{"id":10204,"date":"2008-08-13T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2008-08-13T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/thenewatlantis.com\/publications\/the-prudence-of-neuroscience"},"modified":"2020-09-26T14:07:15","modified_gmt":"2020-09-26T18:07:15","slug":"the-prudence-of-neuroscience","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/publications\/the-prudence-of-neuroscience","title":{"rendered":"The Prudence of Neuroscience"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ren\u00e9 Descartes opens his Discourse on Method<\/em> with the ironic joke that \u201cgood sense is the best distributed thing in the world.\u201d To call it well distributed is not to say that anyone is particularly well endowed in it, and indeed Descartes\u2019 effort to discover rules for methodical cogitation is aimed precisely at relieving man from the vagaries of his own meager powers of discernment. His science seeks to inoculate us against our own rational infirmity by the dispassionate objectivity of algorithmic rules \u2014 the messiness of philosophical and moral judgment is traded for the neatness of mathematical formula, and the path from doubt to certitude is paved by universal reason whose demand for computational precision excludes the inexactitude of old-fashioned prudence and judgment.<\/p>\n

In his new book, The Heart of Judgment<\/em><\/a>, University of Florida professor Leslie Paul Thiele describes the general current of modernity as insalubrious for the esteem of judgment: the \u201cold-fashioned character [of] prudence\u201d causes us to denigrate it in comparison with the youthfulness of creative expression and revolutionary change. As a \u201cpragmatic virtue,\u201d it reeks of expediency in contradistinction to the romance of risk and the modern elevation of the virtue of courage. Moreover, he argues (borrowing from F.H. Low-Beer), \u201cto label an issue a question of judgment is a cognitive put-down\u201d since this implies it is epistemologically indeterminate, or even finally unimportant. Such concerns are \u201coutcasts from knowledge\u201d compared to the indubitableness of genuinely rational thought. The complex, variegated nature of prudence makes it seem arbitrary when compared to the impartiality of law, and our easygoing moral relativism reduces the categories of judgment to matters of aesthetic sensibility.<\/p>\n

According to Thiele, however, what truly undermines the cultivation of prudence today is the valorization of universal reason incapable of fully capturing the deep complexity that surrounds its operation. Practical judgment, he writes, is a \u201chybrid faculty\u201d of which reason is no more than a \u201cco-participant\u201d; unlike the \u201csterile logic\u201d of analysis, it is \u201cattentive to context and contingency,\u201d responsive to a world in flux, and sensitive to the \u201cmultidimensionality\u201d of life as truly lived. In fact, not only is judgment generally \u201cbeyond the jurisdiction of reason,\u201d he argues, but it is more intuitive than reflective, more reliably stewarded by unconscious instinct than conscious decision, and far too elastic to receive much guidance from a \u201ctheory or principle that is valid across space and time.\u201d In addition to the failure of abstract rationality to provide an adequate description of the activity of judgment, an overemphasis on its role can actually stymie our ability to call on simple prudence and enervate us in the face of calls to action.<\/p>\n

For Thiele, the original culprit in the modern weakening of judgment \u2014 especially in our moral life \u2014 is Immanuel Kant, who insisted that the principles of judgment are, in Thiele\u2019s paraphrase, \u201cderived from pure, practical reason, unsullied by the conditional or the particular.\u201d By \u201csevering morality from the empirical world,\u201d Thiele writes, Kant provided \u201clittle room for practical wisdom to maneuver,\u201d substituting \u201caxiomatic morality and the rigidity of legal principle\u201d in its place. Kant\u2019s antipathy towards prudence, according to Thiele, is the end result of a long chain of historical reevaluations. Aristotle originally drew a distinction between judgment informed by principle and clever, unprincipled calculation. Machiavelli\u2019s austere realism sundered the connection between politics and morality, leaving nothing but calculation freed from any moral tethers. Finally, Kant\u2019s relentless preoccupation with a priori<\/em> rules at the expense of context and variability culminates in the identification of judgment with calculation \u2014 after all, if the activity of moral discernment is exhausted by the deduction of particulars from theoretical principle, then practical judgment is little more than craven strategizing. Kant preserves the theoretical purity of moral principle but only at the price of sacrificing any meaningful connection between moral theory and lived moral experience.<\/p>\n

