I probably would never have found Jeremy Lent’s The Patterning Instinct on my own. It came into my orbit through a series of conversations I was having with ChatGPT about systems, patterns, culture, and the ways ideas become embedded in civilizations. I should probably add a disclaimer here: I am not a member of the ChatGPT book club. I do not hand over my reading list and ask a machine what I should read next (I have on occasion asked for some recommendations that build on other books I’m reading/ listening to). In this case, however, the conversation surfaced a book that seemed to intersect with questions I was already exploring, so I gave it a try.
I am glad I did, although I am still trying to decide how much I actually got from it.
That uncertainty is probably the most honest way I can begin this evaluation. The Patterning Instinct is an ambitious book. Lent attempts to trace the ways human beings have constructed patterns of meaning and how those patterns have influenced the development of civilizations. That is exactly the sort of subject that interests me. I have been thinking more about systems theory and the way systems develop behaviors and characteristics that cannot always be understood by examining their individual parts. I am also increasingly interested in the way ideas become embedded in institutions and cultures and then continue shaping the people who live within them.
So Lent was walking into territory I already found interesting.
He was also not introducing me to the ancient civilizations he discusses. I had recently listened to Martin Gurri’s The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium and Joseph Henrich’s The WEIRDest People in the World. Before that, I had spent considerable time with Greek and Roman history and thought, including Anthony Everitt’s The Rise of Athens, Plato’s Republic, Herodotus, Homer, and other classical works. I had also explored Chinese thought through the Tao Te Ching and Eva Wong’s Taoism. In other words, I came to Lent with some context already in place.
That context probably explains some of my reaction to the book.
The book that came before this one
Of all that reading, Henrich was the most immediate point of comparison. I listened to The WEIRDest People in the Worldimmediately before The Patterning Instinct, and both authors attempt ambitious explanations of how cultural patterns developed and how those patterns affected the societies that adopted them.
I enjoyed Henrich’s book. I found it insightful, and more importantly, I felt that he treated the various traditions and historical developments he examined with a degree of respect that made me willing to follow him even when his conclusions were challenging.
Lent did not have the same effect on me.
That does not mean that I agreed with everything Henrich said or that I disagree with everything Lent says. It is more subtle than that. Henrich seemed to me to be trying to understand why people and cultures became what they became. With Lent, I sometimes felt that the analysis moved more quickly from understanding a tradition to evaluating it according to a particular philosophical framework.
That distinction became increasingly important as I continued listening.
Gurri provides another useful comparison. I found plenty in The Revolt of the Public that irritated me, particularly its treatment of Donald Trump and, by extension, his supporters, and what I perceived as an elitist tone. Yet Gurri gave me an idea that stayed with me: the distinction between the people and the public. I disagreed with portions of the book while still coming away with a conceptual tool that I found useful.
I am not sure Lent gave me an equivalent.
And Gurri and Henrich were not the only voices I brought with me into The Patterning Instinct. By this point, I had already spent considerable time with many of the traditions and questions Lent was attempting to connect.
My understanding of the ancient Greek world did not begin with Lent. I had listened to Anthony Everitt’s The Rise of Athens, Plato’s Republic, Herodotus, Homer, and other works dealing with Greek history, philosophy, mythology, and civic life. I therefore had some basis for comparing Lent’s interpretation with other accounts of the same world.
The same is true of his discussion of ancient China. My interest in Chinese thought began with the Tao Te Ching and continued with Eva Wong’s Taoism. I appreciate Taoism as an attempt by an ancient culture to make sense of reality and human existence with the intellectual resources available to it. They worked with what they had. Appreciating that achievement does not require me to conclude that Taoism, or later Neo-Confucianism, represents a superior understanding of reality.
I had also encountered the transition from the classical world into medieval Europe through Chris Wickham’s The Inheritance of Rome, while listening to the Apostolic Fathers gave me at least some direct exposure to early Christian voices. Those experiences mattered when Lent began making broad claims about Christianity and the development of the Western world.
Other books had shaped the questions I was bringing to Lent rather than simply providing historical background. Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Antifragile had given me concepts I actually learned and applied when thinking about systems. Neil Howe’s The Fourth Turning changed the way I think about historical development by making me less inclined to view history as purely linear. Colin Woodard’s American Nations reinforced the idea that large political entities can contain distinct cultural systems rather than functioning as homogeneous wholes.
Even Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism was part of the conversation. Zuboff largely reinforced concerns I already held about institutions accumulating power beyond the ability of individuals to control them. That made me receptive to some of Lent’s criticism of corporate power, even though I do not share his broader economic conclusions.
Seen in that context, The Patterning Instinct was not my introduction to systems, civilizations, Taoism, Christianity, Greek philosophy, institutional power, or historical patterns. Lent was attempting to weave many of those subjects into a single explanation of how human beings developed patterns of meaning.
That is an ambitious undertaking. It also gave him a higher bar to clear.
I was not looking simply to learn about another civilization or encounter another philosophical tradition. I was looking for a synthesis that would cause things I had already encountered separately to fit together in a way I had not previously seen.
