First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis

Rev. Kendyl Gibbons
First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis
February 15, 2004

Humanism is famous for its glorification of the human capacity for reason, and its confidence in the workings of science. So much information about the world has been yielded by the patient application of analysis, experiment, and the effort to understand the real causes of material events. Little by little, over the centuries, human knowledge has chipped away at the prison walls of ignorance and superstition, making our lives more comfortable and our collective will more powerful, giving us abilities once only dreamed of in fables - to fly, to move mountains, to harness rivers, to mend the broken body, to make the desert blossom. We have unlocked the physical origins of the universe, and the chemistry of life itself; we have sent emissaries to the stars. There is no unresolved question of fact that is not under investigation somewhere; our ambition to know the world is only whetted, not sated, by our past success. The Promethean energy still clamors within us to steal whatever secrets the gods might have and bend them to our own purposes; to be free and rational beings in possession of knowledge is the best and highest state we can imagine for ourselves. And yet, ironically, many modern humanists live in the shadow of a suspicion that, while knowledge enables us to get the things we think will make us happy, our lives may not be as characterized by actual happiness as those of people far less informed, less rational and less powerful than ourselves. How can this be?

There are several possible answers to this conundrum. For one thing, we can argue that any unhappiness experienced by those who put their confidence in a rational life is due to stubborn remnants of misinformation and ignorant attitudes which can haunt even the best of us, so that we must redouble our efforts to eradicate primitive notions and emotional excesses from our minds. Alternatively, we can assume that a correct perception of the human position in the universe is necessarily less comforting and cheerful than a more primordial, mythical, anthropocentric perspective, so that it is to be expected that the more we truly know, the less satisfied we must be with our mortal lot, seeing how vulnerable and incidental we really are. Another possible response is that the humanist project, being fully occupied with essential matters of intellectual truth, has little time to expend upon such frills of human experience as feelings and aesthetics, which are well enough in their place, but should be the concern of trivial people who are unable to contribute to the advancement of humanity in more substantive ways. Not so very long ago, women were assigned to be responsible for these secondary endeavors, since they were known to be incapable of engaging in the primary ones.

It is probably apparent that none of these answers seems to me valid, and this morning, as we confront some of our culture's mythology and anxiety about love in the form of Valentine's Day, I would like to propose another way of understanding love, and its essential relationship to human happiness, from a humanist perspective. My theory is based upon an elegant little volume - available, by the way, downstairs in the bookstore - entitled A General Theory of Love. Its three authors, Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon, are all MDs and professors of psychiatry, representing different generations of psychiatric theory and training, who have collaborated to construct a more satisfying understanding of human emotional health and attachment than any of them was offered in the course of their education. Their exposition both challenges and draws from the foundational notions of psychoanalysis, as well as the emerging data on the physiology of the brain. We are shaped, they argue, by evolution, heredity, experience, and environment, in a complex but increasingly comprehensible process that determines a great deal about our potential for happiness in life. As they state in the reading we heard earlier, for many centuries even when scientific progress was being made in the realm of the physical and natural sciences, matters of the heart - emotions, happiness, love - were found accessible only through the arts. It was the poets, painters, and singers, who examined the emotional currents that move us most deeply and give shape to our lives - and, I would argue, it was not an accident that for thousands of years those arts had their greatest and most memorable expressions in the service of the religious community. Something of overwhelming and vital importance goes on in our experiences of attachment, devotion, loss, and loneliness that has always defied rational control, and these matters have always been of interest to the church, even when scientific inquiry has sought to push them aside.

Today human science has the tools to examine these affective experiences in subtle and illuminating ways; our Promethean curiosity has been turned upon ourselves to examine the mechanisms of meaning that make us who we are and color the quality of our living. From what we know about how the brain operates, and from observing the experiences of human beings and of other creatures that are both like us and different, we can begin to understand the structures by which we build our unique perspectives and responses to reality, and what is required to make us secure, happy, kind and productive people. This is surely a question of concern to any authentic humanism.

