Two Views on Global Mental Health - Evidence-Based vs. Cultural Sensitivity

The two articles cited below were referenced in one of the weekly "best of" lists that I read, sorry that I can't remember which one. But these two articles offer very different takes on the topic of mental health as a global health concern.

In 2010, a team of scholars from the Harvard School of Public Health and the World Economic Forum issued a report on the current and future global economic burden of disease.

In 2010, the report’s authors found, noncommunicable diseases caused 63 percent of all deaths around the world, and 80 percent of those fatalities occurred in countries that the World Bank characterizes as low income or middle income. Noncommunicable diseases are partly rooted in lifestyle and diet, and their emergence as a major risk, especially in the developing world, represents the dark side of the economic advances that have also spurred increased longevity, urbanization, and population growth. The scale of the problem is only going to grow: between 2010 and 2030, the report estimated, chronic noncommunicable diseases will reduce global GDP by $46.7 trillion.

One surprise was that the report predicted that the largest source of future financial costs would be mental disorders, which the report suggested would account for at least a third of the global economic burden of "noncommunicable diseases" by 2030.

Taken together, the direct economic effects of mental illness (such as spending on care) and the indirect effects (such as lost productivity) already cost the global economy around $2.5 trillion a year. By 2030, the team projected, that amount will increase to around $6 trillion, in constant dollars—more than heart disease and more than cancer, diabetes, and respiratory diseases combined. 


The above quotes are taken from a very recent article in the Jan/Feb 2015 issue of Foreign Affairs, "Darkness Invisible: The Hidden Global Costs of Mental Illness." The article is written by Thomas R. Insel (Director of the National Institutes of Mental Health), Pamela Y. Collins (Director, Office for Research on Disparities & Global Mental Health National Institute of Mental Health), and Steven E. Hyman (Director of the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research and a core member at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard).

All three of these authors have skin in the game, so to speak - their jobs are based on the existence of mental disorders on a wide scale that must be treated. That makes me suspect of their opinions. 

Still, their article is worth a read.  

In the post that referenced that article, the author also mentioned an alternative view presented by Doerte Bemme and Nicole D’souza at a collaborative website called Somatosphere, "Global Mental Health and its Discontents." Their article was spurred by a then-recent series of articles and conferences on the topic of Global Mental Health.

Recently, an article in Nature entitled “Grand Challenges in Global Mental Health” (2011) identified mental health priorities for research in the next 10 years, sparking controversy and debate about the appropriate methods for establishing priorities, research themes, and interventions in GMH. This year’s annual Advanced Study Institute (ASI) and Conference, hosted by McGill’s Division of Social & Transcultural Psychiatry (July 5-7 2012) in Montreal, Canada, sought to address these concerns and focused on ways to generate critique of the GMH movement to ensure that its goals and methods are responsive to diverse cultural contexts.

Here is the rest of the introductory paragraph from their article:

The ASI workshop and conference entitled “Global Mental Health: Bridging the Perspectives of Cultural Psychiatry and Public Health.”, was chaired by Laurence Kirmayer and Duncan Pedersen, and was animated with intense discussions about various themes related to the GMH endeavour. The three-day ASI series sought to address ongoing controversies and tensions between a public health approach to mental health (grounded in current evidence-based practices largely produced by high-income countries and exported and adapted to local situations) and a culturally-based approach (which emphasizes local priorities and community-based resources and solutions). The first two days took the form of a workshop bringing together experts in cultural psychiatry, public health and medical anthropology for a consideration of ways to bridge various perspectives on GMH.

The authors present their coverage of the conference discussion "in the form of a debate, giving voice to those in attendance." It's definitely worth the time to read.

Broader Topic

This topic points out one of the many issues with the standard position taken on tackling mental health issues, locally or globally - the opposition between one-size-fits-all, "evidence-based" models approach and an individually and culturally sensitive approach that may not fit the "evidence-based" standards of the NIMH.

Living and working in Tucson has provided me with an opportunity to see this conflict in my daily work. A large percentage of our clients are Hispanic, many of whom are Catholic, but others hold beliefs tied to their indigenous heritage (pre-Spanish influence). Even within our Anglo clients there are wide differences in cultural beliefs, religious beliefs, and socioeconomic status, all of which affects their understanding of themselves and of their place in the world.

The treatments favored by the authors of the first article are very often psychopharmacological, i.e., medications, many (if not most) of which create more problems than they solve. For example, antipsychotic drugs used to treat schizophrenia (the costliest of the mental health issues faced in any nation) actually perpetuate the problems they are meant to treat.

During the mid 1990s, MRI studies found that antipsychotics can cause basal ganglion structures and the thalamus to swell, and the frontal lobes to shrink. Then, in 1998, Raquel Gur at the University of Pennsylvania reported that the swelling of the basal ganglia and thalamus was "associated with greater severity of both negative and positive symptoms." In other words, this research showed that the drugs cause morphological changes in the brain that are associated with a worsening of the very symptoms the drugs are supposed to treat. (Robert Whitaker, Psychology Today, May 18, 2010)

The effects of long-term pharmacological interventions are often cited to explain the apparent disparity between outcomes for psychosis between developing nations (better outcomes) and developed nations (poorer outcomes). The research cited by Whitaker supports that belief.

In a longitudinal study of schizophrenia outcomes by Harrow, Jobe, and Faull (2012), it was found that "SZ patients not on antipsychotics for prolonged periods were significantly less likely to be psychotic and experienced more periods of recovery; they also had more favorable risk and protective factors. SZ patients off antipsychotics for prolonged periods did not relapse more frequently."

In his Psychology Today article, Whitake cited another study, in Lapland, Finland, which treated first-time psychosis with a very conservative degree of pharmacological interventions- and the results are striking.

Since 1992, the medical community in the western Lapland region of northern Finland has been using antipsychotics in a selective, cautious manner. At the end of five years, only about one-third of their first-episode psychotic patients have been exposed to antipsychotics, and only about 20% are regularly maintained on the drugs. This is a "continual use" rate similar to the rate for schizophrenia patients from developing countries in the second WHO study, and here are the long-term outcomes for western Lapland's first-episode psychotic patients: Eighty-six percent are working or back in school at the end of five years, and only fourteen percent are on long-term disability. These outcomes are far better than the norm in Western Europe and the rest of the developed world.

Because Finland is a developed nation, this research supports the belief that the deciding factor in why people in developing nations have better outcomes in psychosis is not necessarily due to cultural factors (such as wider family support or better social support), but may largely be due to the pharmacological interventions that are the primary line of treatment in developed nations.

In fact, Parmanand Kulhara (2009), whose research suggests that the difference in outcomes between developed and developing nations is real, notes in his review that “culture should not be used as a synonym for unexplained variance” (Asian Journal of Psychiatry, 2(2); 55-62) - further, "exact factors and the mechanisms subsumed under “culture” that influence outcome and course are still hidden; thus, the “black box” still remains unopened."

It is unlikely that treatment methods in the U.S. are going to change any time soon - pharmacological interventions are considered the primary method, and the only beneficial treatment, for schizophrenia and psychosis.

If you develop symptoms and are lucky enough to find a therapist who understands that psychosis is "a natural though very risky and haphazard process initiated by their psyche in an attempt to cope and/or heal from a way of being in the world that was simply no longer sustainable for them" (Paris Williams; Brain Blogger, Full Recovery from Schizophrenia?, May 29, 2012), you will have a much better chance of maintaining a full-recovery.

From The New Republic, author and psychologist Martha Stout (The Sociopath Next Door, The Myth of Sanity, The Paranoia Switch) reviews the new book from brothers Joel and Ian Gold, Suspicious Minds: How Culture Shapes Madness.

This looks like an excellent and important book - we too often neglect the cultural context of "madness."

Is Modern Culture Making Us Crazier?

The science behind America's deepening disturbance

By Martha Stout
July 31, 2014 | The New Republic

A young friend recently shared with me her experience of being stopped by the police on an otherwise uneventful Tuesday morning. With one arm protectively wrapped around her shoulder bag because it had a broken latch, she’d been walking along a city street. Unbeknownst to her at the time, a shooting had occurred the previous day in the same neighborhood. Three police officers, two male and one female, approached her. They demanded to know whether she had a gun under her arm, took her bag from her, and looked inside. No gun. They checked her identification. No record. (As far as I know, this young woman hasn’t so much as a traffic ticket.) She was completely cooperative throughout.

