Customer Reviews

On Deep History and the Brain

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is a fairly short book that Harvard professor of history Daniel Smail describes as a series of connected essays. It is essentially an argument to include all of human history, not just written history, in academic survey courses and textbooks. Most of the book is an interesting historiographical survey of how historians essentially ignore "pre-history"; the problems with periodization; and a post-modern rejection of Christian Universal History metanarratives which are stealthily still lurking in much of western secular historiography to this day.

Smail suggests using evolution as a new approach - one idea, he suggests, is that changes in brain chemistry, from external and internal forces, play a role in shaping human history. For example the widespread adoption of caffeine in Europe in the 17th century altered Europeans brain chemistry and thus the track of history. Similar investigations could be done with "pre-historic" periods. Smail doesn't go into many specifics, this is a concept book about how to approach history, not a definitive scientific analysis or conclusion - it is part of the larger ongoing discussions on how the ideas of evolution can be applied scientifically to the humanities (history, literature, etc) . Overall I was intellectually stimulated throughout and greatly enjoyed the ideas and perspectives, Smail is well versed in western historiography and the philosophy of history. Even if you are not convinced by the titles premise (almost a sort of hook), discussed in only one chapter, there is a lot to learn in this short but pithy work.

History has addressed a number of Big Questions through the years. As Daniel Smail notes, however, the biggest one has been "Where to begin?" For centuries, the answer seemed simple: the "Creation". Scholars in Christian Europe were able to begin history with the couple in Eden, building from that well-defined starting point. Later, the historians "guild" shifted their foundation. The result was a mélange of opening chapters, ranging from the founding of "civilisation", through the beginning of writing to particular societies such as the Greeks, Sumerians or Egypt. Smail dismisses all of these as short-sighted. He wants a realistic view of history to encompass "Deep Time". In this enthralling book, he urges historians to take up some science and rewrite history to encompass the early days of humanity.

As a professor of history, Smail deftly summarises the various schools of historiography. Early history is dubbed "sacred" for its reliance on Biblical origins. Time was fixed and man's place in those histories was determined. This type persisted until "the bottom dropped out of time" with the advent of geology, paleontology and particularly, biology demonstrating the inadequacy of sacred history. Disputes arose, he notes, during the 19th Century carrying through well into the 20th Century, over the "starting point". Providing many examples, he laments that even as it became clear that human origins extended far back in time, history texts failed to acknowledge early human input worthy of notice. In some cases the view of "pre-historic" humanity even portrayed them as solitary wanderers on the landscape. Agriculture, in this view, was the foundation of human communities, hence discernible history.

Smail's recognises the many advances made in archaeology, genetics and cognitive sciences in recent years. The Paleolithic, he argues, is no longer a "time before history". The key to his thesis is the brain didn't suddenly shift into high gear with the coming of agriculture or the development of writing. In fact, he argues that if we truly need a "starting point" for history, it should rest with the onset of speech and language. These skills forged stronger ties among members of human communities. Those communities, in turn, formed identifiable groups we now decree are "cultures". Cultures bind and reinforce ideas, behavioural standards and even diet. These can be traced back in time to approximate origins, creating a history without texts. Humans may be one species, but uniformity is lacking. In historic terms, our cultures have deep divisions.

History without text means a way must be found to derive those origins from today's evidence. Smail introduces what he hopes will be adopted as a new discipline - "Neurohistory". It's important to remember that humans are the product of natural selection along with the rest of the animals. While the development of our brain was rapid by evolutionary time-scales, it still remains a product of natural selection. Smail warns against assuming a neurophysiological approach means "genetic determinism" - our brains allow too much variation for such a simplistic approach. Even so, patterns seen in other primates have equivalence in our species, and historians must at least be aware of them. Nothing better refutes the "Great Man of History" school of thinking more than the knowledge that the "Great Men" and the populations they ruled carried the same neurotransmitters in their brains. Which ones were triggered and by whom?

Smail goes on to explain the fundamentals of how the brain and body operate. Genes are essential in the various processes, but there are influences among the genes, from other cells and from environmental conditions. Humans don't react the same way to a given stimulus. Bush trackers, for example, have been raised in an environment where small details stand out from the background - a disturbed pebble means a passing gazelle. This same astute observer might well be run down by a speeding car while crossing a busy street if he's never been in a city. The point for Smail is that all these differences must be considered when composing a history of human activities down the ages. Almost inevitably, Smail is led into a discussion of Edward O. Wilson's 1975 classic, "Sociobiology" and the tumultuous years after its publication. Yet, as Smail notes, that work is a foundation for the type of science-based history he wishes to encourage.

