Essays on Polarity: Big Bang to Human Character and Other Reviews

By Dee Wilson

Essays in Polarity: Big Bang to Human Character advances the idea that the creative universe’s organizing principle is polarity in both natural and social phenomena, and that the cosmos is an experiment, an adventure and an entertainment in polarity. Furthermore, the book argues that the main dimensions of polarity were “announced” in the first instant of the Big Bang and have been reiterated in the biological evolution of mind, in early human social development and in human psychology, including in the perception of beauty. This theme is explored in chapters on early ideas regarding the sacred, and in reviews of books on World War 1 and the war in Indochina, and on cultural polarities and in an essay, “Why Is The World Beautiful”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Mar 20, 2024
• ISBN: 9781665757126

Dee Wilson

Dee Wilson has written widely about child welfare issues for many years, including monthly Sounding Board commentaries. He has wide ranging interests in cosmology, evolution of mind, early human’s social development, cultural evolution and human psychology. His eclectic interests enable bold speculation regarding a thematic unity between natural phenomena and social phenomena.

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Copyright © 2024 Dee Wilson.

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ISBN: 978-1-6657-5711-9 (sc)

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2024903592

Archway Publishing rev. date: 3/18/2024

CONTENTS

Introduction

1     Why Is the World Beautiful?

2     Ritual Sacrifice among Early Humans

3     The Story of More

4     The Oracle of Night

5     The Sleeping Beauties

6     Pandora’s Box

7     JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917–1956

8     The Secret of Life

9     Gambling with Armageddon

10   The Doomsday Machine

11   The Candy House

12   The Upswing

13   iGen

14   The Pain of Love

15   On Writing and Failure

16   The Cult of Glory

17   Embers of War

18   Nightbitch

19   The Lonely Century

20   The Metaphysics of Polarity

About the Author

INTRODUCTION

Several of this book’s chapters discuss the theme of polarity in creation from the big bang to human character, including biological evolution of mind, the early social development of humans, and human character. The idea that the cosmos has an organizing principle evident from the first instant of the big bang that unites nature and social phenomena will seem far-fetched to many readers, yet polarity is not a hidden abstract phenomenon in cosmic creation, the life and death of stars, the evolution of mind from bacteria to humans, or in social evolution or human psychology. Polarity is hidden in plain sight, so obvious and pervasive that it’s typically taken for granted—for example, in cosmic inflation, the creation of matter/ antimatter, in broken symmetries and action at a tipping point, in the mechanisms of homeostasis, the enmeshment of feeling and sensory perception, in the unified awareness of animals with millions, billions, and trillions of cells, in ideas of the sacred, tribal loyalties, war, schismogenesis, the bilateral organization of the brain and opposed forces that shape the human psyche. The cosmos is not hiding its organizing principle; quite the opposite.

This book’s essays develop the idea that the cosmos is an experiment, an adventure and an entertainment in polarity. Polarity serves creativity in all spheres, at all scales. The creators of the universe (and there are some) are engaged in an exploration of how to create harmony out of division; they (per Vedic myth) are not omniscient. Creation and creativity occur with a fierce urgency at all scales and in every domain. Human affairs are dominated by division, faction, conflict, and by efforts to overcome these divisions to survive and thrive. It seems that humans were created to explore this terrain; no one is spared. Humans are forced to experience and explore psychic and social divisions and to search for ways of creating functional wholes and new types of beauty. Every person, society, and social group is forced to struggle with internal conflict, create anew or break apart.

Many of the chapters are reviews of books about subjects that bear on this theme: war, cultural divisions among like-minded groups, famous persons with psychological conflicts, the polarized politics of the US. Other chapters use a few main scholarly sources to develop the theme of multiple polarities in cosmology, biology, anthropology, and psychology. I have been greatly influenced by Guido Tonelli, Paul Davies, Antonio Damasio, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Roberto Calasso, Ian McGilchrist, Joseph Heinrich, Levi-Strauss, David Graeber and David Wengrow, Robert Putnam, and others. I doubt that many of these authors would agree with my reflections on polarity, yet it is their outstanding work that has inspired this book.

