I’ve just started John Bargh’s Before You Know It: The Unconscious Reasons We Do What We Do, and it’s fascinating. I may grow less impressed as I get into it, but I doubt it. And he writes so clearly and well.
I have the habit of folding the corner of pages containing passages I might want to return to later, and one such is p.33. Here is the relevant paragraph:
‘What we now know, thanks to Darwin, cultural (and cognitive) anthropology, and modern evolutionary biology and psychology, is that the human brain evolved slowly over time, first as a very basic unconscious mind, without the conscious faculties of reason and control that we possess today. It was the mind of millions of organisms that don’t have or need anything like our human consciousness to act adaptively in order to survive. But the original unconscious mechanisms of our long-ago brain did not suddenly disappear when consciousness and language – again, our very real superpowers among earthly creatures – finally emerged rather late in the evolutionary story. Consciousness wasn’t a different, new kind of mind that miraculously appeared out of the blue one day. It was a wonderful add-on to the old unconscious machinery that was still there. The original machinery still exists inside each of us, but the advent of consciousness gave us new ways to meet old needs and desires, the ability to intentionally and deliberately use that old machinery from within.’
Ok, there is a lot here up for philosophical debate, not least in my view the understandable but challengeable assumption that we humans top the hierarchy of known species. We might, for example, seriously underestimate ants. BUT what I take from Bargh’s statement about ‘unconscious mechanisms’ is the notion that numerous of the – generative or causal – mechanisms that fuel what we think, say and do remain hidden from our view: that is, in normal circumstances they do not present to our consciousness. Nor are such mechanisms confined to ‘surviving’ and ‘reproducing’; the sense of in-group versus out-group seems to creep up on humans early and unawares. Experiences in early infancy and childhood can and do impact on us in adulthood, for instance tilting us towards or away from status-quo conservatism.
I have a quintet of comments to make (which may possibly require amendment when I get further into the book).
The first is to remark on what are to me striking ‘overlaps’ with Bhaskar’s critical realism. I have elsewhere used the rather crude shorthand of ‘biological’, ‘psychological’ and ‘social’ to catch something of the multiple ontological strata that deliver mechanisms issuing in ‘tendencies’ which, when ‘triggered’, carry the ‘potential’ to affect what happens to us as well as what we think, say and do (I explored this to a degree in my blogs on critical realism and health, and on interdisciplinarity and epilepsy). Such mechanisms are ‘intransitive’ (that is, they exist whether or not we detect them), and ‘transfactual’ (that is, they are enduring, not transitory); and although they exhibit ontological continuity in the form of tendencies, they may or may not be triggered, and, even if triggered, their effects may or may not be cancelled out by other mechanisms. This is because we humans inhabit what Bhaskar calls a complex and dynamic ‘open system’.
It follows from all this – and I apologise again for the arcane and overly formal terminology – that Bargh’s ‘retroductive’ inference to the existence of unconscious mechanisms (ie the mechanisms must exist given his and others’ laboratory and extra-laboratory findings), and at each of the biological and psychological (and he later adds socio-cultural) strata, do not lead inexorably to any particular thoughts, acts or events. This is an esoteric way of disavowing determinism in whatever camouflage.
My second comment disavows reductionism too. Genes – even an internal locus of control – do not win the Olympic pentathlon: a person, an athlete, does; and she does so at a conspicuously global, social festival. But genes, aptitude and so on, qua mechanisms, issue in tendencies and exhibit a certain potential for causal salience for, say, high jumping. In other words, and Bargh (at least up to p.78) accepts this, there exists upwards and downwards causality (shorthand again, from the biological to the psychological and social, and from the social to the psychological and biological). For all this, the phenomena biologists, psychologists and sociologists study, and the really existing mechanisms they uncover, just yield an optimal handle on our lives on planet Earth. As ever, there’s happenstance by way of contingency too, plus free will! Nobody, and no discipline, one of my favourite assertions this, wraps everything up. We are just one species among others.
A third comment serves to revisit the critical realist concept of ‘emergence’. This contends that mechanisms in strata ‘emerge from’ (without being reducible to) others. Ok, cells and genes won’t/can’t win the Six Nations in 2018, but both England’s men’s and women’s teams would be hard pushed to do so in their absence. It is possible, no vital, to appreciate this. The ontology, or existence, of generative/causal mechanisms can be (retroductively = quantitatively, or abductively = qualitatively) inferred without being encumbered by epistemological temptations to reductionism.
Fourthly, a mention must be made here of ‘reflexivity’. Bargh understandably presents this as a distinctive property of humans (but don’t forget the ants). I want to insist that those ways of thinking that coalesce into ‘the sciences’, which are to my way of thinking unambiguously superior to myth and religion (Habermas), admit of an imperative which is ultimately moral. The potential of many a mechanism from many a strata can be ‘tamed’ or subverted come its revelation via education (a topical point: this is/used to be what universities is/were about). Giddens and Beck have characterised post-1970s financial capitalism as ‘reflexive modernity’. Whatever the intra- and inter-strata mechanisms edging us via their tendencies towards patriarchy, for example, ONCE THEY ARE EXPOSED AND DRAWN TO OUR ATTENTION, our excuses begin to run out.
Finally, and as an advcocate of a ‘science of society’, I’d like to say chill to my colleagues in sociology and elsewhere (the latter frequently in better furnished university accomodation). We can none of us wrap things up, BUT, accepting the sophistication of fallibilism (and we are after just another species), astrologists never got us to the moon (and I am assuming here the falsity of Baudrillard’s conjecture that the US feat was fabricated).