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The Evolution of the Emotion-Processing Mind: With an Introduction to Mental Darwinism
Book by Langs, Robert J.
223 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1996
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December 20, 2022
How frustrating must it be, to identify what, on the basis of extensive professional research and experience, you consider to be the single greatest threat to human survival, to write a book about it, clearly laying out your argument and suggesting, albeit tentatively, some adumbrations for making a positive intervention in the nick of time, and then seeing the book, more or less, ignored? Quite frustrating, you'd think.
To sum up the book, we can turn to Kilgore Trout, in Kurt Vonnegut's Galapagos, who maintains that all the sorrows of humankind were caused by "the only true villain in my story: the oversized human brain". Langs' addendum to that observation is that, while the human brain is oversized, it is, in some crucial aspects, horribly underdeveloped.
Langs' impressions coincide with my own. I have just one quibble with his analysis. He insists that the conscious mind is not merely tolerant but actually welcoming of frame-deviation (i.e. for example, those occasions on which someone fails to observe the timings of an appointment), and provides a clinical vignette as evidence. Fair enough, the episode he describes is plausible enough, but equally one could have foreseen it going in an entirely contrary direction, just as credibly - with the affected person insulted, slighted, sulking and so on. So, I don't buy his formulations on the ways in which the conscious mind seeks to reconcile itself to death-anxiety via celebrating (relatively) petty acts of expectation-busting. But, this apart, his overall thesis is more accurate than anything that we're generally working with now, and to adopt its insights might, in time (if we have time) make a difference.
He's also right that the condition he describes and dissects, is precisely the reason why his arguments will be abhorred and ignored.
To sum up the book, we can turn to Kilgore Trout, in Kurt Vonnegut's Galapagos, who maintains that all the sorrows of humankind were caused by "the only true villain in my story: the oversized human brain". Langs' addendum to that observation is that, while the human brain is oversized, it is, in some crucial aspects, horribly underdeveloped.
Langs' impressions coincide with my own. I have just one quibble with his analysis. He insists that the conscious mind is not merely tolerant but actually welcoming of frame-deviation (i.e. for example, those occasions on which someone fails to observe the timings of an appointment), and provides a clinical vignette as evidence. Fair enough, the episode he describes is plausible enough, but equally one could have foreseen it going in an entirely contrary direction, just as credibly - with the affected person insulted, slighted, sulking and so on. So, I don't buy his formulations on the ways in which the conscious mind seeks to reconcile itself to death-anxiety via celebrating (relatively) petty acts of expectation-busting. But, this apart, his overall thesis is more accurate than anything that we're generally working with now, and to adopt its insights might, in time (if we have time) make a difference.
He's also right that the condition he describes and dissects, is precisely the reason why his arguments will be abhorred and ignored.
Displaying 1 of 1 review