John Lardas Modern's Neuromatic is a Sign of a Global Apocalypse that Will Kill Us All

NEUROMATIC: OR, A PARTICULAR HISTORY OF RELIGION AND THE BRAIN. By John Lardas Modern. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021Pp. xv + 426. Paper $32.50. I must confess to a bit of autoplagiarism in my title. About a decade ago, I wrote an essay in response to Ann Taves's Religious Experience Reconsidered in which I saw signs of impending global apocalypse (Curtis 2010). I was interested in multiple senses of the apocalyptic, including the promise of a complete revelation of the truth along with the end of the world. One irony of modernity is that scientific progress has been accompanied by the threat of global ecological catastrophe caused in no small part by the same technological development that promised human flourishing. Cognitive science could be read as one response to the urgency to think about human beings as a species, and a focus on religion might help to explain the human propensity to fear the unknown and resist change. I was also interested in the disciplinary implications of Taves's suggestion that there could be common sources for religious fears of taboos and the resistance of academic humanists to reductive explanations offered by cognitive science (Taves 2009, 29–35). While critical theorists of the John Modern variety might not be worried about violating religious taboos, they can be creeped out by scientific confidence in the ability to make everything measurable and intelligible. Modern's anxieties echo Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's pronouncement: “Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense of the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity” (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, 1). Throughout Neuromatic, there is a looming sense of calamity lurking behind human attempts to master the brain. It strikes me that there is a dividing line among academics about whether this sort of concern makes sense or whether it is just silly. This dividing line has less to do with the content of any theoretical argument and more to do with something like a difference in temperament that runs across academic disciplines. The division I have in mind might be called the difference between the “hards” and the “softs.” This is sometimes used to distinguish between hard sciences like biology, chemistry, and physics from the soft social sciences. But the division that I have in mind can be found within the humanities and social sciences. For example, there seems to be a temperamental divide between analytic philosophers who study modal logic and continental philosophers who read French deconstructionists, or between quantitative political scientists and political theorists, or between biological anthropologists who study primates and cultural anthropologists who study colonialism. Taves's book was a rare attempt to bridge these differences. But finding common ground is a difficult task because humanists are unlikely to give up what they see as justified fears of the imperialistic tendencies of the hards, and the hards are reluctant to take softs seriously until they do so. From the perspectives of the hards, the softs are just making stuff up. They lack empirical data. Their theories are unfalsifiable. They endlessly complicate and problematize to the point that there is no truth left. The hards lament that deconstructionists undercut confidence in scientific institutions in a post-truth era inhabited by anti-vaxxers, flat-earthers, and intelligent designers. The hards laugh at people who might find something compelling in Walter Benjamin. From the perspective of the softs, the hards are naïve about their own subject positions, epistemic limits, and interpretive categories. According to the softs, the hards unwittingly naturalize what is historically contingent. They treat particulars as universals. They have lots of empirical data, but what they are measuring is not analytically coherent or consistent. The softs contend that the hards count things that are not really countable and that whatever does not add up is conveniently written off as an exception to the rule. Modern is a soft boy. Neuromatic asks us to question the self-evidence of the hards' assertion that the brain can be made endlessly intelligible. He is aware that a central gripe of the hards is that the softs lack the courage of their convictions. One critique of the softs is that they hold onto false positives, continuing to obsessively scan the horizon when the relevant truth pattern has clearly emerged. And that this portrayal of soft scholarship is a lot like a softness that hards find to be characteristic of religion. On Pascal Boyer, for example, Modern notes: “For religion in Boyer's scheme may have had its local advantages, but, at the end of the day, it is a form of laziness or obsessive compulsive pathology or both. Scientific atheism, on the other hand, is a hard job” (Modern 2021, 95). Make no mistake. Modern is not impressed. He suggests instead that the hards have their own fears. Modern tries to out-Durkheim the contention that humanists treat religion as a taboo subject by suggesting that the brain is itself a neuromatic totem: “I remain unconvinced that our cumulative and accumulating knowledge about the brain is part of a progressive story of enlightenment and secular liberation. On the contrary, it has been my assumption throughout that the brain is a totem of sorts” (Modern 2021, 375). Whereas softs worry about a false certainty, the hards are afraid of the uncertain and unknown. To admit you do not know something is to give that thing an unacceptable power over you, and the work of brain science is to relentlessly expose the rational basis of the apparently irrational in order to steal away some of its mojo. In some ways, then, the difference between hards and softs is less about whether they are dealing with empirical data than it is about their own confidence in their assertions. When it comes to studying human behavior, hards often make big claims with relatively small amounts of data, whereas softs tend to accumulate large amounts of data to make relatively small claims. This might be why prehistory is such an attractive field to evolutionary psychologists. It provides an infinite economy of thought experiments in which one can rationally extrapolate what life was like in the state of nature to develop general theories with an elegance that would be impossible if one is wading through the murky stuff of historical nuance and complexity. The prescriptive stance of the softs is often described negatively, as if they are fixated entirely on telling you what you cannot do without any guide for what you should do. In some of the later sections of Neuromatic, however, there might emerge something like a positive ethos and even a guide for life. The ethos is exemplified in the rockabilly performance of the Cramps at the Napa State Mental Hospital in 1978. The Cramps's frontman, Lux Interior, embodied an alternative aesthetic that connected with patients by letting go of the normative demands of sanity. As Modern explains, “His is an ontology not of systems but of ill-fittedness, of problems that will remain unresolvable, of a mystery that does not arrive with any foreseeable solution” (Modern 2021, 357). In response to the hards lament that the softs have fostered skepticism in a post-truth world, it should be noted that contemporary anti-vaxxers or QAnon acolytes entirely lack the self-reflective, self-critical embrace of mystery without foreseeable solutions that Modern finds in the Cramps ethos. While contemporary conspiracy theorists reject the authority of conventional scientific institutions, they are temperamentally kin with the hards in the confidence in their answers and the empirical validity of their evidence. When they do their own research, they find the truth. For Modern and the Cramps, however, there is too much certainty and confidence in a world that might be better served by an aesthetic vibe that learns to live with difference under conditions of uncertainty. Rather than offer a strategy for mastering the unknown, the softs approach global ecological apocalypse by coming to terms with human limits and precarity. After all, academic softs and hards are usually on the same team when it comes to practical matters like getting vaccinated, endorsing evolution in biology class, and advocating for conserving scarce resources in the face of global warming. One question that I have about all of this: What is it that leads one down the road to become a hard or a soft? How do we explain these temperamental proclivities? At what point in an undergraduate or graduate student's career do they choose teams? In my department, for example, I have a colleague who, like Modern, is a white guy who grew up as a Buckeye with working-class roots to later find himself as a varsity athlete in an elite college. But he is definitely a hard. It might have made more biographical and demographic sense for Modern to go this route. So what went awry? Was it the encounter with punk rock? Fear of a global apocalypse? Is he afraid of the truth

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• Religious Experience Reconsidered

  A Taves•Religious Experience Reconsidered•2009

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• Ann Taves'sReligious Experience Reconsideredis a sign of a global apocalypse that will kill us all

  Finbarr Curtis•Religion•2010

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