Halder’s thesis was basically that of the prophets of the Old Testament, from Isaiah to Jeremiah; his flowing white mane and the pathos of his delivery confirmed this impression. Man, in his view, was a species of assassins – homo homicidus. This was his principal characteristic. Other animals only kill prey belonging to a different species. A hawk killing a field-mouse can hardly be accused of murder. The law of the jungle permits feeding on other species but forbids slaying members of one’s own. Homo homicidus is the only offender against this law – a victim of endemic aggressiveness directed at his own kin; a bundle of murderous instincts…
‘Rot,’ Harriet remarked.
‘Ach so?’ Halder replied with an exaggerated shrug. ‘You will have your say later. Now it is my say. And I say to you, who is a zoologist, show me any other animal who murders and slaughters its con-specifics – its own biological kin. Yes, animals also have conflicts – over territory, or sexual competition, or food, or wanting to be the boss. They fight, but with gloves, like boxers. They always stop short of killing. It is a ritual – like fencing with the epée. It looks savage, but it is all bluff and bluster, and when one combatant signals “touché”, the other stops. The wolf or the dog signals touché by lying down on its back, paws in the air’ (Halder mimicked the waving of paws); ‘the fish swims away, the stag slinks away’ (Halder grew antlers with his fingers and made slinking motions). ‘And the victor lets him get away. But man – tsh sht …’ (he indicated cutting the throat of poor Tony, who sat next to him). ‘Tschsht – kill for money, kill for jealousy, kill for power, kill for territory …’
He ruffled his white hair in despair. How was homo homicidus to be prevented from destroying himself? From committing geno-suicide? He raised both arms in a prophetic gesture:
Gefährlich ist’s den Leu zu wecken
Verderblich ist des Tigers Zahn
Jedoch der schrecklichste der Schrecken
Das ist der Mensch in seinem Wahn…
‘As Friedrich von Schiller tells us:
‘’Tis dangerous to wake the lion
Fatal is the tiger’s tooth
But most horrible of all horrors
Is man in his madness – forsooth…’
There were several repressed giggles.
‘Ach so,’ said Halder, controlling his anger. ‘You think it is funny? But whatever you think, the killer-instinct is a scientific fact, it is in our flesh and blood, under the skin, it is in you and me. If we deny it, if we do not dare to face the facts about our own nature, then there is no hope for a remedy…’
He was interrupted by Petitjacques. ‘Programme,’ he shouted. ‘Your positive programme. That is what you asked me yesterday.’
‘And you said your programme is not to have a programme. My programme is to have a programme. But we are only at the beginning of learning the lessons which science teaches us. And science teaches us that all other animals except man do not kill their own kind because their combats are ritualized, mock combats, play-acting. Therefore, the logical remedy for man is also to ritualize his aggression, to canalize his killer-instinct into symbolic displays. Thus we could transform homo homicidus into homo ludens, the playing animal, who abreacts his killer-instinct in dramatic but harmless rituals like two stags staging a duel but never hitting, as you say, below the belt…’
Now Halder got into his stride. Yes, indeed he had a programme, he assured M. Petitjacques, and it went under the simple name AA – Aggression-Abreaction – as already briefly described in his recent book. Abreaction therapy was as old as mankind. From the Bachae of Euripides we learn how the Theban women worked themselves into a frenzy and symbolically tore the horned god to pieces. After that ecstasy, they stopped nagging their husbands. In the Dark Ages there were flagellants and tarantula dancers who worked off their aggression by masochistic practices, but even these were better than repressing aggression until it burst its dams. Much better were the jousting bouts and splendid tournaments, which resembled the ritualized duels of stags. And in modern times came sport – soccer, rugby, boxing, fencing, all splendid, harmless outlets for the killer-instinct …
But this turned out not to be enough. More efficient abreaction techniques were needed. Some very sensible psychiatrists in the United States cured their patients by simply teaching them to be rude. Halder picked up a book and read with much feeling a passage he had marked: ‘“Tell people all the time what you think of them, regardless of whether it’s politic or impolitic. Down with Emily Post! Live with the shades up. Get the steam out! Be an emotional broadcaster, not a receiver. Never play another person’s game. Play your own.” I am quoting the book of an excellent American therapist, speaking to one of his patients. To another one he speaks even more forcefully: “Never be reasonable about anything. Get rid of your irritations. Don’t keep your feelings corked up, any more than you would your stomach. Yelling gets the knot out of your gut. Remember, they that spit shall inherit the earth.”’
