“Beauty is a Wound” by Eka Kurniawan

This is an epic tale set over many generations in a small beachside village in Indonesia. It starts when the Dutch still rule a colonized Indonesia, continues though the Japanese occupation, the independence struggle, and the communist insurgency. It focuses on one cursed family whose matriarch is the town’s best prostitute, but sprawls to cover characters from all over the whole town and country. Loosely formed around Indonesia’s actual history, the story is also dotted with fantastic elements such as ghosts, flying people, and talking dogs. The characters are memorable and the plot twists keep you enthralled. One cannot help but form rooting interests for certain individuals as more and more of the tale is revealed. Superficially a tragic story, it is also filled with moments of tenderness and hilarity.

“The Shipwrecked Mind (On Political Reaction)” by Mark Lilla

Lilla has written an important book in these days of political upheaval and populist nostalgia. This is a collection of essays originally published in the New York Review of Books and the New Republic, but taken en masse they encapsulate the ideological framework of political reaction over the past century. Lilla distinguishes between reactionaries and conservatives. Reactionaries “are, in their way, just as radical as revolutionaries and just as firmly in the grip of historical imaginings.” The reactionary does not aim to preserve the current order, but seeks to return to a mythical time of bliss, by any means necessary. “The militancy of his nostalgia is what makes the reactionary a distinctly modern figure, not a traditional one.” Like the revolutionary, the reactionary believes he is part of the vanguard of the elect, who will help usher in a new age that will actually be a return to the glorious past. Or better yet, he will push mankind down an alternate path, forsaken in the past, that will lead to ever-greater ensuing bliss. The reactionary “believes that a discrete Golden Age existed and that he possesses esoteric knowledge of why it ended.” 

Lilla’s first essay is on Franz Rosenzweig, a turn of the 20th century German Jew who, literally on the doorstep of a Christian conversion, instead reverted back to his Orthodox faith. Influenced by the philosopher Martin Heidegger, Rosenzweig eschewed metaphysics for a commonsense philosophy of how to live “the everyday of life.” Rosenzweig decried modern philosophy and reform religion, preferring a return to Biblical sources without mediation. “The notion of return is what links Rosenzweig’s two-front battle, against history and for religion…. If man was to return to himself and his God, if he was to learn to live fully again, he would have to undergo some sort of therapy: not by moving back in time but by learning to escape it.” Reactionaries often speak of transcending history and time itself.  For Rosenzweig, “the manner in which Christians understand their revelation and await redemption turns their individual and collective lives into a journey…. [On the other hand,] Jews, as the sole people of revelation, lived in a timeless, face-to-face relationship with their God…. They were given no historical task because they were already what they were destined to be.” For Rosenzweig, the Jews were a community eternally bound by blood. “The Jews did not strike root in land, as the pagans did, or in history, as the Christians would; they struck root in themselves as a way of vouchsafing their eternal relationship with God.” For Rosenzweig, it was a return to faith and their destiny that was the only Jewish calling. He wrote, “The Jewish people has already reached the goal toward which the [other] nations are still moving.” The Jewish and Christian conceptions of revelation and redemption were both incomplete, as both were merely human, but both were also fundamentally incompatible with each other. Boldly, he intoned, “we have crucified Christ and, believe me, we would do it again, we alone in the whole world.”

Lilla’s second biographical essay is about Eric Voegelin, a German Christian who nonetheless, in 1938, had to escape the Nazi’s clutches in Austria, after publishing two books that debunked Hitler’s biological racist pseudo-science. In many ways he seemed a moderate. Voegelin complained he was stuck “between the staid dummies of tradition and the apocalyptic dummies of revolution.” However, he placed himself squarely in the camp of the Counter-Enlightenment. He even feared that the Augustinian conception of a City of God and a City of Man “opened up paths to God that did not have to pass through the royal palace…. It raised the prospect of human beings governing themselves without direct divine guidance,” as they had in ancient times when the king was viewed as either divine himself or having a unique pathway to the gods. This separation of the secular and the spiritual was followed by the Reformation and finally the Enlightenment, which finished the job that “decapitated God.” In Voegelin’s view, “modern man became a Prometheus, believing himself a god capable of transforming anything and everything at will.” With Marxism, fascism, historicism, and scientism, Voegelin feared the secularization of a new faith. He warned, “When God has become invisible behind the world, the things of the world become new gods.” Instead of an ordained historicism, Voegelin thought “history is “a mystery in the process of revelation,” an open field where the divine and human meet, not a highway without exits.”

Lilla’s final biography is on Leo Strauss, a German Jew who left for America before the horrors of WWII. He was a student of Heidegger, who took up his challenge, and defended Socratic philosophy, or at least “the possibility of philosophy.” For Strauss, philosophy was diametrically opposed to revelation- his idea of Athens and Jerusalem. “Strauss held, all societies require an authoritative account of ultimate means- morality and mortality, essentially- if they are to legitimate their political institutions and educate citizens. Theology has traditionally done that by convincing people to obey the laws because they are sacred. The philosophical alternative to obedience was Socrates’ life of perpetual questioning beholden to no theological or political authority.” The question is whether the masses are equipped to follow a philosophical life. Do they need tradition, custom, and the sacred, lest they lose their way? “Philosophers can serve as gadflies to the city, calling it to account in the name of truth and justice; and the city reminds philosophers that they live in a world that can never be fully rationalized, with ordinary people who cling to their beliefs and need assurance.” Strauss strongly defended natural law and inalienable rights derived from reason, but wondered if American society had devolved into a culture where “all men are endowed by the evolutionary process or by a mysterious fate with many kinds of urges and aspirations, but certainly with no natural right?” He would later answer himself, “the contemporary rejection of natural right leads to nihilism, nay, it is identical with nihilism.” Lilla convincingly makes the case that it was not so much Strauss as his students, the so-called Straussian followers who became the intellectual vanguard for reaction in America. Strauss, himself, was unconcerned with contemporary politics or popular cultural debates. His was a life consumed by deep reading of primary texts, which taught timeless esoteric nuggets. Still, it would be fair to say that “from Strauss [his American disciples] had learned to see genuine education as a necessarily elite enterprise that is difficult in a leveling, democratic society.” Lilla concludes with the most damning of ironies, “where but in America could a European thinker convinced of the elite nature of genuine education produce pupils who would go on to make common cause with populist politicians? Where but in America could a teacher of esotericism, concerned about protecting philosophical inquiry from political harm, find his books used to train young people to become guardians of an ephemeral ideology? Where but in America could the Socratic practice of skeptical questioning inspire professions of faith in a national ideal?” Lilla suggests that perhaps, it was really the Straussians, and not Leo Strauss, who became the true American reactionaries.

The rest of Lilla’s essays revolve around various contemporary currents prominent in reactionary politics today. Most rebel against the present wave of subjectivism, secularism, and modernity in general. One current warns that in destroying Christian morality, “the Enlightenment unwittingly prepared the way for acquisitive capitalism, Nietzscheanism, and the relativistic liberal emotivism we live with today, in a society that “cannot hope to achieve moral consensus.”…. Modern liberalism was born to cope with these conflicts, which it did. But the price was high: it required the institutionalization of toleration as the highest moral virtue.” To liberals these are features and not bugs, but to the reactionary these are signs of moral rot and regression. Lilla makes the case that reaction does not want to appeal to reason at all, but “the connections are meant to be felt.” Its success has been to inspire by a sense of rightness, rather than a specific program. It appeals to the heart and not the head. “For an ideology to really reshape politics it must cease being a set of principles and become instead a vaguer general outlook that new information and events only strengthen. You really know when an ideology has matured when every event, present and past, is taken as confirmation of it.” At some point, according to reactionaries, history itself took the wrong path and that is what has led to this world of despair. “For the apocalyptic imagination, the present, not the past, is a foreign country.” Their path is to right the ship by destroying the present and returning to firmer ground. Lilla concludes with the chilling realization, “we are only too aware that the most powerful revolutionary slogans of our age begin: Once upon a time…”

“Behave- The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst” by Robert Sapolsky

It took me a couple months of stops and starts to finish this one. It was always interesting, but often dense, interspersed with more than a few casual asides and meanders. This is a big book in every sense of the word. Sapolsky is a neurobiologist, who spends much of his career studying primates in the wild. This book, however, is on the complexity of what makes humans behave the way we do. Sapolsky is concerned that many fields, from neurobiology to evolutionary biology, to behavioral psychology, to anthropology, to economics, are stove-piped and do not communicate across disciplines. Even within the study of the brain some experts focus only on the amygdala, while others on the prefrontal cortex. Sapolsky seeks to break down these walls. His focus is on the various effects that apply on the human body over the course of time. 

