tales of copper city

Downsizing Democracy

I'm reading a terrific book, Downsizing Democracy: How America Sidelined Its Citizens and Privatized Its Public, by Matthew Crenson and Benjamin Ginsberg.  The book is about how we have been changed from a popular democracy to a personal democracy, a democracy where the citizen typically faces government as a consumer and customer individually and privately rather than collectively as a member of a mobilized public.

The tale is complicated  and about far more than the rise of conservative populism over the past decades, or  what I call "The Invasion of the Body Politics Snatchers." Democrats and Republicans alike have had a hand in transforming the character of our democratic politics.

First there is the brain

I am reading James Austin's, Zen and the Brain, a big fat wonderfully-written book, a combination of scientific analysis, philosophical exploration, and personal odyssey.

What I like most is neurologist Austin's emphasis that everything in Zen begins with the brain. He quotes Krishnamurti: " ...I don't know what you mean when you say Big Mind and Little Mind. First of all there is the brain."

Austin makes the distinction between the goal of Zen (and perhaps all spirituality) and that of religion. Religion is entering and exploring the world of an elaborated belief system. Zen is exploring the way things are or what is the case.

But what do we mean by exploring and accepting what is the case? Understanding how the brain works might help make this more clear. A few days back I wrote of Guy Claxton's book, Hare Brain and Tortoise Mind: How Intelligence Increases When You Think Less, in my post, The Shadow knows.

Claxton argues that there are several different kinds of intelligence and ways of learning found in our evolved brains. There are also different speeds in which our intelligence is deployed.

There is first a rational and calculating mode of thought where we work out the elements of a problem rationally and logically, weighing the pros and cons. This kind of knowledge which Claxton calls the d-mode (for deliberative or default) is much prized in the hurried, rationalized, and problem-solving modern world. This kind of learning and intelligence stands at the center of our educational system and the institutions that serve us in so many ways.

But there is also the slow, intuitive, and patient learning over time which all of us use but are seldom aware of it. Children learn language and to recognize faces, building on inherited capacities, in this relatively slow and intuitive way. Adults use this implicit form of learning all the time.

We all are able to “size up situations” in our fields of endeavor based on years of experience and in ways we cannot explain to ourselves and others. This is our unconscious intelligence or the intelligent unconscious of our Undermind which can take many confusing, perplexing, and even contradictory patterns and sorts them out silently, patiently, and ingeniously over days, or weeks or even years.

Subjects given tests to determine if they can recognize implicit patterns in sequences of numbers and to anticipate the next and upcoming sequence, for example, quickly learn to accurately predict the next sequence despite the fact that they cannot explain how they do so or even that they have learned anything at all.

The Shadow knows

In the past year I have been reading more and more about one important consequence of evolution: how our brains work and how we think. There has been in the past three or four decades an explosion of the new sciences of the brain and of consciousness and of how evolution has shaped the adapted mind, most of which I knew nothing about.

The best introductions I have found to this field are Steven Pinker’s How the Mind Works and The Blank Slate, Michael Gazzaniga’s The Mind’s Past, and Matt Ridley’s The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation, all mind-blowing (pun intended) surveys of what we now know about how evolution has shaped our brains, our conscious life, and the categories with which we view the world.

All these experts seek to debunk the idea that we are born mostly as blank slates and that society and culture imprints us. We are also nature’s children, our minds a miracle of millions of years of successful adaptation to dangers and selective environments and not just stamped-out copies of cultural influences.