Homo Conscius

by Timothy Balding

  “Who’s talking to us now?” enquired the interrogator, as though he were addressing a medium.

  That’s a good question, thought Victor. The man’s no fool, clearly. I’ll have to think about that one.

  “I’d say, both my selves,” said Victor after a moment’s reflection. “You’re hearing a kind of duet between the two voices. But my objective self will always have the final word, if you give him time, because it is he who represents my attachment to the truth and who is authentically ‘me’ while still, in a way, remaining neutral. My subjective self is very approximate, completely immoral and lazy and, unlike my objective self, he will never act against my interests. He will tell you only the first thing that occurs to him from all that he has lived, heard and seen, digested or not, and he will also lie to you without hesitation, not necessarily because he wants to dissimulate anything—though he can do that with incredible ease—but because it’s simply more convenient and effortless to do so, and often more attractive too.”

  “You said earlier that psychoanalysts tend to confuse the relationship between emotions, desires, instincts—and thoughts. What did you mean by that?” asked the interrogator.

  “Well, take the notion of ‘unconscious’ thoughts,” said Victor. “This is a contradiction in terms, isn’t it? A thought is something that has been consciously articulated in words, or is on the brink of so being, or it isn’t a thought at all in my view. So when the shrinks tell us that this or that is what we really think, unconsciously, I just can’t take them seriously. I can concede that a man may have difficulty expressing or explaining his views about something, but it’s not because those views are hidden somewhere or other in his brain, plotting for or against him. It’s rather that his objective self hasn’t developed to the extent that he can coldly wrest from his confused mind, brimful of information and ideas, borrowed or his own, the adequate words to describe properly his nascent opinions. Emotion and instinct don’t come into it. These are not mind functions, in my view. Brain functions, for sure—neuroscience is proving that beyond any doubt. But if the word ‘mind’ has any sense at all, it signifies the seat of words, of information, of thoughts and of ideas. You can’t simply shovel emotions and instincts into the same dark pit with thoughts and have them wrestling blindly with each other like snakes and rats.”

  “But emotions, instincts and thoughts do interact, don’t they?” asked the interrogator.

  “Interact?”

  “Have an influence on each other, let’s say.”

  “That’s a good question,” said Victor. “I’ve thought about that. I reckon that it’s largely one way: thoughts can influence emotions, but generally it is not the case the other way round. It also depends on what emotions or instincts we’re talking about. They don’t all open themselves to modification in the same way or to the same degree. But the first point first: it really is important, as I may have mentioned to Ron before, that we are clear what we’re talking about when we characterize something as ‘thought’. We probably should have two words for this notion, not a single one. For me, a thought is the conclusion and fruit of a reflection, of the considered and reasoned opposition of the various things we can say about anything. But we also call ‘thought’ the simple expression of any idea at all, whether we have considered and challenged it or not. Let’s take thought in the first, purest sense. We could even call it ‘objective’ thought, so it fits in with my general theory. Well, I think it’s clear that this kind of thinking can and should tame our worst emotions and instincts. It enables us to identify and circumscribe an emotion or an instinct for exactly what it is. This doesn’t mean that we can necessarily, if at all, change the way we feel, but it does certainly mean that we can change the manner in which we act on that feeling. In this, our objective thinking is absolutely essential. And if you’ll forgive me for being anthropological for a moment, the development of the objective thinking capacities in man is thus fundamental to the current and future wellbeing of our species.”

  “Because, for instance, that would reduce the likelihood of man turning to violence to express a raw emotion or instinct?” asked the interrogator.

  He’s really getting the hang of this, thought Victor with renewed enthusiasm.

  “Yes, that’s exactly the point I’m trying to make. Particularly if we distinguish between different forms of violence. Instant anger, for example, is incredibly difficult—though far from impossible—to control even by the most objective and perfectly conscious men. The surge of venom which carries your fist into the face of the man who causes your anger may be so instantaneous that even the clearest mind may not have the time to step in and stop it. But it’s a whole different matter when we are talking about planned violence. Blowing up a bus or a pub, for example.” Victor was conscious that he had used these examples to put himself firmly within the perimeter of their preoccupations. “He who organizes and perpetrates a terrorist act is almost certainly incapable of the objective thinking which would enable him, I would even say compel him, to turn against his emotions and instincts. He is simply a subjective expression of his own hatred. Objective men don’t kill. Even those with unhappy childhoods or a real reason to hate.”

  “Real?”

