PRIMARY SOURCES

Primary sources refers to written documents that originate within history that bring to light new ideas or perspectives that are then used in commentaries and analyses. Primary sources are the seeds of thought that then sprout extensions. The Constitution of the United States is one of these primary sources, as are the The Federalist Papers. The Federalist Papers was a series of publications written in 1787 and 1788 by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay to support the ratification of the United States Constitution. Three of the Founding Fathers of America built a case for ratification but also, in the process, outlined in broad strokes the philosophy and structures upon which the new republic was based.

Primary sources are important for many reasons, not the least of which is to explore ideas that have proved generative over time. Every discipline one can name has its primary sources. Every scientific experiment, for instance, can be considered a primary source for what comes after it. It is important to trace back to the origins of ideas in order to understand how they have come into being and to then develop some perspective on our contemporary thinking. In this way we gain some deeper understanding of the original context for certain ideas and to see how they have evolved. I think asking the question about how true we are to the original is always a good one. What wisdom can we gain from examining the primary sources? Is it useful to know how our own ideas have been changed over time from the original forms? It is part of accepted wisdom in some cultures and traditions to think of the commentaries on primary sources as elevated and original in their own rights, even though their foundations can be traced back in time to a more durable document or narrative. It is also important to think of primary sources as beginnings and not ends. They serve us as points of departure in further explorations of thought extensions. They themselves may be extensions of previous seeds but they need to be organic and elastic sources for future ideas.

Politics is the ocean in which all of us swim and it has been so since time immemorial, since humans began to congregate and codify their beliefs. In its broadest meaning, politics constitutes the agreements factions of people have about how to manage their collective affairs. I suppose even primeval communities had their own methods of governance that allowed for the tribe to survive in a world hostile to their own interests. I think “factions” is a good way to look at politics, as most collective efforts at governance are composed of a set of minorities within a cohesive group. What was true for hunter/gatherers is true for us today. When the colonists decided to separate themselves from what they considered an oppressive monarchy, they were defining their set of beliefs against the backdrop of another set composed of its own factions. Factional prerogatives are not new to contemporary governments. Returning to primary sources challenges us to reexamine our own assumptions about what we think we know or what seems to us to be inherited wisdom. We are challenged to observe the contexts of our own lives as evolutionary steps in a changing landscape of human behavior.

What has grown more prominent in present times about factional governance are the great divides among the factions and the growing tendency to inhabit the factional preferences and not work toward integrating them into a larger fabric of cooperative cohesiveness. James Madison (1751-1836) wrote Federalist No. 10 in 1787 and it stands out from the rest as a statement of philosophy for the remainder. It is a primary source for understanding the perspective of one founding father and to see how it has contributed to our present day politics, if at all. He has written about how a “well constructed union” must deal with the “violence of faction.”

“The instability, injustice and confusion introduced into the public councils, have in truth been the mortal diseases under which popular governments have every where perished; as they continue to be the favorite and fruitful topics from which the adversaries to liberty derive their most specious declamations.”

“To secure the public good, and private rights against the danger of such a faction, and at the same time to preserve the spirit and the form of popular government, is then the great object to which our enquiries are directed.”

In effect, Madison concluded that the common good is supported by having enough representatives to dilute the “cabals of a few; and that however large it may be, they must be limited to a certain number, in order to guard against the confusion of a multitude.” He acknowledged that any system designed to protect the rights of all would inevitably produce “inconveniences” for all factions. He is writing here about the elements of a system of governance that contribute to the maintenance of its parts and to the health of the whole. His summary takes into account the natural tendency for humans to have opinions that aggregate in factions. He is perspicacious about human behavior to include safeguards against the tyrannies of both majorities and minorities. To this end, he supports the structures established in the Constitution that both energize and limit equal and fair treatment of all citizens. It should be noted that Madison also swam in the ocean of the politics of his time and held slaves all his life. The slave trade was permitted under the constitution and he was the one who proposed that apportionment of the United States Senate be based on each state's free population and slave population that led to the Three-Fifths Compromise (1787-1868) that assigned to slaves a three-fifths fraction of a whole human being for determining representation and taxation in the states. Even in the times in which human equality and rights were being debated, the assumptions made about what constituted a human being were being drawn up along lines of race and a defined minority. Our assumptions today about the individuals we consider to be enlightened intellects were also human beings with clay feet and we can learn a great deal about the threads of history that persist today in our own society. Good ideas and bad ideas are part of the mix of politics. Madison recognized that and proposed mechanisms for limiting those ideas that allowed for factions to triumph over the common good.

