“Major Works on Religion and Politics” by Reinhold Niebuhr

Niebuhr is known to be President Obama’s favorite theologian-philosopher. It is easy to see why Niebuhr's writings can be claimed by both modern-day progressives and neoconservatives: he was an unabashed socialist, who believed in American exceptionalism and a muscular foreign policy. This collection, spanning the course of his life, from working as a pastor in Detroit to his time as a public intellectual in New York, shows the nuance in the development of his thoughts, as well as his bedrock principles, which remained constant. Particularly insightful are the essays where he expounds on the dichotomy of civil society versus the governmental State, the morality of the individual versus the morality of society (or lack there of), and on socialism versus Socialism (both of the State and Party varieties). He is most illuminating when he critiques those intellectual bedfellows who would seem closest to him.

“The Master and His Emissary- The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World” by Iain McGilchrist

McGilchrist is a former psychiatrist, neuroimaging researcher, and professor of English at Oxford. He believes that the left and the right sides of the human brain, while exhibiting signs of plasticity, do have unique capabilities. The thesis of his book is that “for us as human beings there are two fundamentally opposed realities, two different modes of experience; that each is of ultimate importance in bringing about the recognizably human world; and that their difference is rooted in the bihemispheric structure of the brain. It follows that the hemispheres need to co-operate, but I believe they are in fact involved in a sort of power struggle, and that this explains many aspects of contemporary Western culture.” This thesis is at once simple and revolutionary. McGilchrist begins by pointing out some hard biology. “The corpus callosum contains an estimated 300-800 million fibres connecting topologically similar areas in each hemisphere. Yet only 2 per cent of cortical neurons are connected by this tract.” That is, most of our brain’s neurons are not connected by the only pathway that links our right and left hemispheres. Furthermore, when comparing various animals, the bigger the brain size, the less interconnected the hemispheres are.

McGilchrist points out that “lateralisation brings evolutionary advantages, particularly in carrying out dual-attention tasks…. The right hemisphere appears to be deeply involved in social functioning…. Where there is divided attention, and both hemispheres appear to be involved, it seems probable that the right hemisphere plays the primary role…. More specifically there is evidence of left-hemisphere dominance for local, narrowly focussed attention and right-hemisphere dominance for broad, global, and flexible attention…. What is new must first be present in the right hemisphere, before it can come into focus for the left…. Only the right hemisphere can direct attention to what comes to us from the edges of awareness…. The right hemisphere understands from indirect contextual clues, not only from explicit statement…. The right hemisphere takes whatever is said within its entire context. It is specialised in pragmatics, the art of contextual understanding of meaning, and in using metaphor. It is the right hemisphere which processes the non-literal aspects of language…. The left hemisphere is the hemisphere of abstraction, which, as the world itself tells us, is the process of wresting things from their context. This, and its related capacity to categorise things once they have been abstracted, are the foundations of its intellectual power…. The left hemisphere operates an abstract visual-form system, storing information that remains relatively invariant across specific instances, producing abstracted types or classes of things; whereas the right hemisphere is aware of and remembers what it is that distinguishes specific instances of a type, one from another…. The right temporal lobe deals preferentially with memory of a personal or emotionally charged nature, what is called episodic memory, where the left temporal lobe is more concerned with memory for facts that are ‘in the public domain’…. Not only does the right hemisphere have an affinity with whatever is living, but the left hemisphere has an equal affinity for what is mechanical. The left hemisphere’s principal concern is utility. It is interested in what it has made, and in the world as a resource to be used. It is therefore natural that it has a particular affinity for words and concepts for tools, man-made things, mechanisms and whatever is not alive…. Self-awareness, empathy, identification with others, and more generally inter-subjective processes, are largely dependent upon…. right hemisphere resources…. The right hemisphere plays an important role in what is known as ‘theory of mind’, a capacity to put oneself in another’s position and see what is going on in that person’s mind…. It is a capacity that children do not acquire fully until the age of four…. The right hemisphere is the locus of interpretation, not only of facial expression, but of prosody (vocal intonation) and gesture…. The left hemisphere reads emotions by interpreting the lower part of the face…. The right hemisphere alone seems to be capable of understanding the more subtle information that comes from the eyes…. It is the right hemisphere that understands the emotional or the humorous aspect of narrative…. It is the right hemisphere that mediates spontaneous facial expressions in reaction to humour or other emotions, including smiling and laughter. It is also the right hemisphere that is responsible for the peculiarly human ability to express sadness through tears…. The left hemisphere has a much more extensive vocabulary than the right, and more subtle and complex syntax. It extends vastly our power to map the world and to explore the complexities of the causal relationships between things…. The superiority of language stems from its nature as the hemisphere of representation, in which signs are substituted for experience…. The right hemisphere plays a vital part in language, too. It uses language not in order to manipulate ideas or things, but to understand what others mean…. It is therefore particularly important whenever non-literal meaning needs to be understood - practically everywhere, therefore, in human discourse, and particularly where irony, humour, indirection or sarcasm are involved…. The right hemisphere represents objects as having volume and depth in space, as they are experienced; the left hemisphere tends to represent the visual world schematically, abstractly, geometrically, with a lack of realistic detail, and even in one plane…. The left hemisphere exhibits a strong tendency to confabulate: it thinks it knows something, recognises something, which it doesn’t, a tendency that may be linked to its lack of ability to discriminate unique cases from the generalised categories into which it places them…. The left hemisphere needs certainty and needs to be right. The right hemisphere makes it possible to hold several ambiguous possibilities in suspension together without premature closure on one outcome. The right prefrontal cortex is essential for dealing with incomplete information and has a critical role to play in reasoning about incompletely specified situations…. The self as intrinsically, empathically inseparable from the world in which it stands in relation to others, and the continuous sense of self, are more dependent on the right hemisphere, whereas the objectified self, and the self as an expression of will, is generally more dependent on the left hemisphere…. The unconscious, while not identical with, is certainly more strongly associated with, the right hemisphere.” The right and left side might work in conjunction with each other, but there is a clear tension between the two hemispheres in each human brain.