Thiele\u2019s ambitious project is an attempt to rehabilitate a conception of prudence that recaptures its indispensability to moral life, to properly depict its malleability in the face of unpredictable human affairs by unfettering it from what he terms the \u201ctyranny of reason,\u201d and to reconnect it with empirical reality by grounding its description in recent neuroscientific discoveries. Thiele believes the incapacity of neuroscientific categories to \u201cinvest our lives with meaning,\u201d or to properly account for the moral dimension of judgment, justifies our turning to the nature of narrative for humanistic understanding. Neuroscience supports \u201cunderstanding the development of the brain in terms of narrative structures\u201d and \u201c(self-)consciousness as a narrative process,\u201d he argues, making the complicated nature of judgment some amalgam of neuroscience and narrative.<\/p>\n

Thiele defines practical judgment as \u201can aptitude for assessing, evaluating, and choosing in the absence of certainties or principles that dictate or generate right answers.\u201d This succinct definition is instructive since it emphasizes Thiele\u2019s guiding preoccupations: the fundamentally practical versus theoretical character of judgment, the contingency of every opportunity for the exercise of judgment, and the demotion of the role of abstract or general principles. In place of the primacy of abstract reason Thiele substitutes experience, unconscious assessment and motivation, the emotional foundations of cognition or affect, and finally the distinctively human capacity for conjuring stories or narrative. While he employs each of these concepts as a counterpoint to the hypertrophic rationalism of Kant, he also relies heavily on what he takes to be the confirmation of their significance in the evidence provided by contemporary neuroscience. Thus, Thiele initially opposes one form of rationality to another: scientific reasoning is distinct from and superior to pure reason, at least insofar as the latter proves far more attentive to the fluid, multifarious nature of prudence. So although both scientific and moral principle turn out to be inadequate if not pernicious guides in matters that require practical judgment, neurophysiologic interpretations of human thought and behavior are still instructive and useful in the description and cultivation of prudence.<\/p>\n

However, it is often unclear precisely what role Thiele assigns to neuroscience in his multidisciplinary investigation. Sometimes, he presents it as a kind of evidentiary instrument for measuring the plausibility of non-scientific theory, so that neurophysiologic data provide an \u201cempirical vindication of some of the most insightful theoretical accounts of judgment, from Aristotle through contemporary pragmatism.\u201d In fact, Thiele argues that the \u201cbrain science\u201d he painstakingly lays out was almost all \u201cforeshadowed by Aristotle\u2019s habit theory of virtue.\u201d At the same time, though, he is quick to concede considerable limits on the explanatory breadth of neuroscientific research given our enduring ignorance of the elusive machinations of the mind and the fact that scientific efforts to render the mind transparent \u201cstill shine only a dim beam into a very dark and convoluted process.\u201d Although he never articulates this, neuroscience seems to function for Thiele less as a mode of original discovery or as the primary paradigm of interpretation than as a bridge across the chasm Kant opened up between a philosophical account of moral theory and a practical account of moral action.<\/p>\n

