Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning

By Jeremy Lent and Fritjof Capra

Winner of the 2017 Nautilus Silver Award!This fresh perspective on crucial questions of history identifies the root metaphors that cultures have used to construct meaning in their world. It offers a glimpse into the minds of a vast range of different peoples: early hunter-gatherers and farmers, ancient Egyptians, traditional Chinese sages, the founders of Christianity, trail-blazers of the Scientific Revolution, and those who constructed our modern consumer society.Taking the reader on an archaeological exploration of the mind, the author, an entrepreneur and sustainability leader, uses recent findings in cognitive science and systems theory to reveal the hidden layers of values that form today's cultural norms. Uprooting the tired cliches of the science-religion debate, he shows how medieval Christian rationalism acted as an incubator for scientific thought, which in turn shaped our modern vision of the conquest of nature. The author probes our current crisis of unsustainability and argues that it is not an inevitable result of human nature, but is culturally driven: a product of particular mental patterns that could conceivably be reshaped. By shining a light on our possible futures, the book foresees a coming struggle between two contrasting views of humanity: one driving to a technological endgame of artificially enhanced humans, the other enabling a sustainable future arising from our intrinsic connectedness with each other and the natural world. This struggle, it concludes, is one in which each of us will play a role through the meaning we choose to forge from the lives we lead.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Prometheus
• Release date: May 23, 2017
• ISBN: 9781633882942

Jeremy Lent

Jeremy Lent is the award-winning author of The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning. A former internet company CEO, he is founder of the non-profit Liology Institute dedicated to fostering an integrated, life-affirming worldview. He lives in Berkeley, California.

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Published 2017 by Prometheus Books

The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning. Copyright © 2017 by Jeremy Lent. 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, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a website without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Lent, Jeremy R., 1960- author.

Title: The patterning instinct : a cultural history of humanity's search for meaning / by Jeremy R. Lent.

Description: Amherst, New York : Prometheus Books, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016036581 (print) | LCCN 2016057101 (ebook) | ISBN 9781633882935 (hardback) | ISBN 9781633882942 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Ethnophilosophy. | Meaning (Philosophy) | Social norms. | Sustainability—Social aspects. | Human ecology. | BISAC: SOCIAL SCIENCE / Anthropology / Cultural.

Classification: LCC GN468 .L46 2017 (print) | LCC GN468 (ebook) | DDC 306.4—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016036581

Printed in the United States of America

List of Illustrations

Formatting Conventions

Foreword

Preface: A Cognitive History of Humanity

Introduction: Shaping Our History

Part 1. Everything Is Connected

Chapter 1. How We Became Human

Chapter 2. The Magical Weave of Language

Chapter 3. The Rise of Mythic Consciousness

Chapter 4. The Giving Environment: The World of the Hunter-Gatherers

Part 2. Hierarchy of the Gods

Chapter 5. Agriculture and Anxiety

Chapter 6. Going Their Own Ways: Early Civilizations

Part 3. The Patterns Diverge

Western Pattern: Split Cosmos, Split Human

Eastern Pattern: Harmonic Web of Life

Chapter 7. The Birth of Dualism in Ancient Greece

Chapter 8. Dualism and Divinity in Ancient India

Chapter 9. The Search for Harmony in Ancient China

Chapter 10. The Cultural Shaping of Our Minds

Chapter 11. Pathways to Monotheism in Israel and Alexandria

Chapter 12. Sinful Nature: The Dualistic Cosmos of Christianity

Chapter 13. The Scourge of Monotheistic Intolerance

Chapter 14. Discovering the Principles of Nature in Song China

Part 4. Conquest of Nature

Chapter 15. To Command the World: Metaphors of Nature

Chapter 16. Great Rats: The Story of Power and Exploitation

Chapter 17. The Enigma of the Scientific Revolution

Chapter 18. The Language of God: The Emergence of Scientific Cognition

Chapter 19. Something Far More Deeply Interfused: The Systems Worldview

Chapter 20. Consuming the Earth in the Modern Era

Part 5. The Web of Meaning?

Chapter 21. Trajectories to Our Future

Further Reading

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Figure 3.1. Aurochs cave painting from Lascaux Cave (Taureaux de la paroi droite, © Cliché N. Aujoulat-MCC/Centre National de Préhistoire)

Figure 3.2. Archaeological finds from Hohle Fels Cave

3.2a. Ivory bird (Photo: J. Lipták, © University of Tübingen, Germany)

3.2b. Venus figurine (Photo: Hilde Jensen, © University of Tübingen, Germany)

3.2c. Lion-man (Thilo Parg/Wikimedia Commons. License: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported)

3.2d. Bone flute (Photo: Hilde Jensen, © University of Tübingen, Germany)

Figure 3.3. Ochre with cross-hatching from Blombos Cave (Image Courtesy of Christopher Henshilwood)

Figure 3.4. Spandrels in St. Mark's Cathedral, Venice (Joanbanjo/Wikimedia Commons. License: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported)

Figure 4.1. Megafauna extinctions by continent

Figure 6.1. Harappan seal showing a seated yoga posture (© J. M. Kenoyer/Harappa.com, Courtesy Dept. of Archaeology and Museums, Govt. of Pakistan)

Figure 6.2. The PIE homeland, according to the Kurgan hypothesis (After David Anthony, The Horse, The Wheel and Language, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007, Figure 13.1)

Figure 7.1. The extent of the Persian Empire around 500 BCE (Department of History, United States Military Academy, West Point/Wikimedia Commons)

Figure 9.1. The classic Chinese symbol of yin and yang

Figure 9.2. Examples of I Ching hexagrams (Frater5. License: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike)

Figure 10.1. Which two go together?