After sketching the basic functions, McGilchrist continues by exploring how each hemisphere interacts with language, music, and truth. He suggests that music has ancient origins, even predating language. In prehistoric society, music played an integral role in religion, ritual, celebration, and in uniting the community. It was not passively experienced, but as shared-performance, binded the people in a single experience. Poetry also evolved before prose. “Most forms of imagination, for example, or of innovation, intuitive problem solving, spiritual thinking or artistic creativity require us to transcend language.” Words influence our perceptions, but thinking evolved prior to language. “What language contributes is to firm up certain particular ways of seeing the world and give fixity to them…. Language may not, after all, have originated in a drive to communicate - that came later - but as a means of mapping the world…. It is a means of manipulating the world…. Language enables the left hemisphere to represent the world ‘off-line’, a conceptual version, distinct from the world of experience, and shielded from the immediate environment, with its insistent impressions, feelings, and demands, abstracted from the body, no longer dealing with what is concrete, specific, individual, unrepeatable, and constantly changing, but with a disembodied representation of the world, abstracted, central, not particularised in time and place, generally applicable, clear and fixed. Isolating things artificially from their context brings the advantage of enabling us to focus intently on a particular aspect of reality and how it can be modeled, so that it can be grasped and controlled.” The right hemisphere plays with metaphor. “Everything has to be expressed in terms of something else, and those something elses eventually have to come back to the body…. Metaphor embodies thought and places it in a living context…. Language originates as an embodied expression of emotion.”

McGilchrist begins to show how the functions of each hemisphere have consequences for how humans interact with the outside world. “Attention is a moral act: it creates, brings aspects of things into being, but in doing so makes others recede.” He posits that philosophy in the Western tradition is a left hemisphere process. “It is verbal and analytic, requiring abstracted, decontextualised, disembodied thinking, dealing in categories, concerning itself with the nature of the general rather than the particular, and adopting a sequential, linear approach to truth…. [After all,] manipulation and use require clarity and fixity, and clarity and fixity require separation and division…. According to the left hemisphere, understanding is built up from the parts; one starts from one certainty, places another next to it, and advances…. It conceives that there is objective evidence of truth for a part outside the context of the whole it goes to constitute. According to the right hemisphere, understanding is derived from the whole, since it is only in light of the whole that one can truly understand the nature of the parts…. The left hemisphere is always engaged in a purpose: it always has an end in view, and downgrades whatever has no instrumental purpose in sight. The right hemisphere, by contrast, has no designs on anything. It is vigilant for whatever is, without preconceptions, without predefined purpose…. The right hemisphere is the primary mediator of experience, from which the conceptualised, re-presented world of the left hemisphere derives, and on which it depends…. The left hemisphere does not itself have life…. The means of argument - the three Ls, language, logic and linearity - are all ultimately under left-hemisphere control…. Its point of view is always easily defensible, because analytic…. The left hemisphere builds systems, where the right does not. It therefore allows elaboration of its own working over time into systemic thought which gives it permanence and solidity…. The existence of a system of thought dependent on language automatically devalues whatever cannot be expressed in language…. The left hemisphere is not keen on taking responsibility. If the defect might reflect on the self, it does not accept it. But if something or someone else can be made to take responsibility - if it is a ‘victim’ of someone else’s wrongdoing, in other words - it is prepared to do so.” Imitation is the function of the right hemisphere. Only humans imitate means as well as ends when trying to achieve a goal. Imitation is at root escaping one’s own experience to enter the mind of another. “More empathic people mimic the facial expressions of those they are with more than others…. The process of mimesis is one of intention, aspiration, attraction and empathy, drawing heavily on the right hemisphere, whereas copying is the following of disembodied procedures and algorithms, and is left-hemisphere-based.”

Through the rest of his book McGilchrist posits that, in the Western world, there has been a historical battle between the two hemispheres that has ebbed and flowed through the ages. At first, the right hemisphere was ascendent. “In the Homeric era, the sense of self is intimately bound up with ‘interpersonal and communal dialogue’ in a shared ethical life…. The hiddenness or necessarily implicit quality of Nature requires a particularly alert flexibility on the part of those who go to approach her. ‘Hidden structure is superior to manifest structure’; and openness is required by the seeker of wisdom.” Heraclitus’ philosophy did not turn inward, but sought to carefully study the phenomenal world. “Opposites define one another and bring one another into existence.” However, soon after, the left hemisphere would gain sway. Plato’s “legacy includes the (left-hemisphere-congruent) beliefs that truth is in principle knowable, that it is knowable through reason alone, and that all truths are consistent with one another…. Plato’s belief that knowledge must be unfailing and general led to the position that we cannot know things that are changing or particular.” The ideal forms were all that were worth knowing and striving towards. Ideas about things were prized over the things themselves. Plato particularly disdained poetry, putting in Socrates’ mouth, “all the poets from Homer downwards have no grasp of reality but merely give us superficial representation.” Hans Peter L’Orange writes that this trend away from nuance continued in the traditions of the Roman Empire where “there is a movement away from the complex towards the simple, from the mobile towards the static, from the dialectic and relative towards the dogmatic and the authoritarian, from the empirical towards theology and theosophy.” McGilchrist posits this trend furthered with the early Christians, whose “passion is for control, for fixity, for certainty; and that comes not with religion alone, but with a certain cast of mind, the cast of the left hemisphere.”

