Dualists have a foot in each camp, precariously.

Having prefaced this series on dualism with a clarifying exaltation and a grounding in animism, we’re ready to roll up our sleeves and trace the origins of dualism.

Animist tendencies have to be stamped out of children in our culture, who display a natural proclivity to treat the entire world around them as alive and full of potential friends. They soon learn from acculturated adults the sin of anthropomorphism. “Stop talking to that stool and inviting it for tea! Don’t dare project human greatness onto mere ‘things’—or even animals. No, not even Boots, the family pet. Yes, technically humans are animals, but that’s just a quirky fact, not how we should act.” Indeed, we do a number on our kids, molding them into fine little human supremacists.

Viewing rocks and weather and rivers as part of a single, unified co-dependent Web of Life, animists are somewhat allergic to both supremacy and hierarchy. Humility is the watchword. We don’t and can’t understand enough to call ourselves superior, voiding any case for ranking. Many cultures recognized humans’ newbie status and explicitly looked for wisdom in our elder relatives: the plants and animals, who knew how to live in “right relationship” with each other and with the planet—tested over eons.

This aversion to hierarchy went hand-in-hand with “fiercely egalitarian” social practices—wherein everyone had essentially equal access to food and its means of procurement. Various “leveling mechanisms” were employed deliberately and explicitly to prevent the emergence of instability resulting from power concentration. Demand-sharing and jocular meat-shaming were common practices in this vein, all the way to banishment or death for dangerous aggrandizers (see also earlier, related work from Hayden). As Christopher Ryan phrases it in Civilized to Death, “There’s plenty of ferocity in the ‘fierce egalitarianism’ of foragers.”

So, what happened to upset this long-standing social order?

The Hierarchy of Control

Prior to agriculture, hierarchies developed in some complex hunter-gatherer cultures, particularly those in which food storage or access to hunting/fishing/foraging could be controlled (e.g., seasonal salmon runs in the Pacific Northwest). The resulting loss of food sovereignty establishes self-reinforcing mechanisms for maintenance of hierarchy and privilege. Building on this foundation was the mother of all food control: agriculture.

Ownership and control displaced humility as watchwords: individuals would claim ownership of land under cultivation, and then store the produced grains in ways that fueled hierarchical control via food disbursement. Working in exchange for food (or wages with which to buy food) became the norm for those not fortunate enough to claim and defend ownership of land.

Control also manifested in the management of crops. War was waged against weeds and pests, aiming for eradication. Fences enslaved livestock under the same work-for-food program while keeping wild thieving browsers out. Animal reproduction was controlled to promote domestic qualities that were good for human production goals even if not good for the animals themselves—forever robbing them of the option for ecological freedom as a sort of zombie species. Nice zombie. Productive zombie. Tasty zombie.

Security, accounting, and patriarchy emerged as stored food became vulnerable, as attribution and compensation became important, and as ownership was passed along bloodlines. See the River post for more on the unfolding consequences of agriculture. Writing, importantly, also emerged as a powerful amplifier of intellect and ambition—further separating literate humans from the animistic Community of Life they once belonged within, more explicitly.

Anomaly

Note that this development into agriculture transpired very rapidly compared to relevant ecological and evolutionary timescales—which can be millions of years. A few-thousand years for a major transformation represents an ecological blink. As a result, evolution has not yet had time to pass judgment on the ecological viability of this new mode. The fact that we appear to have initiated a sixth mass extinction within a few millennia of the widespread adoption of agriculture does not speak well for it. Metaphorically, sophomoric agriculture has not yet earned a diploma, and is busy racking up failing grades in most subjects (by partying with technology). The prospects are not great.

Evolution blindly tests random mutations on the metric of fitness in relationship with the rest of the Community of Life. Advantages in any number of domains (speed, strength, size, efficiency, stealth, fecundity, dexterity, intelligence, hardiness, camouflage, longevity, etc.) can be pushed beyond adaptive advantage. It may well be that human intelligence represents a step too far, set up for inevitable failure at mass-extinction levels. But it’s too early to be conclusive, since we can’t know the future or the timing and manner in which modernity terminates. Meanwhile, we do know that humans existed with comparable intelligence for roughly 100,000 years (and employed fire for 15 times as long) without instigating ecological collapse. So, it would be premature to rule out a long-lived presence of humans in an ecologically-cooperative mode. We’re just not practicing such a cooperative mode at present. Cultural beliefs (and mythologies) matter a lot, in this regard.