Instead, I often found myself comparing Lent’s interpretation with what I had already learned from other authors.
That comparison did not make the book worthless. It simply meant that Lent was joining a conversation that was already underway.
What Lent gets right
That would be an unfair way to evaluate the book, however, because Lent does make some arguments that I found worthwhile.
I particularly appreciated his discussion of the intellectual history of the Islamic world. I do not want to turn that into an argument about Islam as a religion, because that is not the point I took from the book. What interested me was his willingness to consider how a civilization that had once been extraordinarily productive intellectually could develop internal conditions that constrained that development.
That struck me as a useful historical question.
Civilizations do not simply rise because they possess some permanent virtue, nor do they decline because they suddenly become stupid. Institutions, ideas, incentives, beliefs, and historical circumstances interact. A system that produces remarkable achievements under one set of conditions can eventually produce very different results under another.
That is precisely the kind of systems thinking that attracted me to Lent in the first place. I also found myself agreeing with him about corporate power.
I am not a Marxist, and I do not share Lent’s broader critique of capitalism. But I do believe that modern corporations can accumulate extraordinary amounts of power while operating under accountability structures that are not remotely comparable to those governing individual human beings. A corporation is a legal creation. It does not possess a conscience in the way a human being does. It does not have a soul. Yet it can accumulate wealth, influence, political power, and institutional longevity far beyond that of any individual who participates in it.
That is a problem worth taking seriously.
Lent’s criticism of corporate power therefore gave me an interesting point of agreement with someone whose broader worldview is quite different from mine. We do not need to share the same philosophical foundation to recognize that an institution can become powerful enough to require stronger constraints.
That, in itself, is worth something.
Taoism, Christianity, and the problem of comparison
I also genuinely appreciate ancient Chinese thought. My interest in Taoism predates Lent’s book. I found the Tao Te Ching worthwhile, and Eva Wong’s Taoism gave me an appreciation for the tradition as an attempt to understand reality, human behavior, and the proper way to live.
I can appreciate Taoism without concluding that it represents a superior understanding of reality.
To me, there is something admirable in recognizing what an ancient culture could discern with the intellectual and religious resources available to it. They worked with what they had. That does not require me to pretend that their conclusions were identical to my own.
This is where I became more uncomfortable with Lent’s treatment of Christianity.
I came away feeling that Christianity, and particularly Catholicism, was often presented as a kind of representative Christian model against which Lent could make his larger critique. At the same time, he gives substantial attention to individual Christian thinkers and contributors to Western civilization while treating “the Church” as a much more problematic institutional force.
I found that difficult to reconcile.
Lent himself describes the modern Western world as emerging from a history deeply shaped by Christianity. Yet I did not feel that he gave the Christian tradition proportionate credit for the intellectual, institutional, and cultural developments that eventually produced the world he is now criticizing.
This does not mean that Christianity should be exempt from criticism. It certainly should not. Nor does it mean that the Church (as a medieval Catholic institution) has always acted well. Christian institutions have made serious mistakes, and Christians have sometimes behaved in ways that contradict the principles they profess. They were human, after all.
But if Christianity helped shape the civilization that produced modern science, constitutional government, universities, individual rights, and eventually the intellectual freedom that allows Lent to criticize that civilization, then I think the historical accounting should include both the liabilities and the assets.
I did not always feel that Lent’s accounting was balanced in that respect.
Perhaps that reaction is partly a product of my own convictions. I am not a neutral observer when Christianity is being discussed. I recognize that. But that makes the issue more interesting to me, not less. I tried to ask whether I was simply objecting because Lent reached conclusions different from mine, or whether I was reacting to what I perceived as an uneven standard of judgment.
I think it was more the latter.
Neo-Confucianism and the problem of the road not taken
The same issue arose for me in Lent’s treatment of China. I appreciated his discussion of China’s intellectual accomplishments, including the developments associated with Neo-Confucian thought. China was an extraordinary civilization, and there is no reason for a Western reader to approach Chinese intellectual history with anything other than genuine curiosity and respect.
But I did not find myself persuaded that Neo-Confucian thought was therefore superior to Christianity. This is where I thought Lent’s historical framework needed more follow-through.
China possessed enormous intellectual, technological, organizational, and maritime capabilities. At one point, its naval capacity dwarfed the three small ships with which Christopher Columbus crossed the Atlantic. Yet it was Columbus’s expedition, not the magnificent Chinese fleets, that became part of the beginning of a sustained period of European global exploration and expansion.
That creates a problem for any theory that wants to explain history primarily through the superiority of one pattern of thought.
The question is not why China was impressive. It clearly was. The question is why an impressive civilization with enormous capabilities did not follow the historical trajectory that Europe eventually followed.
China peaked in many respects and then turned inward. Europe did something different. If patterns of thought are supposed to help explain those outcomes, then the theory needs to explain both sides of the comparison.
I am not convinced Lent consistently does that.
