Depressive Realism

Interdisciplinary perspectives

Colin Feltham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317584827
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy of Religion

Depressive Realism argues that people with mild-to-moderate depression have a more accurate perception of reality than non-depressives. Depressive realism is a worldview of human existence that is essentially negative, and which challenges assumptions about the value of life and the institutions claiming to answer life's problems. Drawing from central observations from various disciplines, this book argues that a radical honesty about human suffering might initiate wholly new ways of thinking, in everyday life and in clinical practice for mental health, as well as in academia.

Divided into sections that reflect depressive realism as a worldview spanning all academic disciplines, chapters provide examples from psychology, psychotherapy, philosophy and more to suggest ways in which depressive realism can critique each discipline and academia overall. This book challenges the tacit hegemony of contemporary positive thinking, as well as the standard assumption in cognitive behavioural therapy that depressed individuals must have cognitive distortions. It also appeals to the utility of depressive realism for its insights, its pursuit of truth, as well its emphasis on the importance of learning from negativity and failure. Arguments against depressive realism are also explored.

This book makes an important contribution to our understanding of depressive realism within an interdisciplinary context. It will be of key interest to academics, researchers and postgraduates in the fields of psychology, mental health, psychotherapy, history and philosophy. It will also be of great interest to psychologists, psychotherapists and counsellors.

Chapter 1
Big history, anthropathology and depressive realism

Can we say there is something intrinsically fantastic (unlikely), admirable (beautifully complex) and simultaneously tragic (entropically doomed from the outset) about the universe? And about ourselves, the only self-conscious part of the universe as far as we know, struggling to make sense of our own existence, busily constructing and hoping for explanations even as we sail individually and collectively into oblivion? Was the being or something that came out of nothing ever a good thing (a random assertion of will in Schopenhauerian terms), a good thing for a while that then deteriorated, a good thing that has its ups and downs but will endure or a good thing that must sooner or later end? Or perhaps neither good nor bad? Depressive realism looks not only to the distant future but into the deepest past, interpreting it as ultimately negatively toned.

It is quite possible and indeed common practice for depressive realists and others to explicate their accounts without recourse to history. It appears that much contemporary academic discourse, certainly in the social sciences, is tacitly structured abiologically and ahistorically, as if in spite of scientific accounts we have not yet accepted any more than creationists that we are blindly evolved and evolving beings. In other words, in spite of much hand-wringing, many maintain a resignedly agnogenic position as regards the origins of the human malaise: we do not and may never know the causes. But we have not appeared from nowhere, we are not self-creating or God-created, we were not born as a species a few hundred or a few thousand years ago, we are not in any deep sense merely Plato’s heirs. Neither Marxist dialectical materialism nor Engels’ dialectics of nature capture the sheer temporal depth of evolution and its ultimate cosmogony (Shubin, 2014). Existence, beyond the animal drive to survive, is ateleological and unpromising. Religious and romantic teleologies largely avoid examination of our material roots and probable limits. From a certain DR perspective it is not only the future that has a dismal hue; an analysis of the deep past also yields much sorry material.

My preference is to begin with certain historical and materialist questions. The reasoning behind this is that (a) we have accounts of and claims to explain the existence of life as once benign but having become at some stage corrupt; (b) we might find new, compelling explanations for the negative pathways taken by humanity; (c) recorded observations of human tragedy that can be loosely called depressive realism are found in some of the earliest literature; (d) this procedure helps us to compare large scale and long-term DR propositions with relevant micro-phenomena and transient patterns. This anchorage in deep history does not necessarily imply a materialist reductionism to follow but it tends, I believe, to show a ceaselessly adaptive, evolutionarily iterative process and entropic trajectory via complexity.