Figure 14.1. Major Neo-Confucian philosophers

Figure 14.2. Key Neo-Confucian terms

Figure 15.1. Thirteenth-century illustration showing God as architect of the universe

Figure 15.2. Buddhist Temple in the Hills after Rain by Li Cheng (Attributed to Li Cheng, Chinese [919–67 CE]. A Solitary Temple Amid Clearing Peaks, Northern Song Dynasty [960–1127]. Hanging scroll, ink and slight color on silk, 44 x 22 inches [111.8 x 55.9 cm]. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri. Purchase: William Rockhill Nelson Trust, 47–71)

Figure 15.3. Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci

Figure 18.1. Kepler's illustration of the geometric Secret of the Universe (ETH-Bibliothek Zürich, Alte und Seltene Drucke)

Figure 19.1. Computer-generated fractal image of a fern (DSP-user. License: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported)

Figure 21.1. Debasement of the denarius to 269 CE (Joseph A. Tainter and Temis G. Taylor, Complexity, Problem-Solving, Sustainability and Resilience, Building Research & Information 42, no. 2 [2014]: 168–81.)

An asterisk has been added to any endnote that contains significant information beyond a listing of textual sources, as an indicator to the reader that it may be worthwhile to turn to that particular note.

This book follows the convention established in the field of cognitive linguistics of using small capitals when referring to cultural metaphors such as CONQUEST OF NATURE.

When I went to high school in Austria in the 1950s, history was taught exclusively as military history, which I found utterly boring and studied only minimally, just enough to pass my exams. My main academic interests were literature, foreign languages, and, above all, science and mathematics. Then, a decisive moment came when, as a young physics student, I read Werner Heisenberg's Physics and Philosophy, his classic account of the conceptual revolution triggered by quantum physics and relativity theory.

Heisenberg's book had a tremendous influence on my thinking and determined the trajectory of my entire career as a scientist and writer. One passage, in particular, planted a seed in my mind that would mature, more than a decade later, into a systematic investigation of the limitations of the Cartesian worldview and the wide range of its scientific, philosophical, social, and political implications. The Cartesian partition, wrote Heisenberg, has penetrated deeply into the human mind during the three centuries following Descartes, and it will take a long time for it to be replaced by a really different attitude toward the problem of reality.

This passage also triggered in me a new interest in history, but this time in the history of ideas, a subject that has fascinated me ever since. The history of ideas is endlessly captivating because well-known sequences of political and cultural events of the past, again and again, appear in a new light when we look at them through a different narrative lens. I have no doubt that this is the reason for the tremendous success of books like Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel and Yuval Harari's Sapiens, and of documentaries like Kenneth Clark's Civilisation and Jacob Bronowski's The Ascent of Man.

The Patterning Instinct by Jeremy Lent continues this tradition of broad interdisciplinary historical narratives, written in nontechnical language, eminently readable, entertaining, yet sophisticated and intellectually fascinating. In this book, the author introduces a new perspective, which he calls cognitive history. Instead of the traditional approach of assuming that the direction of history is determined, ultimately, by material causes—geography, economy, technology, and the like—he argues that, following the fundamental human urge to endow our surroundings with meaning, different cultures construct core metaphors to make meaning out of their world and these metaphors forge the values that ultimately drive people's actions.

By calling his approach cognitive history, the author implies that he traces the human search for meaning through the lens of modern cognitive science, a rich interdisciplinary field that transcends the traditional frameworks of biology, psychology, and epistemology. The key achievement of cognitive science, in my view, is that it has overcome the Cartesian division between mind and matter that has haunted scientists and philosophers for centuries. Mind and matter no longer appear to belong to two separate categories but are seen as representing two complementary aspects of the phenomenon of life: process and structure. At all levels of life, mind and matter, process and structure, are inseparably connected.

The Santiago theory of cognition, in particular, identifies cognition (the process of knowing) with the very process of life. The self-organizing activity of living systems at all levels of life is mental or cognitive activity. Thus, life and cognition are inseparably connected. Cognition is embedded in matter at all levels of life. Moreover, the theory asserts that cognition is not a representation of an independently existing world but rather a bringing forth or enacting of a world through the process of living.

Jeremy Lent applies this insight to history, recognizing the power of the human mind to construct its own reality and arguing that the cognitive frames through which different cultures perceive reality have had a profound effect on their historical direction. Engaging the reader in an archaeology of the mind, he shows how, in different epochs of history, dominant cognitive frames can be defined in terms of certain fundamental patterns of meaning: everything is connected, the hierarchy of the gods, split cosmos, split human, the harmonious web of life, nature as machine, and so on.

From this cognitive perspective, Lent proposes new answers to some age-old questions of human history: Is it our true nature to be selfish and competitive, or empathic and community-minded? How did the rise of agriculture set the stage for our current ecological crisis? Why did the Scientific Revolution take place in Europe and not in Chinese or Islamic civilization? What are the root causes of our modern global culture of rampant consumerism, and is there a way we can change that culture?

In our time of global crisis, which desperately needs guidance through new and life-affirming metaphors, the answers to these questions are more important than ever.

Fritjof Capra, physicist, author of The Systems View of Life

This book takes an approach to history that recognizes the power of the human mind to construct its own reality. It offers a simple thesis: culture shapes values, and those values shape history. While this might appear self-evident to some, it's an approach at odds with some widely accepted principles of modern historical interpretation. There are good reasons why contemporary historians have denied the importance of culture in shaping history, but this has led to an unnecessarily limited understanding of our past. In today's world, reeling from global crises and transfixed by the dazzle of technology, it is more important than it has ever been to understand how values have shaped history and, consequently, how they might also shape our future.

The book introduces an approach I call cognitive history. In the broadest terms, cognitive science is the analytical study of the human mind. It is an interdisciplinary tradition that began in the decades following World War II and has since expanded in many directions, leading to important insights in fields as diverse as neuroscience, linguistics, and anthropology. Like these other fields, cognitive history analyzes its subject with reference to the cognitive structures of the human mind. In this book, it attempts to interpret historical phenomena such as the rise of agriculture, the Scientific Revolution, and our current world system from a cognitive perspective. In doing so, it recognizes the enormous complexity of human culture and draws from recent advances in systems thinking to develop an interpretative framework.

For those interested in the book's methodological underpinnings, this preface places it in the context of modern interpretations of history and shows how the systems approach to understanding complexity can be usefully applied to the field of history.

Truth and Reason…Or Geography and Greed?

