In
1947 Lionel Trilling described a reductive “spectre” that, he
said, “haunts our culture. People will eventually be unable to say, ‘They fell
in love and married’, but will as a matter of course say, ‘Their libidinal
impulses being reciprocal, they activated their individual erotic drives and
integrated them within the same frame of reference’.”
Nowadays
neuroscientific explanations for behaviour have largely replaced
the Freudian ones Trilling was so suspicious of.
We’re more likely to talk about neurons firing than libidinal impulses. But the
underlying anxiety he diagnosed remains. We want to believe we are more than our
brains. Are we?
Dick
Swaab, a professor of neuroscience at the University of Amsterdam, doesn’t think
so. In We Are Our Brains he identifies himself as a “neurocalvinist”. He thinks
that everything from gender identity to sexual orientation to a propensity for
schizophrenia is neurologically determined in utero. This leads him to make some
counter-intuitive pronouncements. If you are born in the winter, Swaab says,
you’re more likely to develop schizophrenia. Exercise is bad for you. The bigger
your brain the longer you’ll live. Most antidepressants are no more effective
than placebos.
Swaab
argues that free will is an illusion, and that the social relativism of the
Sixties and Seventies, a time when “there was a universal belief in social
engineering”, was profoundly misguided. People are born bad or good, mad or sad,
and there’s little we can do to change them. Telegraph.
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