We have seen that connections between neurons reflect individual experiences in a nested assembly; the more significant a person or object is, the more associations it will trigger and vice versa. This personalization of the brain, ‘the mind’, as defined in Chapter 6, could perhaps be as easily viewed as the ‘ego’. Once we are self-conscious we are aware of ourselves as separate entities distinct from everything else in the outside world. And just as we can define a tooth as part of a potential necklace, so we will define ourselves in terms of other things too. This process of forming associations, of generating a significance to ourselves, will extend into our lives in whatever ecological niche we find ourselves; we need to be seen in terms of other things, be it prizes, family or possessions. The more associations we can trigger in this way, the more status we have, the more significant and important we are.
This human tendency to see things in terms of other things, to seek ‘meaning’ to our existence, is particularly relevant as we extend our unique cognitive powers to contemplate the future: by reflecting on what has happened, and what we have been told has happened in the past, we reach the inevitable conclusion that we are going to die. In previous centuries our reaction was to bequeath ourselves immortality: the Renaissance version of the ego might arguably have been the soul. In these more secular times a greater premium has been placed on immortality through our children, or on being so important that in some way at least one's achievements endure. And it is of course this personalized brain, this mind, this ego, this sense of self, that is now under threat from the kinds of new and pervasive influences that we have seen might be starting to dominate in this century.
The basic thesis of this book is that new technologies will have an all-powerful and unprecedented influence on our highly impressionable neuronal connections since, for the first time ever, they will be the sole source of all experience. The prospect becomes even more serious with the potential advent of invasive technologies, which could eventually drive and contrive the configurations of connections directly. But the driving need have no sinister intent – no need to conjure up Big Brother or Huxley's World Controller. Rather, the control could be homeostatic, balanced to sate all physiological drives as and when they surged, and to maintain a sense of non-self-conscious well-being, as though perpetually lying in the sun half asleep after a glass or two of wine.
Previously I have suggested that the basis of pure pleasure is a configuration of the brain such that the active contribution of the personalized connections – the mind – is temporarily non-operational. Small children, lacking extensive connections anyway, are more easily the passive recipients of their sensory input, having a ‘sensational’ time. Adults, however, turn to extreme measures: drugs that blunt the functioning of our neuronal connections, or such rapid, successive input through our senses from, say, fast-paced sport that no single configuration has time to grow before it is displaced by the start of another. Be it wine, women or song, or the modern analogue, drugs and sex and rock'n'roll, there is a strong premium on sensory, non-associative input; in all cases our brains revert to a simpler, sparser pattern of connections, we recapitulate the ‘booming, buzzing confusion’ of the infant brain. This state of sensory oblivion, stripped of all cognitive content and bereft of self-consciousness, is probably more like the type of consciousness that most animals experience most of the time. It is to this hedonistic, passive state that the new technologies could be taking us, a state that we enjoy, but that up until now has been only temporary. By incessantly stimulating neuronal connections into certain highly constrained configurations, the new technologies might jeopardize the very existence of human nature, permanently.
But there is an alternative: it could be called the ‘public ego’. Let's go back to the Nuremberg crowds that so concerned Paul MacLean. MacLean thought that their behaviour was reptilian – perhaps analogous to what we now recognize as the blind aggression of road rage or a crime passionnel or, on a more domestic level, a temper tantrum, where you ‘see red’: the atavistic urge to destroy, unleashed. Yet although it is true that the Nuremberg crowds behaved in a collective fashion they were not directionless. Like the football hooligans of today, the swaggering and shouting crowd is not mindless and reptilian: it is all too horribly human. So what if there is, after all, a difference between road rage and the Nuremberg rallies – what if MacLean was wrong?
In Lord of the Flies, William Golding captures the collective madness of a group of schoolboys marooned on a desert island; they start as miniature upper-middle-class Englishmen, and end up painting their bodies and killing the weak outsider. Golding's masterpiece was published in 1954, in the post-war climate, and was intended as an illustration of the fragility of civilized society. As he observed in his essay ‘On the Nature of Man’ (1965): ‘My book was to say: you think that now the war is over and an evil thing destroyed, you are safe because you are naturally kind and decent. But I know why the thing rose in Germany. I know it could happen in any country. It could happen here.’
Golding chillingly captured the behaviour of a collective mass of civilized individuals who have in some way abrogated their own private identity. But what they have not done is followed the MacLean version, and ended up in a collective group temper tantrum. No, their aggression is focused and value-related; for the Nazis, for football hooligans and for current fundamentalist fanatics worldwide, the violence is not that of a psychopath, of someone who does not know what they are doing because they are ‘out of their mind’.
Instead, there is a very strong sense of group identity and a very clear set of values. There are slogans, an unseen enemy and an abstract cause – all the trappings of adult humans. We saw previously that an element sometimes overlooked in analysis of the Al Qaeda movement is the idea of a great unavenged wrong dating back to the Crusades, when Europeans oppressed the followers of Islam. This highly cognitive narrative of an oppressed minority heroically struggling for its identity against the backdrop of one's own values, which are clearly ‘right’ whilst those of the prevailing powers are clearly ‘wrong’, has parallels with certain elements of the Nazi mentality – their romance of Nordic gods and idea of themselves as descendants of the inhabitants of Atlantis, overturning the scheming and powerful Semites. Along more innocent yet comparable lines, fanatical football support is surely all about the triumph of good (your team) over bad (the opposition).
