The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures

Damasio's central claim is that feelings were the key motivators in the development of human culture, and that culture is at bottom an elaboration of homeostasis—the biological drive toward life maintenance and flourishing [citation:2][citation:10]. He rejects the assumption that language and abstract reasoning are the primary shapers of culture, arguing that neuroscience's emphasis on language has eclipsed the role of feelings [citation:3]. He also challenges the transhumanist belief that human nature can be captured in substrate-independent algorithms, arguing that consciousness requires a living body regulated by homeostasis, something computers lack [citation:3][citation:5].

Damasio traces the origins of culture to the homeostatic imperative present in the earliest single-celled organisms, which already displayed social behaviors such as kin recognition and collective defense [citation:3]. He argues that feelings—subjective experiences of the body's internal state—arose as mental representatives of homeostasis, reporting on whether conditions were favorable or unfavorable [citation:5]. These feelings, in turn, generated the motivations that drove cultural creativity: the desire to alleviate suffering, pursue pleasure, and maintain conditions conducive to flourishing. Culture, on this account, is not a departure from biology but its most elaborate expression, a negotiation between instinctual drives and conscious attempts to achieve culturally appropriate outcomes [citation:3].

The reception was mixed but generally admiring of its ambition. Adrian Woolfson, writing in Nature, called it 'bold and important' but noted a significant weakness: the lack of substantial discussion of supporting scientific literature, which makes parts of the text read more like a nineteenth-century philosophical treatise than a contemporary study [citation:3]. Mark Solms, reviewing in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, described it as a 'neuroscientific vindication of Freud's views' on civilization and its discontents, updated with modern biology and 'slightly less pessimism about the implications for humanity' [citation:4]. Library Journal and Kirkus Reviews recognized its scope and originality, while noting the density of its argument [citation:2].

The Strange Order of Things extends the argument Damasio began in Descartes' Error (1994), where he first challenged the separation of reason from emotion and introduced the somatic marker hypothesis. Where Descartes' Error focused on individual decision-making, the 2018 book scales the argument up to the level of culture itself. Damasio argues that the same homeostatic mechanisms that guide personal choices also drove the collective construction of art, science, religion, and governance [citation:14]. The book thus represents the culmination of a trajectory that began with the embodied mind thesis and now encompasses the biological foundations of civilization itself, a project one reviewer described as 'almost a quarter century after Descartes' Error' [citation:10].

Damasio argues that consciousness cannot be replicated in a substrate-independent algorithm because it requires feelings, and feelings require a living body regulated by homeostasis [citation:5]. He contends that the mind is not purely cerebral but bodily—'a product of the brain but also of its interaction with the body'—and that the specific chemistry of biological organization is essential to explaining who we are [citation:5][citation:18]. A computer program may master complex tasks, but without the biological hardware that generates subjective experiences of satisfaction, pain, or desire, it will never possess consciousness as humans do. This argument directly challenges transhumanist aspirations to upload or replicate minds digitally [citation:3].

Homeostasis is the organizing principle of the entire argument. Damasio defines it as the condition that regulates human physiology within the range that makes possible not only survival but also the flourishing of life [citation:10][citation:17]. He argues that homeostasis is not merely a physiological mechanism but a powerful force inherent in our very chemistry, a striving toward life maintenance that governs all life processes [citation:17]. Feelings, in this framework, are the mental perceptions of the body's internal state as it responds to homeostatic imperatives [citation:5]. Culture emerges when feelings—freed from purely automatic biological responses—enable humans to attempt homeostasis by cultural means rather than remaining captive to basic biological devices [citation:4].