‘We are hardly aware of the degree to which we depend on modern comfort, so much that it goes without saying. The most modest servant would violently revolt if a room were put at their disposal with the heating, lighting, bedding, and conveniences that seemed decent to Goethe or the Duchess of Weimar.
Alongside this, the least social inequality is perceived as ‘injustice’: by contrast (for the all-penetrating media provides everyone with a means of a comparison) it appears doubly ‘scandalous’, and gives rise to ideologies of resentment (‘what about me?’).
Hypersensitivity to displeasure renders one incapable of joy: ‘Helmut Schulze has pointed out the surprising fact that neither the word nor the concept of joy appears in Freud.433 He knows pleasure, but not joy. When one reaches the summit of a difficult mountain, remarks Schulze, with sore muscles, damaged fingers, and the prospect of soon confronting the greater risks and difficulties of the descent, it is not a question of pleasure, but of the greatest imaginable joy’.
Thanks to the manipulation of fashion, a certain industry tends to encourage this desire for instant gratification by creating false needs and producing objects with ‘built-in-obsolescence’.
‘Intolerance to pain, which never ceases to increase in our day, transforms the natural ups and downs of human life into an artificially levelled plain, and this tendency engenders a fatal boredom’.
The man whose pleasure is dulled by habit and ease is effectively compelled to seek ever renewed sensations, always stronger, so that very soon he will desire that which exceeds norms: drugs, perversions.
‘Men’, says Lorenz, ‘have today reached a state of dangerous softening, which probably leads to the ruin of a culture’.
The unhealthy love of novelty is called ‘neophilia’. A pathological ‘cultural’ exaggeration of this specifically human trait can be seen in neoteny. The demand for the immediate satisfaction of every desire in nuce, remarks Lorenz, is, moreover, a characteristic feature of childhood. Previously, the adolescent learned patience by becoming an adult. Today, patience has become useless: ‘psychological’ childhood lasts longer than ‘physiological’ childhood. And egalitarianism, which brings everything to the lowest level, adds even more to the infantilisation of adults by gradually tracing the outlines of a ‘fool-proof’ civilisation (where even ‘imbeciles’ can occupy the first ranks).
‘The question is therefore knowing whether the infantile characteristics of the genetic program are not being developed in disastrous proportions’.
The Erosion of Tradition
Here Konrad Lorenz observes some great analogies between the development of individuals, the evolution of civilisations, and the phylogenesis of species.
The ideology that dominates today, he remarked, is an ideology of the least effort, which refuses all hierarchy and all constraint. Now, the acceptance of constraint, in all its forms, is already one of the characteristics of maturity. In egalitarian doctrines there is, on the contrary, a puerile utopianism which finds a natural prolongation in the cult of the infantile (‘the child in power’). According to Rousseau, man in the natural state is instinctively good; society corrupts him. According to certain fashionable theses, the moods of the child are naturally good; the adult corrupts them. The dispute of generations thus took an unforgiving turn.
‘The current youth’s revolution is founded on hate. Rebellious youth react against an older generation like a cultural unit reacts against a foreign race’.
Konrad Lorenz emphasises, however, that the ‘revolt of the young’ is not an evil in itself. The adolescent, like the crab, must reject his ‘shell’ in order to grow: in order to reveal his own personality, he must distance himself from the world with which, as a child, he had first identified. The time of the ‘just measure’ comes after. What is abnormal, therefore, is not that youth revolt, but that their revolt is taken for something other than what it is; and that adults, subjugated by their rhetoric, demonstrate a complacency towards them that indicates a loss of energy and proves that they now have the same mental age as their progeniture.
‘At the age of puberty, young people turn away from parental tradition. Their function is to criticise old ideals, to throw overboard all that is outdated and to discover new tasks (...) But at the same time, the coherence of tradition must never be truly broken’.
