Janus: A Summing Up, Page 3

  At this point I must insert two brief polemical remarks:

  Firstly, when Freud proclaimed ex cathedra that wars were caused by pent-up aggressive instincts in search of an outlet, people tended to believe him because it made them feel guilty, although he did not produce a shred of historical or psychological evidence for his claim. Anybody who has served in the ranks of an army can testify that aggressive feelings towards the enemy hardly play a part in the dreary routines of waging war. Soldiers do not hate. They are frightened, bored, sex-starved, homesick; they fight with resignation, because they have no other choice, or with enthusiasm for king and country, the true religion, the righteous cause -- moved not by hatred but by loyalty. To say it once more, man's tragedy is not an excess of aggression, but an excess of devotion.

  The second polemical remark concerns another theory which recently became fashionable among anthropologists, purporting that the origin of war is to be found in the instinctive urge of some animal species to defend at all costs their own stretch of land or water -- the so-called 'territorial imperative'. It seems to me no more convincing than Freud's hypothesis. The wars of man, with rare exceptions, were not fought for individual ownership of bits of space. The man who goes to war actually leaves the home which he is supposed to defend, and does his shooting far away from it; and what makes him do it is not the biological urge to defend his personal acreage of farmland or meadows, but his devotion to symbols derived from tribal lore, divine commandments and political slogans. Wars are not fought for territory, but for words.

  6

  This brings us to the next item in our inventory of the possible causes of the human predicament. Man's deadliest weapon is language. He is as susceptible to being hypnotized by slogans as he is to infectious diseases. And when there is an epidemic, the group-mind takes over. It obeys its own rules, which are different from the rules of conduct of individuals. When a person identifies himself with a group, his reasoning faculties are diminished and his passions enhanced by a kind of emotive resonance or positive feedback. The individual is not a killer, but the group is, and by identifying with it the individual is transformed into a killer. This is the infernal dialectic reflected in man's history of wars, persecution and genocide. And the main catalyst of that transformation is the hypnotic power of the word. The words of Adolf Hitler were the most powerful agents of destruction at his time. Long before the printing press was invented, the words of Allah's chosen Prophet unleashed an emotive chain-reaction which shook the world from Central Asia to the Atlantic coast. Without words there would be no poetry -- and no war. Language is the main factor in our superiority over brother animal -- and, in view of its explosive emotive potentials, a constant threat to survival.

  This apparently paradoxical point is illustrated by recent field-observations of Japanese monkey-societies which have revealed that different tribes of a species may develop surprisingly different habits -- one might almost say, different cultures. Some tribes have taken to washing potatoes in the river before eating them, others have not. Sometimes migrating groups of potato-washers meet non-washers, and the two groups watch each other's strange behaviour with apparent bewilderment. But unlike the inhabitants of Lilliput, who fought holy crusades over the question at which end to break the egg, the potato-washing monkeys do not go to war with the non-washers, because the poor creatures have no language which would enable them to declare washing a divine commandment and eating unwashed potatoes a deadly heresy.

  Obviously the quickest way to abolish war would be to abolish language, and Jesus seems to have been aware of this when he said: 'Let your communication be Yea, yea, Nay, nay, for anything beyond that cometh from the devil.' And in a sense mankind did renounce language long ago, if by language we mean a method of communication for the whole species. The Tower of Babel is a timeless symbol. Other species do possess a single method of communication -- by signs, sounds or by secreting odours -- which is understood by all members of that species. When a St Bernard meets a poodle they understand each other without needing an interpreter, however different they look. Homo sapiens, on the other hand, is split into some 3,000 language groups. Each language -- and each dialect thereof -- acts as a cohesive force within the group and a divisive force between groups. It is one of the reasons why the disruptive forces are so much stronger than the cohesive forces in our history. Men show a much greater variety in physical appearance and behaviour than any other species (excepting the products of artificial breeding); and the gift of language, instead of bridging over these differences, erects further barriers and enhances the contrast. We have communication satellites which can convey a message to the entire population of the planet, but no lingua franca which would make it universally understood. It seems odd that, except for a few valiant Esperantists, neither UNESCO nor any international body has as yet discovered that the simplest way to promote understanding would be to promote a language that is understood by all.