McGilchrist suggests that in the Renaissance priority begins to shift back to the right hemisphere. Giotto, in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, is the first painter to employ perspective. “Perspective mediates a view of the world from an individual standpoint.” The Renaissance ushered in an age of more cultural tolerance and plurality. Melancholy was co-mingled with wit and intelligence. Sadness and pleasure were intertwined. This growth in nuance was, to a large degree, countered by Luther’s Protestant Reformation. “The outer world was in itself empty, and therefore the only authenticity lay in the inner world alone…. The Reformation is the first great expression of the search for certainty in modern times.” The literal Word replaced metaphors in the quest for human understanding. This need for certainty continued with the Enlightenment, which replaced Luther’s religion with a secular science of positivism. Rationality imposes an either/or mentality on life. “Whereas reason respects the implicit, the ambiguous, the unresolved, rationality demands the explicit, the clear and the complete.” This trend was in opposition with artistic creation and this tension grew into the Romantic movement. “Art is by its nature implicit and ambiguous. It is also embodied: it produces embodied creations which speak to us through the senses, even if their medium is language, and which have effects on us physically as embodied beings in the lived world.” Max Scheler stated, “For this reason poets, and all makers of language having the ‘god-given power to tell of what they suffer’ [Goethe, Marienbader Elegie], fulfill a far higher function than that of giving noble and beautiful expression to their experiences and thereby making them recognizable to the reader, by reference to his own past experience of this kind. For by creating new forms of expression, the poets soar above the prevailing network of ideas in which our experience is confined, as it were, by ordinary language; they enable the rest of us to see, for the first time, in our own experience, something which may answer to these new and richer forms of expression, and by doing so they actually extend the scope of our possible self-awareness. They effect a real enlargement of the kingdom of the mind…. That indeed is the mission of all true art: not to reproduce what is already given (which would be superfluous), nor to create something in the pure play of subjective fancy (which can only be transitory and must necessarily be a matter of complete indifference to other people), but to press forward into the whole of the external world and the soul.” The Romantic movement was a move back towards the incompatible. Goethe emphasized, “we are, and ought to be, obscure to ourselves, turned outwards, and working upon the world which surrounds us.” McGilchrist suggests the Romantics returned to the theme of childhood again and again as “childhood represents innocence, not in some moral sense, but in the sense of offering what the phenomenologists thought of as the pre-conceptual immediacy of experience (the world before the left-hemisphere has deadened it to familiarity). It was this authentic ‘presencing’ of the world that Romantic poetry aimed to recapture.” Goethe stressed the impermanence of reality when he stated, “the phenomenon must never be thought of as finished or complete, but rather as evolving, growing, and in many ways as something yet to be determined.” Shelley suggested, “poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar…. It creates anew the universe, after it has been annihilated in our minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted by reiteration.” The familiar is the realm of the left hemisphere, whereas the unique and particular of the right.

Industrialization, modernity, and post-modernity were each turns back towards the primacy of the left hemisphere. “The world is either robbed of its substantiality, its ‘otherness’, its ontological status as an entity having an independence from the perceiving subject; or alternatively seen as alien, devoid of human resonance or significance…. The more we rely on the left hemisphere alone, the more self-conscious we become; the intuitive, unconscious unspoken elements of experience are relatively discounted, and the interpreter begins to interpret - itself. The world it puts into words for us is the world that words themselves (the left hemisphere’s building blocks) have created…. [We become] modern man as homo consumens: concerned with things more than people, property more than life, capital more than work…. Socialism and capitalism are both essentially materialist, just different ways of approaching the lifeless world of matter and deciding how to share the spoils.” Modern man becomes passive to the world. “An admiration for what is powerful rather than beautiful, a sense of alienated objectivity rather than engagement or empathy, and an almost dogmatic trampling on all taboos, lies at the heart of the modernist enterprise.” There is novelty and shock, as opposed to newness- seeing afresh what one once thought of as familiar. The explicit reigns over implicit meanings. “Originality as an artist (as opposed to as a celebrity or a showman) can only exist within a tradition, not for the facile reason that it must have something by ‘contrast’ with which to be original, but because the roots of any work of art have to be intuitive, implicit, still coming out of the body and the imagination, not starting in (though they may perhaps later avail themselves of) individualistic cerebral striving…. Language makes the uncommon common. It can never create experience of something we do not know - only release something in us that is already there.” In modern society, knowledge has become professionalized. “Expertise, which is what actually makes an expert (Latin expertus, ‘one who is experienced’) would be replaced by ‘expert’ knowledge that would have in fact to be based on theory, and in general one would expect a tendency increasingly to replace the concrete with the theoretical or abstract.” Measurability and quantification become the standards of knowledge. Context could be neglected for general rules. Uniformity and equality become the overriding goals. In art, “metaphor and myth have been replaced by the symbolic, or worse, by a concept.” The world is seen as a collection of objects. However, “certainty is the greatest of all illusions: whatever kind of fundamentalism it may underwrite, that of religion or of science, it is what the ancients meant by hubris.”

“What is China?” by Ge Zhaoguang

This is a short, yet important, book, if for no other reason than it is one of only a few recent books written by a Chinese intellectual, still working in China, that has been translated into English. As such, this book gives the reader insight into how mainland Chinese see the breath of Chinese history, as well as the country’s place on the world stage today. Ge is a history professor, but he also delves into the culture and politics of what has made China China. However, as a historian, he begins by asking how has China been defined historically and how has that conception changed over its various dynasties, both as defined by the Chinese themselves and by the outsiders who have come into contact with “the Middle Kingdom.”

