional expression is associated with a locus or loci does not prove that the distinction between cognition and emotion is artificial, but these chapters review a wide range of experiments whose results suggest that processes traditionally called “cognitive” are operative in animal behaviors that appear to reflect human emotion.  The third section reviews human research more directly.  Lesion studies and skin conductance studies support the contention that the amygdala is involved in human emotion, but they also demonstrate the involvement of other brain regions.  The hypothesis that the complex mental phenomena we refer to as emotion involve multiple structures, pathways, and molecular mechanisms is supported by much more data than the hypothesis that there is a single “emotion center.” The last section of the book examines the effects of brain lesions on emotional function. Again, there is abundant evidence linking emotional activation to multiple neural pathways.  This line of work does not directly address whether cognition and emotion are distinct or entwined brain capacities, but it does provide a set of methods by which neural mechanisms can be dissected.
Although the central question of the book is yet to be answered, this volume demonstrates clearly that the emotion/ cognition interface is an important area of study and that progress is being made along many fronts. The ultimate answer may well be that both views of the emotion/cognition dichotomy are true: these states share some circuitry and molecular mechanisms but also involve distinct loci and mechanisms. A much better understanding of the neural substrates of both emotion and cognition will undoubtedly develop, but new conceptual models of CNS organization and function may be needed before a comprehensive understanding emerges.  Readers interested in the even more radical view that our current conception of the term “emotion” needs to be rethought and perhaps even discarded will enjoy Paul Griffiths book, What Emotions Really Are: The Problem of Psychological Categories (1).

Reference
1. Griffiths PE: What Emotions Really Are: The Problem of Psychological Categories. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1997

PETER V. RABINS, M.D., M.P.H.
Baltimore, Md

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Controversies, such as the Freedom of Speech debate at the Oxford Union, always brings people back as to what is truth, what are ethics, and whether they relate to each other in any critical manner. To this extent, we have, on The European Rationalist, written and reference a number of previous articles on the subject: How Could I Be Wrong? How Wrong Could I Be?; Delusions, Beliefs; Theism, Atheism, and Rationality;  Science and Truth; etc. At the level of general public debate we begin to think of issues such as to whether free speech (and consequently as to what we believe and why we believe it) has an envelope beyond which it becomes unacceptable to the current norms and metrics. The only problem is who decides – the media barons, big business, religious groups, powerful minorities?

I came across the book True to Life, and found a quite good review by Kieran Setiya of it that I think is worth reading to start off with.  

In True to Life, Michael Lynch sets out to defend “four truisms about truth”: truth is objective, a “cognitive good”, a worthy goal of inquiry, and something valuable in itself. On the back cover, Nussbaum says that the book “performs a major public service”.  

The argument of the book is intricate, though it is presented with an enviably light touch. It begins with the platitude that a belief is correct if and only if its object is a true proposition; deduces that, if p is true, it is good to believe p, other things being equal; interprets this as final or non-instrumental value; and concludes that truth is itself a normative property, and, given Moore’s “open question argument”, an irreducible one: “If truth matters, reductive naturalism is false.”

In a different context, it would be interesting to engage with these steps, each of which is controversial. Here, my focus is rhetorical. Who is Lynch writing for, and what are his chances of convincing them?

I think he cannot be writing for the post-modernist “enemies of truth” alleged to inhabit our English Departments. They will rightly feel that they are not taken seriously here. There is no mention of Derrida, and only a page or two on Foucault. In any case, the whole operation will seem to them naïvely unhistorical. To engage with them, one has to sink, or rise, to their level – as in Literature Against Itself.

Perhaps the aim of the book is prophylactic: it is meant to forestall the attractions of subjectivism and the cynical equation of truth with power. But if this is his persuasive task, Lynch has adopted an unfortunate strategy. Arguing that one cannot accept the value of truth without Moorean non-naturalism is bad salesmanship, even if is sound. It is not just the post-modern crowd who cannot stomach Principia Ethica: most philosophers find its commitments incredible.

The effect of True to Life, if it carries conviction, will thus be to enmire the truisms about truth in a swamp of metaphysics, to retrench the suspicion that those who believe in the possibility and the value of objective truth inhabit a Platonic jungle. As I said, that might be so – I haven’t tried to engage with Lynch’s arguments – but it would be terrible news. This truth might be one of those we do better not to believe.

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Manipulating your mind – What will science discover about our brains, and how are we going to deal with it?