The female officer then patted her down, which my friend said she tolerated by deliberately becoming a little dissociative—“spacing out”—until the stranger’s hands finally finished their journey over her body. Then, though there was no gun in it, the two male officers decided to search her shoulder bag again, item by item. Riffling through her wallet, they found a condom, and that discovery grabbed their attention.

“Oh look. We’ve got a young slut here,” said one, waving the condom. All three officers laughed.

My friend, very scared by now, said nothing.

Finally, they let her go. As she walked away, the female officer called after her, “Guess you came here ready to fuck anyone you wanted to, didn’t you?”

I find this officer’s parting salvo grimacingly ironic.

These days, mind-spinning stories of misogyny assail us from all over our country, and indeed, this account is hardly the worst. But knowing the victim personally, and understanding that she will carry the hateful essence of this ridicule with her for a long time to come, I was especially saddened. And for me, one of the most disheartening features of this incident was the fact that the young woman who endured it was not even taken aback. Far from being shocked and outraged, she was not even surprised. When I asked her about her reaction, she explained, “I was very upset, but no, I wasn’t surprised. If you walk around alone, you kind of expect this sort of thing to happen. It’s really only a matter of time.”

Is this frightening belief about the world a symptom of paranoia on her part? And, as the old saw goes, are you paranoid when they’re really out to get you? Most of her twenty-something years have been spent in a nation beset by furious cultural and political forces on a course to push back the legal standing and social status of women by half a century. As but two illustrations, there are Supreme Court actions such as the recent Hobby Lobby ruling and state-level abortion-restriction laws that are designed to make certain of women’s medical procedures as costly and humiliating as possible.

How much of an influence has the traumatized and reactive culture of a post-September 11 United States had on the mental status of this young citizen—and for that matter, on the mental status of the police officers who bullied her? And in general, how much, and in what ways, do events in the wider world affect our individual personalities? Societal factors clearly influence our observable behavior—what we will and won’t do in public on a day-to-day basis—but can societal, cultural, political, and even technological factors soak into our very psyches, infiltrate our inner cores and make lasting changes to who we are? This is a fascinating and in some cases alarming question, and is the basis of Joel and Ian Gold’s book, Suspicious Minds: How Culture Shapes Madness.

Suspicious Minds: How Culture Shapes Madness,
by Joel Gold and Ian Gold. Free Press.

Joel Gold, MD, Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the NYU School of Medicine, and his brother, Ian Gold, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Philosophy and Psychiatry at McGill University, discuss a number of psychotic patients who all have the same delusion—that the people in their lives are acting out a script, much like the family and friends of Jim Carrey’s character in the 1998 movie, The Truman Show. Juxtaposing recent research on schizophrenia with page-turning case studies of these paranoid patients, the Golds argue that psychotic delusions (not to mention mesmeric movie plots) are the result of interactions between the brain and the sociocultural world, and they bring to light the discipline-altering fact that culture has a role to play in the development of psychopathology generally.

If you happen not to be a psychiatrist or a psychologist, you might reasonably imagine that mental health professionals have written many other books on this crucial and intriguing question: Can zeitgeist have an enduring negative effect on the individual psyche? But the startling fact is that most of the relevant scholarly writings by psychopathologists are quite new (post-2001), and discussions for nonprofessionals are rare. Over the past 40 years or so, psychology has attempted to divvy up the causes of pathological conditions between two now-famous categories, “nature” (as transmitted genetically) and “nurture” (environmental influences). For various psychopathologies, including paranoid schizophrenia, and also normal “personality traits” (introversion/extraversion, conservatism/liberalism, rigidity/adaptability, and several dozen more), research has yielded remarkably consistent results, indicating that these differences among human beings are accounted for by genetic and environmental factors in more or less equal measure, with genetics sometimes edging out environment by a point or two (51 versus 49 percent, in some instances). This research has been indispensable to our growing appreciation of the role of genetics both in normal personality and in the mental illnesses.

Contrastingly, our conception of environmental influences has been biased and narrow. We have tended to think of “nurture” only in the familial sense: In mental health research, “environment” tends to mean child-rearing factors, which is to say the personalities and actions of parents and, to a lesser degree, siblings. That an individual’s personality or mental illness might be affected by environmental factors outside the home has been largely overlooked. Take the study of sociopathy, which is another profound form of psychopathology—this one characterized not by delusions but by the complete absence of conscience. Research indicates that the factors involved in sociopathy, like those in many other mental illnesses, are about 50 percent genetic and 50 percent environmental. But researchers have been perplexed because they have been unable to find specific child-rearing variables that would consistently account for the environment’s half in cultivating sociopaths. I maintain (in my book The Sociopath Next Door) that this half consists primarily of larger societal factors, and this idea would seem to be supported by the fact that the incidence of diagnosed sociopathy is significantly lower in certain East Asian countries (most notably Taiwan and Japan) than in North America. It seems likely that, in the United States especially, any genetic predisposition to sociopathy will be nurtured and shaped by a single-mindedly competitive and individualistic culture that regards “winning” and domination as the ultimate goods.

Why have psychologists who study pathology tried to divide up the causality universe between inborn tendencies and the family environment, and turned a mostly blind eye to influences from the wider world? One answer is that a cultural hypothesis frustrates prevention: Though correcting the child-rearing practices of a large group of people would be a tall order, setting out to alter the entrenched belief systems of an entire society is even more daunting and might eventually involve taking a political stance, something many clinical psychologists and psychiatrists are loathe to do.

Gold and Gold make it clear that psychiatry is dispensing with the possibility of cultural factors in mental disorder even more summarily than psychology has done. They write, “The social world is at the heart of our theory of delusions, and this puts us at odds with much of mainstream psychiatry.” Mental illness, they explain, “at least severe mental illness—is nothing more than genetic and neural dysfunction,” according to psychiatric dogma. They point to the large and growing number of psychiatrists who aspire to understand and treat mental disorders as brain disorders, and convincingly illuminate the losses that psychiatry may suffer on account of this new reductionism.

The central argument in Suspicious Minds derives from the increasingly accepted “social brain hypothesis,” the idea that the primary function of enlarged primate (and therefore human) brains is to deal with the cognitive challenges of living in groups. In reference to paranoid disorders in particular, Gold and Gold ask the question—“What sort of cognitive system is required to enable one to be sensitive to social threats?” In answer, they propose that the human brain contains an adaptive “Suspicion System,” which is “the solution that evolution came up with to enable us to pick up evidence of infidelity and other social threats for the purpose of early detection and defense.” In other words, courtesy of natural selection, we are all biologically prepared to be leery. They hypothesize that a healthy Suspicion System makes social life safer through “heightened responses to subtle, uncertain, and ambiguous signs of social danger,” but that a malfunctioning or overloaded Suspicion System “will sound the alarm without good reason and detect evidence poorly—that is, see malign intent where there is none.” Over time, an overreactive Suspicion System may inaugurate “an idiosyncratic belief that is firmly maintained despite rational argument or evidence to the contrary”—i.e., a paranoid delusion. The authors point out that the persecutory delusions of clinical paranoia are by far the most prevalent form of delusion the world over.



Paramount Pictures
The delusions of psychotic patients—that their lives are scripted, and that their friends are mere actors—recall the plot of The Truman Show.

Gold and Gold conclude that the “Truman Show delusions” of their paranoid patients express those patients’ fears of being controlled by what other people know about them: “Truman Show is a delusion of control in the age of surveillance.” They declare, “Reductionism in psychiatry constrains theory to operate within the skull or the skin. Our bet is that the outside world is going to matter as well.”

Suspicious Minds is a contrarian, insightful, and important book. Gold and Gold do not take on the more politically involved and incendiary aspects of our society, such as run-amok individualism—or the abuse of power and the national upsurge in misogyny that plagued my young friend on that demoralizing Tuesday morning. Nonetheless, their analysis of culture-linked paranoia comprises an effective argument that our seemingly endless struggle to align our society with our more enlightened ideals may be a fight for our very minds.