It is the parents who have given up that bear the responsibility for the erosion of tradition, according to Lorenz; those who have found ‘anti-authoritarian education’ a good pretext for evading the responsibilities of a well-understood authority.
‘Thousands of children’, he asserts, ‘have become unfortunate neurotics because of the famous “anti-authoritarian” education designed to prevent frustrations’.
He explains: ‘The child brought up within a non-hierarchical group is in an absolutely artificial situation. Not being able to repress its instinctive tendency to assume first place, the child tyrannises its parents without resistance and is obliged to assume a role of leader, which it does not feel at ease in at all. When the child tries to annoy its parents to provoke a justified reaction of indignation in them, it does not receive the aggressive response that it unconsciously expected, but runs up against the rubber wall of beautiful speeches and hollow, pseudo-rational phrases.
‘Yet no man has ever identified with a poor slave, and no one is willing to admit the cultural values respected by this slave. It is only if one loves someone from the depths of the heart and is admired at the same time that one can adopt his tradition. Such an “image of the father” is manifestly lacking in most teenagers growing up today’.
Faced with a challenge of affirming the irreducible antagonism of authority and love, Lorenz proclaims: ‘The recognition of a hierarchical situation is not an obstacle to love. Everyone should remember that as a child he did not care less for the people he admired and to whom he was subject. On the contrary, he loved them more and better than his equals and inferiors’.
‘A man whose social behaviour has not reached a sufficient degree of maturity’, he adds, ‘remains at a stage of infantilism and can only become a parasite of society. He wishes to continue enjoying the consideration of adults proper only to the child. Countless young people today stand up against the social order and, also, against their parents. Despite this attitude, they expect to be nurtured by this very society and by their parents. It is a sign of unthinking, childish behaviour. If these frequent states of infantilism and the growing progress of juvenile criminality are based, as I fear, on genetic anomalies among civilised man, we run a very serious danger’.
In the end, says Lorenz, the ‘eight deadly sins’ are the most visible signs of a process of dehumanisation. And this process is favoured by this ‘pseudo-democratic doctrine according to which the social and moral behaviour of man is not absolutely determined by the phylogenetic evolution of his nervous system or its sensory organs, rather it is influenced only by the “conditioning” it has undergone during its ontogenesis’.
‘It is senseless’, he writes again, ‘to suppose that it is enough to destroy a forest in order to automatically make a new one grow. And yet we are witnessing in our day the continuous weakening of the factors which ensure the transmission of tradition and the strengthening of factors which rupture it. By destroying the institutions and the old data, we risk the triumph of true regression (...) If this evolution continues to be maintained in an uncontrolled way, if no mechanism, no institution for conservation appears, this phenomenon could very well mean the end of civilisation and, I think very seriously, the regression of man to a pre-Cro-Magnon stage’.434
Such remarks led the Marxist Jean-Michel Goux, a Professor at the University of Paris VII, to blame the author of On Aggression for ‘treating as biological phenomena’ those ‘phenomena which are manifestly linked to capitalist competitiveness’ (L’Humanité, November 2, 1973)!
For Konrad Lorenz, the solution to current problems will never occur by ‘ideological speculation’ but rather by the ‘patient w
ork of inductive research’, which consists in identifying and acting upon real causes.
To begin with, it would be necessary to better understand the realities of life.
‘I consider it in no way utopian’, says Lorenz, ‘to give every sensible human being sufficient knowledge of the essential facts of biology. Biology is a fascinating science, provided it is intelligently taught in such a way that the pupil realises that, being himself a living creature, what he is told is directly relevant to him. (…) The qualified teaching of biology forms the only foundation on which to establish sound opinions concerning humanity and its relations with the universe’.
As Robert Ardrey already said:
‘What is dramatic is not that Rousseau was mistaken, but that two centuries later we were still following him; that the progress made by biology since Darwin has not influenced our way of thinking; that today’s modes of thinking proceed from Rousseau’s errors, as if the natural sciences had never existed’.