In place of the ostensibly calcified categories of abstract reason, Thiele aims to substitute a \u201cthick\u201d description of moral events that properly situates them in their circumstantial particularity; he rejects what he considers to be the clumsy and often Procrustean imposition of moral precepts in favor of a contextualized account that prioritizes our essential \u201cembeddedness\u201d in the world. However, despite his announced intention to avoid \u201cmechanistic models of science\u201d and to follow explanatory avenues that \u201cdo not lead in the direction of biological determinism or crass reductionism,\u201d Thiele consistently translates the language of ordinary moral life into an often remarkably counterintuitive neurophysiologic vernacular. For example, in making the reasonable argument that experience is a prerequisite for the development of prudence, he adopts a \u201cneural Darwinism\u201d that counts experience as the sum result of the \u201congoing development of the brain\u2019s synaptic pathways over the life of the individual.\u201d The \u201csynaptic constitution\u201d of our brains is characterized by a susceptibility to change given different kinds of exposure to different stimuli, and this \u201cneuroplasticity\u201d allows our brains to more effectively encode the lessons of experience than purely conscious learning. What ultimately gets produced over time, he writes, are \u201cextensive neural relays\u201d that \u201cchart the history of the individual, from its prenatal experiences, to its various encounters with the world, including the internal reactions and mental (re)processings that these environmental encounters generate.\u201d So, when Thiele extols the \u201cindispensability of experience,\u201d he means \u201cbrain maps\u201d that \u201cconstitute a neural inventory of an individual\u2019s life.\u201d While this conception of experience does include conscious memory and a reflection upon our past, it assigns greater significance to unconscious neurophysiologic process, prenatal synaptic formation, and species evolution. Even when Thiele discusses the \u201cpermanent ink\u201d of our \u201cancestral experience,\u201d he intends this not as the influence of our family history in the ordinary sense but the \u201cgenetic inheritance\u201d that \u201chas congealed in the form of inherited brain circuits or strong propensities for their formation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Contrary to his own stated purposes, then, Thiele exchanges one counterintuitive mode of explanation for another; a description of the synaptic structure of the brain is even more remote from a phenomenologically sound depiction of human experience than the simple adumbration of moral rules. At the very least, even the most abstruse moral principles implicitly refer to particular moral predicaments, however inarticulately; the content of moral principle is not completely disconnected from the context of moral circumstance. If neurophysiology did, in fact, provide the key to understanding the role of experience in good judgment then the surest means to assessing whether a person possesses judgment would be an inspection of that person\u2019s brain; completing his departure from common sense, Thiele suggests precisely this.<\/p>\n

In fact, he goes even further, denying the connection between experience and conscious rationality. Thiele contends that, generally speaking, \u201cethico-political life … is highly dependent on tacit knowledge,\u201d and likewise that \u201cpractical wisdom is intrinsically grounded in unconscious capacities.\u201d In fact, the activity of prudence is so far removed from a \u201cdeliberative, cognitive exercise in analytical assessment\u201d that the judgment it renders is a \u201cproduct of intuitions\u201d only \u201coccasionally refined by propositional discussions.\u201d Fortunately, this should not cause concern: \u201cWords and the conscious thoughts behind them get in the way of acute perception,\u201d he writes. If thinking aloud precludes access to the \u201coften more fecund capacities of the unconscious mind,\u201d then practical judgment is best served by avoiding the introduction of explicit analysis; apparently, we judge best when we rely upon \u201cimplicit memories and intuitive apprehension.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thiele presents this thesis as a kind of updated Aristotelianism: intuition is more efficient and effective than its conscious counterparts and is understood as the result of cultivating certain habits and skills. But Thiele\u2019s account of our development of prudence only bears a shadowy resemblance to Aristotle\u2019s intention; habits and skills are reinterpreted as the \u201cbehavioral expressions of neural remappings.\u201d Thiele de-intellectualizes Aristotle\u2019s view by reducing habit to biologically-conditioned instinct. In place of the moral education Aristotle prescribes, Thiele recommends we figure out how to \u201ceducate\u201d the amygdala, find more effective means to stimulate the motor cortex, or maybe facilitate the arousal of the right hemisphere of the brain. Somehow he never acknowledges the contradiction between this view and his advice to social scientists to \u201cmove beyond the antiseptic massaging of data and get one\u2019s hands dirty grappling with the real world.\u201d<\/p>\n

The examples Thiele marshals in defense of the primacy of unconscious reflex over conscious deliberation \u2014 he repeatedly cites athletic and musical virtuosity \u2014 prove to be less than satisfying; in obvious and decisive respects, these activities are clearly not analogous to the domain of moral decision. Thiele seems aware of this, since despite his contention that moral judgment is not essentially different from other varieties of judgment, it does distinguish itself with respect to the peculiar version of \u201cdeep complexity\u201d that characterizes moral predicaments: \u201cmoral and political judgments are never uncontestably right or wrong.\u201d However, the indeterminacy of moral principle is only one part of the story \u2014 Thiele\u2019s protracted attack on it has less to do with its unspectacular contribution to the activity of prudence than with deeper suspicions regarding its philosophical defensibleness. He describes moral principles as the \u201cinternalization of social values\u201d that are constituted and policed in ways not categorically distinct from the \u201cnorms of reciprocity\u201d employed by primates to \u201cgrease the wheels of social interaction.\u201d He caricatures a sincere reliance upon general moral principle as an appeal to hackneyed clich\u00e9; general moral rules, he says, rarely amount to more than \u201cnuggets of folk wisdom\u201d like \u201copposites attract\u201d or \u201cbirds of a feather flock together.\u201d<\/p>\n

