Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson (who wrote Gilead ) has written a thoughtful crituque of reductionist accounts of the mind. The title could be a bit misleading as if it is making a case for disposing of inwardness when in fact it is more an expose of the way that inwardness is dispelled and why that is problematic. I enjoyed the cultural and historical contextualisation of some of the protaganists of reductionist ideas. I didn't find this examination as lucid as some others I've come across; it is written in an academic style -which reflects the genesis of the book as a series of lectures. Nonetheless, a helpful resource in considering the issues around how we understand the mind in a culture informed by science and popular mis-understandings of the scientific enterprise and results of it.

Notes and quotes

 primary assertions make other information either irrelevant or subordinate to kinds of explanation that serve the favored theory. What is art? It is a means of attracting mates, even though artists may have felt that it was an exploration of experience, of the possibilities of communication, and of the extraordinary collaboration of eye and hand. location 141

here—the emperors presided over a remarkably brutal society, brilliant as it was. As is usual, Russell blames Christian violence on the traditions of Jewish monotheism, not on the norms of the pagan civilization in which the faith took root. location 260

religion is indisputably a central factor in any account of the character and workings of the human mind. Does religion manifest a capacity for deep insight, or an extraordinary proneness to delusion? Both, perhaps, like the mind itself. location 275

The Gilgamesh epic was found in various forms throughout the ancient Near East. It is absurd to imagine that the most dramatic part of it could simply be atched into the Hebrew Genesis and no one would notice the plagiarism. To retell their story with changes would be to defend against its pagan theological implications, and also to address what are, after all, questions of very great interest. All this assumes that these ancients had an intellectual life, that they had meaningful awareness of surrounding cultures. location 416

Whoever controls the definition of mind controls the definition of humankind itself, and culture, and history. location 467

I would argue that the absence of mind and subjectivity from parascientific literature is in some part a consequence of the fact that the literature arose and took its form in part as a polemic against religion. And it has persisted, consciously or not, in a strategy for excluding thought of the kind hospitable to religion from the possibility of speaking in its own terms, making its own case. Metaphysics in general has been excluded at the same time, even from philosophy, which since Comte has been associated with this same project of exclusion. The arts have been radically marginalized. In its treatment of human nature the diversity of cultures is left out of account, perhaps to facilitate the making of analogies between our living selves and our hypothetical primitive ancestors, so central to their argument, who can only have been culturally very remote from us indeed. When history is mentioned, it is usually to point to its follies and errors, which persist to the degree that the light of science has not yet fallen over the whole of human affairs. location 514

At this point, the parascientific genre feels like a rear-guard action, a nostalgia for the lost certitudes of positivism. location 538

Darwin, famously influenced by Malthus, made the competition for limited resources an elemental, universal principle of life, and, in The Descent of Man, folded tribal warfare into the processes of evolution, a notion which meshed nicely with colonialism and with the high esteem in which Europeans of the period held themselves. location 558

My point being that another proper context for the interpretation of Phineas Gage might be others who have sufered gross insult to the body, especially those who have been disfigured by it. And in justice to Gage, the touching fact is that he was employed continually until his final illness. No one considers what might have been the reaction of other people to him when his moving from job to job—his only sin besides cursing and irritability—attracts learned disapprobation. location 654

The meme is not a notion I can dismiss out of hand. It seems to me to describe as well as anything does the obdurate persistence and influence of the genre of writing I have called parascientific. This piece of evidence for its reality might not please its originators, who always seem to assume their own immunity from the illusions and distractions that plague the rest of us. location 833

have come to the conclusion that the random, the accidental, have a strong attraction for many writers because they simplify by delimiting. Why is there something rather than nothing? Accident. Accident narrows the range of appropriate strategies of interpretation, while intention very much broadens it. Accident closes on itself, while intention implies that, in and beyond any particular fact or circumstance, there is vastly more to be understood. Intention is implicitly communicative, because an actor is described in any intentional act. Why is the human brain the most complex object known to exist in the universe? Because the elaborations of the mammalian brain that promoted the survival of the organism overshot the mark in our case. Or because it is intrinsic to our role in the universe as thinkers and perceivers, participants in a singular capacity for wonder as well as for comprehension. location 889

 philosopher John Searle objects to the commonly held conception that “suggests that science names a specific kind of ontology, as if there were a scientific reality that is different from, for example, the reality of common sense.” He says, “I think that is profoundly mistaken.” And he says, “There is no such thing as the scientific world. There is, rather, just the world, and what we are trying to do is describe how it works and describe our situation location 903

little that is modern departs as cleanly from its precursors as myth would have us believe. location 924

Rereading Freud, I have come to the conclusion that his essays, and therefore very central features of his thought, most notably the murder of the primal father with all its consequences, were meant to confute theories of race and nation that were becoming increasingly predominant as he wrote. location 1007

Freud’s highly polished, deeply troubled Vienna, for many years seeming to sustain a perilous equilibrium between the strict imperatives of social order and the raw frictions of group conflict, bears more than a little resemblance to the Freudian self. To hope for more, for something to compare with the rootedness and authenticity for which the racial nationalists yearned, would risk destabilizing the very fragile equilibrium that for Freud is the closest approach human beings can make to their natural condition. location 1105

we come upon a contention which is so astonishing that we must dwell upon it. This contention holds that what we call our civilization is largely responsible for our misery, and that we should be much happier if we gave it up and returned to primitive conditions. I call this contention astonishing because, in whatever way we may define the concept of civilization, it is a certain fact that all the things with which we seek to protect ourselves against the threats that emanate from the sources of suffering are part of that very civilization. location 1159

If there is one thing Freud asserts consistently, from which every theory proceeds and to which every conclusion returns, it is just this—that the mind is not to be trusted. The conversation in the larger culture to which I have referred, the variously lamented loss of spiritual authenticity, assumes that civilization has alienated Europeans from their essential selves and corrupted their experience. location 1228

 There are physicists and philosophers who would correct me. They would say, if there are an infinite number of universes, as in theory there could be, then creatures like us would be very likely to emerge at some time in one of them. But to say this is only to state the fact of our improbability in other terms. location 1260

 According to E. O. Wilson, “The brain and its satellite glands have now been probed to the point where no particular site remains that can reasonably be supposed to harbor a nonphysical mind.” Perhaps this statement is to be taken as tongue-in-cheek. But to prove a negative, or to treat it as having been proved, is, oddly enough, an old and essential strategy of positivism. So I do feel obliged to point out that if such a site could be found in the brain, then the mind would be physical in the same sense that anything else with a locus in the brain is physical. To define the mind as nonphysical in the first place clearly prejudices his conclusion. location 1273

the human brain as case in point. How strange it would be, then, that this accident, this excess, should feel a tropism toward what Pinker himself calls “the truth.”

Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self (The Terry Lectures Series) Marilynne Robinson

Out of Babylon -Brueggeman

There's hardly a theologian currently more revered than Walter Brueggeman, and deservedly so: he is able
to bring to bear on reading the Hebrew scriptures a wide knowledge and understanding of the culture of the Ancient Near East but in a way that doesn't draw attention to his erudition but simply help unfold the meaning of the text and to bring it together with the 'horizon' of our own understandings and culture. I particularly enjoyed this expose -in effect- of perenniel forces which coagulate in/to empires and the way that they affect the corporate psychology and spirituality of 'subject' peoples. He then reframes the insights to help Christians (and other aliens) in the West (particularly the USA but actually this affects us all) to pray and live faithfully. And also, it seems to me, uses the contemporary experience of living under hegemonic systems to help us to understand the dynamics of Empire and give us insight into Babylonian exile.

I especially enjoyed the connections he makes between surviving and resisting Empire and liturgical practice. There are also important insights into the ways of corporisations and how we might minister to them.

Notes and quotes

obedience or disobedience will variously yield blessings and curses. The disaster of the sixth century, so goes the paradigm, was a justly merited curse worked against those who had violated covenantal obedience. This logic both imposed meaning on chaotic events and established the voice of the deported elite as normative for the larger community.   location 242

If we read the United States as chosen people, as carrier of "local tradition," then the church must bring to the table a clearer, less compromised sense of what "chosenness" means. The church must insist that the public policy and public practice of the United States be measured against covenantal requirements of neighborly justice, mercy, and generosity. Such a society might be expected to organize its life and its resources around the shared destiny of haves and have-nots. For as far back as the tradition of Deuteronomy, the notion of "chosenness" had to do with attentiveness to needy neighbors. If the "year of remission" in Deuteronomy 15:1-18 is central to who Israel was as a chosen people, then even its own economy was subordinate to its obligation to its neighbors. Likewise today, the church's challenge is to summon civil society to its best self.  location 698


On the other hand, it may be an easier case now to see the United States as empire that seeks to impose its will around the world, to demand "reform" as the price of engagement, and to monopolize resources in every possible way. As the prophets judge, such a superpower as Babylon is intrinsically unable to restrain itself, even as the acquisitive power of the United States is mostly beyond restraint. In such an environment God calls the church to carry the "local tradition," bearing witness against the empire's arrogance, greed, and insatiable appetites. It is likely that it comes only very late to every empire—including Babylon—to recognize itself as empire, to flex its muscles with restraint, to acknowledge the selfdestructiveness of imagining autonomy that is not subject to any ordered morality or even to the community of nation-states. It may be the work of the church to name empire for what it is.   location 705


contrast to the "local tradition" of Jews and Christians, empires do not know about loss. Empires do not grieve, do not notice human suffering, do not acknowledge torn bodies or abused villages. Empires deal in quotas, statistics, summaries, and memos. And memos rarely mention loss; when they do, they disguise it in euphemism so that no one need notice. Empires characteristically do not notice loss because they are able to engage in realitydenying ideology that covers over everything in the splendor of power, victory, and stability. Empires do not acknowledge that many such claims are highly contested, and beyond contestation are frequently exhibited as false. But empires are undeterred by inconvenient truths, and rush on to persuasive certitude. Thus I propose in this reflection on loss that we consider the tension between the candor and acknowledgment of the local tradition and the capacity for denial that characterizes empire.  location 775


If it is the case that "the truth makes free" (even truth about loss), then it is also true that "cover-up makes powerful."  location 784


Arrayed against the formidable social power of this claim that God would never abandon Jerusalem was the relatively weak challenge of prophetic poetry. This ongoing but highly irregular tradition featured uncredentialed utterers with no social standing. Their sole authority came from (a) their imaginative, playful utterance; (b) their knowledge of the facts on the ground connected to human, bodily reality; and (c) the claim to be connected enough to speak the truth of YHWH.  location 807


