rigorousintuition.ca

Stanford's Robert Sapolsky, one of the most interesting anthropologists I've heard lecture, gives us 90 minutes on the evolutionary basis for literal religious belief, "metamagical thinking," schizotypal personality and so on, explaining how evolutionarily, the mild schizophrenic expression we called "schizotypal personality" have enjoyed increased reproductive opportunities.

What is schizotypal? It's a more subtle version of schizophrenia. This is not somebody who's completely socially crippled; they're just solitary, detached: these are the lighthouse keepers, the projectionists in the movie theaters. These are not people who are thought-disordered to the point of being completely nonfunctional; these are people who just believe in kinda strange stuff. They are into their Star Trek conventions. They're into their astrology, they're into their telepathy and their paranormal beliefs, they're into--and you can see now where I'm heading [laughter]--very, very literal, concrete interpretations of religious events.

Schizophrenics have a whole lot of trouble telling the level of abstraction of a story. They're always biased in the direction of interpreting things more concretely than is actually the case. You would take a schizopohrenic and say, "Okay, what do apples, bananas and oranges have in common?" and they would say, "They all are multi-syllabic words." [laughter] You say "Well, that's true. Do they have anything else in common?" and they say, "Yes, they actually all contain letters that form closed loops." [laughter] This is not seeing the trees instead of the forest, this is seeing the bark on the trees, this very concreteness.

What you find with schizotypals is what is called metamagical thinking, a very strong interest in new-age beliefs, science fiction, fantasy, religion, but in a very concrete, literal form, a very fundamentalist style. Somebody walking on water is not a metaphor. Somebody rising from the dead is not a metaphor; this is reported, literal fact.

Now we have to ask our evolutionary question: "Who are the schizotypals throughout 99% of human history?" And in the 1930s, decades before the word "schizotypal" even existed, anthropologists already had the answer.

It's the shamans. It's the medicine men. It's the medicine women. It's the witch doctors. In the 1930s an anthropologist named Paul Radin first described it as "shamans being half mad," shamans being "healed madmen." This fits exactly. It's the shamans who are moving separate from everyone else, living alone, who talk with the dead, who speak in tongues, who go out with the full moon and turn into a hyena overnight, and that sort of stuff. It's the shamans who have all this metamagical thinking. When you look at traditional human society, they all have shamans. What's very clear, though, is they all have a limit on the number of shamans. That is this classic sort of balanced selection of evolution. There is a need for this subtype--but not too many.

The critical thing with schizotypal shamanism is, it is not uncontrolled the way it is in the schizophrenic. This is not somebody babbling in tongues all the time in the middle of the hunt. This is someone babbling during the right ceremony. This is not somebody hearing voices all the time, this is somebody hearing voices only at the right point. It's a milder, more controlled version.

Shamans are not evolutionarily unfit. Shamans are not leaving fewer copies of their genes. These are some of the most powerful, honored members of society. This is where the selection is coming from. What this shamanistic theory says is, it's not schizophrenia that's evolved, it's schizotypal shamanism that's evolved. In order to have a couple of shamans on hand in your group, you're willing to put up with the occasional third cousin who's schizophrenic. That's the argument; and it's a very convincing one.

If you look at all these 1930s and 1940s anthropologists, there's a certain dead-white-male racism that runs through all of this stuff that anthropology still has not recovered from. If you read their writings, what was between the lines--and often not between the lines--was, this is about "them." This is about the folks with the bones in their noses and no clothes who wind up in the National Geographic nudie pictures. These are them and their subjective paranormal beliefs; thank God we live in objective modern societies. [laughter]

What is perfectly obvious here is that this entire picture applies just as readily to our western cultures. Western religions, all the leading religions, have this schizotypalism shot through them from top to bottom. It's that same exact principle: it's great having one of these guys, but we sure wouldn't want to have three of them in our tribe. Overdo it, and our schizotypalism in the Western religious setting is what we call a "cult," and there you are in the realm of a Charles Manson or a David Koresh or a Jim Jones. You can only do post-hoc forensic psychiatry on Koresh and Jones, but Charles Manson is a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic. But get it just right, and people are gonna get the day off from work on your birthday for millennia to come. [laughter]