The Decade of the Brain, proclaimed by US President George Bush in 1990, passed without making much of an obvious impact. But it did in fact produce considerable scientific advances in neuro-biology, giving scientists an exponentially increasing knowledge of how the brain works and the means to manipulate biochemical processes within and between nerve cells. This knowledge is slowly trickling down to society as well, be it in the pharmaceutical industry, to parents concerned about their child’s performance in school, to students looking for chemical helpers to pass their exams, or to military researchers who have an obvious interest in keeping soldiers awake and alert.

“Unlike the many claimed applications of genetics… diagnostic and therapeutic products from neurobiological research are already available”

The ability to fiddle with the brain with ever-increasing effectiveness has also created critical questions about how to use this knowledge. Francis Fukuyama, in Our Posthuman Future, Leon Kass, Chairman of the US President’s Council on Bioethics, and Steven Rose, a neurobiologist at the Open University, UK, are the most prominent and outspoken critics of the use of psychopharmaceuticals and other neurological techniques to analyse and interfere with human mental capabilities. Their concerns have also grasped the attention of neurobiologists, ethicists, philosophers and the lay public, who are all slowly realising the enormous potential of modern neuroscience. “People closely identify themselves with their brains, they don’t with their genes,” said Arthur L. Caplan, Professor of Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA.

Although these debates started in the late 1990s, it took the general public a bit longer to take notice-The New York Times and The Economist did not pick up on the issue until 2002. “There is a great amount of information about the brain but no one’s paying attention to the ethics,” Caplan said. “The attention of ethicists went to genetics because of the Human Genome Project…so we had to jump-start the ethics [in neurobiology].” But that is rapidly changing. Unlike the many claimed applications of genetics, such as gene therapy or molecular medicine, diagnostic and therapeutic products from neurobiological research are already available. Caplan sees four major controversial areas: the definition and diagnosis of certain types of behaviour, such as aggression, terrorism or poor performance in school; the use of drugs to alter such behaviour; questions about moral responsibility-with people going to court and saying ‘this man isn’t responsible because his brain is abnormal’; and eventually new debates about racial and gender differences.

These controversies are not just anticipated: most are already occurring. Society’s pursuit of perfection entails ‘treating’ whatever is not desirable-be it bad mood, aggression or forgetfulness. Many people take herbal memory enhancers, such as ginkgo biloba, even though they are probably no more effective than sugar or coffee. But neurobiology adds a new twist. By understanding the brain’s workings at the chemical level, it paves the way for much more efficient ways to tweak brain function. And many psychopharmaceuticals already enjoy a much broader popularity beyond treating neurological and psychiatric diseases. “When you think of the millions of pills that people take as anti-anxiety drugs, how many of these people are really anxious? Probably just a small percentage,” said James L. McGaugh, Director of the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory at the University of California, Irvine, CA, USA. Millions of school children in the USA are prescribed antipsychotic drugs or are treated for depression and attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and the numbers in Western Europe are also increasing (Brower, 2003). There is an epidemic of new behavioural disorders: ADHD, seasonal affective disorder (SAD), post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), panic disorder (PD), narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), borderline personality disorder (BPD), antisocial personality disorder (APD), histrionic personality disorder (HPD)-soon we will run out of letter combinations to abbreviate them all. The explosive increase in prescriptions for Ritalin® for school children has already prompted questions about the apparent epidemic of ADHD. “Now it’s not that Ritalin is not effective in sedating an over-active kid, it certainly is, but it’s turning a complex social relationship into a problem inside the brain of a child and therefore inside the genes of a child,” said Rose (see interview, in this issue).

In a way, Ritalin is neuroethics “in a nutshell”, commented Wrye Sententia, co-director of the Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics (CCLE), a non-profit education, law and policy center in Davis, CA, USA, and head of its programme on neuroethics. The debate over the drug covers social, ethical and legal issues: who defines behaviour and behavioural disorder, who should control treatment, how should society react to drug misuse, and is it ethical to use drugs to gain an advantage over others? These are valid questions that apply equally to neuroethics in general.

Neuropharmaceuticals have already found applications outside a medical setting. Like amphetamines before it, Ritalin is increasingly used by healthy people to help them focus their attention. Similarly, the development of new drugs to influence the biochemistry of brain function also has broad economic potential outside the medical setting. Most memory-enhancing drugs available to treat Alzheimer’s, such as donezepil, galantamine or rivastigmine, inhibit cholinesterase to slow down the turnover of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine in the synapse. New drugs in the development pipeline will act on other compounds in the biochemical pathway that encodes memory: Cortex Pharmaceuticals (Irvine, CA, USA) are studying compounds called Ampakines®, which act on the AMPA receptor. This receptor responds to glutamate, which is itself involved in memory acquisition. Another class of drugs under development acts on the cAMP responsive element-binding protein (CREB), the last step in establishing long-term memory. “What we would expect is that drugs that enhance CREB signalling would be specific to inducing long-term memory and not affect upstream events of memory, such as memory acquisition and short term memory,” explained Tim Tully, Professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (NY, USA) and founder of Helicon Therapeutics (Farmingdale, NY, USA), one of two companies now working on drugs to increase CREB function.