The Book of Lamentations invites us to imagine a long pause in both certitude and denial. It is a long pause against old temptations and against new imperial impingement. The pause is in order to honor and cherish and valorize this powerful moment of undoing.No need to rush, as there is nowhere to rush to. Linger. Linger in the ashes and tears, and ponder the truth that makes one free.  location 878


profound anxiety that the posturing of the Department of Homeland Security has brought about. But the empire really doesn't want that anxiety to go away, because it creates the hostility and rage that feed imperial ideology. By pandering to and co-opting anxiety among its citizens, the empire creates the "need" for even tighter hegemony, and at the same   location 956


Isaiah 40–55 works best when understood as a divine response to the Book of Lamentations' deep grief over the destruction of Jerusalem and the deportation of folk from Jerusalem.Read more at location 1314

There was plenty to fear in Babylon. There was taxation and exploitation, hostility toward local tradition, violence toward dissidents, and the requirement of conformity to imperial expectation. It was enough to cause the members of a local tradition to worry about opportunities for social advancement at the least, and perhaps even about their physical safety. Knowing all of those fears, the poet speaks a word that voids them. The ground for fearlessness is the utterance, promise, presence, and resolve of YHWH. The "salvation oracle" is dominated by first person assertions by YHWH. YHWH enters the empire's affairs and overrides its threat of coercion, not unlike, of course, the way in which YHWH nullified the abusive authority of Pharaoh in ancient memory.   location 1333


Empires do have their use, and it is not surprising to find traces of affirmation about Babylon in the biblical tradition. Indeed, more than traces, for it could even be affirmed in ancient Israel that Babylon, in its imperial expansionism, was acting out YHWH's intention for the world and for Israel. Thus we must allow for a sense of ambiguity and complexity about Babylon, because the empire may do good even as it is a devastator. Its reasons for doing good, of course, are never altruistic, but rather seek to further its interests and expand its power. Thus some in the ancient world saw that when Babylon imposed order on lesser states it also acted as their protector—albeit never a disinterested one. Indeed, some in Israel clearly perceived Persia, Babylon's successor on the world stage, as a benign or positive force. It is, moreover, well known that in the New Testament period one's status as a Roman citizen counted for a great deal (Acts 16:37-38; 22:25-29).  location 1609


the contemporary news of the gospel is that God invites and summons the faithful to a life beyond the demands and gifts of empire. In the New Testament, that offer is a call to discipleship. In contemporary practice, it is the joyous possibility of joyous existence beyond what I have elsewhere called the "therapeutic, technological, military consumerism" of our society. While the texts portray this homecoming as a joyous alternative, it is at the same time a costly alternative. Just as the erstwhile slaves in the book of Exodus yearned to return to Pharaoh's Egypt and just as many Jews preferred life in Babylon, so the imaginative possibility among us for an alternative life in the world is not cheap. But to "go out in shalom" is a mantra that continues to ring in the ears of those gathered in the "local tradition" of Yahwism.  location 1873


life with YHWH. The latter is a life of free sustenance—no money, without price. The imperial alternative is labor that does not satisfy. The empire is always propelled by cheap labor. Because the empire provides neither material nor spiritual satisfaction to its laborers, the poet urges these workers to end their collusion with the empire.  location 2066


this text summons Christians to depart the rapacious selfindulgence and exploitation of the U.S. empire, even as we continue to value and affirm this geographical space as our home. I suggest in such contemporary usage three dimensions of departure that belong to a faithful hearing of the text: 1. The departure from empire is liturgical, that is, it is a symbolic, bodily performance of what leaving is like.  location 2122

The liturgy invites participants to recognize that we do not belong to empire and need not obey empire,  location 2129


The reiterated practice of liturgical departure has as its intent a psychological transformation.   location 2133


The distinctive sign of that theology of "letting go" is no doubt the Sabbath that seeks to disengage, by bodily practice, the self from the imperial ideology of production and consumption.  location 2141

one can imagine that the departure from the empire is fundamentally an economic one, a refusal to participate in the aggressive economy of accumulation with all its practices of credit and debt.  location 2144

modest steps along the way to such radicality may open our eyes to further possibilities; and one never knows where the liberating presence of YHWH may lead.   location 2147

the compelling power of empire makes regular, reiterative narrative performance of emancipation in liturgy indispensable. Loc 2157

Add a note
The capacity to utilize religious claims for the sake of political expansionism is a hallmark of empire. While Luther does not unpack the formula in that way, his use of the phrase "Babylonian captivity" rings true on that score. In empire—Babylon or any of its successors—everything is taken up in advancement for those who sit at the center of power.  location 2362

Empires are about money initially, amassing, leveraging. There is still a lot of it in some quarters, even after the collapse of much of it. The high end need not be restrained. Because the lines are still organized to deliver for the controllers who refuse socialism but in fact thrive on it . . . a free stadium, free use of taxpayer money for those who know how to access.   location 2428

see—in sequence—Babylon, Rome, and us, and then notice that empires never learn.   location 2439


The empire intends to erase all local tradition and all local belonging and all local gospel.   location 2504


There would be no "going home" from Persia, for everywhere Jews went, including back to Jerusalem, it was still Persia!   location 2592

there. The deportees still had to participate in the Babylonian economy. They still had to obey Babylonian laws, acknowledge Babylonian authority. After an orgy of radical rhetoric one must still "come to terms." And coming to terms required a different way in the world of empire.  location 2633


The different posture of Old Testament texts toward Babylon and toward Persia could hardly be more pronounced, even if the empires were in fact not that different. The dismissive polemics against Babylon have already been noted. Remarkably, there are no such explicit polemics against Persian rule in the Old Testament, not one.  location 2637


suggest then that the texts reflect the change from a selfunderstanding of exile-restoration to one of accommodationresistance. The change is to be understood in terms of the change of imperial overlords and a changed choice of rhetoric from confrontation to engagement. Above all, the change reflects the good sense of those more concerned with sustaining the life of the community than with being heroes.  location 2663

Daniel makes no concession to royal preeminence, but subordinates that arrogant imperial rule to the most elemental claim of the God of Sinai. It turns out, in this quick testimony, that mercy and righteousness—to the oppressed, no less!—is the wave of the future. Such a heavenly mandate violates and contradicts the most important passions of empire, for empires prosper primarily by exploiting the oppressed, transferring the wealth and well-being of the many to the few. The narrative ends with a moment of imperial sanity when even the great brutal empire can sing in Jewish cadences, almost as if converted:   location 2799

Note: sanity and conversion. a story then of successful spiritual direction towards a corporisation?

Given a food monopoly, Joseph, on behalf of Pharaoh, confiscates the land and the means of production of the peasants and reduces them to slavery (Genesis 47:19-26). The trajectory of Joseph's rise to power in Egypt has rightly been termed by Leon Kass the "Egyptianization" of Joseph: "Joseph uses his administrative authority to advance the despotic power of his master. Joseph's rise to full Egyptian power is, to say the least, highly problematic, both in itself and in its implications for the future of the Israelite way."Read more at location 2864


consideration of these four narratives indicates that Jews experienced a complex relationship with the empire, one that admitted of no single or simple solution. It is in any case clear that the shared assumption of these narratives is that we are remote from a model of exile and restoration. These characters are not going anywhere; they are not departing the Persian Empire. Rather, they must use their agility, shrewdness, and patience to come to terms with Persian power and mobilize that power to work for their own wellbeing.These narratives suggest a variety of modes of accommodation and defiance of empire. • Ezra and Nehemiah mange to harness the resources and authorizations of the empire for local initiative; their hidden script emboldens them to tell the truth about imperial exploitation. • Daniel, in his wisdom, moves from an initial act of disciplined defiance and exhibits enormous authority in rescuing the empire, having found ways both to defy and to instruct the empire. • Joseph, at the other extreme, embraces "Egyptianization" (or in context we may say "Persianization"), whereby his Jewish identity is radically submerged in the management of imperial power and resources. • Esther dares to exhibit her Jewish identity and wins over the empire to care for and protect her people. The common theme is boldness, daring, and imagination that are to be enacted in a variety of strategies. All of these narratives underscore the importance of intentionality in the local tradition, and refusal to forgo that identity, though the refusal is perforce sometimes understated and opaque.  location 2917

is a matter of editing the script of displacement; perhaps we may risk a slight revision of the famous "Serenity Prayer" commonly credited to Reinhold Niebuhr: Give me the dignity to accommodate, When accommodation is the only option; Give me the courage to resist, When identity depends upon it; Give me the wisdom to know when to resist and when to accommodate. I suggest a viable gospel posture amid empire.

Out of Babylon

Insurrection: To Believe is Human; to Doubt, Divine

I quite enjoyed Pete Rollins' Insurrection. I feel it's a worthwhile project to try to pick up Dietrich Bonhoeffer's unfinished thinking about religionless Christianity. One of the things I like about Rollins' thinking is his seeming delight in the paradoxical and in exploring oppositions which seem to fold into one another and I think he's right to work with the crucifixion to ground that exploration in the Divine economy.
What emerges then, is a way of approaching faith which takes the experience of life seriously and also is resonant with mystical experience and a worldly-lived spiriituality. Rollins is, I think, an apophatic theologian.

