Lent, Jeremy R. The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity’s Search for Meaning. Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 2017. --- # Progressive Summary What Jeremy Lent does well is to anticipate the questions a critical reader might ask. For instance, when he proposes that the Western mindset led to the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions, he suggests that an obvious question might be why Asia and the rest of the world have been so adept at catching up. He answers that when drastic change occurs to a society, its cognitive structures can change equally drastically within a generation or two. He claims to have started a new approach to history – cognitive history – which tells the story of how cultures shape values, and values shape history. Barry Lord, in Art and Energy, takes one step further, and argues that energy sources shape culture and values. His main narrative arc is that a dualistic conception of human beings and the cosmos originated in ancient Greece, in which reason was valued over emotion, and which split human existence into mind and body, and then defining humanity only by its mind. This set the cognitive foundation for the scientific and industrial revolutions. The earth was desacralized (same message as The Death of Nature), which led to the root metaphors of nature as AN ENEMY TO BE CONQUERED and A MACHINE TO BE ENGINEERED. This will lead our civilization either to collapse or a Techno Split, where humans split off into 2 distinct species, one of which will dominate because they hold all the tools of bioengineering and wealth creation. In the collapse outcome, we will deplete our fossil fuel resource and will doom countless generations to an agrarian existence ruled by elites and dependent on slave labour. --- # Key Points ## Human evolution In the Great Rift Valley of Africa, we split off from the other Great Apes around 6 million years ago. Tectonic shifts caused mountain peaks to rise, cutting off the Eastern forests from its usual rainfall, and those forests became dry and arid. The forest slowly turned into savannah. Our ancestors had to adapt to moving on the ground. The ones that could be bi-pedal and use their hands for holding tools or carrying surplus food had an advantage, and their descendants survived. The ones who were more co-operative also survived. All the other Great Apes have hierarchical social structures, dominated by alpha males. Only humans can co-operate. But visible estrus would cause males to constantly fight, so humans are the only apes who have a non-noticeable estrus. Fighting diminished. This caused our canines to recede, as having powerful teeth for attacking became less useful. This is when we started producing mimetic culture, an ability to communicate via non-verbal means. This mimetic culture survives till today. It is present in the power of cheering in a football stadium, in the importance of eye contact, in the rhythms of dancing and music, in a child's instinct to copy everything its siblings or parents do. The mainstream modern value system is based on separation from a desacralized natural world. It was “created by the Greeks, systematized by Christianity, and endorsed by reductionist science.” ## Resilience Every system goes through a complex adaptive cycle that consists of 4 phases - growth, conservation, release, and renewal. Growth phases - the system grows towards greater complexity Conservation - gains are consolidated, and networks become reinforcec Release - the system grows too complex for it to maintain itself, and begins to fall apart. Renewal - a new system begins to emerge from the remnants of the new Our globalalized civilization contains many nested systems that are at different stages of the complex adaptive cycle. The tech sector may still be at the growth phase. But our ecosystems might be at the collapse stage. The whole system might be at the tail end of the conservation phase. A system comes under pressure from threshold effects and sledgehammer effects. A threshold effect is something that builds up internally over time, like a forest that builds up the potential to catch fire. A sledgehammer effect is a sudden event hitting the system from the outside, like a lightning strike that sets a forest on fire. Our societies have two major threshold effects - inequality and exponential growth of technology. There are two sledgehammer effects - climate change and depletion of world’s natural resources. ## Conclusion > In a resilient system, individual nodes – families or communities – need to be self-sufficient enough to survive in an emergency. In our modern civilization, most of us lack self-sufficiency, relying on the global network of commerce and information for food and other necessities. As those networks have been honed over decades for ever greater efficiencies, their resilience has been whittled away. Jevons paradox: > ... whenever technology makes the use of a resource more efficient, this only increases its use, as consumption goes up to exploit the new efficiencies. Jeremy Lent believes that the only hope lies in more and more people finding meaning in connection, rather than disconnection (his message here is almost identical to that of Charles Eisenstein's.) # Quotes > The first Westerners who observed shamanism were travelers in Central Asia, and the word comes from a Siberian tribe in which the central figure of the community was called the saman. Since then, extensive studies have shown similar practices occurring in virtually every forager community worldwide. The significance of shamanism goes beyond its hunter-gatherer origins: it influenced agrarian cultures around the world, and elements of it can be seen in Indian Yoga, certain practices of ancient Chinese culture, and in the Aztec and Mayan civilizations of Mesoamerica. > > Why would shamanism be prevalent all around the world? There are two possible explanations. It could be because it was originally practiced by the early humans who took the first epic journey out of Africa. The original Upper Paleolithic immigrants to Europe would have brought shamanistic beliefs with them, as would their fellow travelers who migrated throughout Asia. Some of those Asian settlers then crossed the Bering Strait around thirteen thousand years ago, making it all the way down to South America within a couple of thousand years. Another explanation could be that shamanism is an inevitable part of human mythic consciousness and that, wherever humans evolved, the same set of beliefs would evolve with them.