  “Real in the sense that they have been directly harmed by something or somebody. The families of murder victims, for example. From what I know about the lives of many terrorists—this is your business, of course, not mine—the reasons that push them to kill have very often absolutely nothing to do with them personally. Outside the realm of ideas, of course. The people they murder don’t generally have any connection with their supposed griefs. Indeed, they may well unknowingly kill a man who agrees with their cause! It’s ideas that turn our emotions into killers. A man given to hate, with no objective control over himself, could kill in the service of just about any cause, real or imagined. Hate must have an object even if, in rare cases, it is uniquely turned against a man himself. It can’t exist in a vacuum. This is why a few months, even, apparently, a few days of propaganda and brainwashing can convince a man to kill for a reason he hadn’t even thought much about.”

  “I think it’s important to consider an emotion like hatred in isolation,” Victor continued. “All emotions don’t exist in the same way. Take love, for instance. Poets, writers, psychologists, philosophers, religious ideologues, even the man in the street, have struggled for thousands of years to come up with a meaningful manner in which to express this most unique, beautiful, compelling and painful of sentiments. I’ll let you judge their success. But my feeling is that we have failed to adequately express the essence of this extraordinary feeling principally because it does not at all belong in the kingdom of words and ideas, it does not exist in the realm of thought. It is completely elsewhere and stubbornly refuses to be tamed and circumscribed by our words. Unlike hatred, love can exist without an object. Even though it is inclined to seize upon innocent bystanders, in the same way as hatred, one really can wander around full of love without a reason in one’s head. Love is pure emotion. Isn’t that a song?”

  “Certainly should be,” said Ron with a smile. “Shall we take a break here?”

  The subject of love is clearly not of much interest to counter-terrorism, thought Victor. Perhaps it’s better, though, that they stop me there. If it weren’t the case, I might confess to the overwhelming love which grows inside me without an object, and how I could so easily, if I didn’t restrain myself, go up to the first woman I encounter in the street and sincerely declare my passion for her. Not for the first time, he suspected that on this matter this was how Jesus had felt. And that belief was most certainly something to keep to oneself.

  He Lies about His Teddy Bear

  Well, I’m not sure that any of that helped them, said Victor to himself as he made his way to the underground station to return to his suburb, running the tape of the interview once more in his mind. Would they now be able to spot an objective man and pronounce him harmless? He doubted it.<
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  The session had gone on for another hour or so after the break, though if it had at any time resembled an interrogation, it had then become nothing more than a conversation. Victor had frequently thought “fuck it” as he tried from a variety of angles to make himself clearer on this subjective-objective business, which for him held the key to behavior and action, but which nevertheless frequently tired him and also made him doubt himself.

  “How do you explain that, by your own admission, there are highly intelligent and accomplished men and women who are devoid of this consciousness of their selves—and, by your reasoning, thus objectivity?” the interrogator had enquired. “How is it that these people, too, clearly think a lot, deal easily with complex questions, come up with original and meaningful ideas? We can fairly say that they do not simply spout or recycle—I think ‘regurgitate’ was your word—information and thoughts that they have ingested from others, don’t you think?”

  The point was valid. Victor had weakly said that he didn’t have all the answers, that he was only suggesting tracks, directions, for further exploration, because to his knowledge these questions were neglected and he thought them of consuming importance. He had reacted more decisively, though, to the interrogator’s suggestion that he was “only” talking about “self-awareness.” Why “only”? Victor had shot back. Self-awareness was surely one of the most fundamental and least understood dimensions of psychology and neurology. “But all right,” he had conceded, “let’s say that what I’m really talking about is indeed self-awareness. No matter. But I’m going a lot further. It’s precisely self-awareness which leads to, or prepares the ground for, the other, vital faculty about which I am berating you: objectivity.” In any case, why was it that the awareness of our selves differed so dramatically from one human being to another, he asked? Did this imply, as he suspected, alternative brain evolutions, perhaps even a mutation? He kept his new species, Homo conscius, to himself, but in his own mind was inexorably drawn back to this idea. “I’m saying that self-awareness, this ability to be conscious of oneself, leads to at least two other phenomena: it enables us to be a lot more aware of others than would be the case if we were not able to watch ourselves; more importantly, to repeat myself, it is the path that leads us to our objective selves. And, if we follow that path, if we don’t cheat or abandon the task, we shall sooner or later attain a high degree of, and in rare cases perhaps even absolute, objectivity. A condition in which we can consider ourselves as distinct third persons, if you like, with all our virtues and vices identified and out in the open and, normally, under control. That’s the heart of the matter.”