If moral principles are basically platitudes emptied of substantive content and \u201cconscious judgments are mostly afterthoughts,\u201d Thiele unmoors moral judgment not just from abstract reason but from any<\/em> moral reason. He situates his own work within the postmodern project that aims to \u201creject axiomatic moral theory\u201d but still \u201cvalorize ethico-political judgment\u201d; in effect, practical judgment has to be rescued from the collapse of its previous rational and metaphysical foundations. Cognitive neuroscience is the \u201cprotagonist of the tale told here\u201d; its role reaches fruition in validating \u201cnarrative as the source of the self and a chief resource for the cultivation of practical judgment.\u201d One subtle subtext of Thiele\u2019s ambitious exposition of judgment is a reconciliation of narrative and science tantamount to an attempt at a postmodern rapprochement between science and poetry. Narrative construction allows us to represent the \u201cneural inventory of life created by brain maps\u201d as a kind of \u201cexistential tale\u201d \u2014 \u201cneural mapping\u201d can be depicted as \u201csynaptic storylines\u201d that \u201ccapture the organism\u2019s march through space and time.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thiele\u2019s marriage of science and narrative is from the start a terribly uneasy one, since it requires a heavy dose of salutary myth in the form of what he calls the \u201cuser illusion,\u201d or the healthy self-deception that we are transcendent authors of our own selves and that there is an \u201cenduring teller behind the neurological tale.\u201d However, the truth, according to Thiele, is that we are \u201cfabricated characters\u201d who are \u201cretrospectively abstracted from synaptic stories.\u201d The self is a \u201cnarrative artifact,\u201d a fiction that has \u201cno transcendental nature, no essence.\u201d Thiele seems to agree with Dewey that \u201cjudgment secures nothing less than human freedom,\u201d but freedom turns out to be illusory if not only our behavior but our personhood is constituted through the development of neural relays in the brain. In this vein, Thiele offers up approving quotes from neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga regarding our \u201cconcocted stories\u201d; each one, he says, \u201cliberates us from the sense of being tied to the demands of the environment and produces the wonderful sensation that our self is in charge of our destiny.\u201d Now the crux of the partnership between neuroscience and narrative becomes clear: neuroscience repairs the damage done by a discredited moral theory premised upon discarded metaphysical foundations by reconnecting it with the particulars of empirical reality. In turn, narrative knowledge allows us to contrive an \u201cautonomous, inventive individual\u201d who makes moral decisions out of the deterministic particulars of neurophysiology through a \u201creflective mythologizing.\u201d Oddly enough, Thiele\u2019s book seems designed to awaken us to the dream of our selves \u2014 one has to wonder if Thiele\u2019s meta-narrative undermines the assurances we unknowingly gain from our neurophysiologic slumber.<\/p>\n

The explanatory power of narrative, in Thiele\u2019s account, can\u2019t stop with the construction of the self; in the absence of metaphysical foundations grounding moral principle, narrative also must account for the creation of moral preference. Thus, Thiele proclaims there are \u201cno trans-historical, culturally universal, non-contingent principles of right.\u201d Rather, we are left with \u201cmore or less persuasive stories.\u201d Following the philosopher Richard Rorty, he argues there is \u201cnothing but stories all the way down, all the way up, and all the way out in every direction.\u201d Indeed, practical judgment turns out to be a kind of reader\u2019s instinct: it can be defined \u201cas the faculty that allows one to apprehend stories in progress \u2014 to predict with some assurance what events will occur based on the characters involved and the circumstances at hand, and to state with some authority what events should occur to achieve the best practicable results.\u201d This understanding of judgment requires a new definition of the role of moral imagination as \u201cthe capacity to situate oneself in competing and complementary narratives,\u201d which turns out to be more productive than passively intellectual since \u201cenvisioning alternative points of view really amounts to constructing alternative narratives.\u201d The successful practical judge is akin to Adam Smith\u2019s \u201cimpartial spectator\u201d \u2014 he has the empathy to imagine himself in someone else\u2019s shoes. Impartiality is not the same as objectivity \u2014 it carries with it none of the pretence regarding dispassionate inquiry into the nature of things. Rather, it is a \u201cform of intersubjectivity\u201d that Thiele describes as an \u201cenlarged mentality\u201d; stripped down to its basic character, impartiality is very close to the liberal virtue of tolerance. In a world devoid of any rationally defensible moral precept, open-mindedness reigns supreme; the \u201cgood judge is not judgmental.\u201d<\/p>\n

