A Just So Story…

Mind and Body are the inventive odd couple of human evolution. One rides high, head in the clouds. The other pushing off heroically in pursuit of newly discovered strategies that maximize fitness.

Together they swam, slithered, trotted or stumbled forward through the eons, undergoing the costume and scenic changes scripted by chance, death and change: as filter feeders, as bloodsuckers, as toothy sets of murderous jaws: now amphibian, now reptilian, and most recently as mammal, elaborating upon the digestive tube format in myriad variations until, together, they arrived at last as Homo Sapiens: the threshold of the modern world.

As we survey the myriad transformations leading to us, we gain a profound appreciation for the useful Mind and its Bodily master.

From within the prison of the skull, Mind directing our activities from afar, somewhat like a NASA technician guiding a Lunar Lande safely to the surface of the moon. Along the way they devised hunting strategies, mastered the mystery of fire, and discovered Knapping and the invention of the spear.

And while in sleep the conscious self slipped beyond reach, the unconscious Mind never rested. Even in its dreams it spent its time grinding dutifully away at the material and psychic problems of existence: all while the muscular Tyrant slumbered in a shroud of animal skins, safe from the chill of the primal night.

This long spiraling climb through the eons has not only been the story of these boon companions learning to get what they needed from a hostile environment. It has also been the chronicle of the dramatic explosion of a specialized human activity–the newly fashioned power to reflect, to analyze and to anticipate, all on a scale far beyond that possessed by those cousins of ours who never made it out of the seas or out of the trees.

It must have been some goddy, body wildness, perhaps some mistake in the transmission of instructions sent to multiplying embryonic cells, that caused the first eruptions in the size of the cranium, as well as in the mass of the prefrontal neocortex.

Whatever the cause, the Mind awoke to discover itself transformed. It had dynamoed its power by means of incredible electronic intervolutions, whereas the old, wheezing, farting Body was stuck in the past: the line of the tendon, the lever of the hinged bone and musculature, the gyrating plasticity of the ball and socket. These have remained fundamentally the same since the earliest days.

Like a maturing child, Brain at last began to grow up. And as it began to pile up the memic stones of its cultures, it could for the very first time begin to see its defecating, brusable Parent with new eyes.

But the memes fashioned by this on-board computer did not yet counter the conservative commandments of DNA. The culture it produced could at times “consult…but [could not] effectively challenge the Oracle residing within the epigenetic rules” (Ibid, 359).

“The Lord created me at the beginning of his work…Ages ago I was set up…When there were no depths I was brought forth…I was beside him…rejoicing before him always…and delighting in the sons of men…” (Prov. 8.22-31).

2

The odds were clearly against Mind ever becoming Body’s rival. For aeons, the granitic, horribly patient face of natural selection had taught the Body and its oldest Brain that affiliative strategies maximized survival in a hostile world. There was as yet no reason to change that rule.

And where evolution left off, culture soon took up the ancient themes with a renewed intensity. The ancient values burned into the DNA were cast into language and symbol, reified, invested with all the authority of the Totem and then transmitted across the generations. In this way the simple wisdom of the genetic and neural “Fathers” continued to guide the young toward a future that was deliberately structured as a replica of the past.

“I have not spoken on my own authority. The Father who sent me has himself given me the commandment what to say and what to speak” (John 12.49).

Simple behavioral repertoires maximized survival; various forms of in-group allegiance and pseudospeciation made tribes and nations strong. These behaviors enabled our ancestors to navigate successfully though those early, dangerous aeons when curiosity and innovation could have gotten them killed. And so, the first and most ancient commandments urged humanity to submit or perish, to be aggressive or be defeated. Enmity bought these wary creatures space and time to feel amity for a chosen few.

The antinomies of the biological world had already become ideological truths, mimicked, sanctioned and at last genetically incorporated by humanity’s earliest myths and religions.

But the accidental discovery of agricultural, and the surplus it promised, partially freed the prefrontal cortex from its hectic devotions. In some few individuals it was at last freed to begin to reflect upon itself and its own thought processes (MacLean, 1990). It could now begin to critically contemplate the body which housed it, as well as the culture which it had dutifully labored to erect.

The dangerous potentialities of the dual-inheritance model unfolded themselves at last. The phenomenon anciently known as Mind/Body conflict could only have been imagined by a creature that was becoming slowly divided against itself.

This ability to evaluate the traditions which one had imbibed from the earliest days was not widespread. Such a perspective was not any more common than in the general population today. Cultural and evolutionary factors continue to militate against the exercise of the critical faculty–either by guaranteeing that most compulsions will remain screened from consciousness, or that individuals will be selected for docility and ease of indoctrinability (H. Simon, E.O. Wilson, Lumsden, Badcock).

Besides, as already stated, most members of the species were aware of the dangers inherent in challenging the way things were always done. About that, the myths and legends seemed to be in agreement:

“You shall fear the Lord your God; you shall serve him, and swear by his name…For the Lord your God is a jealous God; lest the anger of the Lord your God be kindled against you, and he destroy you from off the face of the earth…” (Deut. 6, 13-16).

But now that it was powerful enough, and now that it had the perspective supplied by the permanence of writing, the Minds of a special few could have begun to walk down the dangerous road that detours from mere reflection into critical self analysis.

Somewhere upon its secret and solitary journey it would have reached a kind of promontory; and from this height, it would have been able to cast a backward glance across the cavalcade of the centuries. Some very few could now begin to see the pathways by which It, and its Master, had come.

And if it did so, it would have made a chilling discovery:

It would have discovered that the greatest products of human intelligence– the wonderful words that it and its cortical siblings had given to religion, philosophy and governments– had always been twisted by body into selfish strategies.