~ Martha Stout, Ph.D., is the author of The Myth of Sanity: Divided Consciousness and the Promise of Awareness, The Paranoia Switch: How Terror Rewires Our Brains and Reshapes Our Behavior--and How We Can Reclaim Our Courage, The Sociopath Next Door, and an upcoming book, The Sociopath Files.

Massimo Pigliucci: Scientia Salon - A Manifesto for 21st Century Intellectualism

Scientia Salon is a webzine about science and philosophy. There is a very active conversation occurring there around these two BIG topics. Back in March, Massimo Pigliucci (founder and editor of the site) posted a "manifesto for 21st Century intellectualism.

Here is a little taste . . .

That problem, to put it plainly, is that many of our fellow citizens have not taken any intellectual course in self-defense (literally or more broadly speaking), and that they are bombarded by the best political and — let’s not forget it — corporate propaganda money (a lot of money) can buy.

This has a cascade of effects, from the very personal to the societal. At the personal level, many go about their lives with hardly a clue about why they are doing what they are doing. Socrates’ dictum that an unexamined life is not worth living was surely an exaggeration, but it definitely pays from time to time to pause and reflect on what we want from our existence on this planet and why. The ancient called it the pursuit of eudaimonia, the good and moral life. But in order to reflect and make informed decisions we need thinking tools, and there is a dearth of them both inside and outside of our educational system.

At the societal level, this means that we elect politicians because they look like the sort of fellows one would want to have a beer with, rather than because they are honest and brimming with good ideas about how to navigate the perils of the modern world in ways that maximize fairness and well being.

Yep.

The whole manifesto is posted below - be sure to check out some of the other writing at their site - some interesting topics and authors.

Massimo Pigliucci is, most recently, co-editor (with Maarten Boudry) of Philosophy of Pseudoscience: Reconsidering the Demarcation Problem (2013).

Scientia Salon: a manifesto for 21st century intellectualism

by Massimo Pigliucci

on March 21, 2014

During the Enlightenment, the Marquis de Condorcet defined a public intellectual as someone devoted to “the tracking down of prejudices in the hiding places where priests, the schools, the government, and all long-established institutions had gathered and protected them.” A number of years later, on 13 January 1898 to be precise, the writer Emile Zola showed the world — and in particular the French government — what public intellectualism could do. He penned his famous “J’accuse” letter to the President of France, concerning the abysmal behavior of the French authorities in the infamous Dreyfus affair.

Intellectualism, of course, has its detractors, particularly in the United States. Richard Hofstadter’s classic “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life” [1] traces several strands of the phenomenon all throughout American history, and we can very much see it today in the form of religious-based opposition to the teaching of evolution in public schools, or in the open disdain for politicians who dare name a favorite philosopher that is not Jesus.

At the City University of New York, where I work, I often teach a basic course in Critical Reasoning that uses a handy little booklet entitled, A Short Course in Intellectual Self Defense, by University of Québec-Montreal professor of Education Fundamentals Normand Baillargeon [2]. I highly recommend it, just as I wholeheartedly agree that teaching critical thinking really ought to be part of our concept of “educational fundamentals” — despite the fact that it is seen as optional even at the college level, let alone earlier.

The title of Baillargeon’s book is a play on a quote by the most famous (and controversial) public intellectual of the late 20th and early 21st century: Noam Chomsky. In his essay on Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies [3], Chomsky wrote that “Citizens of the democratic societies should undertake a course of intellectual self defense to protect themselves from manipulation and control, and to lay the basis for meaningful democracy.” No kidding. Just turn on Fox News, MSNBC, or even CNN and you will see just how intense and damaging the political propaganda is in the US (I know it is no less so in the other country I am directly familiar with, Italy — and I doubt the situation is much different elsewhere, give or take).

People concerned with developing a thriving society have always been worried about the specter of totalitarianism, let’s call it the “1984” scenario. And to be sure, there is much of that still going on in the world, with billions of people living under non democratic (or democratic only in name) regimes, from China to Russia to much of the Middle East.

But a more subtle, arguably more effective, way of controlling people is rather akin to the scenario presented by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World. In that particular dystopia it is psychological (and biological) manipulation that plays the crucial role — and it is much more powerful than overt coercion. Or, if you prefer, arch back to the Roman empire, where its military might abroad was coupled with the famous panem et circenses approach to handling the civilian population at home: give them enough food and entertainment and they won’t have the stomach for a revolution. If that sounds as an even rough approximation of many modern societies, then we agree that we have a serious problem.

That problem, to put it plainly, is that many of our fellow citizens have not taken any intellectual course in self-defense (literally or more broadly speaking), and that they are bombarded by the best political and — let’s not forget it — corporate propaganda money (a lot of money) can buy.

This has a cascade of effects, from the very personal to the societal. At the personal level, many go about their lives with hardly a clue about why they are doing what they are doing. Socrates’ dictum that an unexamined life is not worth living was surely an exaggeration, but it definitely pays from time to time to pause and reflect on what we want from our existence on this planet and why. The ancient called it the pursuit of eudaimonia, the good and moral life. But in order to reflect and make informed decisions we need thinking tools, and there is a dearth of them both inside and outside of our educational system.

At the societal level, this means that we elect politicians because they look like the sort of fellows one would want to have a beer with, rather than because they are honest and brimming with good ideas about how to navigate the perils of the modern world in ways that maximize fairness and well being.

For all of this, I am not so naive as to propose that more education — or even more courses in critical thinking — is the panacea needed to cure the ills of humanity. After all, David Hume famously said that “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them” [4], by which he meant that human beings aren’t just the rational animal (as Aristotle suggested), but also the passionate one. It follows that one needs to take care of emotions just as much, if not more, as one addresses reason.

Indeed, modern research in cognitive science has borne out Hume’s warning. Antonio Damasio [5] has argued in his Descartes’ Error that a functional human being cannot be modeled on the emotionless Spock, unless we wish for a polity of sociopaths. And of course more recent writings by the likes of Daniel Kahneman [6] and Jonathan Haidt [7] have clinched the case that we are so fraught with cognitive biases and so prone to rationalization that it is a miracle anything gets done around the world.

And yet, stuff does get done. Humanity has invented philosophy, and then science, and both have thrived precisely because we can and do use reason to understand the world and improve our lot. I find it somewhat amusing (well, frustrating, really) that every new paper coming out of the social or cognitive sciences showing just how limited and biased the human mind is becomes an argument for the irrelevance of rational thinking. As if those discoveries were made in any other way but by deploying the best reasoning abilities we have in order to overcome whatever biases even the researchers involved in those very studies surely suffer from.

To draw on a pertinent analogy: we have incontrovertible evidence that people in general tend to be bad at estimating probabilities, a phenomenon on which the multi-billion dollar casino industry is built. But very few people (other than casino owners, perhaps) would argue that therefore it is useless to teach about the gambler’s fallacy and other pertinent concepts. On the contrary: teaching the rudiments of probability theory is the best way we know of at least partially immunizing fellow human beings from wasting their fortunes at gambling establishments.

The same goes with critical reasoning and open intellectual discourse. They are not a silver bullet, but I guarantee you that once my students are made aware of the standard logical fallacies [8] they see them everywhere (because they are everywhere!), and they are better off for it.

Which brings me to the current project, of which this essay is the beginning and informal “manifesto.” Scientia is a Latin word that means knowledge (and understanding) in the broadest possible terms. It has wider implications than the English term “science,” as it includes natural and social sciences, philosophy, logic, and mathematics, to say the least. It reflects the idea that knowledge draws from multiple sources, some empirical (science), some conceptual (philosophy, math and logic), and it cannot be reduced to or constrained by just one of these sources. Salons, of course, were the social engines of the Age of Reason, and a suitable metaphor for public intellectualism in the 21st century, where the gathering places are more likely to be digital but where discussions can be just as vigorous as those that took place in the rooms made available by Madeleine de Scudéry or the marquise de Rambouillet in 17th century salons.

