The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity’s Search for Meaning,  by Jeremy Lent (Prometheus Books, 2017)

Review by Robert M. Ellis

I had great hopes for this book, after listening to Jeremy Lent’s podcast interview with Barry. It is, indeed, generally very interesting, and sometimes illuminating. It is a highly synthetic, multidisciplinary book, which again puts me in sympathy with it. I would much rather that more books like this were written, even if their success is incomplete, and that they are not too readily dismissed because of the degree of messiness that inevitably accompanies synthetic work. This book is obviously the fruit of a great deal of research. I’m also extremely sympathetic to the values with which it approaches its subject, which build on systems theory, embodied meaning, and a general concern for the assumptions that have led to the looming eco-crisis. All of these points make it well worth reading. However, despite all this, I remain unconvinced by its central thesis, and find the arguments used to support that thesis both unclear and weak. I think much can be learnt from the ways that this book overall fails in what it attempts, so they are well worth the discussion of an extended review.

Lent’s overall argument

‘The Patterning Instinct’ of the title refers to the human ability of symbolic meaning, which Lent recognises as a crucially distinctive development in early humans. This capacity develops together with the pre-frontal cortex of the brain, and a leap forward in our social co-operation skills using language. This sense of meaning is synthetic or gestalt in nature, involving awareness of connections between experiences that is created by the massive connectivity of the pre-frontal cortex. Lent makes use of the embodied meaning theory (confusingly often called ‘cognitive linguistics’) of Lakoff and Johnson in his account of this ‘patterning instinct’. In their important and groundbreaking account, meaning begins with basic schematic connections created in infancy which neurally associate active experiences with symbols. These basic level associations are then extended through metaphor.

Lent’s overall thesis is that this ‘patterning instinct’ has provided differing metaphorical bases of meaning in different cultural contexts. From its starting point in hunter-gatherer society, our patterning has developed in differing ways in different parts of the world. In particular, he stresses the differing metaphorical basis used in ancient Greek and Near Eastern thought (which then sets the course of Western civilisation) to that found in China. He traces what he sees as an underlying dualism in the dominant metaphors used in the Western tradition, which separate mind from body, reason from emotion, and humans from nature. He contrasts this dualism with the systemic metaphors and emphasis on harmony with nature found in the Chinese tradition. Broadly speaking, and not without some qualifications, he identifies Western tendencies of religious intolerance, exploitation of others, and exploitation of the environment with the dominant dualistic metaphors maintained in the West. He contrasts these with the relative absence of these tendencies in China. He thus holds dualistic metaphors responsible for the eco-crisis, and urges the adoption of systemic, integrative ones in their place.

A fair linguistic argument

Crucial to this argument is chapter 10, ‘The Cultural Shaping of Our Minds’. This discusses the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, which is the view that our minds and their capacities are shaped by the capacities of the language we are embedded in. Lent quotes an Australian Aboriginal language whose speakers use the cardinal directions of north, south, east and west instead of the relative directions of left, right, front and back. This use of language comes with the activation of a directional capacity which speakers of other languages often lack, illustrating the profound shaping effect that language can have. Examples like this one seem to offer good grounds for a revival of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, at least in a weak form, against the insistence on a universal innate language influentially championed by Chomsky. The weak form, that Lent supports, claims that our language encourages us to think in certain ways, but does not determine those ways. Thus far, the argument seems to work. We can appreciate, for instance, that the greater ambiguity in Chinese grammar encourages Chinese speakers to give more attention to linguistic context than a language like English that brings more precision to linguistic representation through its grammar.

The weakness of the historical argument

However, the bulk of this book is not linguistic but historical. The majority of its chapters offer a ‘big history’ approach reminiscent of a rather less linear and more systemic version of Yuval Noah Harari‘s ‘Sapiens’. Lent wants to show that the lines of general development, and even some of the key events, in the histories of East and West can be attributed to the shaping effects of the dominant metaphors in these different cultures. For example, he compares the massive fleet of Admiral Zheng of China, which traversed the Indian Ocean in 1405, with the paltry three little boats with which Christopher Columbus ‘discovered’ the Americas in 1492. Zheng facilitated the setting up of embassies for international contact, but made no attempt to exploit his discoveries, whereas Columbus’s second thought, after wondering at the innocence of the Caribbean natives, was how he could exploit them for profit. Lent argues that this illustrates a fundamentally different approach to power:

As a result of the dualistic split in European cognition, the collective European mind-set was more predisposed to use knowledge as a means to gain power over the environment, including both the natural world and other human societies. In contrast, the collective Chinese mind-set was predisposed to use knowledge as a means of maintaining stability. The foundational frames of European thought that we’ve been exploring – their religious absolutism, their sense of dominion over the natural world, and their mission to conquer nature – underlaid and shaped the European attitude towards their voyages of discovery. (p.301)

This may at first sight seem a very tempting way to explain the contrast, except that only two pages before this Lent has just been discussing a strong counter-example. The Chinese, he says, used an estimated five million conscripted peasants to build the Grand Canal in China , half of whom died. Millions more also died in building the Great Wall of China. What is this but an illustration of a Chinese mind-set in which knowledge is used to gain power over both other humans and the environment? The argument, then, turns out to be a weak one. Though, to be fair to Lent, he does not grossly over-state it, that does not prevent it being weak, and raising considerable doubts even about the rekatively modest claims he makes. The “dualistic split in European cognition” is held responsible only for a greater emphasis on the exploitation of power, or perhaps a greater probability of it occurring than in other cultures.  On this weak argument, a great deal of the book’s argument hangs.

The key weakness: meaning and belief conflated

However, it is not just the weakness of that argument that creates the central weakness of this book as a whole, but more than anything else a lack of clarity about what exactly is being claimed and what the grounds of it are. There is a correlation being pointed out between dominant cultural metaphors on the one hand, and historical attitudes and actions that produce conflict and unsustainable exploitation on the other. However, most of the evidence considered in the historical chapters is not about metaphors that provide a basis of meaning at all, but is about the beliefs and values held in different cultural contexts. The possibility of any distinction between metaphorical bases of meaning and beliefs (whether explicit or implicit) is simply never discussed – rather the distinction between meaning and belief is constantly blurred by the use of terms like “cognitive structures” or “frames of thought”. It is thus extremely unclear whether the correlation is meant to be one between specific types of meaning and conflict, or between specific beliefs and conflict.

This distinction is not just hair-splitting, but actually makes a vital difference to the case. Meaning in the form of metaphorical structures offers a set of resources that can be drawn on in the cultural context where those meanings are used, but they do not in any way require anyone to use them. There may also be alternative metaphorical structures available in the same culture that could be used to understand the issues in a different way. Beliefs do require certain metaphorical structures to be conceptualised, but there are nevertheless a variety of different beliefs that can be developed using the same metaphorical structure. For example, the metaphor of ‘nature as resource’, which Lent holds responsible for the West’s excessive exploitation of the environment, can indeed be used to form beliefs that anything (or anyone) in the world around us can be used to whatever extent we wish, but it is also compatible with beliefs that resources should be conserved and used sparingly. It can also be combined with other metaphors that influence that interpretation – for example, seeing a resource as a gift or as a right.

It seems, from the evidence of this book, that Lent either does not understand or does not accept the distinction between meaning and belief. Traditional representationalism (of the kind that still dominates the academy) does blur that distinction by interpreting meaning in a way that is subsidiary to belief, generally claiming that meaning is an understanding of the circumstances in which a belief would be true or false. However, Lakoff and Johnson, on which Lent draws, clearly reject this traditional account of meaning, and instead make it clear that we develop meaning first, through embodied schemas developed in infancy that are then extended through metaphor. Beliefs are subsequent to and dependent on meaning, with the implication that we can readily explore ideas using the imagination without any necessary implications for what we believe or how we act.

The problem of elite beliefs

Instead of exploring the differing interpretations of the metaphors he is attributing these big effects to, Lent gives most of his attention, instead, to the beliefs formally expressed by elite intellectuals in the societies of the cultures he is comparing. Not only are these beliefs not in the least necessarily required by the metaphors they may draw on, but they also do not even necessarily represent the general beliefs in the societies they are taken to represent. If Chinese Neo-Confucian philosophers of the Song Dynasty give a lot of emphasis to the harmonious integration of the emotions, for instance, that does not necessarily indicate either that ordinary Chinese people do so, or even that their political leaders do so. Such harmony may be presented as an ideal precisely because it is generally absent. As in the condemnation of artificial contraception in the Catholic Church, the official moral line is a dubious guide to the habits of a culture.