A few chapters are reviews of books about the threats to civilization presented by global warming and nuclear weapons. No sane and rational civilization would take the reckless gamble with its own survival and the survival of other species that our civilization has been engaged in for seventy years. How a civilization can be intelligent enough to create technologies that endanger its own survival and unwise enough to sustain their use despite multiple dire warnings is a difficult question to answer. Smart/dumb, rational/crazy may be the polarities that destroy our civilization.

1

WHY IS THE WORLD

BEAUTIFUL?

T he question of why the world has any aesthetic qualities whatsoever may seem deceptively simple: what features of the perceived world do human beings (or most human beings) experience as beautiful, ugly, pleasing, or displeasing? This question, however, presupposes another more basic question: how is it that the human brain/mind is incapable of experiencing the world in any way other than beautiful, ugly, and so on—for example, as purely instrumental in the struggle for survival, safety and security, advantage, or pursuit of personal goals? Clearly, beauty or ugliness (at the extremes) and other aesthetic qualities, which may be highly nuanced, are not intrinsic features of the objects of sense perception. Rather, the human mind perceives the world of the senses in a way that reflects its structure and interests. The first requirement of a theory of beauty is to describe the characteristics of mind/brain that shape all sensory experiences and other types of experiences as well.

In his book The Strange Order of Things (2018), the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio describes the enmeshment of sensory experiences and affect (i.e., feelings and emotional states) in organisms with central nervous systems:

Most every image in the main procession we call mind, from the moment the item enters a mental spotlight of attention until it leaves, has a feeling by its side … the ground zero of being corresponds to a deceptively continuous and endless feeling state, a more or less intense mental choir underscoring everything else mental. … The complete absence of feeling would spell a suspension of being, but even a less radical removal of feeling would compromise human nature. Hypothetically, if you would reduce the feeling tracks of your mind, you would be left with desiccated chains of sensory images of the external world … sights, sounds, touches, smells, tastes, more or less concrete or abstract … Once feeling would had been removed you would have become unable to classify images as beautiful or ugly, pleasurable or painful, tasteful or vulgar, spiritual or earthy. If no feelings were available, you might still be trained, at great effort, to make aesthetic or moral classifications of objects or events. So might a robot, of course. (pp. 100–101)

In Damasio’s formulation, sensory experiences (which he describes as images) have aesthetic qualities because they are infused with feelings, which always have valence (i.e., they are experienced as positive or negative). There is no affect-free sensory experience in the minds of animals or humans from this perspective, with which I concur. Feelings, in turn, represent mentally the state of life within the organism (p. 30). And feelings portray the organism’s interior—the state of internal organs and of internal operations. … Valence translates the condition of life directly in mental terms, moment to moment. It inevitably reveals the condition as good, bad, or somewhere in between. … Valence is the defining element of feeling and, by extension, of affect (p. 102).

Every sensory perception of humans, and by implication animals as well, has aesthetic qualities because perception has an affective component that reflects how the organism feels about every element of its experience. The foundation of the mind in animals and humans is affect, which shapes cognition, not the other way around. For this reason, every human experience is value laden. Aesthetic qualities make up one of those values.

The Conflicted Dynamic of Beauty

The enmeshment of perception and feeling explains why sensory experiences have aesthetic qualities but not the different ways in which feelings affect sense perception or the language through which beauty and ugliness (and other aesthetic qualities) are described. Concretely, objects of desire are often described as beautiful (e.g., a beautiful woman or man, car, home, meal), but some objects, sights, sounds, and smells are beautiful even though we do not desire them. The experience of art is no stranger to acquisitive instincts, but it’s possible, even common, to admire art, music, sculpture, drama, and more without wanting to acquire it. Furthermore, in dramatic art, it’s possible to view with fascination and pleasure repugnant actions and scenes and morally objectionable behavior of all kinds yet admire the play, movie, novel, or story. Affect is a part of every perception of beauty but seemingly not the same type of affect. How can this striking difference in experiences and descriptions of beauty be explained?

