I think most of us can bring to memory images of ancient statues missing limbs and facial features such as noses. For me it’s the statue Venus de Milo, thought to be “Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love, whose Roman counterpart was Venus” (quoting Wikipedia). Certainly limbs and even facial features were lost as the result of damage, which seems to be the case for Venus de Milo. However, it was common place for armies to dismember and disfigure statues as a part of the process of vanquishment. There’s physical vanquishment certainly. However, psychological vanquishment or vandalism is often thought to be just as important if not more so.
This type of psychological or conceptual destruction has a name: iconoclasm. Writing in their review article entitled Smashing Statues: Re-evaluating Iconoclasm in History, Dwyer and Orr[1] tell us that “The definition of iconoclasm itself has expanded from what was once narrowly defined as the destruction of icons in the Byzantine world, to the destruction of painting and religious imagery during the Reformation, to recent approaches that incorporate the destruction of all forms of art and all cultural artefacts.” In recent years (since about 2020) Dwyer and Orr point out that “statues around the world [have been] pulled down at a rate the West [has] purportedly not seen in generations….” The authors tell us that the most prominent recent “wave” of iconoclastic behavior is associated with the Black Lives Matter movement both here in the U.S. as well as in the U.K. During this wave, statues were removed by the public forcefully from “below” (as Dwyer and Orr call it) as well as from “above” through official or legal processes.[2]
When I think of iconoclasm I think of the ancient Goddess religions. “In Neolithic Europe and Asia Minor (ancient Anatolia)—in the era between 7000 B.C.and 3000 B.C.—religion focused on the wheel of life and its cyclical turning,” writes archaeologist Maria Gimbutas.[3] Gimbutas spent her career unearthing Goddess figurines and other artifacts associated with the practice of Goddess religion. Through her work, she was able to discern patterns of invasion that had their origins “in the steppes of Russia.” In contrast to people who worshipped the Goddess, these northern invaders (as Gimbutas called them) “were militaristic, produced weapons, and rode horses.” She continues, “Their religion centered upon male gods.” Yes, Gimbutas discovered Goddess figurines that had been purposefully disfigured.
In essence, these northern invaders wished to replace Goddess religion with God religion. Iconoclastic activities were part of this process, which carried on for millennia. Alongside iconoclasm we can find forms of appropriation, which may also be considered a form of iconoclastic activity. Christians enjoy the Christmas and Easter holidays largely unaware that such icons as yule logs and Easter eggs were icons associated with Goddess religion and practice (especially fertility rituals). It’s no coincidence that Christmas is celebrated near the winter solstice, an event that was celebrated by Goddess religions as a part of the circle of life, death, and rebirth. One egregious form of appropriation is still with us and figures prominently in many Christian liturgical services.
In his 1998 book entitled The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, Leonard Shlain, who was chairperson of laparoscopic surgery at the California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco, suggests that the more body-oriented and holistic Goddess religions (i.e., right-brain) were invaded and ultimately replaced by mind-oriented and linear God religions (i.e., left-brain). “After Christianity became Rome’s state religion,” writes Shlain, “Church fathers ordered the destruction of images.” Shlain explains this decision thus:
Why did the Church fathers order the landscape cleared not only of pagan [i.e., Goddess] deities but of all images of anything? For the same reason that Moses declared images subversive: in order for a left-brained written message to dominate, images, perceived by the right brain, must be effaced.
This iconoclasm born of a left-brain view of the world was set on destroying anything remotely related to the Goddess. It ran rampant in the streets.
