The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning

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A new lens on history

​In 1405, Admiral Zheng set off from China with the greatest armada in history, leading three hundred magnificent ships on a thirty year odyssey to distant lands as far afield as Africa. Later that century, Columbus landed in the New World with three barely seaworthy boats. Zheng’s armada, for all its grandeur, left virtually no imprint on the world while Columbus changed the entire course of history. Why?

The Patterning Instinct provides a new answer to this question with a simple but compelling theme: Culture shapes values, and those values shape history. So even if Zheng had discovered America, the Chinese would never have conquered the New World because they were driven by a fundamentally different set of motivations from European explorers.

Pioneering the new field of cognitive history, The Patterning Instinct provides a fresh perspective on other crucial questions of 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 culture of rampant consumerism and is there a way we can change it?


These questions have never mattered more than now. As we peer into the headlights of climate change and ever-accelerating technology we ask ourselves: where are we headed?

​This book frames an answer by recognizing that our current crisis of unsustainability is not an inevitable result of human nature, but is culturally driven: a product of particular mental patterns that could conceivably be reshaped.

https://www.jeremylent.com/the-patterning-instinct.html




The book is based on a simple but compelling theme – culture shapes values, and those values shape history. It will show the layers of values that form the norms of mainstream Western culture, and how these continue to shape our world today. That is why, although this book focuses on history, it can help us understand not just where we came from, but where we’re headed.

마음의 고고학(archaeology of the mind.)
We can think of a society’s worldview like a building that’s been constructed layer by layer over older constructions put together by generations past. Imagine the mainstream Western worldview, with its implicit beliefs in science, progress and economic growth, as a house we’re living in comfortably. As in a regular house, we’re used to seeing the walls, decorations and furnishings every day, but only rarely, if something goes wrong, are we called upon to probe through the masonry and inspect the house’s infrastructure. Rarer still are those times when we need to delve into the house’s foundations. But now we’ve learned that we’re living in an earthquake zone: there’s a growing awareness that we may be creating our own Big One in the form of global climate change, resource depletion and species extinction. If our worldview is built on shaky foundations, we need to know about it: we need to find the cracks and shore up the weaknesses before it’s too late.
Unlike modern houses, where the foundations are part of the blueprint and constructed specifically for the house, the foundations of a worldview comprise the earlier worldviews of previous generations. As we probe further into history, we excavate deeper into the cognitive layers of our ancestors. That’s why we can think of this exercise as an archaeology of the mind.

뿌리 은유(root metaphors)
It’s not just a matter of delving deeper in time, but also into the underlying structures of human cognition: the entire set of processes, conscious and unconscious, that we rely on to know our world and respond to it. In recent decades, cognitive scientists have made important discoveries into how we learn, as infants, to make sense of the reality around us. They’ve shown that our worldview is based on root metaphors that we use to frame other aspects of meaning, without even realizing we’re doing so. These core metaphors, which arise from our embodied existence, structure how we conceptualize our world. High is better than low; light is better than dark; our life is a journey along a path. Throughout this book, we’ll see how root metaphors have played a crucial role in structuring the worldviews of different cultures.

인간은 의미(가치)를 찾는 동물
What causes us to create these root metaphors in the first place? As we dig deeper into the archaeology of the mind, we find that, unlike other mammals, we humans possess an insatiable appetite to find meaning in the world around us. In the words of a little doggerel:

Fish gotta swim; bird gotta fly.
Man gotta sit and say why? why? why?

As far as we know, asking why is something only humans do, so if we want to know why we ask why, it helps to look to the source of what makes us uniquely human. Fortunately, in recent decades, cognitive neuroscientists have come a long way in their efforts to answer this. They’ve identified the prefrontal cortex (PFC) as the part of our brain primarily responsible for our thinking and acting in ways that differentiate us from other animals. It mediates our ability to plan, conceptualize, symbolize, make rules, and impose meaning on things. It controls our physiological drives and turns our basic feelings into complex emotions. It enables us to be aware of ourselves and others as separate beings, and to turn the past and the future into one coherent narrative.