As a teenager growing up in London, I remember sitting in the living room and watching television with my father as we avidly soaked up The Ascent of Man, an award-winning BBC documentary series produced by Dr. Jacob Bronowski. For my father, it was a splendid exposition of how Man (there were no qualms in those days about giving humanity a male gender) climbed from peak to peak in his ascent to the pinnacle of modern scientific achievement. In contrast to animals, which merely adapt to their environment, Bronowski explained triumphantly, Man is not a figure in the landscape; he is the shaper of the landscape.¹

I didn't know it at the time, but I was watching a view of history that fit snugly within the cultural metaphor of CONQUEST OF NATURE. Inspired by the discoveries of Europe's scientific revolution, historians had spent centuries extolling the inexorable march of progress that, in their view, culminated in the glorious achievements of Western civilization. The conquest of nature was paralleled by an equally ambitious conquest of the rest of the world by European powers, leading to the decimation of indigenous populations and the rise of empires that spanned the globe. By the early twentieth century, the supremacy of the white man galvanized a pseudoscientific, racist interpretation of history with a grand narrative describing the evolutionary progress of humanity from its origins (which, it was thought, could still be seen in the brutal Hottentot of Africa) to its culmination in modern European culture. By the time Jacob Bronowski took the stage, the aftermath of the totalitarian horrors of the mid-twentieth century had muted some of the overt racism of this narrative and added some ambivalence to the triumphalist storyline, but the core thesis remained the same.²

In the postwar generation, the West had the magnanimity to invite the Third World nations to a seat at its table, as long as they learned to play by its rules. Underlying these rules was a cognitive framework that went something like this: the Truth has been discovered by Science, which leads to continual Progress as a result of Man using his unique faculty of Reason for the benefit of all. While other cultures might have something to offer, they were generally viewed as complementing the rule of Reason as defined by Western civilization. In 1946, American philosopher F. S. C. Northrop kicked off a new globalist era with his book The Meeting of East and West, envisaging a world civilization combining the theoretically scientific philosophy of the West with the aesthetic component which the Orient has mastered. In the following decades, countless visionaries offered their own versions of this synthesis of East and West, generally with the West playing the role of rational investigator of scientific truth and the Orient offering various complementary perspectives based on some form of mysticism or spiritual insight deemed more difficult for the logical, scientific mind of the Westerner to access.³

However, in the 1970s, while Bronowski was eulogizing the Ascent of Man, a new generation of intellectuals set out to challenge the assumptions underlying this narrative. In his book Orientalism, Edward Said showed how centuries of cultural prejudice had shaped the West's romanticized image of Oriental mystique. A series of critiques by a school of French philosophers coalesced into a movement known as postmodernism, which attacked the notion that objective truths could be applied universally under the rubric of such capitalized abstractions as Truth, Science, Reason, and Man. Included in this attack was the tradition of cultural essentialism, by which Northrop and those who followed him had sought to ascribe a particular set of universal characteristics to the Orient, the West, or, for that matter, any racial or cultural stereotype.⁴

In contrast to the modernist view of the world, which had emerged with the Scientific Revolution, the postmodernists proposed that reality is constructed by the mind and can never therefore be described objectively. Each culture, they argued, develops its own version of reality that arises from its specific physical and environmental context. If you try to essentialize a culture's frame of reality and compare it with that of another culture, you risk decontextualizing it and therefore invalidating its unique attributes. The postmodernists accused Westerners who had attempted to do so of engaging in a form of cultural imperialism, seeking to appropriate what seemed valuable in other cultures for their own use while ignoring its historical context. A more useful investigation, according to the postmodernist critique, would be to recognize the multiplicity of discourses created by various cultures and, rather than try to distill some essential meaning from them, trace how certain social and political groups used these discourses to maintain or enhance their own power relative to others.⁵

The postmodernist critique has had a profound effect on the social sciences, and even when it hasn't been fully accepted, some of its principles have helped shape the current norms of many academic disciplines, including history. A major step in establishing this new standard was the publication by Jared Diamond of Guns, Germs, and Steel in 1997. This book, which has deservedly become a modern classic, investigates one of the crucial questions of history: why have the Eurasian civilizations been so successful in establishing hegemony over the people of other continents? Diamond claims the reasons can be found not in genes or culture but in geography. For example, the broad east-west axis of Eurasia meant that newly domesticated crops could easily spread across zones with similar climates, whereas the north-south axis of the Americas prevented it. Similarly, new infectious diseases that arose in humans from animal domestication spread in waves across Eurasia, leaving survivors with immunity. All this led to the Eurasian population developing the tools of civilization before the rest of the world, resulting in the guns, germs, and steel that permitted them to dominate other continents.⁶

Eurasia, however, includes not just Europe but China, Russia, and India. If geography caused Eurasia's rise, why was it Europe that eventually established empires throughout the world? There are no end of different explanations offered for this conundrum, but a prominent one again fingers geography as the cause. Historian Kenneth Pomeranz argues in his acclaimed book The Great Divergence that it was England's easily accessible coal deposits and the proximity of Europe to the New World that gave it the impetus to achieve an industrial revolution and thereby dominate the rest of the globe.⁷

Something these, and other influential modern histories, have in common is a rejection of cultural essentialism. It's assumed there are no intrinsic behavioral differences between the people of various parts of the world, and, therefore, we need to look to environmental factors to explain how each developed in different ways. This approach is an admirable improvement over the racist assumptions of Western superiority that previously infused theories of history, but it inevitably creates its own form of cultural imperialism by implicitly assuming a new set of human universals. The distinctive values and beliefs about human nature that form the bedrock of Western thought are silently assumed to be those that drive people all over the world and throughout history. When investigating, for example, why Europe rather than China experienced an industrial revolution, most historians take it for granted that this was a wholly desirable goal that China failed to achieve before Europe. Similarly, when asking why Europe, not China, conquered the New World, it's generally assumed that if Chinese navigators had reached the Americas before the Europeans, they would have plundered the continents in the same way the Europeans did. The underlying values that drove Europeans into these historical pathways are simply taken to be universal human norms, leaving the only remaining question: who got there first?⁸

This reductionist approach to history—arguing that all the reasons for the direction of history can ultimately be reduced to material causes—reached a kind of nadir in a book published in 2010 by Ian Morris entitled Why the West Rules—For Now, in which the author offers his own Morris Theorem to summarize the universal cause of social change in history: Change is caused by lazy, greedy, frightened people looking for easier, more profitable, and safer ways to do things. To Morris, culture, values, and beliefs were unimportant in explaining the great currents of history, and instead we need to look for brute, material forces, specifically those arising from geography.⁹

