Hi everybody! I’ve got an essay for you today. It’s about a book a Melendy Avenue Chieftain commissioned me to read! That’s right, if you subscribe to the Review at the Chieftain level, you get to commission a book for me to read (within reason- terms and conditions apply) and review! I had fun with this one and hope you do too.
REVIEW ESSAY - Of Nerds and Words: Julian Jaynes, “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind” (1976)
The school from which I received a high school diploma possessed the right sort of peculiarities – it was small, it was odd, it was all-ages, it attracted bookish people – that there was a sort of canon, or anyway seemed to be one that extended somewhat before my time and a little while after it. One of our gallant Melendy Avenue Review Chieftains, who pays for the highest structured reward tier we’ve got, did more than his fair share to shape that canon, passing along, possibly introducing, given books to the ecosystem of nerds that grew luxuriant in the tolerant atmosphere of the school. As a Chieftain, he has a right to will it of me to read a book of his choosing for each year of his Chieftaincy, and he wound up choosing a book that was not in that canon, but which I first heard of from an SVS nerd culture tentpole- Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash.
I understand Snow Crash has taken a bit of a tumble in reputation in recent decades. It’s not hard to see why. There’s a books podcast a friend of mine recommends every so often, but which I despise for its smugness and narrow idea, which took the book to task, implying all sorts of supposed problems but really zero-ing in on one (that “dance allusively around the fact you only have one criticism of a given work but feel the need to pad things out” thing internet people so often do) - Stephenson does, indeed, strongly sexualize an underage girl, one of his two main characters, throughout the book. I was fifteen, the same age the character was, when I first read it, so, did not think it all that odd, but yeah, it’s fucking weird, and not the only time in his work Stephenson gets deeper than one likes into the sexuality of the space between girlhood, virginity, and whoredom (used in contrast to “sex work” advisedly- he’s not into “sex workers,” he’s into whores, or was through the early oughts if his work is an indication, and I think the conceptual difference is important here). Add to that Stephenson’s fan base of young, technologically-inclined men and his own palling around with the Silicon Valley elite (arguably Snow Crash inspired the way Google Earth works), and you’ve got the kind of guy who loud portions of the internet will hate. I acknowledge many of these criticisms, but still think him a great writer, and Snow Crash a good book (not his best, but good), even if it’s got some creepy bits and even if some of his books fall flat. I am not the internet.
Stephenson is, whatever else he is, a novelist of ideas, and while that sounds good – certainly, sympathetic critics use it as a compliment for him – it also can be tough for reputation in the current day. Really, that’s because most people don’t want to hear ideas, they want slogans and little morality tales that affirm whichever slogan they and their cliques like. But, an added wrinkle of our time, a novelist of ideas, necessarily, is not going to get the ideas –right–, formally correct. They’re not optimizing for correctness, they’re working with ideas in the context of a broader work of art. And in an internet full of pedants, that’s going to lead to problems, especially if the waters are already chummed by questionable aesthetic or political choices. You gotta figure Neal has gored the ox of a good dozen of pedant communities, by this point- just counting the historians, you’re looking at historians of the Bronze Age Near East, early modern Europe (really the early modern globe, considering the range of the Baroque Cycle), World War II… Snow Crash probably got some people interested in Sumerian, and you gotta figure that’s been a distinctly mixed blessing to Sumerian scholars from 1992 to the present.
Snow Crash is also where I learned of Julian Jaynes, and I wonder if it’s where the older boy I knew at my oddball school learned of him too- he’s also a Stephenson fan. Stephenson’s delve into the history and language of ancient Sumer must have added insult and injury to longsuffering laborers in the cuneiform mines when he intertwined his takes with the neurohistorical speculations of Julian Jaynes, as expressed in his one big book, 1976’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. And all this in service of a scifi action plot (Snow Crash had been conceived of as a graphic novel and/or screenplay before becoming a novel) that involved a swordfighting hacker named Hiro Protagonist having to save the world from some terrible Sumerian consciousness curse alongside his 15 year old platonic gal pal and her nice mob boss employer! What a world.