Sapolsky begins with the effects one second before a given event. The layers of the brain are complicated and talk back and forth with each other. Nonetheless, Paul MacLean conceptualized the idea of the “triune brain” where there are three layers- layer 1 which controls automatic, regulatory function, layer 2 which handles emotions, and layer 3, the neocortex on the surface of the brain, which deals with “cognition, memory storage, sensory process, abstractions, philosophy, and naval gazing.” This layer evolved last and primates devote proportionally more brain space to it than other animals. The limbic system is central to emotions. The hypothalamus influences autonomic function, allowing layer 2 to talk to layer 1. “The sympathetic nervous system (SNS) mediates the body’s response to arousing circumstances…. The SNS mediates the “four Fs- fear, fight, flight, and sex.”” In contrast, the parasympathetic nervous system controls calm, vegetative states, such as digestion. The cortex, in layer 3, decodes much of the sensory information. It commands movement, deciphers language, stores memory, computes spatial and mathematical problems, and executes executive decisions. However, the frontal cortex and limbic systems are intertwined, communicating in both directions. They can stimulate and inhibit each other, sometimes coordinating and sometimes working at cross purposes. The amygdala has been thought to control aggression and is highly activated during sensations of fear and anxiousness. “In PTSD sufferers the amygdala is overreactive to mildly fearful stimuli and is slow in calming down after being activated.” It actually permanently expands in size in severe cases of PTSD. For normal people, “the amygdala injects implicit distrust and vigilance into social decision making.” Surprisingly, some sensory information can shortcut the cortex and directly go to the amygdala so that you sense fear before the cortex can process it. The frontal cortex seeks to control longterm action, regulate emotions, and reign in impulsivity. It is central to empathy. It “makes you do the harder thing when it’s the right thing to do…. It’s the prefrontal cortex (PFC) that is “the decider.”… The PFC is essential for categorical thinking, for organizing and thinking about bits of information with different labels.” The frontal cortex tracks the rules in life. If it is taxed with “cognitive load”, either through a complicated or strenuous problem or through multitasking, then its performance declines significantly. After a heavy cognitive load task, humans also become less prosocial and more impulsive (for example, cheating on their healthy diets). “During REM sleep, when dreaming occurs, the frontal cortex goes off-line, and dream scriptwriters run wild.” The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) “is the decider of deciders, the most rational, cognitive, utilitarian, unsentimental part of the PFC…. The ventromedial PFC…. is all about the impact of emotion on decision making”  leading some neuroscientists to call it an honorary member of the limbic system. Finally, the mesolimbic dopamine pathway uses the ventral tegmental area (tegmentum) to target nucleus accumbens. The mesocortical dopamine pathway targets the PFC, but no other part of the cortex. “The dopaminergic system is about reward- various pleasurable stimuli activate tegmental neurons, triggering the release of dopamine.” In hungry as opposed to satiated individuals, a picture of food releases dopamine. If accumbens are activated while listening to music, it is more likely a customer will buy it. Punishing norm violators also releases dopamine. Crucially, it is often social interaction that affects dopamine. “Losing a lottery had no effect, while losing a bidding war [at an auction] inhibited dopamine release.” It also relies on expectations, coordinating bidirectionally with the cognitive brain. “Get what you expected, and there’s a steady-state dribble of dopamine. Get more reward and/or get it sooner than expected, and there’s a big burst; less and/or later, a decrease.” Neurons release the inhibitory neurotransmitter GABA in such cases. “In habituation…. the reward that once elicited a big dopamine response becomes less exciting” to the system. Furthermore, “once reward contingencies are learned, dopamine is less about reward than about its anticipation,” as the system releases it in expectation before actual contact. An additional neurotransmitter is serotonin. “Low serotonin didn’t predict premeditated, instrumental violence. It predicted impulsive aggression, as well as cognitive impulsivity…. Other studies linked low serotonin to impulsive suicide.”

Next Sapolsky focuses on the seconds to minutes before an event. “Across species the dominant sensory modality- vision, sound, whichever- has the most direct access to the limbic system.” These sensory effects are often unconscious. The interoceptive system also plays a huge role because “you decide what you feel based on signals from your body…. Some brain regions with starring roles in processing social emotions- the PFC, insular cortex, anterior cingulate cortex, and the amygdala- receive lots of interoceptive information.” 

Sapolsky moves on to the hours to days before an event. “There is a weak and inconsistent association between testosterone levels and aggression in [human] adults.” Testosterone does increase confidence and optimism, while reducing fear and anxiety. It also increases impulsivity and risk taking by decreasing activity in the PFC by decoupling it from the amygdala, while the amygdala communicates more instead with the thalamus. Increased levels of testosterone is pleasurable. But the effects are also context dependent. “This context dependency means that rather than causing X, testosterone amplifies the power of something else to cause X…. Rising testosterone levels increase aggression only at the time of a challenge…. Watching your favorite team win raises testosterone levels, showing that the rise is less about muscle activity than about the psychology of dominance, identification, and self-esteem.” It is also affected by expectations. A better than expected performance can increase testosterone, while subpar victory decreases it. “When testosterone rises after a challenge, it doesn’t prompt aggression. Instead it prompts whatever behaviors are needed to maintain status.” In cases where high status is given to acts of generosity, people with higher testosterone levels act more generously. Oxytocin is another hormone that regulates social situations. “Oxytocin is central to female mammals nursing, wanting to nurse their child, and remembering which one is their child…. Circulating oxytocin levels are elevated in couples when they’ve first hooked up. Furthermore, the higher the levels, the more physical affection, the more behaviors are synchronized, the more long-lasting the relationship, and the happier interviewers rate couples to be.” This goes beyond human couples. Dogs and their owners create mutual loops of increased oxytocin levels. People with high levels of oxytocin are also foolishly trusting in social economic games, but not in those against a computer! “Stated scientifically, “oxytocin inoculated betrayal aversion among investors”; stated caustically, oxytocin makes people irrational dupes; stated more angelically, oxytocin makes people turn the other cheek.” Oxytocin, in general, makes people more charitable and sensitive to social approval. It also increases social competence. People with elevated oxytocin “look at eyes longer, increasing accuracy in reading emotions. Moreover, oxytocin enhances activity in the temporoparietal juncture (that region involved in Theory of Mind) when people do a social-recognition task. The hormone increases the accuracy of assessments of other people’s thoughts, with a gender twist- women improve at detecting kinship relations, while men improve at detecting dominance relations.” However, oxytocin’s effects are modulated by tribal instincts. “When playing against strangers, oxytocin decreases cooperation, enhances envy when luck is bad, and enhances gloating when it’s good…. Oxytocin makes you more prosocial to people like you….but spontaneously lousy to Others who are a threat.” It helps create and amplify an Us versus Them dynamic. Finally, hormone ratios can be more important than absolute levels, “hormone levels are extremely dynamic, with hundredfold changes in some within hours” and there is extreme variability across species. Another huge challenge to the body system is stress. Homeostasis “means having an ideal body temperature, heart rate, glucose level, and so on. A “stressor” is anything that disrupts homeostatic balance…. Stress response rapidly mobilizes energy into circulation from storage sites in your body. Furthermore, heart rate and blood pressure increase, delivering that circulating energy to exercising muscles faster. Moreover, during stress, long-term building projects- growth, tissue repair, and reproduction- are postponed…. Beta-endorphin is secreted, the immune system is stimulated, and blood clotting is enhanced, all useful following a painful injury. Moreover, glucocorticoids reach the brain, rapidly enhancing aspects of cognition and sensory acuity.” This makes sense in a short burst, but can be damaging over time. “If you are constantly but incorrectly convinced that you’re about to be thrown out of balance, you’re being an anxious, neurotic, paranoid, or hostile primate who is psychologically stressed…. Chronic stress suppresses immunity…. The core of psychological stress is loss of control and predictability…. Collectively, stress or glucocorticoid administration decreases accuracy when rapidly assessing emotions of faces…. [The] glucocorticoids don’t cause action potentials in amygdaloid neurons, don’t invent excitation. Instead they amplify preexisting excitation…. Stress makes it easier to learn a fear association and to consolidate it into a long-term memory…. Stress also makes it harder to unlearn fear, to “extinguish” a conditioned fear association…. Prolonged administration of high glucocorticoid levels to healthy subjects impaired working memory…. These stress effects on frontal function also make us perseverative- in a rut, set in our ways, running on automatic, being habitual…. Major stressors make people of both genders more risk taking. But moderate stressors bias men toward, women away from, risk taking.” Basically, stress impairs overall risk assessment. Many animals also exhibit stress induced displacement aggression. We all take it out on others. Stress induces selfishness. It makes people less altruistic concerning personal (but not impersonal) moral decisions. “The amygdala becomes overactive and more coupled to pathways of habitual behavior…. Frontal function- working memory, impulse control, executive decision making, risk assessment, and task shifting- is impaired.”

Sapolsky moves further back in time to tackle the days to months before an event. New synapses can grow in the brain between neurons. New axon receptors can also form to redirect brain traffic. “When a person who is deaf and adept at American Sign Language watches someone signing, there is activation of the part of their auditory cortex normally activated by speech.” Recently, it has been discovered that even new neurons grow in adults. “There’s considerable adult neurogenesis in the hippocampus (where roughly 3 percent of neurons are replaced each month) and lesser amounts in the cortex.” However, neuroplasticity is still little understood.

Sapolsky next moves back to adolescence. “The final brain region to fully mature (in terms of synapse number, myelination, and metabolism) is the frontal cortex, not going fully online until the midtwenties…. No part of the adult brain is more shaped by adolescence than the frontal cortex…. Nothing about adolescence can be understood outside the context of delayed frontocortical maturation…. It’s the time of life of maximal risk taking, novelty seeking, and affiliation with peers.” The frontal cortex actually matures as its neurons decrease. “The fetal brain generates far more neurons than are found in the adult…. Neuronal overproduction followed by competitive pruning (which has been termed “neural Darwinism”) allowed the evolution of more optimized neural circuitry.” In adolescence, this creates gradually improved “working memory, flexible rule use, executive organization, and frontal inhibitory regulation…. Adolescents also improve at mentalization tasks (understanding someone else’s perspective)”, cognitively, if not emotionally. Adolescents also “experience bigger-than-expected rewards more positively then do adults and smaller-than-expected rewards as aversive.” Adolescents are also affected by their peers more than adults. “In neuroimaging studies, peers egging subjects (by intercom) lessens vmPFC activity and enhances ventral striatal activity in adolescents but not adults…. Ask adults to think about what they imagine others think of them, then about what they think of themselves. Two different, partially overlapping networks of frontal and limbic structures activate for the two tasks. But with adolescents the two profiles are the same. “What do you think about yourself?” is neurally answered with “What everyone else thinks about me.”” Because of their less developed frontal cortex, rejection actually hurts adolescents more. “By definition the frontal cortex is the brain region least constrained by genes and most sculpted by experience.”