According to Shlain, Paul (of Biblical fame) got caught up in this movement. “After Paul converted the singular Yahweh into a nuclear Christian family,” reveals Shlain, “he was faced with the danger that Christianity was no longer a monotheistic religion.” He continues, “In one of the most complicated explanations ever conceived, Paul claimed that while Jesus was the Son of God, he was also God Himself.” So far we have two-thirds of what would come to be known as the Holy Trinity. “Paul’s Trinity consists of a Father, a Son, and … a Holy Ghost,” Shlain reminds us. But who or what is the Holy Ghost? Well, according to Shlain, the Holy Ghost is none other than Goddess religions generally, and mothers more specifically. Shlain gives us this bottom line: “In Paul’s formulation, she [the Goddess, the mother] evanesced into the ether.” Every time Christians invoke the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, they are, unknowingly I would argue, tipping their hat to Goddess religions still floating around in the ether. Goddess religions may have found a way to return back to Earth in what can only be called “reverse iconoclastic activity” or a case of “fight fire with fire.” Let us fast-forward to the mid-1980s.
Writing in his 2010 book entitled The Shallows—What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, social commentator and science writer Nicholas Carr talks about how the introduction of HTML (hypertext markup language) along with hyperlinks was enthusiastically embraced by progressive educators.(*) “The academic enthusiasm for hypertext was … kindled by the belief, in line with the fashionable postmodern theories of the day [the early to mid-1980s], that hypertext would overthrow the patriarchal authority of the author and shift power to the reader,” writes Carr. I would suggest that this is a classic case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Yes, hyperlinks allowed for the digital dissection of books, articles, and other printed works. However, reading books, articles, and other printed works as “a whole” from start to finish allowed for what Carr calls “deep reading.” Deep reading is a chief way of developing the brain’s Executive Function skills such as empathy, reflection, critical thinking, appropriately shifting attention. Are we not throwing out the “deep reading” baby (and, in the process, access to EF skills) with the “authority of the singular white male” water? At the risk of being glib, this seems like a case of cutting one’s nose off to spite one’s face. Progressive educators are big advocates of developing critical thinking. However, this digital iconoclastic behavior seems bent on closing off the pathways to EF and critical thinking. Let’s look at the Executive Function baby a bit more.
Challenging your mind to create a unified whole (i.e., context) out of the pieces of information delivered by a book or article is one of the chief ways to develop what neurobiologists call Executive Function (EF) skills.[4] Again, EF is a critical component (no pun intended) of critical thinking as EF is part and parcel of such cognitive skills as empathy, reflection, perspective-taking, appropriately focusing and shifting attention, mental modeling, and time travel (i.e., our sense of past, present, and future). Looked at another way, are we not throwing out Executive Function skills by disfiguring the statue of white male authority by clicking on hyperlinks? Very perplexing.
“The need to evaluate links and make related navigational choices, while also processing a multiplicity of fleeting sensory stimuli,” writes Carr, “requires constant mental coordination and decision making, distracting the brain from the work of interpreting text or other information.” Carr continues, “In reading online … we sacrifice the facility [i.e., the EF facility] that makes deep reading possible.” Quoting work by Maryanne Wolf, Carr gives us this bottom line: “We revert to being ‘mere decoders of information.’ ”
Looked at from a neuropsychological perspective, here’s what’s going on when reading online: the left brain is tasked with allowing in a “multiplicity of fleeting sensory stimuli” (quoting Carr); the right brain struggles to create a coherent whole—a context—as a result of this bombardment; the resulting cognitive confusion sees to it that EF centers are not engaged; the left brain then becomes frustrated—triggering the brain’s fear center, the amygdala—and, as a result, increases its data mining looking for anything that will provide understanding. As Carr puts it, “Our ability to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction remains largely disengaged.” As Executive Function expert Russell Barkley tells us on his YouTube channel[5], it’s EF skills that allow us to regulate our emotional responses. The EF centers are the ones who say, “Whoa, hold on a minute, let’s count to ten and think this through.” When students are triggered by small offenses (now called microaggressions) and deliver out-of-proportion responses, they have been hijacked by their fear center, the amygdala. Why on Earth would educators promote such a disastrous and potentially volatile educational environment? Rather than dismembering statues, educators are dissociating brain centers. Why? Again, the only reason I can come up with is fight fire with fire, which, I hate to say it, is a response that comes from the fear centers of the brain. It does not reflect a “let’s step back for a moment and take a look at the big picture” attitude.
