TWO REMARKABLE BOOKS!

TWO REMARKABLE BOOKS!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 23, 2010

* * *

AGE OF AMERICAN UNREASON by Susan Jacoby (2008)

Susan Jacoby surveys the anti-intellectual landscape of America today from pop culture to a pseudo-intellectual universe of what she calls “junk thought.” She follows this by a penetrating look at “junk science” exposing the underbelly of what Americans take seriously as meaningful when it is not.

She finds a disdain for logic and evidence that defines a pervasive malaise fostered by mass media, religious fundamentalism, mediocre public education, and the death of fair-minded public intellectuals on the far right and far left. In this intense polarity, extremes pervade with those in the middle all too ready to accept half-truths in their lazy apathy.

To a country of underachievers and proud of it, this book delivers a kick in the pants. Snap out of it, she says, getting it right matters.

* * *

When an author makes a wide swath through contemporary life and culture, and writes honestly about her experience and perceptively about her subject, she is likely to connect with the reader. Ms. Jacoby connected with me.

In introducing you to this author and this book, you may sense a common bond with what you have read on these pages from me over time.

Perhaps it is only a coincidence that Ms. Jacoby graduated from a Big Ten university (Michigan State) and I from Iowa, another Big Ten school. She was reared in a small town in Michigan, as I was in a small town in Iowa.

Her town was located in northeastern Michigan whereas my town was in northeastern Iowa. She matriculated at parochial grammar schools, as did I, and attended public high school; again, as did I.

She pursued journalism in a highly successful career with the Washington Post, also writing for a number of periodicals. Traveling a good part of the world in her work, as I did I in my work in chemistry and corporate management.

It was astounding to see that she read many of the same books that I read at various stages of my life.

Again, perhaps it is not a coincidence. Antonio Damasio may supply the reason.

* * *

DESCARTES’S ERROR: Emotion, Reason and The Human Brain (2006) by Antonio Damasio

Damasio uses the premise of Descartes famously proclaimed, “I think, therefore I am,” to show the error. He claims there is a close connection between thought and feeling in the brain, and consequently in the mind as it reveals itself.

The author manages to maintain a conversational tone to explain the complexities of this marvelous instrument while bringing the reader into contact with modern neuroscience of the emotions as well as cognitive aspects of brain function.

Damasio first challenged conventional wisdom in his earlier version of this book in 1994. There he argued that the connection between emotions and rationality heretofore thought as separate entities were connected.

In this book, he takes the reader on a journey of scientific discovery through a series of case studies, the most famous that of Phineas P. Gage. In 1848, Gage was a respected leader of a railroad gang blasting a railroad through the West. One day a premature blast caused a seven-inch spike to rip through his left eye socket out the top of his head and to land some hundred feet beyond.

Gage was conscious, articulate and mobile, and subsequently seem to recover, except for his personality – it totally changed so that “Gage was no longer Gage.” The accident resulted in a flat affect, that is, no emotional range, yet in every other aspect he could think and behave. It led the author unto the journey that is this book.

* * *

THE AGE OF AMERICAN UNREASON, connection to DESCARTES’ ERROR

As you know, my laboratory is my empirical experience. This is the source of my ideas and the basis of my speculations. Obviously, I am not alone in this pursuit of truth, but it is clear in reading these two books that my truth may not be your truth, or your truth my truth. That should not be the problem that it often is.

Behavior often finds the individual retreating from reality seeking solace in an imagined world that denies reality, and is isolated from it by fear. Both authors attack this problem but from opposite perspectives: one from the content of neurobiology (Damasio) and the other from the context of culture (Jacoby).

* * *

Jacoby hits hard at junk thought and junk science being very specific in her proclamations as I have been with non-thinking thinking. She is concerned with the dumbing down aspects of society, as have I with the corporation. Where she differs with me is her direct and crushing assault on anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism. She doesn’t hesitate to identify those in such categories as lowbrow, middlebrow and highbrow thinkers, and the impact of these modalities on American society.

* * *

Thus, Damasio says, as we develop from infancy to adulthood, the design of brain circuitries that represent our evolving body and its interactions with the world seems to depend on the activities in which the organism engages, and on the action of innate bioregulatory circuitries, as the latter react to such activities.


He sees the inadequacy of conceiving the brain, behavior and mind in terms of nature versus nurture, or genes versus experience, or indeed, as the arbitrary standard of such instruments as IQ tests. Neither our brains nor our minds are tabulae rasae when we are born; nor is there any guaranteeing that early promise will be sustained if not exercised.

In other words, intelligence is not a dormant entity, and that if you don’t use it you lose it. Likewise, people with similar experience, not surprising, may come to similar conclusions about the world they observe in the context of those observations. Perhaps that is why Jacoby’s book resonates with me, and what I have been attempting to say these many years from an entirely different perspective, but in essence coming to similar conclusions.

The structure4 and function of the brain involves complex processes. Damasio shows how the simple reading of these words (here) forms a topographical map that is an organized representation of what is called a disposition that become images appearing in the mind as the brain processes them indirectly in convoluted misdirectional ways.

The point, then, is that images are the main content of our thoughts, regardless of the sensory modality in which they are generated. Hidden behind those images there are processes that guide those images in time and space. They are “faint,” as David Hume put it, in comparison to the lively images generated by stimuli from outside the brain. But they are images nonetheless.

Reading develops the musculature of the thinking athlete. It is an intimate, and yes, complex relationship of the mind with the word, an exercise of intimacy between the author and the reader expanding consciousness and growing awareness of another point of view, a point of view that may connect with yours in certain ways to cause you to rethink yours.

* * *

--
Posted By The Peripatetic Philosopher to The Peripatetic Philosopher at 9/22/2010 08:39:00 PM