개념적 의식 our conceptual consciousness 인간고유의 측면 vs
생체적 의식our animate consciousness 동물과 공유


Before cognitive neuroscience, astute observers of the human condition already understood the drive for meaning to be a defining characteristic of humanity. The father of evolutionary theory, Charles Darwin, saw it as a natural consequence of human cognition, writing that “as soon as the important faculties of the imagination, wonder, and curiosity, together with some power of reasoning, had become partially developed, man would naturally crave to understand what was passing around him, and would have vaguely speculated on his own existence.” Anthropologist Clifford Geertz recognized something similar, describing a human being as a “symbolizing, conceptualizing, meaning-seeking animal,” whose “drive to make sense out of experience, to give it form and order, is evidently as real and as pressing as the more familiar biological needs.” Geertz saw religion, art and ideology as “attempts to provide orientation for an organism which cannot live in a world it is unable to understand.”

본능의 정형화
The Patterning Instinct

Through the capabilities of the PFC, our species has evolved a patterning instinct: an instinct unique to humans that lends its name to the title of this book. It deserves to be called an instinct because it emerges in human behavior at the earliest stages of development, well before any cultural learning has taken place. In fact, this instinct is what’s responsible for an infant’s ability to engage in cultural learning. As we’ll see in a later chapter, when an infant is only nine months old, she has already begun to identify the unique phonetic patterns of her native language, and by twelve months she’s learned to ignore phonetic units that don’t exist in her own language. No-one tells her to do this; she does it by instinct. This human instinct for patterning is embedded in our cognition, maintaining its activity throughout our lives. We create narratives about our past and future, we construct an identity for ourselves, we categorize things, putting more value on some and less on others. And, just like our distant ancestors, we continually search for meaning in our lives and the world around us.

https://www.resilience.org/stories/2019-04-25/excerpt-from-the-patterning-instinct-introduction-an-archaeology-of-the-mind/

기후 파괴와 생태계의 붕괴에 무능한 지식. 그 원인은?

"We know we are in the midst of climate breakdown and ecological collapse. Yet we seem constitutionally incapable of acting on this knowledge...

"So what stops us from responding? For years, I’ve suspected that the cause runs even deeper than the power of big business and the official obsession with economic growth, potent as these forces are. Now, thanks to the most profound and far-reaching book I have ever read, I feel I’m beginning to understand what it might be.


사랑과 지혜의 통일로서의 지식
遍知万物而不知人道，不可谓智；遍爱群生而不爱人类，不可谓仁。仁者爱其类也，智者不可惑也。仁者虽在断割之中，其所不忍之色可见也；智者虽烦难之事，其不暗之效可见也。内恕反情，心之所欲，其不加诸人，由近知远，由己知人，此仁智之所合而行也。
小有教而大有存也，小有诛而大有宁也，唯恻隐推而行之，此智者之所独断也。故仁智错，有时合，合者为正，错者为权，其义一也。
府吏守法，君子制义，法而无义，亦府吏也。不足以为政。耕之为事也劳，织之为事也扰。扰劳之事而民不舍者，知其可以衣食也。人之情不能无衣食，衣食之道必始于耕织，万民之所公见也。物之若耕织者，始初甚劳，终必利也众。愚人之所见者寡；事可权者多，愚之所权者少；此愚者之所多患也。物之可备者，智者尽备之，可权者尽权之，此智者所以寡患也。故智者先忤而后合，愚者始于乐而终于哀。

今日何为而荣乎？旦日何为而义乎？此易言也。今日何为而义？旦日何为而荣？此难知也。问替师曰：“白素何知？”曰 “缟然。”曰“黑何若？”曰“缟然就像熟透的桑葚오디심一样。”援白黑而示之，则不处焉。人之视白黑以目，言白黑以口，瞽师有以言白黑，无以知白黑，故言白黑与人同，其别白黑与人异。入孝于亲，出忠于君，无愚智贤不肖皆知其为义也。使陈忠孝行而知所出者鲜矣。凡人思虑，莫不先以为可而后行之，其是或非，此愚智之所以异。