Sapolsky goes backwards in development to the crib and the womb. “Neuron formation, migration, and synaptogenesis are mostly prenatal in humans. In contrast, there is little myelin at birth, particularly in evolutionarily newer brain regions…. myelination proceeds for a quarter century…. Myelination is most consequential when enwrapping the longest axons, in neurons that communicate the greatest distances. Thus myelination particularly facilitates brain regions talking to one another.” By the ages of ten to twelve empathy is more generalized and abstracted. Consequently, this is when stereotypes also form. Kids also begin to derive comfort from reconciliation after a conflict, which decreases their glucocorticoid secretion and anxiety. Kids also slowly begin to exhibit willpower. “Maturation of willpower is more about distraction and reappraisal strategies than about stoicism.” Kids also learn behavioral context. “Mothers and peers don’t teach the motoric features of fixed action patterns; those are hardwired. They teach when, where, and to whom- the appropriate context for those behaviors.” Childhood adversity “increases the odds of an adult having (a) depression, anxiety, and/or substance abuse; (b) impaired cognitive capabilities, particularly related to frontocortical function; (c) impaired impulse control and emotion regulation; (d) antisocial behavior, including violence; and (e) relationships that replicate the adversities of childhood…. Early life stress permanently blunts the ability of the brain to rein in glucocorticoid secretion.” Again, peers often mediate parental influence. Peer interactions teach social competence. Play is a form of social teaching. “Kids in individualist cultures acquire Theory of Mind later than collectivist-culture kids and activate pertinent circuits more to achieve the same degree of competence. For a collectivist child, social competence is all about taking someone else’s perspective.” Humans are affected by their environment even before birth. We may prefer foods our mothers ate during pregnancy. “Prenatal testosterone plays a major role in explaining sex differences in aggression and affiliative prosocial behaviors in humans…. Prenatal testosterone exposure influences digit length. Specifically, while the second finger is usually shorter than the fourth finger, the difference (the “2D:4D ratio”) is greater in men than in women.” A major environmental factor is maternal stress levels. “Stress alters maternal blood pressure and immune defenses, which impact a fetus. Most important, stressed mothers secrete glucocorticoids, which enter fetal circulation.” Glucocorticoids’ create negative consequences “through organizational effects on fetal brain construction and decreasing levels of growth factors, numbers of neurons and synapses, and so on.”

Sapolsky goes further back to when the egg was just fertilized. It is important to remember that 95% of DNA is noncoding. Furthermore, “saying the a gene “decides” when it is transcribed is like saying that a recipe decides when a cake is baked.” Relating to humans particularly, “the more genomically complex the organism, the larger the percentage of the genome devoted to gene regulation by the environment.” Epigenetics also affects gene activation later in life. Furthermore, “dogma was that all the epigenetic marks (i.e., changes in the DNA or surrounding proteins) were erased in eggs and sperm. But it turns out the epigenetic marks can be passed on by both (e.g., make male mice diabetic, and they pass the trait to their offspring via epigenetic changes in the sperm.” DNA is also affected by alternative splicing, which “can generate multiple unique proteins from a single stretch of DNA” and transposable genetic elements or transposons, which are randomly inserted into stretches of code. “Evolution is heavily about changing regulation of gene transcription, rather than the genes themselves…. Epigenetics can allow environmental effects to be lifelong, or even multigenerational.” Furthermore, “it’s difficult to quantitatively assess the relative contributions of genes and environment to a particular trait when they interact.” That means, “it’s not meaningful to ask what a gene does, just what it does in a particular environment.” These can be physical or social human environments. And, of course, compared to other species on Earth, humans live in the most varied range of habitats possible. Furthermore, depending on the environment, genes can become more of or less of a factor. “Heritability of various aspects of cognitive development is very high (e.g. around 70 percent of IQ) in kids from high-socioeconomic status (SES) families but is only around 10 percent in low-SES kids.” Being poor is no good for anyone, but once you become rich, genes begin to matter. Most traits are also highly polygenic. Hundreds of genetic variants are implicated in regulating height, all in combination. Furthermore, “the single genetic variant identified that most powerfully predicted height explained all of 0.4 percent- four tenths of one percent- of the variation in height, and all those hundreds of variants put together explained only about 10 percent of the variation.” Genes cannot be looked at in isolation, but must be studied in combination with hundreds of other genes and as influenced by countless of different environments. “Genes aren’t about inevitability. Instead they’re about context-dependent tendencies, propensities, potentials, and vulnerabilities.”

Sapolsky continues to look back in time- centuries to millennia before conception. Culture can affect biology and vice versa. For example, “subjects from individualist cultures strongly activate the (emotional) vmPFC when looking at pictures of themselves, compared to looking at a picture of a relative or friend; in contrast, the activation is far less for East Asian subjects.” Relatedly, “consider a monkey, a bear, and a banana. Which two go together? Westerners think categorically and choose the monkey and bear- they’re both animals. East Asians think relationally and link the monkey and banana- if you’re thinking of a monkey, also think of food it will need.” Traits like aggression can also be influenced by culture. Both people living in high density areas, like cities, and in honor cultures, like the American South, tend to behave more aggressively. However, culture only affects those with a predisposition to aggressive behavior. Again, your environment and biology interact and influence each other, sometimes in self-reenforcing loops of behavior.

Evolution is not about survival of the fittest, but about reproductive success. Sometimes these are at odds. Antagonistic pleiotropy are traits that increase reproductive fitness, but decrease your lifespan. “Primates’ prostates have high metabolic rates, enhancing sperm motility. Upside: enhanced fertility; downside: increased risk of prostate cancer.” Other examples include salmon spawning and male peacock tails. Evolution also only selects for the present. Living species are not “better” or “more evolved” than extinct species. Group selection is also largely a myth. “Animals don’t behave for the good of the species. They behave to maximize the number of copies of their genes passed into the next generation.” That is done primarily through individual selection and kin selection. “Competitive infanticide has been documented…. in 119 species” when a new mate enters the scene. “The extent to which a male primate cares for infants reflects the certainty of paternity.” A third factor in evolution is “reciprocal altruism”, defined by Robert Trivers as, “incurring a fitness cost to enhance a nonrelative’s fitness, with the expectation of reciprocation…. Social interactions have to be frequent enough that the altruist and the indebted are likely to encounter each other again. And individuals must be able to recognize each other.” There is even parent-offspring conflict in evolution. “As long as Mom nurses she is unlikely to ovulate, curtailing her future reproductive potential. Baboon moms evolved to wean their kids at the age where they can feed themselves, and baboon kids evolved to try to delay that day. Interestingly, as females age, with decreasing likelihood of a future child, they become less forceful in weaning.” This conflict starts even before birth. “Fetus and Mom have a metabolic struggle involving insulin, the pancreatic hormones secreted when blood glucose levels rise, which triggers glucose entry into target cells. The fetus releases a hormone that makes Mom’s cells unresponsive to insulin (i.e. insulin resistant), as well as an enzyme that degrades Mom’s insulin. Thus Mom absorbs less glucose from her bloodstream, leaving more for the fetus.” Neo-group selection is when A dominates B, but a group of Bs dominates a group of As or “the circumstance of a genetically influenced trait that, while adaptive on an individual level, emerges as maladaptive when shared by a group and where there is competition between groups…. Cultures magnify the intensity of between-group selection and lessen within-group selection.” Group selection is rarely seen in the animal kingdom, but might be most strongly prevalent in humans because of our dependence on culture.

Sapolsky next goes on to discuss in-group and out-group relations. Oxytocin production exaggerates an Us vs. Them mentality. However, creating an Us relationship sometimes requires only the most meaningless of commonalities- hair style, car model, music preferences. Mimicry is pleasing, activating mesolimbic dopamine, increasing pair bonding. Arbitrary markers that link to values and beliefs, such as national flags, often gradually take on a value and power of their own. “By age three to four, kids already group people by race and gender, have more negative views of such Thems, and perceive other-race faces as being angrier than same-race faces…. Infants learn same-race faces better than other-race.” This is learned behavior often conditioned by adults, such as in statements like “good morning, boys and girls,” which teaches children to see the world by that dichotomy. “Children adopted before age eight by someone of a different race develop expertise at face recognition of the adoptive parent’s race.” When forced to think about Them, feelings of disgust often activate in the insular cortex. The same regions in the brain are activated when told to think of rotten food and a drug addict. “People with the strongest negative attitudes toward immigrants, foreigners, and socially deviant groups tend to have low thresholds for interpersonal disgust (e.g., are resistant to wearing a stranger’s clothes or sitting in a warm seat just vacated).” Thems are also simpler and more homogenous than Us. They are monolithic and interchangeable, not individuals. Sometimes it is hormonal. “White women, when ovulating, have more negative attitudes towards African American men.” Even minorities tend to identify with the Us/Them dichotomy of the majority. “Roughly 40 to 50 percent of African Americans, gays and lesbians, and women show automatic IAT (Implicit Association Test) biases in favor of whites, heterosexuals, and men, respectively.” Groups also exacerbate. However, internally this can lead to cohesion. “Groups with highly hostile interactions with neighbors tend to have minimal internal conflict.” Each human, unlike most animals, belongs to multiple categories of Us and Them simultaneously. We are parts of multiple groups and shift our prioritizing of these groups, based on context, with ease. Perspective taking, consciously focusing on stereotypes, making implicit biases explicit, and thinking at the level of the individual all help in counteracting Us/Them mentalities.