None of these drugs, however, tackles brain degeneration itself, the cause of Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases, but instead they delay the disease by squeezing a little more out of the remaining brain material. Consequently, they will also work on healthy people. Not surprisingly, the pharmaceutical industry has a great interest in this non-medical use of memory-enhancing drugs, according to McGaugh: “The Alzheimer market is a very important one, but small. The real market is everyone else out there who would like to learn a little easier. So they take a pill in place of studying harder.” Tully warned about the dangers of this off-label use of memory enhancers. The side effects of the first generation of memory drugs are a risk that should not be taken when there is no reason, he said. And this may never become an application, due to other intrinsic side effects. “Maybe it is not a good thing to have memory enhanced chronically every day for the rest of your life. Maybe that will produce psychological side effects, like cramp your head with too many things you can’t forget,” Tully said.

“The strong military interest in psychopharmaceuticals also presents another conundrum: if the military allows their off-label use, it would be hard to call for a ban on their civil use…”

Although memory is important, so too is the ability to forget negative experiences. As long-term memory is largely enhanced by stress hormones and emotional arousal, a horrendous event can overload the system and lead to PTSD: patients persistently re-experience the trauma. Researchers at Harvard University are now studying propranolol, a beta-blocker commonly used as a cardiac drug, as a means to decrease PTSD. Similarly, Helicon Therapeutics is working on CREB suppressors to achieve the same goal: forgetting unwanted memories. These drugs could be valuable for rape victims, survivors of terrorist attacks or young soldiers suffering from PTSD as a result of battlefield experiences. Nevertheless, an ethical debate over memory suppressors has emerged. Kass has described them as the “morning-after pill for just about anything that produces regret, remorse, pain or guilt” (Baard, 2003). But “if the soldier should be shot in the leg, he is treated. They mend the wounds. Now why wouldn’t they mend the mental wounds? On what moral grounds?” countered McGaugh. “We need the right regulations and we need the right education of society so that the social acceptance of how to use such drugs is appropriate,” said Tully. “Just to give the drug to every soldier that has been out in the field, that would be an abuse… A commander-in-chief, one would hope, would decide against such a use based on his education and on his advisors telling him scientists and experts have discussed this issue and it’s immoral to do something like that.”

“Freedom of thought is situated at the core of what it means to be a free person”

Cognitive enhancement is of just as much military interest as the treatment of PTSD. German fighter pilots in World War II took amphetamines to stay alert during British bombing raids at night. During the war against Iraq, US fighter and bomber pilots used drugs to keep awake during the long flights to and from their targets, which with briefing and debriefing could easily exceed 24 hours. Not surprisingly, the US Air Force is carrying out research on how donepezil could improve pilots’ performance. The strong military interest in psychopharmaceuticals also presents another conundrum: if the military allows their off-label use, it would be hard to call for a ban on their civil use, as Kass has suggested.

Neurological advances are not limited to new drugs. Brain imaging techniques, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) or positron emission tomography (PET), offer enormous potential for analysing higher behaviour. While neurologists originally used them to analyse basic sensual, motor and cognitive processes, they are now increasingly being used by psychologists and philosophers to investigate the mechanics of social and moral attitudes, reasoning and moral perceptions (Illes et al, 2003). Joshua Greene, a graduate student at Princeton University’s Center for the Study of Brain, Mind and Behavior, put his human subjects into a fMRI scanner and presented them with hypothetical scenarios in which they had to make a decision between two more or less bad outcomes of the situation (Greene et al, 2001). The results of the studies show how the brain weighs emotional and rational reasoning against each other in its decision-making. Potentially, this could be used as a sophisticated lie detector to see if someone answers a question spontaneously or after considerable reasoning. Other studies showed that the brain reacts differently at first sight when seeing a person of the same or a different skin colour (Hart et al, 2000; Phelps et al, 2000). That does not necessarily mean that everyone is a racist, but refinement of such methods could unveil personal prejudices or preferences. The use of brain scans to evaluate people’s talents or dispositions will therefore draw as much interest as the drugs used to manipulate them. “Parents will be falling over themselves to take these tests,” Caplan said. In contrast to Kass and other conservative critics, he therefore argues that regulation will not make sense but that it should be left to the individual to make decisions about whether to undergo diagnostic tests for behaviour or take behaviour-modifying drugs. “Medicine, business and the public will have to negotiate these boundaries,” Caplan said, but he remains worried that “peer pressure and advertising and marketing will make us take those pills.” Rose also does not call for a ban, but wants society to take control of these new advances and their applications, based on democratic decisions.