What is it that makes one story superior to another if all appeals to rational criteria for selection are ultimately baseless? The short answer, for Thiele, is that the better story proves to be more persuasive or benefits from a more compelling \u201credescription.\u201d However, this response seems evasive \u2014 what is it that makes a story more persuasive than other competing candidates? Thiele assuages our anxiety in the face of this discomfiting question by asserting that the \u201cabsence of philosophically compelling arguments does not signal defeat.\u201d Substantively speaking, Thiele is not free of political commitments \u2014 he borrows from Rorty an attachment to solidarity, inclusiveness, tolerance, social justice, and the whole panoply of progressive rights. Formally speaking, he favors those narratives that are the most attentive to subtlety and nuance that paint portraits of contingency and context. For Thiele, of course, this means a rejection of all \u201cmeta-narratives\u201d that present themselves as conclusive or synoptic or don\u2019t recognize the \u201cinherent provincialism of our moralities.\u201d<\/p>\n

Any narrative that denies that it is ultimately \u201cnestable\u201d within other narratives by staking a claim to \u201cauthoritative status\u201d is a meta-narrative; these include \u201cthe priority of first virtues, the Golden Rule, the word of God, or the categorical imperative,\u201d and other familiar favorites. In each of these instances, the narrative became a meta-narrative when it achieved hegemonic status through particularly compelling description and re-description \u2014 in the course of many tellings the story gained momentum but lost awareness of its narrative origins. Thiele borrows from Rorty in his formulation: \u201cthe \u2018universality\u2019 of a moral claim only ever gains motivational force when it finds a home in the \u2018provinciality\u2019 of narrative.\u201d For example, \u201csincere, rational Nazis\u201d could never be persuaded by J\u00fcrgen Habermas\u2019s \u201cliberal arguments\u201d precisely because the principles they cling to are so firmly embedded within the \u201cparticular narratives of Aryan supremacy\u201d; the principles themselves have no attraction independent from the irreducibly particular circumstances out of which they were born. The narrative of hate that produces a Nazi only gets subsequently rationalized by a theory of racial superiority.<\/p>\n

Frustratingly, Thiele refuses to acknowledge the real possibility that some stories have proven more attractive because they are more true<\/em>; he replaces the modern dogmatic acceptance of universal reason with the postmodern dogmatic rejection of any and all metaphysical ground for moral discourse. In place of the lack of self-awareness that constitutes moral absolutism at its core, Thiele proposes a more sophisticated self-ignorance that flatters the self with fictional tales of freedom, autonomy, and open-mindedness. In the end, one is left with a deformed version of Socratic wisdom \u2014 one knows that one knows nothing but spins gossamer tales of one\u2019s own progressive moral and philosophical growth nonetheless. Thiele is certainly aware that there are limits to the stories we can accept but provides no serious reflection on the possibility that, deprived of any philosophical reasons to accept one narrative over another, they will be bereft of the capacity to inspire and incapable of defending themselves against those who quite like their own<\/em> meta-narratives and don\u2019t worship at the altar of inclusiveness. In other words, Thiele fails to consider that a manly and spirited defense of our own requires more than the literary richness of a well-hewn plot.<\/p>\n