Or you can be an orthodox rabbi who spends your time in a slaughterhouse. You don't ritualistically slaughter the animals. Your job is to make sure everybody else is doing it. Your job is to ritualistically make sure they follow the rituals. And you get paid, and you get your health insurance. In the crudest sort of anthopological terms of economics, while the peasants are sweating to produce the bread that they need to consume, they're sweating to produce the bread that the clergy is consuming as well. We are paying, throughout history, for people who are the best, most avid, psychiatrically-driven performers of ritual.

To get a real insight into this, we have to come back to that question, "Why is there this similarity between religious ritualism and OCD rituals?"

You could say, "It's just by chance."

Or you could say, "There's a biological convergence going on there." It's not random that we're most concerned with rituals about keeping our bodies healthy, our food clean, that sort of stuff.

But another answer in there has got to be, "People with OCD invented a lot of these religious rituals."

Let me give you one example of this. A 16th-century Augustinian monk named Luder for some reason left a very detailed diary. This is a man who grew up with an extremely brutal father, had a very anxious relationship with him, was very psychosomatic-illness-oriented. One day he was out walking in the field. There was a thunderstorm, and he got a panic attack, and vowed, "If I'm allowed to survive this, I will become a monk and devote the rest of my life to God." He survives, becomes a monk, and throws himself into this ritualism with a frenzy. This was an order of monks that was silent 20-some hours a day. Nonetheless, he had four hours worth of confessions to make every day: "I didn't say this prayer as devoutly as I should have. My mind wandered when I was doing this, doing that." The first time he ran a mass, he had to do it over and over because he got the details wrong. He would drive his Father Superior crazy with his hours and hours of confession every day: "God is going to be angry at me for doing this, because I said this, and I didn't think this much, and I didn't do this the right way, and I . . ." until the Father Superior got exasperated with him and came up with a statement that is shockingly modern in its insight. He said, "The problem isn't that God is angry with you. The problem is that you're angry with God." The most telling detail about this monk was, he washed and washed and washed. As he put it in his diary: "The more you wash, the dirtier you get." Classic OCD.

The reason why we know about this man Luder is because we know him by the Anglicized version of his name: Spoiler:Martin Luther. [laughter]

Taking Evolution Seriously

Back in 1904, sociologist Max Weber proposed that the modern period was witnessing “the disenchantment of the world” – a process which traditional mythic ideas that wove meaning into human experience were being replaced by the alienating and dehumanizing worldview of materialist science. There’s some truth to Weber’s thesis, but I’m not sure he anticipated the inevitable backlash: the Procrustean stretching and lopping of scientific ideas in the popular imagination that has turned many of them into substitute myths.

One example that has been much on my mind of late is the way the theory of evolution has been manhandled into a surrogate mythology. The reason it’s been on my mind is simple enough: whenever I discuss peak oil at a lecture, book signing, or some other public setting, it’s a safe bet that someone will raise a hand and ask what I think about the possibility that the approaching crisis is part of our transition to a new evolutionary level. I am always left wondering what to say in response, because this sort of question is almost always rooted in the notion that evolution is a linear movement that leads onward and upward through a series of distinct stages or levels – and this notion is a pretty fair misstatement of the way evolution takes place in nature.

Few things in the history of ideas are quite so interesting as the way that new discoveries get harnessed in the service of old obsessions. When X-rays were first detected in 1895, for example, one of the first results was panic over the possibility that the new rays might make it possible to see through clothing; the New Jersey state legislature actually debated a bill to ban the use of X-rays in opera glasses. Wildly inaccurate as it was, this notion was rooted in profound fears about sexuality, and so it took many decades to dispel – when I was a child, ads in comic books still claimed to sell “X-ray glasses” that would let you see people naked.

