To put it in the simplest way: the individual who indulges in an excess of aggressive self-assertion incurs the penalties of society -- he outlaws himself, he contracts out of the hierarchy. The true believer, on the other hand, becomes more closely knit into it; he enters the womb of his Church or party, or whatever social holon to which he surrenders his identity. For the process of identification in its cruder forms always entails, as we have seen, a certain impairment of individuality, an abdication of the critical faculties and of personal responsibility.
This leads us to a basic distinction between primitive or infantile forms of identification, and mature forms of integration into a social holarchy. In a well-balanced holarchy, the individual retains his character as a social holon, a part-whole who, qua whole, enjoys autonomy within the limits of the restraints imposed by the interests of the group. He remains an autonomous whole in his own right, and is even expected to assert his holistic attributes by originality, initiative and, above all, personal responsibility. The same considerations apply to the social holons on the higher levels of the hierarchy -- clans and tribes, ethnic and religious communities, professional groups and political parties. They, too, ought ideally to display the virtues implied in the Janus principle: to function as autonomous wholes and at the same time to conform to the national interest; and so on, upwards, level by level, to the world community at the apex of the pyramid. An ideal society of this kind would possess 'hierarchic awareness', every holon on every level being conscious both of its rights as a whole and its duties as a part.
Needless to say, the mirror of history, past and present, confronts us with a different picture.
6
Those dramatic manifestations of mass-hysteria which so much impressed Freud and Le Bon I have only mentioned in passing, because I meant to focus attention on the process of 'normal' group-formation and its devastating effects on the history of our species. This 'normal' process, as we have seen, involves identification with the group, and acceptance of its beliefs. An important side-effect of the process is to deepen the split between emotion and reason. For the group-mind is dominated by a system of beliefs, traditions, moral imperatives, with a high emotive potential regardless of its rational content; and quite frequently its explosive power is enhanced by its very irrationality. Faith in the group's credo is an emotional commitment; it anaesthetizes the individual's critical faculties and rejects rational doubt as something evil. Moreover, individuals are endowed with minds of varying complexity, while the group must be single-minded if it is to maintain its cohesion as a holon. Consequently, the group-mind must function on an intellectual level accessible to all its members: single-mindedness must be simple-minded. The overall result of this is the enhancement of the emotional dynamics of the group and simultaneous reduction of its intellectual faculties: a sad caricature of the ideal of hierarchic awareness.
7
I mentioned earlier on the paranoid streak which runs through History. Enlightened people may be quite willing to admit that such a streak existed among the head-hunters of Papua or in the Aztec kingdom, where the number of young men, virgins and children sacrificed to the gods amounted to between 20,000 and 50,000 per annum. 'In this state of things,' commented Prescott,
... it was beneficially ordered by Providence that the land should
be delivered over to another race, who would rescue it from the
brutish superstitions that daily extended wider and wider . . .
The debasing institutions of the Aztecs furnish the best apology for
their conquest. It is true, the conquerors brought along with them
the Inquisition. But they also brought Christianity, whose benign
radiance would still survive, when the fierce flames of fanaticism
should be extinguished ... [19]
Prescott must have known, though, that shortly after the Mexican conquest, the 'benign radiance' of Christianity manifested itself in the Thirty Years War, which killed off a goodly proportion of Europe's population. And so on to Auschwitz and Gulag. Yet even clear-sighted people who recognize the mental disorder underlying these horrors are apt to dismiss them as phenomena of the past. It is not easy to love humanity and yet to admit that the paranoid streak, in different guises, is as much in evidence in contemporary history as it was in the distant past, but more potentially deadly in its consequences; and that it is not accidental but inherent in the human condition.
'Chairman Mao's swim across the Yangtze river', wrote the official New China Agency,' . . . was a great encouragement to the Chinese people and revolutionaries throughout the world, and a heavy blow to imperialism, modern revisionism and the monsters and freaks who are opposed to socialism and Mao Tse-tung's thought.' [20]
The symptoms vary with time, but the underlying pattern of the disorder is the same: the split between faith and reason, rational thought and irrational beliefs. Religious beliefs are derived from ever-recurrent archetypal motifs, which seem to be shared by all mankind and evoke instant emotive responses.* But once they become institutionalized as the collective property of a specific group, they degenerate into rigid doctrines which, without losing their emotive appeal, are potentially offensive to the critical faculties. To paste over the split, various forms of double-think have been designed at various times -- powerful techniques of self-deception, some crude, some extremely sophisticated. The same fate has befallen the secular religions which go by the name of political ideologies. They too have their archetypal roots -- the craving for utopia, for an ideal society; but when they crystallize into movements and parties, they can become distorted to such an extent that the actual policy they pursue is the direct opposite of their professed ideal. This apparently inevitable tendency of both religious and secular ideologies to degenerate into their own caricatures is a direct consequence of the characteristics of the group-mind which we have discussed: its need for intellectual simplicity combined with emotional arousal.