You'll get something of a flavour of that from the quotes I've highlighted -shown below.
Rollins' has roots in what was the Alternative Worship movement and it shows, not least here: "Such a community would need to ritualize the full range of human emotions, bringing radical doubt, ambiguity, mystery, and complexity into the very heart of the liturgical structure itself. "

I enjoyed his comment about the Batman stories in the sense of exposing what bad politics stories can sometimes be: "Batman’s archvillains would have a difficult time carrying out their crimes if they did not have an unlimited number of poor and desperate people to prey upon, people who turn to crime in order to survive and find identity. If Batman spent his time and money supporting a life-giving infrastructure, the crime wave in Gotham might be broken.  [location 2099]"
Somehow that seems to be a message for certain approaches to political economy too, but it rightly alerts us to the power of stories to re-present to us ways to view life and community and can actually make harder contstructive, collaborative and co-operative and real solutions.

the task of working through a circumcision question can never be described as some project in constructive theology; it is a work of pyro-theology.   location 123



the question for us today is whether or not religion is necessary in order to participate fully in the life testified to by Christ.  location 142

perhaps it is not what remains after the fire has died that is true, but rather the fire itself. If so, then we need to take the words of Spanish anarchist Buenaventura Durruti seriously when he boldly declares: The only church that illuminates is a burning one.  location 159

our desire for those we love is not merely superior to all other desires, it is of a fundamentally different kind.  location 214

when we lose the one we love more than life itself, we do not simply lose something we desire; we begin to lose the very ability to desire. In other words, when we lose our beloved, we find that the other things that once tempted us lose their seductive power. Thoughts of promotions, vacations, and new homes lose all of their glittering appeal. A chilling melancholy slowly envelops us, fading our once vibrant world into various shades of gray. In these times, we discover that our beloved is not simply the object of our desire, but the very source of it. In that dark dungeon of despair, we find that the other is the one who invests our activities with meaning and significance.  location 217

the one who invests our activities with meaning and significance.   location 224

Note: attractive vision: appealing. But is bereavement really this? a revelation of the importance of the beloved, yes. but this is overdetermined I think.

it is our beloved’s desire for us that has this luminous effect. We might even still be with the one we love, but if we feel that they no longer love us, we experience the profound pain and suffering described above.  location 228

the most sought after material in the universe is not some precious metal or limited resource but rather the attention of those whom we desire.  location 240

Getting people to believe is easy precisely because it is so natural for us. Any persuasive human can do it—and even make some money in the process. But to truly unplug from the God of religion, with all the anxieties and distress this involves, takes courage. Indeed, one could say that it takes God.  location 406

The Crucifixion, however, stands in opposition to mythology. It is a reflection of the experience in which we lose any sense of being connected with a higher truth or reality. Something we see foreshadowed in the book of Ecclesiastes. Is not the Teacher’s cry, “Meaningless, meaningless, everything is meaningless,” a precursor to Christ’s cry of dereliction on the cross? This event thus speaks of an explosion that fundamentally breaks apart mythology in all of its various forms (spiritual, social, and political).  location 468

All religions have generated their atheistic oppositions, but in the Crucifixion this atheistic opposition is brought into the very heart of the Christian faith. It is no longer to be thought of as a response one makes to faith but is part of that faith’s very expression. As such this negation is not something that we must fight or merely endure; rather, it is something that we must step into and courageously embrace.   location 485

the famous exchange between Elizabeth Anscombe and Ludwig Wittgenstein: It is said that Anscombe commented, “I can understand why people once believed that the sun revolved around the earth.” In response, Wittgenstein said, “Why is that?” Anscombe looked up, pointed to the sky, and said, “Well, it looks like it does.” “Yes, yes,” Wittgenstein replied. “But tell me, what would it look like if it was the other way around?”  location 579

what we see taking place on the Cross? As Christ is cut off from his own essence, so our loss of the religious God is not the loss of some foreign power external to ourselves, but instead a loss of that which is fully us. When we truly participate in the event of the Cross, we (as Number Six) are forsaken by ourselves (cut off from Number One)—we are cut off from the system that we construct and which constructs us.  location 673

In order to participate in the Crucifixion, we must find leaders who openly experience doubt, unknowing, and a deep mystery, leaders who see these as a part of Christian faith and important in our ongoing development of a healthy and properly Christian spirituality. The problem is not that there is a lack of leaders who have these experiences; rather, there is a lack of leaders who can admit to these experiences.  location 1062

We often change our behavior in light of a documentary dealing with some ethical issue, not because we are confronted by something we don’t know, but rather because we are confronted with something we already know but refuse to admit to ourselves. When we are directly confronted by what we know but have refused to admit, we can no longer pretend that we are ignorant.  location 1096

The whole religion industry is thus fueled by our desire to escape suffering and avoid the gnawing sense of meaninglessness. The certainty is marketable because it is a response to our unhappy situation, and it keeps selling because it is ultimately ineffective in properly transforming it. In this way, the religious structure operates in a similar way to how movies functioned during the Great Depression. Despite the poverty, theaters showing musicals, gangster films, and comedies were packed. These films were so popular because they offered people a way of escaping their dire reality for a couple of hours.  location 1128


One other thing to note about the opening anecdote is the way that the only people naïve enough to take the game seriously are those on the outside, the ones watching on in disbelief at what is transpiring. Does this not represent one of the major drawbacks of the New Atheist movement? Their critique misses the mark by attacking the beliefs of people playing the religious game rather than attacking people’s material participation in the game itself. Indeed, some of the major voices in the New Atheist movement express this explicitly when they claim that they have no real problem with people participating in Church life, going on a Sunday to sing and pray, as long as they don’t really believe it all. For the radical Christian, however, belief in God, Jesus, and the various claims of the Church are not where the insidious power of religion lies, but rather in one’s direct material involvement within a structure that uses these beliefs to protect us from facing the difficulties of life. In contrast to the New Atheism, the radical Christian affirms what may be called “a/theism.” A/theism aims to rupture, not the actual beliefs of a person, but the way those beliefs function as a crutch to prevent the individual from actively participating in the difficult challenge of embracing the world. In short, the critique is not concerned with the content of our mind but is aimed directly at our involvement with a game that many of us do not believe in yet continue to support by our participation.  location 1147

Such a community would need to ritualize the full range of human emotions, bringing radical doubt, ambiguity, mystery, and complexity into the very heart of the liturgical structure itself. Hymns would need to delve into absence, sermons excavate doubt, and prayers probe the possibility that no one is on the other side. The structure would need to reflect back the experience of Christ on the Cross in such a way as to invite a direct encounter with that event horizon.  location 1164

Note: interesting -is this why some find northumbria community liturgies hrlpful? Edit
But there will always be those who act more like the critic, those who seek to protect themselves by avoiding full emotional involvement in any liturgical practice that seeks to bring us into contact with our pain and suffering. This type of refusal is something that brings us close to what John Wesley called the experience of being “almost Christian.” In this state of almost-Christian, nothing is missing in terms of our actual beliefs and practice, nothing is missing but the subjective participation itself.  location 1191

Note: but i am not convinced that wesley was on about the same thin

her life reflected that experience of Christ on the Cross, the cry which addressed God while simultaneously testifying to experiencing the absence of God. In this way her belief was not a security blanket that helped her avoid a confrontation with the experience of unknowing. Mother Teresa continued to affirm God at an intellectual level, but she passed through the white-hot fires of forsakeness. She is, as such, a shining example of what it means to enter into the fundamental Christian event of Crucifixion.  location 1229

On the Cross, God as a psychological crutch dies, and we are overtaken by a deeply felt dark night of the soul.   location 1267


Hitler was well known to be a strict vegetarian who avoided alcohol, loved animals, was kind to his staff and enjoyed the company of children. Hitler was likely an interesting person once one got to spend time with him in a more private and intimate setting. This is so difficult for us to accept because we are accustomed to thinking that the truth of a person is discovered best in such a setting. When confronted by the article above, we are forced to acknowledge the dark underbelly of the popular wisdom that an enemy is simply someone whose story you have not heard. What if this is true? What if most people, at a subjective level, are not that different from us and might actually be people we would enjoy spending time with?   location 1408


we must read Resurrection in its full radicality: as the state of being in which one is able to embrace the cold embrace of the Cross. If the Crucifixion marks the moment of darkness, then the Resurrection is the very act of living fully into this darkness and saying “Yes” to it. The faith that is born in Resurrection does not enable us to escape these deeply troubling anxieties; it provides the power to face up to them.  location 1708


In both of these responses (where God is believed to await us in the next life or is something we can encounter here in specific places or states), life as a whole itself is negated, and we are left unable to fully embrace and enjoy it. In religious terms, God is an object who is either totally distant or only present at very specific, highly regulated times.  location 1766

In contrast, we are introduced to a radically different way of understanding God’s presence in the Resurrection. Here we no longer approach God as an object that we love. Indeed, the idea of loving God directly becomes problematic. Instead, we learn that God is present in the very act of love itself. We do not find happiness by renouncing the world and pointing our desire toward the divine, but now we discover the divine in our very act of loving the world. God is loved through the work of love itself (Matthew 18:20, 1 John 4:20). It is in love that we find new meaning, joy, and fulfillment. location 1787


This is why the idea of God being love is such good news. For when we love, we gain what we desire while remaining at a distance from it.   location 1792

love does not stand forth and vie for our attention but rather brings others forth. When we love, our beloved is brought out of the vast, undulating sea of others. Just as the Torah speaks of God calling forth beings from the formless ferment of being, so love calls our beloved out from the endless ocean of undifferentiated objects.  location 1828

This is why religious experience cannot be properly approached as an experience at all. To experience is to encounter something. But in the Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection we discover that God is not something we encounter directly and thus is not some-thing that we experience. Rather, God is that which transforms how we experience everything, i.e., love. God is the name we give to the way of living in which we experience the world as worthy of living for, fighting for, and dying for.  location 1857


what if Resurrection life is marked by the acceptance of our role as creators of destiny rather than mere pawns to be moved around by it? In the Christological frame, the idea of destiny remains, but it is understood as forged through the free acts of those dedicated to the bringing of life. Here destiny no longer refers to some predetermined reality that history conforms to, but rather comes into being through our direct participation in the transformation of the world. In short, we participate in the creation of the eternal itself.  location 1991


Resurrection houses a deep violence, an ethical violence. This is not a violence directed against individuals, but rather a violence against those systems that would oppress, destroy, and bring death. People like Martin Luther King, Jr., in his pacifism express this Christian violence beautifully, for in his nonparticipation in institutionalized racism and uncompromising stance against passive involvement with oppressive norms, he directly expressed an alternative vision of the world. In his seductive picture of a new world and unrelenting quest to see its realization in reality, he ruptured the corrupt systems of power that surrounded him.  location 2054


In order for Bruce Wayne to fund his high-tech, covert military campaign against the criminals of Gotham, he must secretly siphon off vast sums of money from Wayne Industries, the business that he owns. The amount he pours into his work would run into the millions, if not billions. When confronted by this, one must wonder whether it might not be much more effective if he took that money and spent it on developing a strong educational system within the city, setting up training programs for the unemployed, and helping small businesses develop. location 2090

Note: this is a really important point: batman retains the individual against the world myth eschewing collectve effort and collaborative or participatory solutions

Batman’s archvillains would have a difficult time carrying out their crimes if they did not have an unlimited number of poor and desperate people to prey upon, people who turn to crime in order to survive and find identity. If Batman spent his time and money supporting a life-giving infrastructure, the crime wave in Gotham might be broken.  location 2099


What if the Church should be less concerned with creating saints than creating a world where we do not need saints? location 2109

By really changing things, Bruce Wayne might actually create a world where his own lifestyle is challenged. By avoiding these questions, Bruce Wayne is able to look and feel like he is part of the solution when, in his overall material practices, he is really a part of the problem.  location 2114

in the spirit of the text, we must push further: You are all children of God through faith in Christ Jesus, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither high church nor low church, Catholic nor Protestant, citizen nor alien, capitalist nor communist, gay nor straight, beautiful nor ugly, East nor West, theist nor atheist, Israel nor Palestine, American nor Iraqi, married nor divorced, uptown nor downtown, terrorist nor freedom fighter, for all are made one in Christ Jesus.  location 2442

Of course, an opaque biological, socio-symbolic background constitutes us; of course, we cannot forget our gender, sexual preferences, political opinions, nationality, etc. But while being within them, we can find ourselves no longer of them. In other words, we can occupy a space in which they are no longer the absolute horizon. We see them rather than simply see through them. A collective founded upon Crucifixion and Resurrection invites people into the experience of this neither/nor, not by offering signs that point toward this reality (like a road sign), but by offering sacramental and liturgical performances that open up a participation in it.  location 2496

Instead of offering some system of explanation for what had happened, the appropriate response lay in creating a space for deep, honest, and compassionate human interaction. In the same way, it is not the job the community of faith to offer ways of escaping the suffering that is part of being human (namely the anxiety brought about by the sense of death, meaninglessness, and guilt), but rather to form spaces in which it can be acknowledged and worked through. It is a community fully embracing life in all its joy and pain that is faithful to the way of Christ.