Without attempting to offer a complete course in neuro-anatomy just at this moment, it is important to understand a couple of basic facts about the human brain. Most of us are aware that evolution has endowed us with a kind of cerebral layer cake; what is called the triune brain is a result of innovative survival strategies being added by adaptation to pre-existing structures but not replacing them. Hence we have what is known as the reptilian brain, the smallest and most primitive core that is responsible for relatively or absolutely involuntary bodily functions; things that we rarely or never think about, like breathing, or regulating the salt concentration in our blood streams. The reptilian brain neither thinks nor feels; it reacts. It is the piece that is still functioning in people who are termed 'brain dead'; without its operation, we cannot physically survive, period. The second layer is called the limbic brain; it evolved as mammals began to flourish, and to give birth to live young. The interesting transitional forms that can still be observed, which are the monotremes like the Australian echidna, lay eggs but carry them in a pseudo-ovarian pouch, and have such a primitive limbic brain that they are the only mammals who do not dream. The limbic brain enables not only dreaming, but nurture and defense of offspring, and the variety of non-instrumental behaviors that we group under the rubric of 'play'. Finally, and in human beings the largest of the three brains, is the neo-cortex. This is the layer that is responsible for abstract thought; for speaking, reasoning, planning, conscious motor control, symbolic representation, problem-solving, and reflective self-awareness. We know these things about the neo-cortex because certain areas of it can be damaged by trauma or disease, affecting particular abstractive skills, but leaving the rest of a person's survival and feeling mechanisms functioning perfectly well.

Humanism is the theological champion of the neo-cortex; the values that it affirms, like reason, truth, freedom, justice, and tolerance, are functions of the capacity of abstract thought and self-reflection. It is a common proposition of western Enlightenment thinking that if we could just complete the process of suppressing the reptilian and limbic brains, with their primitive functions and irrational demands, and live entirely in the light of our neo-cortical processes, we would both realize our highest human potential, and experience our greatest possible happiness. What Lewis, Amini, and Lannon have suggested in their work, and what many of those who have given their allegiance to the path of humanism have long suspected, is that this is a mistaken notion. It is not by suppressing the function of our limbic brains, but rather by understanding and cooperating with them, that we may actually experience the fullness of our humanity and its greatest potential for satisfying lives.

What these authors propose is that for human beings, as for other social mammals, the limbic brain functions inherently and necessarily as an open loop. We are born without the capacity do many things - indeed, almost anything - for ourselves, and our brains are just as undeveloped as our bodies. There is much assembling yet to be done in order for a newborn to become a whole person, and the process will never be completed; we will always need, throughout our lives, the presence, attention, and care of other people, in order for the body/mind organism to function properly. It is this open loop, this absolute requirement for the involvement of others to complete the feedback mechanism by which our psychology and physiology are regulated, that gives rise to the experience of, and the longing for, love. Love is not merely a pleasant side-effect of our reproductive impulses; many creatures have been reproducing with enviable efficiency for millennia that have no capacity to nurture or protect either their offspring or their mates. Indeed, outside the world of the mammalian strategy, most adults are insouciant cannibals of their own young, and many are just as happy to eat their mates as well. Rather, love is a mechanism whereby our limbic brains learn, through implicit, non-verbal instruction, to engage in a process of mutual regulation with others of our species. This learning is fantastically easy early in life; the longer we have been around, the more difficult it is to change what we know, because the physical structures of our brains literally conform to the patterns we first encounter.

Many of us will be familiar with some of the experiments that help us to understand these feedback procedures. We know that baby geese hatch with a compelling impulse to follow whatever moving object first attracts their attention; this process of imprinting is only a more mechanistic version of the attachment normally formed between young mammals and their mothers. We know that infants who are kept meticulously fed, clean, and warm will wither and eventually die if they are deprived of human attention and contact, and we know that monkeys that are raised with just enough maternal substitute to keep them alive, such as a wire mesh screen covered with a towel, will grow up to be miserable, socially inept, and utterly incompetent parents themselves. Some essential element of 'monkey-ness', of what makes the creature recognizable to his community and himself as one of them, never comes into being if he is deprived of certain kinds of crucial interactions during his formative years. Lewis, Amini, and Lannon claim that what is happening in the context of normal attachment behavior between mothers and infants is that they are regulating one another, both emotionally and bio-chemically. Through the open loop of the limbic brain, they adjust one another's respiration, heart rate, sleep patterns, adrenaline, oxytocin, and dozens of other hormonal and neural messengers. They also create, mirror, and fine-tune one another's moods, communicating anxiety, contentment, distress, safety, excitement, anger, and delight in a wordless symphony that is innately comprehensible across all cultures. Over time, as the baby's limbic brain repeatedly makes certain connections among these emotional states and other experiences in the world, those connections become engraved in his neural pathways, and other connections, that were equally potential to begin with, wither from disuse and fall away. Gradually, through practice, the child becomes more able to regulate his or her own biologic functions and emotional states, but the loop never closes, it only becomes specifically structured. Part of what the bonded pair have been formulating are the mechanisms of relationship itself. The mother has been exploring, and the baby has been taking in, the very meaning and shape of love. Down the years of all his life to follow, the growing child will seek connections of mutual limbic regulation, measuring their adequacy according to the templates carved by these early experiences. The developing neo-cortex will issue its own demands for autonomy and integrity, but limbic learning is not a matter of facts or logic. The only way to change what we know about love is to engage in it; it is only someone who willing to enter into that mutuality who can show us alternative ways to experience or express it; such transformation can never come about through argument or information.