Sapolsky next covers hierarchy, conformity, and obedience. “Hierarchies establish a status quo by ritualizing inequalities.” They are ranking systems that formalize unequal access to limited resources. Humans have evolved biologically as we have evolved socially. The bigger the average size of the social group in a species “the larger the brain, relative to total body size and the larger the neo-cortex, relative to total brain size.” Along with all primates, attaining alpha status might require brawn, but maintaining rank “is about social intelligence and impulse control: knowing which provocations to ignore and which coalitions to form, understanding other individuals' actions.” Furthermore, amongst humans, “the larger the size of someone’s social network (often calculated by the number of email/texting relationships), the larger the vmPFC, orbital PFC, and amygdala, and the better the person’s Theory of Mind-related skills.” Much of this social interaction is subconscious. It takes only forty milliseconds to distinguish between a dominant and subordinate facial expression. “One study showed kids, ages five to thirteen, pairs of faces of candidates from obscure elections and asked them whom they’d prefer as captain of a hypothetical boat trip. And kids picked the winner 71 percent of the time.” The decision between obedience or resistance can also be effected by cognitive load, the interoceptive system, and feelings of disgust or stress. “People become more conservative when tired, in pain, or distracted with a cognitive task…. Stick subjects in a room with a smelly garbage can, and they become more socially conservative…. People are more likely to conform and obey at times of stress, ranging from time pressure to a real or imagined outside threat to a novel context. In stressful settings rules gain power.” Animals are wired to conform to the group. “A chimp is more likely to copy an action if he sees three other individuals do it once than if one other individual does it three times…. A male grouse courts a female who, alas, doesn’t feel magic in the air and rebuffs him. The researchers then make him seem like the hottest stud on the prairie- by surrounding him with some rapt, stuffed female grouse. Soon the reluctant maiden is all over him, pushing her statuesque rivals aside.” Humans are the same. “It takes less than 200 milliseconds for your brain to register that the group has picked a different answer from yours, and less than 380 milliseconds for a profile of activation that predicts changing your opinion…. When we choose incorrectly in a task, the dopaminergic decline is less if we made the decision as part of a group…. The discovery that you are out of step activates the amygdala and insular cortex; the more activation, the greater your likelihood of changing your mind, and the more persistent the change (as opposed to the transient change of compliant public conformity)…. When you get the news that everyone else disagrees with you, there is also activation of the (emotional) vmPFC, the anterior cingulate cortex, and the nucleus accumbens. This is a network mobilized during reinforcement learning, where you learn to modify your behavior when there is a mismatch between what you expected to happen and what actually did.”

Sapolsky next takes on morality. “Logical and moral reasoning about the correctness of an economic or ethical decision, respectively, both activate the (cognitive) dlPFC.” When moral dilemmas are considered, intuitions about intentionality come into play. However, “intuitions discount heavily over space and time. Exactly the myopia about cause and effect you’d expect from a brain system that operates rapidly and automatically.” We also can be harsher when viewing the morals of others than ourselves. It is harder to judge intentions. “We use different brain circuits when contemplating our own moral failings (heavy activation of the vmPFC) versus those of others (more of the insula and dlPFC)…. We judge ourselves by our internal motives and everyone else by their external actions. And thus, in considering our own misdeeds, we have more access to mitigating, situational information.” Modern humans have adapted to be prosocial even with strangers. Market integration predicts both making fairer offers in economic games and altruistic third-party punishment of deviators, even at expense to oneself. The larger the community size and the more religious, the more incidence of third-party punishment. “Large religions invent gods who do third-party punishment.” Culture also plays a key role in shaping morality. “Collectivist cultures enforce with shame, while individualistic cultures use guilt…. Shame requires an audience, is about honor. Guilt is for cultures that treasure privacy and is about conscience. Shame is a negative assessment of the entire individual, guilt that of an act, making it possible to hate the sin but love the sinner. Effective shaming requires a conformist, homogenous population; effective guilt requires respect for law. Feeling shame is about wanting to hide; feeling guilt is about wanting to make amends.” Social interaction and approbation comes through language and specifically gossip. “Anthropologists, studying everyone from hunter-gatherers to urbanites, have found that about two thirds of everyday conversation is gossip, with the vast majority of it being negative…. Gossip (with the goal of shaming) is a weapon of the weak against the powerful. It has always been fast and cheap.”

Sapolsky continues by discussing feeling the pain of others. Empathy is felt through the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). The ACC processes interoceptive information, “funnels literal gut feelings into intuitions and metaphorical gut feelings influencing frontal function” and works out conflicts and discrepancies from what is expected. It seeks the underlying meaning of pain and therefore is as concerned with social pain, such as social exclusion, anxiety, disgust, and embarrassment, as with physical pain. “By adulthood the insula (and to a lesser degree the amygdala) is nearly as intertwined with experiencing empathy as is the ACC…. There is more engagement of the dmPFC when observing someone in emotional pain than physical pain. Likewise when the pain is presented more abstractly…. Resonating with someone else’s pain is also a cognitive task when it is a type of pain that you haven’t experienced…. We have a stronger sensorimotor response in our hands when the hand we see being poked with a needle is of our race…. Feeling the same degree of empathy or achieving the same level of perspective taking for a Them as for an Us requires greater frontocortical activation. This is the domain where you musty suppress the automatic and implicit urges to be indifferent, if not repulsed, and do the creative, motivated work of finding the affective commonalities.”

Sapolsky next goes on to tackle free will. He maintains that you either believe that there is absolutely no free will or that there is some sort of soul or homunculus that exists outside of the biological realm. “Even if 99.99 percent of your actions are biologically determined…. and it is only once a decade that you claim to have chosen out of “free will” to floss your teeth from left to right instead of the reverse, you’ve tacitly invoked a homunculus operating outside of the rules of science.” He quotes the philosopher Hilary Bok, “The claim that a person chose her actions does not conflict with the claim that some neural processes or states caused it; it simply redescribes it.” Sapolsky goes on to quote the philosopher Shaun Nichols, “It seems like something has to give, either our commitment to free will or our commitment to the idea that every event is completely caused by the preceding events.”

Sapolsky concludes by discussing war and peace. He suggests as humans have expanded their trading networks peace has spread too. From between family, to neighbors and friends, to countrymen, to distant strangers, the advantages of mutual trade brought with it a disincentive to kill one another. Cooperation increases when interactions could be open ended, there are multiple levels of cooperation to build trust, and reputations are apparent so that third parties can monitor and engage in indirect reciprocity. Religion, on the other hand, has been a double edged sword. “Reciting a familiar prayer activates mesolimbic dopaminergic systems. Improvising one activates regions associated with Theory of Mind, as you try to understand a deity’s perspective…. More activation of this Theory of Mind network correlates with a more personified image of a deity.” In a study of sixty-seven countries, the greater the belief in hell the lower the national crime rate. The belief in heaven had no effect. Finally, some cheerful thoughts about actual war. “Of the 27,000 single-load muskets from the field [at the Battle of Gettysburg], almost 24,000 of them were loaded and unfired; 12,000 were loaded multiple times, 6,000 loaded three to ten times…. Similarly, in World War II only 15 to 20 percent of riflemen ever fired their guns.” Studies of PTSD have revealed something fascinating. Drone pilots’ rates of PTSD are just as high as for soldiers on the ground. “The deepest trauma is not the fear of being killed. It’s doing the close-up, individuated killing.”

Sapolsky’s book is mammoth. It seeks to balance nature and nurture- biology and culture. Obviously, there are loops that reinforce and build on each other. Everything, including the effects of our genes and hormones, is context dependent. The book’s only overarching theme might be that the human body is amazingly complicated. For all of his statistics, Sapolsky is at pains to emphasize that they are all just averages. No individual human acts exactly in all the ways that would be predicted by looking at any formula or textbook.

“Covenant & Conversation: Genesis: The Book of Beginnings” by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks

This is a collection of essays that annotate the Book of Genesis by the chief Rabbi of London. It is written for a Jewish audience, but can definitely be appreciated by Gentiles as well. He explains, expounds upon, and interprets each parasha of Genesis. He uses the Torah, as well as the Midrashic scholarship, to elucidate a central theme or lesson in each short essay. The book is designed for one to read and discuss an essay each week, but Sacks' essays can also easily all be read in a couple of sittings. The collection is that engrossing. As someone who hasn’t read the Bible since high school this book was a nice refresher on its stories, as well as great commentary from a humanist Biblical scholar.

“Anna Karenina” by Leo Tolstoy

I had been meaning to read this for a while, but had been hesitant to pick it up because of the commitment. However, it did not disappoint. I haven’t read much Russian fiction as of yet, but have long been influenced by Bakunin’s and Kropotkin’s anarchist writings. Even in reading Lenin and Trotsky there is something strangely spectacular and mystifying about the grandeur of their visions. Perhaps peculiar to the Russian psyche is an unresolved tension between West and East that appeals to me. Added to that milieu, in Tolstoy, are the tensions of his age, in which the aristocracy was giving way to the twin modernities of science and capitalism. It was an age of change in which serfs were becoming peasants and merchants were replacing the nobility in wealth and power. You could sense the end of the Romanovs in the air. Tolstoy’s anarchist leanings (or flirtations) have also naturally intrigued me. What better time than the present, given current world events, to try to get a better sense of the Russian mind. Tolstoy weaves together world history, the backdrop of the Crimean War, a picture of the landed gentry and the peasantry, industrialization and modernity, Moscow and St. Petersburg life, all with a clever and entertaining story. At parts the novel reads like a soap opera, while at other times Tolstoy riffs on the philosophical and religious speculations of the day. He moralizes without preaching and always makes sure the characters and plot reign supreme.