Insurrection: To Believe is Human; to Doubt, Divine: Amazon.co.uk: Peter Rollins: Books

The Divine Commodity: Discovering a Faith Beyond Consumer Christianity

Skye Jethani has written a great set of reflections on the way that USAmerican Christians, especially Evangelicals, have been seduced and co-opted by the marketisation of their culture. One of the prima facie odd things about this book is the way that Skye uses Vincent Van Gogh as a way to help us into the key insights he wishes to convey. In fact this works well and helps us to learn about Van Gogh and to retrieve him as a Christian worth listening to for what he can help us to appreciate about Christian responses to culture and social issues.
 There are some good insights into the way that a wrongful assimilation to culture have affected the way we conduct church and worship.
See ...

Quotes and notes

Over a century ago another struggling Christian fled the church to find God in the stars. Vincent van Gogh is remembered for his volatile mental health, severing his ear, and later taking his life. But the tortured artist also had a volatile relationship with Christianity, oscillating between devotion and rejection. At one time his fervor was so intense he became a missionary. Later he announced, “That God of the clergymen, he is for me as dead as a doornail,”1 and called himself “no friend of present-day Christianity.” His paintings and letters show us a man wrestling to synthesize his faith with modern thought. But his struggle was primarily with the institutional church, not Christ. In his final years, as his mental illness became more severe, van Gogh reveals a profound devotion to Jesus while remaining disillusioned with the church. His most celebrated painting from this period, Starry Night, captures this sentiment. The scene of a quiet hamlet beneath a churning sky of stars was composed from his imagination. For this reason Starry Night depicts the vistas of van Gogh’s soul more than the countryside surrounding Saint-Rémy, France. The deep indigo of the sky was used by Vincent to represent the infinite presence of God, and the heavenly bodies are yellow — van Gogh’s color for sacred love. The divine light of the stars is repeated in the village below, every home illuminated with the same yellow warmth. For Vincent, God’s loving presence in the heavens was no less real on the earth. But there is one building in van Gogh’s imaginary village with no light, no divine presence — the church. Its silent darkness speaks van Gogh’s judgment that the institutional church was full of “icy coldness.” Like many people today, van Gogh struggled to find God in the confines of institutional, programmatic religion. Instead, he found himself drawn outside the respectable piety of the church to commune with peasants and prostitutes. And his devotion to Christ was inspired by nature — the radiance of sunflowers, the knuckled contortion of olive trees, and the silent providence of the stars. Rather than visiting the church, van Gogh said, “When I have a terrible need of — shall I say the word — religion, then I go out and paint the stars.” location 135

A more recent painting by pop artist Ron English captures the church’s condition today. A parody of van Gogh’s work, Starry Night Urban Sprawl replaces the original French village with the architecture of consumerism — fast food restaurants and Hollywood icons. The church steeple is crowned with McDonald’s golden arches and King Kong straddles the roof. Unlike van Gogh’s Starry Night, in Ron English’s composition the church is not dark. Light diffuses through every window and door, but it is not the sacred yellow light of the stars above. Instead, the church repeats the electric white light of the franchised stores and restaurants around it. It reflects the values of the earth, not the values of the heavens. This church is a corporation, its outreach is marketing, its worship is entertainment, and its god is a commodity. It is the church of Consumer Christianity. Richard Halverson, former chaplain of the United States Senate, is said to have observed that: In the beginning the church was a fellowship of men and women centered on the living Christ. Then the church moved to Greece, where it became a philosophy. Then it moved to Rome, where it became an institution. Next, it moved to Europe, where it became a culture. And, finally, it moved to America, where it became an enterprise. location 156

Our minds are so captivated by these ideas that we’ve lost the ability to think an alternative thought. As a result, the imagination has become the critical battleground between the kingdom of God and consumerism, and before we can hope to live differently we must have our minds released from consumerism’s grip and captivated again by Christ. As Thomas Kelly contends, before we can live in full obedience to God we must be given a flaming vision of such an existence. This burning image comes to us through our intuitive faculties. “Holy is imagination, the gateway of Reality into our hearts.” location 197

cannot imagine how to carry out the fantastical mission of our leader. Wanting to obey Christ but lacking his imagination, we reinterpret the mission of the church through the only framework comprehendible to us — the one we’ve inherited from our consumer culture. location 299

who dismissed Jesus’ words, they had eyes but they could not see. Vincent believed the ability to perceive the unseen was achieved only by the grace of God. He wrote, “You need a certain dose of inspiration, a ray from on high, that is not in ourselves, in order to do beautiful things.” location 425

the Gospels are dominated by Jesus telling stories and weaving parables. He used these verbal Trojan horses to sneak radical truths past his listeners’ defenses and into the chamber where their imaginations slumbered. And as they began to awaken, Jesus’ stories illuminated a new vision of the world. They disentangled reality for his listeners, and his disciples slowly perceived the kingdom of God that Jesus saw all around him. It was a kingdom that defied the conventionality of his day. location 458

If we are to effectively make disciples of Jesus Christ and teach them to obey everything he commanded, we cannot neglect the imagination. Knowledge and skills are important, but neither will be employable if the mind is still imprisoned by the conventionality of the surrounding culture. location 476

Who would want an uncontrollable, mysterious, and holy God when you could have a genie in a Bible? location 632

Sometimes amnesia can be very convenient. Without awareness of one’s story or context a person can be whomever and whatever he or she desires with no worry of repercussion. Without context there is no responsibility. location 730

items are rarely packaged to convey the story of their creation or the human lives impacted by their production. Instead the packaging reinforces our consumer amnesia by appealing only to our desires. Marketing actively discourages shoppers from contemplating where items come from, nor do we want to. We simply want to buy them, use them, enjoy them, and discard them with no larger responsibility. location 746

a brand is a manufactured idea that infiltrates the imagination. location 898

Colin Bates, a marketing expert, says “a brand is a collection of perceptions in the mind of the consumer.” location 898

Nothing in the commercials explicitly communicates PC users are dullards or klutzes, but that is the power of branding. It triggers the imaginative ability of the mind to make these associations automatically. Branding has allowed Apple to become a seller of identity and not merely computers. location 944

Should it scare me that my five-year-old has memorized more corporate brands than prayers, Bible verses, or even names of relatives? location 980

Ford and Pizza Hut spend millions of dollars marketing in preschools?18 Three- and four-year-olds cannot order a pizza or buy a car, but by planting a branded seed in the kids’ imaginations and associating it with positive feelings, these corporations hope to reap the fruit when these children begin to form their identities as teenagers. This sort of brand marketing has been so effective that the average ten-year-old has already memorized between 300 and 400 brands. location 987

After studying recent Social Security records he’s reported an increase in the number of children named after popular brands. location 994
Note: of ccourse thisshould be reflected on in the light that conventional names are often saints ...

Brands are the little gods of modern life, each ruling a different need, activity, mood, or situation. Yet you’re in control. If your latest god falls from Olympus, you can switch to another one. location 1014

appears that God’s people are constructing and expressing their identity through the consumption of Christ-branded products. As Mark Riddle observes, “Conversion in the U.S. seems to mean we’ve exchanged some of our shopping at Wal-Mart, Blockbuster, and Borders for the Christian Bookstore down the street. location 1019

becoming synonymous with “unclean” or “heathen.” Because the absence of a foreskin carried so much meaning in the ancient world, in a real way it was the prototype religious brand — location 1071

When the church gets into the business of staging experiences, that quickly becomes idolatry. MS: I’m stunned. So you don’t encourage churches to use your elements of marketable experiences to create attractive experiences for their attenders? Gilmore: No. The organized church should never try to stage a God experience. location 1383

We’ve come to regard our church buildings, with their multimedia theatrical equipment, as mountaintops where God’s glory resides and may be encountered by mere mot-als. location 1503

Others may simply be carried along by the music, crowd, and energy of the room. Whether a result of God or group, what is beyond question is that many people depart feeling spiritually rejuvenated and capable of taking on life for another six days. The problem with these external experiences, as Moses discovered, is that the transformation doesn’t last. In a few days time, or maybe as early as Sunday lunch, the glory begins to fade. The mountaintop experience with God — the event you were certain would change your life forever — turns out to be another fleeting spiritual high. And to hide the lack of genuine transformation, we mask the inglorious truth of our lives behind a veil, a façade of Christian piety, until we can ascend the mountain again and be recharged. location 1510

Far more energy is poured into the Sunday morning experience than actually equipping people to internally experience God throughout their “common business.” location 1596

from a smiling Quaker man, or syrup from Aunt Jemima? Through branding corporations came to possess names, faces, and even personalities. They became people in the public’s imagination just as they had gained personhood in the courts. Advertising has formed us to give our affection not only to the products we consume, but also to the personified corporations that supply them. location 1757

Through branding a church differentiates itself from all the others offering the same basic product — God. After all, in a competitive religious market the goal is not simply for believers to be dedicated to God, but to the particular institution who supplies him. location 1776

people became, the more dissatisfied they were with the church. In fact, those recognized to be the most Christ-centered were the least enthusiastic about engaging church programs. Rather than a utilitarian ocean liner transporting them closer to God, the church was seen as a lumbering cruise ship full of entertaining distractions, and the more mature Christians were eager to get off. location 1989

In less than a century, Christians have gone from opposing over-consumption at Christmas to demanding it be done in Christ’s name alone. location 2069

Ads became the prophets of consumerism — turning the imaginations of the people toward the goods they didn’t know they wanted. location 2096

a consumer culture designed to keep adults thinking, and buying, like children. Maturity and rationality are the enemies of our desire-based economy. As Benjamin Barber says, “For consumer capitalism to prevail you must make kids consumers and make consumers kids.” location 2144