* See, for instance, 'William James's The Varieties of Religious
Experience, still a classic in this field. A more recent
treatment is offered by Sir Alister Hardy in The Divine Flame
and The Biology of God.
Irrational beliefs are saturated with emotion; they are felt to be true. Believing has been described as 'knowing with one's viscera'. And visceral knowledge, whether innate or acquired, is mediated by the 'old brain'. We often describe our affect-charged judgements -- mistakenly -- as 'instinctive reactions'. They are not. But they have the same elemental, reason-defying, old-brain power as true instincts. At this point the psychological considerations of the present chapter lead straight back to the neurophysiological theories discussed in the Prologue. The schizophysiology of the brain provides an essential clue to the streak of insanity running though the history of man.
Our cherished beliefs are of course neither exclusive products of the human neocortex, nor of the 'old brain' which we share with the lower mammals, but of their combined activities. Their degree of irrationality varies according to which level dominates and to what extent. Between the theoretical extremes of 'pure logic' and 'blind passion' there are many levels of mental activity, as we find them in primitives at various stages of development, in children at various ages, and in adults in various states of consciousness (lucid, daydreaming, dreaming, hallucinating, etc.). Each of these types of mental activity is governed by its own 'rules of the game' which reflects the complex interactions of the old and new structures in the brain. For interact they must all the time -- even if their coordination is inadequate, and deficient in the effective controls which lend stability to a well-ordered holarchy. Thus even abstract verbal symbols become imbued with emotive values and visceral reactions -- as the psycho-galvanic lie-detector so dramatically shows. And that applies even more, of course, to doctrines and ideologies amplified by the group-mind. Unfortunately we cannot apply a lie-detector to measure the irrationality of its beliefs, nor its explosive and devastat
ing potential.
V
AN ALTERNATIVE TO DESPAIR
1
As long as we believed that our species was potentially immortal, with an astronomical lifespan before it, we could afford to wait patiently for that evolutionary change in human nature which, gradually or suddenly, would make love and sweet reason prevail. But man's biological evolution came to a virtual standstill in Cro-Magnon days, 50,000 to 100,000 years ago. We cannot wait another 100,000 years for the unlikely chance mutation which will put things right; we can only hope to survive by inventing techniques which supplant biological evolution. That is to say, we must search for a cure for the schizophysiology endemic in our nature, which led into the situation in which we find ourselves. If we fail to find that cure, the old paranoid streak in man, combined with his new powers of destruction, must sooner or later lead to his extinction. But I also believe that the cure is not far beyond the reach of contemporary biology; and that with the proper concentration of efforts it might enable man to win the race for survival.
I am aware that this sounds over-optimistic, in contrast to the pessimistic views expressed in previous chapters, of the prospects ahead of us. Yet I do not think that these fears are exaggerated, and I do not think that the hope for a rescue is entirely utopian. It is not inspired by science fiction, but based on the recent spectacular advances in neuro-chemistry and related fields. They do not yet provide a cure for the mental disorder of our species, but they indicate the area of research that may eventually produce the remedy hopefully invoked in the Prologue: that combination of benevolent hormones or enzymes which would resolve the conflict between the old and recent structures in the brain, by providing the neocortex with the power of hierarchic control over the archaic lower centres, and thus catalyse the transition from maniac to man.
Yet I have learned from painful experience that any proposal which involves 'tampering with human nature' is bound to provoke strong emotional resistances. These are partly based on ignorance and prejudice, but partly on a justified revulsion against further intrusions into the privacy and sanctity of the individual by social engineering, character engineering, various forms of brain-washing, and other threatening aspects of overt or covert totalitarianism. It hardly needs saying that I share this loathing for a nightmare in whose shadow most of nay life was spent. But on the other hand it has to be realized that ever since the first cave-dweller wrapped his shivering frame into the hide of a dead animal, man has been, for better or worse, creating for himself an artificial environment and an artificial mode of existence without which he no longer can survive. There is no turning back on housing, clothing, artificial heating, cooked food; nor on spectacles, hearing aids, forceps, artificial limbs, anaesthetics, antiseptics, prophylactics, vaccines and so forth. We start tampering with human nature almost from the moment a baby is born, by the universal practice of dropping a solution of silver nitrate into its eyes as a protection against ophthalmia neonatorum, a form of conjunctivitis often leading to blindness, caused by bacilli which lurk in the mother's genital tract. This is followed later by preventive vaccinations, compulsory in most civilized countries, against smallpox and other infectious diseases. To appreciate the value of these tamperings with the course of nature, let us remember that the epidemics of smallpox among American Indians were one of the main reasons why they lost their lands to the white man. It also decimated the population of Europe in the beginning of the seventeenth century -- its ravages only equalled, perhaps symbolically, by the massacres, in the name of true religion, of the Thirty Years War.