In times in which the structures of stable government (for good or ill) are being questioned and, it could be asserted, marginalized or ignored altogether, it is important to be clear about the truth of the changes and their rationale. Where the changes seem to be random and at the whim of egoic passion, it is even more important to be awake to the extent to which they represent a danger to the pursuit of freedom and attempts at equality and justice. I think any time judgments are presented as simple and intuitive all of us must be alert to their validity and applicability. Returning to primary sources can be a method by which we can evaluate the validity of moves by one faction to favor their own causes, thus causing disruption to the fabric of governance that covers all citizens. We are left at the mercy of demagogues and tyrants if we do not excavate the legitimacy of history and what lessons it can teach us. Primary sources are a priceless reservoir of wisdom and balance that are accessible to us in our quest for understanding our 21^st century American character. They are equally important for those values of enduring worth and to see the values once considered true that no longer serve our ongoing struggles to attain the lofty ideals of the founding fathers, those inalienable rights encoded in our national psyche.

Concepts of governance and what we are now experiencing change all the time but depend on structures established centuries ago. We jettison those structures at our national peril, just as we entertain chaos and despotism when any structures of self-governance (families qualify here, as well) begin to break down. One of our hopes for stabilization is what Madison presented as a bulwark against such chaos and that is to dilute the power of factions by a sufficient number of agreeable representatives (families don't work under this proviso most of the time). Tensions and pressures of individual and group prejudices will always be present in how we govern ourselves. This contributes to the strength of the republic if kept in balance and also contributes to opportunities for change as we examine the fundamental properties of the system.

It is worthwhile to point out that politics might be the ocean in which we swim every day, but consulting and studying primary sources applies to any discipline or corner of our lives that we might otherwise take for granted. We must be ever alert to the tendency to freeze ideas and treat them as inflexible dogma. The power of curiosity and the practice of inquiry are instrumental in our attempts to dig as deeply as we can into the hierarchies of power and influence that affect our lives. In this sense, there is a reason to question what is presented as “common sense” or as common knowledge. Knowledge can become diluted and subject to the contexts of different oceans (like those of the sciences, the arts, economics, education, etc.) in which all of us swim from time to time. We need to remain wakeful and alert to what we hold as prejudices and acknowledge partial truths, our partial understandings, and how everything changes over time. If we cannot know the future (and we can't), then often the best we can do is to question what we do know and that often relies on history and its primary sources. We would be wise to consult them and wiser still if we can learn from them. When we can understand their teachings, then we are better able to make the changes that will benefit more of us citizens in our collective efforts to make better lives for all. Let us never assume we know all the answers to problems and so let us always keep a healthy practice of inquiry. What is it? Is it true? Do we believe what we do because we need to believe we are right? What assumptions are we making today about our lives that we might change by referring to primary sources? What seeds are we cultivating?

Since I crafted the ideas above, the House of Representatives has begun impeachment proceedings against President Trump. I reread my comments with this pivotal event in mind and I think what I have written stands the test of relevance. I didn't change any of it, knowing what I do about the present events. I believe that our democracy is strong enough in the institutions encoded in our constitution to withstand the insults of a demagogue and the processes by which he can be removed from the seat of power. We are returning to primary sources for the support and strength we need in these times.

EXQUISITE PRESCIENT AESTHETICS

The beginning of science is art.

The beginning of art is seeing.

The beginning of seeing is looking.