  7

  In his Unpopular Essays, Bertrand Russell has a telling anecdote:

  F.W.H. Myers, whom spiritualism had converted to belief in a future life, questioned a woman who had lately lost her daughter as to what she supposed had become of her soul. The mother replied: 'Oh well, I suppose she is enjoying eternal bliss, but I wish you wouldn't talk about such unpleasant subjects . . .' [10]

  The last item on my list of factors which could account for the pathology of our species is the discovery of death, or rather its discovery by the intellect and its rejection by instinct and emotion. It is yet another manifestation of man's split mind, perpetuating the divided house of faith and reason. Faith is the older and more powerful partner, and when conflict arises, the reasoning half of the mind is compelled to provide elaborate rationalizations to allay the senior partner's terror of the void. Yet not only the naive concept of 'eternal bliss' (or eternal torment for the wicked) but also the more sophisticated parapsychological theories of survival present problems which are apparently beyond the reasoning faculties of our species. There may be millions of other cultures on planets that are millions of years older than ours, to whom death no longer is a problem; but the fact remains that, to use computer jargon, we are not 'programmed' for the task. Confronted with a task for which it is not programmed, a computer is either reduced to silence, or it goes haywire. The latter seems to have happened, with distressing repetitiveness, in the most varied cultures. Faced with the intractable paradox of consciousness emerging from the pre-natal void and drowning in the post-mortem darkness, their minds went haywire and populated the air with the ghosts of the departed, gods, angels and devils, until the atmosphere became saturated with invisible presences which at best were capricious and unpredictable, but mostly malevolent and vengeful. They had to be worshipped, cajoled and placated by elaborately cruel rituals, including human sacrifice, Holy Wars and the burning of heretics.

  For nearly two thousand years, millions of otherwise intelligent people were convinced that the vast majority of mankind who did not share their particular creed or did not perform their rites were consumed by flames throughout eternity by order of a loving god. Similar nightmarish fantasies were collectively shared by other cultures, testifying to the ubiquity of the paranoid streak in the race.

  There is, once again, another side to the picture. The refusal to believe in the finality of death made the pyramids rise from the sand; it provided a set of ethical values, and the main inspiration for artistic creation. If the word 'death' were absent from our vocabulary, the great works of literature would have remained unwritten. The creativity and pathology of man are two faces of the same medal, coined in the same evolutionary mint.

  8

  To sum up, the disastrous history of our species indicates the futility of all attempts at a diagnosis which do not take into account the possibility that homo sapiens is a victim of one of evolution's countless mistakes. The example of the arthropods and marsupials, among others, shows that such mistakes do occur and can adversely affect t
he evolution of the brain.

  I have listed some conspicuous symptoms of the mental disorder which appears to be endemic in our species: (a) the ubiquitous rites of human sacrifice in the prehistoric dawn; (b) the persistent pursuit of intra-specific warfare which, while earlier on it could only cause limited damage, now puts the whole planet in jeopardy; (c) the paranoid split between rational thinking and irrational, affect-based beliefs; (d) the contrast between mankind's genius in conquering Nature and its ineptitude in managing its own affairs -- symbolized by the new frontier on the moon and the minefields along the borders of Europe.

