The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning

by Jeremy Lent

This book takes an approach to history that recognizes the power of the human mind to construct its own reality. It offers a simple thesis: culture shapes values, and those values shape history.

One set of researchers illustrated how language affects perception. They used the fact that the Greek language has two color terms—ghalazio and ble—that distinguish light and dark blue. They tested the speed with which Greek speakers and English speakers could distinguish between these two different colors, even when they weren't being asked to name them, and discovered the Greeks were significantly faster.13

Another study demonstrates how language helps structure memory. When bilingual Mandarin-English speakers were asked in English to name a statue of someone with a raised arm looking into the distance, they were more likely to name the Statue of Liberty. When they were asked the same question in Mandarin, they named an equally famous Chinese statue of Mao with his arm raised.14

One intriguing study shows English and Spanish speakers remembering accidental events differently. In English, an accident is usually described in the standard subject-verb-object format of “I broke the bottle.” In Spanish, a reflexive verb is often used ...

Language can also have a significant effect in channeling emotions. One researcher read the same story to Greek-English bilinguals in one language and, then, months later, in the other. Each time, he interviewed them about their feelings in response to the story. The subjects responded differently to the story depending on its language, and many of these differences could be attributed to specific emotion words available in one language but not the other. The English story elicited a sense of frustration in readers, but there is no Greek word for frustration, and this emotion was absent in responses to the Greek story. The Greek version, however, inspired a sense of stenahoria in several readers, an emotion loosely translated as “sadness/discomfort/suffocation.” When one subject was asked why he hadn't mentioned stenahoria after his English reading of the story, he answered that he cannot feel stenahoria in English, “not just because the word doesn't exist but because that kind of situation would never arise.”16

“It is now established that native language affects one's perception of the world.”

The great philosopher Mencius shows the classic Chinese viewpoint when he says, “Why I dislike holding to one point is that it injures the Tao. It takes up one point and disregards a hundred others.”

This led them to develop certain core principles about the universe: reality is never fixed but constantly shifting, opposites complete each other to coexist in harmony, and nothing exists in isolation but rather is integrated within a complex web of interrelationships.

The tests developed to evaluate these differences have used subtle and sometimes ingenious methods to highlight the contrasting patterns of thought. In one test, for example, to determine cultural preferences for uniqueness or conformity, Koreans and Americans were asked to choose a gift from an assortment of colored pens. Americans chose the rarest color, whereas Koreans chose the most common color. Another test was designed to distinguish between the East Asian emphasis on relationships and the Western focus on categories and rules. Chinese and American children were presented with a series of pictures with three things, such as a cow, a chicken, and grass (figure 10.1), and asked to say which two went together. American children, focusing on categorizing rules, pointed to the chicken and cow, explaining that “both are animals.” Chinese children, emphasizing relationships, put the cow and the grass together, pointing out that “the cow eats the grass.”52

One important implication is that many attributes that psychologists have believed to be human universals are really only true for Westerners, a relatively small portion of humanity. A group of researchers, pointing out that most psychology experiments are carried out on samples drawn from Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic societies, have memorably given this subpopulation the acronym WEIRD. People from WEIRD societies are, it turns out, frequent outliers in experiments conducted globally, and one of the least representative human populations.56

From this foundational belief in the intellect as the essence of human existence, Descartes preserved and even strengthened the unyielding dualism of the Christian cosmology he had inherited.

It is almost impossible to overstate the profound impact Descartes has had on modern cognition. Along with Plato and Augustine, Descartes was a prime architect of the structures of thought so pervasive in the modern world that they are frequently viewed as self-evident truths: that our thoughts constitute our essence and that the mind is separate from the body and is what makes us human.39 Descartes's dualism also forms the basis for the modern view of our relationship with the natural world. According to Cartesian logic, if the mind is the source of our true identity, then our bodies are mere matter with no intrinsic value. And if that is true of our own bodies, it must be equally true of the rest of nature—animals, plants, and everything else—since no other entity possesses a mind capable of reason. In Descartes's own words: “I do not recognize any difference between the machines made by craftsmen and the various bodies that nature alone composes.”40