When we look, what do we really see? This is the question that emerges out of my study of the life and work of Santiago Ramon y Cajal (1852-1934), a Spanish neural investigator and pathologist who focused his attention on the histology of the central nervous system. Learning about him raised many questions about the possibilities of a life's work and, especially about Cajal's life and the distinction made between art and science. I think what I discovered is that, for him and maybe for all of us, we need to particularize before we unify our thinking about anything. We seem to need details in order to see the whole. We can't deduce or synthesize or conclude without knowing the particulars. Ironically, the whole can't be seen until all the pieces (or as many as possible) can be brought into the picture. When we do that we can be surprised by what coalesces. Because most investigations are vast in their scope, our impression of the whole is ultimately only partial and temporary until more information is obtained or more experiments are performed. This is as true in science as in art.

What did Cajal notice? Cajal's father was a professor of anatomy and Santiago followed in his footsteps through medical school and into a professorship of anatomy, even though his early interests were in art and photography. In science his interests were focused on the study of histology (study of cells in tissues) of inflammation and basic cellular structures. He was aided in his studies by the available technology of the light microscope and a technique for staining cells in microscopic slide preparations, a method developed by the Italian scientist Camillo Golgi. These technologies allowed him to explore the histology of the central nervous system, a lifetime study that earned him and Golgi a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1906. It is important to Cajal's life story to outline the way in which he devoted his time and energy but, of course, that is only the beginning of what his life's work signifies. There are many threads and themes in his life that one could pull on to see the whole of it better. It is his studies of neuroanatomy that are of primary interest, even though one could also write about his family life or his own writings (his autobiography, Recollections of a Life, is considered to be one of the finest scientific autobiographies), among many other threads in a life of multiple interests and accomplishments.

What is striking to me about his work in histology is the beauty of the drawings he did of the cells he studied under the microscope. It is interesting to me that he was also interested in the early techniques of photography (he wrote a book on the technology and art of color photography and many of the portraits of him are self-portraits, the very first “selfies,” I suppose) and one can see in his drawings some of the stop-action motion that characterized the early experiments in photography. This reminds me of how Thomas Eakins (1844-1916), too, was fascinated with photography and especially the work of Edweard Muybridge and his photographic motion studies. The lives of Cajal and Eakins overlapped in time and in other ways, too. Eakins was devoted to the idea that the study of gross anatomy enabled the artist to shape the surface anatomy of the human body in ways that conformed to the truth of its functions. Cajal also discovered much about the functioning of the human brain from its anatomical structures, only from the microscopic perspective. Each was an artist in his own right and each began with the particularities of anatomy. The beginning of science is art. The beginning of art is science. When we make too many categories and distinctions, we lose sight of the fact that the goal is to understand the entirety as a marvelous construction. Science and art are wedded in reality and we lose much if we feel a need to pick one or the other when we want to know about the structures of body, brain, and mind.

The drawings Cajal made of the human central nervous system are intimate observations of structures that often show all the marks of progressive understanding. There are in some of his drawings the preliminary pencil lines that resemble ancient palimpsests. There are heavy lines and darker colors to designate primary foci of investigation. There are ghostly structures to indicate the tangle of background fibers and tracts. We are asked to notice his lettering and numbers that put some order into the layers of brain tissue to show locations and proximities. He has also highlighted specific areas by painting in contrasting white washes around structures and these are an artist's working marks. Some cells are exaggerated in size to call attention to their importance in the drawing. His working methods often meant that he would spend mornings peering into his microscope and then drawing from memory in the afternoons. He estimated that he had done 20,000 drawings but only about 2,500 survive. One can only imagine how prodigious his work methods were to produce so many individual studies.

His drawings were more than descriptive and artfully beautiful. They were also maps of brain function. We don't stop to think how important the little arrows are in understanding a map. They designate location as well as direction. One can see their importance to Cajal's thinking and his formulations of brain function by noticing how he used them. They relate to his ability to bring motion, the motion of photography perhaps, into a two-dimensional rendering of brain cellular structure, an otherwise static image. The deductions he made of nerve function were prescient and many were corroborated and supported only decades later when more sophisticated technologies for studying cellular structures were developed. The beginning of science is art. Cajal's autobiography is divided into two sections, one focused on his science and the other on his art. Yet, his life was an example of how it is possible to unite the two divisions. We take things apart in order to put them back together into some cohesive and comprehensive whole. When we do gather the pieces we often find new combinations and new meanings. When taken as a whole, what we observe is something with artful properties. It isn't until we begin to dissect the parts, either with microscopes or unaided eyes, that we discover the miraculous interweavings and interdependence. Cajal's drawings were ideas about central nervous system function, a very complex aspect of human anatomy and as yet unyielding in the secrets of how brain becomes mind.

