Reclaiming Hearts & Minds

Hearts and Minds (Reclaiming the soul of science and medicine) by Walter Alexander; (Lindisfarne Books, 2019), 335 pages.

review by Frederick Dennehy

Years ago, when I was on the board of Steiner Books, there were repeated discussions about what it would take to have a “breakout” book, one that would sell multiple thousands of print copies and make Rudolf Steiner and anthroposophy household names. One suggestion that came up often was a personalized, intimate, “warts and all” non-hagiographic biography of Rudolf Steiner, preferably by a well-known and non-anthroposophist author—someone who could draw in the readers who very much wanted to hear about Steiner and what he had to say but didn’t yet know it.

Others said that you had to break open the hard anthroposophical ground first—crack the shell— or the audience in waiting would not be prepared to listen. Owen Barfield had done something like that in academic circles in the latter part of the twentieth century, with Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry, the reissued Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning, and a host of other elegantly reasoned works. They had been widely respected in American universities, often assigned as reading in English departments. Barfield’s acknowledged purpose in writing Saving the Appearances had been precisely to remove the obstacles to a contemporary appreciation of Steiner and his teachings.

The biographies that have appeared since that time—excellent ones by Lindemann, Selg, Lachman—have done little to move the needle in this country. Barfield is now largely forgotten on campuses, and even among many anthroposophists his writings are considered too “difficult,” “stylized” or “off-putting” to generate much interest. Removing the obstacles to an appreciation of Rudolf Steiner’s teaching has become tougher and trickier, precisely because those obstacles—the prevalence of reductionism and the shrinking sense of an inner life that follows from it—are more embedded than ever, both in in academia and in popular culture. Their removal today requires a deeper reach. Walter Alexander, in his Hearts and Minds (reclaiming the soul of science and medicine), does more than reach deep. In his engaging, user-friendly and penetrating study of the thinking that underlies orthodox science and medicine, he invites, coaxes and finally persuades his readers to come to their own awareness of the clear and present danger of reductionism, to prepare ground in which spiritual science might flourish.

Reductionism is dangerous because at best it makes no room for, and at worst it outright denies, the willed activity of thinking. If we lose the understanding of the place of our own thinking, we have lost ourselves. Without a tenable experience of that self, an authentic questioning of our place in the social, political, economic, or communal world is meaningless. Hearts and Minds is a book about the possibility of restoration—restoration of the soul that orthodox science has estranged from us as well as from itself. That restoration, Mr. Alexander makes clear, depends not only on the arts and humanities, but on the victims/victimizers themselves, on the peripheral precincts of science and medicine.

Mr. Alexander has no special training in medicine or any of the sciences he discusses in this book. He is, however, a freelance medical journalist of long standing—as he puts it, an expert at talking to experts—and, we should add, at decoding technical jargon into accessible prose and reformulating unfamiliar concepts on multiple levels. He introduces “Sound Check” sections that raise the reader’s level of focus in order to begin to connect at a higher level the disparate stories, interviews, and surveys that weave their way through the chapters. And there are the many “Trash Talk” digressions, where two of New York City’s sanitation workers attempt to make workaday sense of the scientific expositions and conundrums that have come before in the text.

More than half a century ago, Sir Isaiah Berlin famously divided the world of thinkers and writers into “hedgehogs” and “foxes.” Hedgehogs view the world in terms of a single idea. They know “one big thing.” Foxes draw on a variety of unrelated, even contradictory ideas and experiences, without reaching after a unifying principle. Berlin is reported to have coined the distinction as a kind of intellectual parlor game, but it is an unusually intriguing one, and has not lost traction over the years. Mr. Alexander is a writer with an unusually wide variety of interests, including medicine, science, the arts, philosophy, political issues, and human behavior. He draws on a wealth of disparate information, and writes with the wit and humor that is born of experience layered with tolerance, manifested in cascades of unexpected metaphors and analogies. He has, in short, all the characteristics one would expect in a fox.

Mr. Alexander, however, is a hedgehog in disguise, because he knows one very big thing. It remains in the afterglow of every interview, anecdote, exploration, illustration, and question that permeates this delightful book. That one big thing might be capsuled in a phrase coined by Owen Barfield in his novel, Unancestral Voice: “Interior is anterior,” or, phrased differently, thinking is the silent partner in every perception, idea, or discovery we have.1

1 Other concepts in Hearts and Minds extended from their origins in Barfield are the evolution of consciousness, as distinct from the history ofideas, which posits that because consciousness is correlative to phenomenon, the evolution of the earth and various aspects of it is at the same time an evolution of consciousness. Thus, as Mr. Alexander points out in Chapter 4, the facile assumption that history tracks only our changing ideas about the same “world” ignores the fact that our “world,” or our perception of the world, may change even more fundamentally than our thoughts about it. To use Mr. Alexander’s own imaginative and useful vocabulary, our “worlding” changes. “Worlding,” or our inner contribution to the construction of the world we experience, is itself expanded from Barfield’s figuration.

Far from being an “epiphenomenon,” or a peripheral nuisance to experience and fact, it is, as Sherlock Holmes once described Doctor Watson, “the one fixed point in a changing world.” It is the substance that underlies our medicine, our physics and the way we see the world. And if we want to understand these or any other phenomena of our experience, thinking is the place where we have to start.

Ours is an age of general distrust of expertise and, in the battle zone of choices we have been thrust into by modern health care schemes, a particular distrust of medical expertise. For that reason, Mr. Alexander’s dispatches from the front lines of today’s medical research and pharmacological trials will be of close interest to every reader.