The use of these new tests and drugs may cause another problem. Going back to Ritalin, Sententia explained that an important reason for the apparent increase in ADHD may be overcrowded classrooms and overworked teachers, who are quick to label a child with ADHD rather than call for improvements in the school. “From the top down there is a clear message to put these kids on drugs,” Sententia said. Society should instead “put the parents’ rights back into focus” and better educate parents about behavioural disorders. This would give them more freedom to make their own decisions for their child “so they are not at the mercy of doctors or teachers,” she continued. Such “cognitive liberty”, as Sententia described it, would have to rest on better public education and understanding about the risks and benefits, the potentials and myths of neurobiology. “What I think we need to do in the next five or ten years is discuss exactly what is appropriate and inappropriate in applying these things,” said Tully. “Now is the time for education.”

This does not, however, solve the question of who controls diagnostic tools and treatment in the case of people who are not free or able to make their own decisions-such as children, prison inmates or psychiatric patients. CCLE, for instance, filed an amicus curiae (’friend of the court’) brief to the US Supreme Court on behalf of Charles T. Sell, to argue against a court order requiring Sell to be injected with psychotropic drugs to make him mentally competent to stand trial for insurance fraud. Sententia sees some limitations, however, to cognitive freedom. Children do not enjoy the same civil rights as adults, but it should be the parents-not teachers or schools-who make the decisions about the diagnosis and treatment of their children, she said. Prison inmates also lose some of their individual rights when they are convicted, Sententia continued, and this may include their right to refuse medication. “The legal system will have to decide how to use this knowledge about the brain,” Caplan commented, in light of the “tremendous tension between brain privacy and social interest in controlling dangerous behaviour.” Sententia therefore stressed that all decisions about diagnosis and treatment must at least be in accordance with the US Constitution and the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights.

Some of the most important applications of this right to privacy concern using brain scans as a sophisticated lie detector for prisoners seeking parole, foreigners applying for a visa or employers testing their employees’ honesty. “What and how you think should be private,” Sententia said, because “freedom of thought is situated at the core of what it means to be a free person.” Caplan also expects more pressure from society in future to make sure that no such tests are performed without informed consent.

“The use of brain scans to evaluate people’s talents or dispositions will therefore draw as much interest as the drugs used to manipulate them”

Equally, Caplan, Sententia and others believe that individuals should be free to use neurological technology to enhance their mental abilities outside a medical setting. This is in contrast to the prohibitive stance taken by Kass and other conservatives who argue that it would be neither ‘natural’ nor fair to those who choose not to use such enhancement. “It’s not clear to me that all forms of enhancement are bad,” commented Adina Roskies, a neuroscientist and philosopher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Department of Linguistics and Philosophy (Cambridge, MA, USA). “There are all sorts of things that we do today that enhance our life prospects and that are not considered to be bad. … We’re far away from the ‘natural’ order already.” Thus, in some cases, instead of controlling or even restricting these new possibilities, it would be better if society focuses on trying to ensure that everyone has access to them, she continued. Given the increasing interest that the public is showing in the new possibilities offered by neuroscience, it may be too late for restrictions anyway. “There is no way of stopping this tide, the genie is out of the bottle,” Sententia said, “so the question is: how can we navigate this sea of change?”

References

1. Baard E ( 2003) The guilt-free soldier. The Village Voice, Jan 22
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Manipulating your mind – What will science discover about our brains, and how are we going to deal with it? Holger Breithaupt & Katrin Weigmann, EMBO reports 5, 3, 230-232 (2004)

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Imagine this futuristic courtroom scene. The defence barrister stands up, and pointing to his client in the dock, makes this plea: “The case against Mr X must be dismissed. He cannot be held responsible for smashing Mr Y’s face into a pulp. He is not guilty, it was his brain that did it. Blame not Mr X, but his overactive amygdala.”