  As he recalled this exchange, while the train chugged along out of the capital, Victor wondered what he might say now, with further thought, about the brilliant subjective men. He thought of two of them recently in the public eye. Both one-time lawmakers, they were also economists, though doubtless that was a coincidence. Both caught up in scandals, one sexual, the other financial. Men considered to be top of the class in their fields, innovators, creators, popular men of unchallenged authority who in committing their misdemeanors had bullied and subjugated, in the one case women, in the other the political and banking classes. Both exposed as uncommon liars and, each in his way, violators of law and, it must be said without excessive moralization, ordinary decency. What did they have in common? A lack of remorse or concern for their victims, certainly. Didn’t this alone suggest a blindness to one’s actions? But clearer still, in his mind, an absolute incapacity to honestly criticize oneself or even to truly admit one’s guilt to oneself. One had forced a blow job on a hotel chamber maid, the other had secreted his money away beyond the reach of the income tax authorities in a Swiss bank while calling in Parliament for tougher measures against banking fraud. Exposed, they had been dragged through police stations and in one case prison, had lied until the evidence became overwhelming and beyond denial, had then made minimal and wooden statements of contrition and penance, and then immediately resumed their lives, parading around like peacocks and trying, without much success, it must be said, to look regretful when caught in the headlights of the media caravan. These men, thought Victor, and this was an idea supported by the off-the-record confidences of their friends, did not and had never doubted themselves, and apparently protected by their self-absorption, their public disgrace had changed little, if anything. They did not possess in their minds the mirrors which throw back our reflections of ourselves, warts and all. Or if they did, it might be thought that their images were distorted and that, unlike people with even minimal distance, clarity and objectivity in their self-vision, they saw nothing but the carbon copy of what, subjectively, they considered themselves to be, assuming, of course, that they had any honest thoughts about the question. In this sense, they were more of a piece, more homogenous than the others. If, after all, Victor reflected, the world’s worst criminals, his Nazis and others responsible for mass murder, for example, could protest their innocence and, to all intents and purposes, really believe, in the vast majority of cases, that they indeed were blameless, why not a couple of minor scoundrels? The mental processes were the same, he thought. Only the dimensions of the offenses differed. As for understanding how these sexual and financial delinquents could nevertheless dazzle in the realm of ideas, in the absence of, or blind to their other or ‘higher’ selves, as one writer had put it, he could only conclude that intelligent thought and ideas could and did well exist in absolute independence from conscious self-scrutiny and were, indeed, unrelated. These men’s minds simply couldn’t turn back upon themselves, that was all. And this was what made them so strong and often so seductive to others. Their very lack of doubt. To an objective man who, necessarily, is riddled with uncertainty, disbelief and hesitation much of his life, these men were the enemies.

  Victor was embarrassed now by the interview, but he had been aware at the time, and indeed even before it took place, that he would be, for he knew himself now right down to his last sentiment. If nothing else, the interrogation had enabled him to clarify his thoughts even further and for this alone he thought he had been right to agree to go through with it. But Jesus—he had even talked about his teddy bear! How he had left it on a double-decker bus when he was four or five years old and had grieved for it ever since. In this he had not been entirely honest. It was probably, he thought, a concession to the prejudices of the epoch—and evidence of the bad faith that he had confessed to—that he had all his life told people, women at least (for they were unfailingly moved), that the loss of his bear had forever marked him. By habit, he had repeated the same story to Ron and the interrogator, though he knew by now that it was untrue. He had, in reality, forgotten about it almost entirely even in his childhood and, if it moved him at all, it was in a poetic and not a personal sense. However, in telling this tale once more, he had realized that there was something more significant about it: he had lived through the loss of his bear from the outside, as though he had even then seen himself as another person. His mother had taken him to the bus depot on the evening of the loss to question the drivers completing their day’s work. Strangely, the image of his mother and the little boy walking empty-handed back out of the depot, which he could see clearly even today, was as shot from a perspective several meters away from the pair of them. More curiously than this, he distinctly recalled the little boy’s feelings, even as tears rolled down his cheeks. He was not grieving for the bear, nor even really for himself, but for the poignancy of the scene, for the pathos of it. And he had known this even in his little child’s mind at the time. He realized later that neither then nor subsequently did he have the ability to feel sorry for himself, though he came to experience this sentiment very strongly towards the others. And it was the very first occasion, thought Victor, that I caught myself as my own spectator. It’s a pity it took me so long to understand it. I should have thought more about the other children I have observed who have this early grain of objectivity, as yet without its moral development. He
had seen them, seen them often, crying in the arms of their parents as though their very lives were threatened, while all the while sneaking cynical and knowing looks at passers-by …

  Victor looked around him in the train carriage, examining one by one his fellow passengers. An attractive red-haired woman held his gaze for a moment, long enough for him to begin to think that she might be aware of him. Is she thinking about me, he wondered? And thinking about what she is thinking about me? Anything would do. That we are both members of the human race, for example, and that this moment of our lives is, quite literally, unique, will never be repeated, because for three seconds our eyes joined in shared humanity. He looked at this beauty again. He wished he had been able to say what Handke’s Bruno, in The Left-handed Woman, in one of the most beautiful and meaningful things Victor had ever read in a book, had said: “She looked at me as though she knew we were both going to die.” But he rather thought that she had not seen him at all; it saddened him.