Culture December 2007
Beyond Belief
by Dr. Ron Shane
Roger Bingham, a TV producer at the Salk Institute, recently produced a program entitled “Beyond Belief.” Although the program’s execution was problematic, it did demonstrate that there is a need for contemporary humans in the Western world to reflect upon their way of knowing and their religious belief systems. It also pointed to the fact that humans must awaken from what Blake referred to as the “lethe sleep of urizen.” How much of our present belief systems are based in illusion? All of what is created by man’s intellectual processes does not necessarily translate to universality. Many Western philosophers, such as Nietszche, have questioned the validity of man’s social reality.
From the pre-cortex down to the brain stem, the homo sapien is very similar to a chimpanzee. The brain’s circuitry, which evolved roughly 60,0000 years ago, enables us to mentally experience an abstract, symbolic world. Modern man believes and feels that “thinking makes it so.” Yet human beings’ social evolution is a relatively new phenomenon.
Culturally speaking, many anthropologists argue that the human primate dramatically changed one to two thousand years after the last ice age. Human modification with respect to social behavior occurred approximately eight thousand years ago and was inspired by early man’s ability to plant and harvest grains. For over 50,000 years, early humans were primarily like other higher mammals—motivated by it’s hardwired instinctuality. Indeed, Freud argued that this aggressive and hedonistic animal was impassioned by its body’s neurobiologically-based pleasure dynamics. The semi-nomadic hunter/scavenger, like other chimp-like primates, did not initially possess much abstract language or any kind of elaborate, symbolic belief system. Early homo sapiens did, however, bury their dead. Biological anthropologists have argued that Cro-Magnon man, as well as the Neanderthals, were the only primate species to do so.
There is significant evidence to suggest that the human primate, when it became agrarian and populations within a particular area increased, also became discordant from its natural habitat and evolved a more abstract, symbolic means of social communication. Thus, it is likely that man’s belief systems are manifestations, after the fact, of an epigenetic phenomenon. Certain neuroscientists also argue that the newer, biologically-evolved “cortical neural networks” in man are not quite integrated with omnipresent and highly-conserved genes within our central nervous system.
Freud as well appeared to be asserting that humans functioned as though they had antithetical, or opposite, realities and Blake called man’s perceptual reality something which is woven or created by the molecular processes of our “chicanery of reason,” or imagination. Most of the mechanisms of a human’s brain circuitry create instinctual behaviors like other primates. Metaphorically speaking, man’s neural network revolted against the body’s instinctually evolved genotype when human culture created symbolic edifices. Artists like Herman Hesse, in his novel “Steppenwolf,” figuratively sum up this meta-biological phenomenon the best.
Many twentieth century philosophers realize that man’s way of knowing sequestered him from the brain/body’s emotionality as well as nature’s heuristic sensations. Human beings’ enigmatic form of brain plasticity has empowered our species to manipulate our habitat as well as develop the dream-like analytical workings of what neuroscientists refer to as our species’ “reflective consciousness.” But this remodeling of our brain circuitry has also created a conflict between what our bodies want to feel and how our cognitive pathways want us to behave.
The culturally engendered mental activities of our central nervous system have alienated us from our body’s instinctual pleasures as well as nature’s fecundity. The existential philosopher Sarte argues that we live sequestered from our intrinsic nature, in an absurd reality. Psychiatric researchers have suggested that man’s fascination with his make-believe reality may now be pathogenically impacting the body’s robustness, leading to disease. The contemporary human phenotype is becoming morbidly deregulated though long periods of immobility and by an increasing disconnection with the body and movement. We will see through the illusions that our cognitive pathways have created when we are again in touch with our bodies and the emotional and physical play within them.
Dr. Ron Shane has a Ph.D. in the Social Psychology of Literature and is a Sixth-degree black belt and international instructor in Taekwondo. He currently is a research scholar at UCSD in the Department of Psychology and has written many articles and books on a wide range of subjects.