We will discover in this chapter that not only is religious intolerance tightly intertwined with monotheism, but, before the emergence of monotheism, it simply didn't exist. Religious intolerance, as we will see, may indeed be the predictable by-product of monotheistic belief, which, by definition, posits that there is only one true explanation of the cosmos, and, consequently, any other interpretation is necessarily false and at odds with the sole source of spiritual meaning.3

For those nations unfortunate enough to exist in the territories Yahweh decided to give the Israelites as an inheritance, a more awful fate is in store: “Do not leave alive anything that breathes,” commands Yahweh. “Completely destroy them.” Why should the Israelites carry out this terrible genocide? Because “otherwise, they will teach you to follow all the detestable things they do in worshiping their gods, and you will sin against the Lord your God.”9*

Perhaps even more disturbing than the glorification of massacres is the requirement that God's commandments must be carried out unfalteringly, regardless of how inhumane they appear. A particularly sinister episode in the book of Samuel drives this point home. The Israelite king, Saul, is told by Yahweh to conduct the by-now-familiar genocidal campaign against the Amalekites. Saul does as commanded, except that, having slaughtered the entire population, he keeps the king of the Amalekites, Agag, alive and saves the best of the sheep and cattle to sacrifice to his Lord. Yahweh is furious at even this slight disobedience and sends his prophet, Samuel, to tell Saul he is now rejected by Yahweh as king of Israel. Saul immediately tries to make amends. He calls for Agag to be brought to him and puts him to death right there, abjectly following Yahweh's command. It is worth recalling that, during the Nuremberg trials, the claim of “just following orders” became notorious as an insufficient defense against the charge of mass murder. It is a grim irony of history that the first exemplar of genocide carried out in the name of ideology came from the holy book of the Jewish faith, the very people that the Nazis tried to wipe out with their racist ideology.12

The battle waged by the early Christians was not just against competing faiths but against the very notion of independent thought, which might undermine faith in the word of God. The idea arose that if you believed Christ was the savior sent by God for all mankind, this was the only truth you should ever care to know. “After Jesus Christ,” wrote church father Tertullian, “we have no need of speculation, after the Gospel no need of research.” Augustine referred to intellectual inquiry as “the disease of curiosity…to try and discover the secrets of nature, those secrets which are beyond our understanding, which can avail us nothing and which man should not wish to learn.”19

Astonishingly, it turns out this is simply not the case. Before the influx of monotheism and later forms of absolutism from the West, the cultural traditions of Asia had no experience of the kind of murderous religious intolerance documented here. While there was competition for patronage between faiths, the notion of heresy as something to be eliminated didn't exist. Hajime Nakamura, a leading crosscultural authority on Asian spiritual traditions, observes that “in India there were no religious wars. Neither Buddhists nor Jains ever executed heretics. What they did to heretics was only to exclude them from the orders. Religious leaders in India died peacefully attended by their disciples and followers. Toleration is the most conspicuous characteristic of Indian culture.”28

An example can be seen in the writings of Zongmi, a ninth-century scholar trained in the Confucian classics who became an influential Buddhist monk. When asked by one of his students whether Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism were the same or different teachings, he replied: “For those of great wisdom, they are the same. On the other hand, for those with little capacity they are different. Enlightenment and illusion depends solely on the capacity of man and not on the difference of teaching.” The public shared this eclectic appreciation of religious wisdom. Even today, in a typical Taoist temple, along with a central image of Lao-tzu, you might find images of a Christian saint, a Confucian sage, and the Buddha, among other deities.35

As we make our way through the twenty-first century, we are increasingly bombarded with news of climate change, deforestation, resource depletion, pollution, and other global crises arising from an imbalance in humanity's relationship with the earth. If we are to correct this imbalance before it's too late, we need to reevaluate and possibly replace the core metaphors we use in understanding the natural world.

We belong to the same category of living beings as all the creatures of the world. It is only through size, strength or cunning, that one species gains mastery or feeds upon another. Man catches and eats what is fitting for his food, but how can you say that Heaven produced them just for him? Mosquitoes and gnats suck his blood; tigers and wolves devour his flesh—but we don't assert that Heaven produced man for the benefit of mosquitoes and gnats, or for tigers and wolves.38

the scale of changes brought about by agriculture over the past ten thousand years has been compared to the impact of the asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs sixty-five million years ago.5

The domestication of plants led to fewer and fewer species taking most of the land, so that, today, just twenty species of plant provide 90 percent of the vegetable food people eat.

