An An-alleluial Allele? Genes, Depression, & Spirituality

“[N]ot too many people
Can see we’re all the same
And because of all their tears
Their eyes can’t hope to see
The beauty that surrounds them….” — George Harrison, “Isn’t It a Pity” ¹

 

That “we’re all the same” is one of the fundamental assumptions of most, if not all, forms of religion and spirituality. Without that assumption, there’s no plausible basis for imposition of universal requirements for thinking, feeling, and acting. And without that imposition, there’s no profit in religion for the primitive instincts, such as security and domination, that, in part, it serves. Nonetheless, the assumption is erroneous: we’re not all the same. We differ fundamentally in, for example, abilities, potential, and ways of experiencing and responding to the world. George Harrison’s sentiment notwithstanding, there are far too many people, Quakers included, who believe that they “see we’re all the same.” But they don’t see, because they don’t really look, or because they can’t see through the blindfolds of their belief systems. They don’t see the irreconcilable differences that make us more like a menagerie of exotic species, some by nature a mortal danger to others, than a flock of sheep in which the occasional expression of a recessive gene provides the odd black exception to prove the rule.

And genes (basically, strings of DNA) appear to be the locus of some of our most significant differences. Take the short 5-HTTLPR allele (please!). The 5-HTTLPR is a polymorphic region—a region that varies in shape—of the serotonin transporter gene (a.k.a. 5-HTT). Those who are familiar with contemporary antidepressant medications will recognize the word “serotonin” immediately: the neurotransmitter serotonin, or 5-HT, is involved in regulation of mood, including response to stress. And the 5-HTT gene is a crucial determinant in the regulation of serotonin. The region of that gene which is under our metaphorical microscope here, the 5-HTTLPR allele (5-HT Transporter-Linked Polymorphic Region), has an important characteristic: it may be either long (“l”) or short (“s”). And that tiny difference in shape matters greatly. As Caspi et al. put it in 2003, reporting on their research:

Individuals with one or two copies of the short allele of the 5-HT T promoter polymorphism [i.e., 5-HTTLPR] exhibited more depressive symptoms, diagnosable depression, and suicidality in relation to stressful life events than individuals homozygous for [i.e., having only] the long allele. ²

Other studies have found that persons with the s (short) allele are likely to be more sensitive to the emotional content of experience and may find it necessary to attempt to shield themselves from negative emotional stimuli. (I am reminded of the “empath” characters in the Star Trek TV series.) Overall, research indicates that such people are temperamentally different from persons who have only the long, or l, allele, from persons who tend to be more optimistic and/because more neurologically resilient. Temperament is biology.

Given that depression is closely related to anxiety, it’s not surprising to learn that

Carriers of the short allele … have increased anxiety-related temperamental traits, increased amygdala [area of the brain, part of the limbic system, with a primary role in the processing and memory of emotional reactions] reactivity and elevated risk of depression. ³

The authors of that statement, Pezawas et al., used neuroimaging technology to find out how that works. They found that s-carriers have “reduced gray-matter volume … in limbic regions critical for processing of negative emotion….” And they discovered a significant difference between s- and l-carriers in the neural feedback system that regulates the duration and extinction of negative mood states—which means that the central nervous system (CNS) of an s-carrier reacts to stressors, perhaps even small and “ordinary” stressors, more readily, more intensely, and for a longer time than that of an l-only carrier. (And that kind of reaction appears to have continuing effects on the physiology of the CNS/brain, reinforcing the structure of the feedback system and contributing to the reduction in volume of areas related to stress response and mood.⁴) Their conclusion was this:

These genotype-related alterations in anatomy and function of an amygdala-cingulate feedback circuit for emotional regulation implicate a developmental, systems-level mechanism underlying normal emotional reactivity and genetic susceptibility for depression. ⁵

A “developmental, systems-level mechanism underlying” our emotional responses. A “genetic susceptibility for depression.” In other words, it’s the way we’re made. Many of us have a genetic makeup that makes us very sensitive to emotion-stimulating aspects of life; that gives us powerful but hair-trigger biological stress-response systems which, as it were, engage too often and too fully and don’t know when to quit (the feedback problem); that does not permit us to easily “get over” stressors but, on the contrary, makes us increasingly sensitive; that makes us more likely not only to be clinically depressed (a condition, by the way, which affects the entire organism, with cognitive, emotional, and somatic, or “physical,” manifestations) but to be suicidal; that even inhibits our response to antidepressant medications.⁶ All of that is genetic, biological, in origin, and correlates with the presence of the particular short allele we’ve been discussing. And 5-HTTLPR is but one of a myriad of interacting, soul-shaping factors in our biology.