The ideal consumer remains a child from the womb to the tomb. location 2150

The dilemma posed by consumerism is not the endless manufacturing of desires, but the temptation to settle for desires far below what we were created for. The forces of marketing have captured our imaginations and convinced us to desire mud pies and sneer at the possibility that greater pleasures even exist. We have been reprogrammed to desire immediate satisfaction rather than infinite satisfaction. location 2223

The redemptive affect of sorrow, its power to redirect our desires from the immediate to the infinite, was the subject of an English sermon van Gogh delivered in 1876: Sorrow is better than joy . . . for by the sadness of the countenance, the heart is made better. Our nature is sorrowful, but for those who have learnt and are learning to look at Jesus Christ, there is always reason to rejoice. It is a good word, that of St. Paul: as being sorrowful yet always rejoicing. For those who believe in Jesus Christ, there is no death or sorrow that is not mixed with hope — no despair — there is only a constant being born again, a constantly going from darkness into light. location 2272

Perhaps the complicated interplay of sorrow and joy he recognized in Gethsemane eluded even his artistic brilliance. In 1889, his friends Gauguin and Bernard sent him photographs of their paintings of Christ in the Garden ofOlives. Vincent said the paintings “got on my nerves” perhaps for the same reason he abandoned his own attempt. They could depict Jesus’ suffering, but not the inner joy that led him to accept the Father’s will. Rather than painting Jesus in Gethsemane, Vincent used the olive trees themselves to illustrate the truth of the story. He believed “that one can try to give an impression of anguish without aiming straight at the historic Garden of Gethsemane.”26 Instead, he saw in the contorted trees a representation of Christ’s pain. By giving the olive trees a vaguely human form van Gogh hoped to “make people think” more than if he had depicted Jesus explicitly. In this way the trees could be the symbol of Jesus’ pain as well as his own. location 2292

This kind of pain comes in two varieties — there is suffering we don’t choose, which is often referred to in the New Testament as a “trial,” and there is suffering we do choose, which we call a “discipline.” location 2325

The table of Christ confronts and abolishes our consumer tendencies. It mocks our desire for comfortable community, and it abolishes the principle of homogeneity because we come to the table of Christ as guests and not the host. We have no control or authority over who is invited. Instead we are asked to surrender control and simply take our seat with the other wounded souls redeemed by the broken body and shed blood of Jesus. location 2655

In Starry Night the golden light of the heavens, his color for divine love, is not seen in the church building. Instead, he reserves this sacred hue for the houses of his imaginary village. location 2736

“The structure of the suburb tends to confine people to their houses and cars; it discourages strolling, walking, mingling with neighbors. The suburb is the last word in privatization, perhaps even its lethal consummation, and it spells the end of authentic civic life.” location 2757

Note: this may relate to Actor Network Theory but in any case tells how physical non human stuff affects culture and organisation of humans

In many ways the suburb is the topological manifestation of consumerism, the ethos of commodification lived out in architectural form. Suburban living means dividing life into clearly discernable parts. Professional, recreational, industrial, and residential activities each have their zone. These zones are connected by roads where we drive alone in our cars, minivans, or SUVs. Socioeconomic zones are separated by neighborhoods and school districts. Family zones are demarcated by fences. And within the home, family members are zoned into private bedrooms — each with a television, Internet connection, and telephone. The suburb, like the consumer worldview from which it came, forms us to live fragmented and isolated lives of private consumption. location 2761

most homes are set as far back from public spaces, the street and sidewalk, as possible. The rooms facing the street tend to be the spaces we use least — the formal living room or dining room. The spaces where real life happens, the kitchen and family room, are hidden in the back. Outdoor recreation is also confined to the back of the house, usually behind a fence. Everything about suburban home design communicates to the passerby, “Leave me alone!” location 2774

With no real sense of self apart from our possessions and preferences, every telephone ring, knock at the door, or alert from our inbox is not welcomed as a human-to-human connection, but merely an attempt to invade our personal zone to take some commodified part of “me” away. We instinctually assume that every stranger we meet has a hidden agenda. In our society it has become altogether implausible for anyone to be genuinely interested in us. location 2792

we aren’t actually interacting with real people online but “phantoms.” The medium allows us to abandon real identities to become whoever we want, or whoever we think people want us to. location 2798

Note: this may relate to the idea that in corporisations we are roles rather tha whole people. Do we transfer that or is something else going on? cf also I and Thou and the Secular City

Van Gogh’s painting from 1888 is clearly modeled from Millet’s work, but the sower neither fills the canvas nor dominates the composition. Instead, Vincent’s painting is dominated by a radiant citron-yellow sun that saturates the sky with light. We know from his letters to his friends that van Gogh used yellow light and the sun to represent God. It is Christ who dominates his Sower painting, rather than the humble servant in the field. location 3229

Van Gogh’s painting reminds us that we have a role to play, but we are minor actors in a much larger cosmic drama. Our work certainly matters, but probably not as much as we’d like to think — because ultimately the outcome of our labor is not in our hands. We work, and the world is changed, but exactly how this spiritual impact occurs remains a mystery. location 3237

Rather than abandoning the outcomes to God, we’ve been formed to judge a ministry’s legitimacy, and our own, based on measurable outcomes. The most common are referred to as the ABCs of ministry: attendance, buildings, and cash. If these three factors are increasing, we assume that our ministry is effective, our church is legitimate, and our community is blessed. But what if Jesus, Paul, and Vincent are right? What if the outcome of our labor is beyond our control? What if we are not the primary agents behind bountiful growth or its absence? What if we stopped judging ourselves and others based on outcomes which rightfully belong to God, and rediscovered the humility of the sower — the one who rises day and night, casts the seed upon the ground, and marvels as it grows? location 3257

The shock-and-awe approach to mission is extremely appealing to people shaped by consumerism. location 3278

we ask, How does Coca-Cola impact the world? How does Disney impact the world? How does Starbucks impact the world? And we forget to ask the only question that really matters: How does Jesus impact the world? location 3286

We have incorrectly made the scale of our methods conform to the scale of our mission. location 3288

God’s plan to redeem creation (big) is achieved through his incarnation as an impoverished baby (small). Jesus feeds thousands on a hillside (big) with just a few fish and loaves (small). Christ seeks to make disciples of all nations (big) but he starts with a handful of fishermen (small). Even Goliath (big) is defeated by David with a few stones (small). location 3302

Phil Vischer came to embrace the counterintuitive wisdom of God after losing his Daisy Cutter dream. He now advises other followers of Christ to embrace a mustard seed approach to changing the world: location 3313

The premise of this book has been that the Christian imagination must be free to sing a new song before the world can hear our music. This requires a process of deconstruction and reconstruction: Deconstructing our commodified view of God, and reconstructing a sense of wonder through silence. Deconstructing our branded identities, and reconstructing identities rooted in faith through love. Deconstructing our attempts at transformation through external events, and reconstructing internal transformation through prayer. Deconstructing our devotion to institutions as God’s vessels, and reconstructing relationships with our brothers and sisters in Christ. Deconstructing our unceasing pursuit of pleasure, and reconstructing the redemptive power of suffering through fasting. Deconstructing our contentment with segregation, and reconstructing the unity of all people through the cross. Deconstructing the individualism pushed by consumerism, and reconstructing our love for strangers through hospitality. All of this razing and building begins in our own imaginations. location 3330

the recommendations in this book have been primarily personal disciplines to awaken and transform, rather than calls for changes within the church. Silence, prayer, fasting, love, hospitality, and friendship — these are what I need to loosen consumerism’s hold on me. And it is only when minds are illuminated, imaginations set free, and wounds healed, one by one, that real transformation can come to the church. location 3390


The Divine Commodity: Discovering a Faith Beyond Consumer Christianity: Amazon.co.uk: Zondervan: Books

The Social Animal: A Story of How Success Happens

I found this a really interesting book; a great combination of psychological research and interpretation through a narrative following two people through their lives from birth to death -the latter part of which I found quite moving -I had to brush tears away from my eyes as I read it on the bus! One of the things I liked about it was the authors sympathetic agnostic stance with regard to religion and spirituality -it is recognised as a part of life for at least some people and the results of the research are not given the 'nothing but' treatment with regard to religion. That's not to say interpreting things in a way that takes a Christian or similar view of ultimate reality is really in view in the book, just that it isn't discounted and room is made for it as a possibility. Perhaps more than a possibility; through one of the characters we follow, we get this reflection: "The brain was physical meat, but out of the billions of energy pulses emerged spirit and soul. There must be some supreme creative energy, he thought, that can take love and turn it into synapses and then take a population of synapses and turn it into love. The hand of God must be there."  (location 6004)

I would say that this book is a really good way into find out what kind of picture modern psychological research is giving us of what it means to be human. Headlines on that -far more socially determined than Enlightenment rationalism allowed for and far more emotionally driven than we've tended to think. One of the things that this book does, though, is not to lament that our consciousness and rationality are but a small part of what makes us up, but rather to show how without the substrate of social and emotional and unconcious 'processing' of information, we couldn't have consciousness at all.

I actually don't have any problem with this as a Christian. It seems to me that taking seriously the affirmation of a Hebraic wholistic assessment of being human would lead us to expect that being human would involve the somatic and that necessarily implicates the emotional and unconscious. It well behoves us to try to understand how that makes us tick.

Here are some quotes and notes from the book.

And a core finding of their work is that we are not primarily the products of our conscious thinking. We are primarily the products of thinking that happens below the level of awareness.   location 62

the human mind can take in 11 million pieces of information at any given moment. The most generous estimate is that people can be consciously aware of forty of these. “Some researchers,” Wilson notes, “have gone so far as to suggest that the unconscious mind does virtually all the work and that conscious will may be an illusion.” The conscious mind merely confabulates stories that try to make sense of what the unconscious mind is doing of its own accord.    location 67

If the outer mind highlights the power of the individual, the inner mind highlights the power of relationships and the invisible bonds between people. If the outer mind hungers for status, money, and applause, the inner mind hungers for harmony and connection—those moments when self-consciousness fades away and a person is lost in a challenge, a cause, the love of another or the love of God.    location 79

If the conscious mind is like a general atop a platform, who sees the world from a distance and analyzes things linearly and linguistically, the unconscious mind is like a million little scouts. The scouts careen across the landscape, sending back a constant flow of signals and generating instant responses. They maintain no distance from the environment around them, but are immersed in it. They scurry about, interpenetrating other minds, landscapes, and ideas.    location 81

My note: this sounds like a corporisation: perhaps this gives us a way into understnding them? Recognising ourselves as pluriformed creatures and our thinking as multitudinous may help us to get a sense of fellow-feeling with corporisations.