“Incarnations: A History of India in Fifty Lives” by Sunil Khilnani

Khilnani’s book on India is a history told in fifty biographies, spanning in time from the Buddha to Dhirubhai Ambani. In vocation, Khilnani chooses from religious leaders (Adi Shankara), spiritual guides (Vivekananda), kings (Akbar), warriors (Malik Ambar), social agitators (Jyotirao Phule), politicians (Indira Gandhi), scholars (Srinivasa Ramanujan), entrepreneurs (Chidambaram Pillai), writers (Iqbal), and artists (Amrita Sher-Gil), among other professions. In space, he chooses people from the Tamil south (Rajaraja Chola), the Bengal east (Tagore), the Maharashtra west (Shivaji), the Kashmir north (Sheikh Abdullah), and places in between. He chooses from Brahmins (Rammohun Roy), Dalits (Ambedkar), Sikhs (Guru Nanak), Buddhists (Ashoka), Jains (Mahavira), Parsis (Jamsetji Tata), Sunnis (Kabir), Shias (Jinnah), and Sufis (Amir Khusrau). There are even a couple British (William Jones and Annie Besant), who “went native” tossed into the mix. The vast variety of India is given its full life. This method shows the breath and depth of history on the subcontinent. By choosing figures both well-known and obscure Khilnani exposes the reader to tasty nuggets on every page. In detailing each individual life he reveals the character of the whole country from which they all sprang. It is this diversity that makes India such a magical place. As the painter M.F. Husain opined, while in self-imposed exile after death threats made against him by Hindu nationalists, “a liberal tolerance of a different point of view causes no damage. It means only a greater self restraint. Diversity in expression of views whether in writings, paintings or visual media encourages debate. A debate should never be shut out. “I am right” does not necessarily imply “You are wrong.” Our culture breeds tolerance- both in thought and in actions. I have penned down this judgement with the fervent hope that it is a prologue to a broader thinking and greater tolerance.”

“Seven Brief Lessons on Physics” by Carlo Rovelli

This is pop-science at its best. Rovelli tries to elucidate some of physics’ most important concepts to the layman. He largely succeeds in explaining concepts like the general theory of relativity in a simple, if necessarily incomplete, manner. What it lacks in academically rigorous depth Rovelli makes up for by inspiring fascination and wonder to explore further. For a non-scientist like myself he makes science fun and accessible, while challenging my assumptions of the world as I know it. He makes the implausible seem as real as, in fact, it often is: such as a twin who spends his whole life in the Himalayas is actually very slightly older than his brother who lives by the ocean, since time passes more slowly at sea level. Does quantum mechanics actually prove that there are no firm laws in physics, just probabilities or is there really an “objective reality independent of whoever reacts with whatever”, as Einstein struggled to believe to his dying day? Was the Big Bang the beginning of the Universe and time or was it just the beginning of one universe and more like a Big Bounce, the point where one previously contracting universe started to expand again, as loop quantum gravity would suggest? Rovelli makes you ponder the mysteries of matter, space, and time in ways that make you wish you knew more about the current state of physics.

“Seeing Like a State” by James C. Scott

I don’t know why it took me so long to pick up this book. When a self-professed quasi-anarchist and professor of political science and anthropology at Yale writes on the nature of the State, you know it is going to be engaging. This book does not disappoint. Scott sees the project of state formation as one primarily of ever-increasing legibility. “Suddenly, processes as disparate as the creation of permanent last names, the standardization of weights and measures, the establishment of cadastral surveys and population registers, the invention of freehold tenure, the standardization of language and legal discourse, the design of cities, and the organization of transportation seemed comprehensible as attempts at legibility and simplification.” According to Scott, there are four main steps involved in state-initiated social engineering: “The first element is the administrative ordering of nature and society…. The second element is what I call a high-modernist ideology. It is best conceived as a strong, one might even say muscle-bound, version of self-confidence about scientific and technical progress…. The third element is an authoritarian state that is willing and able to use the full weight of its coercive powers to bring these high-modernist designs into being…. A fourth element is closely linked to the third: a prostrate civil society that lacks the capacity to resist these plans.” 

Scott’s book uses detailed case studies to examine the process of state formation. The first study is on the formation of scientific forestry in late-eighteenth century Prussia and Saxony. “In state “fiscal forestry”…. the actual tree with its vast number of possible uses was replaced by an abstract tree representing a volume of lumber or firewood…. The forest as habitat disappears and is replaced by the forest as economic resource managed efficiently and profitably…. Thus plants that are valued become “crops”, the species that compete with them are stigmatized as “weeds,” and the insects that ingest them are stigmatized as “pests.” Thus, trees that are valued become “timber,” while species that compete with them become “trash” trees or “underbrush.” The same logic applies to fauna. Highly valuable animals become “game” or “livestock,” while those animals that compete with or prey upon them become “predators” or “varmints.” Scientific forestry is the language of progress and classification. The language is that of the engineer. It narrows the scope of vision and gives precision to an imprecise ecosystem. The aim is always to simplify. It eliminates diversity for the sake of codification. “Everything that interfered with the efficient production of the key commodity was implacably eliminated. Everything that seemed unrelated to efficient production was ignored.” The Norway spruce that was elegantly planted in straight lines for mile upon mile thrived in the first generation, living off the old-growth capital that it had replaced. But by the second generation problems had already begun to arise. At first, trees began to die inexplicably. Disease spread rapidly. “Monocultures are, as a rule, more fragile and hence vulnerable to the stress of disease and weather than polycultures are.” 

Scott next turns to the imposition of standard measures in post-revolutionary France. Most traditional measures were of human scale- a foot, a stone’s throw, a handful, or within earshot. “There is, then, no single, all-purpose, correct answer to a question implying measurement unless we specify the relevant local concerns that give rise to the question. Particular customs of measurement are thus situationally, temporally, and geographically bound.” However, large scale commercial trade, long distance exchange, and, particularly, central government taxation relied on standardization. Much of the tug of war came between the central government and the local aristocracy and Church. When the local nobility was charged with collecting local rents and passing them along to the central authority there was room to wiggle and for slippage. On the plus side, each locality was free to use the measures most applicable to it and reliable for their particular situation. The metric system, in contrast, went hand in hand with the notion of a total French citizenship, removed from local loyalties. Illegibility had allowed for local autonomy. 

Scott continues by examining urban development. “The aboveground order of a grid city facilitates its underground order in the layout of water pipes, storm drains, sewers, electric cables, natural gas lines, and subways- an order no less important to the administrators of a city. Delivering mail, collecting taxes, conducting a census, moving supplies and people in and out of the city, putting down a riot or insurrection, digging pipes and sewer lines, finding a felon or conscript…., and planning public transportation, water supply, and trash removal are all made vastly simpler by the logic of the grid.” Modernist planning was aided and formed through the aerial perspective. The city was viewed by looking down upon it, instead of from within it. Another area of legibility came in the form of the people themselves. The last name was an institution designed to mark, record, and tax each individual as a unique subject of the State. “In almost every case it was a state project, designed to allow officials to identify, unambiguously, the majority of its citizens. When successful, it went far to create a legible people. Tax and tithe rolls, property rolls, conscription lists, censuses, and property deeds recognized in law were inconceivable without some means of fixing an individual’s identity and linking him or her to a kin group.” In France, the regime also tried to centralize language and culture. The hub and spoke system of roads and rail was even mimicked by culture, where all forms radiated out from Paris to its surrounds. “The implicit logic…. was to define a hierarchy of cultures, relegating local languages and their regional cultures to, at best, a quaint provincialism. At the apex of this implicit pyramid was Paris and its institutions: ministries, schools, academies (including the guardian of the language, l’Academie Francaise).” Language was so important because culture invariably was wrapped up within it. French history, literature, and myth were all symbolized through language. The spoken word, particularly, had the power to unite or divide. The gathering of statistics, in and of itself, was an integral process in state formation. “Each item or instance falling within a category is counted and classified according to the new unit of assessment….. Such facts must lose their particularity and reappear in schematic or simplified form as a member of a class of facts…. The grouping of synoptic facts necessarily entails collapsing or ignoring distinctions that otherwise might be relevant….. There is…. a strong incentive to prefer precise and standardizable measures to highly accurate ones.” Modern statecraft was as much about internal colonization as about anything else. The goals were uniformity and order at all cost. All of this data and new classifications, again, shaped the very reality it hoped to classify. Language had the power of aggregating all that was deemed important or necessary and leaving the chaff to the wayside. What was important was what was quantifiable. Or rather what was quantifiable is what became important.

High-modernism was often entwined with scientism. There was the optimistic belief in the linear progress of the world through the study and control of nature. Along with this belief was the modern idea of the beneficent State. History and custom were superstitious relics that should be ignored and discarded. “The past is an impediment, a history that must be transcended; the present is the platform for launching plans for a better future.” Scott first examines Le Corbusier who was “visually offended by disarray and confusion…. Formal, geometric simplicity and functional efficiency were not two distinct goals to be balanced; on the contrary, formal order was a precondition of efficiency.” Jane Jacobs, in her critique, stressed that aesthetic order is not the same as functional order. In trying to simplify each area of the city to a single function, Le Corbusier instituted a sprawling mess at ground level. What looked like order from a bird’s eye view, created stress and disfunction on the streets, where actual people had to live their daily lives. Jacobs knew that “order is embedded in the logic of daily practice.” The city must be conceptualized as an organic whole where “its interconnections are so complex and dimly understood that planning always risks unknowingly cutting into its living tissue, thereby damaging or killing vital social processes.” The city develops much like a language evolves. It must allow for contingency, continuity, community, and a future that might be radically different than its past, but transformed in a gradual manner, almost imperceptible, except after a spell of time.

Scott next dissects the Bolshevik plan in Russia. Lenin’s “What Is to be Done?” contains a top down plan with the vanguard always teaching the proletariat. However, it is also clearly authoritarian, with no room for questioning and dissent. It resembles a military hierarchy in the fact that the vanguard acts as if a General Staff, while the masses act like an infantry, carrying out orders without input. In effect, it is more commanding than didactic. “Once the rank and file are so labeled, it is clear that what they chiefly add to the revolutionary process are their weight in numbers and the kind of brute force they can represent if firmly directed.” They have lost all individuality as they have become a class, a mass. Scientism and bureaucracy are the means to the future. “There is, for Lenin, a single, objectively correct, efficient answer to all questions of how to rationally design production or administration.” Furthermore, every single aspect of life had to be controlled to produce the ideal society. “The greater the manipulation envisaged, the greater the legibility required to effect it.” Stalin’s final push towards total agricultural collectivization was indeed inefficient and murderous. Destroying the kulaks starved between three and twenty million citizens and more than half of the nation’s livestock ended up being slaughtered. But what the plan lacked in agricultural production, it gained in state control. “The great achievement, if one can call it that, of the Soviet state in the agricultural sector was to take a social and economic terrain singularly unfavorable to appropriation and control and to create institutional forms and production units far better adapted to monitoring, managing, appropriating, and controlling from above…. For Trotsky, the sooner what he called “the Russia of icons and cockroaches” was transformed and “urbanized” the better…. The main purpose of collectivization was to increase state grain procurements and reduce the peasants’ ability to withhold grain from the market.” The needs of the Plan superseded the needs of any individual. The peasant became a tool of the State, undifferentiated from a draft animal or even a plow. “As they were under serfdom, they were legally immobilized. An internal passport system was reintroduced to clear the cities of “undesirable and unproductive residents.”” However, in the eyes of the State, the plan was a success. “The state managed to get its hands on enough grain to push rapid industrialization, even while contending with staggering inefficiencies, stagnant yields, and ecological devastation. The state also managed, at great human cost, to eliminate the social basis of organized, public opposition from the rural population.”