That new discipline is well-summarised in the Epilogue to this comprehensive and persuasive analysis of the field of history teaching and its future. The trappings of civilisation didn't alter our brain chemistry, which must be the root of any new growth in the field. He calls for a closer alliance between history and science, particularly cognitive science. He's planted a seed which we can only hope will develop into a strong, informative blossoming [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

This is kind of a bipolar book. The first three quarters criticizes the way other people do history or social science. Smail holds everyone to extremely high standards and finds everyone deficient. The end of the book is a first cut at a history he wants to see, a history that focuses on the human brain. After all, everything humans do is caused by their brains. Here, he is impressionistic and unrigorous. The Smail of the first part would give this book one star. The Smail of the end would give it five. I give it three.

Smail argues that people's brains cause them to act so as to achieve certain levels of chemicals in the brain. Two centuries ago, the English utilitarians tried to found a social science on something similar. People, said Jeremy Bentham and James Mill, try to achieve pleasure and avoid pain. To the extent they do, they experience "utility." The idea of trying to maximize utility became a part of what was then called political economy. Eventually, it became conventional wisdom that a pleasure/pain principle was too simple, so economists redefined utility to mean preference, and dropped the question of where these preferences come from. If neurology can put some flesh back on the bones of "preference," it may indeed form a basis for a better economics and history.

Smail likes the metaphor of a "drug." The stresses of modern life cause undesired levels of some brain chemicals. Some people shop to change the levels to more desired ones. Thus, shopping is a drug. Similarly, in medieval times, attendance at church services--experiencing the communal ritual, the smoke, etc.--acted to change brain chemicals in desired ways. But when more powerful drugs, like the caffeine in coffee, came to Europe in "the long 16th century," attendance at church went down.

What to make of this? In the words of Deirdre McCloskey, "all theories are metaphors, and all metaphors are lies." No theory is perfect but many theories are useful. Centering a history on modern knowledge of how the brain works may lead to significant new insight. I look forward to seeing what Smail does with the idea.

I would recommend this book to people 1) who are fascinated by listening to historians talk about how to do history, 2) who want a very short explanation of the modern resolution of the nature/nurture question (an easy-to-read longer version is Matt Ridley's Nature Via Nurture: Genes, Experience, and What Makes Us Human), or 3) who want to see what an early attempt at neurohistory looks like.

You know how when some popular musician or movie star comments on a subject out of his field of expertise (say, on politics or some scientific field) and says something ridiculous and the intelligentsia pokes fun at him? It turns out that when a Harvard professor does the same thing, those intelligentsia are too intimidated to criticize him.


I originally read this book for two reasons. First, I'd heard of Dr. Smail (as a historian of late medieval Spain) but had never read any of his work. Second, in spite of reading reviews of this book in both the NY Times and The Economist, I still had little idea what this book was really about. I was intrigued.

Dr. Smail makes two basic points. The first is wholly uncontroversial but still very much worth making--that historians would benefit from updating the psychological models of human behavior they use in their analyses. He illustrates his point nicely by providing two examples from his own field of research where recent psychological models shed light on behavior that would otherwise be difficult to explain. While few historians would dispute this point, Dr. Smail still does the field a service by reminding them (and all of us) that the models of behavior that we make our analyses with may be outdated.

The second point is the one that has created the stir. Dr. Smail claims that historians should somehow look into writing histories of the time before the invention of written records (what he calls "deep history"). He makes this claim although (1) that time period is already well-studied by archaeologists, paleontologists, evolutionary developmental biologists, and others, and (2) historians lack the training to add very much to the discussion among those fields.

Dr. Smail criticizes historians' traditional focus on texts as the primary raw materials for analysis, pointing out (rightly) that inscriptions, oral history, historical linguistics, and archaeology can provide us with insights into the history of a time period. Of that list, of course, when it comes to "deep history", only archaeology is truly useful (though historical linguistics may provide some insights). But trained experts have already been hard at work at these problems for quite a long time. What exactly can historians add to this?

Most damningly, Dr. Smail does not provide a single example of what such a history would look like. While it's true this book is an exploratory work, it seems unreasonable to me to fail to provide even ONE solid example of what he's talking about. Readers are left wondering what exactly he's proposing, and we get incomprehensible reviews like those in the NY Times and The Economist.