*
Les huite péchés capitaux de la civilisation, a study by Konrad Lorenz.435 Flammarion, 170 pages.
*
In Behind the Mirror: A Search for a Natural History of Human Knowledge,436 a work which is a kind of follow up to Civilized Man’s Eight Deadly Sins, Konrad Lorenz attempts to give an overview of the cognitive mechanisms in man. He stresses that this task is the indispensable prerequisite for a ‘self-analysis of civilised man based on biological knowledge’.
Overwhelmingly ethological in order to establish anthropology and sociology on new foundations, he reminds us that the knowledge we have of the world is closely linked to the physiological apparatus (the human ‘mirror’) in which it is reflected. This perceptual and cognitive apparatus rests on innate foundations inherited from evolution. Thus neither ‘reason’ nor ‘knowledge’ exists autonomously: the relations between the perceiving-man and the perceived-world form an organic system of interactions. Likewise, there is no ‘a priori experience’: evolution itself is a storehouse of information to which man adds his own acquisitions. Gradually, all the spiritual, intellectual and technological activities of humanity are thus seen to be situated in a phylogenetic perspective.
The theory of perception and the theory of knowledge proposed by Lorenz refer back to both the rationalists, who claim to be able to know the world ‘objectively’, and to the idealists who claim to study ‘human nature’ without taking into account the world of which it is the ‘reflection’.
The Hidden Dimension
We live in an invisible bubble. This bubble is our ‘personal distance’, our intimate and vital space. This is our hidden dimension. All these bubbles form a ‘super-bubble’. When it is too compressed, it bursts. And we burst with it.
Published in the United States in 1966, the study entitled The Hidden Dimension constitutes a long dissertation on ‘proxemics’, which the author defines as ‘the science concerning man’s use of space as a specialised elaboration of culture’. That is to say, it concerns the way man uses the space that he maintains between himself and others, and the one he builds around him.
Edward T. Hall, attached to the Department of Anthropology at Northwestern University, has been cited at length by Robert Ardrey. He himself cites the works of Konrad Lorenz and Nikolaas Tinbergen. Indeed, proxemics owes very much to ethology.
‘My training as an anthropologist’, emphasises Professor Hall, ‘has accustomed me to seek in biological infrastructures the origin of such and such an aspect of human behavior. This approach highlights the fact that man, like other members of the animal kingdom, is, from beginning to end, an irremediable prisoner of his organism’.
Vital space (Lebensraum) is a concrete reality, necessary for the equilibrium of every individual. In nature, this balance is normally assured by predation (destruction of the surplus population of one species by members of another species). When predation no longer plays a role, self-regulation intervenes, which is not only linked, as Malthus believed, to the presence or absence of food reserves, but also to ‘physiological mechanisms of reaction to density’.
The Scandinavians have observed for centuries the suicidal march of lemmings (a rodent closely related to voles) into the sea. Similar suicidal behaviours were observed in rabbits.
In other cases, self-regulation is effected by a glandular path: the mean weight of the adrenals increases in proportion to the density of the population, leading to a fatal endocrine reaction. In the course of the 1950s, Professor John Christian showed that the average weight of the adrenal glands in marmots increased by 30 to 60% during periods of ‘overpopulation’.
Placed in overcrowded conditions, and with the impossibility of committing suicide, some animals adopt aberrant behaviour.
This is the case with humans. The increase in population density leads to a qualitative change in lifestyle. Beyond a certain threshold, the most common activities become impossible: to teach a course to students, to maintain relations with neighbours, to use public transport. The laws of mass psychology take precedence over the individual principles of behaviour. This is reflected in the rise of anxieties and neuroses, the succession of trends, the whirlwind of exoticism. Stress.
