Jeremy Lent - The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity’s Search for Meaning

When I went to high school in Austria in the 1950s, history was taught exclusively as military history, which I found utterly boring and studied only minimally, just enough to pass my exams. My main academic interests were literature, foreign languages, and, above all, science and mathematics. Then, a decisive moment came when, as a young physics student, I read Werner Heisenberg's Physics and Philosophy, his classic account of the conceptual revolution triggered by quantum physics and relativity theory.

Heisenberg's book had a tremendous influence on my thinking and determined the trajectory of my entire career as a scientist and writer. One passage, in particular, planted a seed in my mind that would mature, more than a decade later, into a systematic investigation of the limitations of the Cartesian worldview and the wide range of its scientific, philosophical, social, and political implications. The Cartesian partition, wrote Heisenberg, has penetrated deeply into the human mind during the three centuries following Descartes, and it will take a long time for it to be replaced by a really different attitude toward the problem of reality.

This passage also triggered in me a new interest in history, but this time in the history of ideas, a subject that has fascinated me ever since. The history of ideas is endlessly captivating because well-known sequences of political and cultural events of the past, again and again, appear in a new light when we look at them through a different narrative lens. I have no doubt that this is the reason for the tremendous success of books like Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel and Yuval Harari's Sapiens, and of documentaries like Kenneth Clark's Civilisation and Jacob Bronowski's The Ascent of Man.

The Patterning Instinct by Jeremy Lent continues this tradition of broad interdisciplinary historical narratives, written in nontechnical language, eminently readable, entertaining, yet sophisticated and intellectually fascinating. In this book, the author introduces a new perspective, which he calls cognitive history. Instead of the traditional approach of assuming that the direction of history is determined, ultimately, by material causesgeography, economy, technology, and the likehe argues that, following the fundamental human urge to endow our surroundings with meaning, different cultures construct core metaphors to make meaning out of their world and these metaphors forge the values that ultimately drive people's actions.

By calling his approach cognitive history, the author implies that he traces the human search for meaning through the lens of modern cognitive science, a rich interdisciplinary field that transcends the traditional frameworks of biology, psychology, and epistemology. The key achievement of cognitive science, in my view, is that it has overcome the Cartesian division between mind and matter that has haunted scientists and philosophers for centuries. Mind and matter no longer appear to belong to two separate categories but are seen as representing two complementary aspects of the phenomenon of life: process and structure. At all levels of life, mind and matter, process and structure, are inseparably connected.

The Santiago theory of cognition, in particular, identifies cognition (the process of knowing) with the very process of life. The self-organizing activity of living systems at all levels of life is mental or cognitive activity. Thus, life and cognition are inseparably connected. Cognition is embedded in matter at all levels of life. Moreover, the theory asserts that cognition is not a representation of an independently existing world but rather a bringing forth or enacting of a world through the process of living.

Jeremy Lent applies this insight to history, recognizing the power of the human mind to construct its own reality and arguing that the cognitive frames through which different cultures perceive reality have had a profound effect on their historical direction. Engaging the reader in an archaeology of the mind, he shows how, in different epochs of history, dominant cognitive frames can be defined in terms of certain fundamental patterns of meaning: everything is connected, the hierarchy of the gods, split cosmos, split human, the harmonious web of life, nature as machine, and so on.

From this cognitive perspective, Lent proposes new answers to some age-old questions of human history: Is it our true nature to be selfish and competitive, or empathic and community-minded? How did the rise of agriculture set the stage for our current ecological crisis? Why did the Scientific Revolution take place in Europe and not in Chinese or Islamic civilization? What are the root causes of our modern global culture of rampant consumerism, and is there a way we can change that culture?