Still, at present our trajectory is terrible and the predominantly dualistic attitudes accompanying this mode deserve scrutiny.

As a clarifying aside, the evolutionary, cultural, and technological developments of humans are not somehow outside of nature: nothing is. Neither would nuclear annihilation be “unnatural,” so that “natural” becomes a meaningless criterion for assessing values. Thus, note that I am not arguing agriculture or modernity in general to be unnatural developments so much as yet another set of rogue experiments in evolution that show ominous signs of being a rapid route to calamity. The big question is whether enough humans will react to such recognition in ways that facilitate a longer future by abandoning maladaptive practices. Get out the popcorn!

Emergence of Dualism

In contrast to animist beliefs that situated humans within—but not above—the Community of Life, hierarchical control-freaks (made prevalent and successful by agriculture and accompanying practices) began to see themselves as separate from—and masters of—the plant-and-animal world. Supporting evidence was all around. We controlled what plants grew, and where, and which were eliminated as weeds. We mastered animals and animal husbandry to create domesticated breeds, while eliminating “pests” who had the gall to infringe on “our” crops.

Vibrant forests, rather than persisting as living communities light years beyond our capacity to create, become land to be cleared for agriculture while also supplying firewood and building material: mere things to exploit. If we’re “lucky,” precious substances under the ground can be destructively dug up and distributed around the globe—to the detriment of the Community of Life, whose members aren’t evolved to cope with the resulting unusual toxins.

It became obvious that humans were unique, exerting a degree of control unmatched in the living world—as if gods. Is it any wonder that the religions that sprang up (in response to a newfound state of pervasive human suffering under hierarchical domination and agriculturally-introduced famines) reflected a patriarchal Master of the world who created humans in His own image? The hierarchy was complete: God (and angels) on top; Man as the pinnacle of life on Earth (sharing some godly privileges), granted explicit dominion over all the lowly animals and plants placed on Earth for his sole exploitation (note characteristically-gendered language). Thus was dualism born. Hierarchies within humans (and in gender) were all of a piece: inevitable once the world was viewed in hierarchical terms.

Seeing ourselves as separate from “the rest of nature” was a profound shift—a schism rending what was a unified universe of unity into a divided, divorced dualism. I’ll stress that changing material conditions went hand-in-hand with the attitude shift. As with a chicken and an egg, both arrived/developed in tandem, rather than the attitude preceding the action. The attitude was, one might say, a necessary companion of a materially-possible and practiced lifestyle rooted in (ultimately temporary) control and domination over “the rest of nature.”

Enter the Villain: Descartes

The late wanker DayKart.

I will not try to hide my loathing of Descartes, here. Even the fact that we refer to his ideas as Cartesian bugs me: such practice would make more sense if his name were Cartese. While I’m griping, the name has two instances of the letter “s,” yet its “proper” pronunciation lacks any such snake sounds. In fact, you know what? I’ll express my disrespect by dubbing the dude DayKart henceforth within this series. More than any other figure in history, DayKart is tagged with the idea of dualism.

Let’s be clear that DayKart did not introduce the world to dualism, which had been firmly in place for thousands of years and deeply rooted in religious tradition. He simply was a conduit—a mouthpiece—for an idea that was bound to be made explicit in modern terms by somebody in the early days of the Enlightenment, when many old ideas found expression (or at least preservation) for the “first” time. In a similar vein, by now we would certainly know about electromagnetism, relativity, and quantum mechanics without the incidental characters of Maxwell, Einstein, or Schrödinger—because the universe makes the rules, not people who happen along and translate for us.

But DayKart, wanker extraordinaire, really put the screws to it in articulating an assertion of mind/body dualism. That is, the body is simple matter no more dignified than dirt. The mind, however, is made of a different substance altogether, divorced from the material plane, and possessing divine qualities shared by angels (and their Boss). Mind/body differentiation is thus the main aspect of dualism as articulated by DayKart. As an added bonus, DayKart’s rendering of dualism had it that only humans possess the mind substance! How wonderful, and god-adjacent! The validation makes it an easy sell for anyone already in the human supremacist camp.