Mutual limbic regulation is required for healthy human functioning; that is the shorthand meaning of love. And it is a process that takes place outside the realm of all our abstract, neo-cortical notions of individuality and rationality. Moreover, it is a process that requires many elements the importance of which our current culture seems to dismiss; physical proximity, relaxed attention, extensive periods of time, repeated opportunities, an intrinsic, non-instrumental pleasure in another person's company, small gestures of connection. All these, added together, may not produce the limbic resonance between two people that we recognize as love, but without them it will be hard for other attractors, however powerful, to bring about the fulfillment that our hearts yearn for. In its own way, human sexuality is a kind of brute force limbic regulation; all the signals of attraction and arousal as well as satisfaction invite couples into a state of physiological mutuality; heart rate, respiration, heightened tactile awareness, the whole hormonal symphony that lovers induce in each other. It is not surprising that the crude mutuality of such arousal invites a more diffuse and sustained engagement of limbic systems which, when it succeeds, goes by the title of Falling In Love.

Our human quest for limbic resonance and regulation is not limited to parental and reproductive partners, however. Puppies napping together in a heap are regulating one another's body temperature, breathing, and sleep patterns. When we move beyond our family and siblings, we seek the limbic mutuality of peers, and ultimately of larger communities; clubs, unions, graduating classes, combat units, street gangs, sports teams, sororities, political parties, therapy groups, religious institutions. So basic is the open loop of the limbic brain to the mammalian heritage that its mutuality may even leap across the line between species; it is not an accident that people who have beloved pets live longer, or that petting a dog or cat can reduce one's blood pressure. These impulses to affiliate, to touch, to gaze into another's eyes and know one's self as seen, are not merely pretty distractions from the main business of our rational individuality. They are as fundamental to what it means to be human as the abstract cogitations of our neo-cortex, and far more relevant to the experienced happiness of our lives. To be in a state of mutual limbic regulation with others is not to have failed in the philosophical project; it is to have succeeded in the human one.

Ironically, of course, it is the conceptual apparatus of our neo-cortical capacity for abstraction that enables us to understand these ideas and arrive at these conclusions, but this process of intellectual discovery is necessary if we are to address effectively the conundrum with which I began this discussion. For the truth is that our reason, though it takes us to the stars and beyond, though it gives all matter and nature into our hands, will never make us happy. There is no question whose answer can ease the ache of longing built into the core of our mammalian architecture; only when we learn to take with passionate seriousness the open loop that is our physical and emotional need for one another's presence, shall we fully occupy our own human reality, and create for ourselves joyfully satisfying lives. The pressures of our contemporary culture all push us to neglect the lessons of love, but the heart's demands can be shunted aside only for so long, and only at an uncountable cost. Only with time, and mutual vulnerability, and time, and ongoing commitment, and time together, and the small rituals of pleasure, and time and again time to be with one another, can we live as the students and teachers of love that evolution has required us to be all the days of our lives.

It was just a few centuries ago that the mighty key finally turned in the lock of science when the natural world was accepted on its own terms, to be explored and understood as it was, not as philosophers and theologians insisted that it ought to be. A revelation of even greater power awaits us, whenever we shall learn to accept and abide by the terms of our humanity, which are as much love's stipulations as they are reason's. When we shall set ourselves to create a society in which the implicit structure of relationships receives as much compliance and respect as the disciplines of reason, then we shall have something worth handing on to our children, and we shall be prepared to fulfill at last the promise that humanism has always intended to offer the world.