Is critical race theory an inversion of history?

John Ellis, who says yes, is a professor emeritus of German literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz (and author of “A Short History of Relations Between Peoples: How the World Began to Move Beyond Tribalism.” )

I've decided to share his recent WSJ essay to archive them for myself and interested MindBlog readers, even though it is overly simplistic in its emphasis on the virtues of the Anglosphere versus its vices. His basic argument is that so-called "White Privilege" of the Anglosphere is what originally freed us from a universal tribalism in which everyone, by today's standards, was racist. It did this by developing the idea of a common humanity.  Here is the text: 

It’s a tribute of sorts to critical race theory’s success that the Trump administration will make its eradication a priority. The Biden administration had quietly implemented policies throughout the federal government based on this theory, and it is being taught in colleges and schools throughout the country. It has overrun much of the corporate world, and it has even secured a place in the training of many professions. The accusations made in closed training sessions are astonishingly venomous: Arrogant white supremacy is ubiquitous; white rage results when that supremacy is challenged; whites hold money and power because they stole it from other races; systemic racism and capitalism keep the injustices going.

All of this is based on categorically false assumptions about the past. We need only look at how the modern idea of our common humanity originated and developed to see that critical race theory has everything backward. A realistic history tells us that the thinkers and engineers of the Anglosphere, principally England and the U.S., are the heroes, not the villains, of this story, while the rest were laggards, not leaders.

For most of recorded history, neighboring peoples regarded each other with apprehension if not outright fear and loathing. Tribal and racial attitudes were universal. That’s a long way from the orthodoxy of our own time, which holds that we are all one human family. Before that consensus arose, a charge of racism made no sense. By today’s standards, everyone was racist.

It’s not hard to understand why tribalism once reigned everywhere. Without modern transportation and communication, most people knew nothing about other societies. What contact there was between different peoples often involved warfare, and that made everyone fear strangers. The insecurity of life in earlier times added to this anxiety. Protections we now enjoy didn’t exist: policing, banking, competent medical care, social safety nets. The supply of food was uncertain before trucks and refrigeration. In a dangerous world people clung to their own kind for safety, and that was a natural and even necessary attitude.

How did we get from this mindset to the idea of a common humanity? The practical impediments to the world’s peoples getting to know and eventually respect each other were largely removed by British and American engineers. They invented the steam engine, then used it to develop the first railways. They followed this by inventing and massproducing cars, trucks and finally airplanes. They pioneered radio, television, films, newspapers and the internet. The result was that ignorance of other peoples was turned around.

But in the 18th century the British did something even more important: They began to develop our modern outlook on race.

Why Britain? Liberalizing political developments beginning with the Magna Carta and the first representative Parliament, called by Simon de Montfort, fostered greater liberty for the British subject. Liberty led to increasing prosperity, and prosperity to a rapid increase in literacy. Widespread literacy created the first large reading public: By the beginning of the 18th century, dozens of newspapers and periodicals were being published in Britain. An extensive reading public allowed public opinion to become a powerful force, and that set the stage for manifestos and petitions, even campaigns about matters that offended the public’s conscience.

A series of British writers began to promote ideas about the conduct of life and the role of government. Among the most important was John Locke, who argued that every human life had its own rationale, none being created for the use of another. Another was David Hume, who wrote that all men are nearly equal “in their mental power and faculties, till cultivated by education.” These and many others were launching what would become the modern consensus that we are all one human family. The idea gained ground so quickly that in Britain, and there alone, a powerful campaign to abolish slavery arose. By the end of the 18th century that campaign was leading to prohibitions in many parts of the Anglosphere, while Africa and Asia remained as tribalist and racist as ever.

As this idea took hold it made the British see their empire differently. Like other European countries, Britain had initially sought empire to strengthen its position in the world—others would add territory if Britain didn’t, and Britain would be weakened. But if the peoples of the British Empire were one human family, how could some be subordinate to others? The British began to consider themselves responsible for the welfare and development of their subject peoples, and for giving them competent administration before they had learned to provide it themselves. That change inevitably led to the dissolution of empire, and to a consensus that the time for empires (of which there had been hundreds) was over. The world’s most influential anti-imperialists were British. The idea of a common humanity spread across the globe as the power and influence of the Anglosphere grew.

