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Today's selection
-- from Fields of Blood by Karen Armstrong. We each
have three "brains" with conflicting needs and priorities, and
thus have a complex and uneasy coexistence:
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"Each of us has
not one but three brains that coexist uneasily. In the deepest
recess of our gray matter we have an 'old brain' that we
inherited from the reptiles that struggled out of the primal
slime 500 million years ago. Intent on their own survival,
with absolutely no altruistic impulses, these creatures were
solely motivated by mechanisms urging them to feed, fight,
flee (when necessary), and reproduce. Those best equipped to
compete mercilessly for food, ward off any threat, dominate
territory, and seek safety naturally passed along their genes,
so these self-centered impulses could only intensify. But
sometime after mammals appeared, they evolved what
neuroscientists call the limbic system, perhaps about 120
million years ago. Formed over the core brain derived from the
reptiles, the limbic system motivated all sorts of new
behaviors, including the protection and nurture of young as
well as the formation of alliances with other individuals that
were invaluable in the struggle to survive. And so, for the
first time, sentient beings possessed the capacity to cherish
and care for creatures other than themselves.
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"Although these limbic
emotions would never be as strong as the 'me first' drives
still issuing from our reptilian core, we humans have evolved
a substantial hard-wiring for empathy for other creatures, and
especially for our fellow humans. Eventually, the Chinese
philosopher Mencius (c. 371-288 BCE) would insist that nobody
was wholly without such sympathy. If a man sees a child
teetering on the brink of a well, about to fall in, he would
feel her predicament in his own body and would reflexively,
without thought for himself, lunge forward to save her. There
would be something radically wrong with anyone who could walk
past such a scene without a flicker of disquiet. For most,
these sentiments were essential, though, Mencius thought,
somewhat subject to individual will. You could stamp on these
shoots of benevolence just as you could cripple or deform
yourself physically. On the other hand, if you cultivated
them, they would acquire a strength and dynamism of their
own.
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"We cannot entirely
understand Mencius's argument without considering the third
part of our brain. About twenty thousand years ago, during the
Paleolithic Age, human beings evolved a 'new brain,' the
neocortex, home of the reasoning powers and self-awareness
that enable us to stand back from the instinctive, primitive
passions. Humans thus became roughly as they are today,
subject to the conflicting impulses of their three distinct
brains. Paleolithic men were proficient killers. Before the
invention of agriculture, they were dependent on the slaughter
of animals and used their big brains to develop a technology
that enabled them to kill creatures much larger and more
powerful than themselves. But their empathy may have made them
uneasy. Or so we might conclude from modern hunting societies.
Anthropologists observe that tribesmen feel acute anxiety
about having to slay the beasts they consider their friends
and patrons and try to assuage this distress by ritual
purification. In the Kalahari Desert, where wood is scarce,
bushmen are forced to rely on light weapons that can only
graze the skin. So they anoint their arrows with a poison that
kills the animal --only very slowly. Out of ineffable
solidarity, the hunter stays with his dying victim, crying
when it cries, and participating symbolically in its death
throes. Other tribes don animal costumes or smear the kill's
blood and excrement on cavern walls, ceremonially returning
the creature to the underworld from which it came.
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link now: http://www.ccnow.com/cgi-local/cart.cgi?vaksam_PERSONALITY"Paleolithic
hunters may have had a similar understanding. The cave
paintings in northern Spain and southwestern France are among
the earliest extant documents of our species. These decorated
caves almost certainly had a liturgical function, so from the
very beginning art and ritual were inseparable. Our neocortex
makes us intensely aware of the tragedy and perplexity of our
existence, and in art, as in some forms of religious
expression, we find a means of letting go and encouraging the
softer, limbic emotions to predominate. The frescoes and
engravings in the labyrinth of Lascaux in the Dordogne, the
earliest of which are seventeen thousand years old, still
evoke awe in visitors. In their numinous depiction of the
animals, the artists have captured the hunters' essential
ambivalence. Intent as they were to acquire food, their
ferocity was tempered by respectful sympathy for the beasts
they were obliged to kill, whose blood and fat they mixed with
their paints. Ritual and art helped hunters express their
empathy with and reverence ( religio) for their fellow
creatures -- just as Mencius would describe some seventeen
millennia later -- and helped them live with their need to
kill them."
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Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of
Violence
Author: Karen Armstrong
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
Copyright 2014 Karen Armstrong
Pages 7-8
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