Now, this information may make a classic, double-predestinarian Calvinist happy, but most theists, needing a God who gives us freedom and requires voluntary allegiance (a double bind, but what theist would dare call Him—or himself—on it?), will be tempted to deny it. Yet the research piles up, and the facts are ineluctable: innocently, science continues to illuminate the errors of religion. Why is this information a problem for, say, Christian moral theology? At the most obvious level, we need only recall that despair (greatly feared by the depressed George Fox) and suicide are among the most grievous possible sins for Christians, and that sin involves free consent of the will. Theistic religion condemns depression as evil, or, at best, as moral weakness: saints fresh from stoning sinners “make a joyful noise unto the Lord,” while Judas, whose somber realism has perhaps saved their lives, goes off alone and hangs himself. Likewise, anxiety is seen as a lack of confidence in divine providence: “consider the lilies of the field.” (That reminds me of the absurd history of churches and lightning rods, but that pleasure must await another post.) Depression and anxiety are signs of sin, selfish sorrows of the unregenerate who choose not to cooperate with God’s grace. Theistic religion requires that we try to overcome those sins by submitting to its sovereignty, purchasing its wares, and praising its God. But our little allele can’t sing alleluia.

I may return in a future post to consideration of Christian doctrine, in the prime myth of which the Other is sacrificed in order that we all may be one, from this perspective. For now, however, I want to examine the often overlooked, often harmful totalizing claim of contemporary “spirituality,” particularly in a popular Buddhist form, regarding anxiety and depression.

That which today goes by the name of spirituality wants to distance itself from theistic religion’s oppressive and anachronistic belief systems, but in this respect at least it does no better. Among those influenced by popular Buddhist and New Age (e.g., “integrative”) thought, unhappiness and anxiety are, again, signs of weakness, unfortunate characteristics that indicate one’s “unevolved” condition, negative tendencies that have unwholesome effects on self and others and must be overcome or transmuted by vigorous discipline (and, of course, by the purchase of books, magazines, electronic media, workshops, retreats, meditation aids, etc.). Those who cannot overcome such negativity will be seen—and, more importantly, will learn to see themselves—as failures, lesser beings, losers in need of a spiritual make-over.

Consider the following passage from the opening paragraphs of the book Being Peace, written by the beloved Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh.

If we are not happy, if we are not peaceful, we cannot share peace and happiness with others, even those we love…. If we are peaceful, if we are happy, we can smile and blossom like a flower, and everyone in our family, in our entire society, will benefit from our peace. ⁷

It appears that, according to this popular master, we have a duty, a moral obligation, to be happy and peaceful. Another double bind? But Thich Nhat Hanh has not yet defined these terms. What is happiness, and what is peace?

Happiness, we learn in subsequent paragraphs, is an awareness that enjoys the present moment. Although, as we are reminded, “Each day 40,000 children die of hunger,” yet “To be here and now, [sic] and enjoying the present moment is our most important task.” Such happiness, such enjoyment, is the feeling we have when we’re smiling. “If in our daily life we can smile, if we can be peaceful and happy, not only we, but everyone will profit from it. […] Smiling means that we are ourselves, that we have sovereignty over ourselves, that we are not drowned in forgetfulness.” Presumably, then, not smiling means that we are false beings, alienated from self and others; that we are weaklings, unable to govern ourselves; that we are submerged in self-centered ignorance, not awake, not aware, not mindful—that we are, in effect, spiritually weak, disordered, dormant, or dead. Is this the Buddhist version of “grievous sinners”? In Christianity, sinners are condemned to reside in hell after death; in this popular westernized Buddhism, we’re already living there—and need to get ourselves out by smiling.