While I have been thinking for years about a venture like Scientia Salon, and have indeed slowly ratcheted up my involvement in public discourse, first as a scientist and more recently as a philosopher, the final kick in the butt was given to me by my City University of New York (Brooklyn College) colleague Corey Robin. I have never (yet) met Corey, but not long ago I happened across his book, The Reactionary Mind [9], which I found immensely more insightful than much of what has been written of late about why conservatives think the way they do.

More recently, though, I read his short essay in Al Jazeera America, entitled “The responsibility of adjunct intellectuals” [10] and it neatly crystallized a lot of my own unease. Corey points out that academics have always loved to write for other academics using impenetrable jargon (his example of choice is Immanuel Kant), while other thinkers have forever complained about it. He quotes Thomas Hobbes, for instance, as saying that the academic writing of his time was “nothing else … but insignificant trains of strange and barbarous words.”

And yet, observes Robin, we live in an unprecedented era where more and more academics engage openly and vigorously with the public. This, of course, has been made possible by the technologies of the information age, and especially by social networking platforms like blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and the like. While the average academic article is read by tens or hundreds of people, and it is the rare academic book that reaches 2000 copies, blogs such as my Rationally Speaking (the predecessor to Scientia Salon) is hit by tens, sometimes hundreds of thousands of readers per week, connecting to it from the world over.

Sounds like good news for public intellectualism, no? Well, not exactly, for the simple reason that the tenured academic (such as myself, and Robin) is in decline. While extinction is not an immediate threat, the trend has been as obvious as ominous: in 1971, American universities featured slightly less than 80% full time faculty, complemented by slightly more than 20% adjuncts. In 2009 the two percentages essentially coincided, around 50% per part [11]. It’s not good. Not for adjuncts, not for universities, and not for society at large.

This is not the place to enter into a defense of the tenure system (which, like any social institution, has its pros and cons). But an essential idea behind its inception — which dates back only to the beginning of the 20th century, and was not widely in place until after World War II — is to safeguard faculty from undue administrative and political pressures, giving them relatively free rein as scholars and, you guessed it, public intellectuals. By shifting the balance increasingly toward precariously employed (exploited, really) adjuncts, especially public universities and the States that fund them are effectively undercutting the potential for a new generation of academics interested in engaging in public discourse.

I am not suggesting that the rise of the adjuncts was a premeditated plot by Big Brother to curb the vibrancy of intellectual life — it’s pretty clear that the situation is simply the result of economic decisions coupled with an exceedingly myopic concept of what universities are for. Nor am I claiming that tenured professors are necessarily particularly interested in (or good at) talking to non-peers about what they do. But the fact remains, as Robin so aptly puts it, that “the vast majority of potential public intellectuals do not belong to the academic one percent. They are not forsaking the snappy op-ed for the arcane article. They are not navigating the shoals of publish or perish. They’re grading.”

And this is why I decided to start Scientia Salon and to ask a few colleagues and other interested people to join me. I’m not grading that much compared to the adjuncts working in my Department, and I decided that my time is much better spent working on that “snappy op-ed” (or on essays like this one), which is likely to reach tens of thousands and contribute to the wider debates in our society, rather than on yet another “arcane article” for which I will be lauded by the four or five hyper-specialized colleagues who bothered to read it.

Francis Bacon, arguably the first philosopher of science, famously wrote Ipsa Scientia Potestas Est (which, you may have noticed, is the tag line of Scientia Salon): knowledge is power. While he meant it especially in the sense of harvesting the power of understanding how nature works in order to manipulate her and make human life better, I intend it even more broadly: knowledge and understanding — scientia — of what goes on in the world gives everyone more power over their lives, more ability to influence events, and ultimately more meaning to their existence. This publication aims at making a small contribution in that direction.

Which finally brings me to our manifesto, such as it is:

1) Scientia Salon is a forum for academic and non-academic thinkers who do not shy from the label “public intellectual.”

2) We think intellectualism — in the broader sense of a publicly shared life of the mind — is crucial to the well-being of our society.

3) We acknowledge — as is clear from research in the cognitive sciences — that human beings navigate the world by deploying a complex mixture of reason and emotion, and that they often engage in rationalization more than rationality.

4) Indeed, we think with David Hume that this is a crucial part of human nature, since emotions are necessary in order to actually care about anything in the first place.

5) But we also think that open and reasoned discourse is fundamental for the pursuit of a eudaimonic life on the part of the individual, as well as for the development of a just and democratic society.

6) Scientia, understood as the broadest range of scientific and humanistic disciplines that positively contribute to human understanding, is an essential tool for pursuing that eudaimonic life and achieving that just society.

7) In order to make an impact, we think that writers concerned with these matters ought to aim at a wide audience, avoid unnecessary jargon, and write clearly and engagingly, even humorously when appropriate.

8) We therefore welcome authors and readers who are willing to contribute honestly and substantively to an open dialogue on all matters of the intellect, especially those of general interest to fellow human beings.

Happy writing, reading and commenting, everyone.
_____

Massimo Pigliucci is a biologist and philosopher at the City University of New York. His main interests are in the philosophy of science and pseudoscience. He is the editor-in-chief of Scientia Salon, and his latest book (co-edited with Maarten Boudry) is Philosophy of Pseudoscience: Reconsidering the Demarcation Problem (Chicago Press).

NOTES:

[1] Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, by Richard Hofstadter, 1966.
[2] A Short Course in Intellectual Self Defense, by Normand Baillargeon, 2011.
[3] Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies, by Noam Chomsky, 1999.
[4] For a good introduction to the context of that quote, and Hume’s moral philosophy in general, see this entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
[5] Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, by Antonio Damasio, 1994.
[6] Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kanheman, 2001.
[7] The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, by Jonathan Haidt, 2012.
[8] See the exceedingly well done and fun “Thou Shall Not Commit Logical Fallacies” site, and while you are at it, download their handy poster.
[9] The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin, by Corey Robin, 2011.
[10] The responsibility of adjunct intellectuals, by Corey Robin, Al Jazeera America.
[11] For an in-depth analysis of the “adjuncts phenomenon,” with handy data provided, see “The work of the university” by Stephen Perez and Andrew Litt.

Salon Culture: Network of Ideas - A Conversation with Andrian Kreye

In 2001, the LA Times wrote about the emergence of a new salon culture in Los Angeles, frequented by writers, filmmakers, and actors. This phenomenon is the re-emergence of a salon culture, which began originally in the 16the century in Italy, but is most often associated with the 17th and 18th century literary culture of France.

In 2011, both Alternet (US) and The Telegraph (UK) did articles on salon culture. This is a bit of the history of American salons from the Alternet article:

The modern salon formally emerged in New York during the early 20th century. Edith Wharton, who loathed the American literary scene and resettled in Paris in 1907, likely attended the intellectual gatherings hosted by her sister-in-law, Mary Cadwalader Jones, on East 11th Street. In 1900, Jones gained national prominence championing the role of nurses in public health, fiercely arguing for the professionalization of a traditionally female vocation. She enjoyed intellectual life and hosted "Mary Cadwal's parlor” at which many leading intellectual lights of the day were regulars, including the writers Henry James, Henry Adams and F. Marion Crawford, the painters John LaFarge and John Singer Sargent, and the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens.

However, it was Mabel Dodge’s famous “Evenings,” hosted at her townhouse at 23 Fifth Avenue during the 1910s, that made salons part of the city’s social life. Dodge was a classic Gilded Age “poor little rich girl,” a spoiled dilettante and libertine who, until she found her calling, attached herself to the latest fad and male celebrity. In 1913 she helped organize the controversial International Show of Modern Art, popularly known as the Armory Show, which launched modern art in America. That same year, she joined John Reed, “Big Bill” Hayward and Emma Goldman in support of the IWW-backed silk workers strike in Paterson, NJ, playing a leading role organizing the controversial, “Pageant of the Paterson Strike,” held at Madison Square Garden.

Dodge’s salons were organized along the lines of the traditional discussion-group format known as the General Conversation. An appointed leader, normally a specialist in an artistic, academic or political subject, offered a brief introductory commentary focusing the discussion and then invited those in attendance to jump into the discussion. Salon leaders ranged from A. A. Brill on Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis, Reed on Pancho Villa and the Mexican Revolution, Margaret Sanger on birth control and women’s rights and even African-American entertainers from Harlem.