Something not that different happened to the theory of evolution, and thus nearly all of today’s popular notions about evolution are shrapnel from the head-on collision between Darwin’s theory and the obsessions of the era in which that theory emerged. Social class rather than sex was the driving force here; as religious justifications for the English caste system faltered, the manufacture of scientific justifications for social hierarchy became a growth industry, and by the time the ink was dry on the first copies of The Origin of Species, evolution was already being drafted into service in this dubious cause. The resulting belief system was very nearly a parody of George Orwell’s Animal Farm in advance – all living things evolve, but some are more evolved than others.

Now of course this is nonsense. A human being, a gecko, a dandelion, and a single-celled blue-green alga are all equally evolved – that is, they have all been shaped to the same degree by the pressures of their environment, and their ancestors have all undergone an equal amount of natural selection. We think of humans as “more evolved” than blue-green alga because Victorian Social Darwinists such as Herbert Spencer engaged in conceptual sleight of hand, transforming the amorphous outward surge of life toward available niches into a ladder of social status, with English gentlemen at the top level and everybody and everything else slotted into place further down. The concept of evolutionary stages or levels was essential to this conjurer’s act, since it allowed social barriers between classes to be mapped onto the biological world.

In nature, though, evolution has no levels, it just has adaptations. There is no straight line of progress along which living things can be ranked. Instead, evolutionary lineages splay outward like the branches of an unruly shrub. Sometimes those branches take unexpected turns, but these evolutionary breakthroughs can no more be ranked in an ascending hierarchy than organisms can. They move outward into new niches, rather than upward to some imagined goal. There are any number of examples from nature; the one I want to use here is the evolution of bats.

The ancestors of the first bats were shrewlike, insect-eating nocturnal mammals, related to early primates, who scampered through the forest canopies of the Eocene around 60 million years ago. For animals that live in trees, the risk of falling is a constant source of evolutionary pressure, and adaptations that will help manage that danger will likely spread through a population; that’s how sloths got their claws, New World monkeys got prehensile tails, and many animals of past and present got extra skin that functions as a parachute. If the extra skin bridges the gap between forelegs and the hindlegs, the most common adaptation, you get the ability to glide, like flying squirrels, colugoes, and the like; you’ve got a viable adaptation, and there you stop.

If the extra skin is mostly on and around the forelimbs, though, you’ve just jumped through the door into a new world, because you can control your glide much more precisely, and you can put muscle into the movements – in other words, you can begin to fly. Once you can do better than a controlled fall, furthermore, the trillions of tasty insects flitting through the forest air are on your menu, and the better you can fly, the more you can catch. The result is ferocious evolutionary pressure toward improved flight skills, and in a few hundred thousand generations, you’ve got agile fliers. That’s what happened to bats, as it happened some 200 million years earlier to the ancestors of the pterodactyls.

By 55 million years ago, bats almost identical to today’s insect-eating bats were darting through the Eocene skies. Sonar seems to have taken a while to evolve, and some offshoots of the family – the big fruit bats and flying foxes, for example – took even longer, but the basic adaptations were set and, to the discomfiture of countless generations of mosquitoes and moths, have remained ever since. As evolutionary breakthroughs go, the leap into flight was a massive success; bats are the second most numerous of mammal orders, exceeded only by the rodents, but it’s impossible to fit the breakthrough that created them into any linear scheme.

Applying an ecological concept to human social systems always takes tinkering, but there are good reasons to accept the idea that societies are capable of evolution; like populations of other living things, human communities face pressures from their environments, and adapt or perish in response. Here again, though, the evolutionary process moves outward in all directions rather than ascending an imaginary hierarchy of levels. Hunter-gatherer systems seem to have been the original form of human society, but other forms branched off as adaptations opened doors to possibilities that were likely as appealing at the time as the bug-filled night sky must have been to the first clumsily flapping proto-bats.

Where large herbivores could be tamed, therefore, nomadic herding societies came into being; where many food plants could be raised in intensive gardens, tribal horticultural societies were born; where extensive fields of seed-bearing grasses offered the best option for survival, agrarian societies took shape. As it turned out, grains could be bred to yield large surpluses that could be transported and stored, and so the agrarian system opened the door to large-scale divisions of labor and the rise of cities. These in turn made complex material culture possible, and ultimately drove the creation of the machines that broke into the Earth’s stockpiles of fossil carbon and gave the modern world its three centuries of exuberance.

