The strange order of things Life, feeling, and the making of cultures

Review by New York Times Review

THE STRANGE ORDER OF THINGS: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures, by Antonio Damasio. (Vintage, $17.) Damasio, a well-known neuroscientist, makes a case for the centrality of feelings and emotions in human history. Unlike other accounts that focus on cognition and are largely unconcerned with the role of affect, his book reframes the history of humans and the natural world, putting feelings at its core. THE PISCES, by Melissa Brodér. (Hogarth, $16.) In this darkly funny novel, a depressed and stalled graduate student finally meets her dream date - who turns out to be half fish. As our reviewer, Cathleen Schine, put it, Brodér "approaches the great existential subjects - emptiness, loneliness, meaninglessness, death and boyfriends - as if they were a collection of bad habits." SHARP: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion, by Michelle Dean. (Grove, $17.) In breezy biographical chapters on 10 writers, including Susan Sontag, Joan Didion and Pauline Kael, Dean explores their successes and failures and their relationship to feminism. Above all, she considers the doubleedged nature of the word "sharp": It's a compliment with an undertow of terror, she writes. "Sharpness, after all, cuts." THE IMMORTALISTS, by Chloe Benjamin. (Putnam, $16.) In late 1960s New York, the Gold children visit a fortuneteller known for predicting the dates when people will die. The four siblings grapple with the prophesies over the next 50 years: One heads West for San Francisco, and another becomes a scientist, researching the possibility of living forever. For each, the knowledge turns out to be both a blessing and curse, and all must try to balance their desires and choices with their predetermined destinies. NO ASHES IN THE FIRE: Coming of Age Black and Free in America, by Darnell L. Moore. (Bold Type, $16.99.) Growing up gay and black in Camden, N. J., Moore had a brutal, violent childhood. In his book, he sets out to make visible the "forces that rendered my blackness criminal, my black manhood vile, my black queerness sinful," he writes, but despite the cruelty he faced, he suffuses his memoir with humanity. THE SPARSHOLT AFFAIR, by Alan Hollinghurst. (Vintage, $16.95.) Hollinghurst's emotionally resonant novel charts nearly a century of queer life and desires in Britain. When readers meet the title character, he's an object of intense desire among a group of male friends at Oxford. Years later, a sex scandal torpedoes his political career, leaving his gay son to claim the possibilities his father never had.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 2, 2019]

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Damasio (Self Comes to Mind), director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California, continues his quest for a theory of human consciousness, here linking feelings and culture with homeostasis and evolution. His ideas are exciting, yet his explanations tend to be abstract, as when he writes that "the constructions that inhabit our minds can well be imagined as ephemeral musical performances, played by several hidden orchestras." Attempting to explain "the biological underpinnings of the human cultural mind," Damasio begins with the Cambrian unicellular organism and shows how the mapping of internal and external images led to the development of nervous systems, which in turn laid the groundwork for verbal language, consciousness, subjectivity, and feeling. Damasio posits that feelings in humans "arose from a series of gradual, body-related processes... accumulated and maintained over evolution." He then explores the biological roots of culture, particularly the role homeostasis played in generating behavioral strategies. Damasio extends his thinking on homeostasis to the shaping of moral codes and the emergence of religious and political systems, and even to the internet and what he dubs "the current crisis of the human condition." Wide in scope, though occasionally difficult to follow, Damasio's book contains moments of genius but feels like a work in progress. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Neuroscientist Damasio (neuroscience, psychology, & philosophy, Univ. of Southern California; Self Comes to Mind) argues that feelings such as pain, suffering, and pleasure were key motivators encouraging the development of culture-a uniquely human phenomenon. Central to the author's theory is the relationship between feelings and homeostasis (the state of equilibrium between internal and external forces). Homeostasis is the foundation of all forms of life and is a driving force in the struggle for survival within the simplest cells, such as bacteria, as well as in complex organisms, such as humans. Feelings are connected to homeostasis in that they are, according to Damasio, "the subjective experiences of the momentary state of homeostasis within a living body." Every living organism aims to achieve homeostasis for survival, but only those with nervous systems are capable of feelings. It is feelings, argues the author, with their inherent connection to the concept of homeostasis, that spurred the development of culture. Damasio's sophisticated and complex theory on the role of feelings in the emergence of culture incorporates hard science, neuroscience, and even philosophy. VERDICT Densely packed with information, this title will appeal primarily to avid science readers who are interested in discovering new ways of looking at the world and humans' complex relationship to it.