As the scholar Andrea Barnet reminds us, “Dodge’s salon was where black Harlem first met Greenwich Village bohemia and, conversely, where white bohemia got its first taste of a parallel black culture that it would soon not only glorify but actively try to emulate.”

I wish there were something like this in Tucson today. It would be awesome to meet up with a group of intelligent and educated people to exchange ideas, explore new topics, and generally hear new ideas or new perspectives.

I said this out loud the other night, so my girlfriend immediately mentioned to a friend on Facebook, and he and his wife like the idea, so maybe it will happen. And as tradition holds, the salon is often hosted by a female, the Salonnière.

The article below is about one of the major ongoing salons in the 20th-21st century - the Edge Salons hosted by John Brockman.

Salon Culture: Network of Ideas

A Conversation with Andrian Kreye [10.2.14]

Despite their intense scientific depth, John Brockman runs these gatherings with the cool of an old school bohemian. A lot of these meetings indeed mark the beginning of a new phase in science history. One such example was a few years back, when he brought together the luminaries on behavioral economics, just before the financial crisis plunged mainstream economics into a massive identity crisis. Or the meeting of researchers on the new science of morality, when it was noted that the widening political divides were signs of the disintegration of American society. Organizing these gatherings over summer weekends at his country farm he assumes a role that actually dates from the 17th and 18th century, when the ladies of the big salons held morning and evening meetings in their living rooms under the guise of sociability, while they were actually fostering the convergence of the key ideas of the Enlightenment.

Salon Culture
NETWORK OF IDEAS

The Salon was the engine of enlightenment. Now it's coming back. In the digital era the question might be different from the ones in the European cities of the 17th century. The rules are the same. Why is there such a great desire to spend some hours with likeminded peers in this age of the internet?

by Andrian Kreye, Editor, The Feuilleton (Arts & Essays), Süddeutsche Zeitung, Munich.

The salon, which marked a entire era: Duchess Anna Amalia of Saxe-Weimar with her guests, including Goethe (third from left) and Herder (far right).

For more than a century now the salon as a gathering to exchange ideas has been a footnote of the history of ideas. With the advent of truly mass media this exchange had first been democratized, then in rapid and parallel changes diluted, radicalized, toned down, turned up, upside and down again. It has only been recently that a longing emerged for those afternoons in the grand suites of the socialites in the Paris, Vienna, Berlin or Weimar of centuries past, where streams of thought turned into tides of history, where refined social gatherings of the cultured elites became the engine of the Enlightenment.

Just like back then, today's new salons are mostly exclusive if not closed circles. If you do happen to be invited though you will swiftly notice the intellectual force of those gatherings. On a summer's day on Eastover Farm in Connecticut for example, in the middle of green rolling hills with horse paddocks and orchards under the sunny skies of New England. This is where New York literary agent John Brockman spends his weekends. Once a year, he invites a small group of scientists, artists and intellectuals who form the backbone of what is called the Third Culture. Which is less of a new culture, but a new form of debate across all disciplines traditionally divided into the humanities and the natural sciences, i.e.,  the first and second culture.

On that weekend, for example, he had invited a half-dozen men. Each of whom had a large footprint in their respective disciplines: the gene researcher Craig Venter, who was the first to sequence the human genome; his colleague George Church, Robert Shapiro, who explored the chemistry of DNA, the astronomer Dimitar Sasselov, quantum physicist Seth Lloyd, and the physicist Freeman Dyson, who sees in his his role as scientist the need to continually question universally accepted truths. A few science writers were also present, along with Deborah Triesman, literary editor at the New Yorker.

At some of his other meetings, the number of Nobel Laureates might have been higher, but the question under discussion in the warm summer wind among rustling tops of maple trees with jugs full of freshly made lemonade, carried utmost weight: "What is life?" Seth Lloyd formulated the problem right at the start: science knows everything about the origin of the universe, but almost nothing about the origin of life. Without this knowledge, the sciences, on the threshold of the biological age, are groping in the dark.

Brockman had deliberately chosen the invited scientists as representatives of different fields, who, for years, had understood the need to think across the scientific disciplines. But even then, you could feel like an outsider, as was the case when Robert Shapiro made a joke about ribonucleic acids, which was greeted with boisterous laughter by the scientists.

Despite their intense scientific depth, John Brockman runs these gatherings with the cool of an old school bohemian. A lot of these meetings indeed mark the beginning of a new phase in science history. One such example was a few years back, when he brought together the luminaries on behavioral economics, just before the financial crisis plunged mainstream economics into a massive identity crisis. Or the meeting of researchers on the new science of morality, when it was noted that the widening political divides were signs of the disintegration of American society.  Organizing these gatherings over summer weekends at his country farm he assumes a role that actually dates from the 17th and 18th century, when the ladies of the big salons held morning and evening meetings in their living rooms under the guise of sociability, while they were actually fostering the convergence of the key ideas of the Enlightenment.

Not all salonnières were content to play the host role—Johanna Schopenhauer (the mother of the philosopher Arthur, here with her daughter Adele) was a significant writer with an extensive oeuvre.

The salon is still regarded as a mysterious world of thoughts and ideas, a world in which the participants soon were consigned to the role of historical figures in history books. In the early days of the salon culture these meetings were incubators of new ideas as well as the first form an urban and bourgeois culture. The first salons were formed in Paris in the early 17th century, when the nobles left their estates and are gathered in the capital around the King. Initially, they cemented these early manifestations of bourgeois culture such as music and literature. But soon philosophers such as Voltaire and Diderot appeared in the 18th century and prepared the intellectual ground for the French revolution.

In all major cities in Europe, it soon was common for ladies of high society to gather influential thinkers around them. Often, these were for their time radical gatherings, because those salons dissolved the rigid boundaries between social classes. With rational thinking of the Enlightenment, the reputation enjoyed by a person was measured in terms of intellect, not status or wealth. Berlin and Vienna were established, next to Paris, as cities of culture of the salon. But in small towns too, the intellectual life soon revolved around salons. The salons in Weimar were legendary, where Johanna Schopenhauer, the mother of the future philosopher, Arthur, and the Duchess Anna Amalia of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, counted Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller among their guests.

At the end of the 18th century, the revolutionary spirit was present in the salons of Caroline Schelling in Mainz. The Prussian military arrested Schelling in 1793 for her links to the Jacobins.

At the same time England developed the first coffee house culture. In 1650, the first English cafe, called Grand Café, opened in Oxford. The open structure of the cafés had a tremendous effect on the culture of debate, but so did coffee and tea, the new drinks from the colonies. In a country in which the entire population at any time of day was drinking alcohol, the stimulant of caffeine acted as fertilizer for the burgeoning idea cultures. But it was mostly the lounges and cafes in Europe (and later America) that gave birth to the fundamental principle of progress and innovation, namely the network. Indeed, it was rarely the sudden Eureka-moments in the solitude of the laboratory of the study, that scientists and thinkers brought humanity from the dark times of the pre-modern era into the light of reason.  It was the fierce debates held in the lounges and cafes that allowed the ideas behind these Eureka-moments to mature.

The salon of the Duchess Anna Amalia  was called "Garden of the Muses." In addition to her role as salonnière, the Duchess was also generous patron of Goethe and Schiller.

No wonder that the nostalgia for these meetings between big thinkers is so strong today. With his 2010 film "Midnight in Paris", Woody Allen, the greatest of the urban romantics, created a cinematic monument to this nostalgia. As the American author Gil Pender roams the nighttime streets and alleys of Paris, he accidentally falls into a time portal and lands in the Paris of the 1920s. There, in the rooms of the writer and collector Gertrude Stein with walls covered in works of art, he meets Pablo Picasso, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel. This is a tribute to the small world of bohemians who gave birth to so many great things in the history of culture.

This nostalgia fits perfectly in an age when the mass media abandon models of publications and programs to turn into networks with an infinite number of nodes. Facebook, Twitter and countless blogs and forums perfectly simulate this exciting exchange of ideas for an audience of billions. In terms of today's digital Weltgeist, there is already talk about the global salon, and a universal brain. Could it be that nostalgic interest in the salons of the past is a desire for more clarity to face the complexity of the networked future?