The legal profession in America is taking an increasing interest in neuroscience. There is a flourishing academic discipline of “neurolaw” and neurolawyers are penetrating the legal system. Vanderbilt University recently opened a $27 million neuroimaging centre and hopes to enrol students in a programme in the law and neuroscience. In the courts, as in the trial of serial rapist and murderer Bobby Joe Long, brain-scan evidence is being invoked in support of pleas of diminished responsibility. The idea is abroad that developments in neuroscience – in particular the observation of activity in the living brain, using techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging – have shown us that we are not as free, or as accountable for our actions, as we traditionally thought.

Defence lawyers are licking their lips at the possibility of (to use law professor Jeffrey Rosen’s succinct phrase) placing “the brain on the stand” to take the rap on behalf of the client. Though they failed to cut much ice in Long’s case, arguments that blame lies not with the defendant but with his overactive amygdala (supposedly responsible for aggressive emotions) or his underactive frontal lobes (supposedly responsible for inhibiting the expression of such emotions) are being deployed with increasing frequency. If our brains are in charge, and bad behaviour is due to them, our attitude to criminal responsibility, to punishment (the balance between rehabilitation and retribution) and to preventive detention of individuals thought to have criminal tendencies may all have to change.

Before we invest millions in “neurolaw” centres, however, we need to remind ourselves that observations of brain activity in the laboratory can explain very few things about us. We have no neural explanation for: sensations; the differences between sensations; the way our consciousness coheres at any particular time and over time; our relationship to an explicit past and an explicit future; our sense of being a self; and our awareness of other people as having minds like ourselves. All of these are involved in ordinary, waking behaviour. The confident assertion that “his brain made him do it”, except in well-attested cases – such as the automatisms associated with certain forms of epilepsy or the disinhibited behaviour that may follow severe brain injury – therefore goes beyond our current knowledge or understanding.

Those who blame the brain should be challenged as to why they stop at the brain when they seek the causes of bad behaviour. Since the brain is a physical object, it is wired into nature at large. “My brain made me do it” must mean (ultimately) that “The Big Bang” made me do it. Neuro-determinism quickly slides into determinism tout court.

And there is a contradiction built into the plea of neuromitigation. The claim “my brain made me do it” suggests that I am not my brain; even that my brain is some kind of alien force. One of the founding notions of neurolaw, however, is that the person is the brain. If I were my brain, then “My brain made me do it” would boil down to “I made me do it” and that would hardly get me off the hook. And yet, if I am not identical with my brain, why should a brain make me do anything? Why should this impersonal bit of matter single me out?

The brain is, of course, the final common pathway of all actions. You can’t do much without a brain. Decapitation is, in most instances, associated with a decline in IQ.

Nevertheless, there is a difference between events that owe their origin to the stand-alone brain – for example the twitching associated with an epileptic fit – and actions that do not. While we do not hold someone responsible for an epileptic fit, we do hold them responsible for driving against medical advice and causing a fatal crash. The global excuse “my brain made me do it” would reduce life to a condition of status epilepticus.

In practice, most brain-blamers are not prepared to deny everyone’s responsibility for anything and everything. While the brain is blamed for actions that attract moral disapprobation or legal sanction, people do not normally pass responsibility on to their brains for good actions or for neutral actions such as pouring a cup of tea or just getting up for a stretch after a long sit down. When asked why he is defending a particular client, a barrister is unlikely to say: “My brain made me do it, your honour.” This pick-and-mix neuro-determinism is grounds for treating a plea of “neuro-mitigation” with caution.

So we still retain the distinction between events such as epileptic fits that can be attributed to brain activity and those that we attribute to persons who are more than mere neural activity. Deciding on the boundaries of our responsibility for events in which we are implicated cannot be handed over to neuroscientists examining the activity of the isolated brain in the laboratory. As Stephen Morse, a professor of law, has reminded us, it is people, not brains, who commit crimes and “neuroscience . . . can never identify the mysterious point at which people should be excused responsibility for their actions”. That moral, legal question must be answered not in laboratories but in courtrooms and legislatures.

Meanwhile, the neuromitigation of blame has to be treated with suspicion except in those instances where there is unambiguous evidence of grossly abnormal brain function or abnormal mental function due to clearcut illness that may have its origin in brain disease. Our knowledge of the relationship between brain and consciousness, brain and self, and brain and agency is so weak and so conceptually confused that the appeal to neuroscience in the law courts, the police station or anywhere else is premature and usually inappropriate. And, I would suggest, it will remain both premature and inappropriate. Neurolaw is just another branch of neuromythology.

Why blame me? It was all my brain’s fault
The dubious rise of ‘neurolaw’ Raymond Tallis

The Times Oct 24, 2007

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