Ge realizes that both culturally and geographically what has been considered China has changed over the centuries. “From the third century BCE, when the Qin Shi Huangdi established a unified empire and used its official power to ensure that “all weights and measures were standardized, the gauge of wheeled vehicles was made uniform, and the writing system was standardized,” down to the second century BCE, when the Han dynasty “admired nothing other than Confucianism” in its philosophy but, in terms of its institutions, “took variously from the ways of the Lords Protector and the [ideal] kings” in its political system, a Chinese empire (Zhonghua diguo), relatively unified in terms of politics, culture, and language, had formed.” The peripheries of the empire might have shifted and its borders might have expanded, but from the Qin Shi Huangdi there arose a core to China. This core consisted of “the central region [that] has been relatively stable, becoming very early on a place with commonly recognized territory…. The cultural tradition based on Han culture, however, extended across time in this region, forming into a clear and distinct cultural identity and cultural mainstream…. Regardless of how [future] dynasties were established, they all believed that they were “China” or the “Middle Kingdom”…. The notion of All-under-Heaven, through which traditional culture imagined itself as the center of the world, and the tribute system, which depended on courtly ritual, also helped build up a [single] consciousness” of China.

For Ge, ““All-under-Heaven” is one family; its standard of identification is culture.” There is a China-centric particularism to the world that does not depend on geography. There is a tension between how China’s borders are understood in political and in cultural terms. There was always the historical fascination with “bringing the Four Barbarians into China (na si Yi ru Zhonghua),” even as the actual power of the state ebbed and flowed with each empire. The aim was expanding territory from the ethnically Han center out to the peripheries, while accepting other ethnic groups as part of a single Chinese nation (Zhonghua minzu). Even, “the abdication edict from the last Qing emperor in 1911 called for preserving the model of “Five Nations under One Republic” that “continued to preserve the complete territory of the five nations of Manchus, Han, Mongols, Hui, and Tibetans.””

Despite the coopting of multiple ethnicities, Ge claims that the core of Chinese culture has always been Han. This comprises “the use of Chinese characters (Han zi) to read and write, as well as the ways of thinking that are derived from Chinese characters…. The structure of family, clan, and state in ancient China…. The belief system of “three teachings in one.” In traditional China, “Buddhism was used to cultivate the mind, Taoism was used to extend life, and Confucianism was used to govern the world.”… No religion could supersede the secular power and authority of the emperor, and thus religions accommodated one another while remaining under a dominant political power…. [The] understandings of and interpretations of ideas about “the unity of Heaven and man” (Tian ren he yi) in the universe, the study of Yin and Yang and the Five Elements…. and finally [the concept] of All-under-Heaven, which was influenced by the cosmology of “round Heaven and square Earth.”” Ge does recognize cultural blending and convergence between the outsiders and the Han, crucially, in both directions. During the Tang, Song, and Ming dynasties Han culture and Confucian primacy was particularly ascendant, whereas in the Yuan and Qing dynasties foreign ways were blended into Han orthodoxy.

External interactions have been paramount in defining how China sees itself and its place in the world. It has been colored by the Manchus conquering of the Ming Dynasty and establishing the Qin Dynasty, the West’s efforts at colonization of Asia, and by Japan’s grasping for Asian hegemony starting at the end of the nineteenth century. As the Chinese were forced to interact with outsiders beyond their neighboring barbarians within the tribute system, they were forced to acknowledge that the world was not centered around China. “As the status and power of the nation and state were diminished, the self-consciousness of the nation and state grew ever stronger.”

In the present day, Ge feels that China has ambitions to unite the cultural Chinese across the globe, while taking its place as a central leader on the world stage once again. ““Grand unification” has been a political ideal, some might even say a dream, throughout Chinese history…. Because China was bullied by both East Asian and Western countries in the early modern period, none of its rulers can accept the ignominy of losing sovereignty or giving up territory…. China’s idea of itself as a ruler of All-under-Heaven (Tianxia ba zhu) meant at most that it was a “suzerain” (gong zhu) state of the Asia region…. China is a state that is formed on the basis of culture, and feels that it is important to defend the idea of a great multinational state that has existed since the Han and Tang dynasties and was exemplified in the Qing-dynasty ideal of “spreading virtue in four directions” across vast territories…. China is also eager to show that its culture is the representative of Eastern culture.”

“Stream System- The Collected Short Fiction” by Gerald Murnane

This is a collection of short stories written by Murnane over the past fifty years. Some stories are as short as five pages while the longest span around a hundred. What connects them all is Murnane’s use of imbedded stories within stories. “Somewhere today in a suburb of Melbourne is a man who calls himself a writer of fiction but who writes, in fact, a sort of diary of the man he wishes he could be.” He constantly mines the territory of his home state of Victoria, Australia. “I admired him, for one thing, because he preferred to look at his land rather than farm it.” He also returns to themes of writing, reading, and a relationship with books in general. “The writing of fiction was something that a certain sort of person had to do in order to explain himself or herself to an imagined parent or an imagined loved one or an imagined god.” Many of his stories involve the narrator describing the act of writing the very story Murnane is himself writing. Yet the narrator is not identical to Murnane. Or not quite. “I wrote fiction in order to learn the meaning of certain images in my mind.” Murnane again and again goes back to the craft of writing and the mind as the grounds for imagination. “I have always been interested in what is usually called the world but only insofar as it provides me with evidence for the existence of another world.” He is constantly plumbing the depths of the mind for both images and feelings. “A diagram of my mind would resemble a vast and intricate map with images for its small towns and with feelings for the roads through the grassy countryside between the towns.” Like in his novels, it is hard to decipher what comes from the facts of his real life and what details are made up whole cloth. “Even to his wife and children he had sometimes said that Sunday afternoon was the saddest time of the week: the time when you had to admit that you were no more than the person you were. To himself he would have added that Sunday afternoon was the time when he tried to understand how he had come to be who he was and where he was rather than someone else in some other place.” His nested stories and asides often seem more important and real than the original thread of his story. “I have trusted for many years that I will remember from every text that I read the few words or phrases that I need to remember.” His digressions into the recesses of his mind are so vivid and illuminating that one forgets where one is while reading his words. “Or I might finish this piece of fiction by mentioning that I have always been drawn to writers who have felt their minds threatened.”