In the digital era we might very well witness once again the phenomenon that Jürgen Habermas has called "structural transformation of the public sphere", the rise of a new bourgeoisie and mass society that began with the salons. There is no across-the-board answer to this question, that's impossible when the structural transformation of the digital age affects various spheres of the international community differently. In Europe and America, digital media always leads to new cul-de-sacs and roundabouts of communication. Social networks claim to be not only the successors of salons, they evoke the ominous metaphysical principle of the Weltgeist (global mind), while they actually reduce the principle of intellectual eruptions in salons to a de-intellectualized white noise.

Salon of the 21st century: the literary agent John Brockman (Center, with Hat) in the circle of the scientists of the Edge network during one of his legendary weekends at Eastover Farm in Connecticut.

In emerging and developing countries on the other hand, the use of digital media has indeed made Habermas's structural transformation of the public possible, in much the same way as in the Europe of the Enlightenment in terms of the salons and the early mass media. In countries like Iran, Egypt or the Ukraine, each change begins with dangerous ideas, because if ideas are to make a difference, they must be dangerous.

This was no different in the early salons. If the great intellectuals and artists of the time met in the literary salons, it was by no means solely to discuss questions of aesthetics or literary forms. In the late 18th century salons of the woman of letters Caroline Schelling, for example, in Mainz and Göttingen, were collecting revolutionary spirits who took a stand in Paris, at the dawn of a new era that brought the demise of the monarchy. Caroline Schelling was arrested, slandered, vilified, but it did not change the fact that, under her leadership, the Jacobins eventually formed in Germany as well as a force opposing the monarchy and empire.

This is the very reason that an autocracy such as China uses its power to promote the social concept of the individual, because a single individual cannot spread dangerous ideas. This fear of the power of networks also explains the unusually harsh persecution of religious communities. It's bad enough that faith calls into question the sovereignty of the party on thinking. However there is a danger for power is also lurking in the networks of churches and monasteries. Faith calls into questions the sovereignty of the party line of thinking and thoughts. Danger lurks for those in power in the networks of churches and monasteries.

In the birthplaces of the enlightenment, in America and Europe, the current struggle for sovereignty over interpretation is not a political fight though—this has dissolved since the end of ideologies in countless, often regional micro-conflicts. Similarly, the battle between religion and science has been in play for a long time. Yet it is science that challenges the certainties.

The Internet has the possibility to enlarge the circle of great minds that exchange ideas ad infinitum. To not get lost in the vastness of cyberspace, thinkers and creators have started to meet again on a regular basis for various new forms of salons like DLD; the Aspen Ideas Forum or the TED Conference. What started as an elite gathering of Silicon Valley pioneers thirty years ago has turned into a global forum of ideas, which are spread via internet videos of lectures and talks. Twice a year about a thousand scientists, artists, activist and entrepreneur come together in one place like Monterey, Vancouver, Oxford or Rio, to learn about new ideas "worth spreading" to quote the motto of the conference. In a lot of cases, such ideas will have an impact on the world for years on end.

At this point, the memory of that summer day in Connecticut comes into focus, and the moment when the scientists asking questions about the origin of life talked about their research and projects. Craig Venter told of his plans to develop bacteria that could supplant fossil fuels as an energy source. George Church described the sequencing of the genome of the Mammoth. Dimitar Sasselov reported by his search for Earth-like planets. Seth Lloyd explained the unprecedented opportunities of the quantum computer.  What, for the onlookers under the maple trees only a few years ago sounded like science fiction, is today, to a large extent, scientific reality.

In the New York of the 1960s, hardly anyone understood the network of eccentric artist Andy Warhol, as seen here with John Brockman (left) and Bob Dylan (right) in the "Factory", a hybrid of salon, studio, and party room.

Of course, John Brockman long ago put his salon online. Leading scientists, artists, prominent intellectuals, regularly meet on his edge.org website to have a conversation about the issues of our time. Annually, there is a concerted action in which he asks the entire network a big question. Eight years ago, the following was central issue for this salon culture: "What is your most dangerous idea?" More than a hundred responses were submitted and published. It reads like intellectual fireworks. In your own head, you quickly feel for yourself how ideas clash, release energy and generate new ideas. It is then that you experience the intellectual thrill that has always inspired the salons.

In the meantime, Brockman's arena of ideas has sparked countless likeminded gatherings of all scales and fields. Conferences have been established as a distinct independent form of communication, because the network tends to be significantly more effective and fruitful beyond the Internet. Other than the observable external format, events such as the TED Conferences, the Aspen Ideas Festival, PopTech, or the Digital Life Design (DLD), have little in common with the congresses and meetings of old. They have long since become the new crucibles in the history of ideas. Especially the American TED Conference has shown in recent years the way in the salon of the 21st century can evolve. What started in 1984 as a meeting of Silicon Valley elites under the banner "Technology, Entertainment, Design", is now a global network that utilizes all channels of communication—conferences, online videos, books, TV, radio, blogs to make ideas blossom and develop on a global scale. Twice a year, a small circle from this large network meets in a cosmopolitan city ... in the spirit of the salons of yesteryear.

Rival Cultural Evolution Camps Find Common Ground at Santa Fe Institute

From the Santa Fe Institute, the post below is a summary of a group session on cultural evolution led by Daniel Dennett, and including Susan Blackmore, Robert Boyd, Nicolas Claidière, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Joseph Henrich, Olivier Morin, Peter Richerson, Dan Sperber, Kim Sterelny.

The general impression was that (as he tweeted some time later) "the meeting revealed a lot of unexpected common ground". The International Cognition and Culture Institute is happy to publish, by way of proceedings, each participant's summary (Dennett's summary is included below and links to the others are also included).

Rival cultural evolution camps find common ground at SFI

Sept. 26, 2014

 

While the movement toward an evolutionary perspective on human culture has been gaining traction over the past decade, the field of cultural evolution is a divided house. The disagreements – mainly between two factions – hinge on a working definition of culture itself and how cultural information is transmitted.

In an effort to bridge those differences, SFI External Professor Daniel Dennett held a working group, “Perspectives on Cultural Evolution,” at SFI in May. The group comprised many of the field’s leading theorists and experimentalists – including SFI Cowan Chair Rob Boyd.

That the two rival camps emerged from the working group more in agreement than in disagreement Dennett and Boyd attribute to the collaborative spirit of SFI in general, to the fact that the gathering focused more on common cause, and to Dennett’s unusual methodology.

After having participants send in what they’d written, Dennett asked them to rank whose work they’d like to introduce. “People usually read someone else’s work with an antagonistic approach,” he explains. “But here, they had to present someone else’s work to that person. It brings out the best in people.”

Boyd’s three-member camp described the work of a group led by Dan Sperber. “We came away with a deeper appreciation of what they are trying to say – and the reverse was true as well,” says Boyd.

Summaries of the meeting written by each participant are posted here.

“Cultural evolution may still be seen as being divided into camps,” said Dennett. “But from this point forward, they’ll also be seen as having much more in common than people had realized.”

* * * * *

Cultural Evolution at the Santa Fe Institute

Last May, Daniel Dennett gathered, at the Santa Fe Institute, a handful of people who have written about cultural evolution. The general impression was that (as he tweeted some time later) "the meeting revealed a lot of unexpected common ground". The International Cognition and Culture Institute is happy to publish, by way of proceedings, each participant's summary. Comments are open!

Daniel Dennett's introduction (with comments).

Participants' summaries (in alphabetical order): Susan Blackmore, Robert Boyd, Nicolas Claidière, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Joseph Henrich, Olivier Morin, Peter Richerson, Dan Sperber, Kim Sterelny.

Here is Dennett's statement:

Perspectives on Cultural Evolution, by Daniel C. Dennett

Category: SFI Cultural Evolution Workshop

Created on Tuesday, 02 September 2014

Published on Tuesday, 02 September 2014

These are Daniel Dennett's introductory remarks on the workshop on cultural evolution he conveyed in Santa Fe in May 2014.

Perspectives on Cultural Evolution 

(Footnotes contain comments by Richerson and Sperber.)