  It is important to underline once more that these pathological phenomena are specifically and uniquely human, and not found in any other species. Thus it seems only logical that our search for explanations should also concentrate primarily on those attributes of homo sapiens which are exclusively human and not shared by the rest of the animal kingdom. But however obvious this conclusion may seem, it runs counter to the prevailing reductionist trend. 'Reductionism' is the philosophical belief that all human activities can be 'reduced' to -- i.e., explained by -- the behavioural responses of lower animals -- Pavlov's dogs, Skinner's rats and pigeons, Lorenz's greylag geese, Morris's hairless apes; and that these responses in turn can be reduced to the physical laws which govern inanimate matter. No doubt Pavlov or Lorenz provided us with new insights into human nature -- but only into those rather elementary, non-specific aspects of human nature which we share with dogs, rats or geese, while the specifically and exclusively human aspects which define the uniqueness of our species are left out of the picture. And since these unique characteristics are manifested both in the creativity and pathology of man, scientists of the reductionist persuasion cannot qualify as competent diagnosticians any more than they qualify as art critics. That is why the scientific establishment has so pitifully failed to define the predicament of man. If he is really an automaton, there is no point in putting a stethoscope to his chest.

  Once more, then: if the symptoms of our pathology are species-specific, i.e., exclusively human, then the explanations for them must be sought on the same exclusive level. This conclusion is not inspired by hubris, but by the evidence provided by the historical record. The diagnostic approaches that I have briefly outlined, were: (a) the explosive growth of the human neocortex and its insufficient control of the old brain; (b) the protracted helplessness of the newborn and its consequent uncritical submissiveness to authority; (c) the twofold curse of language as a rabble-rouser and builder of ethnic barriers; (d) lastly, the discovery of, and the mind-splitting fear of death. Each of these factors will be discussed in more detail later on.

  To neutralize these pathogenic tendencies does not seem an impossible task. Medicine has found remedies for certain types of schizophrenic and manic-depressive psychoses; it is no longer utopian to believe that it will discover a combination of benevolent enzymes which provide the neocortex with a veto against the follies of the archaic brain, correct evolution's glaring mistake, reconcile emotion with reason, and catalyse the breakthrough from maniac to man. Still other avenues are waiting to be explored and may lead to salvation in the nick of time, provided that there is a sense of urgency, derived from the message of the new calendar -- and a correct diagnosis of the condition of man, based on a new approach to the sciences of life.

  The chapters that follow are concerned with some aspects of this new approach which in recent years have begun to emerge from the sterile deserts of reductionist philosophy. Thus we shall now leave the pathology of man, and turn from disorder to a fresh look at biological order and mental creativity. Some of the questions raised in the previous pages will be taken up again as we go along -- and eventually, I hope, fall into a coherent pattern.

  PART ONE

  Outline of a System

  I

  The Holarchy

  1

  Beyond Reductionism -- New Perspectives in the Life Sciences was the title of a symposium which I had the pleasure and privilege to organize in 1968, and which subsequently aroused much controversy.* One of the participants, Professor Viktor Franld, enlivened the proceedings by some choice examples of reductionism in psychiatry, quoted from current books and periodicals. Thus, for instance:

  Many an artist has left a psychiatrist's office enraged by interpretations which suggest that he paints to overcome a strict bowel training by free smearing. We are led to believe that Goethe's work is but the result of pre-genital fixations. Goethe's struggle does not really aim for an ideal, for beauty, for values, but for the overcoming of an embarrassing problem of premature ejaculation. . . . [1] * It is usually referred to as the 'Alpbach Symposium' after the Alpine resort where it was held. The participants were: Ludwig von Bertalanffy (Faculty Professor, State University of New York at Buffalo), Jerome S. Bruner (Director, Center for Cognitive Studies, Harvard University), Blanche Bruner (Center for Cognitive Studies, Harvard University), Viktor E. Frankl (Professor of Psychiatry and Neurology, University of Vienna), F. A. Hayek (Professor of Economics, University of Freiberg, Germany,), Holger Hyden (Professor and Head of the Institute of Neurobiology and Histology, University of Gothenburg, Sweden), Bärbel Inhelder (Professor of Developmental Psychology, University of Geneva), Seymour S. Kety (Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard University), Arthur Koestler (Writer, London), Paul D. MacLean (Head of the Laboratory of Brain Evolution and Behaviour, NIMH, Bethesda, Maryland), David McNeill (Professor of Psychology, University of Chicago), Jean Piaget (Professor of Experimental Psychology, University of Geneva) J. R. Smythies (Reader in Psychiatry, University of Edinburgh), W. H. Thorpe (Director, Sub-Department of Animal Behaviour, Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge), C. H. Waddington (Profrssor and Chairman, Department of Genetics, University of Edinburgh), Paul A. Weiss (Emeritus Member and Professor, Rockefeller University, New York).