凡人之性，莫贵于仁，莫急于智。仁以为质，智以行之，两者为本，而加之以勇力辩慧、捷疾劬录彔(록)의 속자(俗字). 錄(록)의 간체자(簡體字).、巧敏迟利：聪明审察，尽众益也。身材未修，伎艺曲备，而无仁智以为表干，而加之以众美，则益其损。故不仁而有勇力果敢，则狂而操利剑；不智而辩慧怀给[ huái gěi ]善于花言巧语。，则弃骥而不式。
虽有材能，其施之不当，其处之不宜，适足以辅伪饰非，伎艺之众，不如其寡也。故有野心者，不可借便势，有愚质者，不可与利器。
鱼得水而游焉则乐，塘决水涸，则为蝼蚁所食。有掌修其堤防，补其缺漏，则鱼得而利之。国有以存，人有以生。国之所以存者，仁义是也；人之所以生者，行善是也。国无义，虽大必亡；人无善志，虽勇必伤。治国土使不得与焉；孝于父母，弟于兄嫂，信于朋友，不得上令而可得为也。释己之所得为，而责于其所不得制，悖矣！

淮南子·主术训(下)

https://m.gushiwen.org/gushiwen_25c390a998.aspx


개개인의 결단과 선택이 중요한 이유
The flap of a butterfly’s wings

This is more than just a pedantic point on whether the probability of collapse is actually 99% or 100%. An approach to our current situation based on a belief in inevitable collapse is fundamentally and qualitatively different from one that recognizes the inherent unpredictability of the future. And I would argue that a belief in the inevitability of collapse at this time is categorically wrong.
The reason for this is the nature of nonlinear complex systems. Jem repeatedly describes our climate as nonlinear in his paper, but seems to understand this as simply meaning a rising curve leading to accelerating climate change. Our Earth system, however, is an emergent process derived from innumerable interlinking subsystems, each of which is driven by different dynamics. As such, it is inherently chaotic, and not subject to deterministic forecasting. This is a major reason to be fearful of the reinforcing feedback loops that Jem points out in his paper, but it’s also a reason why even the most careful computer modeling is unable to forecast future changes with anything close to certainty.

When we try to prognosticate collapse, we’re not just relying on a long-term climate forecast, but also on the impact this will have on another nonlinear complex system—human society. In fact, as I describe in the Preface to The Patterning Instinct, human society itself is really two tightly interconnected, coexisting complex systems: a tangible system and a cognitive system. The tangible system refers to everything that can be seen and touched: a society’s technology, its physical infrastructure, and its agriculture, to name just some components. The cognitive system refers to what can’t be touched but exists in the culture: a society’s myths, core metaphors, hierarchy of values, and worldview. These coupled systems interact dynamically, creating their own feedback loops which can profoundly affect each other and, consequently, the direction of society.

The implications of this are crucial to the current debate. Sometimes, in history, the cognitive system has acted to inhibit change in the tangible system, leading to a long period of stability. At other times, the cognitive and tangible systems each catalyze change in the other, leading to a powerful positive feedback loop causing dramatic societal transformation. We are seeing this in today’s world. There is little doubt that we are currently in the midst of one of the great critical transitions of the human journey, and yet it is not at all clear where we will end up once our current system resolves into a newly stable state. Yes, it could be civilizational collapse. I’ve argued elsewhere that rising inequality could lead to a bifurcation of humanity that I call TechnoSplit, the moral implications of which are perhaps even more disturbing than full-blown collapse. And there’s a possibility that the cognitive system transforms into a newly dominant paradigm—an ecological worldview that recognizes the intrinsic interconnectedness of all forms of life on earth, and sees humanity as embedded integrally within the natural world.

There’s another crucial point arising from this understanding of complex systems: each of us plays a part in directing where that system is going. We’re not external observers but intrinsic to the system itself. That means that the choices each of us makes have a direct—and potentially nonlinear—impact on the future. It’s a relay race against time in which every one of us is part of the team. It’s because of this dynamic that I feel it’s so important to counter Jem’s Deep Adaptation narrative.
Each one of us can make a difference. We can’t know in advance how our actions will ripple out into the world. As the founder of chaos theory, Edward Lorenz, famously asked: “Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?” His point was not that it will set off a tornado, but that if it did, it could never be predicted. Will your choice about how you’re going to respond to our current daunting crisis be that butterfly’s wing? None of us can ever know the answer to that.

https://patternsofmeaning.com/2019/04/11/our-actions-create-the-future-a-response-to-jem-bendell/