Culture: The Great Escape: The Alternative Reality of Cultural Systems

By A. V. Newton

Humanity has long sought to answer the big questions, like who are we and where are we going? It is possible that some of these questions are actually too big to be tackled by the rational mind. Religions claim to have the answer, but it is becoming increasingly difficult to believe in them. If you don’t believe in religious answers, you have a rather more complex answer to the problems of existence. Among other things, there arises the question of why so many people do believe in religions and a rather smaller number of people find it difficult or impossible to accept religious tenets. This seems to be a neurological problem, even a psychiatric one. What is the answer?

The preceding book in this series, ‘The Unreasonable Silence of the World’ provided one interpretation of the available evidence in relation to the unique survival of Homo sapiens out of a wide variety of hominid forms following our departure from the primate line approximately seven million years ago. The remarkable invention of mythologies occurred about 100,000 years ago, dominated human belief and social systems until the present day, and was probably mainly responsible for that unique survival. Mythology achieved this dominance by creating a reality that relegated the real world to second place. ‘Culture: The Great Escape’ explores this departure - the escape - as it affects the modern world and considers how it is that science is often thought to be reducing these traditional avenues of escape.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Mar 3, 2023
• ISBN: 9781398432246

A. V. Newton

A. V. Newton retired as a senior lecturer and emeritus consultant in the Faculty of Medicine in Liverpool, where he was mainly involved in teaching dental students. His research interests in pain were greatly assisted by membership of the local neuroscience group, ‘The Brain Cell’. This inspired a lifetime interest in neuroscience, the fruits of which have been applied to the interesting and important puzzle of human origins. He is a past chairman of the University Art Group and long-term committee member. He is married, with three children.

Book preview

Culture: The

Great Escape

The Alternative Reality of

Cultural Systems

A. V. Newton

Austin Macauley Publishers

Culture: The

Great Escape

About the Author

Dedication

Copyright Information ©

Acknowledgement

Introduction

Chapter One: Prehistory, Religion and the Nervous System

Chapter Two: The Parental Legacy

Chapter Three: Some Fundamentals

Chapter Four: The Continuation of Mythology by Other Means

Chapter Five: The Continuation of Mythology as Mythology

Chapter Six: The Short Cut

Chapter Seven: A Historical Perspective

Reference List

About the Author

A. V. Newton retired as a senior lecturer and emeritus consultant in the Faculty of Medicine in Liverpool, where he was mainly involved in teaching dental students. His research interests in pain were greatly assisted by membership of the local neuroscience group, ‘The Brain Cell’. This inspired a lifetime interest in neuroscience, the fruits of which have been applied to the interesting and important puzzle of human origins. He is a past chairman of the University Art Group and long-term committee member. He is married, with three children.

Dedication

To my wife, for long term support and benign tolerance of an often-intrusive affair with a computer.

Copyright Information ©

A. V. Newton 2023

The right of A. V. Newton to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781398432239 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781398432246 (ePub e-book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published 2023

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Acknowledgement

I would like to acknowledge the assistance of Dr Geoffrey Woodcock, B.A., M.A., PhD, FRSA, who has read the manuscript, removed stylistic infelicities, pointed out grammatical and typographical errors and considerably widened the reference base.

Introduction

It is through Art and through Art only that we can realise our perfection; it is through Art and through Art only that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence.

Oscar Wilde

Intentions 1891

While many of Wilde’s quotes are to be taken with a pinch of salt as doing little more than making fun of the frailties of language, this one could be regarded as an epigrammatic summary of the rest of this book, and has provided the sub­title for this account, although this is not confined to Art. A comparable, but perhaps more direct remark was recorded by the American psychologist, Steven Pinker¹ who began one of his books with a few of the questions that had been addressed to him during lectures. In one of these he was discoursing on the fact that all our thought processes, however grand or trivial, are wholly masterminded by billions of cells in the central nervous system. A female student, at the end of this account, asked him… ‘If that’s the case, why should I live?’ Pinker was decent enough to give her a long answer, detailing many of the adult pleasures of life, but a more brutal response would have been to inform her that among those billions of cells in her head was a complex biological programme devoted to motivating her to survive and reproduce – so she should just get on with it and obey the call of nature.