Because animals did not possess this angelic substance, DayKart could engage in vivisection as he wished. The screams of animals were rationalized as unfeeling reflexes rather than expressions of pain as we know it. Still, his delicate, angelic soul required earplugs so that these unfeeling screaming automata did not disturb his own fragile peace. I wonder what transcendent masterpiece he hummed to himself?

Much of what DayKart espoused is alive and well today, even if we personally (directly, in plain sight) refrain from animal cruelty to the same degree (which, recall, is not the crux of dualism).

The concept of mind apart from body is held by a majority of people in the modern world (roughly 80%). Many who self-identify as materialists may still harbor deep dualist leanings without being aware. After all, as closet dualists they would still staunchly believe in the reality of materialism—but sometimes unwittingly reserve a space for transcendent specialness among humans or mind or free will, etc. It’s hard not to carry the dualist taint when immersed in our culture.

In this prevailing view, the mind is the master of the body, commanding its actions. For many, the mind is eternal (a soul, in effect), existing apart from (or alongside) the biological support system. Movies in the line of Freaky Friday or Big, where minds switch bodies, are decidedly dualist. The dualistic premise of souls detached from bodies pervades the Harry Potter series and gets hardly a blink from readers. Sure, one might question whether souls can be split and anchored to material artifacts, but the very idea of a non-corporeal soul does not strike audiences as being at all absurd because it’s the cultural norm even among secularists.

The most famous line from DayKart: “I think, therefore I am” gives voice to the primacy of thought, and its ability to define our existence. Consciousness commands the corporeal, in dualist reckoning.

I’ll skip for now an exposition on the obvious reverse in the form of mind-altering chemicals (even in very small quantities), anesthesia (consciousness-robbing material), or the mere fact that a honking-big mass of well-provisioned and functioning hardware (i.e., meat-brain, complete with atoms and chemical metabolism) seems to be necessary for our every thought. The sensation of mind is too strong and convincing for most to look beyond: it sure feels like “we” exist separate-from and in-command-of our bodies, as conscious minds. That’s dualism, and it’s powerfully persuasive—by construction.

But declaring that a mind operates “above” (or apart from) matter is an example of “working backwards” from an elaborate end result that could have another explanation—however inaccessibly convoluted. Consider an adult watching a magic show. As convincing as the visuals might be, the adult would not take it on face value that an assistant has truly been sawed in half, or that a rabbit really materialized out of an empty hat. They would instead try to “work forward” from a solid foundation of how the universe works and how our senses might be fooled: imagining mechanisms by which one reality could acquire the appearance of another. Need we fall for the illusion of a separate mind, as convincing as it may appear to be?

Dualism also serves as a pernicious underpinning of human supremacy. It was pretty explicit in DayKart’s expression: among all life on Earth, only Humans possess the mind substance—imposing an instant and well-justified hierarchy over all other life. But even in a moderated and more inclusive modern form, the notion that mind is separate from body (not “simply” generated by the mechanistic bodily tissues, for instance, even if there’s nothing at all simple about it) not only separates us from the biophysical world, but establishes an instant hierarchy that is inevitably applied broadly across the Community of Life and the material world out of which it is fashioned. If all entities were only matter, or only consciousness, for instance, then at least we’d all be starting out on the same playing field. Division between mind and body (dualism) leads to division among lives.

Growing Inclusiveness

Given the monstrous actions of DayKart—viewing animals as mindless automata incapable of pain or feeling and thus game for vivisection—it is understandable that most people today have the instinct to run away from any association. Even those who fundamentally remain dualists stand aghast, and perhaps reject the label (but not the metaphysics) because of DayKart’s rationalized cruelty to animals. It’s perfectly understandable: I share the revulsion. Perhaps the main rub for many in our culture, then, is not with dualism itself, but hinges on whether animals are afforded the same dualistic mind/body split as humans. The mere fact that I and others frequently need to remind readers that humans are animals—or the fact that use of “animals” is not automatically assumed to include humans—is its own indication of a cultural problem.