A Cognitive Approach to History

This book takes an entirely different approach from historical reductionism. Instead, it offers a cognitive approach to history, arguing that the cognitive frames through which different cultures perceive reality have had a profound effect on their historical direction. The worldview of a given civilization—the implicit beliefs and values that create a pattern of meaning in people's lives—has, in my opinion, been a significant driver of the historical path each civilization has taken. But, at the same time, I disavow any affinity with the old triumphalist view of history, which posits some characteristic of the Western mind-set that made it somehow superior to that of other cultures and, therefore, led to the West's success over the rest of the world. Instead, as the book unfolds, it reveals an underlying pattern to Western cognition that is responsible for its Scientific and Industrial Revolutions—as well as its devastating destruction of indigenous cultures around the world and our current global rush toward possible catastrophe. In this respect, the book shares much with the postmodern critique of Western civilization, recognizing those capitalized universal abstractions such as Reason, Progress, and Truth to be culture-specific constructions. In fact, a significant portion of the book is devoted to tracing how these patterns of thought first arose and then infused themselves so deeply into the Western mind-set as to become virtually invisible to those who use them.

An obvious question arises to challenge this point of view: if Western cognition was responsible for the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions, how come the rest of the world (especially Asia) has been so adept at catching up with—and now, in many ways, surpassing—Western achievements? And aren't China, India, and other so-called developing countries partly responsible for the world's impending environmental catastrophe? My answer is based on the premise that cognitive frames, while deeply influencing the direction of a society, are not permanently fixed. When drastic change occurs to a given society, its cognitive structures—and, ultimately, its entire worldview—can change equally drastically within a generation or two. When the Western powers installed their empires throughout the globe, humiliating traditional leaders and undermining established hierarchies, they overwhelmed the old cognitive patterns with new values and measures of success, which people in the conquered societies aspired to achieve. Through this process, I would argue that—especially since the mid-twentieth century—what had once been the Western worldview has now become the dominant worldview of those in positions of wealth and power who drive our global civilization, from Bangkok to Beijing and from Mumbai to Mexico City.

For cognitive history, there's an important lesson to learn from this, which applies to the entire sweep of human experience from the evolution of Homo sapiens to the present: the relationship between cognition and history is not one-way but reciprocal. The cognitive patterns of humans living their day-to-day existence are continually affected by what goes on around them, and the consequent actions they take are continually affecting whatever is around them. It's a perpetual, bidirectional feedback loop. From this perspective, the currently fashionable reductionist view of history is half right: it captures a one-way causative flow from environment to cognition but misses the reciprocal causative flow in the other direction.¹⁰

Creating Our Own Reality (Without Really Trying)

The thought of tracing feedback loops winding back on themselves can feel intimidating, and it's easy to see the attraction of a simpler view, such as historical reductionism, that just focuses on one direction of causality. However, I've written this book in the belief that important insights can be gained by investigating how these reciprocal loops can transform societies and ultimately shape the course of history. Fortunately, some valuable research in recent decades has shed light on how these feedback loops work. Their findings inform this book's methodology and merit a brief overview.

A good place to begin is the theory of evolution. Like the reductionist view of history, the traditional approach to evolution was based on a one-way flow: an environment poses a set of problems to organisms, and the organisms best adapted to solve the problems leave the most offspring, leading to the process of natural selection. The particular way in which an organism finds its own survival strategy, whether it's spiders weaving webs or bees turning pollen into honey, is called an evolutionary niche. However, in recent years, researchers have suggested there's really a two-way flow going on, which they call niche construction. As organisms adapt to their environment, they are not just finding their niche but actively constructing it, and, by doing so, they are shaping the environment for themselves, their offspring, and the other organisms around them. As they shape their environment, these organisms also take an active role in eventually shaping their own genome as their descendants evolve specialized attributes to thrive in the niche they've constructed. As spiders, for example, became expert at constructing their webs, they also evolved an array of techniques for camouflage, protection, and communication that work specifically for their web niche.¹¹

What was the niche that humans constructed for themselves as they evolved? Many evolutionary biologists have come to agree it was an entirely different kind: it was a cognitive niche, a result of using their unique cognitive powers to learn to cooperate with others and collectively discover new ways to manipulate their environment. Gradually, hominids began to invent tools to hunt animals stronger or faster than them and process foods that would otherwise be inedible. A crucial outcome of this cognitive niche was the power it unleashed by allowing them to work together as a group. While some might use teamwork to hunt prey, others could forage for plant food, all of which would later be shared within the community, enabling everyone to enjoy a more nutritious diet. The importance of this social aspect of human evolution has led some researchers to argue that the human niche might instead be called a sociocognitive or cultural niche.¹²

From this cognitive niche, human culture emerged as a set of shared symbols and practices that ties a group together and is passed down from one generation to the next. And here we have a new feedback loop to consider: in a process known as gene-culture coevolution, culture has shaped the human niche so profoundly that it's caused changes within the human genome, affecting the very direction of human evolution. This may have begun as far back as two million years ago, when our prehuman ancestors first figured out how to use fire to cook their food. Because cooking frees up more energy from food for our bodies to digest, new generations relied increasingly on cooked food, leading eventually to physiological changes that caused their descendants to depend on cooking in much the same way spiders depend on their webs. Much later in history, when cattle were first domesticated, a few lucky people had genes that allowed them to drink milk as adults, known as lactose tolerance. With the extra nutrition available to them, they flourished, leaving more offspring, until their genes spread through virtually the entire population of Europe, making dairy farming even more important than before.¹³

And the feedback loops kept turning: From culture to genes to livelihood. And then, from livelihood back to culture. As various populations developed different forms of agriculture, the requirements of their work influenced the cultural patterning of each society. Social psychologists have discovered, for example, that people who herd animals for a living tend to lead more independent and mobile lives, resulting in more individualistic values. Farmers, on the other hand, who lead more settled lives and rely on each other to help with planting and harvesting, develop more collectivist cultures. Even within farming, important cultural variations have been shown to arise from the kind of crops that are cultivated. A recent study, for example, has found that Chinese provinces that rely on rice, which requires a great deal of mutual cooperation within the community, have a more holistic outlook than those provinces that rely on wheat, where farmers can manage more easily by themselves.¹⁴

How do these cultural differences get passed on from one generation to the next? There are some who speculate it's through genetic changes, even in the more recent past.¹⁵ However, a more convincing explanation—and one that forms a foundation of this book—is that each society shapes the cognitive structure of individuals growing up in its culture through imprinting its own pattern of meaning on each infant's developing mind.