These signals don’t control our lives, but they shape our interpretation of the world   location 88

the philosophic implications in simple terms, the French Enlightenment, which emphasized reason, loses; the British Enlightenment, which emphasized sentiments, wins.    location 107

The conscious mind writes the autobiography of our species. Unaware of what is going on deep down inside, the conscious mind assigns itself the starring role. It gives itself credit for performing all sorts of tasks it doesn’t really control. It creates views of the world that highlight.   location 112

Note: As I read that I'm wondering if this is describing the tragedy of executive management when translated into corporised key: They overidentify themselves with the organisation and create a 'them' out of other workers/members and buying their own myth of control when in fact there is far more down to good fortune, morale, and factors that are actually unknown.

 when you look deeper into the unconscious, the separations between individuals begin to get a little fuzzy.   location 156

We become who we are in conjunction with other people becoming who they are.  location 158

We are junctions where millions of sensations, emotions, and signals interpenetrate every second. We are communications centers, and through some process we are not close to understanding, we have the ability to partially govern this traffic—to shift attention from one thing to another, to choose and commit.   location 162

The unconscious is not merely a dark, primitive zone of fear and pain. It is also a place where spiritual states arise and dance from soul to soul. It collects the wisdom of the ages. It contains the soul of the species. This book will not try to discern God’s role in all this. But if there is a divine creativity, surely it is active in this inner soulsphere, where brain matter produces emotion, where love rewires the neurons.   location 179

Centuries ago, members of the educated class discovered that they could no longer compete in football, baseball, and basketball, so they stole lacrosse from the American Indians to give them something to dominate.   location 208

Members of the Composure Class spend much of their adult lives going into rooms and making everybody else feel inferior.    location 214

The use of the word “boob” was a source of subliminal annoyance to him, because that undignified word did not deserve to be used in connection with so holy a form, and he sensed it was used, mostly by women, to mock his deep fixation.   location 251

People generally overestimate how distinct their own lives are,  location 325

As Geoffrey Miller notes in The Mating Mind, people tend to choose spouses of similar intelligence, and the easiest way to measure someone else’s intelligence is through their vocabulary.   location 327

Courtship largely consists of sympathy displays, in which partners try to prove to each other how compassionate they can be, as anybody who has seen dating couples around children and dogs can well attest.   location 372

(Women resist dating outside their ethnic group much more than men do.)  location 381

Note: how culturally compensated is this? Edit

People who lack emotion don’t lead well-planned logical lives in the manner of coolly rational Mr. Spocks. They lead foolish lives. In the extreme cases, they become sociopaths,  location 455

“somatic marker hypothesis,” on the role of emotion in human cognition.  location 457

Emotion assigns value to things, and reason can only make choices on the basis of those valuations.  location 492

as Nobel Laureate Gerald Edelman put it, the brain looks like an ecosystem, a fantastically complex associative network of firings, patterns, reactions, and sensations all communicating with and responding to different parts of the brain and all competing for a piece of control over the organism.   location 496

Note: this would be an interesting way to try to reimagine corporisations.

The average baby demands adult attention of one kind or another every twenty seconds. New mothers lose an average of seven hundred hours of sleep during that first year. Marital satisfaction plummets 70 percent, while the risk of maternal depression more than doubles. At the merest hint of discomfort Harold could let out a piercing scream that could leave Julia weeping in hysterics and Rob angry and miserable.  location 698

women who give birth to boys have shorter life expectancies because the boys’ testosterone can compromise their immune system.  location 710

babies organize their internal states by seeing their own minds reflected back at them in the faces of others.   location 729

Mammal brains grow properly only when they are able to interpenetrate with another.  location 735

Harold didn’t talk. They got to know each other largely through touch, tears, looks, smell, and laughter. Julia had always assumed that meanings and concepts came through language, but now she realized that it was possible to have a complex human relationship without words.  location 748

people aren’t cold theorizers who are making judgments about other creatures. They are unconscious Method actors who understand by sharing or at least simulating the responses they see in the people around them. We’re able to function in a social world because we partially permeate each other’s minds and understand—some people more, some people less.   location 756

laughter seems to bubble up spontaneously amidst conversation when people feel themselves responding in parallel ways to the same emotionally positive circumstances.  location 812

laughter and solidarity go together. As Steven Johnson has written, “Laughing is not an instinctive physical response to humor, the way a flinch responds to pain or a shiver to cold. It’s an instinctive form of social bonding that humor is crafted to exploit.”   location 816

People are born into relationships—with parents, with ancestors—and those relationships create people. Or, to put it a different way, a brain is something that is contained within a single skull. A mind only exists within a network.  location 824

Coleridge once observed, “Ere yet a conscious self exists, the love begins; and the first love is love of another.   location 827

Rob was like a warthog in a frolic of gazelles. Their imaginations danced while his plodded. They saw good and evil while he saw plastic and metal. After five minutes, their emotional intensity produced a dull ache in the back of his head. He was exhausted trying to keep up.  location 1009

Note: it strikes me that this shows something about the task of countering the myths peddled via action films etc. how do we join in or shape or counter the emo force in our liturgy and formation?

With the onset of puberty, humans enter a period of ruthless synaptic pruning. As a result of this tumult, teenagers’ mental capacities don’t improve in a straight line. In some studies, fourteen-years-olds are less adept at recognizing other people’s emotions than nine-year-olds. It takes a few more years of growth.  location 1410

and stability before they finally catch up with their former selves.  location 1412

large body of research shows that people retain information better when they alternate from setting to setting. The different backgrounds stimulate the mind and create denser memory webs.  location 1502

The human brain is built to take conscious knowledge and turn it into unconscious knowledge. location 1512

That frees up the conscious mind to work on new things. Alfred North Whitehead saw this learning process as a principle of progress: “Civilization advances by extending the number of operations which we can perform without thinking about them.”  location 1515

Note: but we need to be aware of which are automated thus and which not and also in relation to corporisations what the corporisation automates for its human constituents and which it requires them to think consciously about.

reach and reciprocity. Start with the core knowledge in a field, then venture out and learn something new. Then come back and reintegrate the new morsel with what you already know. Then venture out again. Then return. Back and forth. Again and again. As Ogle argues, too much reciprocity and you wind up in an insular rut. Too much reach and your efforts are scattershot and fruitless.  location 1524

the expert doesn’t think more about a subject, she thinks less. She doesn’t have to compute the effects of a range of possibilities. Because she has domain expertise, she anticipates how things will fit together.   location 1551

should give his mind time to connect things in different ways. He should think about other things and allow insights to pop into his head. The brain doesn’t really need much conscious pushing to do this. It is such an anticipation machine, it is always and automatically trying to build patterns out of data.  location 1559

There’s a controversy among scientists about what sleep accomplishes, but many researchers believe that during sleep the brain consolidates memories, organizes the things that have been learned that day, and reinforces the changes in the brain that have been ushered in by the previous day’s activity.  location 1642

Ms. Taylor had guided Harold through a method that had him surfing in and out of his unconscious, getting the conscious and unconscious processes to work together—first mastering core knowledge, then letting that knowledge marinate playfully in his mind, then willfully trying to impose order on it, then allowing the mind to consolidate and merge the data, then returning and returning until some magical insight popped into his consciousness, and then riding that insight to a finished product. The process was not easy, but each ounce of effort and each moment of frustration and struggle pushed the internal construction project another little step. By the end, he was seeing the world around him in a new way.  location 1687

The people in the poorer neighborhoods wanted the same things as everybody else wanted—stable marriages, good jobs, orderly habits. But they lived within a cycle of material and psychological stress. Lack of money changed culture, and self-destructive culture led to lack of money. The mental and material feedback loops led to distinct psychological states. Some people in these neighborhoods had lower aspirations or no aspirations at all. Some had lost faith in their ability to control their own destinies. Some made inexplicable decisions that they knew would have terrible long-term consequences, but they made them anyway.   location 1780

Annette Lareau, of the University of Pennsylvania, is the leading scholar of the different cultural norms that prevail at different levels of American society. She and her research assistants have spent over two decades sitting on living-room floors and riding around in the backseats of cars, observing how families work. Lareau has found that educated-class families and lower-class families do not have parenting styles that are on different ends of the same continuum. Instead, they have completely different theories and models about how to raise their kids.   location 1796

study by Betty Hart and Todd Risley of the University of Kansas found that by the time they are four, children raised in poor families have heard 32 million fewer words than children raised in professional families. On an hourly basis, professional children heard about 487 “utterances.” Children growing up in welfare homes heard about 178.    location 1823

poverty is an emergent system.   location 1854

Emergent systems exist when different elements come together and produce something that is greater than the sum of their parts. Or, to put it differently, the pieces of a system interact, and out of their interaction something entirely new emerges.  location 1864

marriage is an emergent system. Francine Klagsbrun has observed that when a couple comes in for marriage therapy, there are three patients in the room—the husband, the wife, and the marriage itself. The marriage is the living history of all the things that have happened between husband and wife. Once the precedents are set, and have permeated both brains, the marriage itself begins to shape their individual behavior. Though it exists in the space between them, it has an influence all its own.  location 1885
Note: this is so remniscent of some social Trinitarian  theology. It seems to give a way of thinking about corporisations that links them to the image of God.

easier to change your environment than to change your insides.  location 1936

Some researchers distinguish between dandelion children and orchid children. Dandelion kids are more even-tempered and hardier. They’ll do pretty well wherever you put them. Orchid children are more variable. They can bloom spectacularly in the right setting or wither pitifully in the wrong.   location 2061

self-control is twice as important as IQ in predicting high-school performance,   location 2078

evidence suggests reason and will are like muscles, and not particularly powerful muscles. In some cases and in the right circumstances, they can resist temptation and control the impulses. But in many cases they are simply too weak to impose self-discipline by themselves. In many cases self-delusion takes control.   location 2139

The research of the past thirty years suggests that some people have taught themselves to perceive more skillfully than others. The person with good character has taught herself, or been taught by those around her, to see situations in the right way. When she sees something in the right way, she’s rigged the game. She’s triggered a whole network of unconscious judgments and responses in her mind, biasing her to act in a certain manner. Once the game has been rigged, then reason and will have a much easier time. They will be up to the task of guiding proper behavior.   location 2146

Aristotle was right when he observed, “We acquire virtues by first having put them into action.” The folks at Alcoholics Anonymous put the sentiment more practically, with their slogan “Fake it until you make it.” Timothy Wilson of the University of Virginia puts it more scientifically: “One of the most enduring lessons of social psychology is that behavior change often precedes changes in attitude and feelings.”  location 2170

