Mind and Society

One of the great unresolved questions in philosophy and neuroscience is the nature of mind. Many textbooks in these subjects begin their discussions with Descartes, who proposed a separation between matter (which occupies space) and mind (which involves thought and does not occupy space). Most discussions focus on how these two substances could interact, since the a person’s mind can clearly lead to physical action. One increasingly dominant view (held by ‘materialists’) is that the mind is located in a series of chemical processes in the brain.

Less attention seems to have been given by philosophers and neuroscientists to the slightly different problem of the location of society. This might at first sight seem a puzzling question because the institutions of society and government seem solid and permanent - so permanent in fact, that we give them the names of the buildings that are associated with their headquarters. We speak of the ‘White House’ or ‘10 Downing Street’ to designate their current political inhabitants and their staff. Or, extending the metaphor, we talk of the ‘structure’ of society. Yet this solidity is an illusion because apparently ‘solid’ governments and societies can disappear almost overnight. The German Democratic Republic had large armed forces, a secret police with records on the majority of the population and a network of informers (one for every 6.5 citizens), no overt opposition, and was defended against its enemies (and those of its inhabitants who wished to live elsewhere) by a wall, fences, minefields and machine-guns. Despite surviving with little change for 40 or so years, this ‘structure’ blew away in the wind in a few weeks in 1989.

This indicates that, however solid they may appear to be, societies are generated in the minds of individual people. For years, they wake up each morning and go about their daily routines, thereby maintaining patterns of behaviour that sustain those in authority over them. They may, from time to time, reflect on their lives and decide individually or in small groups to look for other work, seek a new partner, or move to another part of the country. These decisions will take account of the rewards and sanctions for alternative courses of action. On a few occasions, they may act in accord with many others to make a sudden and major change in their daily habits. This will result in attempted political uprisings, outbreaks of mass violence, adherence to a new religious order, support for a new form of music, and other such revolutions.

If society is in people’s minds, then where is it located? The materialist approach is unlikely to be helpful. Even if it became possible to interpret the chemical processes of the brain with greater sophistication than with the current fMRI scanners, all we would find in each individual would be sets of hopes, fears, expectations, habits of thought and expectations of routine behaviours. This would give us some understanding of how that individual functioned in society, but not much else. Instead, we need to think of societies and other human institutions as sets of recurring patterns of human behaviour that are akin to Descartes’ understanding of the mind. They are sustained by thought but are not in themselves a material substance. Perhaps then we could stop talking about organisations of people as if they were blocks of stone and concrete.

See also: Working in the Machine

The Quality of Gulag Life

In his novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Alexander Solzhenitsyn drew on his own experience to describe life in a Soviet prison camp in the Arctic. This involved almost unimaginable suffering: imprisoned without any prospect of release for what would not be a crime in any reasonably free society; forced to work long hours in subzero temperatures; appalling food and accommodation; and a probable early death from illness, exhaustion, or murder by the guards. Yet the hero of the book looks back on his day with some satisfaction:
    “Shukhov went to sleep fully content. He’d had many strokes of luck that day: they hadn’t put him in the cells; they hadn’t sent the team to the settlement; he’d pinched a bowl of kasha at dinner; the team-leader had fixed the rates well; he’d built a wall and enjoyed doing it; he’d smuggled that bit of hacksaw blade through; he’d earned something from Tsezar in the evening; he’d bought that tobacco. And he hadn’t fallen ill. He’d got over it. A day without a dark cloud. Almost a happy day” (pp142-143).

This extract tells us something about how people assess the quality of their own lives. Almost everybody would rate the life of Ivan Denisovich Shukhov in the most negative terms, even compared with that of ordinary citizens of the Soviet Union at that time. Yet he had adapted to his way of life, and was able to win sufficient minor triumphs over adversity to regard it as ‘almost a happy day’. There is therefore sometimes a difference between a person’s quality of life rated by an observer, and that person’s own sense of well-being.

Researchers call the first of these an ‘objective measure’ of quality of life, compared with a person self-rating, which is termed ’subjective’. But these phrases are misleading because ‘objective’ measures are simply the subjective assessments of others about what constitutes the good life. Researchers may poll lots of people in a particular society about what they wish from life and hence obtain some numerical score for quality of life, but in the end they are just measuring the extent to which a particular individual conforms to other people’s subjective assessments of what makes them happy. Needless to say, some people willingly choose a way of life that would not appeal to all of us - as monks spending a spartan life of prayer, as soldiers living in barracks facing daily danger, and so on.

