Philosophy is dead

Or so the New York Times would have you believe. In an opinion piece on April 6, columnist David Brooks declared we were facing 'the end of philosophy', as cognitive scientists realised the extent to which our moral judgements are guided by our emotions, rather than our reason.

Think of what happens when you put a new food into your mouth. You don’t have to decide if it’s disgusting. You just know. You don’t have to decide if a landscape is beautiful. You just know.

Moral judgments are like that. They are rapid intuitive decisions and involve the emotion-processing parts of the brain. Most of us make snap moral judgments about what feels fair or not, or what feels good or not. We start doing this when we are babies, before we have language. And even as adults, we often can’t explain to ourselves why something feels wrong.

In other words, reasoning comes later and is often guided by the emotions that preceded it. Or as Jonathan Haidt of the University of Virginia memorably wrote, “The emotions are, in fact, in charge of the temple of morality, and ... moral reasoning is really just a servant masquerading as a high priest.”

So Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and about 95% of the canon of Western philosophy is a waste of time. We can't reason our way to happiness and virtue. Instead, we should embrace our emotional intuitions about the world.

Well, up to a point.

It's true that cognitive scientists are now arguing that many of our judgements about the world are automatic, non-conscious, and guided by the limbic system in the brain. The limbic system is one of the oldest bits of the brain, and it guides our emotional or 'gut' reactions to things, like desire, shame, revulsion, euphoria, and so on.

We couldn't sit around and philosophize about every external thing that forces itself onto our attention. We'd end up never doing anything and, in our original home of the African savannah, we'd quickly be eaten. So our brains developed to make rapid, automatic assessments of our environment.

However, sometimes our automatic assessments go wrong. They gets out of synch with our external environment, and consistently gives us wrong information. If you're depressed, for example, your automatic assessments of the world are consistently over-pessimistic. If you're in the grip of an anxiety disorder, you consistently perceive or 'feel' danger even when you're in non-threatening environments.

This is where philosophy can help. Socrates taught that you can take even very habitual, automatic responses to the world, and bring the light of reason to bear on them. You can ask 'is this really a wise way to perceive the world? Does it make sense? Is it helpful?'

Then you can gradually replace a habitual, automatic, way of evaluating the world with a wiser, more philosophical way of perceiving it. So philosophy can bring your mind into a more harmonious relationship with your environment, when your automatic limbic system has got out of synch with the world.

This has now been proven by cognitive scientists. The most successful and evidence-backed modern therapy - cognitive behavioural therapy - has shown how unconscious emotional disorders like depression and anxiety can be healed through a process of rational self-enquiry.

The patient, in CBT, learns to become aware of how their automatic evaluations of the world may have become misleading and irrational. Then they work to challenge those automatic views, and to replace them with more rational ways of interpreting the world.

It doesn't come easy - it's a long process of repetition and practice, until the new way of seeing the world sinks in and itself becomes automatic. So while the limbic system often guides our reason, our reason can also, with alot of effort, sometimes shape our limbic system.

And what did the inventor of CBT, Professor Aaron T. Beck, call his method of rational self-enquiry? The Socratic method.

There's life in the old dog yet.

Philosophy and CBT: Donald Robertson interview

Here's an interview I did with Donald Robertson, the head of the Hypnosynthesis school in London, and the author of an excellent new book called Philosophy and CBT. We discuss the influence of Greek philosophy on modern cognitive behavioural therapy.

It's only part of the whole interview, which I've been intending to post in segments. If you click on twice on the screen, you can see the higher resolution version on the YouTube site.

Some thoughts...

...in no particular order.

1) Am reading Brighton Rock, by Graham Greene. If the closest parallel for what the UK will be like in an era of climate change and scarcity is war-time London, then I figure we should all be reading Greene, particularly Brighton Rock and The Third Man.

Why? Because an era of rationing will also be an era of gangsters and racketeers. Shortages and quotas will lead to huge global black-markets in energy, water, food and other commodities, and the rise, at the local and international levels, of new Pinkies (he's the gangster anti-hero of Brighton Rock), who control the flows.

2) Philosophers like Plato have tended to juxtapose the body with the soul, and implied that to free the latter we have to detach ourselves from the former. A physical existence, including love-making, is supposedly opposed to a spiritual existence, according to Plato and his ilk.

I disagree. Nothing makes me feel more that our bodies are souls in motion than being in bed with a naked woman. Love-making is two souls in intimate conversation.

3) The next Google, the next Microsoft, will be an IT company that makes software for the human brain. We will be able to download applications that run directly to our neural systems, giving us real-time information feeds. Tribal identity will be defined by the operating systems that we have. Memory crashes and viruses will be fatal.