The news, for the most part, is not good. At least as far as medical research is concerned, the notion of science as a discipline of open-minded inquiry seems quaint at best. The experimental evidence for the efficacy of homeopathy, for instance, is impressive, and unquestionably is deserving of further research and robust debate. That is unlikely to happen in today’s academic climate, with its reflex “circle the wagons” reaction to whatever cautious suggestion is made at readjusting , even slightly, the way of looking at things and ideas that have achieved the emblem of orthodoxy. Ideology, it seems, trumps test results, and to challenge that ideology, even implicitly, may place prestige and even livelihood at risk. Mr. Alexander details the downfall of Jacques Benveniste, a worldwide respected author of hundreds of scientific papers, who in 1988 published in Nature a series of tests purporting to show that certain immunoglobulin antibodies preserved their efficacy after multiple repeated dilutions, suggesting the plausibility of homeopathic methods. What followed was an unleashing of the wrath of scientific orthodoxy, including a “peer-review” by a group including James Randi, the stage magician with delusions of philosophical grandeur. The “review,” replete with a “trial” held amidst a spontaneous display of card tricks by Mr. Randi, might have qualified as the stuff of comic opera had it not resulted in the tragic loss of Benveniste’s laboratory, academic position, and reputation.

Mr. Alexander traces the avoidance of a similar fall from professional grace by Dr. Bruce Pomerantz, known in the early part of this century as “the father of alternative medicine,” who, observing Benveniste’s downfall, exercised extreme caution and turned from researching homeopathy (from which all research funding had evaporated, anyhow). Alternative medicine itself, now gathered into the fold of the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH), while increasingly popular, is hounded by calls for its remedies to be subjected to the same high testing standards as conventional ones, and is watched warily for unsubstantiated claims. Paltry research funds for its generally non-patentable strategies and substances, as if by design, preclude testing proportional to the high public interest. Mr. Alexander interviewed at some length Dr. Barrie R. Cassileth, at the time the Director of Integrative Medical Services at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, about the future of alternative medicine’s various therapies. While hospitable to acupuncture as a therapy that helps patients endure the side effects of chemotherapy, Dr. Cassileth drew a line in the sand separating remedies to be considered from those to be avoided. Her litmus test was the “rational basis” test, by which she meant those procedures that yield to a “plausible” mechanistic explanation. Homeopathy was far over that sand line, foundering somewhere in the froth of the surf.

“Rational basis” in contemporary science seems to be whatever conforms to the materialist/ reductionist paradigm, or shows a fair chance of doing so in time. It does not appear presently to welcome rational self-criticism. But the materialist/reductionist paradigm has recently been attacked by one of the most widely respected philosophers alive today, Thomas Nagel, a self-confessed atheist “without a religious bone in my body,” who in 2012 wrote “Mind & Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False.” As the title suggests, Mr. Nagel is not one to mince words, and his argument, as deliciously worded by Frederick Amrine in his recent compendium of essays, Thresholds, is that “materialist reductionism can explain everything except life, consciousness, human reason, the lawfulness of the universe, and moral values.” The publication of Nagel’s book occasioned cries of betrayal, heresy and, if not a flat out motion to suppress, a kind of fond nostalgia for the days of hard line censorship. Perhaps peer pressure will accomplish that same end. His critics will certainly not succeed through one-on-one debate.

Fortunately, there is ample hope provided in this book for the “reclamation” alluded to in the full title. Quantum physics, long seen as at least an enemy-of-my-enemy champion of some form of Geisteswissenschaft (literally “spirit knowledge”) against billiard ball reductionism, has been very much around for nearly a century, and has at the least extended the boundaries of what is thinkable, by making it blindingly clear how little of the world is yet understood by science. Also, exhaustive studies of “placebo effects” have demonstrated beyond question the fundamental effect of mind on body. There is hope, too, in the open entertainment in peer reviewed journals of Branko Furst’s picture of the heart not as a propulsion pump but a ram pump, not as a cause, but as a restrainer and regulator of prior blood flow—an idea first put forward by Rudolf Steiner in 1920. But perhaps the most comprehensively hopeful development is the theory of emergence as articulated by Dr. Peter Heusser, who views complex phenomena not as Lego-like assemblages of lower parts, but as interactive systems of “levels,” the lower levels “sublated” to fully independent realities, primary phenomena to be dealt with not in terms of what lies beneath, but as self-subsistent entities.

At the outset of this review, I suggested that Hearts and Minds has the potential to open hearts and minds to the worldview of spiritual science. It is not just the subject matter, the first hand reportage, the concise reasoning, or the author’s natural eloquence that prompt this expectation. More than anything, it is the style. This is above all a friendly book. Where many, if not most anthroposophists would be inclined to be argumentative, intense in their defense of what they most fervently believe, Mr. Alexander invariably shows restraint. There is always more than one point of view in a controversy. Questions regularly take the place of killingly formulated answers. Humor, including self-deprecating humor, is everywhere. Without summarizing it, I direct the reader’s attention to the star character of Chapter Thirteen, Herr Professor Doktor Isador Harrumfen, for an object lesson on how to release a reader from an embedded preconception without hurting the patient.

The author’s technique throughout this book is centrifugal, allowing a hitherto untried idea or image to rise out of the reader, rather than centripetal, bearing down and in, upon cherished beliefs. More minds and hearts are turned by schmoozing than by lecturing, and Mr. Alexander knows it. Hearts and Minds may prove to be the breakout book for which we have been hoping.

Frederick Dennehy is a retired lawyer, author, and actor, as well as a classholder of the School for Spiritual Science, member of the Section for the Humanities and Literary Arts, and associate editor of being human.

Walter Alexander has served on the council of the New York City branch for twenty-five years. A former public and Waldorf teacher, he has been a professional writer about medicine and science and a frequent contributor to being human.