Post by datacruz on May 5, 2009 16:49:52 GMT -1
I've just read what I think is a very good read. I've read quite a lot of this sort of stuff but I think Enough by John Naish is one of, if not the, best in this area. women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/body_and_soul/article3171583.ece
Well, I'm quite good at 'enoughism', that is untill it comes to posting on message boards... here's some material from the book.
“There are strong evolutionary reasons for believing that socially generous impulses are wired into our minds. Charles Darwin suggested that we overtook rival species when our higher social brains grew to think beyond survival-of-the-fittest individualism and learnt to act fur our tribe’s collective advantage.
Darwin labelled this winning form of social connection ‘group selection’.
Connectedness is another never-enough that constantly gets marginalised nowadays — not least by the way in which our society urges us to. ‘celebrate our uniqueness’ instead of exploring how our lives are inextricably woven into the human ecological whole. But despite our culturally inflated egotism, we still seem configured to benefit greatly from our wider connections.
As we saw at the end of the last chapter, having warm human contact comes second in economic value only to having good health. And when we sing together (something few of us get the opportunity to do nowadays), group connection even provides a life-enhancing high. Manchester University scientists have found that the sacculus, an organ in the inner ear which responds to musical frequencies, is connected to the brain’s pleasure centre. The sacculus is sensitive only to low-frequency, high-intensity sounds of the type produced by communal singing.
The innate human urge for connection with our fellows seems also to lie at the heart of humankind’s unique sense of spirituality. Spiritual people of all faiths and none often describe their mystical experiences as a ‘union’ with something larger than themselves. Some call this the universe or nature, while others call it God. Mystical experiences are not exactly rare, either: think of our sense of awe at seeing a beautiful sunset or the ecstatic sense of ego dislocation that happens when you’re in love. Some neurological researchers claim to have found the mechanism for producing this sense of universal ‘oneness. They believe it occurs when the brain’s ‘orientation area’,, which creates an egotistical wall between our sense of self and our sense of the rest of the world, is shut down. The process, called deafferentation, lets us glimpse our connectedness with everything. It may be produced by meditation or prayer, and can create anything from warm feelings of fellowship to soaring mystic ecstasies.
But we are rapidly losing our longstanding connection with humankind’s rich history of spiritual thought and wonder, because the more-more world derides any kind of religiosity as sad, embarrassing and old. Amputated from our vast history of spiritual ideas and debate, we lose our line of communication with people who were just like us, who happened to live in earlier times, who also wondered about the nature of life and questioned what our purpose could be.
Consumer society promises to drown out such perplexing thoughts by holding us secure in the certainties of getting and spending. Perhaps we might take our rocketing levels of depression as indicating a certain lack of success in this area.
Meanwhile, the non-dogmatic tradition of spiritual questing quietly continues, if only as a minority sport. I’m rather drawn to the new emerging concept of scientific pantheism, an approach that harnesses discoveries from fields such as quantum physics and space exploration to support the idea that the universe and what many religions call God are just the same thing [reminds me of this, what I read the year before last viewfromthecenter.com/]. Scientific Pantheism’s suggestion that ‘the cosmos is divine, the Earth is sacred’, seems a good way as any to emphasise our vital interconnection with the planet.”
He finishes
“Thanks to the rapid rise of consumer culture, though, there is another deeply intractable taboo here that is both blocking human evolution and helping to stifle debate on the previous four unspeakables. The fifth taboo is that our society increasingly stimulates the wrong brain — the primitive, lower, fear-driven, insatiable brain that sees the world only in terms of competition, consumption and famine. Pushed out of the equation is the higher cortex, the reasoning, altruistic human brain that we evolved to intercede in our primitive responses. Our ever-accelerating, overstimulated, self-obsessed cultural environment marginalises the very brain mechanisms that make us such uniquely civilised creatures by constantly hyper-arousing our lower instincts and giving our reasoning circuits no time to respond.
This robs us of the ability to think our collective way out of the consumerist conundrum and encourages us instead to dig deeper into it. Brain-scanning science, as explored in this book, is showing this to be true in ever-starker terms. But to raise this debate is to risk being caricatured as some elitist snob whining about ‘dumbing down’. Nevertheless, unless we make a wholesale shift from a lower-cortex culture back to a more considered, more sharing, more spiritual higher-cortex one, our chances of deciding to take the long-term, altruistic, evolutionary route out of disastrous overconsumption may be stuck at near zero.
Where does the process of change begin for any of this? It can only start with us as individuals, looking to our personal ecologies and then trying to extend it from there. We can do it by rejecting junk infotainment, junk aspirations, junk possessions, junk choices, junk food, junk life. . . the whole gamut of junk striving. And we can work to break the taboos by bringing new ideas to the agenda, through writing, blogging, arguing, lobbying — and most of all, through living by example. If others are inspired by our lifestyles to change their own, then with luck the pressure may grow.
The question remains, will we ever have the conditions that precipitate timely action? As a culture, we seem stuck in a state of what psychologists call ‘cognitive dissonance’, believing one thing, but acting in a diametrically opposed way — just like smokers who know that the habit will kill them, but keep on lighting up. Like any addiction, our cultural addiction to more-more is proving extremely tough to break The way out, if there is one, is within the power of every one of us, but only f we start living out answers to the questions that really matter
Well, I'm quite good at 'enoughism', that is untill it comes to posting on message boards... here's some material from the book.
