Pointed via Denyse as usual, the strange book and career of Julian Jaynes.
Jaynes published only one book, which became popular among philosophers who like to discuss pointless and untestable questions. He theorized that modern awareness was a recent development.
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Humans were not fully conscious until about 3,000 years ago, instead relying on a two-part, or bicameral, mind, with one half speaking to the other in the voice of the gods with guidance whenever a difficult situation presented itself. The bicameral mind eventually collapsed as human societies became more complex, and our forebears awoke with modern self-awareness, complete with an internal narrative, which Jaynes believes has its roots in language.
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This is obvious nonsense, and real neurologists have always known it’s nonsense. The brain isn’t bicameral, and the structure didn’t change 3000 years ago. The cortex has two sides which are fully connected, but the rest of the brain has a dense network of crossovers, and most of the lower brainstem is singular. Real neurologists have always known people who have lost half of the cortex and remain fully functional. I knew two people in that condition, both as a result of car crashes when young. You wouldn’t notice anything unusual about them. They had somewhat weak logical and metaphorical ability, which is also common among people with complete brains.
The Jaynes notion was popular, needless to say, among the arrogant tech types who believe that “progress” results from book learning and math, and religion belongs strictly to unevolved Neanderthals and non-tenured peasants.
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I found Jaynes’s career far more interesting than his fashionably silly theory. He was a HARDASS dissenter who spent all of WW2 in prison for refusing to serve. After that he bounced around various universities, often jumping the Atlantic to work as an actor in Britain then back to Princeton where he was an adjunct lecturer.
This type of easy drifting is NOT bicameral. It’s far more like the oldest and newest image of the entire brain working together as a single electric field, moving parts and functions easily to fit talents to needs.
Drifting was common before 1980, contrary to the popular myth of rigid 50s. In my first few jobs in Oklahoma, each business had a couple of Jaynes-type drifters who showed up and operated a press or drove a truck for a while, then mysteriously disappeared for a while. They were good at their work, so they always had a task when they showed up because their SKILLS WERE NEEDED.
Several of my friends had parents who were drifty, always finding a task when they were sober because their SKILLS WERE NEEDED.
Drifting didn’t halt suddenly. Around 1980, coincident with the Share Value coup, everything gradually turned more regimented and militarized and credentialized. Dogs had to be leashed. Fences appeared around parks and open land. Old roads and mysterious buildings were torn up, blocking curiosity and exploration. Nobody was given responsibility or allowed to carry keys or money. The old unifying trust field was replaced by ONE corpus callosum called the Web, and it was indeed callous.
Jaynes’s evolution was backwards like McLuhan’s media.
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Later: The driftiness was probably left over from postwar tolerance. Employers realized that everyone was GODDAMN TIRED AND USED UP after 4 years of wartime privation, and many of the returned soldiers were permanently damaged by seeing and doing things that no man should have to see or do. Employers were initially hardass but soon figured out that they had to loosen up if they wanted any work at all.
Right now we’re in a similar period of figuring out. Our current employers are starting from a nastier baseline, especially in the tech world where offshoring has been the solution to all Negative Externalities. Now that the free money is shut off, and China is retracting into its shell, smart employers may be catching on.
Polistra's Mill 