Cajal developed an approach to the study of neural function he called the Neuron Theory. This was a description of neuroanatomy in which nerve cells were contiguous and not continuous in structure (the Reticular Theory), as championed by Camillo Golgi. Additionally, the Neuron Theory contained Cajal's Theory of Dynamic Polarization where chemical signals (now referred to as system information) flowed in only one direction along the nerve fibers, the directions designated by the arrows drawn on the maps of anatomical structures. The interruptions in nerve structure allowed for transmission of nerve signals by way of chemicals that crossed the small spaces between nerve bodies. This was not confirmed until the 1950s with electron microscopy. Many other theories proposed by Cajal were also confirmed many decades after his work was first published, all based on what his eye could see through his microscope. He was looking and also seeing, a prerequisite for discovery.

Prescience is far removed from guesswork. Cajal's foresight was based on endless hours hovering over a microscope and drawing what he could see. He brought to his scientific work an artist's eye and sensibility. What he recorded demonstrated that what he saw was structure and pattern and he translated these into elements of form, specificity, interdependence, complexity yielding to simplification, and information transmission—all precursors to intelligence and the evolution of mind. We are still far removed from the correlations that link our brains to our minds even in the most simplistic ways. Modern neuroscience has made strides in making connections between brain function and thought and behavior patterns but there is still no accounting for what makes me different in my thoughts from you. We know that all we are, how we act and interact, is confined to the processing in our brains but we don't have many clues as to how identities are formed and shaped in that marvelous machine, a machine that never sleeps the way we think sleep occurs. We don't know all the details about brain function in its normal state and less about abnormal brain function, about how it heals and about synaptic plasticity. Does the brain create the mind? Is learning a function of brain or mind? Where in the brain do we harbor our spiritual selves? How do we get the sense that our ideas are evolving and that we are growing in awareness and wisdom?

Today's Connectome Project is designed to map all of the brain's neuronal connections. Will that help us understand the answers to some of the questions asked above? If the neurons aren't connected in an interwoven reticular pattern and brain function is dependent on chemical transmission in one direction only along individual cells and if normal function recruits neurons from all over the brain, then do we think we will be able to know how the brain generates and supports the mind? In thinking even this, how will we track all the millions of connections and sparkings that help us think it?

I find it interesting that Cajal and Golgi championed diametrically opposite theories of nerve structure and function but shared a Nobel Prize for their work. We don't see this same open-ended acceptance of the idea that even in science (maybe especially in science) there are partial truths to be discovered and that science is more like art in being malleable, improvised, and creative in format but never fabricated. And it is also true that science is as often wrong as confirmatory in its results. But don't we learn as much and perhaps more by what science can't confirm as by how the results confirm the hypotheses? Don't we approach art in the same way? Isn't every piece of art an experiment? Don't both scientists and artists use the same neural structures in the brain, perhaps borrowing fibers and bundles from one another and recruiting for different purposes?

Cajal was honored in his own lifetime and not only by being awarded a Nobel Prize. One of the cells he first described and drew was named the “interstitial cell of Cajal.” It is a specific neuron within the smooth muscle of the gut that is a generator and pacemaker for the slow waves of gut contraction that mediates between motor neurons and the smooth muscle cells, allowing for the all-important movement of waste along the GI tract. In a gesture that honors Cajal's devotion to life viewed through the microscope and into the cosmos, Asteroid 117413 was named Ramonycajal in his honor. So, in the gut of us human animals or in the heart of the cosmos, Santiago Ramon y Cajal is truly honored as a man for all times. His life and work were art forms in the service of science and a greater understanding of the brain and mind.

ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE AND PRISONS

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) was a visitor from France to American soil in 1831, along with his friend Gustave de Beaumont. His stated mission was to observe and document the state of American prisons and penitentiaries. It was an odd subject and quite circumscribed in nature. What resulted from his visit was a book titled Democracy in America, published in 1835. This work was a wide ranging set of observations about a nation that had been populated and settled over a relatively short period of time compared to the country from which he hailed. Tocqueville was attuned to the issues of social consequence in his country and abroad. He was involved in the turmoil that rattled French society in the mid-eighteen hundreds and held posts in government at high levels. He seemed to be attuned to the effects of governmental transitions, violent or otherwise. It was this interest as well as an interest in the freedoms government promoted or curtailed that occupied him and to which he turned his prescient critical eye. What he was able to describe about the American character has been passed down to us even today as a legacy of his keen observations. I am not certain that his book on democracy influenced Frederick Jackson Turner in his descriptions of the passing of the frontier in American settlement, but I see it as the nucleus of Turner's portrait of the American character and “rugged individualism.” Both historians drew some conclusions about American society based on the characteristics of its citizens and these, in turn, were further elucidated and updated by Robert Bellah, et. al., in 1985 in their book, Habits of the Heart, a reference to Tocqueville's observations about American mores. That is still quite a long time ago as our history has unfolded. In many ways we are still a “new” country and always will be when compared with other nations and cultures. We seem to be in a continual state of growing pains, experiments, and restructuring. We resemble all other nations and cultures, however, in that we are always in the process of redefining our hopes and our progress, or lack of it. I believe that a way out of the confusion I experience when I examine current events is provided by a look back at sources like the works of Tocqueville, Turner, and Bellah which paint a broad picture of a nation always in flux. The seeds of American culture and character are still present in the soil of our lives together. Some of the seeds become weeds and some become more useful plants that sustain us. It isn't always easy to discern which is which. I believe that the agricultural/botanical/biological metaphor is useful because it can be used to better understand our complicated and often contradictory lives as a national community. The biological reference also allows us to borrow the idea of ecosystem as a way of teasing out what we can observe and understand from what we can't explain but which is part of the overall structure of autopoiesis (a word meaning self-regulating), and homeostasis (biological balance).

I have often thought of American culture (which includes our history) as a collage but I now see that as insufficient to understand the deeper levels of commitment and engagement that characterize us now in the early years of the 21^st century. A collage is a superficial arrangement pasted together and it is easy to portray American life that way, to paste together headlines and short stories about what we do and how we think. But our collective lives are much, much deeper and more profound than that and it takes some hard work to make it more of a sculpture or a defined entity. It takes intention and attention to carve away from the raw block of material what our character is not and to get to the three-dimensional form inside. Our lives are complicated and it isn't always possible to fit all the pieces together to see how it holds together. The idea of an ecosystem suggests that we have a system that does hold together in ways we can observe and in other ways we can't understand, but which are still within the system. As we mature as a nation, we are learning more about who we are and what our character looks like—and what we envision becoming over time.

I think it is as true for a nation as it is for an individual that we can create open spaces as well as prisons for ourselves. Tocqueville came to America with the intention of investigating prison systems but eventually defined aspects of national character (some universal and some particular to the United States) that translated as imprisoning forces for its government as well as for its individual citizens. For instance, he noticed that individualism and pragmatism were part of our character. Among our cultural traditions he also wrote about public-private tensions, the importance of personal success, the insistence on freedom and justice. But he also noted, as with all things, that there were some darker aspects to the loftier attributes of national character. Freedom granted to all was sometimes curtailed in the interests of some individuals whose freedom was borrowed from others. Economic acquisitiveness (greed), freedom from governmental interference, freedom to govern one's own course, and freedom from conforming values and from the past didn't necessarily translate into ideas about cooperation and community. Tocqueville noticed that for all the emphasis on this radical individualism there was an attendant isolationism for individuals who segregated themselves from others in their attempts to express their own freedoms. This tendency often led to a dispersion of effective communal action when it became important to resist authoritarian, administrative despotism or the call for greater social cohesion to protect against the threats of natural disaster or security threats. Individualism, in other words, opened up a vacuum into which more aggressive individuals with personal agendas were able to move and consolidate authority. I think we can see versions of this on the national and international political stages even today.