The trend lately is to slowly extend membership into the elite mind-club—one embattled research study at a time. Inevitably, such efforts are branded as “anthropomorphizing”—the accusation itself almost always betraying a core human-supremacist attitude (only Humans can be credited with X behavior). The line is slowly shifting on sentience, emotion, problem-solving, empathy, altruism, etc. but by one hard-fought skirmish at a time—remaining wholly unpersuasive to hard-nosed holdouts. One might attribute their resistance to an inherent conservatism on the part of science, but more likely it also reflects a baseline human-supremacist worldview that only grudgingly—if at all—cedes ground. It’s like clawing back toward animism, at a painfully glacial pace—and severely limited by available techniques.

Why not start with the assumption that all life is sentient until proven otherwise: able in some manner to differentiate between pain and pleasure? Especially given evolutionary heritage, how is doing so any less justified than starting with the assumption of non-sentience for all but humans and a growing-but-still-small club? Just watch an amoeba run from danger or gorge on free food. Sure, one could assert without proof that this behavior has nothing to do with valanced sensations of good and bad: just doing what it is “programmed” to do. That’s the standard line. Yet, we could appeal to the unbroken line of kinship and guess that if we humans can tell the difference between pain and pleasure, so can all life likely make the distinction, in their own ways. Just like every other part of our anatomy, we didn’t somehow invent sentience (a term I’ll elaborate later in the series). The main point is that what goes for us goes for all, though not identically as material complexity spans a spectrum.

Blurring the Lines

My goal here is to blur—or really remove—lines of division that are artificial products of our brains and their simplified, categorized mental models (see, for instance this video illustrating how squishy the concept of “species” can be). Dualism manifests in many connected flavors. Besides mind/body, we get inner/outer, subject/object (then subjective/objective), first/third person in language, animate/inanimate. Modern languages are a showcase of dualist framing—full of categories and divisions. Blur/Burn them all!

Consider an amoeba that we might observe moving toward food, fleeing danger, repairing damage, or reproducing. Is it a collection of inanimate atoms and molecules engaged in inexpressibly complex interactions honed by evolution to preserve its life and genetic line? Or is there a non-material “spark” commanding its moves that standard matter/physics could not possibly accommodate (and whence the conviction)? Is a seed or spore (which can remain viable and completely inert for tens-of-thousands and hundreds of millions of years, respectively) inanimate on account of its static existence and total lack of metabolic activity, or is it animate? How about an apple (which contains seeds)? Does it matter if the apple is still connected to the tree? What about a chicken (temporarily) running around quite animatedly without a head? Is it alive, without a brain (thus “mind” in dualist-speak)? Is the chicken body experiencing pain? Is the frantic running a clue? What about a severed octopus leg, which has distributed neural hardware so that legs sense and “think” independently? Is the leg by itself animate or inanimate? For that matter, humans have over a hundred-million gastro-intestinal neurons. Are our guts separately animate because they can sense and react? Do they have free will? Is mind/consciousness located there? Anywhere?

First, please forgive my severed examples—just when I’m trying to distance myself from DayKart. But dualism started it by insisting on cleavages: I’m just exploring the ambiguous consequences of imposing divisions. My point is that it becomes hard to commit to a distinction, which causes me to ask why we must? Why must we become slaves to labels and self-generated categories? The universe is far more fluid and varied and label-averse than what we construct in our brains. Maybe the problem is in our models (categories, lines, divisions) and not in the universe. Just sayin’.

Defeating Dualism

I hope that the exercise of blurring/eliminating lines will also help in dislodging dualism in its artificial declaration of separate mind/body, among other artificial splits.

Dualism is a core problem afflicting humanity these past few millennia, which in turn afflicts the world. It undergirds a sense of separateness from the rest of the universe (labeled “nature” as a result), and underpins human supremacy. On the basis of dualism, we feel justified in commodifying the non-human world as resources (enveloping humans, too: think HR). This place of asserted privilege is not found in animistic cultures, and promotes lethal levels of ecological instability.

It is a huge improvement to admit animals (then even plants, fungi, microbes) into the “minded” fold, but dualism persists as long as “mind” is believed to be somehow separate from (and typically superior to and having mastery over) matter and its physical interactions. In the dualist view, because we possess a mind—and a superior one, at that—we still privilege ourselves as special and separate. In other words, the destructive consequences of dualism stem more from the mind/matter split than from which beings are included in the (still hierarchical) club.

The next installment will explore the nature of mental models and the question that anchors discussions of consciousness and the “real” phenomenological status of “mind”: “what it’s like” to experience something.

Views: 26