My view is that consciousness has four main modalities (i.e., settings) that fundamentally alter the relationship of perception and feeling.

1. Instrumental. Perception is goal driven and purposive (i.e., oriented to the fulfillment of needs and desires). Instrumental consciousness is impressed with the beauty of desirable persons, possessions, food, interpersonal relationships, and so on, and often repulsed by persons or things viewed as undesirable.

2. Appreciative. Attention without a goal changes the way events are experienced. Dramatic art captures appreciative consciousness because there is no need or opportunity to act, to intervene, or do anything at all except pay careful attention, contemplate, and enjoy. Consciousness is freed from goal seeking. Appreciative consciousness recognizes and values details or fragments that contribute to the whole experience. At its best, dramatic art neutralizes desire and moralistic reactions that demand action. Great art captures and deepens attention, and it’s possible to employ appreciative consciousness outside artistic awareness by paying attention without a goal, a mode of attention Simone Weil once described as prayer.

3. Selfless. Consciousness that is not organized around a subject and that moves outside the structure of time and space has been sought, or feared, throughout human history. The idea that consciousness is inextricably tied to subjectivity and to self is false. With rare exceptions (e.g., Sidarta Ribeiro), neuroscientists are clueless (and skeptical) regarding this mode of consciousness, which can result from a large dose of a psychedelic drug or from other ways of achieving mystical experiences. Selfless consciousness begins as an intensification of appreciative consciousness but has a special feature that completely alters experience (i.e., the effacing of a boundary between subject and object). In selfless consciousness, the mind merges with the object of perception, whether that be features of the external world or the electrical activity of the brain. Furthermore, this experience is blissful beyond description. Persons who have never had this type of paradisal experience often view it as illusory, a form of mental illness, or the product of poorly understood brain chemistry with no religious or metaphysical implications, while those who have been surprised by selfless awareness may view the world of conscious subjectivity as an illusion (i.e., as a collective dream as evanescent in a larger perspective as dreams that occur during sleep).

4. In dream states, including daydreaming, the mind, with a minimum of conscious intention, organizes itself around simulations of desires, fears, and emotional concerns. Dream states are soaked in affect and employ dream logic in which sensory images represent feelings, ideas, and themes from the dreamer’s life. Sidarta Ribeiro’s The Oracle of Night (2019) is an outstanding book on dreams and dreaming. According to Ribeiro, dreams and daydreaming are not appreciative states of mind. Rather, they are mental states that reflect the dreamer’s desires and/or fears and employ simulations without physical risk, in part to communicate a motivational message: "you [i.e., the dreamer] want x and you fear y, and here is what may occur if you act on these motivations or fail to act."

How a person experiences aesthetic qualities of sensory perception depends on the mode of consciousness dominant at a specific time. It is common to project the quality of one’s mind onto the world of sensory perception and interpersonal experience. For example, any statement of the form "x is interesting or fascinating or boring" reflects the mental state of the speaker, not a feature of the world. Nothing in the world is intrinsically interesting or boring; rather, the speaker is interested or bored in some experiences but not others. Much of what anyone says about any part of the world is frequently more about the speaker than whatever is being described, and this is especially true when using words that describe affective states of mind such as interesting or boring. The same is true of attributions of beauty, which are contributions of the human mind to the external world reflected in sense perception.