Similar tensions evolved in public vs. private life, in economics, in the spiritual life of individuals vs. communities of faith, in marriage and family life, in work vs. leisure, in the abandonment of rural life and the move to cities, in the “trigger” issues of personal choice, race (the persistence of slavery's legacies, for instance), gender, and moral values that have come down to us even today as important cultural and societal aspects of the American ecosystem. A biological ecosystem conforms to certain characteristics: dynamic interactions among elements, interactions that are non-linear (small changes can create large effects), modulation of local interactions within the system, feedback of interactive elements, unpredictable behavior of the whole system when compared to the behavior of individual elements, hard to define system boundaries, activation far from equilibrium (implying energy needs to sustain the system as a functioning whole), operating in the present as a result of adaptation to an evolving history, and various elements operating under the influence of local stimuli rather than from the system as a whole. When examined with a culture or society in mind, these same characteristics might also describe social vectors and influences which to my mind are very complex and difficult to understand and difficult, too, to put into a cohesive picture.

The fact that a complex system exists means that we might not understand all its necessary requirements but we can rely on its adaptive vigor for self-maintenance. Systems that don't maintain themselves in ways described above will not persist. And so when I think about how dysfunctional our form of democracy seems at times, I think that it is an ecosystem following an evolution of autopoiesis that can sustain its life. It doesn't mean that its elements won't change, that they will be predictable, and that all the elements will be discernible. It is a source of some psychological discomfort to accept levels of uncertainty in a system that we think should be more transparent and understandable, but we are living now in a time of great uncertainty and we are aware of structures of governance evolving (is dissolving too strong a word?). Our knowledge of change is based on a history of what seemed predictable and at a slower pace of change than what we are now experiencing. But our challenge is to define the changes in terms of a complex adaptive system and rest in the fact that if the changes cannot maintain the health of the entire system with all its different parameters, then the system will no longer exist and another complex system will appear with its own vectors and forces.

I am not sure that thinking about complex adaptive systems in reference to governance will bring any comfort of mind. But this is a different way to see the world as it changes and it allows for hope and possibility of new structures that may, in the process, be more useful and of greater service to the commonweal. I find that thinking in this way also applies to so many other sticky issues that confound us as a society, issues that have existed in one form or another for all of our history and as issues particular to us as human beings. I see challenges in the realms of interpersonal relationships, of status and privilege, of economic imbalances, political partisanship, of gender rights, of race, of social isolation, and the role of women in society, to name just a few. I see each of them as a complex adaptive system interacting with American society as a whole. Each is not isolated from the rest and all are somehow interwoven in the human psyche. They persist in our lives because they have autopoietic mechanisms and forces that give them life. They are continuing to evolve and sometimes at a pace that makes them seem exaggerated and overwhelming. But that is the nature of systems within systems that are given the nutrients they need to survive. Are we able to investigate and explore them deeply enough to understand them better? Do we have the perspective to allow this to happen? To whom do we turn to guide us in this search? Do we do this as a community? Is it even possible for one person (the rugged individualist?) to manage this exploration alone? What elements of the system aid us in our inquiry?

I began this entry with the idea that we often find ourselves imprisoned by boundaries we impose on our lives in one way or another. We would not need prisons if there were a different set of assumptions about what constitutes right and wrong behavior. A different set of “habits of the heart” would lead to different possibilities. I think we can see ourselves in a limited and imprisoning way or we can see how complex our lives are and seek new and different ways of understanding them. Tocqueville and his heirs (and maybe their predecessors at the founding of the republic) make a good case for individual freedom and also for communal engagement, all of which free us from a variety of prisons. No one gets everything and that is a good thing. We are complex beings living in ever more complicated times and knowing more about our capacities for adaptation makes us more resilient and healthier. But, like all healthy complex adaptive systems, this requires energy and the work of self-regulation.