Mind over matter. Willpower. Free-will. Those sound good when you wish to think of yourself as being in charge. The problem is that ‘yourself’ then becomes some entity which is an agent separate from the human organism and somehow in control over that organism. As I’ve argued repeatedly in my various writings, we are organisms who shape ourselves by responding to created being as we encounter it. Once our encounters with created being were mostly at levels in which our apish ancestors had evolved. A man of the 21st century has a richer environment. He is in contact with far more human beings and is exposed to knowledge about outer space and also alien human cultures. A small businessman who keeps his own accounts is exercising skills which were at the level of a specialist scholar in the early Renaissance. A teenager who plays around with the statistics of his favorite athletes is showing skills unimaginable to the men who built the pyramids of Egypt. We have built somewhat powerful minds by proper responses to created being and by finding ways to build our knowledge and skill base up so that we can teach to children what would have been too difficult for any but the greatest thinkers of the Medieval world.
We human beings aren’t some sort of immaterial mind-stuff or soul-stuff which is inside a flesh-and-blood body. There is no will controlling our organic selves the way a pilot controls an airplane. This airplane, our body, largely flies itself if only because decisions to move often have to be made too fast for the brain-regions which engage in planning and abstract thought. If the higher regions of our brains really controlled the immediate movements of our bodies, the human race would have long ago ended as so many meals for cave-bears or large cats. The higher regions of our brains inhabit, so to speak, more abstract regions, including the past and the future. The mind-like aspects of a human being contribute by understanding created being at abstract levels, allowing us to build powerful computers and to engineer the attributes of material almost down to the individual atom — nano-technology. We can reshape our moral habits over time and we can form social relationships with those we never see and with whom we share only a dedication to Gaelic music or a set of professional credentials. Western Civilization is breaking down in some ways that are frightening to me but it’s also still growing more complex and is entering ever more complex relationships with other cultures and with the non-human parts of God’s Creation.
In recent postings, I’ve been arguing that we need proper sorts of abstract thinking to deal with our practical problems, but we need to understand what abstract thinking can do and what it can’t do. The mind can be seen as a pilot of sorts, but the human body isn’t just a plane. It flies by ingrained habit and responds to what’s happening around it, before that mind is even made aware that there’s a storm or a mountaintop ahead. Part of the task of a mind is to create a narrative explaining what has happened and those who think their minds or wills to be in control are often fooled into taking those narratives as memories of their planning or decision-making. Decisions are made too fast for the regions of our brain which control abstract reasoning and rational planning. See the article The Scientist and the Stairmaster for a discussion of the mind’s lack of direct control over our body’s level of fatness. Will as you will, the belly is likely to win. The lesson isn’t that it’s useless to go on diets or to exercise, but rather that each human being has to work with his own bodily traits and his own environment. We don’t have the sort of will which would allow us to pick up an instructional manual for a recorder and just tell our fingers to do what our mind wishes them to do as it reads the notes and the fingering, nor do we have any inborn knowledge or instincts to help us act properly in this period a bit different from, say, the decades around 1900, when the West went through a period of creative ferment which we’ve never transcended and have not really understood.
It takes a bit of thought to analyze a complex situation and then lots of practice to execute any plans you’ve developed. Then, you’ll be ready for those times when you must act fast and for keeps. As responsible citizens, we may decide to learn about Western Civilization so that we can figure out if we really are in a state of decay and then try to think of ways to improve the situation. We don’t have the will to just say, “I’m going to start reading Jacques Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence,” and then plow through it, understanding it and responding to his claims and his presentation of the history of the West over the past five centuries. It’s not a work for a mind formed by public school textbooks or the sorts of books usually found on bestseller lists in this age.
Let me say a little more about that book because it speaks to the issue at hand. That masterpiece, published in 2000 when its author was 93, is still more complex than War and Peace and perhaps longer as well. It tells the story of the decay of the West largely in terms of the decay in literacy and — by implication — abstract reasoning. When we read such books — and use the references to find other worthwhile books, we discover there was a time when a well-educated man was supposed to be skilled in proof techniques of Euclidean geometry, but some of those men kept up with advancements in mathematics and physics and other difficult subjects on their own time. A man such as Jonathon Edwards, the Puritan theologian of the mid-18th century, was said by one historian of ideas to have had a profound understanding of Newtonian physics. On his own time, driven by interest or a sense of duty to keep up with important advancements in human thought, that Puritan divine studied Newton’s writings and other serious, difficult works.