All if Mind’s idealistic language had been little more than a verbal smokescreen, lulling the selfish, masticating, death-fearing Body with a metaphysical doublespeak as ancient as the invention of the clause.

For the first time, the gulf between rhetoric and praxis could have become shockingly clear. Troubling questions would have arisen; questions that would have struck at the docility mechanism, and would have urged–like a speech of Tiberius Gracchus in the forum–that awakening of the oppressed: those many who had labored for so few and for so long.

The worm had turned.

2

This discovery would become the deconstructed prototype for a thousand mythologies: a Samson pulling at the pillars of Dagon; a Prometheus stealing fire and giving it to humans; a Serpent whispering god-slaying advice to the innocents in the Garden; a Dragon emerging from the cave, threatening the populace with its irreligious presence. But in this deconstruction, the St. George who comes to the rescue would not be the humanist hero or the friend. He would be the enemy of freedom and individuation: the dragon master come to slay the inquiring mind.

Such knowledge would have exposed the Pharaohs, Prophets, Saints, Kings, Philosophers, Presidents and political saviors in whom so many had placed their childlike trust. These would at last stand revealed as traitorous agents who had acted in service of an ancient, atavistic bodily interest.

For behind their glittering proposals and uplifting ratiocinations–behind Plato’s Republic, behind Medieval scholastic treatises, behind the panoply of testaments, divine revelations, rituals and incense-wafting processionals, behind the metaphysical maunderings of a host of philosophical gurus, behind the stony backdrop of the paintings at Lascaux–lurked the brooding form of the Ancient Tyrant, shrouded in its almost unmanageable fears.

At last, the real meaning of the Totem story would have become clear: the newly emergent critical faculty, cast as the Rebellious Son, and the ancient appetitive self, cast as the Primal Father, would have to come to blows over the shape of the future. History and literature–its multi-faceted Thucydides–would mirror and describe this fundamental conflict again and yet again.

There was no question as to who had to win.

The body saw this too–eavesdropped in its own heavy-lidded way on the dangerous ruminations of the newly critical faculty.

Long ago it had planted its agents in the brain–in those physical structures that formed the foundation stones of the neocortex itself. This was one way of keeping track of the ambitious Junior Partner, for long ago body ruefully recognized that the usually tractable “reason” could sometimes fall in love with itself. Could sometimes attempt to “defy the selfish genes of our birth, and if necessary, the selfish memes of our indoctrination” (Dawkins, 1976).

“We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.”

Long ago, the loyal Mind received a command from the muscular Tyrant: “Allay my fear,” it said.

Loyal Mind went busily to work, embellishing the hunger-borne images of primary process thinking with the all the rhetoric and artifice at its disposal. It elaborated triumphant theological doctrines–guaranteeing an eternal afterlife of Bodily enjoyment. It peopled the skies with the attachment figures, shadows and gigantic actors called devils, angels and gods. And it obscured the vision of mortal annihilation by blinding itself with the swirling smoke rising from the laburnums of myriad faiths.

The governing secrets of the animal kingdom were projected into the skies where they appeared as great chains of being, celestial seats of judgment, threats of divine displeasure: Floods or fiery punishments should the great truths be violated.

The ancient rituals of the swamp were transplanted the Milky Way, and the animal vocabulary of submissive display became the prostrate prayer, the beautiful oratorio or hymn, the inaugural address and the genuflection.

As such, cultures were ultimately held in thrall by atavistic commandments and processes; mimicking a kind of shoaling behavior or other defensive maneuver.

A herd of musk ox, bound rump to rump in the Arctic, is a pretty effective deterrent to wolves. It is also a pretty effective (albeit illusory) deterrent against the greatest predator of all: Death.

The harsh conditions of reality suggested the antidote instantly, and so the loyal Brain poured its finest efforts into elaborating an increasingly intricate and deceptively beautiful form of reality denial: a mythology of origins and eschatology that accounted for, and mitigated, the fear of–death. Amphibians do not built cathedrals; but after the hominid neural revolution, people did. And in pretty short order. A heightened awareness of place and time, a sense of history and fragility–these were the painful curses that came along with the skull-packaging that housed the more powerful Mind–and a cathedral is a first-rate anodyne, to be sure.

But the antidote for Death–metaphysics–produced a toxin more dangerous than the Death it was designed to deny. The terribilitas of existence urged human beings on into a monumental masochism: the life that was sentenced to die had to be reduced and controlled. Holiness addicted men and women among the most zealous in this regard: life itself was abreacted, defiled, profaned, and then transformed into a living death, a counter-death. Shades of Dimmesdale.

Such strange metaphysical intervolutions–and they shall become our focus later on–were perhaps the most important and perverse–project that Body and Mind had ever undertaken together. More important than their cities and laws, more important than their inventions and works of art–more important, even than breathing, physical existence itself.

But to make the existential nexus of guilt and ambivalence “stick,” one thing above all was required: a conspiracy of silence and forgetfulness: The still loyal neocortex must never acquire the skeptical attitude; never doubt the benefits that religious practice and patriotic submission. If Mind ever did come to doubt, then the Body’s deoxy-ribonucleic culture project was threatened.

The newly critical Reason, if allowed to ruminate unchecked, threatened to topple the pantheon of gods by showing the body its fate in a handful of dust. It threatened to play physician to the diseases produced by doctrines of salvation by offering the patient the physic of cold, rationalistic truth. It threatened to set the Body free from its self-created, addictive terror by giving it back to itself.

Burnings at the stake, ideological purges, all the varieties of moral and intellectual censorship, the holy Crusades– these had been the perennial, superficial traces of an ancient, ongoing struggle; a struggle which like a coal fire far below the surface of the earth, burns ferociously, out of control, and usually out of sight.

Our ancestors saw the smoke, perhaps felt some of the heat–but few among them knew the cause.