Thus industrial society is not “more evolved” than other societies, for for that matter “less evolved.” It was simply the most successful adaptation to the evolutionary pressures that opened up once fossil fuel energy had been tapped, and it outcompeted other systems in something of the same way that an invasive exotic outcompetes less robust native organisms. As fossil fuels deplete and climate change unfolds, the balance of evolutionary pressures is shifting, and as the new reality of limits takes hold, selection will favor those systems that are better adapted to the new ecological constraints of global climate instability, energy scarcity, and resource shortage.

The fact that those new systems are better adapted to new realities, however, does not free them from the human condition. This is where the rubber meets the road, because the people who ask me about the prospects of a new evolutionary level are rarely asking whether the societies of the future will be better adapted to an environment of resource scarcity. They are generally asking whether societies on the other side of an imagined evolutionary leap will be free from problems such as poverty, war, and environmental destruction.

The best way to assess this, it seems to me, is to consider what happened the last time human social evolution yielded a breakthrough to a new way of living in the world: that is, the rise of industrial societies beginning around 1750. Agrarian societies suffered from poverty, war, and environmental destruction, and so did all the other “evolutionary levels” or, rather, adaptations, right back to the hunter-gatherers. Many hunter-gatherers among the First Nations in North America, for example, had sharp social inequalities, a busy slave trade, and a long history of fierce tribal wars. Their ecological relationships were less problematic, since those native societies that failed to find a balance with nature, such as the Mound Builders and the people of Chaco Canyon, collapsed long before 1492.

Just as bats faced the same experiences of hunger, social squabbles, and the unfriendly attentions of predators as their ancestors, the societies that took up industrialism experienced poverty, war, and environmental destruction just like earlier societies, and it’s hard to think of a good reason why the new societies that emerge in response to the evolutionary pressures of the deindustrial age should be exempt from the same troubles. Evolutionary adaptations can make things easier for living things – plenty of predators in the Eocene must have been discomfited when bats evolved the ability to flutter away to safety – but no living thing is exempt from the balances of the natural world. It’s a mistake, in other words, to see evolution as a movement toward Utopia.

When I’ve tried to explain any of the above in public, though, someone – and it’s not always the same someone who asked the original question – usually insists that this may be how biological evolution works, but spiritual evolution is different. Some of my readers just now may have come up with the same objection. All I can say in response is I know of none of the world’s great spiritual traditions that would approve the claim that people living extravagant lifestyles of wealth and privilege – this is, after all, a fair description of life in modern industrial societies from the standpoint of the rest of human experience – can expect a sudden leap to an even more comfortable and convenient life, just because they happen to want it, and would find it a useful way to avoid dealing with the consequences of their own shortsighted choices.

This may seem unduly harsh. Still, the notion that an evolutionary leap will extract us from the mess we’ve made for ourselves is as much a distortion of the realities of the evolutionary process as any Social Darwinist screed. If people want to believe that a miracle will rescue them from the predicament of industrial society, they have every right to their faith, but it would confuse communication a little less to call it a miracle, instead of trying to wrap it in the borrowed prestige of Darwin’s theory. Perhaps it’s the bias instilled by my own Druid faith, furthermore, but it seems to me that if we are going to use evolution as a metaphor, we need to start by taking evolution seriously, rather than imposing our own fantasies on the very different stories that nature is telling us.

jakell » Mon Feb 16, 2015 7:33 am wrote:I would like to unpick a subtle strand from the article in the OP that is also suggested by the title (otherwise I might not have noticed it) which I think is a modern fallacy. This is the overuse of the word evolution in speech to create some concrete connections in human metaphysical creations. It's reinforced throughout by references to 'adaptive advantages', and shamans 'passing on their genes'.