The most important way in which a growing infant's mind is molded by her culture is through language. Anthropologists in the early twentieth century became so entranced by the power of language to shape cognitive structures that they sometimes overstated the case, asserting that our native language forces us to think in certain ways and prevents us thinking in other ways. This theory, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, was witheringly attacked in the later twentieth century as researchers showed how people from a particular culture were able to adapt their cognition to culturally different ways of thinking even as adults. More recently, however, a plethora of new evidence has convincingly demonstrated a more refined version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: that the language we speak from birth—although it doesn't prevent us thinking in different ways—establishes structures of cognition that influence us to perceive, understand, and think about the world according to certain patterns. Or, in its simplest terms: language has a patterning effect on cognition.¹⁶

And in yet another feedback loop, the patterning each person uses to impose meaning on the world ultimately affects the actions and choices they make in the world. When aggregated to an entire civilization, these patterns of meaning shape history and fundamentally alter the world around us. In the words of cognitive linguist George Lakoff, metaphorical concepts…. structure our present reality. New metaphors have the power to create a new reality. When, for example, European thinkers began to conceive of the natural world as a complex machine, this inspired them to discover how the machine worked in order to manipulate it more effectively for their benefit, leading ultimately to our present era of genetic engineering and synthetic biology.¹⁷

Making Sense of Complexity

These reciprocal feedback loops are not just complicated—they're also complex. In everyday language, we tend to use these two words interchangeably, but, in the world of systems theory, they're very different. A system can be complicated but not complex, no matter how large, if each of its components and the way they relate to each other can be completely analyzed and given an exact description. A jumbo jet, an offshore oil rig, and a snowflake are all examples of complicated systems. A complex system, on the other hand, arises from a large number of nonlinear relationships between its components with feedback loops that can never be precisely described. Any living thing, or system comprising living things, is complex: a bacterium, a brain, an ecosystem, a financial market, a language, or a social system.¹⁸

In this book, I've taken the view that human culture itself can be viewed as a certain type of complex system. Thinking about culture in this way makes it easier to understand some of the critical transitions that have taken place in history. With this in mind, it helps to consider how systems theorists try to make sense of complexity.

Complex systems have some indicative characteristics. They have a large number of elements, each of which interacts with and influences other elements within the system through nonlinear feedback loops. They constantly interact with their environment, and, frequently, they contain smaller systems within them while themselves being nested within bigger systems. They are never in equilibrium but are continually in flux, evolving through time as a result of both their previous conditions and the environment around them.¹⁹

One important attribute of a complex system is a special type of reciprocal causality: each part of the system has an effect on the whole, while the system as a whole affects each part. Because of this, a complex system can never be fully understood by reducing it to its component parts. An example of this kind of reciprocal causality can be seen in a tropical rain forest. As a forest becomes dense and large, the roots of its trees interconnect to create a healthy network of root fungus in the soil; the foliage creates more shade, which keeps the undergrowth moist; and the evaporation from its leaves creates its own cloud system, increasing the rainfall. The forest system as a whole thus affects each tree, while each tree affects the entire system.²⁰

The reciprocal causality of complex systems has a profound impact on the nature of change in the system. Within certain parameters, a complex system can be highly resilient, adapting to and accommodating changes both within itself and in its external environment. However, at a certain point, the cohesive set of reciprocal causal relationships that form the system can rapidly become unraveled, and when that happens, the system undergoes what's known as a critical transition, leading to a new stable state that can be either more or less complex than the previous one. When this happens, it's very difficult for the system to shift back to the state it was in previously, a characteristic known as hysteresis. For example, in the case of the tropical forest, once the system forms its root network, its shady foliage, and its own rain clouds, it's likely to remain in that stable state for millennia. If, however, something drastic happens to it—such as humans cutting down trees and thinning out the forest—at a certain point, it reaches a critical threshold. There's no longer enough foliage to keep the ground cover moist and not enough evaporation to form rain clouds. In a relatively short time, the tropical forest turns into a new, stable state of arid scrubland, and it's now very difficult for the system to shift back to its previous state.²¹

The entire four-billion-year history of life on earth can be understood in terms of these critical transitions with hysteresis. The emergence of life itself, in the form of single-celled organisms such as bacteria, was the first such critical transition. Another occurred when cells developed a nucleus, leading to all other forms of life. Other transitions include the emergence of multicellular organisms, such as animals and plants; colonies of organisms, such as ants and bees; and the evolution of humans with language. In each case, once the newly complex, stable system emerged, the earth's ecosystem never reverted to its previous state.²²

Given that human societies are themselves complex systems, can we use this framework to understand the great critical transitions in our history? I believe we can, with the caveat that when we apply this framework to human society, there is yet another crucial feedback loop to consider. Because of our unique cognitive capacity, human social systems need to be understood as a pair of two tightly interconnected, coexisting complex systems: a tangible system and a cognitive system. The tangible system refers to everything that can be seen and touched: a society's tools; its physical infrastructure; and its agriculture, terrain, and climate, to name just some of its components. The cognitive system refers to what can't be touched but exists in the cognitive network of the society's culture: its language, myths, core metaphors, know-how, hierarchy of values, and worldview. These coupled systems interact dynamically, creating their own feedback loops, which can profoundly affect each other and, consequently, the direction of the society. Sometimes the cognitive system might act to inhibit change in the tangible system, leading to a long period of stability. At other times, the cognitive and tangible systems might each catalyze change in the other system, leading to a powerful positive feedback loop that causes dramatic societal transformation.²³

Much of this book is devoted to tracing these complex feedback loops. In some of the most significant transitions of human history—the appearance of language, the rise of agriculture, and the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions—we'll see how the cognitive and tangible systems of the period interacted with each other, causing a newly coherent system to emerge and usurp what had gone before. I think it's a fascinating story in its own right, but this approach gains extra relevance when we turn to our present era. There seems little doubt that we are currently in the midst of one of the great critical transitions of the human journey, and yet it is not at all clear where we will end up once our current system resolves into a newly stable state. The final chapter uses this systems framework to explore some of the possibilities we face. My hope in writing this book is that it can offer a valuable framework for readers to come to their own assessment of humanity's future path—and their own potential role in shaping it.