“Trick” by Domenico Starnone (translated by Jhumpa Lahiri)

This short novel is narrated by an Italian widower finagled by his daughter into traveling back to his old home in Naples to babysit his grandson. The old man is a once famous artist who now keeps busy illustrating books. As the novel progresses one can sense the narrator has not aged well. He is now unconfident in both his art and his life. “For a few moments I felt like an insignificant part of a long process of disintegration, a scale soon destined to join the organic and inorganic matter solidifying since the Paleozoic era on the ground and at the bottom of the sea.” Snooping through his dead wife’s papers, he found that she had been cuckolding him for years. The narrator moves about gingerly, as if each new step could spell disaster. He is old and proud, yet he knows that time has passed him by. “Fashions, I thought, sadly, wear out, leaving behind the futile traces of those who upheld them.” His grandson gives him all he can handle. He is rambunctious, bordering on bratty. Yet, in time, the narrator almost seems to crave the four-year-old’s approval. The grandson becomes both his rival and his glimpse to a path not taken. Starnone is at his best when he describes the specificity of Naples in detail. The narrator can still speak in dialect, but it almost seems false to him. “But the Neopolitan that was spoken in Vasto, at the Pendino, at the Market— the neighborhoods where I was raised, and before that my father and grandparents and great-grandparents, maybe all my ancestors put together—didn’t know the word ire, the wrath of Achilles and others who lived in books. They only knew ‘a raggia, rage.” Instead of becoming a street tough or a degenerate gambler like his father, he has become an effeminate artist. But he still has a part of the old city within him. This is a story about an old man trying to come to terms with the importance of his legacy and the futility of his remaining days.

“Who We Are and How We Got Here” by David Reich

Reich is a professor in the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School. This is a book intended to educate the layman on the recent technological advances in genetics. Specifically, it details how the mapping of the complete human genome, along with subsequent tests on samples from prehistoric and modern humans in the last decade, is changing the received wisdom about patterns of migration and inter-breeding of different populations from 70,000 to 1,000 years ago, previously based on techniques from archeology, linguistics, skeleton morphology, and anthropology.

The first five examples of complete ancient human genomes were only published in 2010- a few archaic Neanderthal genomes, an archaic Denisova genome, and a four-thousand-year-old individual from Greenland. Since then, hundreds more samples of genome-wide data have been analyzed, studied, and published. This was a vast improvement on previous techniques that only analyzed small stretches of the genome, such as mitochondrial DNA. “The genome is written out in twin chains of about three billion chemical building blocks…. What we call a gene consists of tiny fragments of these chains, typically around one thousand letters long.” By analyzing the complete genome, scientists have been able to divine much more detailed information about humanity’s collective past, historical migration patterns, and when human lineages broke off from one another and perhaps came back to co-mingle. “The most recent African ancestor of all the branches [of modern humans], “Mitochondrial Eve,” lived sometime after 200,000 years ago. The best current estimate is around 160,000 years ago.”

In this book, Reich first analyzes the relationship between modern humans and Neanderthals. “When we tested diverse present-day human populations, we found Neanderthals to be about equally close to Europeans, East Asians, and New Guineans, but closer to all non-Africans than to all sub-Saharan Africans…. We found that non-African genomes today are around 1.5 to 2.1 percent Neanderthal in origin.” This Neanderthal DNA probably mixed with modern human DNA somewhere between eighty-six thousand to thirty-seven thousand years ago, so we can be certain at least some Homo Sapiens and some Neanderthals were having children together at that point in history. But that was not all. Homo Sapiens were also inter-breeding with Denisovans. “We eventually estimated the separation between the Neanderthal and Denisovan ancestral populations to have occurred 470,000 to 380,000 years ago, and the separation between the common ancestral populations of both of these archaic groups and modern humans to have occurred 770,000 to 550,000 years ago.” From that point on, however, there was still inter-breeding between all these human sub-groups. “Interbreeding between Denisovan and New Guinean ancestors occurred fifty-nine to forty-five thousand years ago…. We estimated that about 3 to 6 percent of New Guinean ancestry derives from Denisovans…. The Denisovan-related ancestry in East Asians is about a twenty-fifth of that seen in New Guineans- it comprises about 0.2 percent of East Asians’ genomes, rising to up to 0.3-0.6 percent in parts of South Asia.”

Reich goes on to detail the recent discovery of a ghost population, no longer are alive in pure form today, but who have passed on parts of their genome to present-day humans. These are the Ancient North Eurasians. “There was a population living in northern Eurasia that was not the primary ancestral population of the present-day inhabitants of the region. Some people from this population migrated east across Siberia and contributed to the population that crossed the Bering land bridge and gave rise to Native Americans. Others migrated west and contributed to Europeans…. All told, more than half of the world’s population derives between 5 percent and 40 percent of their genomes from the Ancient North Eurasians.” Reich describes the process of migration (and the breeding that went along with it) as more akin to a trellis, than the more common tree branching metaphor. These populations separated and then often recombined as they moved about, traded with or invaded others, and relocated around the globe. In fact, the Mal’ta genome (a boy found in south-central Siberia, who lived about twenty-four thousand years ago) has strong genetic affinity to modern Europeans and Native Americans, but has little resemblance to modern-day Siberians. “The analysis of the Mal’ta genome made it clear that Native Americans derive about a third of their ancestry from the Ancient North Eurasians, and the remainder from East Asians. It is this major mixture that explains why Europeans are genetically closer to Native Americans than they are to East Asians.” 