Of course, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov did not choose to be in a gulag, but his life there had narrowed his awareness of the alternatives. This may have been essential for psychological survival, but would also have made adaptation after release particularly difficult. Like Brooks, the elderly released prisoner in The Shawshank Redemption, suicide would have seemed a reasonable option. This raises questions about whether we should give preference to people’s own assessments of their preferred way of life over that of ‘objective’ opinion. This already happens routinely when the person in question is deemed unable to make a rational decision because of childhood, mental illness or severe learning disability. But none of us ever make a rational decision about what we wish from life, in the sense of considering and weighing all the possible alternatives. Instead, most of us choose between the limited range of alternatives we know about or just copy what other people do, while a few reckless souls leap into the unknown.

Does this mean that most of us are living in a gulag of our own making? For some people, this is true. It is possible to meet people who live narrow and restricted lives without poetry, the excitement of sport and the stimulation of friendship and good conversation. This can happen even when there are the financial means to live otherwise. My advice for escaping from such a gulag is to travel to new places when you can, try out new foods, learn new languages, make an effort to meet different kinds of people, read more and watch less television.

Read: Solzhenitsyn A (1963) One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Penguin, Harmondsworth.

See also:

Looking down on others' needs

I-Spy van Gogh (and a Rodin)

When I was young, I collected train numbers, bus numbers, and also filled in I-Spy books. Each I-Spy book covered a particular topic such as vehicles, aeroplanes, birds, insects and so on. Each would include information about a particular car, animal etc, and space to record where you first saw it. The book awarded marks for each first sighting, graded according to rarity. I Spy books still exist, glossier than they were in the past, but still small enough to fit into a boy’s pocket.

I-Spy books are for collectors, but collectors of memories rather than objects. The dominant drive is the same in both cases: the desire to accumulate for its own sake. However, the I-Spy motive is the most innocent form of accumulation. The accumulation of memories does not usually destroy what is being accumulated, or deny others its pleasures. Collectors of memories do not steal or hoard great works of art, but view them in galleries and tick them off the their mental list.

I suspect that the I-Spy motive drives a substantial proportion of those that visit art galleries and museums. There are of course other reasons for seeing great works of art - to be inspired, to look with awe at a work completed with great skill, or to understand the mind of the artist. However, these more aesthetic objectives are hard to achieve when visiting the major art galleries. This is because crowds gather round the most familiar paintings because they are famous, because they wish to tick them off in their mental I-Spy book of great paintings.

I found this to be true last month in the van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. The museum was packed, with people gathering around the most well-known pictures. Van Gogh was a particularly obliging artist for collectors because he often painted multiple pictures of the same subject - nine different pictures of sunflowers in a vase, now all spaced round the world in different collections. How many people would appreciate these paintings if they were not in all the art books, and sold for vast sums to museums? Some of the early paintings by van Gogh certainly struck me as dismal efforts.

The potato eaters is a grotesque cartoon of peasant life. The peasants were painted as ugly semi-animal figures with outsize hands and noses. This was supposedly a work in honour of manual labour, but it is degrading. I suspect that the peasants who were models for the picture would have preferred to be seen in their Sunday best, to have their dreams and hopes respected.

A pair of pictures elsewhere in the museum also the limitations of van Gogh’s early works. His view of Paris seemed to me to be an uninspired technical exercise, flat and conveying nothing of the city and its life.

Next to it in the gallery was Bonnard’s view of Montmartre which, like van Gogh’s picture, was painted from the window of a flat. Bonnard’s picture sparkles with city lights in the rain, evoking the excitement of a great city at night. But Bonnard is not as famous as van Gogh, so the I-Spy crowds did not gather around this wonderful picture.

Van Gogh’s later work is of course far more attractive and commercially successful (although sadly only after the artist’s early death). His series of paintings of iris flowers are utterly beautiful and, like many people,  I have a reproductions of one of these on my living room wall. But I was affected much more by the sole sculpture in the Museum by Rodin, of one of the Six Burghers of Calais. This showed the anguish of the senior men of the City, who had agreed to surrender their lives to the besieging English army in exchange for it agreeing not to massacre the inhabitants when the City surrendered. The English king ordered that they walk out of the City gates dressed in rags, wearing nooses around their necks, and carrying the keys to the city and its castle. Rodin’s sculpture portrays the anguish of the starving magistrate, his teeth grit in determination and sacrifice, as he stumbles to surrender and death. These emotions burn our hearts when we think of the lives of our forefathers in Europe who lived through the first half of the 20th Century - the century of genocide and mass murder, the century from hell.

Much more comforting to turn aside and look at sunflowers.