The Need for Coherence (EN#18)
The existence of physiological imperatives like hunger or thirst, or of emotional systems like fear or rage rarely creates controversy among observers of the human species. Things get a little tougher when it comes to more complex systems. Precisely, this post looks at a need belonging to a complex system that I often put at the head of the pack when I try to make sense of the functioning of a person, I think here of the need for coherence. Whether or not our behavior appears coherent to others, we need to believe that it is. The illusion does not create so much of a problem with neural functioning; in fact, it tends to harmonize it.
You know that my posts are most often launched by a coincidence that causes a desire to write, the pleasure of finding the keyboard under my fingers. This time it is the reading of an amazing production by Edgar Morin who was one of my thinking masters of a more distant time of my existence. Amazing, because as I understand it, he wrote “Les souvenirs viennent à ma rencontre[1],” a book of over 700 pages, as he approaches his 100th birthday. So, an autobiographical memory in such good condition at this age. Easy to grasp that it gave me so much pleasure, it gives me hope, it is not impossible to continue to function well mentally even at the dawn of a century of existence. When we have fewer years to live than those that have already passed, these little details count 🤔.
Edgar Morin, this colossal intellectual and humanist, was a resistance fighter during the Second World War, my father was a voluntary participant (Canadian in Europe). Edgar Morin was from that time when ideas were just as important as the concrete aspects of life … they were “the opium of intellectuals[2].” My adolescence bathed there; it even suffered because my neurotic functioning at the time forced me to abdicate to the Truth that after having found (a rather disproportionate requirement, you will agree) I had to implement, without the slightest compromise … nothing less. Now, I have learned, life benefits from flexibility, if only to recognize the reality of things and beings (no way around). It may sound obvious, but it isn’t when you give ideas all that power. But another thing that I learned is that ideas are not what they look like. This is why the problem with adhering to an ideology is that there is a certainty that it will turn out to be false at some point. And whatever they claim to be, ideas have no way of getting out of our embodiment; Antonio Damasio definitely convinced me of this one. So, in my understanding of things, an idea must be embodied, testing all the dimensions of reality that are accessible to us.
Let’s go back to the trigger for this post. A morning at dawn, reading this work by Edgar Morin (with a brain already bubbling with dopamine), I came across a paragraph in which he explains how he at some point believed that the Soviet Communism was the hope of the world (another time-consuming addiction to neurotransmitters):
“… I convince myself that the Soviet victory, by putting an end to the capitalist encirclement, will allow the advent of a marvelous civilization conforming to the communist ideology of brotherhood and human emancipation, not only in the Soviet Union, but in Europe and beyond. Malraux’s novels, La Condition humaine, Le Temps du mépris, L’Espoir, made his communist heroes exalting models, evoking the heroic epic of the revolutionaries and their martyrdom. The communists became in my mind like the first Christians. I concealed the fact that communism had produced executioners, I saw that it had produced and continues to produce saints and heroes[3].”
(Edgar Morin, Les Souvenirs viennent à ma rencontre, Éditions Fayard, p. 104)
Do you understand what I was saying about the neural harmony created by illusions? It’s wrong, but it’s harmonious; objections are simply put aside, and everything floats with the current.
It’s as if in the few sentences of this extract I find guidelines from my life … as a sign that our destiny is linked to that of certain people without anyone really knowing how.
Our autobiographical memory is the most plastic. Like an unfinished painting, it can be touched up at any time. A new context leads us to review for a nth time certain periods of our life, to give them a slightly or radically different meaning. So, this passage borrowed from this book by Edgar Morin leads me to reformulate another time certain guidelines of my life, yet already visited in this blog. It may probably be a little less confusing than my previous post on Infinity even if it always comes from the same brain (some might believe that at times it derails) 😊.
Already, in my early childhood, and this until the beginning of my adult life, I had to be certain of having identified a Truth and to dedicate my life to it. Although Edgar Morin’s communism was never part of it, I was more on the side of religion, of the spiritual. I already mentioned it on this blog, it had finally led to the plan to become a Jesuit, an order that I considered to be the intellectual branch of the Catholic Church and of which one of my idols at the time, Teilhard Chardin, had been part of.
Dedicating your life to the “real” ideology obviously involves the enormous risk of being mistaken and ending up with the painful experience of one day having to grieve it when, unfortunately, you realize that you have chosen the wrong side. And as today I consider that the problem there is to adhere to an ideology, it is that there is a certainty that it will turn out to be false at a given time, one can thus understand with what stake I, as a neurotic, found myself at the time. It is this period of my existence whose memory is revived by Edgar Morin’s book.