He paused for effect. ‘I am glad to say that the author has a considerable following in his country. But acting on the individual plane is not enough…’
In the remaining fifteen minutes of his lecture, Halder developed his grandiose projects – foreshadowed in Homo Homicidus – for creating outlets for violence on a mass scale. It would start in the kindergarten, where all-in wrestling would be compulsory. The much maligned duelling fraternities of German universities would be revived – Halder fingered lovingly two horizontal scars on his right cheek. Future mass-entertainments would include gladiatorial games, athletes fighting robots programmed to hurt but not to kill. On an even larger scale, realistic war games could be held every year in summer – the notorious rioting season – with whole armies engaged in repelling hostile invading forces, also composed of man-like robots made of software and programmed to bleed profusely. Lastly, Halder wished to remind his dear colleagues of the daily Hate Sessions and quarterly Hate Weeks in George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. The author himself obviously regarded them as a damnable institution, invented by Big Brother. But there was another way of looking at the matter. Listen to this…
Halder picked up another book, lying in front of him, with a marker in it. He read aloud:
‘“Before the Hate had proceeded for thirty seconds, uncontrollable exclamations of rage were breaking out from half of the people in the room … In its second minute the Hate rose to a frenzy. People were leaping up and down in their places and shouting at the tops of their voices … In a lucid moment Winston found that he was shouting with the others and kicking his heels violently against the rung of his chair. The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp … It was even possible, at moments, to switch one’s hatred this way or that by a voluntary act.”’
Halder put the book down: ‘Here you have the classic abreaction therapy on a mass-scale. The Orphic mystery cult revived. When the Hate Session is finished, the people are exhausted. The thirst for violence is assuaged. The killer-instinct has found its symbolic fulfilment. They have obtained katharsis, they feel purified. Mr Orwell got it all wrong. He hated the Hate idea because he was a good hater himself; otherwise he would not have been able to give such a vivid description of the scene, but his theoretical interpretation of it was wrong. He was describing a session of mass-therapy without knowing it. But at least in one very advanced industrial country Mr Orwell’s message – or perhaps Otto von Halder’s message – has been correctly interpreted and put into beneficial pract
ice. I shall now quote to you a recent news report from a well-known American weekly magazine:
‘“Therapy by Dummies. Leaving his station, the distraught worker approaches two life-sized padded dummies seated on a platform. Picking up a bamboo stave placed conveniently near by, he ferociously attacks the dummies, slashing and swatting them until his fury is spent. This strange activity, repeated daily at an Osaka plant of the giant Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., is actually a form of therapy provided by Board Chairman Konosuke Matsushita as a rather uncommon fringe benefit. In Matsushita’s ‘self-control room’, which has attracted thousands of workers, an employee can harmlessly work off his tension, frustration and rage.”
‘Mr Chairman, there was a suggestion that this conference should make concrete proposals to certain exalted personages in your country concerning the strategy of survival. I think in all humility’ – at the word humility a giggle or two could be heard – ‘in all humility, that my presentation contains relevant pointers towards such a strategy, and towards the contents of the intended message…’
2
‘It is getting worse, caro Guido,’ Claire wrote, ‘and I cannot help think of Juvenal: “Why do I write satire?” he asks. “Say rather how could I help it?” Niko is blaming himself for having selected the wrong people, and even I, faithful and loyal Claire, am beginning to wonder? He wanted to avoid the stuffed shirts, the complacent establishment pundits, and collect the more lively ones among the international call-girl set, known for their provocative ideas. When you read their stuff or get them alone in a relaxed mood, you realize their qualities – but the moment you put them together in a conference room, they behave like schoolboys performing a solemn play. They are worse than politicians, because politicians are ham-actors by natural disposition, whereas most academics seem to suffer from arrested emotional development. Politicians take their pride in making impassioned speeches and indulging in rhetorical flights; scientists pose as dispassionate servants of Truth, free from all emotional bias, while ambition and jealousy steadily gnaw away their entrails. And what is their Truth, caro Guido, what is Truth? It seems to me that each of them possesses a small fragment of the Truth which he believes to be the Whole Truth, which he carries around in his pocket like a tarnished bubble-gum, and blows up on solemn occasions to prove that it contains the ultimate mystery of the universe. Discussion? Interdisciplinary dialogue? There is no such thing, except on the printed programme. When the dialogue is supposed to start, each gets his own bubble-gum out and blows it into the others’ faces. Then they repair, satisfied, to the cocktail room.
‘Take our dear Otto von Halder, of international fame, who was blowing his gum this morning. It was a re-hash of his latest book, which has created such a scandal, with some more hair-raising embellishments added. I suppose there is a grain of truth in his ideas – the simple little truth that letting steam off is better than over-heating the boiler. It is almost a truism, but he blew it until it became inflated into a grotesque kind of religion, with echoes of Black Mass and the Nuremberg Rallies. Incidentally, Otto was a member of the Nazi Party – everybody knows it, but pretends not to know. He played no active part; he simply had to join, otherwise his career would have been ruined. Or is that an insufficient excuse? He also sheltered a couple of Jewish colleagues, risking his neck. Or is that not enough? There is no end to these conundrums – the snares of the past. I would not have brought the subject up, had it not been at the back of everybody’s mind – rightly or wrongly, I cannot decide. It may have something to do with the genius loci. Behind each yodel there is the echo of a Heil…?
‘The discussion was a mess, as the previous ones had been. Harriet was holding her horses for the afternoon session, when it was to be her turn to perform. Wyndham, with much tittering, denied any evidence of the killer-instinct in babes in the cradle. He was pooh-poohed by Otto and challenged by the Kleinian female to a sort of verbal ping-pong match which lasted the rest of the session. Bruno, who had been sharpening his knife all morning, waiting for the opportunity to move in for the kill, was at the critical moment called to the telephone for a transatlantic palaver; and as the Fräuleins at various exchanges kept cutting him off, he missed the rest of the session.