Developing your mind is little different from dieting or training for a marathon. It takes sustained effort. Why would we wish to study demanding works of science or history or literature after escaping from the grind of school? Perhaps because a well-developed mind is itself a good, perhaps more of a good than the memories of 20 Sunday afternoons of watching football? I’m not saying that all should be spending their weekends and evenings reading intellectual works, but I am saying we need intellectual and moral and spiritual leaders who are willing to work hard reshaping their minds in active and openhearted response to Creation. We can also respond to Creation by playing music rather than always listening to recorded music, by joining the community theater rather than watching movies on television, by joining a religious community rather than watching services on television. Once upon a time, even some public leaders read serious books or engaged in scientific work. Calvin Coolidge was very well educated and multi-lingual and was said to read classics in Latin or ancient Greek, as well as works in various modern languages, while he was in the White House. Benjamin Franklin was not only a wealthy, hardheaded businessman, but also a highly regarded amateur scientist, not only conducting experiments in electromagnetism but also working on the conceptual or theoretical level in that field.
Why did modern man lose interest in developing his mind unless he was being paid to do so? Isn’t Western Civilization still getting more complex in many ways? Doesn’t empirical knowledge continue to pile up? Without those active, self-driven responses which may take the form of studies or experimentation or perhaps the organization of a musical group, the mind is no more than a poorly organized brain. The belly, so to speak, will rule. This is to say that a man without a mind well-developed to his context will be something like an apeman with a noticeably well-developed prefrontal lobe allowing much more sophisticated planning than his cousin the chimpanzee, but he isn’t going to be able to understand, for example, the relationship between the United States and China, let alone be able to evaluate possible ways of improving that relationship. He won’t be able to understand the assaults on his liberty and the liberty of his children in the form of seemingly beneficial programs. One who did understand was the Austrian Franz Jaggerstatter, recently beatified by the Catholic Church and perhaps on his way to canonization as a saint. Jaggerstatter was beheaded for refusing to serve in the army of Nazi Germany, even in the medical corps. Earlier, he had withdrawn from the fraternal and charitable groups and activities in which he’d participated because he saw that the Nazis were using those groups and activities to form the Austrians into a subservient herd of sorts.
Let’s return to the belly. Did that belly somehow change during this age of diabetes and obesity? Did it suddenly develop a taste for more sugar? Or was that belly like the pilgrim of Dante’s Inferno, a traveler who kept on going straight while the path changed? The path curved away. The belly continued to crave the rare opportunity to indulge in a hive of honey, only that opportunity isn’t rare nowadays. A large jar of honey, as many cookies as you can carry, gallons and gallons of ice-cream to fill the trunk of your car, await you at your nearby supermarket.
Did that brain somehow change during this period when some human thinkers suddenly discovered that time and space are particular examples of abstractions and that matter is frozen energy? Did it change during this period when understanding human moral nature became not a matter of understanding a static listing of virtues and vices but rather a matter of trying to grasp a mountain of facts about DNA and brain-cells and billions of years of evolution, not to mention new reasoning skills dealing with frightening subjects such as chaos? Did our brains become suddenly dysfunctional so that they could not make good decisions as did the brains of the prior century or two of remarkable prosperity?
No. We human beings of, say, the 20th and 21st centuries are like that pilgrim in Dante’s poem, continuing to interpret reality in terms of immediate impressions and models of created being which see concrete being as absolute and objective and abstractions as mere formalisms, though we and our modern cultures have been shaped so much by the abstractions of modern physics and mathematics, history of human thought and languages, literary exegesis, and engineering projects which are beyond the understanding of any one man.
Let’s return to the belly again. If you wish to gain some control over your weight in the modern world, you should come to an understanding of the strength of your will and the tendency of your body to make fat. You should also understand modern food technology, your body’s handling of additives or different forms of sugar or fat, and the seductive layouts in certain aisles at the grocery store. You should step back and understand your own habits and schedule and the habits of those you live with or socialize with. This is possible only by way of abstract thought and a bit of work. The effort will be similar to that of writing a novel or an historical narrative.
But maybe there are still better reasons to come to an understanding of modern empirical knowledge, of your environments, and of your own mind. Maybe there are still better reasons to further develop your mind.