Reassessing all human culture on the basis of the latest insights of contemporary science is, self-evidently, a stupid thing to do. The uncertainty principle in quantum theory has nothing whatsoever to do with Tolstoy's view of war; Newton did not shed light on everything; and Freud's view of art was just plain wrong. Our current stupidity is the conviction that neo-Darwinian evolutionary psychology tells us all we need to know about being human. Like the physicists' Theory of Everything - remember that? - which we were promised in the early 1990s, this, too, will pass.
The impulse, however, will endure because scientists are as vain as the rest of us and because non-scientists love to rest their weary heads on anything that looks like certainty. Physics used to be the preferred pillow; now it is biology - in particular, the study of the brain.
"Brain science," writes Steven Johnson,
has become an avenue for introspection, a way of bridging the physiological reality of your brain with the mental life you already inhabit. The science and technology today are no longer limited to telling us how the mind works. They also have something to say about how your mind works.
Johnson, a technology journalist and lecturer on video games, explains this in Mind Wide Open by immersing himself in the whole business of watching the brain at work, via neurofeedback machines and MRI scanners. This leads him to conclude that his own brain is "well-orchestrated", which explains, apparently, why he is a good writer. In this he is deluded. He has a strange, chatty, low-temperature style that periodically degenerates into sentences such as: "I felt like we were pulling down a lot of data: the real-world conversations grounded things, and the chat let the room riff."
But the real problem here is that this is a magazine article rather than a book. At most, there are 10,000 words of material arising from Johnson's quest. He extends this by padding it with autobiographical ramblings on the subject of his wife, children, 9/11, their New York flat and how he writes. If he had a substantial or original attitude to his subject this might be justified. But, in fact, all he is saying is that brain science is terribly exciting and that knowledge of the mood-altering chemicals we have now discovered "should be a touchstone of the examined life". "The mind," he concludes, "is now open to us in ways that exceed the wildest dreams of poets and philosophers. Why not peer inside?"
I shall assume NS readers do not need me to uncan that particular truckload of worms, and I shall move on. The PR problem with brain science is that, like artificial intelligence and the space programme, it has fallen well behind expectations. The truth is we do not really know very much about how the brain works and the current wisdom embedded in this book (that it consist of a series of modules competing for full consciousness) does not, in itself, tell us very much - though it does conveniently accord with the postmodern conviction that the self is an illusion. Maybe it is but, as Michel Houellebecq acutely observed, it's a bloody painful one.
And it is pain that is missing from the Johnsonian view of the subject. What, after all, are we looking for? In scientific terms, the search is for a way of finally integrating human consciousness into the colossally successful progress of materialism and the experimental method that began with Galileo. Man's mind must be an epiphenomenon of matter, and therefore it is our duty, as Wallace Stevens put it, "To lay his brain upon the board/ And pick the acrid colors out".
Unfortunately, this is a project with certain implications. If modernity began with Galileo, then modernism began with Wordsworth's sonnet "The world is too much with us". Wordsworth understood that the vision of science disconnected us from the world, left us with "little . . . in Nature that is ours". He longed to be "a Pagan suckled in a creed outworn" so that he might once again see the world of myth and magic. The Darwinian reconnection to nature failed to answer this imaginative longing because it was predicated on a nature that seemed merely mechanical.
Furthermore, in the form of evolutionary psychology, Darwinism raises the paradoxical problem that knowledge might actually make us less fit for survival. Religion, for example, is so pervasive throughout human history that it must provide some evolutionary advantage. If it is suppressed by our science, we are likely, therefore, to be worse off. Equally, our minds work on the basis of myriad assumptions. If these are exposed as the deterministic workings of mere chemistry, then we might not even be able to get through the day, never mind the next million years. If this sounds absurd, it should not: there is no reason to presuppose the success of intelligence as a strategy for survival. It has yet to be fully tested and the current evidence - nuclear weapons, environmental degradation, antibiotic breakdown, megacities, global terrorism - is not promising.
On the other hand, it is our strategy and so, I suppose, we have little choice but to pursue it. That should not mean, however, that we do so lightly and in ignorance of history. The idea that brain science is somehow going to do something which will "exceed the wildest dreams of poets and philosophers" is very light and very ignorant. It is, however, a characteristic idea of our time. Dissent, therefore, and do not read this book.
Bryan Appleyard is the author of Brave New Worlds: genetics and the human experience (HarperCollins)