But both quotes, ‘the sordid perils of actual and ’Why should I live’ underline the title of this book – that culture is, fundamentally, an escape from reality, and has been so for at least 100,000 years. Wilde realised it and the female student didn’t. It is also suggested that this form of escapism saved us from an extinction that happened to every other hominid in history. One of the problems of the modern world is that we have come to rely on the technical products of a mindset, science, that threatens to intimidate, even destroy, this traditional avenue of escape. It should not be thought from this that what follows in an essay in Luddite reaction: far from it. But this conflict between the quasi-reality of culture and the actual reality of the world is what has given rise to such deep cultural conflicts as the clash between science and religion and the clash between science and the arts. This is also why prominent intellectuals of the time are concerned about this issue. Pinker² expressed it thus… ‘Our conception of human nature affects every aspect of our lives, from child­rearing to politics, from morality to our appreciation of the arts. However, just as science is providing a clearer understanding of human nature, many people are viscerally opposed to the very idea. They fear that discoveries about an innate human nature can be used to justify inequality, subvert social change, dissolve personal responsibility and strip it of meaning and purpose.’

In that particular volume, Pinker then continued for 434 pages to criticise the notion of the blank slate³, the idea that, in neurological terms, experience is everything while the biological promptings of the emotional self has no influence on subsequent behaviour. In other words, culture is everything and millions of years of evolution have no part to play in determining human behaviour. While this view has, rightly, come under considerable criticism in recent years, it is interesting to speculate on how it came about that this view dominated the human sciences for the best part of a century. One answer to this problem lies, rather obviously, in the structure of the brain. Serious differences have occurred now for hundreds of years between brains that take opposite views about the human environment. One view is that its dimensions can be detected by the five senses, or distantly inferred via practical or technological procedures. On the other hand, are minds that consider that actual worlds exist beyond the limits of the five senses containing beings and situations that conform to none of the rules that govern the behaviour of objects that are apparent to the five senses. In other words, the fundamental clash underlying most of the current major human conflicts is that between materialism and spiritualism.

The contention in the present account is that this clash represents the gross neurological changes that are occurring in human brains in relation to the passing of time. There has been a recent flurry of interest in what is usually termed the cognitive revolution about which much ink has been spilt, which is hardly surprising considering this so-called event occurred around 100,000 years ago. It is hardly novel to suggest that this event eventually allowed the emergence of a world view quite different from any previously held by either humans or hominids. In fact the cognitive revolution seems to be the point in history at which these two species diverged.

The normal biological objectives characteristic of both hominids and other animals are those of ensuring physical survival and reproduction; these changed over the course of the years around the cognitive revolution to become, at best, a second priority. They were replaced by the growth of mythological systems, which, in essence, are verbally encoded world views. Whatever happened at the cognitive watershed facilitated the development of language from a primitive to a much more elaborate form together with the imperative to express human experience in symbolic terms. These symbols were not all verbal but also material and resulted in the archaeological artefacts scattered around the globe of which many, in recent years have been unearthed, while many also remain well above ground, often so monumentally imposing as to induce awe in the observing modern mind.

The next step in history was the agricultural revolution, dated to about a mere 10,000 years ago. Much ink has also been spilt on why this occurred but the main point appears to be that this event allowed the eventual development of an alternative to the mythological or spiritual reality that had materially assisted humanity to survive for the previous 90,000 years while all the other hominid species had failed. One neurological view of this change is based on a major division in the anatomy of the human brain.

Following some heroic neurosurgical operations in the 1960s, most people are now aware that the parts of the human brain capable of manipulating symbols, the hemispheres, consist of a right one and a left one. There are a number of interpretations of why this should be so but, whatever the reason, it must be fundamental, i.e. pre-symbolic, since the ape brain demonstrates the same dichotomy. The view taken here is that the division is due to the differential processing requirements of rapidly changing information and the determination of relatively invariant features of the environment. There is good evidence that the former type of information is largely dealt with by the right hemisphere and invariances by the left.

One occasional result of those neurosurgical experiments referred to earlier was a symptom known as the alien hand syndrome, in which the willed hand is frequently opposed by the other which, like a supermarket trolley, often has a mind of its own. This syndrome underlines the crucial importance of the central mechanism of the process of attention – cerebral dominance, in which one hemisphere takes control while the other provides a supporting role. It is only in experiments that hemispheres act unilaterally. In all normal cerebral processes, both hemispheres are always active. It is proposed that right hemisphere dominance was probably the commonest, possibly the only, neurological mode that our hunter-gatherer forebears used. Since the agricultural revolution, however, the demands on the brain have multiplied enormously. The contrast between the talents of the two hemispheres are, in fact, mirrored by the lifestyle change. The modus operandi of the hunter-gatherer group is movement; that of the post- agricultural farmer is static. It is hardly surprising that the load which fell on humanity at this second watershed involved the left hemisphere to an increasing extent and its influence has led eventually to the modern scientific attitude that places invariance, or symbolic reproducibility, as its premier objective – often directly opposed to a mythological interpretation of the same phenomena. Mythology provides the basis of all cultural systems most of which began life as religions and it is only in recent times that culture and religion have separated, a separation that is probably directly due to the development of science and technology. In non- technological societies the anthropologists report that there is no such separation.