The emerging disciplines of deep and big history challenge the arbitrary starting points, divisions and events of traditional history by going back to the earliest known of cosmic and non-human events, charting any discernible patterns and drawing tentative conclusions. Spier (2011) offers an excellent condensed account of this kind, but we probably need to add as a reinforcer the argument from Kraus (2012) that something from nothing is not only possible but inevitable and explicable by scientific laws. Indeed, it is necessary to begin here as a way of further eroding theistic claims that want to start with God and thereby insist on God’s (illusory) continuing sustenance and guiding purpose. It is not the creatio ex nihilo of the mythological, pre-scientific God, the omnipotent being who brought forth the universe from chaos that any longer helps us to understand our world, but modern science. We do not know definitively how we evolved, but we have convincing enough causal threads at our disposal. Here I intend to sift through those of most interest in exploring the question of why our world has become such a depressing place.

We are animals but apparently higher animals, so far evolved beyond even our nearest relatives that some regard human beings as of another order of nature altogether. Given the millennia of religious belief that shaped our picture of ourselves, the Darwinian revolution even today is not accepted by all. Even some scientists who purport to accept the standard evolutionary account do not seem to accept our residual animal nature emotionally (Tallis, 2011). But it is important to begin by asking about the life of wild animals. They must defend themselves against predators by hiding or fighting, and they must eat by grazing, scavenging or predation; they must reproduce and where necessary protect their young. Many animals spend a great deal of their time asleep, and some play. Social animals cultivate their groups by hunting together, communicating or grooming. Some animals protect their territory, build nests or rudimentary homes and a few make primitive tools; some migrate, and some maintain hierarchical structures. Most animals live relatively short lives, live with constant risk and are vigilant.

However it happened, human beings differ from animals in having developed a consciousness linked with tool-making, language and massive, highly structured societies that have taken us within millennia into today’s complex, earth-spanning and nature-dominating civilisation. Wild animals certainly suffer – contrary to idyllic fantasies of a harmonious nature – but their suffering is mostly acute, resulting from injury, hunger and predation, and their lives are not extended beyond their natural ability to survive. Our ingenuity and suffering are two sides of the same coin. Weapon-making and co-operation allowed us to rise above constant vulnerability to predators, but our lives are now often too safe, bland and boring, since we have forfeited the purpose of day-to-day survival. We have also benefited from becoming cleverer at the cost of loss of sensory acuity. Accordingly, and with painful paradox, we are driven to seek ‘meaning’ and we are gratuitously violent (Glover, 2001; White, 2012). Animals have no such problems.

How and when did our two-sided distinctiveness come about? In order to get at this topic we need to consider some fundamentals. The universe is thought to be probably 13.7 billion years old, the earth 4.5 billion years old and the origins of life lie 3.7 billion years ago. It is reckoned that five major extinction events have occurred since 440 million years ago (MYA), the most recent being 65 MYA in which large animals like dinosaurs perished. Another is sometimes predicted to occur within the present century. We live in a relatively hospitable interglacial period, but various ice ages have determined migrations with survival at stake and sometimes intergroup conflicts resulting in war and extermination.

The appearance of the great apes is dated to about 15 MYA and Homo australopithecus 5.8 to 3.5 MYA. Australopithecus is thought to have had a brain 35% the size of modern human brains, which average at about 1200–1400 cc; and human brain size has increased evolutionarily in relation to body size. The divergence of the human line from chimpanzees is usually put at 5 to 7 MYA. Use of tools may date from over 2.6 MYA, about the same time perhaps that a transition occurred from a mainly vegetarian to an omnivorous diet. The discovery and control of fire is sometimes dated to about 1.9 MYA, when primitive cooking may have begun, which in turn probably contributed significantly to our increased brain size and bodily changes (Wrangham, 2010). The exodus of Homo erectus from Africa may date from 1.8 MYA, but the exodus of modern humans is now often put at 75 KYA. Religion may date back to as early as 500,000 (500 KYA), but some put that figure at a mere 50 KYA. By some accounts both primitive speech and the opposable thumb date to about 400 KYA, but some place speech closer to 150 KYA. Homo sapiens can be traced to 200 KYA, about the same time as human settlements. Trade may date from about 150 KYA. Human burial originates from about 100 KYA. One disputed account estimates that schizophrenia may date from about 80 KYA (Horrobin, 2001). Another has it that artificial clothing dates to about 72 KYA. Forty-three KYA saw humans in Europe and 12 KYA the evolution of light skin in Europeans. From around 12 KYA we also see the move away from hunter-gatherer existence to the development of agriculture (domestication of plants and animals) and high levels of warfare. The origins of patriarchy are disputed but may date from between 12 to 6 KYA, if not much earlier. Picture writing comes from around 8.5 KYA and use of numbers and characters 5.2 KYA. The wheel is found from about 6 KYA. Precise dating and comprehensive evolutionary narrative is obviously not my aim here, nor is there anything like consensus among archaeologists. Indeed, Wade (2007) believes that 90% of human history is irretrievably lost to all efforts at rediscovery. But these few examples merely give some flavour of timescale and linearity and set the scene.