In Europe, further ghost populations were found in West Eurasia. “About ten thousand years ago there were at least four major populations in West Eurasia- the farmers of the Fertile Crescent, the farmers of Iran, the hunter-gatherers of central and western Europe, and the hunter-gatherers of eastern Europe. All these populations differed from one another as mush as Europeans differ from East Asians today.” The Bronze Age was the time when these distinct populations mixed and homogenized, perhaps as the result of technological and cultural integration as well. Furthermore, “five thousand years ago, the people who are now the primary ancestors of all extant northern Europeans had not yet arrived.” The Yamnaya were sheep and cattle herders who originally came from the Steppe. They promulgated, if not invented, the wheel and domesticated the horse. “In Germany, people buried with Corded Ware pots derive about three-quarters of their ancestry from groups related to the Yamnaya and the rest from people related to the farmers who had been the previous inhabitants of that region.” It is also likely that the Yamnaya were the ones who spread the origins of all Indo-European languages as they spread their genes, technology, and culture across Europe.

In India, Reich found the people today “are the outcome of mixtures between two highly differentiated populations, “Ancestral North Indians” (ANI) and “Ancestral South Indians” (ASI), who before their mixture were as different from each other as Europeans and East Asians today. The ANI are related to Europeans, central Asians, Near Easterners, and people of the Caucasus, but we made no claim about the location of their homeland or any migrations. The ASI descend from a population not related to any present-day populations outside India. We showed that the ANI and ASI had mixed dramatically in India. The result is that everyone in mainland India today is a mix, albeit in different proportions, of ancestry related to West Eurasians, and ancestry more closely related to diverse East Asian and South Asian populations. No group in India can claim genetic purity…. We found that West Eurasian-related mixture in India ranges from as low as 20 percent to as high as 80 percent.” This cut across all regions and castes, although the higher castes and males both tended to have a higher proportion of ANI ancestry. The Andamanese were the lone population with zero European genes at all, likely because of their secluded island location. However, within sub-castes in India, Reich did find long strings of identical genetic code, suggesting that “long-term endogamy as embodied in India today in the institution of caste has been overwhelmingly important for millennia.”

Reich’s analysis also provided revelations for the migration patterns of humans into the Americas. “There were at least two migrations that left a human legacy as far as South America and at least two whose impact was limited to northern North America.” These paths split more like tree branches than trellises, with little remixing after the initial separations. “The splits proceeded roughly in a north-to-south direction, consistent with the idea that as populations traveled south, groups peeled off and settled, remaining in approximately the same place ever since.” In the Americas, population displacement was not common. However, one unusual pattern was that “a sublineage of First Americans that originated well after the initial diversification of First American lineages in North America migrated back to Asia.” Migrations patterns are often not obvious, but the genetic codes do not lie.

Reich next moves on to East Asia, which “has been home to the human family for at least around 1.7 million years, the date of the oldest known Homo erectus skeleton found in China…. In Australia, archaeological evidence of human campsites make it clear that modern humans arrived there at least by about forty-seven thousand years ago, which is about as old as the earliest evidence for modern humans in Europe…. Chinese and Australians derive almost all their ancestry from a homogenous population whose ancestors separated earlier from the ancestors of Europeans.” As in West Eurasia, East Asian modern humans soon out-competed archaic humans and completely replaced them in every region that they migrated to. Today’s East Asians derive their ancestry from one of two ghost populations, one starting out around the Yangtze River Basin and the other from around the Yellow River. The Yellow River Ghost Population largely spread west, ending at the Tibetan plateau, while the Yangtze Ghost Population spread to southeast Asia and Taiwan. Often new genetic information in combination with traditional archaeology can yield revelations. For instance, in Japan “around twenty-three hundred years ago, mainland-derived agriculture began to be practiced and was associated with an archeological culture with clear similarities to contemporary cultures on the Korean peninsula…. Present day Japanese have about 80 percent farmer and 20 percent hunter-gatherer ancestry.” That genetic mix yields an approximate date of inter-breeding of sixteen hundred years ago. That means for hundreds of years, the two populations both lived on the islands of Japan, but with relatively little inter-breeding, until social segregation broke down, interbreeding began, and homogenization occurred.

As for Africa, “African genome sequences are typically about a third more diverse than non-African ones.” Most migration patterns moved in a north-to-south direction. “There is little if any sub-Saharan African related ancestry in ancient Near Easterners or Egyptians prior to medieval times.” Surprisingly, Ethiopian “caste” groupings have proven to have gone back generations further than even those in India. The modern Ari are the oldest example of strong endogamy that Reich has thus far come across, persisting at least forty-five hundred years. Another ghost population were the East African Foragers. “We also found that the East African Foragers were more closely related to non-Africans today than they were to any other groups in sub-Saharan Africa. The close relationship to non-Africans suggests that the ancestors of the East African Foragers may have been the population in which the Middle to Late Stone Age transition occurred, propelling expansions outside of Africa and possibly within Africa too after around fifty thousand years ago.”

Finally, Reich concludes his book with controversies associated with these genetic breakthroughs. Race may be a social construct, but it is still a touchy cultural subject. Racial variations are existent, if not determining. “Around 85 percent of variation in the protein types could be accounted for by variation within populations and “races,” and only 15 percent by variation across them.” Inter-breeding was also not propagated randomly. Cultural factors such as inequality played a role in whose genes were passed on. “The contribution of European American men to the genetic makeup of the present-day African American population is about four times that of European American women.” These numbers are even more skewed for the populations of South and Central America for obvious historical reasons. Somewhat less controversially, “8 percent of males in the lands that the Mongol Empire once occupied share a characteristic Y-chromosome sequence or one differing from it by just a few mutations.” The dating of such a “star-cluster” founder, estimated through the rate of the accumulation of mutations on the Y-chromosome, can be placed to between thirteen hundred and seven hundred years ago and then history can guess that Genghis Khan would be the best possible human match to fit such a profile. Finally, as of today the DNA revolution has been dominated by the testing of Europeans, both modern and archaic. “Of 551 published samples with genome-wide ancient DNA data as of late 2017, almost 90 percent are from West Eurasia.” That is because most state of the art techniques and labs were first developed in Europe, but also because DNA from warmer climates is more likely to degrade and harder to extract and many countries, such as India and China, limit the exportation of DNA material outside their borders. Scientists are still in the early days of this genetics revolution. Reich compares this technological breakthrough to the inventions of the microscope and of carbon dating in scientific significance. Genome-wide mapping is a burgeoning field and the future growth in new techniques is only going to expand the scope and scale of the DNA samples available for analysis.