Frequently, environmental degradation would be gradual, leading over generations to cycles of famine and hardship, with inexorable decline in the soil's productivity. This process can be seen poignantly in the Mediterranean and Southwest Asia, where so many great civilizations of ancient times held sway. The Mediterranean landscape, loved nowadays for its vines, olive trees, and scented herbs, is in fact the result of the relentless pressure of civilization.

experts continue to debate the crucial question: why did this unique transformation of society happen in Europe rather than elsewhere in Eurasia?

With this remarkable intellectual tradition spanning hundreds of years and thousands of miles, it's no wonder that historians frequently ask why Islamic learning didn't follow the trajectory European science would eventually take. In the words of historian Toby Huff, “The Arab achievement is so impressive that we must ask why the Arabs did not go ‘the last mile’ to the modern scientific revolution.” The Arabs, in Huff's view, “were perched on the forward edge of one of the greatest intellectual revolutions ever made, but they declined to make the grand transition” to the modern scientific conception of the universe. What stopped them?

He saw mathematics as dangerous because of its reliance on logical proofs to demonstrate whether something is true. He worried that people might become so impressed with the precise techniques of mathematical logic that they might use it to try to prove the existence of God and, being unable to, reject religion altogether.

we can discern a core difference between the European and Chinese approaches to using technology to exploit natural resources. While the Europeans focused on maximizing what they could mine from the earth, the Chinese seem to have targeted a different objective: avoiding an imbalance that could disturb the “publick Tranquillity.”

If “stagnation” is the more apt description, then perhaps it makes sense to view the lack of a scientific revolution in China as a “failure,” in contrast to our modern society's dynamism. If, on the other hand, Needham's assessment is right, then China's unique form of self-regulating homeostasis may hold valuable lessons for our current global society struggling with ever-increasing social, economic, and environmental imbalances.29

about Nature

the goal is to identify the nature of a peculiarly European mind-set that engendered the unprecedented phenomenon the world has experienced in the last few hundred years: one that produced devastating genocides and exploitation as well as the spectacular technological achievements that have transformed the lives of virtually everyone on the planet. According to this hypothesis, that mind-set is to be found in the dualistic structure of thought that originated in ancient Greece and later became synthesized into the systematic monotheism of Christianity. It is this underlying dualism that led eventually to the unique emergence in Europe of what we may call “scientific cognition.”

An important focus of the debate was the difference between reasoned conviction and blind faith or pistis. Celsus, following the Platonic tradition, saw reason as the only valid route to understanding the cosmos. Pistis was the state of mind of the ignorant who blindly accepted whatever they were told. And yet, to the astonishment of Celsus and his peers, pistis formed the foundation of the Christian approach. Origen's response is illuminating. Instead of dismissing Greek philosophy, he showed nearly as much admiration for Plato as Celsus had. The difference, for Origen, was that Plato's ideas could be accessed only by those with a scholarly education: it is as though Plato spiced his dish to please the upper-class palate, whereas Christian preachers, flavoring their sermons with pistis, “[cooked] for the multitude.” We accept pistis, Origen explained, “as useful for the multitude”; it is the best that can be done for them, since “very few people are enthusiastic about rational thought.” The dish could be flavored with reason or pistis, but it remained essentially the same meal. Christianity, Origen implied, was Platonism for the masses.10

Alfred North Whitehead saw continual transformation as a defining principle of the natural world and recognized the impossibility of a completely objective view of the universe. “There is no holding nature still and looking at it,” he wrote. “The real point is that the essential connectedness of things can never be safely omitted.” While Whitehead's was an isolated voice in the English-speaking world, a prominent European philosophical school known as phenomenology raised these ideas to a new level of sophistication. Its underlying basis was the rejection of the notion of scientific objectivity, replacing it with the recognition that humans are embodied in the physical world and that our understanding of the universe arises from how we are situated within it.