The key factor separating geniuses from the merely accomplished is not a divine spark. Instead, what really matters is the ability to get better and better gradually over time.  location 2275

study by Ulrike Malmendier and Geoffrey Tate found that CEOs get less effective as they become more famous and receive more awards.  location 2313

When shown a picture of a chicken, a cow, and some grass and asked to categorize the objects, American students generally lump the chicken and the cow because they are both animals. Chinese students are more likely to lump the cow and the grass because cows eat grass, and so have a relationship with it. When asked to describe their day, American six-year-olds make three times more references to themselves than Chinese six-year-olds.  location 2372

Elite universities are great inequality machines. They are nominally open to all applicants regardless of income. They have lavish financial-aid packages for those who cannot afford to pay. But the reality is that the competition weeds out most of those who are not from the upper middle class.   location 2439

You can teach a chimpanzee sign language, but the chimp won’t teach sign language to his fellows or to his children so that they might talk to one another.   location 2476

Culture is a collection of habits, practices, beliefs, arguments, and tensions that regulates and guides human life. Culture transmits certain practical solutions to everyday problems—how to avoid poisonous plants, how to form successful family structures. Culture also, as Roger Scruton has observed, educates the emotions. It consists of narratives, holidays, symbols, and works of art that contain implicit and often unnoticed messages about how to feel, how to respond, how to divine meaning. An individual human mind couldn’t handle the vast variety of fleeting stimuli that are thrust before it. We can function in the world only because we are embedded in the scaffold of culture. We absorb ethnic cultures, institutional cultures, regional cultures, which do most of our thinking for us.  location 2482

We use intelligence to structure our environment so that we can succeed with less intelligence. Our brains make the world smart so that we can be dumb in peace! Or, to look at it another way, it is the human brain plus these chunks of external scaffolding that finally constitutes the smart, rational inference engine we call mind.  location 2495

book Drunken Comportment, Craig MacAndrew and Robert B. Edgerton found that in some cultures drunken men get into fights, but in some cultures they almost never do. In some cultures drunken men grow more amorous, but in some cultures they do not.  location 2515

Thomas Sowell, who wrote a series of books called Race and Culture, Migrations and Cultures, and Conquests and Cultures that told her some of the things she needed to know. Erica knew she was supposed to disapprove of Sowell. All her teachers did. But his descriptions jibed with the world she saw around her every day. “Cultures do not exist as simply static ‘differences,’ to be celebrated,” Sowell wrote. They “compete with one another as better and worse ways of getting things done—better and worse, not from the standpoint of some observer, but from the standpoint of the peoples themselves, as they cope and aspire amid the gritty realities of life.”  location 2541

Society isn’t defined by classes, as the Marxists believe. It’s not defined by racial identity. And it’s not a collection of rugged individualists, as some economic and social libertarians believe. Instead, Erica concluded, society is a layering of networks.  location 2582

In a few special cases, it’s love. But in most workplaces, and most social groups, the bonds are not that passionate. Most relationships are bound by trust.  location 2591

Trust is habitual reciprocity that becomes coated by emotion. It grows when two people begin volleys of communication and cooperation and slowly learn they can rely upon each other. Soon members of a trusting relationship become willing to not only cooperate with each other but sacrifice for each other.  location 2592

a person crosses the IQ threshold of 120, there is little relationship between more intelligence and better performance. A person with a 150 IQ is in theory much smarter than a person with a 120 IQ, but those additional 30 points produce little measurable benefit when it comes to lifetime success.  location 2739

excel in the real world, intelligence has to be nestled in certain character traits and dispositions.   location 2748

one of the great temptations of modern research is that it tries to pretend that every phenomenon is a clock, which can be evaluated using mechanical tools and regular techniques.  location 2763

Raw intelligence is useful for helping you solve well-defined problems. Mental character helps you figure out what kind of problem you have in front of you and what sort of rules you should use to address  location 2766

Wisdom doesn’t consist of knowing specific facts or possessing knowledge of a field. It consists of knowing how to treat knowledge: being confident but not too confident; adventurous but grounded. It is a willingness to confront counterevidence and to have a feel for the vast spaces beyond what’s known.  location 2793

They used the phrase “corporate culture” with reverence. But still the concept had no concreteness to them. They had been trained to master spreadsheets and numbers. They couldn’t quite bring themselves to take sociological or anthropological categories seriously. To them it was like molding air. t location 2882

classical economics got human nature partially or largely wrong. The human being imagined by classical economics is smooth, brilliant, calm, and perpetually unastonished by events. He surveys the world with a series of uncannily accurate models in his head, anticipating what will come next. His memory is incredible; he is capable of holding a myriad of decision-making options in his mind, and of weighing the trade-offs involved in each one. He knows exactly what he wants and never flip-flops between two contradictory desires. He seeks to maximize his utility (whatever that is). His relationships are all contingent, contractual, and ephemeral. If one relationship is not helping him maximize his utility, then he trades up to another. He has perfect self-control and can restrain impulses that may prevent him from competing. He doesn’t get caught up in emotional contagions or groupthink, but makes his own decisions on the basis of incentives.   location 2931

Rationality is bounded by emotion. People have a great deal of trouble exercising self-control. They perceive the world in biased ways. They are profoundly influenced by context. They are prone to groupthink. Most of all, people discount the future; we allow present satisfaction to blot out future prosperity.  location 2947

stray intuitions, such as a sense of fairness, have powerful economic effects. Pay scales are not only set by what the market will bear. People demand salaries that seem fair, and managers have to take these moral intuitions into account when setting pay scales.  location 2953

There used to be four life phases—childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and old age. Now there are at least six—childhood, adolescence, odyssey, adulthood, active retirement, and old age. Odyssey is the decade of wandering that occurs between adolescence and adulthood.   location 3125

Researchers have done a lot of work over the past few years analyzing social networks. It turns out almost everything is contagious. If your friends are obese, you are more likely to be obese. If your friends are happy, you’re more likely to be happy. If your friends smoke, you smoke. If they feel lonely, you feel lonely. In fact, Nicholas Christakis and James H. Fowler have found that a person’s friends have more influence on whether he or she will be obese than a person’s spouse.  location 3183

If the relationship between money and happiness is complicated, the relationship between social bonds and happiness is not. The deeper the relationships a person has, the happier he or she will be. People in long-term marriages are much happier than people who aren’t. According to one study, being married produces the same psychic gain as earning $100,000 a year. According to another, joining a group that meets even just once a month produces the same happiness gain as doubling your income.  location 3232

a happy life has its recurring set of rhythms: difficulty to harmony, difficulty to harmony. And it is all propelled by the desire for limerence, the desire for the moment when the inner and outer patterns mesh.  location 3411

The desire for limerence drives us to seek perfection in our crafts. Sometimes, when we are absorbed in some task, the skull barrier begins to disappear. An expert rider feels at one with the rhythms of the horse she is riding. A carpenter merges with the tool in his hands. A mathematician  matician loses herself in the problem she is solving. In these sublime moments, internal and external patterns are meshing and flow is achieved.  location 3420

We all feel a surge of pleasure when some clarifying theory clicks into place. location 3424

we spend much of the first halves of our lives trying to build internal models that fit the world and much of the last halves trying to adjust the world so it fits the inner models.  location 3425

The Greeks saw eros as a generalized longing for union with the beautiful and the excellent.   location 3476

They were cutting off her contract, and they didn’t want to cause her pain by telling her, so they just withdrew. Erica began to recognize the dishonesty of niceness. The desire to not cause pain was just an unwillingness to have an unpleasant conversation. It was cowardice, not consideration.   location 3515

The conscious level gives itself credit for things it really didn’t do and confabulates tales to create the illusion it controls things it really doesn’t determine.  location 3571

Half of all students at Penn State said they would make a stink if somebody made a sexist comment in their presence. When researchers arranged for   location 3580

analyzed over sixty-six thousand trades from discount broker accounts. The traders who were the most confident did the most trades and underperformed the overall market.   location 3589

Scientism is taking the principles of rational inquiry, stretching them without limit, and excluding any factor that doesn’t fit the formulas.  location 3694

Lionel Trilling diagnosed the problem in The Liberal Imagination when he noted that so long as politics or commerce “moves toward organization, it   location 3708

Forced to cut costs, they first cut every single practice that might have fostered personal bonds. For example, they took the company phone number off the Web site so it was nearly impossible for a customer with a problem to call and talk to a human being. They eliminated all the company gatherings that used to build camaraderie. They cut office space. Some people who had worked for decades to get a real office now found themselves in ego-destroying cubicles. t location 3739

They saw sliding revenues as a call to enact all their experiments. The launched off on a hyperactive process of reorganization and restructuring.   location 3746

Erica learned there were others in the company just as disgusted as she was—a lot of them, actually. They set up a dissident underground. They had a samizdat network   location 3774

Leaders of the British Enlightenment acknowledged the importance of reason. They were not irrationalists. But they believed that individual reason is limited and of secondary importance. “Reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them,” David Hume wrote. “We are generally men of untaught feelings,” Edmund Burke asserted. “We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason, because we suspect that this stock in each man is small.”  location 3811

Whereas the children of the French Enlightenment tended to see society and its institutions as machines, to be taken apart and reengineered, children of the British Enlightenment tended to see them as organisms, infinitely complex networks of living relationships. In their view, it’s often a mistake to dissect a problem into discrete parts because the truth is found in the nature of the connections between the things you are studying.  location 3826

Memory doesn’t actually retrieve information. It reweaves it.  location 3853

researchers asked young men to walk across a rickety bridge in British Columbia. Then, while their hearts were still thumping from the frightening bridge, a young woman approached them to fill out a questionnaire. She gave them her phone number, under the pretext of doing further research. Sixty-five percent of the men from the bridge called her later and asked for a date. Only 30 percent of the men she approached while they were sitting on a bench called later. The bridge guys were so energized by the rickety bridge, they attributed their excitement to the woman who met them on the other side.  location 3868

Measured at its highest potential, the conscious mind still has a processing capacity 200,000 times weaker than the unconscious.  location 3902

sometimes situations are ambiguous and it is useful to be flexible. The unconscious is quick to make generalizations and to project stereotypes. Well, daily life would be impossible if you didn’t rely on generalizations   location 3904

If you read people an argument while you ask them to move their arms in a “pushing away” direction, they will be more hostile to the argument than if you read it to them while they are making a “pulling in” movement.   location 3914

Unconscious thought can take in many more factors. It naturally weighs the importance of various factors as they come into view. It restlessly scurries about—many parallel processes at a time—as the conscious mind is busy with other things, trying to match new situations with old models or trying to rearrange the pieces of a problem until they create a harmonious whole.  location 3987

Intuition and logic exist in partnership. The challenge is to organize this partnership, knowing when to rely on Level 1 and when to rely on Level 2, and how to organize the interchange between the two.  location 3999

Note: is this part of what is involved in wisdom? 