This brief neurological overview view of history suggests that the human race is in the process of a transition between a mythological world view and a scientific world view, but it may be unlikely that this transition will be completed in the foreseeable future. Cultural systems have been in use for 100,000 years and still provide an existential reality for the vast majority of people. The following account attempts to highlight some of the fault lines currently in existence between the real world and the cultural substitute.

Chapter One

Prehistory, Religion and the

Nervous System

Human kind cannot bear

too much reality.

T.S. Eliot Four Quartets

(1936)

It was argued in the predecessor to this book, The Unreasonable Silence of the World,⁴ that the remarkable and exclusive survival of humanity following the exodus of several varieties of hominid from Africa into the unknowns of ice-age Europe 60,000 years ago was mainly due to a mutation occurring thousands of years earlier in Africa. The psychiatrist, Tim Crow⁵ suggested that either psychotic genes were introduced into the human genome and/or their mode of expression was considerably enhanced at some time in the past, a genetic change most likely to have occurred at the cognitive revolution, 100,000 years ago, an event which also inaugurated what has become known as the Cultural Period This latter is so called because it represents an archaeological discontinuity; evidence of complex social and ritualistic modes of existence date only from that point in our history,⁶ a point at which our ancestors appear to have begun to spend much of their time involved in activities that had little to do, directly, with ensuring physical survival. The paradoxical nature of this event is that of suggesting that humanity actually promoted its survival by dropping its direct survival techniques to second place in its list of priorities. Our survival exclusivity, it was argued, was due to the ability of the refurbished brain to construct an inhabitable mental world quite different from, and far more life-enhancing than, the bleak reality of a cold, dark, hostile Europe 60,000 years ago, conditions that defeated every other hominid. This mental advantage, the construction of mythologies, also seems to have been achieved without disturbing existing successful physical survival techniques.

One of the competing hominid groups at the time in question was that of the Neanderthals, a hominid which, if modern reconstructions are anything to go by, appeared far more capable of surviving in ice-age conditions than our ancestors. But, of course, they didn’t, apart from passing on to us a few of their genes. So – why? Previous theories have suggested that Homo sapiens had become so cunning that the collective conflict between our ancestors and the Neanderthals was resolved by genocide. The last Neanderthal, it has been suggested, expired about 40,000 years ago but the theory that their demise was due to their being some sort of brainless hominid dinosaur is incorrect. Their brain size, estimated from skull volume was quite as large as our own and, is some cases, slightly larger. That, of course, says nothing about the quality of their grey matter and the modern view is that they perished because the size of their groups never rose to a number of members sufficient to counteract the negative effects of a harsh environment – lack of food, accidents, illnesses and adverse climatic events.

This is where mythological systems provided a double advantage – escapism in the first instance and, in the second, it is very likely that the cohesive power of the collective myths developed following the cognitive revolution was, and still is, far greater than that of any tribal bond. This favoured the development of much larger groups and, as is well recognised, there is safety in numbers. The cohesive power of myth hardly needs to be demonstrated since, in the modern world, the most prominent mythologies have millions of followers completely dwarfing the size of our ancestors’ early groups.

It is suggested in the following account that this principle of an essential separation from reality is still in operation at the present time and may be responsible for at least two major cultural disputes. Religions are based on what is usually called divinely revealed ‘truth’ while science, craftsmanship and practical, physical manipulation is based on the real world. The other dispute is the more academic one called the Two Cultures which is, again, a dispute between ‘truth’ revealed by the arts and the actual truth revealed by science. It will be argued that there is less of a difference between these two cultural conflicts than is generally accepted.

It is an interesting and unresolved question why various species of hominid chose to leave the warm sunlight of Africa in the first place. The human population would surely have been too small to consider that they were forced out by population pressure although it should always be borne in mind that hominid migrations out of Africa occurred many years before the famous one around 60,000 years ago. The difference on either side of this date is that all the previous ones were unsuccessful while the post 60,000 year’s migration was successful, if only as far as Homo sapiens is concerned.

One answer to why the African sunlight was left behind in favour of the much gloomier and colder Europe may be due to the increase in the size of