Some spiritual teachers emphasize the theme that self-absorbed instrumental consciousness reduces or virtually eliminates appreciative consciousness, much like wearing hearing plugs to a symphony performance or blinders to an art gallery. In The Wisdom of No Escape, Pema Chodron states,

Resenting what happens to you and complaining about your life are like refusing to smell the wild roses when you go for a morning walk, or like being so blind you don’t see a huge black raven when it lands in the tree you’re sitting under. We can get so caught up in our own personal pain or worries that we don’t notice that the wind has come up or that someone has put flowers on the dining room table … Resentment, bitterness and holding a grudge prevent us from seeing and hearing and tasting and delighting. (p. 25)

The same is true for any type of goal-directed behavior (i.e., perception narrows to conditions or factors pertinent to goal achievement, usually meeting a need, fulfilling a desire, or escaping or confronting a threat). Appreciative consciousness plays a minor role in awareness in which desire or fear shapes perception.

However, instrumental consciousness and appreciative consciousness may be combined in surprising, unexpected ways. For example, in War and Peace, Tolstoy describes the awareness of a main character on the brink of battle as he observes the opposed armies:

Pierre dressed hastily and ran out on the porch. Outside all was bright, fresh, dewy, and cheerful. The sun, just bursting forth from behind a cloud that had concealed it, was shining, with rays still half broken by the clouds, over the roofs of the street opposite on the dew sprinkled dust of the road, on the walls of the houses, on the windows, the fence, and on Pierre’s horses … Pierre went down the street to the knoll where he had looked at the field of battle the day before … Mounting the steps to the knoll Pierre looked at the scene before him, spellbound by beauty … the slanting rays of the bright sun, … cast upon it through the clear morning air penetrating streaks of rosy, gold - tinted light and long dark shadows. The forest … seemed carved in some precious stone of a yellowish—green color; … All this was vivid, majestic and unexpected … (p. 901)

On the verge of a battle in which he and many thousands of other soldiers might die or be horribly maimed, Pierre is vividly aware of the beauty of the world of his senses and of the grandeur of the scene before him. He is not a disinterested observer, nor is he self-absorbed. His appreciative consciousness is a reminder of all that may be lost in the upcoming battle, but it does not detract from his ability to engage in combat.

The idea that instrumental consciousness shaped by a person’s internal narrative and appreciative consciousness are necessarily mutually exclusive is false, though this is often the case absent self-reflection and persistent effort. An initial indicator of spiritual growth is the increased capacity to appreciate the world perceived in instrumental consciousness. Curiosity and appreciation in interpersonal relationships are virtues that create the foundation for moral behavior that respects the rights and needs of others. Too much success at achieving one’s goals and fulfilling one’s desires can be spiritually ruinous if the capacity to appreciate the world, apart from success and social recognition, is reduced to a minimum or virtually eliminated in some individuals. One fruit of spiritual growth is an increased ability to appreciate both the external world revealed by the senses and the internal world of affect and interoception—that is, the awareness of bodily states.

Desire and Appreciation

It is common for appreciative, unselfish awareness of the beauty of nature to lead to a strong desire to have more of these experiences. For example, unexpected pleasure in the sight and smell of beautiful flowers may lead to trips to famous gardens, the mountains, or anywhere where beautiful plants flourish. Any object, person, natural condition, or social gathering can become an object of desire, and the strength of desire may heighten the experience of beauty when desires are fulfilled. Nevertheless, desire powerful enough to motivate persistent effort in the face of resistance shapes experience in predictable ways:

• Desire is increased by resistance (e.g., romance feeds on longing and the seeming unavailability of the desired person).

• The fulfillment of desire, after a brief period of satiety, leads to renewed desire; the mindset of never enough is characteristic of desire.

• Desire has a selfish quality and often leads to possessive behavior—that is, a need to own, monopolize, reserve for oneself the object of desire.

• Desire may enhance the beauty of desired objects—for example, persons or natural wonders—while creating a narrowing of awareness such that the beauty of the rest of the world may be ignored. Desire creates tunnel vision.