In Jaynes’ (1976) unusual thesis, a bicameral mind existed prior to the subjective mind we know today, and it was characterised by a hallucinatory voice of God or gods commanding human beings. This bicamerality, mediated through the brain’s right hemisphere, is a mere 3,000 years or so old, and we evolved obedient to its voice, living lives of a somewhat robotic quality. Somehow the earliest proto-language which partly distinguished us from animals was hijacked by a dominant brain function. Due to various historical catastrophes, the bicameral mind started to break down, religion gradually fragmenting, authority being lost and subjective judgement coming into prominence. Admittedly unlikely in its entirety, Jaynes’s bicameral paradigm yet retains some explanatory power. It certainly helps to underline the enormous power religion still holds in an increasingly scientific, rational world, and why so many hanker for a higher authority. McGilchrist (2009), too, believes that the bilaterality of the brain is key to understanding human history and waywardness but regards Jaynes’ account as untenable and back-to-front. To precis McGilchrist’s view, it is ‘left hemisphere bad, right hemisphere good,’ or to be fairer it is a matter of both being necessary but the left hemisphere having become too dominant, and dangerously so. This latter account is very popular among anti-science arts and humanities observers and those who wish to see a ‘re-enchantment of the world’.

Anthropathology

Among the main explanatory candidates for what I call anthropathology, or human sickness, fallenness or waywardness, are the following: (1) the view that distinctive human consciousness arose gradually from perhaps about 2 MYA, with the double-edged features of accelerating creativity and cleverness, and tribal aggression, territoriality, deceptiveness and alienation. Tattersall (2004), however, argues that changes in consciousness have been rare and episodic, with the contrast between Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons about 30 to 40 KYA being the most significant critical threshold and constituting an ‘incidental exaptation’ towards symbolic consciousness. (2) A proposed ‘Fall’ or major, disastrous climatic and historical event that changed everything for the worse about 10 KYA. (3) An era of intensive agricultural settlement coupled with the advent of social hierarchies, formal religions, symbolic regulation and so on. The most compelling of these to my mind is number (1). I originally considered (2) and (3) very likely (Feltham, 2007) but I have never subscribed to either of two further views, that is (4) the modern, industrial era and capitalism as the culprits, or (5) our woes being minimal, temporary and soon to be rectified. Broadly then, I believe that Zapffe (1933) was right to name surplus consciousness (however so dated) as culpable. We tragically evolved beyond the point that it was useful and harmonious for us to evolve; paradoxically we ‘know too much’ and at the same time we practise repression and lack wisdom. Currently, we cannot shake off ancient habits of violence, illusion, deception and greed; and our dysfunctionality may doom us, for example, via anthropogenic climate change and our unwillingness to face up to it.