My own personal view is that historians lack the training to contribute to the study of "deep history". They are primarily trained to read historical texts (often in multiple languages), and use them to tell a story. It's very difficult and important work, and we're all indebted to them for what they do. But if a scholar were to want to study "deep history", she'd be far better off going to one of the academic fields that has developed tools to understand it. Historians simply have very little to add to this field, just like evolutionary developmental biologists would have very little to say about Dr. Smail's own field of late medieval Catalonia.


In fact, by encouraging historians to focus on a time period that is not amenable to their core competencies, Dr. Smail unwittingly illustrates why this is such a bad idea. When discussing the value of using updated psychological models, he is able to provide two insightful examples from his own field, but he is unable to do the same when discussing "deep history". If even Dr. Smail cannot do what he proposes, how can other historians do it? It's unfortunate that the intelligentsia is too intimidated to make this obvious point.

Daniel Lord Smail is a historian at Harvard University. He is perhaps motivated to write this book because his father, John R. W. Smail was a professor of Southeast Asian history who, out of step with his times, taught an undergraduate course called "The Natural History of Man."

I bought this book because it got a good review in Science, which is not known for its attention to the historian's craft. True to form, Smail is a fine writer who can put together a coherent argument, as is the case for his Chapter 2, which analyzes insightfully why historians generally believe history begins with settled agriculture, urban life, and the written record.

Generally, however, this is a meandering, unfocused book that seems like the author's attempt to learn elementary paleontology, anthropology, brain science, and evolutionary psychology. There is no real history in the book, although there are good (if somewhat casual) introductions to modern sociobiology and neuroscience (especially the neurotransmitters and their role in human sociality). I especially liked his gentle but devastating critique of Evolutionary Psychology, of the sort that characterizes modern Homo sapiens as a "stone age mind in a modern skull."

What is missing most from this book is what it's title promises: a deep history of human society as seen through the evolution of the human brain. Indeed, it is difficult to find such a deep history anywhere, and if it were to be written, it would have to be in the context of the evolution of craniates and vertebrates, of which our species is but one member.

In this highly interesting book, the author gives the first crack at what he has called `neurohistory'. Neurohistory follows the current emphasis in many fields on using the results of neuroscience to explain various phenomena or events of interest. Indeed, one can now find fields such as "neuroethics" that attempts (and is succeeding) to give ethics, an area traditionally dominated by philosophical musings, a foundation based on how decisions are formulated in the brain. And then there is neuroeconomics, wherein the emphasis is on how economic decisions and risk assessments are made in the brain. All of these areas are fascinating to contemplate, and their study demands those curious about them to become knowledgeable about many different fields.

The author's main thesis in the first half of the book is that historical study has been dominated since the nineteenth century by the insistence on written records and by the religious ("sacred history") and "great men" paradigms. What he has called "deep time", namely the geological view of time as expressed in the fossil record, was replaced in the nineteenth century by one whose origin was identified with the "rise of civilization." "History should begin at the beginning", he argues, and his defense of this statement is highly convincing and fascinating in every way. The author is optimistic about the possibilities that his "deep time" approach to historical analysis will take root, and when reading the book one gets the impression that the payoff in this approach is more than just a philosophical one, for it reveals that the deep past is far more interesting than was hitherto reported. An example of this is the presence of complex political arrangements that existed in pre-agricultural societies, countering the view that such was not the case: in that the beginnings of agriculture signaled the beginnings of political complexity.

In the author's view, it is the brain that makes the deep past intelligible, and in the last half of the book he articulates on this view. The Cartesian distinction between mind and body collapses in this view, and in its place is a view of the brain as evolving to fill the need for humans to deal with highly complex social arrangements. His view is a refreshing one, for it eschews (perhaps without intending to do so) philosophical meanderings about the mind-body problem, and their consequent weakness in giving useful explanations about historical events and why humans acted as they did throughout history. "History as sacred", as an expression of a deity's will, does not find a place in neurohistory. "History as that of great men", as an expression of the influence and domination of famous individuals, does not find a place in neurohistory.