Scott sees the idea of state formation as “the displacement of goals toward a strictly quantifiable criteria of performance.” Formation stands contra history and culture as it pushes towards a new scientific age, unhindered by the past. It implements uniformity and simplicity, replacing diversity and particularity. Codified law is static. By its nature, it cannot be varied, dynamic, flexible, or local. “It is far easier for would-be reformers to change the formal structure of an institution than to change its practices.” However, changes, seen initially as improvements, lead to unforeseen consequences. Control of the whole system becomes impossible as changes cascade into further problems which in turn have to be managed from the top down. Managed monoculture inevitably brings about a high risk system. Polyculture, while containing short-term inefficiencies, also contains a hedge against disaster. It allows for contingency and changing patterns both in nature and in society. It can contain unseen order that is not simple and, therefore, not obviously apparent. It is often durable, resistant, and long-term. Scott concludes with a plea for metis. “Broadly understood, metis represents a wide array of practical skills and acquired intelligence in responding to a constantly changing natural and human environment…. Metis is most applicable to broadly similar but never precisely identical situations requiring a quick and practiced adaptation that becomes almost second nature to the practitioner…. Metis resists simplification into deductive principles which can successfully be transmitted through book learning, because the environments in which it is exercised are so complex and nonrepeatable that formal procedures of rational decision making are impossible to apply. In a sense, metis lies in that large space between the realm of genius, to which no formula can apply, and the realm of codified knowledge, which can be learned by rote.” It is the set of skills that artists and cooks possess that can not be regurgitated through instruction or in cookbooks. It is often not even vaguely expressible by the actor himself. It is latent knowledge and its only test is practical success. Metis is always practiced only by those with actual skin in the game. It is never theoretical, but only actual. The actors are always consumers of their own knowledge. Michael Oakeshott sums up this accumulation of traditional knowledge, “the big mistake of the rationalist- though it is not inherent in the method- is to assume that ‘tradition,’ or what is better called ‘practical knowledge,’ is rigid, fixed and unchanging- in fact it is ‘preeminently fluid’…. No traditional way of behavior, no traditional skill ever remains fixed. Its history is one of continual change.” Scott, therefore, cautions that the State ought to take small steps, favor reversibility, and plan on eventual surprises. Do not alter the facts to fit the theory, no matter how perfect theory looks on paper. “Common law, as an institution, owes its longevity to the fact that it is not a final codification of legal rules, but rather a set of procedures for continually adapting some broad principles to novel circumstances.”

“Liberalism Ancient and Modern” by Leo Strauss

These are a collection of essays on Strauss’ conception of liberalism and liberal education. He contrasts modern liberalism, which he sees as having merged with value-free science, with ancient liberalism, which sought out the “right way” to live and the search for “the truth”. Strauss uses his usual method of deep reading, plucking out timeless strands from Plato’s “Minos”, Lucretius’ “On the Nature of Things”, Maimonides’ “The Guide of the Perplexed”, Marsilius’ “Defender of the Peace”, and Spinoza’s “Theologico-political Treatise” amongst others. Purposefully, he chooses pagan, Epicurean, Jewish, Christian, and post-Enlightenment texts. He seeks to prove that “the finished product of a liberal education is a cultured human being.” His view is that every generation has access “to the greatest minds [but] only through the great books…. We are compelled to live with books. But life is too short to live with any but the greatest books.” And a liberal education is more than just memorization and indoctrination, it is treating texts with care, purpose, and criticism. He is unabashedly elitist. “Modern democracy, so far from being universal aristocracy, would be mass rule were it not for the fact that the mass cannot rule, but is ruled by elites…. Liberal education is the counterpoison to mass culture, to the corroding effects of mass culture, to its inherent tendency to produce nothing but specialists without spirit or vision and voluptuaries without heart.” Strauss elevates esoteric knowledge above the convictions of the masses. “It demands from us the boldness…. to regard the accepted views as mere opinions, or to regard the average opinions as extreme opinions which are at least as likely to be wrong as the most strange or the least popular opinions. Liberal education is liberation from vulgarity.” This is no trivial matter because “Plato’s suggestion [is] that education in the highest sense is philosophy. Philosophy is quest for wisdom or quest for knowledge regarding the most important, the highest, or the most comprehensive things; such knowledge, he suggested, is virtue and is happiness…. The gentlemen regard virtue as choiceworthy for its own sake, whereas the others praise virtue as a means for acquiring wealth and honor.” Ancient liberalism stood apart from society, but respected it. “The greatest enemies of civilization in civilized countries are those who squander the heritage because they look down on it or on the past; civilization is much less endangered by narrow but loyal preservers than by the shallow and glib futurists who, being themselves rootless, try to destroy all the roots and thus do everything in their power in order to bring back the initial chaos and promiscuity. The first duty of civilized man is then to respect his past.” Still, Strauss quotes Plato approvingly, “the wise men ought not to obey the laws as his rulers but ought to live freely.” Furthermore, “by denying the dependence of man’s thought on powers which he cannot comprehend, classical political philosophy was irreligious.” The philosopher stands aloof from the city, but cannot live without its protection. “Moderation will protect us against the twin dangers of visionary expectations from politics and unmanly contempt for politics. Thus it may again become true that all liberally educated men will be politically moderate men.” In Strauss there was always this tension between discovery and tradition, between the esoteric and accepted conventions, and between the individual and the city. “Originally, a liberal was a man who behaved in a manner becoming a free man as distinguished from a slave. According to the classic analysis, liberality is a virtue concerned with the use of wealth and therefore especially with giving: the liberal man gives gladly of his own in the right circumstances because it is noble to do so, and not from calculation; hence it is not easy for him to become or remain rich…. Most men honor wealth and show therewith that they are slaves of wealth; the man who behaves in a manner becoming a free man comes to sight primarily as a liberal man in the sense articulated by Aristotle. He knows that certain activities and hence in particular certain sciences and arts- the liberal sciences and arts- are choiceworthy for their own sake, regardless of their utility for the satisfaction of the lower kinds of needs. He prefers the goods of the soul to the goods of the body. Liberality is then only one aspect of, not to say one name of, human excellence or being honorable or decent. The liberal man on the highest level esteems most highly the mind and its excellence and is aware of the fact that man at his best is autonomous or not subject to any authority.” Even more pure, more isolated, more esteemed, and more estranged from the city than the life of the liberal gentleman was the life of the philosopher. “The gentleman as gentleman accepts on trust certain most weighty things which for the philosopher are the themes of investigation and of questioning…. Whereas the gentleman must be wealthy in order to do his proper work, the philosopher may be poor…. [Therefore,] philosophers will be ruled by the gentlemen, that is, by their inferiors…. [because] the end of the city is…. not the same as the end of philosophy.” The search for truth is an individual quest and therefore cannot be a political end. It is the goal for the liberally educated elite, but hardly achievable in one’s lifetime. “Given the fact that philosophy is more evidently quest for wisdom than possession of wisdom, the education of the philosopher never ceases as long as he lives; it is the adult education par excellence.”