And what is peace? Apparently, it is closely related to, or the same as, happiness, that feeling associated with smiling. We are advised that, in a world which has “more than 50,000 nuclear warheads,”

Smiling is very important. If we are not able to smile, then the world will not have peace. It is not by going out for demonstrations against nuclear missiles that we can bring peace. It is with our smiling, breathing, and being peace that we can make peace.

Happiness and peace are, then, conflated, if not equated. If we are not happily smiling, peacefully free of anxiety, then we are making the world a less peaceful place, we are guilty of spiritual and moral failure. The double bind is doubled: we must not be anxious, and we must be happy. We need to pull ourselves together and do the right thing: smile and calmly enjoy the present moment! What is the likely effect of that judgment (“You are morally wrong to feel unhappy!”) and that imperative (“To be a compassionate person, you must feel differently!”) on the sensitive “soul” of, say, an s-carrier? We can expect activation of the stress response system with its unfortunate feedback loop, reinforcement of negative feelings, exacerbation of anxiety and depression, hopelessness or cynicism: a strangling of the soul.

Thich Nhat Hanh’s teaching appears to be a well-intended doctrine directed to a compassionate end, but in practice it misses the mark because it neither respects nor understands the irreducible otherness of the other. It is a totalizing narrative constructed on the false (and narcissistic?) premise that “we’re all the same” and that therefore we all can and should attain the same goals by the same, or similar, means. But, as science increasingly confirms, we’re very different, from the genes up (and down: as we’ve seen, genes, too, are composite structures), and our goals, and the means to approaching them, must needs differ. Compassionate praxis begins with the recognition of that reality. “The beauty that surrounds [us]” lies precisely in the differences, in the otherness of each unique event of human biology interacting with the world—of each unique expression of the human individual. Unless religions and spiritualities open their eyes to that reality, their compassion is too often a well-meaning brutality that harms the more vulnerable of us while passing on its genes, or memes, through the pleasure of those who believe they are loving others while they are only making themselves feel good.

And that reminds me of Freud, who at least recognized happiness for what it is ….

———-
NOTES

1. George Harrison, “Isn’t It a Pity.” From the record album All Things Must Pass, 1970.
2. Caspi, A. et al., “Influence of life stress on depression: moderation by a polymorphism in the 5-HTT gene.” Science. 2003 Jul 18;301(5631):386-9. Online at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12869766.
3. Pezawas, L., et al., “5-HTTLPR polymorphism impacts human cingulate-amygdala interactions: a genetic susceptibility mechanism for depression.” Nature Neuroscience 8, 828 – 834 (2005). See http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v8/n6/abs/nn1463.html.
4. See, for example, Peter D. Kramer’s book, Against Depression.
5. Pezawas, L., et al., op. cit.
6. Ibid.
7. Thich Nhat Hanh, Being Peace. Parallax Press (Berkeley, 1987). This and following quotations are from pp. 3 through 9.

The image of DNA structure is from Wikipedia Commons.

“I know what it’s like to be dead”

My title is from the Beatles’ song called “She Said, She Said”: a couple of the lyric lines are relevant to my topic. When I attempted to describe to my friend Gary G. the change in my experience that I will attempt to describe to you now, he immediately recalled the song.

“She said, ‘I know what it’s like to be dead.’”

Back in May, I decided to tell my relatively new acquaintance, John C., too, about this significant change in my life. I’ll use some of what I wrote to John to help me introduce it here.

Not long ago, something “clicked,” and suddenly I understood the ineluctable reality of evolution as a soulless and self-contained process. From then on, I have awakened many mornings in a kind of near-death experience, a strong intuition of what it means to really not exist at all. That experience returns to me a few times during each day as well. As a result, my felt sense of the world has changed, and I have more compassion now about people’s desire to remove the fear of the unknown. Another positive result seems to be that I no longer fear the dark so much, metaphorically speaking. But I understand first-hand now how dangerous that experience can be, because time is telescoped and, in a real sense, I already do not exist. I seem to have more respect for and yet less fear of death now. Maybe one function of religion has been to protect us from such knowledge — to serve as a kind of socially-inculcated defense mechanism?

That last sentence raises some interesting issues, but I’ll leave them for future musings. Today I want to focus on the experience.