“There are strong evolutionary reasons for believing that socially generous impulses are wired into our minds. Charles Darwin suggested that we overtook rival species when our higher social brains grew to think beyond survival-of-the-fittest individualism and learnt to act fur our tribe’s collective advantage.
Darwin labelled this winning form of social connection ‘group selection’.
Connectedness is another never-enough that constantly gets marginalised nowadays — not least by the way in which our society urges us to. ‘celebrate our uniqueness’ instead of exploring how our lives are inextricably woven into the human ecological whole. But despite our culturally inflated egotism, we still seem configured to benefit greatly from our wider connections.
As we saw at the end of the last chapter, having warm human contact comes second in economic value only to having good health. And when we sing together (something few of us get the opportunity to do nowadays), group connection even provides a life-enhancing high. Manchester University scientists have found that the sacculus, an organ in the inner ear which responds to musical frequencies, is connected to the brain’s pleasure centre. The sacculus is sensitive only to low-frequency, high-intensity sounds of the type produced by communal singing.
The innate human urge for connection with our fellows seems also to lie at the heart of humankind’s unique sense of spirituality. Spiritual people of all faiths and none often describe their mystical experiences as a ‘union’ with something larger than themselves. Some call this the universe or nature, while others call it God. Mystical experiences are not exactly rare, either: think of our sense of awe at seeing a beautiful sunset or the ecstatic sense of ego dislocation that happens when you’re in love. Some neurological researchers claim to have found the mechanism for producing this sense of universal ‘oneness. They believe it occurs when the brain’s ‘orientation area’,, which creates an egotistical wall between our sense of self and our sense of the rest of the world, is shut down. The process, called deafferentation, lets us glimpse our connectedness with everything. It may be produced by meditation or prayer, and can create anything from warm feelings of fellowship to soaring mystic ecstasies.
But we are rapidly losing our longstanding connection with humankind’s rich history of spiritual thought and wonder, because the more-more world derides any kind of religiosity as sad, embarrassing and old. Amputated from our vast history of spiritual ideas and debate, we lose our line of communication with people who were just like us, who happened to live in earlier times, who also wondered about the nature of life and questioned what our purpose could be.
Consumer society promises to drown out such perplexing thoughts by holding us secure in the certainties of getting and spending. Perhaps we might take our rocketing levels of depression as indicating a certain lack of success in this area.
Meanwhile, the non-dogmatic tradition of spiritual questing quietly continues, if only as a minority sport. I’m rather drawn to the new emerging concept of scientific pantheism, an approach that harnesses discoveries from fields such as quantum physics and space exploration to support the idea that the universe and what many religions call God are just the same thing [reminds me of this, what I read the year before last viewfromthecenter.com/]. Scientific Pantheism’s suggestion that ‘the cosmos is divine, the Earth is sacred’, seems a good way as any to emphasise our vital interconnection with the planet.”
He finishes
“Thanks to the rapid rise of consumer culture, though, there is another deeply intractable taboo here that is both blocking human evolution and helping to stifle debate on the previous four unspeakables. The fifth taboo is that our society increasingly stimulates the wrong brain — the primitive, lower, fear-driven, insatiable brain that sees the world only in terms of competition, consumption and famine. Pushed out of the equation is the higher cortex, the reasoning, altruistic human brain that we evolved to intercede in our primitive responses. Our ever-accelerating, overstimulated, self-obsessed cultural environment marginalises the very brain mechanisms that make us such uniquely civilised creatures by constantly hyper-arousing our lower instincts and giving our reasoning circuits no time to respond.
This robs us of the ability to think our collective way out of the consumerist conundrum and encourages us instead to dig deeper into it. Brain-scanning science, as explored in this book, is showing this to be true in ever-starker terms. But to raise this debate is to risk being caricatured as some elitist snob whining about ‘dumbing down’. Nevertheless, unless we make a wholesale shift from a lower-cortex culture back to a more considered, more sharing, more spiritual higher-cortex one, our chances of deciding to take the long-term, altruistic, evolutionary route out of disastrous overconsumption may be stuck at near zero.
Where does the process of change begin for any of this? It can only start with us as individuals, looking to our personal ecologies and then trying to extend it from there. We can do it by rejecting junk infotainment, junk aspirations, junk possessions, junk choices, junk food, junk life. . . the whole gamut of junk striving. And we can work to break the taboos by bringing new ideas to the agenda, through writing, blogging, arguing, lobbying — and most of all, through living by example. If others are inspired by our lifestyles to change their own, then with luck the pressure may grow.
The question remains, will we ever have the conditions that precipitate timely action? As a culture, we seem stuck in a state of what psychologists call ‘cognitive dissonance’, believing one thing, but acting in a diametrically opposed way — just like smokers who know that the habit will kill them, but keep on lighting up. Like any addiction, our cultural addiction to more-more is proving extremely tough to break The way out, if there is one, is within the power of every one of us, but only f we start living out answers to the questions that really matter