Schrödinger's groundbreaking answer to this age-old question began with the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the universe is undergoing an irreversible process of entropy: an inexorable decline from order to disorder. This law predicts that heat will always flow to cooler regions and explains why, once you've beaten an egg, you can never get the yolk back. However, Schrödinger observed that while the universe as a whole undergoes entropy, life somehow manages to reverse this process. Living organisms, he noted, survive through sucking order out of the entropy around them and organizing it in a way beneficial to them. They do this through the process known in biology as metabolism. Schrödinger called this process negative entropy (or negentropy) and saw it as the defining characteristic of life.23

As the system's complexity reaches a certain critical mass, it achieves a newly coherent state, sometimes dramatically, in a process known as emergence.27 A powerful example of emergence can be seen in an ant colony. When ants discover a food source and carry some of it back to the nest, they leave a trail behind them of a chemical called pheromone, which evaporates after a while. If another ant discovers the pheromone trail, it will follow it to the food source and add its own pheromone to the trail when it brings back the food. If only a small number of ants are foraging, the pheromone trail of a successful ant is likely to evaporate before being discovered by the others, and so their collective efficiency is no more than the sum of each individual ant's efforts. However, when the number of ants reaches a critical mass, the likelihood of a pheromone trail being discovered goes up exponentially, and the colony becomes superefficient at collecting the best food sources. A cohesive group intelligence emerges out of a simple chemical signaling system.28

Social media and humans. Emergence but failure?

The reductionist view has become, for many, an article of faith, causing them to claim that every aspect of our world, no matter how awe-inspiring, is “nothing but” the mechanical motion of particles acting predictably on each other. This view is summed up by Nobel laureate Francis Crick, one of the discoverers of the DNA molecule: You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.34

However, in recent decades, the perception of the earth itself as a self-organized entity has become increasingly influential. Scientist James Lovelock was the first to recognize how the different feedback cycles of the oceans, the atmosphere, and the land caused a self-regulating effect responsible for the robust conditions for life to thrive on earth through billions of years. Lovelock named the entire global system Gaia, after the Greek goddess that personified the earth. While Gaia lacks some characteristics of a true organism, it has been shown to display the crucial quality of autopoiesis, sustaining itself as a living planet through its network of complex feedback loops.37

A crucial moment occurred in 1886, when the Supreme Court designated corporations as “persons” entitled to the protections of the Fourteenth Amendment, which had been passed to give equal rights to former slaves enfranchised after the Civil War.22* When we typically think of a corporation, we tend to imagine it as composed of human beings, whether executives, board members, or employees. However, a corporation is utterly different from the people who are part of it. In contrast to people, who are capable of empathy and generally care for others beyond themselves, corporations are abstract entities usually created with the single mandate of maximizing financial returns for their shareholders. They are theoretically immortal and cannot be put in prison, and the larger multinationals are not constrained by the laws of any individual country.23 With equivalent rights to human beings but with the incalculable advantage of their superhuman powers, corporations have literally taken over the world. They have grown so massive that fifty-three of the largest hundred economies in the world are corporations. Along with their vast power, corporations have imposed on the world a set of values, arising from their overriding objective to maximize financial returns, at odds with many intrinsic human values.

An illustration of this single-minded corporate focus on financial returns can be seen in a conversation between biologist Paul Ehrlich and a Japanese journalist. Ehrlich observed that the Japanese whaling industry was at risk of exterminating the whales that were the source of its wealth. The journalist responded: “You are thinking of the whaling industry as an organization that is interested in maintaining whales; actually it is better viewed as a huge quantity of [financial] capital attempting to earn the highest possible return. If it can exterminate whales in ten years and make a 15% profit, but it could only make 10% with a sustainable harvest, then it will exterminate them in ten years. After that, the money will be moved to exterminating some other resource.”