What does have a place in neurohistory are the sometimes powerful moods and emotions of humans, the author argues. These feelings have been induced by drugs such as caffeine or opium, and even by music or reading, but they are powerful enough, in the author's view, to drive historical events (and progress if such a thing is measurable). Along these same lines, possibly the only objection that one can make against the author's view is the role that curiosity played in the workings of human history. Only beginning to be studied by the techniques of cognitive neuroscience, curiosity has in this reviewer's opinion, been the major driving force behind human history. No doubt further research will reveal how it begins and is manifested in the brain, and then it will certainly play a powerful role in the scientific narrative called neurohistory.

Daniel Lord Smail is a professional historian who has written a book about neuroscience, historiography, history, and psychology. There is nothing wrong with a historian writing about- and using the tools of- different academic disciplines to craft his book and its arguments: I am of the conviction that history is naturally an interdisciplinary field (what would history be without, say, economics?). What is disappointing about this volume, however, is that it fails to deliver the goods; instead, it merely serves as an incomplete introduction (the first introduction?) to what Smail calls "deep history".

To understand what deep history is, Smail sketches a brief historiography of traditional historical narratives of early history: traditional historical narratives "begin" with what such narratives see as the birth of civilization. Smail notes that this narrative view is essentially a secular version of the even more traditional narratives that locate the birth of history immediately after the biblical deluge. According to both types of narrative, the birth of civilization and the deluge, respectively, serves as a reset-cum-begin button that, when pressed, serves as the marker where archaic and wandering man turned into man who had the capacity for history.

Smail would like to see a new narrative where the beginning of history, if we are to mark a "beginning" at all, is located deeper into the past. It is erroneous to relegate the Pleistocene and early Stone Age of human history to a few pages at the beginning of a history book, says Smail; it is wrong to brush aside man's deep history and to ignore the long periods of time that shaped his human nature. I agree, but the second part of this book offers no example of what such a "deep history" would look like. When I finished the last page, I couldn't see how such a deep history would be any different from an anthropological history of man, of which there are many. Instead, the second half of the book is immersed in debates about sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, thus illustrating that a "deep history" would have a long way to go in order to reach scientific truth.

Good history ought to support, and be supported by, good science and good philosophy. This book does exactly that. It fits history into the natural framework modern science and scientific philosophy have created.

Busting loose from the conventional contsraints of traditional hisory, Smail goes long for a more panoramic perspective. This approach is both liberating and more satisfying. It accesses the future by means of contemporary knowledge. That is, it leaves obsolete history in the dustbin of history.

I find The Dopaminergic Mind in Human Evolution and History nicely compatible with Smail's work.

The idea of "deep history" seems to be that of an unbroken, scientifically-based, narrative moving from the dawn of time to the present. Smail introduces the concept by giving us an insightful history of history. He begins with the religion-based "sacred histories", which did indeed claim to cover the history of everything. Then he tells how the findings of early modern scientists, particularly Darwin, undermined all this by uncovering a much much longer past than had been previously envisaged. This led to most general historians restricting the scope of history to that of the existence of writing, and labeling everything before that as "prehistory". Smail advocates abandoning this artificial barrier in favor of a more fluid view of the past.

So what does this deep history look like? Smail finishes his work with an example - a history in terms of psychotropy (defined as "mood-altering practices, behaviors, and institutions generated by human culture"). Beginning with things we share with other primates, such as hierarchies, grooming, and random abuse, he explains how certain behaviors can create psychological dependencies. He then shows how later societies and religions came to exploit these and similar "addictions", but were in turn partially undermined in the post-Columbian world by the greater availability of other addictive substances: printed text, coffee, chocolate, cheap alcohol, musical recordings, cinema, television, the internet, ...

This is a small book that often feels like an extended essay or bunch of essays. But, all in all, it is an interesting and thought provoking read.

The concept of human history is tricky. Specifically, when does it start? Geologic time obviously doesn't work, but recorded history is far too abbreviated given the span of existence that precedes the advent of writing.

This is an interesting, but not fascinating, point. It's the sort of topic drunken grad students might get deeply engaged in, but too thin to carry an entire book.

Far more interesting is the fact that the author points to history as a spectrum of evolving interpretation therein, but takes great care to ridicule those responsible for the transition away from "sacred chronology" to cultural temporalism (yes, I made it up...but it captures the essence of history, and historicity as a human based processes).

History depends much on perspective and interpretation. My perspective is that this author forgets that it continues to evolve and will evolve past his view; there's no need to besmirch those that came before, nor to expect others to blindly accept the interpretations of historians given to speculating about the historicalness of pre-recorded history.

It was an insurmountable offense, and I gave up, sadly, after 30 pages.