In their 2018 book book entitled The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are setting Up a Generation for Failure, First Amendment scholar Greg Lukianoff and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt talk about the rise of student cognitions and behaviors on college campuses such as “black-and-white (dichotomous) thinking,“ calling out perceived offenses (like microaggressions), catastrophizing (making mountains out of molehills), emotional dysregulation, stereotypical thinking (e.g., overgeneralizing), and believing emotions devoid of reflection.[6] A full discussion would take us too far afield, however, all of these cognitions and behaviors are associated with viewing the world using the lens of the middle left brain. In other words, students are not able to access the Executive Function centers (such as the PFC or prefrontal cortex) of the upper brain. Lukianoff and Haidt, using cognitive-behavioral therapy as a backdrop, offer up a number of techniques that could be used at home to promote the development of connections between the middle and upper brain. Simply put, if college students are not able to access their EF skills, then emotional regulation will be a big challenge, so much so that educators cannot expect that much in the way of education will be taking place. Again, why would educators countenance such a situation, an educational environment that impedes education? Could it be that iconoclastic activities are having a negative effect on students as evidenced by the cognitions and behaviors Lukianoff and Haidt talk about? I think there is one more piece to the puzzle here: identity formation.
The 2023 edited volume We Don’t Speak of Fear: Large-Group Identity, Societal Conflict, and Collective Trauma features a group representing a diverse number of disciplines such as psychoanalysis, psychiatry, law, politics, political science, public administration, and dispute resolution. This group goes by the name International Dialogue Initiative (IDI) and has worked to resolve conflicts between Arabs and Israelis, Turks and Kurds, Estonians and Russians, “and a number of other groups in conflict” (quoting M. Gerard Fromm, one of the contributors). I will hereafter refer to the authors of this edited volume as IDI for simplicity.
Through their work in various conflict areas, IDI has discovered that often the majority of any particular conflict is psychological. IDI has been greatly influenced by the work of psychoanalyst Erik Erikson who wrote the seminal book Identity and the Life Cycle. Specifically, IDI has embraced Erikson’s thoughts concerning what Erikson calls the transgenerational transmission of trauma, which I will abbreviate TToT. Personally, I found this fascinating because John Bowlby talked extensively about TToT in his work. And, yes, Bowlby and Erikson did meet and exchange ideas through what I am calling the Geneva Conferences back in the 1950s. Erikson effectively says that unmourned collective trauma can be passed on generation to generation. Bowlby added to this by suggesting that trauma is passed along as parents pass their inner working cognitive models of attachment on to their children. Suffice it to say that TToT can affect multiple generations resulting in difficulties forming a collective identity. The idea behind the destruction of a vanquished group’s iconography is rather simply: destroy the vanquished group’s collective identity, and, in doing so, the identities of individuals.
What surprised IDI is how far back a group, or state, or nation will go to find a conflict that allows for solidarity and group cohesion. In working to resolve conflicts between Estonians and Russians, IDI discovered that “The Russian delegates went back to a thirteenth-century massive trauma and, through a time collapse [italics in original], linked emotions connected to this chosen trauma to problems with the Estonians after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Time collapse—reliving an event that happened in the past as if it were happening today—is associated with PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) and typically reveals a disconnection between the Executive Functions (e.g., mental time travel) of the upper brain and the more reactive here-and-now middle brain.
In her 2024 book entitled A Just Future: Getting from Diversity and Inclusion to Equity and Justice in Higher Education, historian and DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) department administrator Nimisha Barton traces out the roots of the DEI movement in the U.S. According to Barton’s research, many of what she calls HWCUs (historically white colleges and universities) were built by settlers on land that was effectively stolen from Native Americans. And these are big name educational institutions: UConn (where I went), Rutgers, Cornell, University of Minnesota, Colorado State University, New Mexico State University, Washington State University, and on the list goes. “Settler colonialism is a system of imposed power that defines who land belongs to, that extracts from the land, and that dispossesses any others from said land in the process,” writes Barton.
