Toward a Spirit-Friendly Science of People

Toward a Spirit-Friendly Science of People

Daniel S. Levine

University of Texas at Arlington

levine@uta.edu

www.uta.edu/psychology/faculty/levine

Workshop presentation at Spiritual Activism Conference, Washington, DC, May, 2006

One of the widely recognized signs of the spiritual crisis in Western society is its over-reliance on quantifiable technological and scientific progress at the expense of concern about meaning and values.  This has been a theme in the writings of our most articulate current chroniclers including Michael Lerner, Riane Eisler, Matthew Fox, Theodore Roszak, and John Saul among others.  Yet none of us wish to throw away the scientific advances that have enabled many of us to live longer, healthier, and more comfortable lives than did our ancestors even a hundred years ago.

The French wartime president Georges Clemenceau was supposed to have said that war is too important to leave to the generals.  The same can be said about any major human pursuit.  Religion is too important to leave to the clergy, and science is too important to leave to the scientists.  So everyone here needs to be part of the dialogue about what role science should play in society.  Rather than being hostile to the human spirit, can a reinvented scientific enterprise play an active role in encouraging a society based on spiritual meaning?  This is a particularly important question for the biological and social sciences that deal with people.  Can we promote healing, that is, tikkun olam, through theories of human nature that give us hope about ourselves?

I believe the answer is yes, and otherwise would choose a different line of work.  Let me interject some personal background.  I was brought up with science in my blood: a father who did major research on the biochemistry of insulin, summers in the seaside scientific ghetto of Woods Hole, MA, and an early interest and talent in mathematics (my college major).  But along came the Sixties, and when the whole world was pregnant with exciting change it didn’t feel right to just sit back in a splendid ivory tower.  So while working between 1968 and 1970 a few miles north of here at the National Institutes of Health, I decided to make science relevant.  This meant learning about the brain and seeking the roots of what motivates some people to initiate, or to accept, the Vietnam War and other actions that do great harm.

Now, some of you will say, the roots of war and of inequality are social, not biological.  Yes, of course they are social.  But the social is biological: societies are created by organisms.  Is this the old reductionism, or what Lerner and the mathematician Ralph Abraham called scientism: the belief that only what is observed through the five traditional senses is real?  Not exactly.  The social sciences don’t reduce to the natural sciences; rather, the influence is in both directions.  What we experience in our social and cultural lives, and what we feel in our souls, has to drive the search for hypotheses about how our bodies and our brains are organized.

We hear over and over again that biological motivations boil down to survival of our selves and of our genes.  This is an unspoken assumption that pervades much of our discourse.  We think it’s all selfish genes because this is how conventional wisdom (or, as my on-line book calls it, common nonsense) interprets Darwinian evolutionary theory.  Even on the left, many good people unconsciously accept the notion that (to paraphrase Bill Clinton) “it’s survival and reproduction, stupid.”  In widely read trade books, scientists like E. O. Wilson and philosophers like Daniel Dennett, warm and decent humanists who are far from reactionary, try to bring science to bear on solving social problems but have trouble stepping outside this orthodox Darwinist box.

But we know in our hearts we are much more than survivors and reproducers.  Our need for meaning is real.  So are our needs for social bonding, for aesthetic enjoyment, and for bodily stimulation.  Sex is associated with reproduction, but we want it for bonding and pleasure even when there’s no possibility of offspring.

Is there any biological basis for all these needs, or must we abandon biology if we want meaning in our lives?  If the answer is no to the first alternative, or yes to the second, we are in bad shape.  That would mean that the search for rational understanding and the search for spiritual meaning are forever doomed to clash.  That would make us vulnerable to the anti-evolution, “intelligent design” crowd, because only their outlook could give us meaning.  In fact, William Jennings Bryan, famous as the prosecuting lawyer in the Scopes trial, opposed evolution (despite his political progressivism) precisely because he feared that belief in Darwin’s theory would deprive us of meaning and be harmful to morality.

