All Mixed Up?

This past summer I came across a blog published by Cris Campbell, an aspiring anthropologist.  His blog gets a significant amount of traffic judging by the number of comments to his posts, and a critical post he wrote (though he does recommend OCBBM) on Jaynes' bicameral mind theory titled "All Mixed Up:  Julian Jaynes" has received over 40 comments from readers.  

Campbell does not really make much of an argument against any of the specifics in OCBBM.  However, I am creating this write up here, because many of the responses in the comments section are thoughtful and engaging and would be worthwhile I think for those interested in Jaynes' ideas.

So anyone who wants to explore the various ideas expressed on Campbell's blog regarding Jaynes and bicamerality can use the above link.  Here I am only going to reproduce the comments I made to Campbell.  Campbell sums up his opening remarks with:

“Here is how we know Jaynes is wrong: there is no evidence that historically recent hunter-gatherers were or are biologically-neurologically different or that their minds were metaphorically bifurcated.”

To which I replied:

"Jaynes did not claim there was anything biologically-neurologically different in bicameral people. Rather, his contention was that the neuroanatomy of bicameral people was the same as we all share, but it functioned differently in people living in bicameral societies due to culture.

Maybe I am missing something, but there is much evidence for at least vestiges of 'metaphorically bifurcated' minds in recent hunter-gatherers if by this term you mean what Jaynes meant which is cross hemisphere communication in the brain that was experienced by these people as hallucinations. Just one example would be the Piraha people’s experience of spirit visitations as documented by Daniel Everett."

Cambell's response:

"Over the past 10 years, I’ve probably read 1,000 or more ethnographies and ethnohistories of hunter-gatherer peoples. I have yet to encounter anything in this vast literature which would suggest some kind of bifurcation, whether metaphorical or otherwise.

In fact, everything I’ve read suggests otherwise. Sure, they have different worldviews but those (animist) worldviews are in no way similar to what Jaynes postulated for bicameral consciousness. I can’t think of a single source, ethnographer, or anthropologist who has ever thought, said, or written that hunter-gatherers have a different kind of consciousness or mind.

That aside, the single best explanation for Jaynes’ identification of a difference between early and later Greek epics/poems is quite simple: writing and literate society. Minds did not change, but external symbolic storage and literate technology did. Jack Goody, Eric Havelock, and Walter Ong have all assessed Jaynes’ work in this way. They are right."

My response, which starts off by addressing Campbell's statement that no anthropologist or ethnographer he is aware of has ever noted a different kind of consciousness in the people they write about:

"Yes, they don’t. I would attribute that to: 1) Since the age of writing and documentation, hunter gatherer societies have faced many of the same pressures Jaynes describes which brought about consciousness, so these people only show vestiges of the bicameral mind to a greater or lesser degree depending on the case. 2) It would be too politically incorrect to assign a different kind of conscious to the people they study for fear that the difference may be interpreted by those who read their work as racist. 3) They don’t know how to interpret the phenomenon they are seeing, being conscious creatures, they have difficulty conceptualizing what is going on.

For example in regards to my third point, I once read an account by a researcher who spent time with a group of aboriginal people in Australia. He insisted that there was a kind of mental telepathy going on between these people. He noted that there were times he would observe an individual drop what she was doing to respond to a command, summons, etc. she received when no one else was around. The only way this modern westerner could interpret this was to attribute it to telepathy, though it sounded much more to me like they were experiencing command auditory hallucinations ala Jaynes.

In my example I used in my original post re: the Piraha, Daniel Everett does not just describe the Piraha as having an animist worldview. He states that they report a direct experience of spirits speaking to them. I am not suggesting the Piraha are not conscious. But I am suggesting Everett’s description sounds like they do have vestiges of bicameral experience.

Jaynes stated that he believed there has not been any truly bicameral people on earth in a long time (which is another reason modern ethnographers and anthropologists don’t report hunter-gathers as having a different consciousness than anyone else). However, as you said, if Jaynes were right human history 'would be filled with fantastic and unbelievable tales'. To my mind, you don’t even have to go to any record of past hunter gatherer societies. Fantastic tales of people communicating with spirits of one sort or another reflecting remnants of bicamerality abound in just about every type of account left to us from the past. The Bible is one great example as James Cohn shows in his book Minds of the Bible. Modern scholars want to write off as something like a symbolic literary device references from past generations of their experiences of talking directly to their gods and ancestors. However, these reports are so constant and ubiquitous across all cultures that it makes more sense to attribute the explaining away of these experiences as a reaction of those who correctly cannot accept the idea of spirits and ghosts, but have no idea of how to account for these phenomena other than to simply insist that the people who report them are not telling us the truth about their experience.

Nor do we have to look to the past for vestiges of bicamerality. The auditory hallucinations of schizophrenics in our modern world, and what recent research has shown to be the very common experience of hearing voices in people not judged to be suffering from a mental illness, are phenomena that lack any good evolutionary explanation of how they came to be so common. That is, unless you understand Julian Jaynes."

I want to add one reference not directly related to the main arguments above, but rather to an issue I alluded to in passing.   That subject being that some anthropologists are blinded by leanings toward political correctness on certain topics--in this case the possibility that people in some cultures may inherently have a more primitive mentality than others.  In that regard, there is a new study out, where sociologists are the subjects, showing a strong bias against any explanations that would suggest certain sensitive differences among people could have evolutionary roots; thereby, under cutting a sacred cow of politically correct social science that all differences between people that appear to be a deficit of some sort for one group are due to oppression, politics, etc.  The idea that some differences between people's abilities are due to evolution would mean its a difference that you cannot fix through raising the consciousness of the oppressors, and is relatively permanent. 

Being a liberal myself and spending lots of time close to my fellow liberal academics, I am not surprised.  Sociologists are not anthropologists, but my experience with the field would make me confident in placing a large wager that if the same study were done on anthropologists, it would result in the same findings. The study itself is behind a pay wall, but the Washington Post has a good review of it: Liberals Deny Science, Too