In 1405, Admiral Zheng set off from China with a glorious armada, leading three hundred magnificent ships on a thirty-year odyssey to distant lands as far afield as Africa. Everywhere he went, Zheng—a Muslim by birth whose father had completed a pilgrimage to Mecca—heightened the prestige of the empire. He left such a fine impression that, in some parts of Southeast Asia, he was even deified, with temples still venerating him to this day. His ships inspired awe in those he visited—not surprisingly, since his crew of twenty-seven thousand men was larger than the entire population of many ports of call. Indeed, his fleet was the greatest the world had ever seen, dwarfing the technological capabilities of Europe at that time. Zheng's largest ships had as many as nine masts and luxurious cabins with balconies, while his armada included troop and horse transports, patrol boats, warships, and tankers holding fresh water.¹

Later that century, Christopher Columbus set sail from Spain with a crew of ninety men in three threadbare boats, each of which could have fit ten times into one of Zheng's. After just three days, one of their rudders broke, and they had to stop in the Canary Islands for repairs.

And yet, in spite of this enormous technological chasm, it was Columbus's voyage that would change the course of history, while Zheng's armada left virtually no imprint on the world. Why?

In this book, we'll try to get inside the minds of people like Zheng and Columbus to gain a new perspective on this and other crucial questions of history: Is it our true nature to be selfish and competitive, or empathic and community-minded? How did the rise of agriculture set the stage for our current ecological crisis? Why did the Scientific Revolution take place in Europe and not in Chinese or Islamic civilization? What are the root causes of our modern global culture of rampant consumerism, and is there any way we can change it?

Pioneering the new field of cognitive history, this book will show how different cultures construct core metaphors to make meaning out of their world and how these metaphors forge the values that ultimately drive people's actions. We will discover why a hunter-gatherer tribe insulted the anthropologist who gave them a fat ox for Christmas, why a great Muslim scholar received fifty lashes for his scientific research, and what drove a prominent church father to castrate himself.

The book is based on a simple but compelling theme: culture shapes values, and those values shape history. It will show the layers of values that form the norms of mainstream Western culture and how these continue to shape our world today. That is why, although this book focuses on history, it can help us understand not just where we came from but where we're headed.

There has never been a more important time to contemplate this question.

Imagine a satellite being launched into orbit, but its controls aren't working too well. If the trajectory gets too steep, it will break through the earth's gravity field and soar into outer space. If it accelerates too rapidly, atmospheric resistance will cause it to come crashing down in a fiery ball. Only if everything is managed with great care will the satellite achieve a stable orbit. The trajectory of our civilization is a lot like that of the satellite. At the accelerating rate of technological innovation, artificial intelligence may soon transcend our own, and human DNA might be re-engineered to produce a genetically enhanced species—akin to the satellite leaving its home planet forever. On the other hand, the rate at which we're exploiting the earth's resources is unsustainable: in addition to climate change, there's a rapidly accumulating list of equally daunting crises, such as capacity limits in crucial resources, deforestation, and a massive extinction of species. If the convergence of these multiple threats becomes too much to handle, our global civilization could face a total collapse—akin to the satellite hitting too much resistance and crashing down.

To me, and perhaps to you too, neither of these scenarios is attractive. But is it possible for our civilization to manage its trajectory capably enough to reach a stable orbit? What would it take to achieve that? If we want to steer our future toward a sustainable path, it's important to know how we got into this unstable and potentially disastrous trajectory to begin with. The operating system of that satellite is buried deep within the values that shape our civilization. That's what we'll be unearthing in this book.

An Archaeology of the Mind

Each of us conducts our lives according to a set of assumptions about how things work: how our society functions, its relationship with the natural world, what's valuable, and what's possible. This is our worldview, which often remains unquestioned and unstated but is deeply felt and underlies many of the choices we make in our lives. We form our worldview implicitly as we grow up, from our family, friends, and culture, and, once it's set, we're barely aware of it unless we're presented with a different worldview for comparison. The unconscious origin of our worldview makes it quite inflexible. That's fine when it's working for us. But suppose our worldview is causing us to act collectively in ways that could undermine humanity's future? Then it would be valuable to become more conscious of it.²

We can think of a society's worldview like a building that's been constructed layer by layer over older constructions put together by generations past. Imagine the mainstream Western worldview, with its implicit beliefs in science, progress, and economic growth, as a house we're living in comfortably. As in a regular house, we're used to seeing the walls, decorations, and furnishings every day—but only rarely, if something goes wrong, are we called upon to probe through the masonry and inspect the house's infrastructure. Rarer still are those times when we need to delve into the house's foundations. But now we've learned we're living in an earthquake zone: there's a growing awareness that we may be creating our own Big One in the form of climate change, resource depletion, and species extinction. If our worldview is built on shaky foundations, we need to know about it—we need to find the cracks and shore up the weaknesses before it's too late.

Unlike modern houses, in which the foundations are part of the blueprint and constructed specifically for the house, the foundations of a worldview comprise the earlier worldviews of previous generations. As we probe further into history, we excavate deeper into the cognitive layers of our ancestors. That's why we can think of this exercise as an archaeology of the mind.

It's a matter of delving deeper not just in time but also into the underlying structures of human cognition: the entire set of processes, conscious and unconscious, we rely on to know our world and respond to it. In recent decades, cognitive scientists have made important discoveries into how we learn, as infants, to make sense of the reality around us. They've shown that our worldview is based on root metaphors we use to frame other aspects of meaning without even realizing we're doing so. These core metaphors, which arise from our embodied existence, structure how we conceptualize our world. HIGH is better than LOW; LIGHT is better than DARK; our life is a JOURNEY along a PATH. Throughout this book, we'll see how root metaphors have played a crucial role in structuring the worldviews of different cultures.³

What causes us to create these root metaphors in the first place? As we dig deeper into the archaeology of the mind, we find that, unlike other mammals, we humans possess an insatiable appetite to find meaning in the world around us. In the words of a little doggerel:

Fish gotta swim; bird gotta fly.

