The Importance of Being Conscious: Absence of Mind by Marilynne Robinson
Among those whose writings about the mind and human nature she discusses at some length are Darwin and Freud and Auguste Comte, along with contemporary figures, including the entomologist (and novelist) E. O Wilson. Too often, Robinson says, she sees in such writings — from the most credentialed to the least — “a kind of parochialism that follows from a belief in science as a kind of magic, as if it existed apart from history and culture, rather than being, in objective truth and inevitability, their product.”
I’m quoting here from the second of four chapters that comprise the book, my favorite, the one entitled “The Strange History of Altruism.” In it, Robinson examines the way altruism — compassion, love — has been argued out of nature and relegated to religion and other “inventions” of human culture by the enormous growth and influence of what she calls “parascientific literature,” for which she offers a definition worth quoting at length:
By this phrase I mean a robust, and surprisingly conventional, genre of social or political theory or anthropology that makes its case by proceeding, using the science of its moment, from a genesis of human nature in primordial life to a set of general conclusions about what our nature is and must be, together with the ethical, political, economic and/or philosophic implications to be drawn from these conclusions. Its author may or may not be a scientist himself. One of the characterizing traits of this large and burgeoning literature is its confidence that science has given us knowledge sufficient to allow us to answer certain essential questions about the nature of reality, if only by dismissing them.
— pp. 32-33
Robinson attributes “the sense of emptiness in the modern world” not to the decline of faith, nor to the advance of science — she considers both religion and science to be poorly represented by the so-called modern debate between them — but to “the exclusion of the felt life of the mind from the accounts of reality proposed by the oddly authoritative and deeply influential parascientific literature… and from the varieties of thought and art that reflect the influence of these accounts.”
Works she assigns to the genre range from the recent contributions of Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett to the writings of Sigmund Freud, whose work she calls “by far the greatest and most interesting contribution to parascientific thought and literature ever made.” Freud gets his own chapter in Absence of Mind. Robinson sees his determination to universalize the psyche as a poignant response to the threatening spirit of his age: his theory opposes a growing faith in “the importance of racial, cultural, and national difference,” an ideology that will lead, in his lifetime, to the rise of fascism.
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