Barton also takes us through the early history of slavery in the U.S. Essentially Barton talks about how group identity for both Native Americans and African American slaves was traumatically wrenched away. “As Europeans enrolled Natives in their colonial colleges, they necessarily devalued and disregarded Indian forms of education,” writes Barton. There is no question that the way of life, the iconography of both Native Americans and African American slaves was dismembered and disfigured. The question becomes: Should college and university students and faculty reach all the way back to the formation of the U.S. to find something approaching a new group identity? This begs a follow-up question: If so, will this “reaching back” create what IDI calls time collapse? If the answer is yes to each of these questions, then is it fair to argue that this “reaching back” may produce the unintended consequence of greatly affecting student’s development of Executive Function skills, which, in turn, will negatively affect their ability to fully engage in critical thinking? Baby and bath water. Then there’s the question of transgenerational transmission of trauma.
It is very clear that we are looking at huge levels of cultural trauma. How will that cultural trauma be properly mourned? And then how will the collective identity of the U.S. shift so that it is more diverse, equitable, and inclusive? In the moment, I do not have concrete answers. Hopefully in a future post I can look at possible solutions. In the mean time I can say that without addressing the above questions and effectively going through an International Dialogue Initiative intervention, DEI is doomed to failure. Plus, I think there is more going on here. I think there are present-day traumas that are not being looked at. One in particular is the slavery that Norbert Wiener predicted not long after he and a group of information scientists developed cybernetics, which forms the roots of the AI or artificial intelligence movement that now surrounds us.[7] And maybe looking back is easier than looking forward and considering what awaits us. More to come.
(*) Disclaimer: If you go back and access blog posts I wrote at the beginning of the BLT blog, 2010 or so, you’ll find that I used hyperlinks within the body of the blog post. Once I became aware that hyperlinks could disrupt “deep reading,” I removed them from the body of a post and only included them in the notes as a way of providing access to reference materials. Here’s a tip: If you find an online article that you wish to read, check the address bar of your browser for the icon (looks like a printed page) that indicates that a Reader View is available. The Reader View typically does not have ads and hyperlinks, and is much easier to print.
NOTES:
[1] – Philip Dwyer, Nikolas Orr, Smashing Statues: Re-evaluating Iconoclasm in History, The English Historical Review, Volume 138, Issue 592, June 2023, Pages 428–441, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/cead100
[2] A bronze statue of the Spanish conquistador Don Francisco Cuervo y Valdes at the entrance to Old Town in Albuquerque has come under attack in recent years as calls for the statue’s removal grow stronger.
[3] – Marija Gimbutas (1999), The Living Goddess, University of California Press
[4] – My go to book on Executive Functions is the 2012 book entitled Executive Functions: What They Are, How They Work, and Why They Evolved by ADHD expert Russell Barkley.
[5] – See this video series entitled ADHD & Executive Functioning by Dr. Barkley wherein Barkley reframes ADHD as Executive Function Deficit Disorder:
[6] In their 2002 book entitled Affect Regulation, Mentalization, and the Development of the Self, attachment researcher, psychoanalyst, and developmental psychology professor Peter Fonagy, along with his colleagues, talk about what they call “psychic equivalence.” Simply, psychic equivalence results when what we think in our minds is equated with what we perceive to be out in the world. In other words, at this level of development (typically in childhood) there is no distinction between object and the model or concept of that object in the mind. This explains in part why infants and toddlers attempt to put everything in their mouths. During this early stage of development, they are not able to build a sense of self that is separate from the object world. Sadly, forms of psychic equivalence can persist into adulthood. For example, during a family therapy session I was conducting, a father, in a state of anger, firmly stated of his son, “When I raise my hand, my son should raise his hand too.” This is psychic equivalence. When the brain’s fear centers hijack the rest of the brain, psychic equivalence is one of the hallmarks along with black and white thinking, emotional dysregulation, and believing emotions devoid of (EF) reflection, as talked about by Lukianoff and Haidt.
[7] See Katherine Hayles 1999 book entitled How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, for a detailed look at the history of cybernetics and information science. I cover this history in my blog series The Drama of Earth Systems.