Ever since Darwin’s Descent of Man (1871), the idea of adopting an evolutionary perspective on human culture has seemed to many to be a natural move,  obviously worth trying—and to many others to be a dangerous, “nihilistic,” “reductionistic”, “scientistic,” assault on everything we hold dear.   Work on cultural evolution has been making good progress in recent years, but has been hindered by distortions, some perhaps deliberate, but others are misunderstandings that naturally arise between slightly different traditions.  I formed this working party to try to find common ground and resolve differences among some of the leading theorists and experimentalists.  The ten participants included the trio of Boyd, Henrich and Richerson (BRH), a French trio of Sperber, Claidière and Morin (SCM), the memeticists Blackmore and myself, and two philosophers of biology who have been particularly engaged with issues of cultural evolution, Peter Godfrey Smith and Kim Sterelny.  Several other leading figures were invited but could not participate for various reasons.   

Consensus:

Each participant was invited to send in two or three recent papers or chapters for everyone to read in advance -- the list of these papers is available here --, and then the first three days were devoted to the “X on Y sessions”, in which each participant (X) in turn took on the task of briefly introducing the work of another participant (Y).  I invited all to send me their preferred list of people to introduce, and more or less optimized the pairings to make sure each X-Y pair were  drawn from different traditions and no two introduced each other’s work.  After fifteen or twenty minutes introduction, each Y then had a chance to respond, followed by general discussion. The atmosphere was informal, permitting frequent interruptions for questions and comments.

Before the working group convened there was some skepticism and grumbling about the X on Y obligation from various participants, but everybody graciously acceded to my request and the results, in my opinion, confirmed the value of the practice.  After the workshop all participants submitted a brief summary of the week, citing what was learned, what was agreed upon, and issues still unresolved. Quoting a few comments from participants: Peter Richerson: “I do think that the disagreements among the various ‘schools’ of cultural evolution represented at the meeting are relatively modest.” Peter Godfrey Smith: “I think that a lot of progress was made on clarifying disagreements, even where the remaining disagreements remain genuine. . . . It’s progress when an initially cloudy situation gives way to a sharper and more definite set of empiricial uncertainties.” Dan Sperber: “It has been a wonderful workshop of serious, demanding, insightful, informal, friendly discussion of a kind and quality rarely experienced.”  Nicholas Claidière noted that part of the distortion is generated by the way we tend to talk about our work to people outside the field, giving the (wrong) impression that there are schools of thought at war with each other: “Given the amount of agreement that we have seen during this meeting, I think it would be more productive to present ourselves as having a common goal with diverging interests rather than competing views of the same phenomena.”

Terminological headaches.

Three frustrating terminological problems were exposed, but we didn’t resolve how to correct them: “cultural group selection,” “meme,” and “Darwinian” are all good terms, historically justifiable  and useful in context, but by now all are so burdened with legacies of ideological conflict that any use of them invites misbegotten “refutation” or dismissal.  Should we abandon the terms in favor of emotionally inert replacements, or should we persist with them, always accompanying their use with a wreath of explanation? These are questions of diplomacy or pedagogical policy, not serious theoretical issues, but still, alas,  unignorable.

As Boyd explained, the adoption by BRH of the term “cultural group selection”  had its roots in the relatively uncontroversial theoretical terrain of  Sewall Wright’s population genetics (and shifting balance theory), not in later, more dubious and controversial variants.  But this is hard to explain to people who have already taken sides for or against “group selection” as an important phenomenon in evolution.  In any event, the working group, enlightened about what BRH mean—and don’t mean—by cultural group selection, while still harboring somewhat different hunches about its importance, acknowledged that Steve Pinker’s recent “extreme and dismissive” (Henrich) position on Edge.org did not find a target in the work of BRH.

The popular hijacking of Dawkins’ term “meme” for any cultural item that “goes viral” on the Internet, regardless of whether it was intelligently designed or evolved by imitation and natural selection, has been seen by some to subvert the theoretical utility of the term altogether.  There is also the unreasoned antipathy the term evokes in many quarters (reminiscent of the antipathy towards the term “sociobiology” that led to its abandonment).  Alternatively, if one is “Darwinian about Darwinism” we should expect the existence of cultural items that are merely “memish” to one degree or another, and we might as well go on using the term “meme” to refer to any relatively well-individuated culturally transmitted item that can serve as a building block or trackable element of culture however it arrives on the scene.  Other terms, such as Boyd and Richerson’s “cultural variant”, have been proposed, but the term “meme” has become so familiar in popular culture that whatever alternative is used will be immediately compared to, identified with, assimilated to meme(a Sperberian attractor, apparently), so perhaps the least arduous course is to adopt the term, leaving open its theoretical definition, in much the way the term “gene” has lost its strict definition as protein-recipe in many quarters.    Since the long-term fate of such an item will be settled by differential reproduction (or something similar to differential reproduction) however much insight or “improvisational intelligence” went into its birth, it has a kind of Darwinian fitness.

But should we go on talking about whether or not a phenomenon is “Darwinian”? Some think the term gets in the way, since we are seldom if ever alluding to what Darwin himself thought, but rather to the neo-Darwinian, post-DNA synthesis, itself an evolving landmark. On the other hand, there is general agreement within the group that some important elements of human culture evolve by processes strongly analogous to genetic natural selection, and the variations in these processes can be usefully diagrammed using Peter Godfrey Smith’s “Darwinian spaces”  (See figure 1 for an instance), in which the similarities and differences can be arrayed in three dimensions.  Since, moreover, there is agreement that these cultural regularities can set selection pressures (e.g., a “cultural niche”) for co-evolutionary processes, generating genetic responses (such as adult lactose tolerance), a unified evolutionary perspective, in which the trade-offs between cultural and genetic evolution can be plotted, is a valuable organizer of phenomena, some “more Darwinian” than others. No other term suggests itself for the set of features that mark paradigmatic (neo-)Darwinian phenomena, so perhaps the misunderstandings the term tends to generate can be deflected.

Figure 1:

The working group agreed on a number of points, some methodological and some substantial, that are still considered controversial by others, or in some cases just not yet considered:

1. We should be Darwinian about Darwinism; there are few if any bright lines between phenomena of cultural change for which cultural natural selection is clearly at work and phenomena of cultural change that are not at all Darwinian. The intermediate and mixed cases need not be marginal or degenerate, a fact nicely portrayed in Godfrey-Smith’s Darwinian Spaces.

2. Models must always “over-“simplify, and the existence of complications and even “counterexamples” relative to any model does not automatically show that the model isn’t valid when used with discretion. For instance, the absence of explicit treatment of SCM’s “hetero-impacts” in BRH’s models “does not amount to a denial of its importance”(Godfrey-Smith). Grain level of modeling and explaining can vary appropriately depending on the questions being addressed.

3. The traditional idea that human culture advances primarily by “improvisational intelligence,” the contributions of insightful, intentional, comprehending individual minds, is largely mistaken.  Just as plants and animals can be the beneficiaries of brilliant design enhancements that they cannot, and need not, understand, so we human beings enjoy culturally evolved competences that far outstrip our individual comprehension. Not only do we not need to “re-invent the wheel,” we do not need to appreciate or understand the design of many human institutions, technologies, and customs that nevertheless contribute to our welfare in various ways. Moreover (a point of agreement between Sperber and Boyd, for instance), the opacity of some cultural memes (their inscrutability to human comprehension) is often an enhancement to their fitness: “This opacity—which is a matter of degree, of course—is what makes social transmission so important. It plays, I believe, a crucial role in the acceptability of cultural traits: it is, in important ways easier to trust what you don’t fully understand and hence cannot properly evaluate on its own merits.” (Sperber) 

4. The persistence of cultural features that are not fitness-enhancing, and may even be fitness-reducing, is to be expected in cultural evolution, and can have a variety of explanations.