In some cases, also, Lent ignores the presence of important philosophical or other movements in a society that suggest a completely different set of alternative beliefs to the ones he takes to be typical of a culture. For example, there is no mention of the Pyrrhonist philosophy that was present in Hellenistic and Roman civilisation as a challenge to the dualism of the Platonic tradition. Pyrrhonism is highly non-dualistic, applying scepticism equally to positive and negative claims, and probably closely connected to Buddhism (as explored by Christopher Beckwith). The effects of Pyrrhonism on Western culture were also not insignificant, creating a challenge that later Western philosophers felt obliged to try to address.

The cultures he contrasts were each themselves the setting for contrasting and rival schools of thought creating different beliefs, as well as offering alternative metaphors out of which to form these beliefs. Most importantly, these alternatives often cut across the central distinction Lent wants to make between a dualistic European tendency and a non-dualistic Chinese tendency. Not surprisingly, the history is often more complex than he presents it as being. There is a long ‘orientalist’ tradition in the West of idealising the East through confirmation bias in the selection of evidence from a culturally distant source, which I’m not sure that Lent is always free from. His claims about the uniqueness of monotheistic intolerance, for instance, are belied by the evidence collected by Trevor Ling on religious motivations for war in south east Asia, and by the violent Japanese repression of Christians recently depicted (with historical accuracy) in Martin Scorsese’s film ‘Silence’.

On the whole, then, there can only at best be a pretty weak increase in probability that someone whose culture’s leading thinkers give more emphasis to dualistic beliefs will act in a more conflictual way than others. There are likely to be many other factors involved in the expression of those beliefs. The mind is like a whole forest in which only some dualistic trees grow: they do not constitute the whole forest. In the mind of any specific individual, they will only offer one influence amongst many. The majority of their beliefs and judgements are, instead, likely to be of an everyday practical sort that tend to be similar the world over. The relationship between those dualistic beliefs, even where they are found in people’s assumptions and appear to determine their judgements, are even more contingently related to the metaphors out of which these beliefs may have been developed. Lent’s comparison of Zheng with Columbus is thus dubious for a variety of reasons: the two men may have had distinctive individual reasons for their judgements, their judgements may have been practical and specific to the situation, and the beliefs that activated their judgements may have been based on a variety of possible metaphors apart from those attributed to them. At this distance in time and culture it is very difficult to even guess what those alternatives might have been, but it is vital to take into account the limitations of what we can assume.

Comparison with absolutisation as an alternative explanation

It may well be objected that in a broad empirical argument of the kind that Lent puts forward, we should be highly tolerant of weak argument, and that pointing out even such an extreme lack of necessity is nit-picking, given the explanatory value of the theory.  I do agree with this: that weak argument needs to be accepted when it supports what is clearly the best and most helpful available explanation, in the absence of alternatives. However, I don’t agree that Lent’s account of the dominant metaphors in cultures is at all the best available explanation of the ways in which dualism produces conflict and unsustainable practice. The alternative is the one that I have myself put forward in the Middle Way Philosophy series. That is that functionally, dualism consists in the absolutisation of belief at the point of judgement. Dualism does not consist in a particular type or content of belief, but rather in the way that belief is held and applied. An absolutised belief is one that is considered to provide a total explanation of what is true or false, with no alternatives considered apart from its mere negation. It can be contrasted with a provisional belief where other alternatives are available, so that their justification can be weighed up through a process of comparison.

This alternative approach can, I believe, account fully for all the evidence that Lent considers in this wide-ranging book, but account for it much more clearly and consistently than the fingering of particular cultural metaphors. There are all sorts of human beliefs that can be taken absolutely. Some of these do involve underlying metaphors, but it is the assumption that the metaphor is the whole story that creates conflict and exploitation, rather than the exact content of the metaphor. Some metaphors, may, indeed, be more hospitable to such absolutisation than others, but only because of a complex interplay between the metaphor and the way it has been used in a particular cultural context. For example, the metaphor of God as a sole ruler of the universe has often been associated with beliefs that use it as a tool of intolerant power, but it can be also be used to represent psychological or social integration. It has only become easier to use it intolerantly because of the gathering tradition of it being used in that way. As with metaphor, so with belief. Some beliefs are more easily absolutised than others, but none is necessarily absolute – or necessarily provisional. Even systems theory, clearly the basis of Lent’s beliefs, can be absolutised, at those points where it merely turns into an abstraction rather than a prompt for considering a wide range of relationships between phenomena.

