by Philip Wylie
The third committee was the Crime Commission, a group in control of some eight hundred young women volunteer police. As these girls had been recruited to strength, instructed and drilled, the sound of plate glass breaking at night had grown rarer, robberies fewer, and women had commenced to feel fairly safe even at night and even, if they were bold and self-reliant, alone.
For lunch, during the incessant discussions, Paula had eaten two peanut butter sandwiches and drunk a glass of milk. So she was hungry, rather than exhausted, when she came home. She found the children racing noisily around the house, a huge pot of stew steaming on the stove, and Kate sitting in the living room with her eyes closed. Kate recited the events bf the day and added that she had a headache. Paula then visited Doris, who had been put to bed and was reasonably comfortable. She opened the door of Edwinna’s room and found her asleep.
“You’re just tense,” she said to Kate when she had finished making rounds.
“That’s why you have a headache, poor lamb! You often get the rough end of our assignments, staying home. Nobody knows better than I what it means! Come over here to me.”
Obediently, Kate stretched out on the divan while Paula massaged her neck and shoulders.
To do so gave Paula deep satisfaction, a feeling of the direct outpouring of herself and a pride in her protective capacity. The act also gave her an experience of possession and control. Watching Kate relax made Paula happy through a sense of aggrandizement.
After a moment of hesitation, she undid the back buttons of Kate’s dress, loosened her brassiere and took the pins from her long, black hair, letting it fall loose. Then she rubbed the scalp from which it grew so thickly.
The young woman accepted those attentions with an occasional, grateful murmur.
At length, Paula was roused from a long bemusement by Edwinna’s voice.
“Where’s supper?” She called the question loudly as she approached. “I’m starved! And the kids must be, too!”
She came into the dimmed living room and saw Kate lying there. For a moment, her face showed with its old rancor. Her lips became hard and hateful. “If you’re running a massage parlor, Mother, how about me? I’ve got a case of stiff muscles that would paralyze an acrobat! After all, Kate hasn’t been farming the whole damned day!”
Paula said confusedly, “Why, of course, dear. Kate! Get the kids in and the table set. Edwinna, stretch out here and I’ll do you.”
Sitting up, buttoning herself, Kate gave Paula a low-lashed, long look. Then she smiled, rose and went to work.
Edwinna lay in her place, grunting. After a while she said, without further resentment, “Mom, you’re getting a crush on our good-looking guest.”
“Ridiculous!”
“Ouch! Take it easy! Nothing ridiculous about it, excepting maybe the way you’re kidding yourself. And don’t mind me! I wouldn’t blame anybody—!”
“Edwinna!”
“Sometimes, especially at night, when Alicia’s asleep and I’m lying awake, I wish I could get crushes myself! Golly! It’s a terrible thing for a woman not ever to—!”
“See here, Edwinna! I want one thing understood. Kate is a great help and a friend in need. She’s a good, sweet, innocent child who never had much of a home or much mothering—”
“Take another look at her, darling,” Edwinna said dryly but amiably. “Kate’s all growed up. Adult. She’s been married. She’s had a child of her own—and doesn’t talk about her Georgie, though the poor kid must feel a lot. I don’t know much about her background. But I will say this: If she’s as naïve as she acts, I have a date tonight with the King of England! She went through high school, and high school isn’t the playpen it was in your dear old East Orange days. She has a couple of older sisters who really get around. Kate’s here on good behavior and she likes it here, so she intends to behave. That means, behave any way you want. Which is all right with me, only don’t try to pull that Mother Superior line, darling!”
This, Paula thought furiously, is too much! This is more than can be borne! I believed Edwinna was changing; but she isn’t! Underneath is the same sadistic, perverse streak! What she accuses me of feeling comes out of her mind, not my mind! It’s how she’d like to feel and doesn’t dare! Yet, anyhow! God knows what people will feel or do years from now!
With the last reflection, her anger inexplicably ebbed. At the same time, tension must have left her fingers. For Edwinna sighed softly and turned her head to one side in such a way that her mother could see the elegance of her profile.
“I’m sorry,” Edwinna murmured. “We all get tired as hell and cranky as hell’s population! I didn’t mean to shock you or to hurt you, Paula. But I guess I’ve run around with some pretty amoral people, so I’ve quit thinking how decent, normal women actually feel.”
“What’s decent?” Paula asked quietly, after a pause. “What’s normal? What’s moral? What’s amoral? I was tired too, Edwinna. Nervously tired. There are so many things to think about, so many problems, so many tragedies to listen to! I suppose, sooner or later, the problem of what to do about sex when there’s only one sex will become the uppermost problem in the whole world. Maybe I was being narrow-minded.”
“You were just being my mother,” Edwinna answered. “Get that place behind my shoulder blade. It’s as sore as a bruise! Being my mother-not wanting a soul to get the jump on you. Honestly, Mum, what earthly difference do such things make? Now?”
“There’s Bill,” Paula answered slowly. “I loved him.” It was the first time she had used the past tense since the Disappearance.