I remember reading many years ago a Zen dialogue (which, if I haven’t imagined it, I may be able to locate later). In the story, a monk is challenged with something like this: “You can conceive of nonexistence, but can you conceive of the nonexistence of nonexistence?” The question itself is subject to a variety of interpretations. For example, one may read it as implying that nonexistence does not exist, that there is no such thing. Well, yes, nonexistence is not a thing: it’s a predicate. One could even go on to say that the Zen master must be teaching that nothing ever ceases to exist. But I don’t think that the master was teaching that: Buddhism attributes only conditional reality, if that, to things. My reading of the question was more like this: do you understand what it means, in terms of your life, that “nonexistence” not only is not a thing, but also is a characteristic that cannot be predicated of any thing? My answer then was, “Yes, but I’ll need to think about that.”

Thinking more about it didn’t give me a useful understanding then, but now the ongoing intuition of nonexistence is helping me to think (and feel) differently. No thing can be said not to exist, I see now. I cannot not exist: not because I am eternal, but because nonexistence is not a characteristic of any real — existing — thing, and I am such a thing. (“Existing” as a thought in someone’s mind is not the existence I require for myself.) There is no time when I will not exist, and yet there will be a time when others can rightly say of me, “He no longer exists.” Contemplating that paradox, I begin to understand “the nonexistence of nonexistence.”

And the reality of death. I might say that death is unconsciousness that never ends, but only with the proviso that no one is unconscious — and that unconsciousness can be predicated only of an existing being. Analogies can’t be of much help here. But this I can say: there are dead bodies, for a time, but no dead persons. I will die, but I will never be dead.

“And she’s making me feel like I’ve never been born.”

And yet, in a sense I am dead now, because to intuit nonexistence is to feel past and future in the present. As I told John, time is now telescoped. Seeing beyond existence allows me to feel the timeboundness and momentariness of our existence. Knowing now the eternal reality of nonexistence and the relentless relativity of time, I begin to understand that already I do not exist. And I see, too, that, from the perspective of eternity, I have never been born.

I’m reminded of a kind of prelude experience that I had in 1990, on the day that my adult family’s first pet dog died. Below is a paragraph from the entry I wrote that day in my journal. (Click here for the entire entry. At the time, I was thinking of Zen Master Bankei‘s notion of “the Unborn,” thus my reference to “Mind” in that entry, but my experience now is different, beyond the reach of doctrine — as, for all I know, Bankei’s was, too.)

A line seems to have an origin and an end, but I come from nowhere and go nowhere. I am an imaginary series of points between two deaths. Each point is drawn on the plane of emptiness; each point of life is a point of death. In perfect stillness I pass through them all. If I could enter that stillness, I would know peace. I would know death in life and life in death; I would no longer want to deny what I am. I would live, at last, as a free man.

I now know death in life. And, because of that, I am learning to know life in death. It may be that freedom is at hand.

[Follow-up post: "Wrestling with Nothingness"]

Re-wiring for Love

In a previous post, I wrote of “re-wiring” the brain so that the principle of natural selection operating through dominance and destruction is no longer one’s primary motivator or orientation, having been replaced by the primary orientation to love. Continuing to use Theissen’s evolutionary model, I want to consider now how that might be accomplished.

Obviously, the principle of selection cannot cease to operate; if it did, the human being could not exist, for every moment of human life requires the subjugation and sacrifice of other life. But it can become subordinate to love, which is already present in the heart, and the two principles can cooperate under love’s guidance, cooperation being love’s way, to achieve love’s ends as much as is humanly possible.

So it may be that what is needed, ironically, is that love become dominant over selection. The contradiction is only apparent, however, because, as our Quaker tradition tells us, love does not overcome by force: “it takes its kingdom,” as James Nayler wrote, “with entreaty, and not with contention, and keeps it by lowliness of mind.” Love’s “dominance” would mean, I think, that selection would be more strongly influenced by love than love by selection, a condition reached not through internal conflict and violence (images such as Gal. 5:24 notwithstanding; I hope to address that sometime) but through the attainment of internal unity, of wholeness. For neither selection nor love can be destroyed or fully repressed; they must cooperate if the person is to be whole. But again, whereas selection (as we have been using the term) tends to operate primarily through competition, cooperation is love’s primary mode. Such cooperation is possible, therefore, when love leads, for selection can function fully, albeit differently (lovingly!), under love’s gentle direction, but love is badly crippled and repressed — trampled, as the first Friends would say — when tyrannized by selection.