New questions:

1. Rob Boyd, in his post-working group summary, proposed a way in which the Evolutionary Causal Matrix idea developed by Sperber and Claidière can be re-expressed in the population genetics formalism used by BRH, raising questions about how—if at all—the homo-impact/hetero-impact distinction introduced by SCM appears in the population genetics formalism. Do SCM have a reply?[1]

2. SCM propose that cultural attraction, not differential replication, accounts for much of the dynamics of cultural evolution [2](in the neutral sense: change over time), but several expressed concern that only a (quasi-)Darwinian process can initiate and refine adaptations (lifting in Design Space).  One line of thought suggests that attraction and replication can sometimes work together:  attractors act rather like norms to somewhat digitize otherwise continuous variations, making exemplars stable and distinct enough to be eligible for iterated replication and selection. Another line of thought is that the distinction between attraction and differential replication is maybe just a question of “zoom”: if you zoom in on apparent replicators, you may find that they are not, strictly speaking, replicating at all, but if you zoom out, the results are as if there was replication going on.[3]  Which of these suggestions will survive further research?  For instance, are there experiments (Claidière’s question) that can distinguish the roles of transformative and selective processes, shedding light on the conditions under which each plays the dominant role?

3. “If individuals are smart enough in their choices, the BRH meso-level picture fades. When people are smart and make good choices, the recurrence of good options and accumulation of design can occur without imitation-and-selection.” (Godfrey-Smith)  But Sperber points out that this need not pose a dichotomous choice between evolutionary and rational-choice explanations: “adding attraction to the cultural evolution story allows us to integrate evolved mechanisms that tend to produce rational choices, not as an alternative kind of explanation, but as a factor of attraction among many.”  Under what conditions can this proposed unification do serious explanatory work?  Since attractors can be both enhancers and decelerators of adaptive change, are they too versatile to be explanatory (at least in this context)? [4]

4. Is cultural evolution “de-Darwinizing” (Godfrey-Smith’s term for phenomena that evolve into less Darwinian phenomena)?   Dennett says yes: in the earliest days of human cultural evolution, individuals were largely uncomprehending beneficiaries of their new tools and customs, only gradually becoming reflective, critical, foresighted users of those tools. Today they aspire to be intelligent (re-)designers of every aspect of their environments, and some of the major changes in culture today are the products of quite concentrated, not distributed, R&D.[5] Blackmore says no: on the contrary, technology has raised the proportion of high-fidelity copying and transmission, and is beginning to usurp the role of the supposedly intelligent designer thanks to automated search and evaluation systems.  Will all roles for human “improvisational intelligence” become obsolete, and “inventors” as rare are telephone operators, coopers, and scythe-sharpeners in the future? Or will the heretofore unreachable ideal of the intelligent designer be approximated by individual human beings, thanks to their reliance on technology (including especially instruction and the cascade of scientific knowledge that creates new platforms from which to begin one’s exploration)?   Human civilization today appears to be a volatile mix of these opposing trends; are there investigations that can clarify the resultant direction in which we are heading?

5. Richerson raises an issue (among many others) that we did not have time to discuss: “Natural selection on genes admits of a number of modes. . . . .  .Throw in density and frequency-dependent selection. . . . . Mate choice and artificial selection introduce agent-based rather than natural selection, demi-god designers if you want. With cultural evolution agent-based social selection runs wild.”  Does this point to a good way to organize the intermediate space between paradigmatic “Darwinian” natural selection and intelligent design?  One thing that is changing in this progression might be called the focus of the selection pressure. At the Darwinian pole (simple natural selection) the selection pressure is “just” a statistical net effect of a kazillion independent events that determine which candidates get replicated; in  the middle-ground, mate choice (as Geoffrey Miller has argued) is focused through the perceptual/cognitive/emotional dispositions of individual (usually female) “minds,” with varying degrees of comprehension and reflection; it is like Darwin’s “unconscious” selection which bridges the gap between agentless natural selection and reflective, intentional “methodical” selection. As agents (conceived as mere concentrations of selective efficacy, selective “hot spots” in the environment)[6]become more discerning, the importance of high-fidelity replication does not lapse, but the breadth of “search” contracts and R&D can become more efficient (it can also hasten the ruin of ill-informed R&D).  As reflectivity about this very process increases, R&D becomes faster and more efficient—but gradually, allowing for opaque attractors to play a large role relative to genuinely insightful or comprehending quality judgments.  Does this proposal withstand scrutiny?

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[1] Richerson commented on the draft of this document and Sperber replied:

Richerson: I thought that the attraction concept had become sufficiently generalized as to obviate this distinction. Perhaps complete resolution of this issue need to await SCM’s development of their models. With a fully functional model in hand, we can see if the structure of them differs in some fundamental way from the population genetics based models I’m more familiar with.

Sperber: My first reaction to Rob’s comments was, to begin with, sheer joy at having him discuss ECM seriously. Given Rob’s experience and competence, this cannot but be good for the science. Were Rob to find that there is a basic flow in the ECM approach, then we would be spared going in the wrong direction, and again, good for science. Rob might also find ways to correct and improve the ECM format at least for some use, and this would be nice, of course.

Now, regarding, the fact that “the ECM formalism can be equivalent ways of representing exactly the same underlying processes,” I like Rob’s illustration, and Nicolas and I had found other examples in our work in the past. I don’t see this as an objection, especially since we didn’t propose the ECM format as it stands as an alternative way to model population phenomena of interest, let alone as a better way. We offered it as to begin with a Dennettian ‘intuition pump’, leaving open the question whether it could, at least in some cases, be developed into a perspicuous way of modeling. The intuition pump effectiveness was, for me, demonstrated at our workshop and in several other exchanges I have had: people who didn’t quite ‘get’ the attraction idea, found it much easier and even congenial when so presented.

On the further more technical points raised by Rob, I would like to coordinate at least with Nicolas and Thom before providing a careful reaction.

[2] Sperber: What we propose is that hetero-attraction is likely to be more or much more than a marginal factor in cultural evolution, making a generalized notion of attraction that includes both homo and hetero-attraction – I agree with Pete with his comment on this point – potentially quite useful. This by itself does not determine which is the best way to model cultural evolution, or precludes the possibility that different models may be better for different types of cases

[3] Sperber: Here I agree with a remark Rob made in his comments: yes we, the attraction people tend to zoom towards greater details, but this doesn’t necessarily preclude the possibility that on some issues at least, a more standard population genetics provides for a better zoom.

[4] Sperber: Here you want to talk about specific factors of attraction and the way they may contribute to adaptiveness, or to the resilience of non-adaptive features. The relevant point here is that the evolved ability to recognize and, under certain conditions, even design well-adapted things is a powerful factor of attraction that contribute to explaining the cultural success of well-adapted things. You get your evolutionary explanation, as usual by looking at micro-processes at a population scale. The fact that, in this case, rational choice modeling can also make the right prediction does not in any way undermine a more standard evolutionary approach (that moreover does better at least in terms of generality and of psychological plausibility)

[5] Richerson: Nuts Dan! Highly innovative places like Silicon Valley are Darwinian pressure cookers. First, the finest engineering training available in the world dumps the max amount of accumulated wisdom into the heads of the best and brightest. Then the B&B are set to work finding marginal improvements in existing designs to patent. Entrepreneurial teams funded by venture capitalists recombine old designs and add the latest new patented ideas to create products that are selected in ruthlessly competitive markets.

Dennett responds: But this Darwinian “pressure cooker” is distant from the Darwinian paradigm in several  important dimensions: it is what Darwin himself called “methodical selection” (in his wonderful introductory passage that segues from the (intelligent) selective actions of plant and animal breeders, through the “unconscious selection” of the inadvertent, or largely purposeless biases of human beings in the early days of agriculture, to “natural selection” (in which no mind, intelligent or clueless, is required).  The search space is pinched by many preconceptions, good and bad, and, as in sexual selection, the winners have been aggressively tested by nervous systems tuned to detect quality.

[6] Sperber: Yes, let’s not overdo ‘agents’. ‘“Hot spots” in the environment’ is a nice metaphor. Another, more detailed way to go is to see cognition both as massively modular and heavily situated/distributed. At this point, the individual organism is still in play, but most cultural phenomena are both infra- and trans-individual (or to use Dennettian terms, sub-personal and collective) The agents that rational choice theorist theorize about not only don’t exist – that is not too bad –, they are not, I believe, a very  good idealization for modeling cultural evolution (this might be a point of difference between the attraction approach and the agents-choose-variant approach).