“Unforbidden Pleasures” by Adam Phillips

Phillips is one of today’s foremost psychoanalysts. He seems to have more questions than answers. He does not come out with empirical statements. Instead, he ruminates and offers possibilities. His lead essay, “Laying Down the Law”, is on living a life of pleasure- not in an immoral sense, but purely away from shame, on one’s own terms. “All our ideals for ourselves- all our aims and aspirations and beliefs- are by definition restrictive.” Forbidding yourself in life is hard work. It is constant struggle. The unforbidden life is a life lived for oneself, instead of for others and the outside world. It is, as Oscar Wilde suggests, the life of the true artist. Art is not craftsmanship. Art is not rational. It is beyond what can be explained. It is divine madness. And in that it makes us feel fully alive. “The forbidden coerces desire. It makes something strangely alluring. It makes us obedient, but it also makes us dream (often at the same time). To abide by a rule you have to have in mind what it would be to break it.” It sets limits and boundaries and dares us to cross them. “The law forbids being open to an open future; the open future of who we may be, and of who we may want to be.” The one confined to laws is the one who settles. It is morality dictated by the majority- the morality of religion, today especially secular religion. Morality is the straightjacket of the other. The only real morality is a free morality, a subjective morality, a morality of the self and for the self. In his second essay he states, “obedience is the unforbidden pleasure that gives us something by forbidding us something else- something often of ultimate value. At its most minimal it forbids us from thinking about the pleasures our obedience might exclude. It narrows our minds, narrows our picture of ourself…” It too is restrictive. And obedience starts at youth, in the home. “The non-complaint child is free to find out what the mother’s range might be, and, by the same token, what his range might be. The compliant child resigns himself; the non-compliant child risks himself: the compliant child consolidates; the non-compliant child experiments.” Obedience takes the world as it is, as a given. The obedient lives within this world instead of trying to mold it to his will. “Obedience becomes the unforbidden pleasure that forbids so much…. But the forbidden can also depend upon the intimidation being disguised as something else- protectiveness, chosenness, destiny, love; obedience here signifying being loved, chosen, protected, destined in some way. Obedience, then, is unforbidden pleasure sponsored by the forbidden pleasure of intimidation.” Obedience then, whether to God or to one’s parents or to the State or to society, is often a trap. It is foisted on you as for your own good. “When we live in a state of unconscious obedience we don’t think of ourselves as being obedient, we think of ourselves as being realistic, or normal, or reasonable. We live as if we know what life is really like. The most pernicious obedience is the obedience we are unaware of.” We live as if the boundaries to life are not even there. Phillips, in his third essay, critiques self-criticism. It too is limiting. It is narrow-minded. He says of Freud’s superego, “were we to meet this figure socially, as it were, this accusatory character, this internal critic, we would think there was something wrong with him. He would just be boring and cruel.” Instead of limiting ourselves and our morals, we need to overinterpret the world- to come at it from different angles, from our different selves. “Tragic heroes always underinterpret, are always emperors of one idea.” And that idea is given to us at birth or even from inside the womb. “Shame is as much about being exposed as about what is exposed…. Guilt, that is to say, is not necessarily a good clue to what one values; it is only a good clue to what (or whom) one fears…. The child says to the parents, ‘I will be what you need me to be, as far as is possible, in exchange for your love and protection…. Safety is preferred to desire; desire is sacrificed for security.” Self-criticism is contracting, while we should be expanding our ideals, creating multiple selves. “In Freud’s language we could say that we free ourselves of our parents’ ideals for us by beginning to use the available culture to make up our own ego-ideals, to evolve a sense of our own affinities beyond the family, to speak a language that is more our own.” The unsuccessful child lives on in the shadow of the parent- playing their own life by the rules of the parent’s game. They have become the tragic hero trapped in the singular criticism of their own superego. It is of their own making. In his eponymous essay Phillips seeks to explicitly contrast forbidden and unforbidden pleasures. “To forbid something, that is to say, is an omniscient act; it attempts to establish a known future, a future in which certain acts will not be performed, and from which certain thoughts and feelings will be excluded.” It is diktat, not suggestion.  The lines are, however, malleable. “Apart from the incest taboo, and its displacement paedophelia, all the rules seem to be made breakable.” Forbidding creates a line, but a line that can be crossed. Phillips seeks to dismantle the psychoanalytic idea that all unforbidden pleasures are mere sad substitutes for forbidden desires. That unforbidden pleasures might be ordinary does not make them anything less-than. Perhaps “we have done it all the wrong way round; we have used the forbidden pleasures to tell us what the unforbidden pleasures are, rather than allowing the unforbidden pleasures to be a way of discovering one’s true likes and dislikes?” By forbidding do we create the very problem we wish to eliminate from the world? “The tyranny of the forbidden is not that it forbids, but that it tells us what we want- to do the forbidden thing. The unforbidden gives no orders.” We are again back to original sin- the fall of man. And “each of these religious forms assumes that the pleasure we can take in each other is insufficient; that something transcendent or supernatural is required to really keep us going.” Phillips final essay, “Life Itself”, examines how one is to truly live. “However painful one’s life turns out to be- however painful one believes that life really is- it is possible that we have been forbidden from enjoying our lives, or from enjoying them as much as we might. Indeed, our sense of injustice- including all of our personal and our more obviously political grievances- is based on this simple idea: that we are being refused possible pleasures.” This is the dichotomy between the individual and society. The busybody is the one trying to mold the world to fix the deficiencies in himself. But what if man, even in his perfectibility, is not good enough? Schopenhauer posits, “What gives to everything tragic, whatever the form in which it appears, the characteristic tendency to the sublime, is the dawning of the knowledge that the world and life can afford no true satisfaction, and are therefore not worth our attachment.” He was a Buddhist. In Greek myth Dionysius’ companion Silenus states to King Midas, “wretched, ephemeral race, children of chance and tribulation, why do you force me to tell you the very thing which it would be most profitable for you not to hear? The very best thing is utterly beyond your reach: not to have been born, not to be, nothing. However, the second best thing for you is: to die soon.” Is it us or our world that makes life so impossible? “Either we seek, or have been educated to seek, the wrong satisfactions, or we are living in the wrong world, a world utterly unsuited to our nature.” In which case, is it better that we had never been born? This is a very different state than dying, it is a state of never having been at all- never having had to exist to begin with. “That the pleasures do not offset the suffering. That we did not ask to be born- it was not our desire, it was not one of our demands…. Good parents wouldn’t bring their children to unbearable life. And if they have, they must be sadists, they must be monsters: evil monsters, or naive monsters, or both…. [for] why would God or our parents create creatures that they had forbidden from enjoying their lives?” Life becomes a waiting game: waiting for something better, waiting to attain perfection, waiting for death. This is the life of forbidden pleasure. It either subsumes you or you relegate it into the deep crevices beyond consciousness- but you never reject it for it is the one thing which frames you; it creates the world in which you inhabit. And the only relief is to break free: to appreciate the unforbidden as the real pleasure in life- and the attainable one.

“How Emotions Are Made” by Lisa Barrett

This is one of those rare books that after reading you will never look at the world or yourself in the same way again. It starts with a simple supposition. “People vary tremendously in how they differentiate their emotional experiences.” Not only that, but how we interpret the emotional cues we see in others is extremely varied. After all, “the human face is laced with forty-two small muscles on each side.” The prevailing view has been that humans have emotional fingerprints, innately transmitted, unquestionably identifiable, and little effected by culture. “If people move the same facial muscles in the same pattern each time they experience a given emotion- scowling in anger, smiling in happiness, pouting in sadness, and so on- and only when they experience that emotion, then the movements might be a fingerprint.” It turns out this view is wrong. In rigorous academic study after study it has simply not held up to testing. Instead, we take many emotional facial cues from context and work backwards to the supposed emotion the face represented. Furthermore, “emotion is not a thing but a category of instances, and any emotion category has tremendous variety” both between individuals and within the same individual, dependent on time and circumstance. There is no thing as an average anger pattern. The idea that certain emotions “reside” in certain parts of the brain has also been thrown into doubt. Despite widespread belief that fear resides in the amygdala, recent twin studies have described “identical twins, with identical DNA, suffering from identical brain damage, living in highly similar environments, but one has some fear-related deficits while the other has none…. They point instead to the idea that the brain must have multiple ways of creating fear, and therefore the emotion category “Fear” cannot be necessarily localized to a specific region…. Brain regions like the amygdala are routinely important to emotion, but they are neither necessary nor sufficient for emotion…. A mental event, such as fear, is not created by only one set of neurons. Instead, combinations of different neurons can create instances of fear. Neuroscientists call this principle degeneracy. Degeneracy means “many to one”: many combinations of neurons can produce the same outcome…. The amygdala, for example did show consistent increase in activity for studies of fear, more than you’d expect by chance, but only in a quarter of fear experience studies and about 40 percent of fear perception studies. These numbers fall short of what you’d expect for a neural fingerprint. Not only that, but the amygdala also showed a consistent increase during studies of anger, disgust, sadness, and happiness, indicating that whatever functions the amygdala was performing in some instances of fear, it was also performing those functions during some instances of those other emotions.” Some have suggested that amygdala activity increases when exposed to anything novel, but even that is not certain and with far from the type of regularity to call anything an emotional fingerprint. It is certain that “emotions arise from firing neurons, but no neurons are exclusively dedicated to emotion.” 

Barrett suggests that all emotions are mental constructions. “Your past experiences- from direct encounters, from photos, from movies, and books- give meaning to your present sensations. Additionally, the entire process of construction is invisible to you. No matter how hard you try, you cannot observe yourself or experience yourself constructing the image….Your brain uses your past experiences to construct a hypothesis- the simulation- and compares it to the cacophony arriving from your senses. In this manner, simulation lets your brain impose meaning on the noise, selecting what’s relevant and ignoring the rest…. Your concepts are a primary tool for your brain to guess the meaning of incoming sensory inputs…. Concepts also give meaning to the chemicals that create tastes and smells. If I served you pink ice cream, you might expect (simulate) the taste of strawberry, but if it tasted like fish, you would find it jarring, perhaps even disgusting. If I instead introduced it as “chilled salmon mousse” to give your brain fair warning, you might find the same taste delicious (assuming you enjoy salmon). You might think of food as existing in the physical world, but in fact the concept “Food” is heavily cultural.” Similarly, your brain creates emotion. “An emotion is your brain’s creation of what your bodily sensations mean, in relation to what is going on around you in the world…. Emotions are not reactions to the world. You are not a passive receiver of sensory input but an active constructor of your emotions. From sensory input and past experience, your brain constructs meaning and prescribes action. If you didn’t have concepts that represent your past experience, all your sensory inputs would just be noise…. Your familiar emotion concepts are built-in only because you grew up in a particular social context where those emotion concepts are meaningful and useful.” For instance, “heart rate changes are inevitable, their emotional meaning is not…. A physical event like a change in heart rate, blood pressure, or respiration becomes an emotional experience only when we, with emotion concepts that we have learned from our culture, imbue the sensations with additional functions by social agreement.” Similarly, “an instance of fear cannot be reduced to mere ingredients. Fear is not a bodily pattern- just as bread is not flour- but emerges from the interactions of core systems. An instance of fear has irreducible, emergent properties not found in the ingredients alone…. You cannot reverse-engineer a recipe for an instance of fear from a feeling of fear.” Your past helps you create emotions by giving context to new inputs. “Emotions are not, in principle, distinct from cognitions and perceptions…. Your brain’s interconnections are not inevitable consequences of your genes alone. We know today that experience is a contributing factor. Your genes turn on and off in different contexts, including genes that shape your brain’s wiring. (Scientists call this phenomenon plasticity.) That means some of your synapses literally come into existence because other people talked to you or treated you in a certain way.” There are no universal emotions. “You depend on emotion concepts each time you experience another person as emotional.” In real life we see people’s faces in context of their bodies, their voices, and their surroundings. These details help cue the brain along with your preconceived concepts.