“Border Districts” by Gerald Murnane

This is a novel that any writer would love. It is fundamentally about the process of thinking, the images that one pictures in the mind, and the memories that the brain recalls. “I have learned to trust the promptings of my mind, which urges me sometimes to study in all seriousness matters that another person might dismiss as unworthy, trivial, childish.” The novel’s narrator is a writer, as well as a deep thinker, perhaps, even, a philosopher. The ebbs and flows of internal thought are tremendous. “I supposed the endless-seeming landscapes of my own thoughts and feelings must have been a paradise by comparison with the drab sites where others located their selves or their personalities or whatever they called their mental territories.” There are thoughts wrapped in thoughts wrapped in memory. The narrator describes the craft and process of writing the very book he is supposedly writing. He is full of asides and tangents that flow to where his thoughts and memories happen to take him. He digresses and circles back around to conclude or clarify a point made in previous pages. “The mind is a place best viewed from borderlands.” I am not sure if this novel is supposed to be memoir disguised as fiction or fiction disguised as memoir. The details of the narrator’s life certainly mimic the experiences of Murnane. “I moved to this district near the border so that I could spend most of my time alone and so that I could live according to several rules that I had for long wanted to live by.” This novel definitely engages with the reader’s mind and forces one to grapple with one’s own conception of the world, one’s mental constructs, with one’s own faulty memory, and with the experience of life itself.

“Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking” by Cecilia Heyes

In this short, dense book Heyes introduces cultural evolutionary psychology, which seeks to combine cognitive psychology with cultural evolution. She posits that human cognitive traits, which were previously assumed to be genetic, might, instead, be passed on through cultural evolution. Heyes subscribes to the selectionist approach of Donald Campbell, where what is required for evolution to occur is “(1) mechanisms for introducing variation; (2) consistent selection processes; and (3) mechanisms for preserving and/or propagating the selected variations.” Of course, these mechanisms can operate culturally as well as genetically.

Heyes suggests that humans have genetically inherited three basic traits that have helped with domain-general learning. First, by temperament humans are extremely social primates, which has facilitated coordination amongst large groups and learning through others. Second, humans have “genetically inherited attentional biases [that] ensure that the attention of human infants is locked-on to other agents from birth.” This includes a propensity to look at the faces of others and gaze-cuing, where attention is focused on the object of another’s attentional gaze. Therefore, “the flow of information that infants receive about the world is guided by adults’ knowledge of what is important and interesting.” Familiar voices, such as the mother’s, as well as native language speech in general, also attract inordinate attention in infants. Finally, humans have inherited powerful information processors, which are domain-general. The human pre-frontal cortex is proportionally larger than in the brain of any other primate. Associative learning techniques and cascading effects allow humans to process ever-more information, while human’s large memory allows for exceptional retention. In addition, executive function, consisting of inhibitory control, working memory, and cognitive flexibility, allows humans to develop such facilities as reasoning, problem solving, and planning. “Cognitive mechanisms that we have reason to believe are distinctively human…. include: (1) mechanisms that are specialized for dealing with the inanimate world, such as causal understanding; (2) faculties that are equally likely to process animate (social) and inanimate (asocial) events, such as episodic memory; and (3) various forms of cognition specialized for dealing with social stimuli, such as face processing, imitation, and mindreading.”

Heyes makes the case that “most social learning- perhaps all non-cultural social learning- depends on the same learning mechanisms as asocial learning, and that these are broadly associative processes that encode information for long-term storage by forging excitatory and inhibitory links between event representations.” What makes humans unique, however, is selective social learning. This is explicit metacognition techniques that “focus social learning on knowledgeable agents so precisely that they encourage high-fidelity copying of behavior. Because it is exclusive, specific, and accurate, this kind of copying promotes cultural evolution by enhancing “parent-offspring relations”…. Explicitly metacognitive rules are typically learned through social interaction and, therefore, show marked cross-cultural variation.” Most importantly, “metacognitive social learning strategies are learned from others (emphasis mine).” In contrast, “the behavior of nonhuman animals and young children can be described and predicted by formulae such as copy the successful or copy older individuals, but the strategies or rules are in the minds of scientific observers, not the actors themselves.” By adulthood, humans are unique in explicitly choosing successful prototypes to mimic. This selective social learning is then passed down and retained only as it is useful. The ability to selectively copy is culturally learned.

According to Heyes, a second cognitive gadget, passed down through cultural evolution, is imitation. This formation solves Andrew Meltzoff’s correspondence problem, where he asks how can cognition “connect the felt but unseen movements of the self with the seen but unfelt movements of the other?” Heyes suggests, “the link between the sensory and motor representations is bidirectional and excitatory…. Matching vertical associations are forged by learning, predominantly social learning, they are not inborn or genetically inherited.” Vertical associations are formed through “correlated sensorimotor experience: experience in which seeing and doing a particular action occur close together in time and in a predictive or “contingent” relationship.” Opaque perception is facilitated by cultural tools such as mirrors, video recordings, synchronized activities and rituals, such as dance, drills and games, action words that provide equivalence experience, and feedback through adults imitating infant behavior in a mirrored way. Heyes suggests that “the most important function of imitation [is] high fidelity cultural inheritance not of object-directed actions, but of communicative and gestural skills…. They include the sequences of body movements that enable group members to communicate without words and, thereby, to coordinate their activities when words are absent (for example, when the message is ineffable, and before language co-evolved), and when words are dangerous (for example, when a group is stalking prey). They also include the sequences of body movements, such as those involved in ritualistic dancing, that enable group members to bond- to achieve the states of trust and commitment required for cooperative action.” Finally, “identical twins are no more alike in their imitative ability than fraternal twins” suggesting that skill in imitation is not genetically inherited.