4) One of the best ideas of the Stoics was alienation - the idea that we make ourselves slaves (which is what alienation literally means, from the Latin alienus, for slave) to other people by giving a fuck what they think of us.

Modern asceticism

The Archbishop of Canterbury used his Easter address to call for a renaissance of Monasticism in the West, as an antidote to the borrow-consume model of industrial capitalism.

"The present financial crisis has dealt a heavy blow to the idea that human fulfilment can be thought about just in terms of material growth and possession," he told the congregation at Canterbury Cathedral.

"Accepting voluntary limitation to your acquisitiveness, your sexual appetite, your freedom of choice doesn't look so absurd after all as a path to some sort of stability and mutual care. We should be challenging ourselves and our church to a new willingness to help this witness to flourish and develop."

I think he has a point.

The dominant economic model all around the world is based on promoting consumption, which means both governments and corporates trying to increase consumer demand - trying to make us want more, in other words. More goods, more, food, more housing, more travel.

This is unsustainable environmentally. We're fast using up our natural resources, and heading for a food crisis. As a species, we will have to learn to limit our desires - to travel less, to eat less (and particularly to waste less), to learn to live according to the limits of natural law.

We should also ask ourselves why we are on this planet? Is it purely to maximize our own pleasure-seeking? Or is human consciousness really the unique aspect of human existence, the unique difference with the rest of the animal world?

Perhaps the reason the Earth has seen fit to produce us is precisely because of our consciousness, our capacity for self-awareness and awareness of our environment.

If that is the case, as I believe it is, then our task as humans is to develop our consciousness to its highest level, which is exactly what monasticism was intended to do. Monks were (and are) spiritual athletes, the flower of human consciousness, who use spiritual exercises (or askesis, in ancient Greek) to develop their minds and train their self-awareness and self-control, just as modern athletes train their bodies in the gym.

Asceticism came to be a dirty word during the 18th century Enlightenment attack on monasticism, where it came to have connotations of sexual repression, ignorance and fanaticism.

It can certainly be warped into this. But at its heart, at its origin, it is simply the idea of training the mind to its greatest capacity for self-awareness and self-control, which also means making it as aware as possible of its obligations to and interdependence with the rest of the world.

That is what asceticism literally means: exercise.

As a culture, we are increasingly absorbed in exercising our bodies, in making the 'body beautiful'.

But we are also beginning to learn that we can train our minds, and make ourselves happier, in part by wanting less.

The modern psychotherapy and self-help movements are now full of such mental exercises. 'Seven steps to happiness', 'Training in the Mind Gym', 'How to Change Your Thoughts' and so on, are really asceticism, in the sense of spiritual exercises, for the masses.

The cognitive exercises they teach invariably come from Stoicism, which developed the idea of askesis, before the Christian Church picked up the idea, and housed it in monasteries.

Is there not, then, an argument for having centres that train virtuosos, top athletes, in these spiritual exercises, in part so that they can then teach them to the rest of us?

Oh Dearism

The highlight of last night’s Newswipe - Charlie Brooker’s rather weak British answer to the Daily Show in the US - was a brief video by Adam Curtis, the maker of such brilliant documentaries as The Century of the Self and The Power of Nightmares.

Curtis, in a typically bold narrative, argued that the hippy counterculture had changed the way we see global events, leading us to see situations like the famine in Ethiopia or the Kosovo War through the simplistic hippy framework of innocent and heroic individuals versus corrupt political systems.

The global ’solution’, in this hippy framework, is for direct aid that side-steps corrupt political frameworks - the Blue Peter aid project to Biafra in 1969 launched this, and Live Aid was the culmination of it.

But the simplistic vision broke down, he argued, during the Hutu / Tutsi wars of the 1990s - first the Tutsis were portrayed by the western media as the innocent heroes, but then the Tutsi massaces of Hutus, and the ensuing civil war, showed the story to be much more politically complex, with no obvious ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’.

But the media can’t handle such complexity, so the result is we’re shown repeated images of evil and suffering, without any political framework in which to comprehend it. The end is ‘oh dearism’ - the attitude of a depressed hippy.

It really reminds me of the western world’s response (including my response at the time) to the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine: kids in tents and good-looking rebel politicians standing up to corrupt political leaders, what’s not to like?

Then the Orange leaders spend the next five years arguing and fighting, and the country descends into a major economic crisis. Oh dear.

South Wales, the best for drugs

Apparently South Wales GPs are giving out anti-depressants like they're going out of fashion. The BBC found that one GP was prescribing anti-depressants to one in every ten patients who visited the practice.

I like those odds.