‘It is all very frustrating. I feel sorry for Niko. He foresaw it, of course, in the cynical half of his divided heart; in the other half he keeps a niche for miracles. So far none have transpired …’
3
In the afternoon it was Harriet Epsom’s turn. Her way of reading her prepared paper contrasted strangely with her ebullient private manner: she spoke in a dry, schoolmasterly voice, as if addressing a student seminar. She started by confessing some bewilderment about an apparent reversal of roles: Professor von Halder, an eminent anthropologist, had based his thesis mainly on arguments borrowed from zoology – predator and prey, ritualized combat, defence of territory, and so on; whereas she herself, a humble zoologist, was mainly interested in those specific attributes which were characteristic of man – and of man alone. But this reversal of roles seemed to her typical of the Zeitgeist: anthropologists, as well as psychologists, seemed to be determined to ignore the humanity of man, and to build their theories of human nature on analogies derived from zoology – Pavlov’s dogs, Professor Burch’s rats, Konrad Lorenz’s geese. In mock bewilderment, Harriet just wondered, wide-eyed, what had got into them…
Halder was listening impassively, sitting sideways in his chair, offering Harriet the view of his noble profile. Burch was demonstratively correcting his galley-proofs; Bruno was busily taking notes; Blood was somnolescent. Petitjacques was absent.
However, Harriet continued soberly, if animals can teach us something about our own nature, then surely we must turn our attention not to rats or geese, but to those species that are nearest to us, such as apes and monkeys. Some forty years ago, zoologists like Zuckerman who made systematic studies of the behaviour of primates in zoological gardens, came up with conclusions that seemed to support von Halder’s pessimistic views of the congenital aggressivity of our species, for these monkeys were highly irritable, constantly bickering and fighting, obsessed with sex, and ruled by murderously violent bosses. But it turned out that to generalize from the behaviour of monkeys in unnaturally crowded conditions of confinement was as hazardous as it would be to describe human society in terms of the behaviour of prisoners in a concentration camp. A new generation of field naturalists – the Carpenters, Washburns, Goodalls, Shallers and Imanishies, who had spent years of their lives observing various species of monkeys in the wild, came up with a quite different picture. They unanimously affirmed that free-living primate societies are peaceful, and that there is an almost complete absence of serious fighting, either within the band or between bands. Aggressive behaviour makes its appearance only when tensions of one kind or another put the animals under stress – as in the zoo cage. There was no sign – not the faintest trace – of von Halder’s killer-instinct to be found in our ancestors…
Halder interrupted: ‘So it is a unique property of man, as I have said.’
‘Rot,’ said Harriet, momentarily relapsing into her usual style. ‘There is not a trace of evidence, for a killer-instinct either in monkey or in man. Violence is not a biological drive, but a reaction provoked by stress when it exceeds a critical limit.’
‘So wars do not exist,’ remarked Halder.
‘They do exist, but they are not the result of individual aggressiveness. Any historian will tell you that the number of individuals murdered for personal motives was always negligible compared to the millions murdered in the name of impersonal causes: tribal loyalty, patriotism, Christian against Moslem, Protestant against Catholic, and so on. Freud proclaimed ex cathedra that wars were caused by pent-up aggressive instincts in search of an outlet, and people believed him because it made them feel guilty. But he did not produce a shred of historical or psychological evidence for his claim. 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 righteous cause, the true religion – moved not by hatred but by loyalty. Homicide committed for selfish motives is a statistical rarity in all cultures. Homicide for unselfish motives is the dominant phenomenon of man’s history. His tragedy is not an excess of aggression, but an excess of devotion. If you replace the label homo homicidus by homo fidelis, you get nearer to the truth. It is loyalty and devotion which make the fanatic…’
‘So fanatics don’t hate,’ remarked Halder with a sigh of resignation in the face of such unwisdom.
‘They do hate, but it is an impersonal and unselfish hatred of everything which threatens the object of their devotion. They hate not qua individuals, but qua members of the group – tribe, nation, Church, party, what have you. Their aggressivity is loyalty turned upside down.’
‘But I can turn your sentence also upside down,’ said Halder. ‘What you call loyalty is nothing but aggression standing on its head.’
‘Rot,’ said Harriet. ‘That kind of dialectic you can leave to Monsieur Petitjacques.’
‘I would not entirely dissent from Herr von Halder’s view,’ chimed in the voice of Helen Porter from the outer perimeter of the conference room.
‘No, you wouldn’t,’ Harriet rasped. ‘Snakes in the grass are not qualified to make pronouncements about loyalty.’
‘According to von Halder’s view,’ said Wyndham with an apologetic titter, ‘the act of love is an act of inverted aggression, and the male organ an aggressive weapon.’
‘But of course it is,’ said Helen earnestly. ‘That isn’t much of a joke, you know.’
The Call-Girls: A Tragi-Comedy With Prologue and Epilogue Page 10