13
AN ESSAY ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF SEX, OR THE LACK THEREOF, EXTRANEOUS TO THE NARRATIVE AND YET ITS THEME, WHICH THE
IMPATIENT MAY SKIP AND THE REFLECTIVE MIGHT ENJOY.
Gaunt sat at his study window and read the Conclusion of his “Preliminary Survey.” It followed his analysis of the lines of research which scientists everywhere were pressing and represented the philosopher’s effort to add to the whole something original. Something new enough and broad enough to suggest different lines of inquiry and novel states of awareness that might lead to fresh formulations. As he read, he looked up from time to time, not really seeing the landscape beyond.
The windows had grown opaque with greasy salt blown from the near sea by summer wind, with summer’s sticky humidity and the dust of months. Spiders had nested in outside corners; the debris of their prey, chitinous carapaces of beetles, miscellaneous wings, legs and antennae, was strewn on the sills. Webs stretched across the dirty panes.
Below the window, a large croton grew rank and untrimmed. Paula’s gardenia at the corner of the house was perishing for want of water, want of aluminum sulphate to acidify the soil, want of fertilizer to enrich the peat moss in which it grew. The lawn was knee high in weeds, unmowed and going to seed. A fire in August had burned the palmettos; now they were reappearing, light green shoots ascending amongst the blackened trunks and the gray ashes. Only one or two of the fire-resistant Caribbean pines were dying but their brown needles came spinning intermittently from the crowns to the charred earth. The annuals were all dead.
He read thoughtfully through the chapter upon which he had spent weeks of work: Disorientation
Two dichotomies have characterized Western twentieth-century society: a scientific objectivity that had no equal subjective logic, and the schism of the sexes.
“Modern” man was never in any complete sense scientific. To objects he applied the honest scrutiny of his mind and so developed his technologies. To every instrument with which he examined and measured objects, save one, he gave the most critical analysis.
The one was himself. For the scientist is the final, supreme and absolute instrument of his
“sciences.” Not to understand the doer is to have no certain knowledge of what has been done, or why it was undertaken.
Soon after the nuclear physicists delivered to the world an atomic bomb they asserted that “man” must develop a “moral s
cience” as effective as his objective sciences or perish from an imbalance of objective power and subjective imbecility.
How pitiful, how pretentious, how ludicrous! Yet neither the physicists nor any other “scientists” of their ilk seemed to be embarrassed. They were saying in effect that they had carried the pursuit of the knowledge of things far beyond the intellectual capacity of average men; with the same breath, they demanded of average men—or at least of others, not themselves—the development of a new “science” of ideas to bridge the gap their one-sided enterprise had created, a “science” whereof they had no clue.
These same gentlemen would scarcely have fired a boiler without first checking its gauge. For some centuries, however, they had stoked the Barnes of objective learning without troubling themselves to check rising pressures within the species or even to discern whether the assumed pressure levels were correct. Thus the search for “pure”
knowledge was conducted by the methodology of pure ignorance: the man sawing off the limb on which he perches is every whit as “scientific” as most of the great men in the lexicon of the pioneers of “learning.”
The fact that when they cried out for a “new” science (to save the lives of their species, countrymen, colleagues, children and selves) such a science had been developed in their presence for half a century, but revealed one more blurred facet of their minds: like most of their scientific predecessors, they lacked the energy, the detachment, the acumen and the integrity to investigate knowledge outside their own narrow spheres.
At the turn of the century the science of psychology concerned itself with such phenomena as sense perceptions, reason and logic, reflexes and their conditioning, the relationship to these of heredity and environment, and the like. Most academic
“psychologists” today are still ignorant of discoveries in their own field outside such execedingly objective regions. A few concede that, through medicine, Freud and others have made certain contributions to what they term “abnormal psychology.” But it is a subject neglected or regarded with suspicion by most institutions of so-called higher learning. Unfortunately for the wisdom of modern men, fealty to the tradition, along with neglect of the new findings of psychology has rendered most of them, in Cousins’ word, obsolete.
What has been learned reveals that the best educated persons seldom accurately identify the motives of their acts. Men do not know what they are doing because they do not know why they do it. Obviously, the gathering of objective information for the subjectively naïve is not a sensible procedure: the man in the street and the researcher into physical phenomena ought to know something of human motives. So the idea of
“knowledge for its own sake” is the alibi of a long and tiresome retinue of men, clever but not wise, who refused to face themselves scientifically. It is a lame and sorry defense of weak men who wondered about stars, and weighed them. Wondering itself, they never weighed. . . .
Personality is shaped in infancy and early childhood. The conflict between the raw cravings of the infant and the efforts of its elders to mold it to some particular cultural pattern is the tense matrix that sets the “style” of every adult. The infant’s cravings (id) were identified as instinctual. What happened in the cradle (or failed to happen there) may be repeated, in endless forms, by the adolescent, the college student, the man as he marries and the same man as the bad-tempered, ill-adjusted, prejudiced, child-adult who presides as chairman of the board of a great corporation. That is the essence of Freud’s discoveries. He showed how early the conditioning of human reflex begins.