Happily, I disagree with this gloomy assessment.  Our needs for meaning and for bonding are just as biologically rooted as our needs for survival.  We even partly share these needs with other animals, at least other mammals.  The much-studied prairie vole, a Rocky Mountain relative of the mouse, forms stable pair bonds in which both parents nurture offspring.  And a recent book by the bioethicist Jonathan Bascombe documents many cases of animals seeking, or working for, stimulation (such as tickling) that gives them pleasure but has no instrumental value for survival or reproduction.

Of all the scientific discoveries that bear on our needs for quality of living, none is so influential as the work of Harry and Margaret Harlow on monkeys, starting in the 1940s.  Before the Harlows’ work it was believed that juvenile monkeys were interested in their mothers only as sources of food and protection.  But the Harlows took some monkeys away from their mothers (which led to poor adult social adjustments!) and gave them a choice of two artificial surrogate mothers, one made of stiff wire and providing milk, the other made of soft cloth and not providing milk.  They found the juveniles spent much more time with the cuddly cloth mothers, going to the rough wire mothers only to be fed.  This suggested that the hugging and pleasurable physical sensations that normal monkeys receive from their real mothers is more important than the food those mothers provide.

In humans, there have been many studies of children raised in orphanages, notably the orphanages in Rumania under the Ceausescu dictatorship.  From the pure survival viewpoint these Rumanian children were well treated, with nutritious food, comfortable shelter, and good medical care.  But they were warehoused in an impersonal manner with no adult caretakers showing them affection or playing with them.  To the surprise of many, this lack of love and stimulation led to brain development that lagged several years behind their peers raised in homes (as some American adoptive parents of Rumanian children found out).

So where did the orthodox, survival-and-reproduction-only Darwinist mentality arise?  Was it from Darwin’s own writings?  Not at all, says David Loye, founder of the Darwin Project, based on detailed study of Darwin’s The Descent of Man (his account of human evolution that followed the more general The Origin of Species).  Loye notes on the project web site (www.thedarwinproject.com) that “In the Descent of Man Charles Darwin wrote only twice of "survival of the fittest" — but 95 times about love! 92 times about moral sensitivity.”  (Aside: the phrase “survival of the fittest” was not coined by Darwin but by Herbert Spencer, founder of what we now call Social Darwinism.)  In the same book, Darwin specifically said that human altruism cannot be explained by natural selection: for example, those soldiers who sacrificed their own safety for the good of their comrades would not survive or reproduce in greater numbers than their more selfish fellow soldiers.

So the almost unconscious tendency of many scientists, and many secular humanists, to say every behavior we repeatedly perform promotes the survival of our genes, and is selectively chosen in evolution over competing behaviors, is wrong.  That unconscious belief is shared by many on the political and religious left, who haven’t thought through its implications.  Yet its implications, like those of Social Darwinism, are profoundly right wing.  It suggests that if we tend to get into wars, or unequal hierarchies, that’s “in our genes” and no social arrangement can be made that will change that fact.

My career has been a search for scientific arguments against this survival-only belief, and in the last few years such arguments have slowly been falling into place.  In 2002, for example, Riane Eisler and I wrote an article for a special issue of the journal Brain and Mind, an issue dealing with brain development and caring behavior.  Our take was: yes, competitive, fight-or-flight behavior is in our genes, but so is cooperative, bonding behavior, or as the psychologist Shelley Taylor called it, tend-and-befriend.  Natural selection has preserved both sets of behaviors for different reasons.  Eisler and I mapped out some of the brain regions, neurotransmitters, and hormones that tend to be involved in each type of behavior pattern.

Like Yahweh in Deuteronomy, evolution says “I put before you good and evil: now choose.”  At that point we can’t rely on natural selection to decide for us.  We must decide, or build social arrangements that can help us decide in a more ethical way more often.