-Ragan O'Malley, Saint Ann's Sch., Brooklyn © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A leading neuroscientist returns with a complex exploration of the life of the mind.Feelings play an unappreciated role in culture and consciousness but turn out to be a universal aspect of life, writes Damasio (Neuroscience, Psychology and Philosophy/Univ. of Southern California; Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain, 2010), who directs the Brain and Creativity Institute. Neuroscience has become a popular genre, so there is a substantial audience for this expert, definitely not dumbed-down examination of the interplay between feelings and the human condition. The author emphasizes that culture is almost entirely a human phenomenon and consciousness entirely so, but these represent only the most advanced neurophysiologic manifestations of feeling thatas emotionare present in many higher animals. These require a brain, but a nervous system (first evolved 500 million years ago) allows simpler animals to monitor their environments and react appropriately. Absence of feeling is incompatible with life, so even primitive bacteria sense their surroundings, cooperate, and defend themselves in sophisticated ways. Damasio emphasizes that all life aims to stabilize its internal environment (chemical concentration, pH levels, oxygen content, temperature, etc.) in the face of external changes. This is homeostasis, a theme the author returns to repeatedly as the engine of evolution. For nearly 4 billion years species have competed, struggled, and died out as evolution has produced other, often more complex species, including humans. Feelings contribute to homeostasis, but homeostasis applies only to individuals. In a long final section, Damasio wonders how its scientific application might diminish conflicts among movements, cultures, and nations in our increasingly dangerous world. His mildly optimistic conclusion is that there are reasons to hope.A dense, detailed mixture of hard science, philosophy, and speculation that will reward readers willing to work through the author's demanding book. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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BEGINNINGS      1   This book is about one interest and one idea. I have long been intrigued in human affect--the world of emotions and feelings--and have spent many years investigating it: why and how we emote, feel, use feelings to construct our selves; how feelings assist or undermine our best intentions; why and how brains interact with the body to support such functions. I have new facts and interpretations to share on these matters.    As for the idea, it is very simple: feelings have not been given the credit they deserve as motives, monitors, and negotiators of human cultural endeavors. Humans have distinguished themselves from all other beings by creating a spectacular collection of objects, practices, and ideas, collectively known as cultures. The collection includes the arts, philosophical inquiry, moral systems and religious beliefs, justice, governance, economic institutions, and technology and science. Why and how did this process begin? A frequent answer to this question invokes an important faculty of the human mind -- verbal language--along with distinctive features such as intense sociality and superior intellect. For those who are biologically inclined the answer also includes natural selection operating at the level of genes. I have no doubt that intellect, sociality, and language have played key roles in the process, and it goes without saying that the organisms capable of cultural invention, along with the specific faculties used in the invention, are present in humans by the grace of natural selection and genetic transmission. The idea is that something else was required to jump-start the saga of human cultures. That something else was a motive. I am referring specifically to feelings, from pain and suffering to well-being and pleasure.   Consider medicine, one of our most significant cultural enterprises. Medicine's combination of technology and science began as a response to the pain and suffering caused by diseases of every sort, from physical trauma and infections to cancers, contrasted with the very opposite of pain and suffering: well-being, pleasures, the prospect of thriving. Medicine did not begin as an intellectual sport meant to exercise one's wits over a diagnostic puzzle or a physiological mystery. It began as a consequence of specific feelings of patients and specific feelings of early physicians, including but not limited to the compassion that may be born of empathy. Those motives remain today. No reader will have failed to notice how visits to the dentist and surgical procedures have changed for the better in our own lifetime. The primary motive behind improvements such as efficient anesthetics and precise instrumentation is the management of feelings of discomfort. The activity of engineers and scientists plays a commendable role in this endeavor, but it is a motivated role. The profit motive of the drug and instrumentation industries also plays a significant part because the public does need to reduce its suffering and industries respond to that need. The pursuit of profit is fueled by varied yearnings, a desire for advancement, prestige, even greed, which are none other than feelings. It is not possible to comprehend the intense effort to develop cures for cancers or Alzheimer's disease without considering feelings as motives, monitors, and negotiators of the process. Nor is it possible to comprehend, for example, the less intense effort with which Western cultures have pursued cures for malaria in Africa or the management of drug addictions most everywhere without considering the respective web of motivating and inhibiting feelings. Language, sociality, knowledge, and reason are the primary inventors and executors of these complicated processes. But feelings get to motivate them, stay on to check the results, and help negotiate the necessary adjustments.   The idea, in essence, is that cultural activity began and remains deeply embedded in feeling. The favorable and unfavorable interplay of feeling and reason must be acknowledged if we are to understand the conflicts and contradictions of the human condition       2   How did humans come to be at the same time sufferers, mendicants, celebrants of joy, philanthropists, artists and scientists, saints and criminals, benevolent masters of the earth and monsters intent on destroying it? The answer to this question requires the contributions of historians and sociologists, for certain, as well as those of artists, whose sensibilities often intuit the hidden patterns of the human drama, but the answer also requires the contributions of different branches of biology.   