BARBICAN LIFE
Psychological Sclerosis
Sreela Banerjee
Sreela Banerjee looks at sclerosis in various areas of life, and wonders if it arises from isolation. Might the Ohio kidnapping have something to do with inserting light emitting diodes into the brains of mice? The scientist Wallace convinces her of the need to allow space for seemingly conflicting ideas in one’s head, and worries about those who
are negating the existence of ideas which defy easy measurement.
The magnificently bearded Alfred Wallace
S Dr Rupert Sheldrake 10
Can intellectual sclerosis can make mothers ineffective ?
pring is struggling to arrive in the Barbican, and stay with any degree of certainty. It seems as if the rapid change in the world today has affected the very airmass we live under.
The song of the daffodils is being drowned out – the tulips don’t know when to start arriving. The weather suffers from sclerosis, stuck on winter, and refuses to consult the calendar which shows a picture of high summer in a park. I gave my son his winter coat, in late May, and wiped the breakfast counter. Sclerosis is everywhere - the washing machine was stuck, and so was I on a presentation about some
very new technology. I took a break, but couldn’t avoid the day’s main theme. A chance skype conversation guided me to the work of Rupert Sheldrake, who contends that science too is suffering from sclerosis. Let me put his thesis simply – science today is based on the understanding that all reality is material, and that each person’s consciousness is therefore some kind of ‘result’ of the brain’s physical activity. Matter is unconscious and evolution has no purpose. God, therefore we seem to have concluded, is an idea resident entirely in the brains of human beings. These beliefs have become powerful in the modern world, not because scientists think about them and examine them critically and rigorously, but because they don’t – these are the core (and according to Sheldrake unexamined) assumptions – in the same way, I thought, that the summer picture on the calendar, leads us to assume an outside temperature, which taking off our jackets and standing on the balcony negates. Sheldrake contends that scientists have failed to take the outside temperature of every zeitgeist since Charles Lyell proposed that all of the change in the natural world happened gradually. Washing the essentials by hand, and calling a plumber, I wondered what Alfred Wallace would say : he was the co-discoverer with Darwin of evolution by natural selection, and happened to have died a hundred years ago this year. Did you see the television programme about him last
month ? Lovely. St Paul’s Cathedral School has decided to sing Wallace’s praises at their concert this summer: ‘Wallace was a very busy man’. He was busy ‘being all of himself’, in spite of the scientific theory he was proposing: What is remarkable about Wallace is that he did not suffer from this sclerosis that Sheldrake complains about – Wallace believed that everything living was ‘imbued with spirit’. This did not sit awkwardly with his knowledge that natural selection, not a divine command, had created all the different species demonstrating a breadth of mind which is rare today. Though he thought of natural selection independently of Darwin, Wallace has long been ignored, perhaps for this reason, as much as any efforts by the pro-Darwin lobby. So what has led to this sclerosis I
wonder. The world has changed rapidly, even since the birth of my millennium baby. It is common these
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