  Now it is quite possible that some sexual (or even scatological) motivation may enter into an artist's work; yet it is absurd to proclaim that art is 'nothing but' goal-inhibited sexuality, because it begs the question of what makes Goethe's art a work of genius, quite unlike other premature ejaculators'. The reductionist attempt to explain artistic creation by the action of sex-hormones is futile, because that action, though biologically vital, does not give us an inkling of the aesthetic criteria which apply to a work of art. Those criteria pertain to the level of conscious mental processes, which cannot be reduced to the level of biological processes without losing their specifically mental attributes in the course of the operation. Reductionist psychiatry is a Procrustean host to the weary traveller.

  It is easy to make fun of those latter-day orthodox Freudians who have reduced the master's teaching to a caricature. In other fields, however, the reductionist fallacy is more discreetly implied, less obvious and therefore more insidious. Pavlov's dogs, Skinner's rats, Lorenz's geese, each served for a while as fashionable paradigms of the human condition. Desmond Morris's bestselling book The Naked Ape opened with the statement that man is a hairless ape 'self-named homo sapiens . . . I am a zoologist and the naked ape is an animal. He is, therefore, fair game for my pen.' To what extremes this zoomorphic approach may lead is illustrated by a further quotation from Morris:

  The insides of houses or flats can be decorated and filled with ornaments, bric-à-brac and personal belongings in profusion. This is usually explained as being done to make the place 'look nice'. In fact, it is the exact equivalent to another territorial species depositing its personal scent on a landmark near its den. When you put a name on a door, or hang a painting on a wall, you are, in dog or wolf terms, for example, simply cocking your leg on them and leaving your personal mark there. [2]

  On a more serious level (though the passage quoted was obviously meant to be taken in all seriousness) we are faced with two impressive strongholds of reductionist orthodoxy. One is the neo-Darwinian (or 'Synthetic') theory which holds that evolution is the outcome of 'nothing but' chance mutations retained by natural selection -- a doctr
ine recently exposed to growing criticism* which nevertheless is still taught as gospel truth. The other is the behaviourist psychology of the Watson-Skinner school which holds that all human behaviour can be 'explained, predicted and controlled' by methods exemplified in the conditioning of rats and pigeons. 'Values and meanings are nothing but defence mechanisms and reaction formations' is another of Frankl's telling quotes from a behaviourist textbook.

  * See below, Part Three.

  By its persistent denial of a place for values, meaning and purpose in the interplay of blind forces, the reductionist attitude has cast its shadow beyond the confines of science, affecting our whole cultural and even political climate. Its philosophy may be epitomized by a last quote from a recent college textbook, in which man is defined as 'nothing but a complex biochemical mechanism, powered by a combustion system which energises computers with prodigious storage facilities for retaining encoded information'. [3]

  Now the reductionist fallacy lies not in comparing man to a 'mechanism powered by a combustion system' but in declaring that he is 'nothing but' such a mechanism and that his activities consist of 'nothing but' a chain of conditioned responses which are also found in rats. For it is of course perfectly legitimate, and in fact indispensable, for the scientist to try to analyse complex phenomena into their constituent elements -- provided he remains conscious of the fact that in the course of the analyses something essential is always lost, because the whole is more than the sum of its parts, and its attributes as a whole are more complex than the attributes of its parts. Thus the analysis of complex phenomena elucidates only a certain segment or aspect of the picture and does not entitle us to say that it is 'nothing but' this or that. Yet such 'nothing-but-ism' as it has been called, is still the -- explicit or implied -- world-view of reductionist orthodoxy. If it were to be taken literally, man could be ultimately defined as consisting of nothing but 90 per cent water and 10 per cent minerals -- a statement which is no doubt true, but not very helpful.