In the integrated economy that emerged, corporations have been able to use their transnational powers to dictate their own terms to virtually any country in the world. With the free movement of capital, corporations can choose to build factories in nations with the weakest labor unions or locate polluting plants in countries with lax environmental laws, basing their decisions solely on maximizing returns for their shareholders. Governments compete with each other to make their nations the most attractive for corporate investment.

a quote from the chief economist at the World Bank, an institution purportedly established to aid development and reduce world poverty. In a leaked 1992 internal memo on pollution, he expressed the view that “a given amount of health-impairing pollution should be done in the country with the lowest cost, which will be the country with the lowest wages. I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest-wage country is impeccable.” This chief economist was Larry Summers, who went on to serve as secretary of the treasury in the Democratic Clinton administration.33

Bolstered by this unremitting appetite for growth, the world economy is projected to quadruple again by 2050.43 It is difficult to imagine what a quadrupling of our current economic activity would mean to the human experience and to the planet on which we all rely. Scientists have calculated that humans now appropriate more than 40 percent of the total energy available to sustain life on earth—called net primary productivity—for our own consumption. We use more than half the world's freshwater for our own purposes and have transformed 43 percent of the earth's terrain into agricultural or urban landscapes. To sustain our current rate of expansion, it's been estimated that human appropriation of net primary productivity would need to double or triple by mid-century. Scientists are understandably asking if this is in fact possible.44

Beyond the narrow interests of the fossil fuel industry, the entire capitalist economy is founded on perpetual growth. In aggregate, world stock markets are valued on the same growth assumptions that predict a quadrupling of the global economy by mid-century. Business leaders fret that if a concerted attempt were made to reduce this growth trajectory, it might lead to a spiraling decline in valuations, possibly even to the collapse of the capitalist system. Additionally, in the arena of geopolitical rivalry, the power of a nation relative to others is substantially based on economic strength. Leaders fear that if their nation unilaterally chose to reduce its own growth to a more sustainable level, this would reduce its ability to protect its national interests. It is as though we live in a world of not one but many sorcerers’ apprentices, each competing with the others, so that even if each of them knew the spell to stop his own runaway broom, he would immediately be outcompeted by the others, so each therefore continues in the group folly.66 This self-defeating collective dynamic, known in economics as the “tragedy of the commons,” highlights a crucial flaw in capitalist ideology: the notion that it is inevitably beneficial for society when each person seeks to maximize his own gain. Underlying this notion is an even more fundamental defect of classical economic theory: the assumption that nature is inexhaustible. When the framework of modern economics was developed in th...

A powerful example of ideological lock-in is the standard of gross domestic product (GDP), by which the performance of governments and countries is judged across the world. The economist who invented it in the 1930s, Simon Kuznets, warned that it was a “potentially dangerous oversimplification that could be misleading” and subject to “resulting abuse.” However, in the aftermath of World War II, as the world was gearing up for the Great Acceleration, GDP was formally incorporated into official policy making.69

An oil spill, for example, increases GDP because of the cost of cleaning it up:

GDP measures the rate at which our society is transforming nature and human activities into the monetary economy, regardless of the ensuing quality of life. When someone picks vegetables from their garden and cooks them for a friend, this has no impact on GDP; however, buying a similar meal from the frozen food section of a supermarket involves an exchange of money and therefore adds to GDP.

activities that put more burden on the environment tend to contribute more to GDP. Driving to work in a car is GDP-enhancing, whereas cycling to work has no effect;

The measure of GDP goes from being merely bizarre to dangerous for humanity's future because of the fact that metrics have a profound impact on what society tries to achieve. As one economist observes: “We get what we measure. The indicators we choose to define success become the things we strive for.”

there is no correlation between the wealth of a country and the reported happiness of its population.74 In countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, and Japan, GDP per capita skyrocketed after World War II, yet the reported life satisfaction of their populations remained flat.

we might ask which path we are on. One trajectory, with Moore's law underwriting endless technological wizardry, promises a future in which humanity itself might be redefined. At the rate with which we are using up the earth's resources, another trajectory threatens potential disaster ahead for humanity. Which of these is more likely to be humanity's actual path? And, even more crucially, is there a way our civilization can somehow be steered to achieve a sustainable path for humanity's future—a path in which progress might mean something other than consuming the earth?

Looking back through human history, we can recognize two great phase transitions: the emergence of agriculture about ten thousand years ago and the rise of the scientific age over the past few hundred years. In our current era, it's becoming clear that we're entering a third great transition.8 But a transition to what? To a glorious age of technology, in which human limitations can be overcome and unimaginable possibilities beckon? Or to the collapse of civilization itself, as presaged in Limits to Growth? Or something in between these two extremes, with convolutions we can't even begin to envisage?