In the past few months or so, I’ve tried to allocate more of my mental energies to studying mathematics and history, concentrating for a short while (4 or 5 substantial book’s reading time) upon some histories of the ancient Celtic peoples (Gauls to the Romans) and the Germanic peoples of the era of the Roman Empire and succeeding centuries as Europe was being born in a `civilizational’ sense.
One claim by some historians is striking: in formulating newer, more complex sets of ideas about the ways in which the larger peoples have formed. It seems that, for example, Roman Gauls formed as various groups of Celts were assimilated to Roman or Latin culture. Large but not overwhelming numbers of Germanic peoples moved in as the Roman Empire concentrated its energies on dangers from the East—the Sasanian Empire of Persia and then Arab raiders followed by Mohammedan armies. Over a number of generations, these Germans, along with many of the Romano-Gauls formed something of a Pan-Germany (Germany and France and Belgium and other countries) by way of a mixture of migrations, political takeovers, and linguistic/cultural takeovers. Some of the movements of `Goths’ and `Vandals’ in the first millennium AD did correspond to large-scale migrations though apparently not nearly all of the people who had lived with and around the migrants. As it was, the Goths under Theodoric (first Germanic Emperor of a major part of Europe) had a wagon train behind them of 2,000 vehicles or more—miles of wagons bearing supplies as well as those not capable of walking hundreds of miles in a year or two. Some centuries later, a political takeover in which elites replaced elites and left the workers in place is documented in excruciating detail—the Norman replacement of the Anglo-Saxon elite. I’m personally a member of peoples formed by an earlier linguistic/cultural takeover: those descended from early farmers of England who became Brythonic Celts and then Anglo-Saxons (without the Normans much disturbing the general culture or language) and those similar peoples in Ireland and the Highlands of Scotland who became Gaelic Celts. (Those early farmers were also the result of such processes with much of the culture and perhaps some languages and perhaps some or a lot of genes coming from the first agricultural peoples of modern-day Turkey.)
This wasn’t greatly surprising to me, partly because I’ve trained my own self to accept the world as it is—perhaps with some goal of making it a little better. Still, I was a little surprised to read of the likelihood that some of these cultural/linguistic takeovers were rapid and the (almost) certainty that there was at least were rapid transformations of some cultural aspects tied to what I’ll label “interior human character traits” as these `peoples’ were forming.
This is disconcerting to see solid evidence that fundamental human attachments can be so shallow as to be changed during a march from the Balkans to Italy. It certainly makes such dystopias as 1984 more plausible. Yet, my understanding of how this comes about leaves open better possibilities.
I’ve updated the Thomistic understanding of being and of mind and have tied them together far more tightly than was possible before modern science largely confirmed the Thomistic understanding of mind-formation (see Walter J Freeman’s How Brains Make Up Their Minds) and also came to strongly support the understanding of being held by St John the Evangelist: relationships are primary over stuff; relationships create and shape stuff. See What is Mind?: Is Christian Morality a Natural Morality? and the next five essays I published for my take on Thomistic theories of the mind by way of discussing Freeman’s book. See Einstein and Bohr’s debate on the meaning of reality and Quantum Mechanics and Moral Formation: Part 1 for short discussions of being under the related understandings of the `radical’ quantum theorists (such as Niels Bohr) and the school of St John the Evangelist.
I wrote a recent essay, Imposing Ideals Upon Empirical Reality is Insane and Not Noble, from a Christian and empirical viewpoint—more consistent than the similar viewpoints of St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas and Galileo and John Henry Newman but I live after Einstein and Bohr. Years earlier, I wrote an essay, What is Mind?: Can Inadequate Formation Mimic Mental Diseases?, which developed some of the fundamental ideas showing up in that recent essay. The idea is, simplistically, that our minds are more or less accurate images of what lies around us, some portion of the thoughts God manifested in Creation.
The interested reader might wish to start exploring my essays or my books—download Catalog of Major Writings by Loyd Fueston for a listing.
The idea, in an unapologetic Christian form, is this:
The human brain is a complex organ of a physical creature. Shaped at the species level by the contingencies of evolution and at the individual level by the contingencies of development (including both environmental factors and our decisions), the brain has additional constraints coming from our own limited natures and also the limited range of possibilities manifested in this particular, concrete world. Yet, that brain forms (“makes up” in Freeman’s terms) a mind which can rise to somewhat understand more abstract and general levels and that understanding is recursive in allowing a better understanding of concrete reality.
The first sentence of the above paragraph starts with the stuff of the human body, but we have to concentrate on the remainder of the paragraph, the relationships and processes which create and shape stuff, starting with the divine love which brought into being the raw stuff of Creation.
Totemism is usually more obvious in boys than in girls—boys used to pretend to be bears or gorillas until the Western entertainment industry pushed stranger or more horrible `games’ into their heads and girls used to play house. Yet the more general version of totemism, shaping the mind and sometimes the entire human person to what lies outside and is of interest, can be seen as the clue to understanding the human mind. The brain is primed from conception in healthy embryos to shape (or make up) a mind as an encapsulation of what that human being has chosen to respond to or been forced to respond to. Our understandings of reality, when the result of ongoing and honest responses to that reality, are like unto an ancient hunter’s understanding of that animal he `emulates’ to better anticipate its behavior, that is—to better understand that animal. That understanding is dynamic and not a mere image and it is a means to changes in heart and hands, that is, feelings and emotions and well as behaviors, habits and others.
Another complication: the human being is both individual and communal and the same is true of the human mind. See Intelligence vs. Intellect for an early development of this idea in the context of responding to The House of Intellect in which Jacques Barzun makes a similar but more qualified claim.
Now we’re ready for my response to the ease with which human characteristics and beliefs can shift so rapidly so that Eurasian nomadic horsemen can `become’ Goths or Vandals or vice versa and, more horribly, so that `nice’ human beings can learn to peacefully accept rule by Nazis.
Most of our worldview, our larger-scale understanding of “the universe and all that”, comes from our community. We become vulnerable when our communities decay and maybe leave us in the presence of a powerful worldview, perverse or noble. We also are vulnerable when our communities are such as not to have such a worldview, an understanding of the universe or of all Creation as being unified, coherent, and complete in a particular and rational and plausible and emotionally satisfying way. A simple, peasant worldview held by a farming folk of limited experience (the Goths and their traveling buddies) can be destroyed when those folks are suddenly exposed to a wider and more complex world. Such destruction can also occur when facts and information about reality pile up without anyone making sense of them within an existing worldview capable of handling those facts and that information (modern Christians). In such states, we are like soft clay and can be easily shaped in response to a madman or a noble genius or anyone else who responds in an energetic way to a world suddenly richer and more complex.
The Germanic people of the period 0-500AD or so were shaping themselves in response to the Romans (including the Gauls or Romanized Celts) and their civilization and shaped themselves into the individuals belonging to the partly new peoples: the Franks and the Goths and so on.
The leaders and intellectuals and artists of the Christian peoples of the modern West have failed to respond to the rich and complex, sheerly wondrous, knowledge we have of Creation; they failed to make greater sense of it and to reconcile it in a worldview explaining how this world of quantum uncertainty and biological evolution and curved spacetime and frighteningly complex human communities is the work of the Triune God, Father and Son and Holy Spirit. The children of those Christians are shaping themselves and their communities in incoherent and desperate responses to the world as modern empirical researchers have shown it to be; those children respond also to the pleas of political scoundrels and various other sorts of exploiters as well as to the pleas of those non-Christians who are trying to make good, but non-Christian, sense of the world as we now can see it more clearly than could prior generations.