And I found myself wondering whether Neo-Confucianism receives a degree of admiration partly because it provides an example of sophisticated thought that does not require belief in an Almighty God. That is an interpretation of the way the argument struck me, not a claim about Lent’s motives. I cannot know what motivated his evaluation.
But the asymmetry was noticeable.
Dawkins and the problem of the neutral starting point
I had a similar reaction to Lent’s treatment of Richard Dawkins. I do not share Dawkins’s materialist assumptions, and I do not regard belief in an intelligent Designer as an intellectually unserious position. From my perspective, an orderly and intelligible universe is perfectly compatible with belief in an intelligent Creator. That makes me predisposed to disagree with Dawkins on some fundamental questions.
But again, that is not really my objection to Lent.
My question is why Dawkins seemed to receive such elevated intellectual status within Lent’s narrative while religious traditions were often subjected to much greater scrutiny. I expected Lent to disagree with Christianity. I expected him to be sympathetic to secular interpretations of human origins. What I found more difficult was the apparent assumption that the secular position could function as the neutral starting point from which religious belief was evaluated.
Perhaps that is simply how I heard the argument.
But if Lent’s larger project is to show how human beings develop patterns through which they interpret reality, then Dawkins should be subject to that same analysis. His interpretation of the universe is itself part of a particular intellectual tradition. I would have preferred to see Lent apply the same curiosity to that tradition that he applies to others.
From history to prophecy
The final portion of the book was where my skepticism increased the most. Lent becomes increasingly concerned about the future of the planet and the consequences of human activity. I agree with him on a basic proposition: we should be better stewards of the world we inhabit.
I am not a militant environmentalist, but neither am I interested in treating the natural world as an inexhaustible warehouse. My environmental outlook is closer to the conservationism associated with Theodore Roosevelt. We have inherited something valuable, and we have a responsibility to use it wisely and preserve it where we can.
Where I part company with Lent is in the degree of certainty with which I think we can predict the future. There is an important difference between saying that climate change is a serious problem deserving attention and saying that particular social and civilizational outcomes are therefore inevitable.
History has a way of humbling people who make confident predictions about it.
Technology changes. Institutions adapt. People respond to incentives. Political arrangements change. Unexpected discoveries alter the possibilities available to future generations. Problems that appear overwhelming at one point can become manageable, while entirely new problems can emerge from places nobody anticipated.
That does not mean we should ignore warnings. It means I am reluctant to treat a forecast as though it were historical fact. Lent is much more convincing to me when he is explaining how the past developed than when he is telling me where the future is going.
One other voice in the room
There is one qualification I need to make because I listened to The Patterning Instinct rather than read it. Derek Perkins narrated the audiobook, and I thought he did a good job. His voice and pacing kept my attention, and I listened at 1.5 times normal speed. I normally listen somewhere between 1.5 and 2.0, depending on the narrator.
But narration is interpretation.
A narrator’s cadence, emphasis, pauses, and tone can subtly influence how an argument is received. A sentence delivered with certainty can sound more certain. A sentence delivered with skepticism can sound more dismissive.
I cannot know how much of the tone I heard came directly from Lent’s prose and how much, if any, was amplified by Perkins’s performance. I have not listened to other books narrated by Perkins, so I have no basis for comparing his treatment of Lent with his treatment of other authors.
That doesn’t invalidate my reaction to the audiobook. It simply gives me one more reason to be cautious about attributing every aspect of that reaction directly to the author.
So what did I actually get from Lent?
This is where I keep coming back to the same answer:
I don’t think I learned anything genuinely new from The Patterning Instinct.
That sounds harsher than I mean it. The book did not waste my time. It brought together ideas that I had encountered separately, and it gave me the opportunity to compare my own understanding with someone coming from a substantially different intellectual tradition.
In some respects, that was valuable in itself.
Lent and I can arrive at some of the same conclusions from very different starting points. Corporate power is one example. The need for greater stewardship of the natural world is another.
That is worth recognizing.
I can appreciate ancient Chinese thought without believing Neo-Confucianism is superior to Christianity. I can recognize legitimate failures within Christian history without accepting a caricature of Christianity. I can agree that corporations can exercise too much power without becoming a Marxist (I’m not accusing Lent of being a Marxist, either). I can believe that we have a responsibility to care for the natural world without embracing every prediction of environmental catastrophe.
Perhaps that is what I ultimately gained from the book: not a new framework, but a better understanding of where my own framework differs from Lent’s.
That is not nothing.
But compared with Henrich, who left me with a deeper understanding of how Western culture developed, or Gurri, who gave me a distinction I continue to think about, Lent did not leave me with a single idea that I feel compelled to carry forward.
I finished the book more interested in arguing with it than in adopting anything from it.
And perhaps that is an appropriate place to leave an argument with a book. A good book does not necessarily have to change your mind. Sometimes it clarifies why you believe what you already believe. Sometimes it exposes weaknesses in your own thinking. Sometimes it gives you an idea that follows you for years.
And sometimes it simply gives you someone intelligent enough to disagree with. I am still deciding which of those The Patterning Instinct ultimately was for me.