Emotion is a form of prediction. Prediction is a primary function of the human brain. “Predictions not only anticipate sensory input from outside the skull but explain it…. Every brain region that’s claimed to be a home of emotions in humans is a body-budgeting region within the interoceptive network. [Interoception is your brain’s representation of all the sensations from your internal organs and tissues, the hormones in your blood, and your immune system.] These regions, however, don’t react to emotion. They don’t react at all. They predict, intrinsically, to regulate your body budget. They issue predictions for sights, sounds, thoughts, memories, imagination, and, yes, emotions.” For example, “when your brain predicts your body will need a quick burst of energy, these regions instruct the adrenal gland in your kidneys to release the hormone cortisol.” Internal predictions create the meaning to outside events. “Other people regulate your body budget too. When you interact with friends, parents, children, lovers, teammates, therapist, or other close companions, you and they synchronize breathing, heart beats, and other physical signals, leading to tangible benefits. Holding hands with loved ones, or even keeping their photo on your desk at work, reduces activation in your body-budgeting regions and makes you less bothered by pain.” If emotion is not innate, what is? “Affect is the general sense of feeling that you experience throughout each day. It is not emotion but a much simpler feeling with two features. The first is how pleasant or unpleasant you feel, which scientists call valence…. The second feature of affect is how calm or agitated you feel, which is called arousal…. Affect…. depends on interoception. That means affect is a constant current throughout your life, even when you are completely still or asleep. It does not turn on and off in response to events you experience as emotional. In this sense, affect is a fundamental aspect of consciousness.” Your feelings are created by the beliefs of your brain, as informed by your interoceptive network. “A bad feeling doesn’t always mean something is wrong. It just means you’re taxing your body budget…. You might think that in everyday life, the things you see and hear influence what you feel, but it’s mostly the other way around: that what you feel alters your sight and hearing. Interoception in the moment is more influential to perception, and how you act, than the outside world is.” So your experience of the world is not an objective fact. “Your brain employs concepts to make the sensory signals meaningful, creating an explanation for where they came from, what they refer to in the world, and how to act on them. Your perceptions are so vivid and immediate that they compel you to believe that you experience the world as it is, when you actually experience a world of your own construction. Much of what you experience as the outside world begins inside your head…. Concepts are not static but remarkably malleable and context-dependent, because your goals can change to fit the situation…. So, what’s happening when you categorize? You are not finding similarities in the world but creating them. When your brain needs a concept, it constructs one on the fly, mixing and matching from a population of instances from your past experience, to best fit your goals in a particular situation.” You cannot escape your past even if you try. Your past is embedded in how you see and interpret your future. It gives meaning to new sensory inputs.

Babies do not predict well. They must learn from sensory input before their brains can model the world. Eventually, “sensations from the outside world…. become concepts in the infant’s model of the world; what was outside is now inside. These sensory experiences, over time, create the opportunity for the infant brain to make coordinated predictions that span the senses.” Eventually, as an adult, “your cascade of predictions explains why an experience like happiness feels triggered rather than constructed. You’re simulating an instance of “Happiness” even before categorization is complete. Your brain is preparing to execute movements in your face and body before you feel any sense of agency for moving, and is predicting your sensory input before it arrives. So emotions seem to be “happening to” you, when in fact your brain is actively constructing the experience, held in check by the state of the world and your body…. An instance of a concept, as an entire brain state, is an anticipatory guess about how you should act in the present moment and what your sensations mean.” When a strange set of inputs occur, “your interoceptive network will launch hundreds of competing instances of different concepts, each a brain-wide cascade, to resolve this quandary. Your control network assists in efficiently constructing and selecting among the candidate instances so your brain can pick a winner. It helps neurons to participate in certain constructions rather than others, and keeps some concept instances alive while suppressing others. The result is akin to natural selection, in which the instances most suitable to the the current environment survive to shape your perception and action.” This all happens within your brain almost instantaneously and with no perceptible agency on your part. “Emotions are meaning. They explain your interoceptive changes and corresponding affective feelings, in relation to the situation.” 

Emotion concepts, like sound and color, are a social reality. “A sound, therefore is not an event that is detected in the world. It is an experience constructed when the world interacts with a body that detects changes in air pressure, and a brain that can make those changes meaningful…. “Red” is not a color contained in an object. It is an experience involving reflected light, a human eye, and a human brain…. Changes in air pressure and wavelengths of light exist in the world, but to us, they are sounds and colors. We perceive them by going beyond the information given to us, making meaning from them using knowledge from past experience, that is, concepts. Every perception is constructed by a perceiver, usually with sensory inputs from the world as one ingredient…. Teach your concepts to others, and as long as they agree, you’ve created something real. How do we work this magic of creation? We categorize. We take things that exist in nature and impose new functions on them that go beyond their physical properties. Then we transmit these concepts to each other, wiring each other’s brains for the social world. This is the core of social reality…. If people agree that a particular constellation of facial actions and cardiovascular changes is anger in a given context, then it is so. You needn’t be explicitly aware of this agreement…. No other animals have collective intentionality combined with words…. Words also have power. They let us place ideas directly into another person’s head…. Words also encourage mental inference: figuring out the intentions, goals, and beliefs of others. Human infants learn critical information resides in the minds of other people…. and words are a vehicle for inferring this information.” But theory of mind goes beyond spoken words. To get inside the heads of others and anticipate and predict what they are thinking is a skill unique to humans. And it is how emotions become social. “Emotion concepts, like all concepts, make meaning…. They are real because people agree that they’re real.” They create a shared social reality, but you can only participate in that reality if you can correctly read and interpret the actions of others. If you are not perceiving the emotions of others correctly you become socially stunted, not able to interpret the shared constructions that make the social world real. “Emotions have no fingerprints, so there can be no accuracy. The best you can do is find consensus.” The emotional concept comes first. “You need an emotion concept in order to experience or perceive the associated emotion. It’s a requirement…. Otherwise, you will be experientially blind to that emotion…. You will be awash in prediction error much of the time. The process of acculturation therefore taxes your body budget. In fact, people who are less emotionally acculturated report more physical illness.”

The latter part of Barrett’s book “devolves” into still useful self help tips. Since you create your emotions, you can master them. “Emotional intelligence (EI) is about getting your brain to construct the most useful instance of the most useful emotion concept in a given situation.” On the other hand, “your body budget…. is regulated by predictive circuitry in your interoceptive network. If those predictions become chronically out of sync with your body’s actual needs, it’s hard to bring them back into balance.” Social rejection is toxic for your body budget. On the other hand, massage (and human touch in general), yoga (and any movement in general), meditation, reading novels (to get in other people’s minds and out of your own for a time), expanding your vocabulary (to recategorize concepts more favorably) and giving gifts to others all improve your body budget. “A key to EI is to gain new emotion concepts and hone your existing ones…. People who make highly granular experiences are emotion experts: they issue predictions and construct instances of emotion that are finely tailored to fit each specific situation…. Be a collector of experiences. Try on new perspectives…. These kinds of activities will provoke your brain to combine concepts to form new ones, changing your conceptual system proactively so you’ll predict and behave differently later…. When you teach emotion concepts to children, you are doing more than communicating. You are creating reality for these kids- social reality. You’re handing them tools to regulate their body budget, to make meaning of their sensations and act on them, to communicate how they feel, and to influence others more effectively.” Emotion is a social experience. “If you want someone to know what you are feeling, you need to transmit clear cues for the other person to predict effectively and for synchrony to occur…. You bear the responsibility to be a good sender.” 

Barrett goes on to discuss the relationship between emotion and illness. “You could suffer prolonged stress or abuse, particularly in childhood, leaving you carrying around a model of the world built on toxic past experiences.” Many illnesses are also built upon prediction error in the brain. “When you are experiencing pain, like the moment just before an injection, your brain regions that process nociception change their activity. That is, you simulate pain and therefore feel it. This phenomenon is called the nocebo effect…. Both placebos and nocebos involve chemical changes in the brain that process nociception…. The pathways sending nociceptive predictions down to the body, and those bringing nociceptive input up to the brain, are closely related to interoception. (It’s even possible that nociception is a form of interoception.)… When people experience ongoing pain without any damage to their body tissue, it’s called chronic pain…. What would happen if your brain issued unnecessary predictions of pain and then ignored prediction error [from your body] to the contrary?” Likewise, “in depression, prediction is dialed way up and prediction error way down, so you’re locked into the past. In anxiety, the metaphorical dial is stuck on allowing too much prediction error from the world, and too many predictions are unsuccessful. With insufficient prediction, you don’t know what’s coming around the next corner, and life contains a lot of corners. That’s classic anxiety.” But you can change your own brain and in doing so change your emotional concepts. “Interconnections between your axons and dendrites increase and decrease as you age. You even grow new neurons in certain brain regions. This kind of anatomical change, called plasticity, also occurs with experience. Your experiences become encoded in your brain’s wiring and can eventually change the wiring, increasing the chances that you’ll have the same experience again, or use a previous experience to create a new one.” The human brain “can reconfigure its billions of neurons to construct a huge repertoire of experiences, perceptions, and behaviors…. Complexity, not rationality, makes it possible for you to be an architect of your experience…. The human brain has few preset mental concepts, such as perhaps pleasantness and unpleasantness (valence), agitation and calmness (arousal), loudness and softness, brightness and darkness, and other properties of consciousness. Instead, variation is the norm. The human brain is structured to learn many different concepts and to invent many social realities, depending on the contingencies it is exposed to…. The human brain is wired to construct a conceptual system…. What is not inevitable, however, is that you have particular concepts.” In the end, “many concepts that people consider to be purely physical are in fact beliefs about the physical, such as emotions, and many that appear to be biological are actually social…. There is no single reality to grasp. Your brain can create more than one explanation for the sensory input around you- not an infinite number of realities, but definitely more than one.”