So we are seeing not a loss of identity but quite the opposite: an overemphasis of identity, but one that is collective, a kind of ego that is not private but public. The individual is no longer discernible, sure, but not because he or she has been saturated by an overexuberant id; rather, the ego has become collective. This public ego has all the trappings of its private counterpart – the kinds of features that Wilson listed, and that are exemplified in the deadly sins.
During the hey-day of the Nazis a Berliner, pen-named Sebastian Haffner, documented what was happening to his nation, in an attempt to account for why, against all the odds and rational thought, Hitler was gaining in popularity. Haffner's conclusion was that during the First World War Germans had become used to living as a collective persona – with a public ego. Every day casualty lists were published and battles discussed, with war understandably uppermost in the public consciousness. When it was all over, so Haffner suggests, the Germans found it hard to return to living privately again. In his view the English had pets or gardens whilst their French counterparts had cooking; each individual had enough in their daily lives to give them a sense of identity, a private ego. Germany at that time, he argued, could offer no such attractions. Hence Hitler gained power because he gave the nation back a strong collective sense of identity – he fuelled a public ego.
Haffner's writing is particularly alarming not only because it was written, and never subsequently revised, before the outcome of the Second World War was known – indeed before hostilities even properly started but also because he describes what happened in Germany between the end of t
he First World War and the rise of Hitler: the nation became obsessed with sport. Haffner's thesis is that this was yet another way of establishing a public ego. Once again there were battles and victories and a clear set of values and, above all, a strong sense of identity, albeit collective.
Bertrand Russell also alluded to the ‘collective passions’ of humans as destructive. I think there are today, increasingly, different groups in which individuals are sublimating their private sense of identity to a public one – from the temporary collective public identity that arose in Britain at the funeral of the Princess of Wales through football fanaticism to cults and the extreme single-mindedness, literally, of Al Qaeda.
But if a tendency to embrace a public ego is increasing, how do we explain the demise of Communism? After all, the very essence of the original Marxist-Leninist doctrine is the subordination of the individual for the greater good. The big difference is that, after the early days of romantic struggle against an oppressor, the Communist public ego lost its identity as part of a narrative, its role as the underdog. Where was the glamour, the heroism of the Crusades or of the Nordic gods? How was the red public ego now significant and meaningful? Once the element of fighting oppression against all odds was removed, and the public ego became dominant, what could be said about it other than that it was in the right? It lacked all character or story, and thus significance. What was the collective identity and goal? After all, how could you identify with something that was merely the sum of all of you… Once the memory of ‘heroic’ leaders, such as Lenin or Stalin, faded, and as materialism beckoned from capitalist countries, a sense of identity could be found elsewhere; the appeal of a private ego became stronger.
We have seen that in the first half of the 20th-century Freud's nephew Edward Bernays nurtured the development of the private ego by advertising material goods with the claim that they ‘stood for’ something special about each individual. Within the culture of the time possessions became symbolic of status and of a particular lifestyle, rather than being attractive because of their intrinsic qualities alone. In this cynical way, as Adam Curtis, the producer of The Century of the Self, notes, manufacturing industries, via advertisers, were able to persuade people to buy products that they did not actually need. But on a more sinister level, he asserts, Bernays had alighted on a means to prevent an unleashing of unbridled, basic drives.
My own view is that Bernays was right to fear an alternative to the private ego, but this alternative was not an unleashed id, or a reptilian force, or a collective road rage or a perpetual rave – rather, the rise of a collective identity, a public ego. The ego, be it private or public, is a bulwark against death, but when it is collective there need no longer be significance for the life of any one individual – witness the trend of suicide bombings we discussed in the previous chapter. Moreover, this public ego thrives on some kind of ‘meaning’ or storyline, as does its private counterpart. The most obvious storyline, to most readily establish significance for a public ego, is struggle – simply establishing one identity as more important than any other. Orwell realized the importance of a struggle to maintain the glamour of a public ego when he wrote in Nineteen Eighty-Four of an institutionalized ‘Enemy of the People’.
Perhaps the great social upheavals of the 20th century could be seen not as a conflict between Communism and capitalism but more basically the private versus the public ego. So far it would seem that the private ego has triumphed, though increasingly threatened by the public ego of extreme terrorist movements. But now we can see that, for the first time ever, the new technologies have the potential to erode the wherewithal of the private ego. This century, then, will witness a competition between movements promoting a public ego and the current trend towards turning the clock back for humanity: perhaps the new technologies could revive a prehistoric stage – before we needed culturally related value systems, a means to be significant as individual people, and where instead we simply lived for the moment, as animals, without recourse to the abstract values and standards of human nature. Participation in the noosphere will not be the same as participation in a cult because, like Communism only very much more so, it will lack a sense of identity. We have seen that it will be a world with no values, no prizes, no goals – no identity. The technological noosphere by which we watch each other, survey each other, will contain no selfishness: it will be the 21st-century version of Communism.