The third cognitive gadget Heyes brings up is theory of mind. She suggests that theory of mind was a necessary prerequisite for teaching, “acts with the intention of producing enduring change in the mental states- especially the knowledge states- of another agent.” Heyes suggests that theory of mind is not a concept that is inherited genetically, but that “children are taught about the mind by members of their social group, and the information that is culturally inherited in this way forms a conceptual structure enabling the ascription of mental states to the self and others.” Heyes continues, “mindreading involves the derivation of meaning from signs…. The signs are facial expressions, body movements, and utterances- many of them conventional- and their meaning relates to the actor’s mental states…. Novice mindreaders learn not only that behavior can be, but that it should be, produced by rational interactions among beliefs and desires, and they are encouraged to make their own behavior obey these conventions.” Many of these social beliefs are culturally specific and, therefore, cannot be inherited genetically.

The fourth cognitive gadget Heyes touches on is language. She admits that she is not an expert in this field, but she still ambivalently concludes that language acquisition is more culturally than genetically inherited. “The cognitive processes of language acquisition evolved genetically to fulfill nonlinguistic functions.” Domain-general tools that evolved genetically became culturally evolved to facilitate language, uniquely in humans. Heyes came to this conclusion through empirical studies which questioned a genetic Universal Grammar, first posited by Chomsky. Studies of the five to eight thousand languages spoken in the world today show that there is little universal linguistically be it phrase category, phrase structure, linear order, numerals, or even the basic concepts of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. Some languages lack adverbs entirely, whereas others adopt a fifth major category, ideophones. Furthermore, fMRI studies have shown that neural activity is spread out across the brain during language processing, not focused in Broca’s area as Universal Grammar proponents had previously insisted. Computer simulations have also shown that complex grammatical construction can be acquired using domain-general tools. Other studies have taught adult humans “artificial grammar”, which uses arbitrary rules, effectively. Other studies have concluded that “Universal Grammar could not have evolved genetically because linguistic conventions change too quickly.” Rules of parsimony also suggest that domain-general processing should be sufficient to generate language acquisition in humans, through cultural evolutionary mechanisms alone.

Heyes concludes by defending the idea of group selection. She suggests that these cognitive gadgets, distinctly human cognitive mechanisms, all evolved through cultural evolution at the group level. These mechanisms increased fitness for individuals by improving their living conditions and increasing their likelihood of reproducing, but they also helped at the group level because “groups with better living conditions are more likely to persist through time and to bud, not only because their members are more likely to survive and reproduce, but also because these groups are more likely to attract net immigration. Groups with better living conditions are also more likely to have their practices emulated by other groups, including childrearing and ritual practices that foster the development of particular cognitive mechanisms.” These mechanisms are amplified through network effects that “go on between people, rather than inside individual’s heads- such as conversation, storytelling, turn-taking, collective reminiscing, teaching, demonstrating, and engaging in synchronous drills.” Inheritance of these cultural mechanisms can take place through many routes (vertical, oblique, or horizontal copying) and, therefore, the mechanisms become more robust over time. Also, redundancy of routes can amplify and solidify acquisition. Children “have many opportunities to pick up and consolidate the same information…. And this does not occur by chance, or as a consequence of a blind selection process.” Many of these specific mechanisms are locally, but not globally, optimal in their particulars. “Distinctively human cognitive mechanisms need to be nimble, capable of changing faster than genetic evolution allows.” With the growth of human group size, specialization allowed for expertise and, as new techniques emerged, they were more likely to be seen by others, imitated, and passed on to the next generation. “Cultural evolutionary psychology, the cognitive gadgets theory, suggests that distinctively human cognitive mechanisms are light on their feet, constantly changing to meet the demands of new social and physical environments.”

“Lightening Rods” by Helen DeWitt

This novel is humorous and raunchy. Some of the jokes are so sly you don’t quite know whether she really means them to be funny at all. The protagonist, Joe, has had an unsuccessful career as a salesman- both trying to sell Encyclopedia Brittanica’s and Electrolux vacuum cleaners. He fantasizes while he masturbates everyday after work in his trailer. And that’s what leads him to his great innovation. He thinks of all the companies that have had problems with over-eager, go-getter-type salesmen, who inevitably get the firm into trouble with sexual harassment suits. The companies want to keep the sales, while avoiding expensive litigation. Therefore, Joe starts up a company, Lightening Rods, which is a temp firm that hires personal assistants who on the side offer anonymous sex in the handicap bathroom stall. The path is initially rocky, but eventually rewarding. On the way to success, Joe ends up inventing toilets that go up and down to help out dwarfs, as well as toilet seats that expand and contract to help the obese and the skinny. One of his personal assistant hires goes on to become a Supreme Court Justice, while two others have successful careers in business. The book is complete farce, but with a thin veneer of social commentary. The story moves along at a brisk pace and Joe’s side thoughts are worth the read in and of themselves. DeWitt has a knack for portraying characters who should seem ludicrous in a highly realistic light. No matter how farcical, she does not skimp on developing their personalities and quirks to make them human. She says she developed the idea of a lightening rod when she got repeatedly fucked in the ass by the publishing industry during the travails of her first novel. This is revenge at its humorous best. This is no “Last Samurai”, but it is an entertaining read.