Anyway- I read The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind at the behest of my Chieftain friend. He’s had a longstanding interest in the history (and expansion) of consciousness. A lot of my friends have such interests! Psychology, neurochemistry, philosophy (eastern, western, analytic, sometimes continental!), drugs, various kinds of math, ecstatic experience, all sorts of art…
Well, you see the problem. I’m a historian and critic who is ultimately rooted in the human world. I don’t refuse transcendence or immanence- if nothing else, what is human – what is the world – the definitions tend to change over time, and you need to acquire at least enough perspective to understand those changes if you want to do the sort of history I do.
And The Origin of Consciousness in etc makes a historical claim! An incredibly bold one: that consciousness as we know it is not a permanent feature of the human mind, or the product of either spoken or written language, but an artifact of a specific time, starting somewhere between two thousand and one thousand years before the birth of Christ. Before that time, the human mind was bi-cameral. The left hand did not know what the right hand was doing! One half of the brain would make decisions, dream, and occasionally shout commands, and the other took care of actually doing things. And these were concrete things- “run here,” “climb this tree,” etc etc. Jaynes tells us that human beings, before roughly the time we now think of as the Bronze Age collapse, did not have an interior monologue, did not narrativize their own experience.
So, as you can see, this is a history book, of sorts. But it’s history based on the sort of thing that I don’t do a lot with- the ancient world, speculation about the nature of consciousness (I’m more used to dealing with its products!), etc. This makes assessing it tricky to me.
The academy, as far as I can tell, has a consensus: Jaynes’ ideas are fascinating, but basically unprovable, way too broad, and, worst of all, lacking the makings of a serious research program. It doesn’t help that he never held a permanent academic position (he was non tenure track! I should get a card from him) and, reading between the lines of his work and what information I can find on him, a “real character” - did not play well with others, not necessarily in a mean way but just doing his own thing. He worked as a clinician, theater actor, sometimes, and understood his Unitarian beliefs as leading him to conscientious objector status in WWII- that kind of guy. Some academics, most notably professional atheists like Dawkins and Dennett, enlist him (posthumously- he died in 1997) in their sallies, but you get the feeling that’s more instrumental, a thing in their long debates, than a sign that either are really going to pursue Jaynes’ ideas.
I guess I should say more about what Jaynes actually says, shouldn’t I! A lot of it is saying he what consciousness clearly is not, and he goes down the list of various efforts to explain it and breezily dispenses with them all. I don’t have a dog in that fight, so was not offended, though I figure your mileage may vary. He talked about then-recent research in the two hemispheres of the brain and how they more often work separately than we might assume. He also discusses schizophrenia, and I get the idea that the very definition of that term is wildly different than it was in the seventies, but, again, I am very far out of the psychology loop.
Hearing voices is pretty important, here, because that’s what Jaynes thought was going on in the heads of people before roughly 1500 BC. They didn’t have an inner monologue. They had a voice from the other half of their brain tell them stuff, sometimes, and they did not think that that voice was “theirs.” This is the bicameral mind.
Jaynes makes three big claims about this right off the bat: first, that this was the condition of all people before whenever the bicameral mind broke down; second, that it was this voice from the other half of the brain that provided information for how to deal with novel situations; third, that people who lived together heard voices they thought of as the same.
Jaynes evidence is partially psychological — evidence for the idea that some people think this way, at least, without a true consciousness of self — but largely literary! You really don’t get an internal voice in literature, he says, until after the middle of the second millennium before Christ. The Iliad shows up a lot, and so does Egyptian and Babylonian scripture. In those, people don’t seem to think very much, or even really act of their own volition- the gods fill Agamemnon with greed and pride, or harden Pharaoh's heart (that last might be a bit of an anachronism- where the Jewish scriptures fit into all of this isn’t quite clear). These god-impulses then impel the heroes to do their thing.