Other psychologists have demonstrated that instinct is not merely a vestigial phenomenon in the young child but that, in man as in all creatures, instinct unfolds a series of compulsions and taboos which parallel biological development. Jung revealed collective aspects of instinct: man, the maker of symbols, images, words and myths—and religions of these, and from religions, cultures—thereby expresses versions of the basic pattern of his instincts. That theory stands as the only complete and plausible explanation of human history, in this essayist’s opinion. It defines the religious and/or cultural imperative in man; at the same time, it shows how cultural diversity came about—just as Freud’s concepts show how culture is imbued in each generation. Jung presents, also, the only satisfactory accounting for what happened to instinct (which so largely controls the behavior of all creatures) when one of them at last evolved a measure of consciousness and reason. It is coherent, “general field theory” of the psyche, seen finely in each man, and broadly in the record of man’s ascent from apehood.
These findings have been arrived at by scientific investigations not always of what man thinks and believes about himself, but very often of what takes place in his subconscious or unconscious mind. It is here that instinct (repressed through ages by a creature attempting to seem “superior” to the rest of instinctual nature) works autonomously. Efforts to perceive instinctual compulsion, whereby men are able to cling to the shameful chaos of their present innumerable “convictions” or (with equal and equally insensate vigor) to their conscious lacks of conviction, have succeeded!
Psychology, in revealing that much of the inner nature of humanity, has also disclosed why and how its own overwhelmingly important findings are still almost universally rejected: the ego of man, the one subjective entity he has thus far come to recognize, sees that what the psychologists have found—if analyzed, ingested and digested —will change ego itself. And man’s greatest fear then summons instinct to defend ego: the animal dread of any change in his personal identity. Only those courageous enough to master that primordial fear have been able to understand, or to benefit by, psychology. They are as yet very few, even amongst the brave physical scientists, who often regard themselves as the repositories of all erudition.
Persons of prior conviction, whether in Roman Catholicism, Presbyterianism, atheism, dialectical materialism, spiritualism, or Mohammedanism-as may be seen-have thus forged unconsciously such bonds between ego and instinct that the penetration of the complex whole is well-nigh impossible. Here instinct rules them, not reason; here instinct identifies the “light” of their convinced egos as the sum of enlightenment. Such is the mechanism of faith and belief; such, the iron curtain confronting the modern psychologist.
The problem is not unprecedented. Even physical “scientists” have never taken an open-minded attitude toward truly new ideas, in spite of their pretensions. The learned of his era did not examine Galileo’s hypotheses; they put him to Inquisition. Darwin is today disputed: the bones of a hundred “missing links” stand assembled in museums, yet many scientists still assert the parent betwixt themselves and apes has not been dug up and never will be. Medical doctors allowed generations to die of infection after Lister and Pasteur; they rejected the “germ theory.” It needed a martyr to abate childbed fever. What Einstein announced early in this era was regarded as ludicrous by many mathematicians—who smile at the postulates no longer.
Strides in new knowledge are taken slowly, usually against the will of the currently knowledgeable; and “education” is designed far more to freeze learning than to advance it. For education caters to the cultural pattern, and promulgates it. Education slams the door of every tabooed vista in the face of all youthful interest. It meticulously blunts imagination and stultifies criticism. It but conveys a culture; in that task, the errors of the culture and its unchallenged prohibitions are handed down. It discourages the rebel and the innovator; it sedulously abets the conformer.
No society yet has evolved a technique for progressive change in its cultural ideas, because religions, on which cultures are founded, would be avowedly tentative in such a process. But as long as religions remain unconscious efforts to patternize instinct they will partake automatically of instinct’s compulsiveness. That is, absolute doctrine will characterize them and tentativeness will seem heretical and will be abhorred.
To incorporate a new advance of fundamental awareness, mankind has therefore
always found it necessary to build a new culture on the wreck of some older one. The nearest approach to a resolution of this wasteful habit is found in the idea of freedom.
Freedom supplies the theoretical room, at least, for subjective advances. But freedom in practice has generally deteriorated, under the pressure of new ideas to which it always gives rise, to a status where “liberty” is transferred from the innovators to the traditionalists so that, once again, it finally surrenders its franchise to tyranny.
Men have only now looked at themselves with the intellectual techniques the objective sciences have developed. And. only a very few have so far summoned up nerve enough for that. The spectacle—like each spectacle of fresh discovery—is so different from contemporary belief that most persons summarily reject the whole finding. Indeed, the essayist has heard it said repeatedly in the past decade that Freud has gone “out of date.” Disturbed myriads said Newton was out of date too, and Copernicus, and a hundred more; but all such efforts of the willfully ignorant did not, in the end, prevail against the simple facts that Newton, Copernicus and the rest had turned up. Since Freud and Jung similarly discovered new truth (and empirical, clinical evidence proves that they did), the willfully ignorant of this age, however highly placed or many-degreed, cannot prevail against those findings in the end, either.
Quackeries have flourished in every science, especially at its beginnings when the public had no sure basis for evaluation. Quackeries abound today in psychology. Also, the early acolytes of every science made blunders; psychologists are making them today.
But each new branch of science has gradually established itself and its principles.