Varki and Brower (2014) propose an unusual thesis regarding anthropogeny. Rather than beginning with the question of why humans have such an advanced consciousness, we might ask why other animals have not come anywhere near this threshold. Using ‘theory of mind’ (ToM) instead of consciousness as their guiding concept, the authors suggest first that a ToM is required in order to appreciate that others have minds like oneself and vice versa, and secondly that witnessing the deaths or corpses of others shocks one into realising that this is also one’s own fate. But in evolutionary terms this devastating insight cannot be afforded since its depressing impact would rob any creature of the imperative to survive and would undermine natural selection. Accordingly, death awareness could not have arisen, claim the authors, without a corresponding cognitive mechanism to override it. This is, of course, self-deception, the faculty that has allowed us to survive, multiply and prosper. Although Varki and Brower do not use this term, we might conceive of human progress as hysterical in its grandiose expanse: indeed, these authors regard optimism as self-deceptive. Self-deception, lying and cheating, which partly characterise humanity, help to explain too why in large societies we will always have some level of crime and mental illness, and why we are bedevilled by religious denial of reality.

After bipedalism, our opposable thumbs, Swiss Army knife-style hands (Tallis, 2003) and fine hand-eye co-ordination, our large brain and ability to innovate, all made us more-than-animal and able gradually to transform the earth, to dominate it (Taylor, 2010). Fagan (2015) argues somewhat similarly that our dominance of animals has both advanced and shaped us; and Rowdon (2008) and Masson (2015) remind us that we are far more gratuitously cruel and violent than animals. But our actions also progressively and reciprocally shaped our brains so that we could only move in this ‘artificial’ or ‘unnatural’ direction. To this gradual development we might add evolutionary mismatch theory: living as hunter-gatherers in small populations worked quite well for thousands of years, but some combination of factors probably forced us out of the open savannah into dense communities and highly organised, symbolic cultures that have exacted a heavy toll across the last 10,000 years (Gluckman & Hanson, 2008; Wells, 2010). It is this overall irreversible push towards a humanity dominated by myth, thought and technology that has brought us to our current problematic state. While outgrowing religious myths, we nevertheless reflect something like Christian original sin in our stubborn and destructive mental and behavioural traits. Perhaps our consciousness may be wired like a Möbius strip, with creativity and self-deceptive destructiveness thoroughly entwined.

The novelist Kurt Vonnegut (1994) depicts a defunct human species a million years ago that perished due to its troublesome big brains. A variety of brain-blaming theories names the left brain, runaway brain, social brain and big brain (Lynch & Granger, 2008) as responsible for our ills. Brain size accounts for our advanced cognitive capacities but also indicates that individual development after birth crucially relies on dependency and nurture well through childhood, and the brain is probably not fully formed until the mid-20s. This means that human birth is highly susceptible to accidents and that human beings are especially vulnerable in adolescence. Since most human societies protect their young and vulnerable members, developmental problems do not result in death and elimination from the gene pool to the extent they would in the wild. But another view of the brain is the evolutionary tripartite one of MacLean (1990), which posits reptilian, limbic and neocortical components. Although not largely in favour today, affective neuroscience uses this tripartite model to focus on the emotional functions of humans that cognitive neuroscience tends to downplay. One of its key suggestions is that evolutionarily earlier aspects of arousal survive within us that retain the power to reassert themselves, particularly under stress. An ongoing battle exists, too, between proponents of the idea that our ignorance or denial of brain mechanisms is responsible for many of our woes (Churchland, 2013) versus the idea that we are rational free agents (Tallis, 2011).

Perhaps emotionally, many of us remain unconsciously suspended somewhere between attachment to religious teleological myths and to the assumpti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Epigraph
• Introduction
• 1 Big history, anthropathology and depressive realism
• 2 Religion, spirituality and depressive realism
• 3 Philosophy and depressive realism
• 4 Literature, film and depressive realism
• 5 Psychology and depressive realism
• 6 Psychotherapy and depressive realism
• 7 The socio-political domain and depressive realism
• 8 Science, technology, the future and depressive realism
• 9 The lifespan, everyday life and depressive realism
• 10 Arguments against depressive realism
• 11 Lessons and possibilities for individuals and society
• Index