Yet fight-or-flight behavior isn’t always evil.  We need it when our lives, our loved ones’ lives, or other things we value are in danger.  We even need a certain amount of fight-or-flight to defend our vision of social justice against the religious right!  But each of us possesses different amounts of bias toward competitive or cooperative behavior.  This involves a balance between biochemical substances involved in reacting to stress, such as cortisol and norepinephrine, and other biochemical substances involved in bonding with others, such as oxytocin and endorphins.  The differences in this brain chemical balance between different people come partly from genes but more from social influences.

Yes, our social interactions profoundly affect our brains!  The synapses connecting cells in our brains are plastic, so your listening and reacting to me affects the biochemistry of your synapses, and my giving this talk to you affects the biochemistry of my synapses.

So saying that a condition is “in the brain” doesn’t mean it should be treated by medication instead of verbally.  Bruce Perry, a child trauma expert in Houston, has shown that a pattern of childhood abuse leads to chronic overload of the brain’s stress coping system, so that adults who were abused as children are biochemically altered to the point that as adults they are less able to engage in bonding patterns and more prone to fight-or-flight (or in some cases, escape into fantasy or drugs).  Likewise, though there are fewer data on this, a caring upbringing makes bonding smoother in adult life.

Surely all of our levels of the stress hormone cortisol have risen after six years of living under the Bush presidency!  And no drug will be able to treat that.  You might be able to find a drug that will increase blood levels of the bonding hormone oxytocin and decrease blood levels of cortisol, and maybe that will help temporarily.  The same goes for relaxation massage.  But as Riane Eisler and I go on to say (and she has said in several of her books), only a change in day-to-day life situations can have a lasting effect on this biochemical balance. 

Of course the biochemical balance is worst for the health of poor people under the stress of difficulty just in obtaining food, safety, and health care.  Yet increasingly the balance is bad for middle class people as well, living under chronic stresses of having to work long hours, often in workplaces where trust is lacking, to preserve their status and pay for ever more expensive necessities.

Until about twenty years ago, mainstream behavioral scientists went along with some version of “it’s survival and reproduction, stupid.”  They tended to disdain concepts like trust as “squishy soul stuff,” in the words of the philosopher Paul Churchland.  But the work of the Harlows on monkeys, and of other psychologists on orphaned children, argues that trust is important not only for our emotional development but for our cognitive development as well.  And trust shows up in our biochemistry.  There is a burgeoning interdisciplinary field called social neuroscience which is just what it sounds like it is.  Social neuroscientists such as James Rilling of Emory University are finding from brain imaging experiments that the brain’s pleasure system, involving the neurotransmitter dopamine, is highly and selectively activated by being involved in a task with one or more trusted and cooperative partners – or at least by believing one has trusted partners.

My research has been at the borders between three fields: neuroscience, psychology, and mathematics.[1]  Most of my published work is on computational theories, partly quantitative and partly qualitative, about the involvement of the frontal lobes and deeper brain areas in human decision making and interactions between cognition and emotion.  I chose this field over other fields of science because of the contact it can make with the very concerns of conferences like this one.  The topics and dates of the publications on my web site illustrate both how long it took for brain theory to reach relevance for tikkun olam, and how relevant it is now.

Science sometimes attracts cautious and dull personalities, people who want to live in a confined world where problems have definite answers and the human world’s ambiguity doesn’t intrude.  But many of the best and most creative scientists are not at all like that.  They practice what Theodore Roszak called a “science of rhapsodic intellect,” whose pursuit answers Matthew Fox’s call for more awe in higher education.  Rhapsodic intellects are found in quantum physics, astronomy, oceanography, ecology, and every other vitally important field of science.  But the science of the mind, brain, and spirit plays a special role in bridging the observation of nature and the interests of the public.  In the words of the Elizabethan poet Francis Quarles:

Why dost thou wonder, O friend,

At the height of the stars or the depth of the sea?

Enter into thine own soul, and wonder there.