Human nature, then, is in one case obliterated and in the other transformed: the single determining factor as to whether it prevails into this century or succumbs to subversion or extinction is its inherent robustness, or otherwise. Perhaps the behaviours human nature encompasses have lived out their usefulness. This idea is not as strange as it might seem, if indeed the predominant talent of humans is adaptability and if we are about to enter a context-free, value-free, status-free lifestyle favouring passive responses rather than individual action. The fact that we currently work hard to put ourselves into these ‘sensational’ situations where we feel ‘truly alive’ may indicate that, with the need for savannah-survival-strategies truly removed, we will slip into a more atavistic state of consciousness where we permanently ‘blow’ our minds, let ourselves – our private egos – go.
But if our Cro-Magnon brains, with limbic system and crinkly cortex, do mandate a sense of identity, a self-consciousness, then the appeal of football fanaticism and fundamentalist movements will grow as we take an increasingly passive role in a life that is less and less private. Since the corollary of this trend will be, as seems imminent already, large-scale death and suffering if not global nuclear war, then the materially comfortable, anodyne existence in which we lose the essence of our humanity, our human nature, might, amazingly enough, seem more desirable. But are there really no other options?
10
The Future: What are the options?
The technologies that are currently coming of age are not going to go away. Yet the options they appear to offer are stark: they fuel the worst fears of The Technophobe. Both Cynic and Technophile alike scoff that such predictions are sensationalist scaremongering, with no bearing on reality. But there is a fourth group from whom we have not really heard very much as yet, and for whom the options offered by present-day progress are running out. Meet The Vast Majority.
The Vast Majority do not live in places where they can easily appreciate our burgeoning technologies. Since 1980 there has been an increase of more than 50 per cent in younger people in sub-Saharan Africa. Of the swelling world population, half are under twenty-five years old, and by the middle of this century, 90 per cent of all babies will be born in the developing world. Quite soon less than 1 billion people will originate from the industrialized countries: by 2050, for example, there will be three times as many Africans as Europeans.
But this tale of two worlds isn't simply about numbers. Currently, 1.3 billion people are living on less than a dollar a day. In developing countries 4.8 billion lack basic sanitation, whilst one-third of the population has no access to clean water. One billion people in the world are currently illiterate, two-thirds of them women. In many developing countries there is a falling not rising GDP, and in many cases ecological damage is already irreversible: in Brazil, for example, a fifth of the Amazon rainforest has already been destroyed in an attempt to meet the current pressures of having a population of 166 million. What will happen in 2050 when the inhabitants of Brazil will number some 240 million? Such an explosion of humanity deprives developing countries of prosperity, and population growth accelerates global warming, deforestation and loss of groundwater.
As a consequence of this population explosion, more people are living in large urban communities: the number of cities with more than a million inhabitants was 173 in 1990, but that will climb to 368 by 2010. In 1960 only Tokyo and New York could boast more than 10 million inhabitants; by 2015 there will be 26 such ‘mega-cities’, 22 of which will be in less developed regions. It is in these built-up areas that most people will pro
liferate most quickly in the next few decades. In 2000 one estimate was that some 2.9 billion were already living in urban areas, about 47 per cent of the world population; but by 2030 this figure will have soared to 60 per cent, and as early as 2007 urban dwellers will exceed their rural counterparts for the first time.
Given the consequences of ecological neglect in the past, as well as shifts towards ever more global markets, life in the country for many is deteriorating to the point of brute survival. As in Britain at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution when to migrate to cities was the only way to survive, we are now globally witnessing desperate people chancing a new, city life; this trend is scarcely surprising. After all, cities offer the opportunities for the most immediate social change and improvement in income. In the future people may well have greater access to schooling, but urban growth will have outpaced employment and services. So there will be no jobs and no decent housing.
Bob Carr, the Premier of New South Wales in Australia, is gloomy as he surveys a planet destined to become more crowded and degraded, hotter, with more desert and less arable land, and with people concentrated into cities: ‘On a visit to North-East Asia, I saw this future. The landscape was simple. There were clusters of shoebox-style tower blocks. They were linked by clogged expressways in a flattened, cleared landscape. It was so bleak, so denatured, it could have been a place rebuilt after a nuclear blast. The air was heavy with smog. Acid rain fell from the nation across the ocean. This will be how more people will live in 100 years.’
Now add another factor, presumably linked to this urban migration: the demise of the extended family. In Egypt, for instance, where traditionally such families were the norm, an estimated 84 per cent of all households have now shrunk to the nuclear family. Imagine life, then, as a young citizen of a developing country not too far on into this century. In moving to your current home in the city, your parents cut their close ties with your original cultural roots and clan-like loyalties. Although you may have education, there will be no job. You live in a slum with poor sanitation, but have heard of the amazing technical achievements in industrialized countries. What do you do?
Tomorrow's People Page 33