Man gotta sit and say why? why? why?⁴

As far as we know, asking why is something only humans do, so if we want to know why we ask why, it helps to look to the source of what makes us uniquely human. Fortunately, in recent decades, cognitive neuroscientists have come a long way in their efforts to answer this. They've identified the prefrontal cortex (PFC) as the part of our brain primarily responsible for our thinking and acting in ways that differentiate us from other animals. The PFC mediates our ability to plan, conceptualize, symbolize, make rules, and impose meaning on things. It controls our physiological drives and turns our basic feelings into complex emotions. It enables us to be aware of ourselves and others as separate beings and to turn the past and the future into one coherent narrative.⁵

The Patterning Instinct

Think of whatever we do that animals don't do: talking, reading, driving a car, planning for retirement, or making music. These uniquely human activities require the involvement of our highly developed PFC, especially during the period when we're learning them for the first time. Because they involve conceptualizations, these PFC-mediated modes of thought may be called our conceptual consciousness. Now think of what we share with other mammals: hunger, sexual urges, pain, aggression, desire for warmth, caring for our offspring—we can call this collection of cognitive experiences our animate consciousness. While many of the PFC's advanced functions exist to some degree in other creatures—chimpanzees, dolphins, and parrots, for example—their predominance in humans is overwhelmingly different in magnitude and scope, accounting largely for our current domination of the world.⁶*

How does our PFC allow us to think this way? Cognitive neuroscientists tell us the PFC is the most connected part of the brain, and one of its primary functions is to make sense of all the inputs it receives from other parts of the nervous system: the senses, primary emotions, feelings, and memories. One important way it does this is to detect patterns in what it receives: What's new? What's recurrent? What's important? What correlates with something else? Out of these patterns, as infants, we begin to make sense of our surroundings: recognizing family members, picking up on speech formations, and gradually learning to become members of our community. As we grow older, we continue to rely on our PFC to make meaning of all the different events we experience and to construct models for how to live our lives.⁷*

Through the capabilities of the PFC, our species has evolved a patterning instinct: an instinct unique to humans that lends its name to the title of this book. It deserves to be called an instinct because it emerges in human behavior at the earliest stages of development, well before any cultural learning has taken place. In fact, this instinct is what's responsible for an infant's ability to engage in cultural learning. As we'll see in a later chapter, when an infant is only nine months old, she has already begun to identify the unique phonetic patterns of her native language, and by twelve months she's learned to ignore phonetic units that don't exist in her own language. No one tells her to do this; she does it by instinct. This human instinct for patterning is embedded in our cognition, maintaining its activity throughout our lives. We create narratives about our past and future; we construct identities for ourselves; we categorize things, putting more value on some and less on others. And, just like our distant ancestors, we continually search for meaning in our lives and in the world around us.⁸

Before cognitive neuroscience, astute observers of the human condition already understood the drive for meaning to be a defining characteristic of humanity. The father of evolutionary theory, Charles Darwin, saw it as a natural consequence of human cognition, writing that as soon as the important faculties of the imagination, wonder, and curiosity, together with some power of reasoning, had become partially developed, man would naturally crave to understand what was passing around him, and would have vaguely speculated on his own existence. Anthropologist Clifford Geertz recognized something similar, describing a human being as a symbolizing, conceptualizing, meaning-seeking animal, whose drive to make sense out of experience, to give it form and order, is evidently as real and as pressing as the more familiar biological needs. Geertz saw religion, art, and ideology as attempts to provide orientation for an organism which cannot live in a world it is unable to understand.⁹

Somehow, though, this drive to make sense of the world around us, while it's given us so much we value, has also brought our civilization to the brink of collapse. How could this have happened? Is it an inevitable result of human nature, or is our present situation culturally driven: a product of particular structures of thought that could conceivably be repatterned? The answer to this question—and its implications—may be one of the most important factors affecting the future direction of the human race.

Core Patterns of Meaning

The path from the earliest human search for meaning to our current precarious situation is what we'll be tracing in this book. It's a fascinating journey, offering up new possibilities to understand our human condition along the way, while occasionally challenging some of our deepest assumptions. The path can be segmented into different periods, each characterized by the core pattern of meaning by which people made sense of their world. These periods, with their patterns of meaning, give the book its structure. Here's what they look like.

Part 1. Everything Is Connected

What makes us uniquely human? Is it our true nature to be competitive or cooperative? The answers to these key questions can be found in our earliest history, and we'll begin by considering the surprising recent findings by scientists that overturn prevailing views of human nature. We'll discover how prehumans developed a nonverbal form of communicating with each other, using mime, laughter, chanting, and communal dancing, well before language came on the scene. We'll examine how, when it finally did, a new form of mythic consciousness arose, causing our ancestors to find meaning in every aspect of their daily existence and that of the animals and plants around them.

We'll see how this new consciousness led early hunter-gatherers to form their worldview around the first pattern of meaning: EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED. The natural world was infused with spirits, while the earth was seen as intimately involved with humans’ daily activities, like a parent. Were their lives really nasty, brutish, and short (in the famous words of Thomas Hobbes) or did they enjoy ease and plenty? With the light cast on this question by modern anthropologists, we'll gain insight into how hunter-gatherers saw each other and their universe and how, in spite of their connection with the natural world, they conducted their own form of mass extinctions around the globe.

Part 2. Hierarchy of the Gods

Hierarchies and wealth. Property and land ownership. These things seem like they've been part of the human experience since time immemorial, but we'll see that's not the case. These new notions only arose when foragers began settling in one place, beginning about ten thousand years ago. We'll discover how, as they domesticated animals and plants, humans were themselves domesticated by the emergence of agriculture. Was this something our ancestors chose, or was it an inexorable process in which they were unwitting participants? As we answer this question, we'll explore how, along with its benefits, agriculture also brought an unprecedented level of anxiety into the human condition.

