Leonard Shlain
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Dr. Leonard Shlain is a surgeon and author of three books. He is the Chairman of Laparoscopic surgery at the California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco and is an Associate Professor of Surgery at UCSF.
He lives in Mill Valley, California, is married to Ina Gyemant and has three children: Kimberly Brooks, Jordan L. Shlain MD and Tiffany Shlain.
[edit] Books
Mortality/Angst
In a chapter of Sex, Time and Power entitled Mortality/Angst, Leonard Shlain discusses the consequences of man’s realization of time and how it prompted a “creative explosion”—the Upper Paleolithic Revolution. Women, speculates Shlain, became acquainted with time because of a flux in human evolution around 150,000 years ago involving narrow pelvic girdles, large skulls, and an increasing mortality rate among females in labor. With their rapidly evolving hominid brain, females grasped the connection between sex and pregnancy, probably by relating their menstrual cycles to the phases of the moon. Thus the concept of time was born, and women taught this concept to men. This knowledge of time was utilized by Homo sapiens by the recognition of patterns. Man began to search for reliability, repetition, permanence. Perhaps this is why human beings so overwhelmingly prefer the familiar to the unfamiliar. We tend to prefer faces closest to the human archetype, we are drawn to patterns of repetition, we are thrilled when a song we know the lyrics to comes on the radio. If someone or something does not fit into our schema, it is shunned. When we are learning new information, a tinge of excitement passes when we can apply already acquired knowledge to new concepts. Maybe these behaviors are the remnants of the obtainment of sequential understanding, the psychological evolution of building the foundations of memory and information. Repetition is the heart of predictability, predictability spawns reason, and reason prompted the rapid development of sapiens. In his search for static sequence, man improved his hunting skills by trial and error. With this mental construct of time, he could test possible solutions to a problem, remember the circumstances of a failed outcome, and eliminate the failed methods from his search for the best solution. In short, he had the advantage of learning from his mistakes. This unique advantage placed Homo sapiens at the top of the food chain in virtually an evolutionary second. Time was implemented in language in the form of tenses and changed communication forever. Reason erupted alongside Homo sapiens’ road of trial and error by the application of a hypothetical situation to the if=then equation, and the unraveling of the mystery of then via the memory of past outcomes of experiences similar to if. Reason provoked the emergence of art and science, ever-shifting satisfactions to an eternally insatiable curiosity. This incredible epiphany brought great evolutionary success to our species, but it has come with a hefty, sometimes unbearable price: the consciousness of our own imminent deaths. Animals are built to protect themselves against death. From an evolutionary standpoint, it seems that the collective goal of a species is to thrive. Upon realizing the inexorable impermanence of physical life, Homo sapiens may have sought to identify with something intangible, without an expiration date. They created methods to cheat the finality of death through the passing on of ideas. Shlain reconstructs a probable scene set around 150,000 years ago in which a Homo sapient tries to see how far into the future he can execute the if=then equation. At some point, he comes to an intellectual halt, unable to presume the future beyond an impenetrable wall: death. He comes to a slow insight: someday he will die, and from then on, his future, if there is one, is completely uncertain, as death forces the individual to sever all ties with the world as we know it. This inevitable end to life inspired fear in the Homo sapiens, as one of animal’s most compelling motives of behavior is survival. However, Shlain notes that there is a distinction between the sexes in the way that they deal with this knowledge of death. Men tend to fear death more than women, because women come into contact with the prospect of death routinely on a minuscule level. Shlain refers to the monthly menstruation cycle as petite morts, or mini deaths. The potential of life, the embers of offspring exiting the body in the demise of conceptual opportunity for the month. She is closer to the cycles of human life, and the passage of time. She has dealt directly with it (though without full realization of its sequence) since the dawn of the species. Men do not routinely encounter these petite morts, and, according to Shlain, are less adapted to the prospect of their own mortality because of their linear view of time. He backs up his assertions with examples of the dichotomy of male and female behaviors. Ask a woman to describe time, and she will present a cyclical flow of events, beginning and end curving into each other, fusing the two. Ask a man to do the same, and he will draw a straight line, spanning from start to finish, limbo on either sides. He will fight to stay on that line, terrified of the uncertainty outside of it. But in a cyclical construct, time flows into itself, and its inhabitants remain in its perpetual rotation. Humans seek immortality through connections. Perhaps the reason that mob mentality can be so persuasive is because we long to be a strong link in a chain that will last from generation to generation. We cannot avoid our own personal death, so we look to something larger that we can help to sustain. We love to thrive. Look at all the virtual pets, entertainment based solely on keeping a computer-generated creature alive. Observe all the video games in which we obtain “lives.” Even our décor of green houseplants reveals our innate need to maintain life. An evolutionary, cultural game of Keep the Ball in the Air. The connections we make in our life form a chain through which our legacies, whatever they may be, can pass. That, in some way, grants us immortality and gives us a strange gift of conscious control over our selves and our species.
