Introduction
In 1931 Soviet neuropsychologist
Alexander Romanovich Luria traveled to central Asia to study the psychology of
the people in that region. His goal was to test a bold hypothesis proposed by
his colleague and mentor, Lev Vygotsky.
Though trained as a literary critic,
who wrote a dissertation on Hamlet,
Vygotsky became one of the giants of developmental psychology, the field that
studies how behavior and thinking changes over a life span. It seems fair to
say prior to Vygostky that most developmental theories emphasized the idea that
the stages of cognitive development are encoded into the child at birth. It was
also then common to use analogies from botany to describe child development.
The child was seen as a plant unfolding through a prearranged sequence from
seed to flower. It was no accident, as Vygotsky wryly noted, that children were
sent to a place called kindergarten.
In contrast, Vygotsky embraced a
radically different understanding of development. To him, the child’s major
task is to become a competent member of society. This meant that the goals of
development would be specific to particular cultures and historical contexts.
For example, it is now considered important that children in the first years of
school learn to read and write. Yet reading and writing are cultural
inventions, less than 10,000 years old and the need for mass literacy arose
only with the industrial revolution. In modern societies, the ability to read
and write had become important developmental milestones. While some
developmental sequences, such as the transition from crawling to walking, may
indeed be hard wired into us, others are created by society and, then,
transmitted by culture.
Vygotsky and Luria built on this
observation. Just as people create and improve physical tools to manipulate the
environment and pass this technology onto future generations, they also invent
psychological tools. A psychological tool (sometimes called a cognitive tool)
can be understood as a technique or strategy that alters human cognition or
behavior. Physical tools alter the material environment, psychological tools
are cultural inventions that change how we process information or how we
behave. For example, the Hindu-Arabic number system is a case of just such a
tool. Hindu-Arabic numbers allow us to perform calculations much more
efficiently than previous systems of representing quantities. If you doubt
this, try doing multiplication with Roman numerals. Reading and writing
themselves are cognitive tools - they allow us to create an external form of
memory and receive information from distant sources. Cognitive tools shift
human consciousness in important ways. In a well documented example, mass
literacy has allowed masses people to directly read and interpret scriptures,
with the importance consequence of loosing the authority of priestly mediation.
An inescapable consequence of this
view is that different cultures and different socio-economic arrangements
encourage different mentalities. This would be particularly true of different
historical stages and different levels of social complexity. From Vygostsky’s
view we should not expect ancient people to think about the world in the same
way as modern people do.
At the time Vygotsky wrote, there
were, according to Luria, two dominant approaches to understanding the
psychological difference between modern and ancient people. One point of view,
associated with the French scholar Levy-Bruhl, argued that there is a
fundamental psychological gap between modern and premodern peoples. The
alternative view was to deny the existence of such a gap. This position was
articulated by the anthropologist Franz Boas, who claimed that the ancient mind
does not differ in any qualitative way from the modern mind.
Boas and his followers played an
important role in discrediting claims of racial superiority, they argued,
correctly, that the biological hardware of the human brain does not differ
significantly between human groups, or between modern and ancient people. What
they ignored, however, is that the cognitive software that we run on those
brains could be different across historical epochs.
Working within a Marxist framework,
Vygotsky and Luria proposed a third model. While they accepted the evolution of
human mentality, they located the source of change not in biology, but in
socio-economic and historical forces. They asserted that our own thoughts,
which we believe to be private and intimate, are in fact, deeply shaped by
social forces. In this view, the link between the individual and the larger
society is language. So while animals can think, human thinking resembles an
inner monologue.
Developmental psychologists had noted
that children often spoke out loud to themselves, with little or no concern
about an audience. Traditionally this behavior has been labeled egocentric
speech as distinct from communicative speech, and it is thought to be related
to the young child’s difficulty in taking the perspective of others. But
Vygotsky amended this view with the hypothesis “that egocentric speech
is actually an intermediate stage leading to inner speech.”
This is a startling proposal.
Vygotsky is saying that in the course of development we internalize the
external linguistic environment and, in this sense, even our thoughts are social
in origin.
Vygotsky and Luria were explicit in
their rejection of the central claim of the Cartesian world view. While
Descartes asserted, “I think therefore I am” as the foundational axiom for all
philosophy, Luria countered with,“the perception of others and the processes of
self-perception are shaped through social activities.” In other words,
self-consciousness itself is the product of socialization and impossible
without language.
One can pause here and ask: how
plausible is this Vygotskian claim? How could we think that consciousness is
the exclusive property of humans or that animals cannot think because they lack
a human language? Here we see the influence of a bias towards human thought
which, in the light of emerging knowledge of animal cognition, is no longer
tenable. Curiously, Descartes also had a similar bias against animal
consciousness and cognition.
While it is clearly false to
disparage the abilities and sentience of non-linguistic animals, it is clear,
that for the human animal, language is a bridge to larger social forces and
plays a strong role in shaping our mental architecture. In turn, our individual
psychology binds us to and shapes the larger social world.