Neglect of brain lateralisation

Lent’s focus on specific metaphors seems to prevent him from investigating more closely what it might be that causes the dualistic phenomena he rightly criticises. This is evident from his treatment of neuroscience, where he discusses only the co-ordinating role of the pre-frontal cortex (PFC) as a whole in enabling symbolisation and much associated awareness. There is no mention at all in this book of the lateralisation of the brain, including particularly that of the pre-frontal cortex. But the linguistic specialisations of the pre-frontal areas are quite distinct, as fully explored by Iain McGilchrist, with the left PFC providing the goal-orientated centres (including both tool using and abstract representation), whilst the right PFC provides the linkages necessary for metaphorical understanding. This division of the PFC can provide us with a much clearer understanding of the neuroscientific basis of absolutisation, for when the left PFC is over-dominant in relation to the right, our representations are decontextualized, leading us to lose awareness of alternatives and assume that the particular construction we have of a situation is absolutely ‘true’ or ‘false’.

McGilchrist also provides some evidence that Far Eastern races are slightly less prone to this left hemisphere over-dominance than Westerners are – but (as far as it goes) this is obviously primarily a racial rather than a cultural feature. Generally, though, absolutisation is a problem for everyone. It’s a product of human brain-structure rather than of particular cultural tendencies. That would be consistent with the fact that there was still plenty of exploitation of other humans and of the environment in the East even before Western influence became a factor, and that there is also a long alternative tradition of challenging that tendency in the West. Where there is a tendency towards more or less absolutisation amongst a particular group (probably expressed more by the intellectual elites), that basic brain-structure will also imply a regression to the mean. We are more likely to conform to a human norm, on the whole, than just a cultural one.

Absence of Jesus and the Buddha

Lent’s accounts of cultural and intellectual history in different cultures is quite rich. Much of it was familiar to me, but I especially appreciated learning about areas I knew little about previously, particularly Neo-Confucian philosophy in China. The book has value as a general cultural history, but is obviously intended to be more than that. The treatment of world cultural history was unavoidably very selective, but I also wondered about the ways that the selection reflected the weaknesses in the argument. Most notable by their absence, for me, were Jesus and the Buddha, both of which got little more than a mention. The discussion of Christianity focuses on St Paul and other early church fathers, while Buddhism gets no more than a passing mention in relation to Chinese thought. I think that one reason that these figures are neglected is that they tend to challenge rather than support Lent’s thesis. The attitudes of both were sceptical, and their emphases on experience and integrity of motive were influential well beyond the bounds of the cultures where they began. They were both highly creative in modifying and adapting the dominant metaphors found in their cultures, showing how flexible they were: for example Jesus’ development of the spirit of the Jewish law rather than its letter, of the Buddha’s adaptation of the idea of the ‘true Brahmin’ to one that was moral rather than chauvinist. Lent’s emphasis on Christian intolerance can only be sustained by entirely omitting to mention the influence of Jesus’ love ethic, whilst the Buddha’s Middle Way, which provides an anti-absolutizing influence across cultures, only gets a brief mention in scare quotes.

The ‘Great Transformation’

The final chapter of the book, which focuses on responses to the eco-crisis, was one that I also found rather weaker than it should have been, even though it follows a penultimate chapter that provides a good summary of systems theory. If, indeed, the metaphors dominant in the West have much responsibility for our problems, I would have hoped at the end for some indication of the practical implications. How can we change or vary our metaphors? Instead, however, Lent gives a lot of space to discussing futuristic speculations of a kind that I found of little relevance to his case and of little practical interest. Only at the very end does he recommend a ‘Great Transformation’:

A Great Transformation would need to be founded on a worldview that could enable humanity to thrive sustainably on the earth into the future. In place of root metaphors such as NATURE AS MACHINE and CONQUERING NATURE, the new worldview would be based on the emerging systems view of life – recognising the intrinsic interconnectedness between all forms of life on earth and seeing humanity as embedded integrally within the natural world. (p.434)

This implies (he goes on) three core values: quality of life, shared humanity and environmental sustainability.