As the Japanese proverb puts it: Don’t study something. Get used to it.   location 4033

Eventually—not soon, not until after many months or years of arduous observation, with dry spells and frustrating longueurs—the wanderer will achieve what the Greeks called métis. This is a state of wisdom that emerges from the conversation between Level 1 and Level 2.   location 4060

Raymond had a few stipulations: “First, no covert ops. We do everything aboveboard and out in the open. Second, no coup. We are not targeting personnel. We are offering suggestions about policy. Third, always helpful. We will never challenge anybody’s ability. We will just try to provide them with constructive alternatives.”  location 4109

most minds are more supple at handling visual images than abstract concepts,   location 4119

most business meetings aren’t about creating new plans, they are about maneuvering a group of managers so that they buy into a basic approach.  location 4129

research has found that people who go back and change doubtful answers improve their score.  location 4136

life is about producing failure. We only progress through a series of regulated errors. Every move is a partial failure to be corrected by the next one. Think of it as walking. You shift your weight off balance with every step, and then you throw your other leg forward to compensate.”  location 4150

MOST married couples are compelled to navigate a transition between passionate love and companionate love.   location 4279

addiction weakens the learning mechanism in the brain. Alcoholics and other addicts understand  what they are doing to themselves, but don’t seem to be able to internalize the knowledge into a permanent life lesson. Some researchers believe they suffer from this disability because they have damaged the neural plasticity in their prefrontal cortex. They can no longer learn from mistakes.   location 4383

Alcoholics Anonymous doesn’t work for most people. Researchers have not been able to predict who will benefit from AA and who will not. They can’t even agree on whether the program works better than the other programs that are out there, or at all.   location 4399

Behavior does not exhibit what the researchers call “cross-situational stability.” Rather, it seems to be powerfully influenced by context.  location 4571

This intuitionist account puts emotion and unconscious intuition at the center of moral life, not reason; it stresses moral reflexes, alongside individual choice; it emphasizes the role perception plays in moral decision making, before logical deduction. In the intuitionist view, the primary struggle is not between reason and the passions. Instead, the crucial contest is within Level 1, the unconscious-mind sphere itself.  location 4573

murderers don’t kill people they regard as fully human like themselves. The unconscious has to first dehumanize the victim and change the way he is seen.   location 4579

is not merely reason that separates us from the other animals, but the advanced nature of our emotions,  location 4635

 especially our social and moral emotions.  location 4636

Haidt, Graham, and Brian Nosek have defined five moral concerns. There is the fairness/reciprocity concern, involving issues of equal and unequal treatment. There is the harm/care concern, which includes things like empathy and concern for the suffering of others. There is an authority/respect concern. Human societies have their own hierarchies, and react with moral outrage when that which they view with reverence (including themselves) is not treated with proper respect. There is a purity/disgust concern. The disgust module may have first developed to repel us from noxious or unsafe food, but it evolved to have a moral component—to drive us away from contamination of all sorts. Students at the University of Pennsylvania were asked how it would feel to wear Hitler’s sweater. They said it would feel disgusting, as if Hitler’s moral qualities were a virus that could spread to them. Finally, and most problematically, there is the in-group/loyalty concern. Humans segregate themselves into groups. They feel visceral loyalty to members of their group, no matter how arbitrary the basis for membership, and feel visceral disgust toward those who violate loyalty codes. People can distinguish between members of their own group and members of another group in as little as 170 milliseconds. location 4644

institutions are idea spaces that existed before we were born, and will last after we are gone. Human nature may remain the same, eon after eon, but institutions improve and progress, because they are the repositories of hard-won wisdom. The race progresses because institutions progress.  location 4680

As some people joke, we may not possess free will, but we possess free won’t. We can’t generate moral reactions, but we can discourage some impulses and even overrule others. The intuitionist view starts with the optimistic belief that people have an innate drive to do good. It is balanced with the pessimistic belief that these moral sentiments are in conflict with one another and in competition with more selfish drives. But the intuitionist view is completed by the sense that moral sentiments are subject to conscious review and improvement.   location 4726

Bartels concludes that partisan loyalties have a pervasive influence on how people see the world. They reinforce and exaggerate differences of opinion between Republicans and Democrats. Some people believe that these cognitive flaws can be eradicated with more education, but that doesn’t seem to be true, either. According to research by Charles Taber and Milton Lodge of Stony Brook University, educated voters may be more factually right most of the time, but they are still factually wrong a significant amount of the time.   location 4921

Voters who went to polling stations in schools are more likely to support tax increases to fund education than voters who went to other polling stations. Voters who were shown a photograph of a school were also more likely to support a tax increase than voters not shown such a photograph.   location 4939

each position about, say, energy policy was really a way of illuminating values of nature and community and human development. Positions were simply triggers for virtues.   location 4981

Sublimated Liquidity Rage, which is the anger felt by Upper–Middle Class Americans who make decent salaries but have to spend 60 percent of their disposable incomes on private-school tuitions.  location 5049 

“grab what you can before the other guys steal it” mentality prevails. The result is skyrocketing public debt and a public unwilling to accept the sacrifice of either tax increases or spending cuts required for fiscal responsibility.  location 5163

The cognitive revolution demonstrated that human beings emerge out of relationships. The health of a society is determined by the health of those relationships, not by the extent to which it maximizes individual choice. Therefore, freedom should not be the ultimate end of politics. The ultimate focus of political activity is the character of the society.  location 5169

The nineteenth-and twentieth-century thinkers who had called themselves socialists weren’t really socialists. They were statists. They valued the state over society. location 5189

Aristotle wrote that legislators habituate citizens. Whether they mean to or not, legislators encourage certain ways of living and discourage other ways. Statecraft is inevitably soulcraft.   location 5216

terrorists are, as Olivier Roy argues, detached from any specific country and culture. They are often caught in the no-man’s-land between the ancient and modern. They invent a make-believe ancient purityRead more at location 5225

soldiers and marines discovered that it was not enough to secure a village; they had to hold it so that people could feel safe; they had to build schools, medical facilities, courts, and irrigation ditches; they had to reconvene town councils and give power to village elders. It was only when this nation-building activity was well along that the local societies would be strong enough and cohesive enough to help them provide intelligence about and repel the enemy.   location 5232

This change in the cognitive load has had many broad effects. It has changed the role of women, who are able to compete equally in the arena of mental skill. It has changed the nature of marriage, as men and women look for partners who can match and complement each other’s mental abilities. It has led to assortative mating, as highly educated people marry each other and less-educated people marry each other. It has also produced widening inequality, so that societies divide into two nations—a nation of those who possess the unconscious skills to navigate this terrain and a nation of those who have not had the opportunity to acquire those skills.  location 5277

Sometimes the IQ gains fade away as children from quality preschools enter the regular school population. But social and emotional skills do not seem to fade away, and those produce lasting gains—higher graduation rates and better career outcomes.  location 5354

wonder how it was that these men and women had risen to the top of the global elite. They weren’t marked by exceptional genius. They did not have extraordinarily deep knowledge or creative opinions. If there was one trait the best of them possessed, it was a talent for simplification. They had the ability to take a complex situation and capture the heart of the matter in simple terms. A second after they located the core fact of any problem, their observation seemed blindingly obvious, but somehow nobody had simplified the issue in quite those terms beforehand. They took reality and made it manageable for busy people.  location 5463

It’s now clear that the visions and transcendent experiences that religious ecstatics have long described are not just fantasies. They are not just the misfirings caused by an epileptic seizure. Instead, humans seem to be equipped to experience the sacred, to have elevated moments when they transcend the normal boundaries of perceptions.  location 5583

research found that Pentecostal worshipers undergo a different, though no less remarkable, brain transformation when they are speaking in tongues. Pentecostals do not have a sense of losing themselves in the universe. Their parietal lobes do not go dark. On the other hand, they do experience a decrease in memory functions and an increase in emotional and sensory activation. As Newberg writes, “In the Pentecostal tradition, the goal is to be transformed by the experience. Rather than making old beliefs stronger, the individual is opening the mind in order to make new experiences more real.”  location 5588

the mind also exists in a state of tension between familiarity and novelty. The brain has evolved to detect constant change, and delights in comprehending the unexpected. So we’re drawn to music that flirts with our expectations and then gently plays jokes on them.   location 5648

Denis Dutton argues in The Art Instinct, people everywhere gravitate to a similar sort of painting—landscapes with open spaces, water, roads, animals, and a few people.  location 5665

that the arts gave her access to her deeper regions. Artists take the sentiments that are buried in inchoate form across many minds and bring them to the surface for all to see. They express the collective emotional wisdom of the race. They keep alive and transmit states of mind from one generation to the next.  location 5738

is a law of human nature that the more men you concentrate in one happy pack, the more each of them will come to resemble Donald Trump. They possess a sort of masculine photosynthesis to start with—the ability to turn sunlight into self-admiration. By the law of compound egotism, they create this self-reinforcing vortex of smugness, which brings out the most pleased-with-themselves aspects of their own personalities.  location 5853

People who are out in nature do better on tests of working memory and attention than people who are in urban settings. Their moods are better.  location 5907

The views of the mountains and trees soothed him and enlivened him. But they didn’t really satisfy him. As others have noted, nature is a preparation for religion, but it is not religion.  location 5910

We needed to stop asking the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and right conduct.”  location 5954

Sometimes he’d think about some project he’d done at work, or a fight he had had with a coworker. He had a sense of himself as a coherent presence in these dramas. But when he tried to think of himself in isolation—what he was and what he lived for—he could conjure up no clear concept in his mind. It was as if he were an optical illusion, visible when you weren’t looking straight at it, but invisible when you made it the object of your attention.  location 5975

The brain was physical meat, but out of the billions of energy pulses emerged spirit and soul. There must be some supreme creative energy, he thought, that can take love and turn it into synapses and then take a population of synapses and turn it into love. The hand of God must be there.  location 6004

had come to see that his conscious self—the voice in his head—was more a servant than a master. It emerged from the hidden kingdom and existed to nourish, edit, restrain, attend, refine, and deepen the soul within. location 6025

Harold had achieved an important thing in his life. He had constructed a viewpoint. Other people see life primarily as a chess match played by reasoning machines. Harold saw life as a neverending interpenetration of souls.
The Social Animal: A Story of How Success Happens eBook: David Brooks: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store