And to add to the coincidences the extract from this book quoted above refers to André Malraux and La Condition humaine, a book which with L’Étranger (The Outsider) from Camus definitely changed all the paradigms at the base of my conception of life I had constructed from childhood to adolescence.
I have already mentioned that at the conclusion of The Outsider, the protagonist waiting in prison for his execution receives the visit of a priest who, trying to bring him to God, finally tells him that he will pray for him. It triggers a state of rage in him: “So, I don’t know why, something burst inside me. I started shouting at the top of my lungs and swore at him and told him not to pray for me. I grabbed him by the collar of his cassock. I poured out all the feelings that surged up from the depths of my heart in waves of anger and joy. He seemed so sure of himself, didn’t he?” And it was this which caused a cataclysm in my beliefs in one sentence: “But no one of his certainties was worth a single strand of a woman’s hair.”[4] I had just had the first experience of an embodied truth – no intellectual effort was necessary to make this certainty of truth (subjective, of course) vibrate inside me … an emotional truth, I would name more than half a century later under the influence of my colleagues from Coherence therapy.
As for Malraux’s La Condition humaine, this book has attacked (by collateral effect as it is said today) the power that ideologues could have over me. In an ideology claiming to defend a Truth, it is not uncommon for the service of the Cause to prevail over all other considerations, which can even lead in extreme cases to the murder of others and to suicide, even if life is the only good we really have. In Malraux’s novel, a communist protagonist, “Tchen,” ends up launching himself with a bomb under a car with the intention of killing a general. Here too, as with Camus’s Outsider, there has been a brutal revolution in my belief system; it was subjectively obvious to me (again this is emotional truth) that Tchen was not sacrificing his life for the communist cause, he was giving himself his own ultimate meaning. Everything that we experience from the noblest action to the most abject (from multiple points of view) must necessarily rest on a system of coherence, itself inseparable from our body, particularly our neural functioning.
Our brains feed on consistency like our stomachs on food. For me, Tchen made no altruistic gesture, he tried to solve his problem once and for all; he would die in a state of coherence and would no longer have to find or maintain others afterwards. Fortunately (in my own coherence), few people opt for such a radical solution, that of depriving themselves of life in order to give it meaning.
But I was not escaping it either, this achievement also came to settle for me issues of coherence. Already, in my period of religious belief, a period when this belief in God irrevocably forced me to devote myself to his service (like the Communists in the service of the party), it was very difficult for me to successfully integrate what I saw in the presbyteries while I was serving mass. Priests, the representatives of God on earth, often displayed a smallness, a meanness which my brain had the greatest difficulty in integrating into this idea of representatives of God. This asked me for distortions of reality such as those referred to by Edgar Morin in: “I concealed the fact that communism had engendered executioners. ”
However, the mission of “Tchen” had just laid the foundation for the direction that was going to take all my intellectual and spiritual quest for the rest of life. I had found my coherence, understanding how biology, psychology and sociology, in particular, gave me access to human coherence and its intentionality.
Nothing that is human escapes the need for coherence. Coherence is for the mind what homeostasis is for the body.
A simple example? Linger over discussions at family gatherings or with friends. Observe how we all want coherence. For example, that rudimentary need to be right even if the discussion should have no concrete impact on reality. Sometimes, the tone rises, we may get angry even in order to finally make it clear to the other that he or she is wrong. Isn’t the simple subscript that I cannot afford to lose this way of seeing and understanding things, this vision of the world and of myself that reassures me about my place in all this?
To come back to what triggered this reflection inside me, the book “Les souvenirs viennent à ma rencontre,” it reminded me of what ended up creating coherence in myself. Edgar Morin published this masterpiece, in six volumes, La Méthode (The Method). He states that coherence can be enriched by Complexity. There are consistencies which are simple, and which may suffice to create a life meaning. Once I asked my father what made him believe in God and he had this charming answer, “Because if God doesn’t exist, life would have no meaning.” It is coherent, and it has held up for over 90 years. But, luckily or unfortunately for his son, it did not have the same imprint on him. So, I had to fall back on characters (idealized?) like Edgar Morin: coherence capable of recognizing complementarity and antagonism integrating into a complexity never at rest, self-organizing endlessly…
[1] “Memories come my way” (free translation)
[2] Free translation of the title of this book: L’Opium des intellectuels from Raymond Aron (1955, revised in 1968: nrf Gallimard)
[3] Free translation
[4] Albert Camus, The Outsider, Penguin Modern Classics.
pcousineau 