All of this gets rather disappointingly lost in abstract hypothesis and vague aspiration, treating the future as to be analysed in a similar way to the past rather than focusing on the practical judgements of any individual. How do we actually change our worldview? There is no discussion at all of what this would mean at a psychological level, and no idea at all of practice, that we need to be working on ourselves as individuals in order to enable such a transformation to occur. But to actually move beyond any tendency to absolutise one metaphor or set of metaphors, the first requirement is surely that we consider them in relation to alternatives when we actually make judgements. To get into the habit of doing that, a variety of practices and techniques can be employed – for example meditation, the arts, and critical thinking. Major political change is also required, but how can we produce that without changing the kind of discourse that takes place in politics? That means not just a new systemic ideology, but a different way of practising political discussion.

Practice of a kind that really follows through the implications of a systemic worldview is really not about adopting a different ideology, let alone a different cosmology. Lent really seems to think that cosmology is relevant, in the sense that we could be saved by adopting a neo-Confucian cosmology. But there are no direct deductions from a belief about the universe as a whole to the specific practical judgements we make – only absolutisations of such beliefs causing us to be over-confident in our judgements. Its by taking into account specific conditions beyond the ones we would otherwise consider, not by adopting general beliefs about the whole universe, that we address the destructive limitations in our awareness. When systems theory is helpful it is not a cosmology, but the basis for a method.

The Middle Way dimension needed in Lent’s argument

Starting from where we are, indeed, for most of us means starting from a complex set of inherited dispositions towards particular metaphors and particular beliefs formed out of them. We cannot do anything about those past conditions, but we can do something about how we respond to the next set of conditions. If we are Westerners, that set of starting conditions is likely to be heavily shaped by the sorts of meanings and beliefs that Lent thinks we should expurgate, but for the most part we can only address the whole set of conditions we face in practice by gradually modifying those meanings and beliefs, not by dropping them and starting de novo. We thus need, not necessarily new metaphors, but more helpful interpretations of old ones. We need to look, not to the wholesale adoption of different cultural models, but to developing those aspects of the ones we started with that address those conditions better.

If we really begin with that embodied situation at the moment of judgement, it is very difficult to tell in advance which meanings or beliefs will be helpful to us and which not. For the Chinese, it can be argued that an over-emphasis on harmony and stability historically prevented the addressing of the whole range of conditions, because they then became too vulnerable to Western interference (which in turn caused resentment and conflict, the effects of which can still be found to this day). Ecosystems are part of the whole range of conditions we need to address, but so are the effects of power-crazed invaders. To prepare ourselves for such a range of conditions, only the maximum possible provisionality can help us, rather than a specific ideology that highlights some conditions as intrinsically more important than others.

That’s why I think that the systems theory that Lent makes the basis of his judgement also requires the Middle Way to be put into practice. Complexity entails uncertainty, and uncertainty entails balanced scepticism and provisionality. The Middle Way cannot be simply assimilated into a more or less cosmological account of systems as the basis of ‘reality’. Instead we need to start with the recognition that we have no access to ‘reality’, and thus that no basic cultural construct will necessarily be better than another, but that different constructs may just be more or less helpful to us contingently in our current position. It may well be the case that Neo-Confucianism, and indeed systems theory, can be extremely helpful to us in our current situation, but the contingency of that helpfulness needs to be constantly borne in mind.

Conclusion

I have found it necessary, as I warned at the beginning, to write at some length here. I have been particularly concerned with making my criticisms of the book clear, which means that I have gone into some detail both about the book’s shortcomings and about my own alternatives. However, I wouldn’t want those criticisms, or the space I give to them, to detract from a proportional view of the value of the book. Overall, it is a book that highlights conditions that we need to urgently address. Overall, it is well written, well researched, and interesting. Overall, I would like there to be more, not fewer, books like this, both in terms of the synthetic approach and in terms of the promotion of adequate systemic responses to the urgent problems facing the planet. Unfortunately, though, given the magnitude and complexity of the conditions we face, that urgency cannot justify us in being satisfied with responses that do not also adequately identify the basic conditions of the problem. The argument about both the causes and the response will need to go on, but at least we are having the right argument.