First, this new ideology spread throughout the quarter of the globe’s peoples that were in the British Empire, where different races were learning to live and work together. Next, the Anglosphere’s cultural influence went worldwide as Britain’s industrial revolution set off a culture of innovation that resulted in a universal civilization— that is, modernity. As that way of life spread throughout the world, it carried with it the idea of a common humanity. There’s a simple explanation for what critical race theory calls “white privilege.” Because the Anglosphere developed prosperous modernity and gave it to the world, English-speakers were naturally the first to enjoy it. People initially outside that culture of innovation are still catching up. Asians and Asian-Americans have done this with great success, but critical race theory impedes the progress of other groups by persuading them to demonize the people who created the modern values they have adopted. It betrays those values by stoking racial hatred. Critical race theory tells us that all was racial harmony until racist Europeans disturbed it, but the truth is rather that all was tribal hostility until the Anglosphere rescued us.

Breathing during sleep orchestrates hippocampal nested sleep oscillations underlying memory consolidation

A fascinating correlation is found by Sheriff et al.  Their abstract:

Nested sleep oscillations, emerging from asynchronous states in coordinated bursts, are critical for memory consolidation. Whether these bursts emerge intrinsically or from an underlying rhythm is unknown. Here, we show a previously undescribed respiratory-driven oscillation in the human hippocampus that couples with cardinal sleep oscillations. Further, breathing promotes nesting of ripples in slow oscillations, together suggesting that respiration acts as an intrinsic rhythm to coordinate synchronization of sleep oscillations, providing a unique framework to characterize sleep-related respiratory and memory processes.

Predictive coding for social perception

Rittershofer et al. introduce a special issue of Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews titled "Neurobiology of Social Interactions Across Species."  Here is the first part of that introduction:

Perception cannot rely solely on bottom-up processes, whereby patterns of receptor stimulation are passed up the hierarchy to generate a corresponding awareness. Such bottom-up processes would always generate experiences that are out-of-date and saturated by noise. Predictive processes are thought to play a key role in overcoming these problems, allowing us to generate best guesses concerning the likely sensorium, and highlighting quickly when the world is not as we expect. Action provides a crucial predictive source and a mechanism for us to resolve uncertainty and surprise, but further complicates our understanding due to further predictive cues and continuous change of sensory input. Another agent who can also change the world and who we seek to understand adds another layer of complexity yet. How can we understand the predictive mechanisms supporting social interaction and understanding, with such a multitude of moving and interacting components? In this special issue, Keysers et al. (2024) outline how predictive coding can be applied to understanding the actions and emotions of others, with Mayo and Shamay-Tsoory (2024) discussing how these mutual predictions might shape social learning. They suggest that such social learning might be supported by interbrain synchronization and Antonelli et al. (2024) discuss the critical role of emotion in shaping these multibrain dynamics.

 

While it is clearly crucial that we understand the nature of the mechanisms underlying social interactions, we wish to highlight the challenges of this complexity for scientific progress. Particularly, how to find ways to properly test, refute, and improve our models, when the assumed supporting mechanisms are so complex.

 

How predictions shape neural processing is thought to differ across space and time, even for processing of the simplest (non-social; static) elements of our environment. Keysers et al. (2024) highlight the assumed neural interactions across cortical layers, such that predictions are passed down the hierarchy to hypothesis units in deep (and perhaps superficial) cortical layers, input arrives in middle layers, and error signals are calculated and represented in superficial layers. This idea is supported by recent 7 T MRI work from our lab demonstrating increased decoding of predicted Gabor orientations in deep layers of primary visual cortex, with an advantage for unpredicted orientations in superficial layers (Thomas et al., 2024). Recent evidence suggests opposing influences at the temporal level as well (McDermott et al., 2024). This electroencephalography (EEG) study found that early perceptual processing is biased towards what we expect (< 200 ms; optimizing veridicality) with the advantage flipping in later timeranges (> 200 ms; optimizing informativeness – in line with the opposing process account proposed in Press et al., 2020). Building testable mechanistic accounts of these interactions across time and space – even for the simple perception of deterministic sequences of Gabor patches – represents a continued puzzle for future work.