Plurality of Mentalities
At the beginning of the century, when they began to study the language of the Indians and the Eskimos, linguists realised that ‘the Indo-European languages were not the model of all other languages’. Since language is only the reflection of thought, Edward T. Hall deduces that, from one population to another, the way of seeing the world is also not the same. ‘Our thesis’, he writes, ‘is that the principles established in regards to language are equally valid for the rest of human conduct and, in fact, for any cultural phenomenon. Individuals from different cultures not only speak different languages, but, more importantly, live in different sensory worlds’.
For any single period, therefore, there is a plurality of mentalities. Each society has its own way of ‘conceiving’ human relationships, individual movements, the layout of dwellings, the structures of cities, the boundaries of intimacy.
Among animals, zoologists distinguish ‘contact’ species, such as the parrot and hedgehog — or the great Antarctic penguin, which maintains its heat by snuggling against its fellows — and ‘non-contact’ species, like the horse, the dog, the cat, the rat, or the seagull. Even among man there are people more inclined than others to contact and promiscuity.
Within European culture, which places great importance on the individual, ‘critical distance’ seems to be particularly important. At the dawn of history, our ancestors formed small, highly fluid communities with human dimensions. At the same time, in the Near East, there were cities like anthills, administered by scribes and royal officials: Babylon, Sumer, Ur in Chaldaea.
Tactical, Visual, and Olfactory Spaces
Today, Europeans use their leisure time to move away from urban concentrations.
The notion of ‘crowding’ is not felt everywhere in the same way. A fixed space in one society is not necessarily fixed in another.
‘In the United States’, remarks Edward Hall, ‘people move from one room to another, or from one part of a room to another, to satisfy each particular activity, whether it be to eat, sleep, work, or to make social contact. In Japan, the walls are mobile: they are discretely opened or folded up according to the various domestic activities. The Chinese behave in an even different manner, by assigning fixed characters to elements that Americans consider to be fixed. A guest in China is not supposed to move his chair unless he is invited by his host. To do so would be tantamount to moving a screen or a partition in a foreign house’.
The shape of the rooms, the position of the doors, the thickness of the walls, and the weight of the seats vary according to whether promiscuity is more or less well supported. Everything depends on the ‘critical distance’, that is, on the size of the bubble. ‘The door is of great importance to the Germans. Those who come to the United States find the doors light and fragi
le. In their offices, the Americans work with open doors. The Germans close them. The closing of the door preserves the integrity of the room and ensures the reality of a protective border that preserves them from contacts that are too intimate’.
This bubble is larger in Great Britain than in the United States; larger among the Nordic than in the Mediterranean; larger in Europe than in the Third World.
‘For the English, to be overheard is to intrude on others, a failure in manners and a sign of socially inferior behaviour. However, because of the way they modulate their voices, the English in an American setting may sound and look conspiratorial to Americans, which can result in their being branded as troublemakers’.
Hall then examines the different categories of space: tactile space, visual space, olfactory space.
‘During World War Two in France’, he recalls, ‘I observed that the aroma of French bread freshly removed from the oven at 4:00 a.m. could make a speeding jeep scream to a halt. The reader can ask himself what smells we have in the U.S. that can achieve such results’.
In the Middle East, Americans find that the Arabs are ‘pushy’ because they ‘shove and jostle in public’. The Arabs, on the other hand, find the Americans lacking education, ‘because they stand apart’. ‘Americans and Arabs’, writes Edward T. Hall, ‘live in different sensory worlds much of the time. They interpret their sensory data differently and combine them in different ways. American women who have married Arabs in this country and who have known only the “learned American” side of their personality have often observed that their husbands assume different personalities when they return to their homelands where they are again immersed in Arab communication and are captives of Arab perceptions. They become in every sense of the word quite different people’.
In light of these observations, man appears as an ‘organism who creates his extensions’ to the point of substituting them for nature.
The consequence: man conflates himself with the world, and by modifying the world, modifies himself. By constructing his biotope, he determines the organism that he will be. Proxemics returns here to the preoccupations of ecology. In large, overpopulated cities, a new type of man is formed.
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