Janus

by Arthur Koestler

  * More precisely, the higher (non-olfactory) functional areas.

  I shall return to the fascinating and much neglected subject of the marsupials later on. In the present context they and the arthropoda, as well as other examples, may serve as cautionary tales, which make it easier to accept the possibility that homo sapiens, too, might be a victim of faulty brain design. We, thank God, have a solid corpus callosum which integrates the right and left halves, horizontally; but in the vertical direction, from the seat of conceptual thought to the spongy depths of instinct and passion, all is not so well. The evidence from the physiological laboratory, the tragic record of history on the grand scale, and the trivial anomalies in our everyday behaviour, all point towards the same conclusion.

  5

  Another approach to man's predicament starts from the fact that the human infant has to endure a longer period of helplessness and total dependence on its parents than the young of any other species. The cradle is a stricter confinement than the kangaroo's pouch; one might speculate that this early experience of dependence leaves its life-long mark, and is at least partly responsible for man's willingness to submit to authority wielded by individuals or groups, and his suggestibility by doctrines and moral imperatives. Brain-washing starts in the cradle.

  The first suggestion the hypnotist imposes on his subject is that he should be open to the hypnotizer's suggestions. The subject is being conditioned to become susceptible to conditioning. The helpless infant is subjected to a similar process. It is turned into a willing recipient of ready-made beliefs.* For the vast majority of mankind throughout history, the system of beliefs which they accepted, for which they were prepared to live and to die, was not of their own making or choice; it was shoved down their throats by the hazards of birth. Pro patria mori dulce et decorum est, whichever the patria into which the stork happens to drop you. Critical reasoning played, if any, only a secondary part in the process of adopting a faith, a code of ethics, a Weltanschauung; of becoming a fervent Christian crusader, a fervent Moslem engaged in Holy War, a Roundhead or a Cavalier. The continuous disasters in man's history are mainly due to his excessive capacity and urge to become identified with a tribe, nation, church or cause, and to espouse its credo uncritically and enthusiastically, even if its tenets are contrary to reason, devoid of self-interest and detrimental to the claims of self-preservation.

  * Konrad Lorenz talks of 'imprinting', and puts the critical age

  of receptivity just after puberty. [9] He does not seem to realize

  that in man, unlike his geese, susceptibility for imprinting stretches

  from the cradle to the grave.

  We are thus driven to the unfashionable conclusion that the trouble with our species is not an excess of aggression, but an excess capacity for fanatical devotion. Even a cursory glance at history should convince one that individual crimes committed for selfish motives play a quite insignificant part in the human tragedy, compared to the numbers massacred in unselfish loyalty to one's tribe, nation, dynasty, church, or political ideology, ad majorem gloriam dei. The emphasis is on unselfish. Excepting a small minority of mercenary or sadistic disposition, wars are not fought for personal gain, but out of loyalty and devotion to king, country or cause. Homicide committed for personal reasons is a statistical rarity in all cultures, including our own. Homicide for unselfish reasons, at the risk of one's own life, is the dominant phenomenon in history.

  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 bar
riers 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 the 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 r
esult 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,