As I considered how feelings could not only drive the first flush of cultures but remain integral to their evolution, I searched for a way to connect human life, as we know it today--equipped with minds, feelings, consciousness, memory, language, complex sociality, and creative intelligence--with early life, as early as 3.8 billion years ago. To establish the connection, I needed to suggest an order and a time line for the development and appearance of these critical faculties in the long history of evolution. The actual order of appearance of biological structures and faculties that I uncovered violates traditional expectations and is as strange as the book title implies. In the history of life, events did not comply with the conventional notions that we humans have formed for how to build the beautiful instrument I like to call a cultural mind.   Intending to tell a story about the substance and consequences of human feeling, I came to recognize that our ways of thinking about minds and cultures are out of tune with biological reality. When a living organism behaves intelligently and winningly in a social setting, we assume that the behavior results from foresight, deliberation, complexity, all with the help of a nervous system. It is now clear, however, that such behaviors could also have sprung from the bare and spare equipment of a single cell, namely, in a bacterium, at the dawn of the biosphere. "Strange" is too mild a word to describe this reality.   We can envision an explanation that begins to accommodate the counterintuitive findings. The explanation draws on the mechanisms of life itself and on the conditions of its regulation, a collection of phenomena that is generally designated by a single word: homeostasis . Feelings are the mental expressions of homeostasis, while homeostasis, acting under the cover of feeling, is the functional thread that links early life-forms to the extraordinary partnership of bodies and nervous systems. That partnership is responsible for the emergence of conscious, feeling minds that are, in turn, responsible for what is most distinctive about humanity: cultures and civilizations. Feelings are at the center of the book, but they draw their powers from homeostasis.   Connecting cultures to feeling and homeostasis strengthens their links to nature and deepens the humanization of the cultural process. Feelings and creative cultural minds were assembled by a long process in which genetic selection guided by homeostasis played a prominent role. Connecting cultures to feelings, homeostasis, and genetics counters the growing detachment of cultural ideas, practices, and objects from the process of life.   It should be evident that the connections I am establishing do not diminish the autonomy that cultural phenomena acquire historically. I am not reducing cultural phenomena to their biological roots or attempting to have science explain all aspects of the cultural process. The sciences alone cannot illuminate the entirety of human experience without the light that comes from the arts and humanities.   Discussions about the making of cultures often agonize over two conflicting accounts: one in which human behavior results from autonomous cultural phenomena, and another in which human behavior is the consequence of natural selection as conveyed by genes. But there is no need to favor one account over the other. Human behavior largely results from both influences in varying proportions and order.   Curiously, discovering the roots of human cultures in nonhuman biology does not diminish the exceptional status of humans at all. The exceptional status of each human being derives from the unique significance of suffering and flourishing in the context of our remembrances of the past and of the memories we have constructed of the future we incessantly anticipate.       3   We humans are born storytellers, and we find it very satisfying to tell stories about how things began. We have reasonable success when the thing to be storied is a device or a relationship, love affairs and friendships being great themes for stories of origins. We are not so good and we are often wrong when we turn to the natural world. How did life begin? How did minds, feelings, or consciousness begin? When did social behaviors and cultures first appear? There is nothing easy about such an endeavor. When the laureate physicist Erwin Schrödinger turned his attention to biology and wrote his classic book What Is Life?, it should be noted that he did not title it The "Origins" of Life . He recognized a fool's errand when he saw it.    Still, the errand is irresistible. This book is dedicated to presenting some facts behind the making of minds that think, create narratives and meaning, remember the past and imagine the future; and to presenting some facts behind the machinery of feeling and consciousness responsible for the reciprocal connections among minds, the outside world, and its respective life. In their need to cope with the human heart in conflict, in their desire to reconcile the contradictions posed by suffering, fear, anger, and the pursuit of well-being, humans turned to wonder and awe and discovered music making, dancing, painting, and literature. They continued their efforts by creating the often beautiful and sometimes frayed epics that go by such names as religious belief, philosophical inquiry, and political governance. From cradle to grave, these were some of the ways in which the cultural mind addressed the human drama. Excerpted from The Strange Order of Things: The Biological Roots of Culture All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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