Rethinking Thinking
The world of academe is currently in the grip of a strange and worrying ¬epidemic of biologism, which has also captured the popular imagination. Scientists, philosophers and quite a few toilers in the humanities believe—and would have the rest of us believe—that nothing fundamental separates humanity from animality.
Biologism has two cardinal manifestations. One is the claim that the mind is the brain, or the activity of the brain, so that one of the most powerful ways to advance our understanding of ourselves is to look at our brains in action, using the latest scanning devices. The other is the claim that Darwinism explains not only how the organism Homo sapiens came into being (as, of course, it does) but also what motivates people and shapes their day-to-day behavior.
These beliefs are closely connected. If the brain is an evolved organ, shaped by natural selection to ensure evolutionary success (as it most surely is), and if the mind is the brain and nothing more, then the mind and all those things we are minded to do can be explained by the evolutionary imperative. The mind is a cluster of apps or modules securing the replication of the genes that are expressed in our bodies.
Many in the humanities have embraced these views with astonishing fervor. New disciplines, prefixed by “neuro” or “evolutionary” or even “neuro-evolutionary,” have been invented. “Neuro-aesthetics” explains aesthetic pleasure in terms of activity in certain parts of the brain observed when people are enjoying works of art. A propensity for aesthetic brain-tingles, implanted in us by evolution, causes us to tingle to the right kinds of things, such as pictures of landscapes loaded with food.
“Neuro-economics” can explain why we buy things we don’t need or can’t afford, by identifying ancestral imbalances between the want-it center in the amygdala, deep in the cerebral hemispheres, and the wait-until-you-can-afford-it center in the prudent frontal lobes. Those toxic subprime mortgages, it appears, were in fact “neurotoxic.” Conspicuous consumption and our trillion-dollar debts are due to a desire to advertise our genetic health, analogous to a peacock virtually crippled by its meretricious tail.