But perhaps we need not picture the two as being in competition, which is to see them within a narrow paradigm of selection. Another way of framing the process is to understand love as an adaptational tool used by selection, so that, in the unified person, love does not so much dominate selection as become selection’s chief mode of operation. And yet another way is the obverse of that, one that Theissen might approve: to view selection as a tool used by love. That would mean that the primacy of love is the original (or ultimate) state of affairs but is subverted by our surrender to the powerful pull of the selection principle — a view that seems compatible with the Christian story of the fall.

Of course, in any case we’re reifying and even personifying love and selection (just as Christian myths have done), but we do so in order to think usefully about our metanarrative and its practical effects. However we picture the relationship between selection and love, the essential insight is that re-wiring for love the brain programmed for competition and violence is both possible and salutary (which is not to say that it’s easy). Primitive Christianity and primitive Quakerism testify to that.

The first Friends not only recognized the centrality in primitive Christianity of resistance to the violence and domination of selection; they also developed a new Christian metanarrative — or, as they believed, recovered the original one — comprising an inner process through which they turned their primary orientation away from that violence to love. We can follow their example. The first step, as they tell us in their writings, is to see and acknowledge where we are — which means, for us, to acknowledge our subjection to the principle of selection as well as our postmodern condition.

“Primitive Christianity Revived”

William Penn accurately expressed the self-understanding of the early Quaker movement in the phrase “primitive Christianity revived.” Given the long history and wide prevalence of mainstream Christianity, it is understandable that we might misunderstand what the Friends meant by “primitive Christianity.” They were not speaking of a system, or proto-system, of doctrine, hierarchy, and cult. Rejecting all of that as a manifestly failed approach, they attempted to discern and enter into the mindset of the writers of Christian scripture. As a result of thus freeing themselves from received suppositions, they discovered a very different meaning in the scriptural texts, a meaning which led them to a very different metanarrative encompassing all three aspects that we have discussed; viz., culture, religion, and self. I expect to discuss that metanarrative in detail later. At the moment, I’m interested in what that grand narrative means in contemporary/postmodern and practical terms.

Gerd Theissen describes early Christianity in just such terms: “Primitive Christian faith consists in a revolt against [natural] selection which often assumes abrupt and bizarre forms and is topical precisely in its contradiction to the modern consciousness” (Biblical Faith: An Evolutionary Approach, 1985, pp. 114-115). Primitive Christianity seemed to “turn the world upside down” (see Acts 17:6) precisely because, following Jesus, it sought to reverse the inhuman operation of natural selection. It protects and exalts the weak while limiting or even condemning the strong (which would exercise Nietzsche many centuries later). It is an active protest against the harshness of the natural selection process; as Theissen writes, “[Its] basic tendency is constantly to oppose human conduct dominated by the principle of selection” (p. 114).

We can think of that principle of selection as a normally unconscious metanarrative wired into the organism. Primitive Christianity and, later, primitive Quakerism wanted to override even that most fundamental and totalizing of metanarratives — that one above all — and replace it with one oriented not to individual survival and personal/familial aggrandizement through competition and dominance but to collective survival and gracious prosperity through compassion and cooperation. It sought that seemingly abnormal kind of existence in order to be in unity with the God – or “the central reality,” as Theissen puts it — who their hearts told them was love and whom they encountered in Jesus. Primitive Christianity is the discovery that, first of all and contrary to the wisdom of the world, love in its weakness is both more essential and more powerful than the principle of selection (which, of course, they knew in other terms; e.g., “evil,” “sin,” “the flesh”), despite the latter’s domination of the world from within and without; and that, secondly, despite the hard-wired nature of the principle of selection, human beings can re-wire themselves sufficiently to center their lives in a love that relentlessly counters selection’s ruthlessness. That was the discovery, too, of the first Friends, a discovery that radically changed their lives.

[Follow-up post: "Re-wiring for Love"]