 

In the social domain, the stimuli are by their nature highly complex and dynamic (Keysers et al., 2024). Therefore, these above interactions across space and time must be continuously updated. Despite this complexity, there is some evidence cited by Keysers et al. (2024) inline with the above laminar conclusions in simpler environments. Specifically, there is increased deep-layer information about observed actions in parietal cortex when presented in a predictable order, mediated via feedback connections (from premotor cortex). Social domains also yield multiple sources of prediction about the self and other (Mayo and Shamay-Tsoory, 2024) and we must determine how we weight the precision, or reliability, of these different sources, as well as how we render information about the self and other separable. Is this achieved by different cell populations coding information about the self and other (Mayo and Shamay-Tsoory, 2024)? Or could mechanisms similar to those proposed to distinguish products of imagination from reality (similarly internal vs external sources), also help in determining the information source in social situations?

 

Social predictions might be supported by interbrain synchronization (measured via hyperscanning), as discussed by Mayo and Shamay-Tsoory (2024); focus on social learning) and Antonelli et al. (2024); focus on emotion). We propose that one key challenge for this approach is determining the role played by different event-related inputs and responses in the effects: Interpretation of hyperscanning data is plagued by the problem that brains will be “in synch” if two individuals are either perceiving the same events or producing the same behaviour. The brain’s responses to moving our arm or looking at a face are remarkably similar across individuals, such that if two of us perceive or produce the same event our neural response will be matched. Fluctuations in synchronisation according to, e.g., dominance of individuals or levels of excitement on stage, could be determined by fluctuations in whether we attend to, or produce, the same events. It is crucial to understand the fascinating influence of these effects on synchronisation.

 

 

Romantic Relationships Matter More to Men than to Women

I pass on the abstract of an interesting manuscript that has been accepted by Behavioral and Brain Science, by Wahring et al. :

Women are often viewed as more romantic than men, and romantic relationships are assumed to be more central to the lives of women than to those of men. Despite the prevalence of these beliefs, some recent research paints a different picture. Using principles and insights based on the interdisciplinary literature on mixed-gender relationships, we advance a set of four propositions relevant to differences between men and women and their romantic relationships. We propose that relative to women: (a) men expect to obtain greater benefits from relationship formation and thus strive more strongly for a romantic partner, (b) men benefit more from romantic relationship involvement in terms of their mental and physical health, (c) men are less likely to initiate breakups, and (d) men suffer more from relationship dissolution. We offer theoretical explanations based on differences between men and women in the availability of social networks that provide intimacy and emotional support. We discuss implications for friendships in general and friendships between men and women in particular.

Children as agents of cultural adaption

When I scroll through some of the social medial sites (Instagram, Tik-Tok, X, YouTube, etc.) used by today's teenagers and their influencers I feel I am visiting another planet whose denizens have brains that process reality in an entirely different way from my 82 year old model. They have much shorter attention spans that remain focused on one context for only a few seconds  before flitting on. What kind of culture does this peer group inhabit?  This issue is addressed in a manuscript  by Levy and Amir accepted by Behavioral and Brain Science that one can download and read through.   Here is their abstract:

The human capacity for culture is a key determinant of our success as a species. While much work has examined adults’ abilities to create and transmit cultural knowledge, relatively less work has focused on the role of children (approx. 3-17 years) in this important process. In the cases where children are acknowledged, they are largely portrayed as acquirers of cultural knowledge from adults, rather than cultural producers in their own right. In this paper, we bring attention to the important role that children play in cultural adaptation by highlighting the structure, function, and ubiquity of the large body of knowledge produced and transmitted by children, known as peer culture. Supported by evidence from diverse disciplines, we argue that children are independent producers and maintainers of these autonomous cultures, which exist with regularity across diverse societies, and persist despite compounding threats. Critically, we argue peer cultures are a source of community knowledge diversity, encompassing both material and immaterial knowledge related to geography, ecology, subsistence, norms, and language. Through a number of case studies, we further argue that peer culture products and associated practices — including exploration, learning, and the retention of abandoned adult cultural traits — may help populations adapt to changing ecological and social conditions, contribute to community resilience, and even produce new cultural communities. We end by highlighting the pressing need for research to more carefully investigate children's roles as active agents in cultural adaptation.

How our brain networks are reconfigured by a cortisol increase 30-45 min after our waking.

 Zeng et al.  offer a fascinating account of how the rise in our body cortisol levels 30-45 min after waking orchestrates a reconfiguration of brain networks underlying working memory, emotional reguation and executive functioning.  I pass on the introductory paragraph of the article, followed by the article's abstract. (Motivated readers can obtain a PDF of the entire paper with graphics by emailing me.)

The introductory paragraph: 

For centuries, scientists have sought to unravel how the brain and endocrinal signals work in concert to support ever-changing cognitive and environmental demands. In theory, to sustain a dynamic equilibrium between internal milieu and external challenges, the brain and endocrinal signals actively engage in allocation of neural resources to prepare for the upcoming challenges (1, 2). Such active process has been conceptualized as “allostasis” and is believed to serve as one key principle of how neural and endocrinal signals interplay to support nuanced emotional and executive functions, though the underlying mechanisms remain largely elusive. Among endocrinal signals, the stress hormone cortisol plays a critical role in mobilizing energy supply for brain, cognition, and emotion (1, 3, 4). The cortisol awakening response (CAR), in particular, as a natural rise of cortisol through activation of the hypothalamus–pituitary–adrenal (HPA) axis within 30 to 45 min after morning awakening, is superimposed upon the circadian rhythm of cortisol secretion and is more than the mere release of cortisol (5–7). The CAR has been thought to support anticipation of a day’s most reliable stressor—waking up, mobilizing the energy to daily activities (8–10) and proactively modulates human emotion and cognition (11–13). Such proactive effects are reminiscent of a potential mediator of allostasis (1, 14). Although the CAR proactive effects are well documented at a behavioral level, our understanding of the underlying neurobiological mechanisms still remains in its infancy.

The article's abstract:

Emotion and cognition involve an intricate crosstalk of neural and endocrine systems that support dynamic reallocation of neural resources and optimal adaptation for upcoming challenges, an active process analogous to allostasis. As a hallmark of human endocrine activity, the cortisol awakening response (CAR) is recognized to play a critical role in proactively modulating emotional and executive functions. Yet, the underlying mechanisms of such proactive effects remain elusive. By leveraging pharmacological neuroimaging and hidden Markov modeling of brain state dynamics, we show that the CAR proactively modulates rapid spatiotemporal reconfigurations (state) of large-scale brain networks involved in emotional and executive functions. Behaviorally, suppression of CAR proactively impaired performance of emotional discrimination but not working memory (WM), while individuals with higher CAR exhibited better performance for both emotional and WM tasks. Neuronally, suppression of CAR led to a decrease in fractional occupancy and mean lifetime of task-related brain states dominant to emotional and WM processing. Further information-theoretic analyses on sequence complexity of state transitions revealed that a suppressed or lower CAR led to higher transition complexity among states primarily anchored in visual-sensory and salience networks during emotional task. Conversely, an opposite pattern of transition complexity was observed among states anchored in executive control and visuospatial networks during WM, indicating that CAR distinctly modulates neural resources allocated to emotional and WM processing. Our findings establish a causal link of CAR with brain network dynamics across emotional and executive functions, suggesting a neuroendocrine account for CAR proactive effects on human emotion and cognition.