Although some very vague allusions can be made about the connection between particular mental states and genetics, these are vague, and to make them more concrete by references to evolution and natural selection I think is a misdirection.
For anyone who would like to see this sort of thing in action (and if they have the stomach for it), take a look at the way it is used by White Supremacists in relation to race and intelligence.

jakell » Mon Feb 16, 2015 7:33 am wrote:I would like to unpick a subtle strand from the article in the OP that is also suggested by the title (otherwise I might not have noticed it) which I think is a modern fallacy. This is the overuse of the word evolution in speech to create some concrete connections in human metaphysical creations. It's reinforced throughout by references to 'adaptive advantages', and shamans 'passing on their genes'.

Although some very vague allusions can be made about the connection between particular mental states and genetics, these are vague, and to make them more concrete by references to evolution and natural selection I think is a misdirection.

brainpanhandler » Mon Feb 16, 2015 3:31 pm wrote:

jakell » Mon Feb 16, 2015 7:33 am wrote:I would like to unpick a subtle strand from the article in the OP that is also suggested by the title (otherwise I might not have noticed it) which I think is a modern fallacy. This is the overuse of the word evolution in speech to create some concrete connections in human metaphysical creations. It's reinforced throughout by references to 'adaptive advantages', and shamans 'passing on their genes'.

Although some very vague allusions can be made about the connection between particular mental states and genetics, these are vague, and to make them more concrete by references to evolution and natural selection I think is a misdirection.
For anyone who would like to see this sort of thing in action (and if they have the stomach for it), take a look at the way it is used by White Supremacists in relation to race and intelligence.

If you haven't already you might want to also watch the lecture. The links to the lecture in the OP are dead. But this is the lecture:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WwAQqWUkpI

BrandonD » Mon Feb 16, 2015 4:12 pm wrote:

jakell » Mon Feb 16, 2015 7:33 am wrote:I would like to unpick a subtle strand from the article in the OP that is also suggested by the title (otherwise I might not have noticed it) which I think is a modern fallacy. This is the overuse of the word evolution in speech to create some concrete connections in human metaphysical creations. It's reinforced throughout by references to 'adaptive advantages', and shamans 'passing on their genes'.

Although some very vague allusions can be made about the connection between particular mental states and genetics, these are vague, and to make them more concrete by references to evolution and natural selection I think is a misdirection.

Totally agree, good observation.

jakell » Mon Feb 16, 2015 4:28 pm wrote:

brainpanhandler » Mon Feb 16, 2015 3:31 pm wrote:

jakell » Mon Feb 16, 2015 7:33 am wrote:I would like to unpick a subtle strand from the article in the OP that is also suggested by the title (otherwise I might not have noticed it) which I think is a modern fallacy. This is the overuse of the word evolution in speech to create some concrete connections in human metaphysical creations. It's reinforced throughout by references to 'adaptive advantages', and shamans 'passing on their genes'.

Although some very vague allusions can be made about the connection between particular mental states and genetics, these are vague, and to make them more concrete by references to evolution and natural selection I think is a misdirection.
For anyone who would like to see this sort of thing in action (and if they have the stomach for it), take a look at the way it is used by White Supremacists in relation to race and intelligence.

If you haven't already you might want to also watch the lecture. The links to the lecture in the OP are dead. But this is the lecture:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WwAQqWUkpI

Thanks for this, it looks right up my street, it might be a while before I comment as there are 20 lectures!.

I am an individual who has undergone a transformative experience that in this culture and setting would be identified as psychosis or schizophrenic. Other cultures and settings have other names for the same experience: kundalini awakening, shamanism, mysticism, gnosis, the psychotic-visionary episode, the dark night of the soul, ego death, the alchemical process, positive disintegration, post traumatic stress disorder with psychotic features, spiritual emergency, etc. I was not on any form of spiritual path previous to that experience nor was I experimenting with ethnogens. I was simply an individual in a great deal of pain doing my best to get through it. That experience lasted approximately six weeks. I was guided through it by a mentor figure who appeared and served as my constant companion. Everything in this blog has been researched after the fact. I share it for the benefit of others who may have no framework for interpreting their own psycho-spiritual crisis.