On the sub-heroic level, the voices provided guidance on dealing with novel situations- the sort of thing that came up a lot as people started living in villages and eventually larger settlements. This part lost me, I admit it. If we grant that people were incapable of thinking through new situations in a narrative/conditional way — “if I do x, y will happen” — and needed to process their thoughts as being a voice speaking from outside, how does it follow that people would come to understand these voices as all being the same, or the same set? Because Jaynes figures this is where the gods and religion come from, the voices telling our ancestors what to do. But like… what caused them to agree they all had the same gods talking to them? Jaynes never makes this clear. He says that gods came from dead kings, that kings came from people who gave orders in the increasingly complex world of villages… but how did they come to make commands? Did they just say the stuff the voices in their head said to them out loud? Is that all it took? To quote Ray, “now I gotta think about if I even LIKE kings!”
In any event, as the Chieftain who assigned this book to me made clear, he does not regard the work as scripture or even necessarily “correct,” but he does enjoy explorations of consciousness. As do I, sometimes, though perhaps less than he does. Among other things, Jaynes asked questions about the relationship between consciousness and human evolution that prefigured later thinking (might have to do with why Dennett would name check him). Was the human configuration of mind set in the Stone Age, or earlier, or is it more labile than that? Heady thoughts that could lead down many angles. For what it’s worth, Jaynes had a nicely non-normative idea of evolution (unlike Dennett)- if consciousness changed, from animal-like early humans to bicameral Neolithic/Bronze Age types to unicameral modern man to whatever might come next, it did so in response to material factors rooted more in ecological change than anything else.
Anyway- part of the reason I don’t do much of this kind of speculation myself, why I don’t seek out bicameral minds, stoned apes, etc, is because, like those mean academics I suppose, I can’t find much to do with it. Well, there’s another reason, too- I don’t care much for sweeping declarations about the nature of man when there doesn’t seem to be a fitting set of stakes alongside them. Maybe I’m less of an academic and more of a politician- I do think Marx set Hegel right side up, not upside down, whatever Hegel’s genius might have been. Jaynes actually isn’t the worst as far as this stuff is concerned. It was a mostly enjoyable read. I will say, though, the best use I can think of for Jaynes is… structuring a scifi novel.
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Well! Mithra sez thanks for reading!
In my very rudimentary knowledge of the brain from linguistics grad school...no, just no. Language function is on the left side of the brain but the brain is extremely flexible (see people who recover from injuries in remarkable ways) and the left-right division has been grossly overhyped. The brain works as a unit and has remarkable compensatory abilities.
Typical linguistic theory is that abstract thought and interiority came about first, and with that internal “workbench” in which things could be constructed/manipulated came the link between sign and signifier, and then finally speech. (Why speech and not sign language for the vast majority of languages? Probably because of the advantage of keeping hands free for things other than comms)
Also...Gilgamesh is full of introspection, and the Vedas were written immediately after the Bronze Age collapse, but are much older in the oral tradition. The Greeks didn’t really have the concept of “will” as a separate part of the human person (Augustine is considered pioneer in that) and they had a fixation on fate and irony, so it’s possible that the “god/command voice” language of the Iliad was either understood as a metaphor or was meant to evoke fear in the audience as these demigods had to contend not just with fate but their heavenly relatives actively manipulating them.
The Hebrew for “hardened his heart” actually alternates who does it--sometimes pharaoh hardens his own heart, sometimes it’s Adonai doing it (and in the much-later rabbinic interpretation, Adonai does it because pharaoh wants to hold out and is afraid he’ll cave in, so it’s respecting pharaoh’s will)
Most of the evidence we have is limited, because writing came much later than language, and we can reliably trace back language family trees only to about 3000-2000 BCE, working back a few centuries from the earliest written texts that provide cognates for comparison.
PS: who said the modern mind is unicameral? The mind is really more a parliament of voices and feelings and motives, sometimes expressed in words and sometimes in images/feelings, but as the ancients said, we are not our minds...we’re whatever is observing the parliament and signing/vetoing its proposals by what we choose to (not) do.