The hierarchical structure of agrarian societies helped shape a new conception of the universe. In agrarian civilizations around the world, a HIERARCHY OF THE GODS emerged, stratified and distant from ordinary people, mediated by priests. People still viewed themselves as connected with the natural world, but now they believed their own active participation was required to keep the cosmos running. We'll see how prayer, worship, and sacrifice became crucial parts of the human endeavor to propitiate the gods, who could take terrible retribution on those who failed to honor them.

While early civilizations everywhere shared important cognitive patterns, they also began to distill different meanings from the cosmos. We'll investigate some of these patterns of meaning spanning the globe—from China to Mesopotamia and from Egypt to Harappa. And we'll discover the unlikely culture on the fringes of the great civilizations that was destined to outlast nearly all of them and leave the greatest imprint on the cognitive structures of our modern world.

Part 3. The Patterns Diverge

Western Pattern: Split Cosmos, Split Human

Eastern Pattern: Harmonic Web of Life

In ancient Greece, a radically new way of thinking about the universe emerged. We'll discover what caused Greek philosophers to split the human experience into two by proposing a divided cosmos, with a heavenly domain of eternal abstractions and a worldly domain polluted with imperfection. And we'll see how this SPLIT COSMOS was paralleled by a SPLIT HUMAN, composed of an eternal soul temporarily imprisoned in a physical body destined to die.

Where did God come from? Recent discoveries have transformed our understanding of who really wrote the Old Testament, when they did it, and—perhaps most importantly—why they did it. We'll review these astonishing findings and trace how Christianity combined the Hebrew vision of a single all-powerful god with the divided cosmos of the ancient Greeks to create the world's first systematic dualistic cosmology. We'll glimpse the agonies of the early Christians struggling with the self-hatred and existential fragmentation arising from their new conception of humanity. And we'll watch how the metaphor of a SPLIT COSMOS led to a new understanding of the world as merely a desacralized theater for the human drama to be enacted.

Meanwhile, in China, a very different pattern of meaning evolved. We'll explore how the early Chinese saw themselves embedded in a HARMONIC WEB OF LIFE, which led to the view of a cosmos where the purpose of life was not to seek everlasting salvation but to harmonize one's existence within the hierarchical network of family, society, heaven, and earth.

We'll explore the gulf between the dualistic view of the cosmos that developed in Europe and the integrated cosmology of China. As we do so, we'll dive into one of the most acrimonious debates of modern academia: whether language affects the patterns of thought of its native speakers or not. We'll find how the front lines of this battle have recently shifted and review startling evidence that the ancient divergence of worldviews between Europe and China still continues to structure different ways of thinking between modern East Asians and Westerners.

Part 4. Conquest of Nature

China was more advanced technologically in the eleventh century than Europe in the seventeenth century. Yet it was in Europe that the Scientific Revolution occurred, fundamentally transforming the human experience across the globe. Why Europe and not China? We'll explore this crucial question, arriving at an answer that challenges prevailing theories of history. As part of our inquiry, we'll see how the language of the Old Testament, giving mankind dominion over the animals, was perceived in Europe as a clarion call for the scientific CONQUEST OF NATURE, framing the pattern of meaning that has encompassed the world through the present day.

In modern times, the clash between science and religion may seem like the inevitable result of two fundamentally contrasting worldviews. However, we'll discover that, far from being diametrically opposed, the Christian worldview served for centuries as an incubator for scientific cognition, which might never have flourished without it. By shining light on these deep linkages, we'll discover certain hidden beliefs underlying mainstream scientific thought that usually remain unquestioned, even by some of the greatest scientific minds of our age. Meanwhile, we'll take a look at an alternative form of scientific understanding—the systems way of thinking—and discover its fascinating parallels with the traditional cosmology of China.

More recently, the Western capitalist model has enveloped the globe, catalyzing a dramatic increase in the consumption of natural resources, with its implicit promise that the future offers greater prosperity and happiness for all. In recent decades, this rampant consumption has begun to take its toll, raising such specters as a massive extinction of species, a global freshwater crisis, and runaway climate change. Equipped with our learnings from history, we'll take a look at patterns of meaning in the prevalent modern mind-set and identify some faulty underpinnings driving our global civilization on its unsustainable course.

Part 5. The Web of Meaning?

The fifth pattern has not yet emerged. The book concludes by examining some of humanity's possible future trajectories, spanning the grimmest to the most dazzling. We'll investigate how earlier civilizations drove themselves to collapse, and we'll ask what lessons might apply to us. Will technology be our savior? We'll savor some of the breathtaking possibilities offered by artificial intelligence and genetic enhancement and ask: How would that affect our experience of being human? Would it exacerbate the chasm already existing in today's world between the haves and have-nots, possibly even leading humanity to bifurcate as a species? Finally, we'll explore an alternative scenario: a transformation of global norms based on a realization of our intrinsic connectedness with each other and with the natural world. Might a greater understanding of our cognitive patterns help us to construct a more integrated worldview that could put humanity on a sustainable path? I've written this book in the hope that this is indeed the case.

A Story That Matters

It's a film clip that's captured the imagination of millions. At the beginning of the classic movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, a band of prehistoric hominids has been driven from a water hole by another clan. In a moment of inspiration, one of them picks up a bone and realizes he can wield it as a weapon. He and his band use their newfound power to beat one of the other clan members to death. It works. They get their water hole back. It's the Dawn of Man. The ape-man genius throws the bone up into the sky, where—in a flash of cinematic brilliance accompanied by a grandiose soundtrack—it morphs into a satellite orbiting the earth.

It's a bittersweet story. But is it true? Are competition and conflict really the ultimate source of human ingenuity? The story of how we became human is an important one, not just from a scientific point of view but because it infuses our beliefs about human nature. Our view of humanity's origin has always been shaped by the cultural lens through which we see it, and, as that lens shifts, so does our perception of what really makes us human. Is it our true nature to be selfish and competitive, or empathic and cooperative? This matters because what we believe about ourselves has a way

Reviews for Patterning Instinct

[tom.wilson · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

An amazingly ambitious history of global thought over the past few thousand years. Lent has a deep appreciation for the contribution of ancient Chinese thought, and the way the Taoist view of the universe as constantly unfolding, holistic and interlinked as a needed corrective to the dualistic vision of nature we in the West inherited from Plato and then a body-deprecating vein in Christianity and the modern West. Important book.