A less well-known form of tampering, pertinent to our subject, is the prevention of goitre and the variety of cretinism associated with it. When I was a child, the number of people in Alpine mountain valleys with monstrous swellings in the front of their necks, and of cretinous children in their families was quite frightening. On recent trips, revisiting the same regions half a century later, I cannot remember having come across a single cretinous child. Thanks to the progress of biochemistry, it has been discovered that this type of cretinism was caused by a malfunction of the thyroid gland. This in turn was due to the shortage of iodine in the nutrients of the mountainous areas affected. Without sufficient iodine, the gland is unable to synthesize the required quantities of thyroid hormones, with tragic consequences for the mind. Thus iodine in small quantities was added by the health authorities to the common table salt, and goitrous cretinism in Europe became virtually a thing of the past.
Obviously, our species does not possess the biological equipment needed to live in environments with iodine-poor soil, or to cope with the micro-organisms of malaria and smallpox. Nor does it possess instinctual safeguards against excessive breeding: ethologists tell us that every animal species they have studied -- from flower beetles through rabbits to baboons -- is equipped with such instinctual controls, which inhibit excessive breeding and keep the population density in a given territory fairly constant, even when food is plentiful. When the density reaches a critical limit, crowding produces stress which affects the hormonal balance and interferes with lifespan and reproductive behaviour. Thus there is a kind of feedback mechanism which adjusts the rate of breeding and keeps the population at a more or less stable level. The population of a given species in a given territory behaves in fact as a self-regulating social holon.
But in this respect, too, man is a biological freak, who, somewhere along the way, lost this instinctual control-mechanism. It seems almost as if in human populations the ecological rule were reversed: the more crowded they are in slums, ghettoes and poverty-stricken areas, the faster they breed. What prevented the population from exploding much earlier in history was not the kind of automatic feedback control which we observe in animals, but the death-harvest of wars, epidemics, pestilence and infant mortality. These were factors beyond the control of the masses; but nevertheless conscious attempts to regulate the birthrate through contraception and infanticide are on record from the very dawn of history. (The oldest recipes to prevent conception are contained in the so-called Petri Papyrus, dating from about 1850 B.C.) Birth control though infanticide was also common from ancient Sparta to quite recently among Eskimos. Compared to these cruel methods, the modern ways of directly 'tampering with Nature' by intra-uterine coils and oral contraceptives are certainly preferable. Yet they interfere in a radical and permanent manner with the vital physiological processes of the oestrous cycle. Applied on a world-wide scale they would amount to the equivalent of an artificially induced adaptive mutation.
There is no end to the list of beneficial 'tamperings with human nature', compared to which the abuses and occasional follies of medicine and psychiatry shrink to relative insignificance. What the sum total of these tamperings amounts to is in fact correcting human nature, which without these correctives would in its biological aspect hardly be viable, and which in its social aspect, after countless disasters, is heading for the ultimate catastrophe. Having conquered the worst of the infectious diseases which assail the body of man, the time has come to look for methods to immunize him against the infectious delusions which from time immemorial have assailed the group-mind and made a blood-bath of his history. Neuropharmacology has given us lethal nerve-gases, drugs for brain-washing, others to induce hallucinations and delusions at will. It can and will be put to benevolent use. Let me quote a single example of the type of research pointing in that direction:
In 1961 the University of California San Francisco Medical Centre organized an international symposium on Control of the Mind. At the first session, Professor Holger Hyden of Gothenburg University made headlines in the Press with his paper -- 'Biochemical Aspects of Brain Activity'. Hyden is one of the leading authorities in that field. The passage which created the sensation is quoted below (the reference to me is explained by the fact that I was a participant at the symposium):
In considering the problem of control of the mind, the data give rise
to the following question: would it be possible
to change the
fundamentals of emotion by inducing molecular changes in the
biologically active substances in the brain? The RNA*, in particular,
is the main target for such a speculation, since a molecular change
of the RNA may lead to a change in the proteins being formed. One
may phrase the question in different words to modify the emphasis:
do the experimental data presented here provide means to modify
the mental state by specifically induced chemical changes? Results
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