The enhancement of beauty through the anticipated fulfillment of desire is undeniably real but comes with secondary effects that exact a high price. Instrumental consciousness converts appreciative awareness to its self-interested goals without the practice of mindfulness. Even then, it is difficult to control attention without becoming goal directed in the usual way. Spiritual seekers can become as acquisitive regarding spiritual goals as financial investors seeking to increase their assets.

What accounts for the universal access to appreciative consciousness? In The Wisdom of No Escape, Pema Chodrin comments,

Each of us has in our heart a joy that’s accessible to us, … Joy is like a soft spring rain that allows us to lighten up, to enjoy ourselves, and therefore it’s a whole new way of looking at suffering. … That sense of wonder and delight is present in every moment, every step, every movement of our own ordinary lives, if we can connect with it. (p. 24)

Appreciative consciousness is a birthright as much as the unitary awareness of self and the capacity for goal directed behavior.

Many scientists and philosophers have performed intellectual cartwheels attempting to confine the evolution of mind within Darwinian principles in which the survival of genes is ground zero that does not require explanation. In The Strange Order of Things, Damasio offers a different perspective:

Homeostasis has guided, non-consciously and non- deliberately, without prior design, the selection of biological structures and mechanisms capable not only of maintaining life but also advancing the evolution of species to be found in varied branches of the evolutionary tree. This conception of homeostasis, which conforms most closely to the physical, chemical and biological evidence, is remarkably different from the conventional and impoverished conception of homeostasis that confines itself to the balanced regulation of life’s operations. … the unshakable imperative of homeostasis has been the pervasive governor of life in all its guises. Homeostasis has been the basis for the value behind natural selection, which in turn favors the genes … The development of the genetic apparatus, which helps regulate optimally and transmit to descendants, is not conceivable without homeostasis. (p. 26)

Stated plainly, homeostatic requirements led to the creation of genes, not the other way around. Damasio asserts, Even at the earliest long- vanished point, the physical and chemical conditions of the life process were responsible for establishing homeostasis in the ample sense of the term and everything else flowed from that fact, including the machinery of genes (p. 30).

Homeostasis, per Damasio, is about flourishing, not just about survival: life is regulated within a range that is not just compatible with survival but also conducive to flourishing (p. 25). Furthermore, feelings are the mental deputies of homeostasis (p. 25). Suffering and flourishing, at the polar ends of the spectrum, would have been prime motivators of the creative intelligence that produced cultures. But so would experiences of affects related to fundamental desires – hunger, lust, social fellowship, or to fear, anger and the desire for power and prestige … Other powerful motivators included the experience of the elevation, awe, and transcendence that arise from the contemplation of beauty (p. 17).

In Damasio’s account, the appreciative awareness of beauty was a type of homeostatic flourishing that led to the creation of human cultures, rather than an accidental by-product of big brains essential for physical survival. Genes are the agents of homeostasis, not its master.

The Psychology of Beauty

The perception of beauty is a signal of homeostatic flourishing that often reflects the congruence between biological needs and natural conditions—for example, beautiful days, weather, flowers, vivid colors, natural wonders that are not threatening. There is also evidence that some features of the world, such as symmetry, are aesthetically pleasing cross-culturally. In the article Symmetry Preferences in Shapes, Faces, Flowers and Landscapes, Bertamini et al. (2019) state:

Several studies have demonstrated that observers tend to prefer the more symmetrical version of a given stimulus, using both familiar and abstract patterns … Some evidence for symmetry as a general aesthetic principle comes from cross cultural studies … In addition to explicit measures, implicit measures have confirmed an association between symmetry and positive valence.

Experiences of flourishing are powerfully influenced by learning and by culture. Damasio asserts:

We humans, along with the creatures from whom we descend biologically, inhabit a universe in which objects and events are not affectively neutral. … any object or event is naturally favorable or unfavorable to the life of the individual experiencer. Objects and events influence homeostasis positively or negatively and, as a result, yield positive or negative feelings. … the separate features of objects and events – their