Thiele is certainly correct in his prognosis \u2014 the terrain of modernity is less than arable ground for the seeds of practical judgment. Much of the difficulty seems begotten from confusion at the heart of the Enlightenment regarding the status of prudence. On the one hand, the Cartesian panegyrizing of universal reason, or the transformation of reason into scientific method, reduces practical judgment to amoral cleverness or purely subjective preference. On the other hand, the modern rejection of the political utopianism of antiquity presupposes the embracing of prudence as the arbiter of means to considerably more modest ends. Even the modern choice to substitute political science for political philosophy was understood as driven by partially prudential reasons; the choice for science can\u2019t be made on solely scientific grounds. Modern political science can be understood as the attempt to broker a compromise between both of these currents \u2014 the Kantian-Cartesian and the Machiavellian \u2014 by more narrowly circumscribing the range for the exercise of discretion. Universal reason provides the certain ends of political life while the emerging constitutionalism of classical liberalism doesn\u2019t eliminate but severely restricts the provenance of non-methodical judgment. In Locke\u2019s Second Treatise of Government<\/em>, for example, promulgated law and the mechanisms of representation only takes him so far \u2014 he eventually has to introduce some opportunity, however rare and extraordinary, for executive prerogative and the discretion it entails. Similarly, even in the midst of articulating his moral rules in the Discourse on Method<\/em>, Descartes recognizes that he \u201csaw nothing in the world that remains in the same state always\u201d and that laws were often designed to \u201cremedy the inconstancy of weak minds.\u201d<\/p>\n

The source of the crisis of prudence in modernity, as well as the most daunting problem for Thiele\u2019s impressive study, is that the relentless monopoly that science imposes upon the market of reason creates an intractable bifurcation between philosophy and science; prudence becomes deprived of its claims to reason by this historic divorce. The rational sovereignty of science is catastrophic for practical judgment since it understands itself as the perfection of pre-scientific consciousness and therefore dismisses the indispensability of common sense as the proper starting point for the investigation of things political. The once deep waters of practical judgment run dry once judgment is defined as mere unscientific bias.<\/p>\n

In one sense, Thiele\u2019s laudable defense of prudence is unmistakably Aristotelian: he attempts to return to an understanding of moral and political life that privileges a starting point at the level of moral and political experience. However, his treatment takes a decisively un-Aristotelian turn in uncritically accepting the postmodern collapse of metaphysical foundations; Thiele acquiesces to the division between science and philosophy and to the chasm between facts and values precisely because he bows to the Enlightenment\u2019s impoverishment of reason. Thiele hammers home time and again that there is more to judgment than analytic deduction but never considers that there is more to reason as well. Given this view of reason, he has little choice but to follow in Rorty\u2019s footsteps and attempt to \u201ccelebrate Enlightenment liberalism while shedding its rationalistic core as a remnant of metaphysical thought.\u201d Thus, he feels compelled to provide a neurophysiologic vindication of non-scientific theory that is incapable of respecting or capturing political experience unvarnished by gratuitous abstraction; Thiele memorably describes good judgment as that which \u201coccurs when the frontal lobes marshal other brain regions into service, utilizing diverse capacities and orchestrating their integrated effort.\u201d<\/p>\n

For Aristotle, prudence may not be based on theoretical knowledge, but the objectives at which prudence aims are decisively shaped by a theoretical understanding of the ends toward which man naturally strives. Prudence itself might not require a philosophical demonstration to account for its partiality within the whole of human experience rightly understood, but some awareness of man\u2019s natural ends is a prerequisite for the exercise of practical wisdom. For Thiele, however, there are no natural ends but rather an endless diversity of scripts that accommodate the \u201cmultidimensionality\u201d of life. There isn\u2019t even a self exactly, only an unconscious weaving of fictional tales that we don\u2019t even get to claim credit for writing. Thiele courageously defends practical judgment from its dismissal by universal reason, but simultaneously robs it of the ends that confer dignity upon it. His book would have been greatly improved if he reflected more seriously on his introductory claim that prudence requires \u201cknowledge of the human soul.\u201d There must be more to such knowledge than an orchestrated dance of frontal lobes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ren\u00e9 Descartes opens his Discourse on Method with the ironic joke that \u201cgood sense is the best distributed thing in the world.\u201d To call it well distributed is not to say that anyone is particularly well endowed in it, and indeed Descartes\u2019 effort to discover rules for methodical cogitation is aimed precisely at relieving man from the vagaries of his own meager powers of discernment. His science seeks to inoculate us against our own rational infirmity by the dispassionate objectivity of algorithmic rules \u2014 the messiness of philosophical and moral judgment is traded for the neatness of mathematical formula, and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"template":"","article_type":[14],"noteworthy_people":[],"topics":[5026],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article\/10204"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/article"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article\/10204\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10204"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"article_type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article_type?post=10204"},{"taxonomy":"noteworthy_people","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/noteworthy_people?post=10204"},{"taxonomy":"topics","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/topics?post=10204"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}