Our humanness is then tied up with
our sociality. To understand how our mind evolved we need to understand human
social cooperation. Indeed, standard evolutionary models do not seem to predict
the high degree of altruism we observe in people. No explanation of human
cooperation is possible without an understanding of human culture and
psychology. To understand our sociality we must understand how cultural change
has shaped the mind.
Uzbekistan
Now, if the Vygostskian view is
correct, then we can expect that people living a premodern life would think
about the world in a radically different way than modern people. The dramatic
transformations that took place in Soviet Uzbekistan during the 1930s, where
illiterate people living a traditional life style, resided in proximity to
people receiving modern education and taking employment in schools, factories
or on collective farms, provided an opportunity to test this proposition.
The people Luria interviewed included
illiterate villagers “not involved in any modern social activities,” as well as
people who had “access to a technological culture and mastery of mechanisms
such as literacy and other new forms of knowledge.”
Luria’s research consisted of lengthy
interviews where he presented “specially
developed tests that the subjects found meaningful and open to several
solutions, each indicating some aspect of cognitive activity.” Luria
was particularly skilled at neuropsychological diagnosis. A number of tests he
developed are still used by physicians today.
In this case, the tests Luria used
consisted of deductive reasoning problems where “the solution could be either
graphic-functional and situational, or abstract and categorical.” He
borrowed this functional-situational versus categorical-abstract distinction
from the work of psychiatrist Kurt Goldstein.
Goldstein described these two
orientations as concrete and abstract and wrote “in the concrete attitude we
are given over passively and bound to the immediate experience of unique
objects or situations.” In the abstract orientation, he claimed that “we
transcend the immediate given specific aspect of sense impressions, we detach
ourselves from the latter and consider the situation from a conceptual point of
view.”
In a typical interview Luria would
ask participants to classify and name geometric figures such as circles,
triangles, and squares. Only the most educated, students in the teacher
training program, identified the figures with their geometric names. Indeed
when, given an incomplete figure they would say it was “something like a circle,”
or “something like a triangle.”
In contrast individuals with less
formal education tended to describe the shapes with names of everyday objects.
For example, they would describe a circle as a plate, a bucket, or the moon. A
square might be called a door, a house, or an apricot drying board. When shown
an incomplete circle, Luria would receive responses such as a bracelet or an
earring. For Luria, such response confirmed his view “that the perception of
geometrical shapes varies from one culture to another.”
Prior to Luria’s work, most
psychologists assumed that basic syllogistic reasoning is a universal feature
of the human mind. But when Luria asked unschooled and illiterate peasants to
reason syllogistically, he received surprising responses.
For example, when presented with this
problem:
“In the far north, where there is
snow, all bears are white. Novaya Zemlya is in the far north. What color are
the bears there?”
Luria found that “as a rule, many
refused to accept the major premise, declaring, ‘I’ve never been in the north
and never seen bears.’” The interviews revealed that while people
could reason well about their direct experience, they were unable to abstract
the process to events and objects outside of the particularities of their
lives.
From these observations, Luria concluded “the facts show convincingly that the structure of cognitive activity
does not remain static during different stages of historical development.”
Luria’s mentor, Vygotsky, died of tuberculous in 1934. Around this time his work fell out of favor with Soviet authorities and, until 1956, three years after Stalin’s death, his books were banned. Luria continued to research and publish but refocused his work onto more strictly neurological topics.
Progress
While a Marxist, Vygotsky’s approach
was too heterodox for the new Stalinist orthodoxy. Vygotsky had read widely in
a number of languages and his writing bears the influence of thinkers such as
William James, Jean Piaget, and Spinoza. Moreover, Vygotsky’s cultural
psychology was accused of chauvinism. It was claimed that his theories devalued
the thinking of peasants and workers.
This last point is important to
explore because similar accusations have been made against other efforts to
understand the evolution of the human psyche. Let us be clear, Vygotsky and
Luria rejected any notion of biological inferiority of premodern people. They
saw the differences embedded in social and historical forces. They did,
however, accept a theory of progress.
Notions of progress have fallen out
of favor, and the phrase “the myth of progress” has become an unexamined
truisms.
Progress can be understood as some
directional change toward the good. It is hard to draw up a balance sheet on
history. One can find trends that have improved, such as improvements in health
and literacy. At the same time it is easy to see trends, such as climate
change, that imperil our future.
The work of Vygotsky and Luria offers
us an avenue for constructing a viable theory of human progress. Shifts in
technology and sociocultural arrangements are closely linked to shifts in human
mentalities. At certain historic junctures, there have been dramatic
revolutions in our cognitive architecture.
Understanding these changes will help
us solve some enduring mysteries. These include the origins of human
hyper-altruism, the fact of moral progress, and the rise of abstract
philosophic thought.
In addition, using ideas borrowed
from sociologist Pitirim Sorokin, I will demonstrate that there is a dialectic
in modern thought between secular and spiritual ideas that powerfully shapes
our behavior.
Finally, I will argue that further refinement of rational/scientific
thinking and the fact of moral progress will result in both a new consciousness
and a new more altruistic civilization.
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