Thread by @DoctorVive

Yesterday I tweeted that I thought the concept of "human cognition" was an ideological fiction, which essentializes mental processes that are determined by history and culture.

Here are three examples of the way "human cognition" has changed since the English Renaissance.

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https://twitter.com/DoctorVive/status/1280633691061006337

First of all: educated people used to have much better memories than they do now.

Obviously they didn't have little devices on which they could look up whatever.

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But they were also trained to memorize everything they learned by constructing mental images of buildings into which they placed pictures of information, which they could retrieve by imagining walking through the buildings and "reading" the images they had placed there.

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Cool, right? There's more in the book *The Art of Memory* by F Yates.

Arguably few have the capacity to do this today, except for competitive memorizers (yes they do exist—the book *Moonwalking with Einstein* is about a journalist's attempt to win a memory championship).

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So does that mean the Renaissance capacity for extraordinary memory characterizes "human cognition"? Or that our lack of recall due to our education and technology exemplifies the human?

The answer of course is: neither.

The capacity for memory is constructed by culture.

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Second: time.

You often hear that people don't care about climate change because "human cognition" can't really perceive geological time or future consequences or whatever.

This is hogwash.

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Reformation Protestantism (the English Renaissance state religion) was *obsessed* with the apocalypse. OBSESSED.

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The idea was that you died a physical death but
then kind of hung around in suspended animation until the last day, the day of judgement, waaaay in the future, when God would resurrect your body from the ground and place you in heaven.

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That was if you were good, of course: if you were bad your soul would go straight to hell and then be utterly destroyed at the apocalypse never to exist more.

Or something like that: the details were always being debated.

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And whatever you did in your daily life you would measure against this idea of a judgement that would come to you far, far in the future, when time would be converted into eternity.

The mundane connected to the cosmic at every moment.

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And even if you weren't religious, you were influenced, perhaps, by your concern with your posthumous reputation—a worry that shows up in almost all writing, fiction and non-fiction, from the period.

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Capitalist culture invented the idea that "human cognition" is most concerned with maximizing utility, or sussing out the obstacles to and opportunities for fulfilling individual preferences.

This is an impoverished idea of the mind.

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And, finally, death: most writers in early modern England lost at least one of their children.

Now, in our culture, losing a child is understood as a trauma from which you never fully recover.

But here is little evidence for this view in Renaissance texts.

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Does this mean that early modern English parents felt less traumatic grief than we do? And if so would it not be because children so often died that it was by necessity was normalized?

But then, how do you identify the "human" response to losing your child?

You can't.

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Anyway, the point is that it's wrong and misleading to say that "human cognition" will always deal with climate change in one way or another.

And it's no accident that those arguments very often seem to uphold the status quo.

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Attempts to universalize the way things are now, whether in our societies or in our heads, are nearly always attempts to make our current situation, and it's current structures of power, seem inevitable. Don't fall for it!

fin/

*its