The exchange, from the lungs of the speaker to the brain of the listener, takes about one second to complete; but it is only a prologue. A voice does not begin its true existence until the brain of the hearer has absorbed and converted the electrical signals of the neurons. We copy the external signal, discard the original and then remake the copy in our own image, based on the meaning the voice has for us. We mould and remould the voice over and over again, the copy deviating from the original that produced it and at the same time becoming inseparable from what it is stimulating. A voice has spoken and we have heard.
The most extraordinary thing about this account is of course that last paragraph and particularly its third sentence: We copy the external signal, discard the original and then remake the copy in our own image … Herein lies a clue to every misunderstanding that has plagued us since speech began; here is the mechanism through which everything from Chinese whispers to mondegreens operates; here is where our sovereign disregard of what people actually say, as opposed to what we thought they said or what we wanted them to say, arises. Here too is a clue to the persistence in memory of certain remarks that may have been said to us forty or fifty years ago; and, inter alia (Smith’s point) also a possible explanation for the human potential to hear voices where no external source exists. His own father, a lawyer, suffered from this affliction, as do, it turns out, as many as one in three of us. A third of humanity! Socrates, Joan of Arc, my own sister. Non-verbal quadriplegics may experience auditory hallucinations. Even the deaf hear voices. As do the insane; indeed, when I was a child, talking to yourself was always described as the first sign of madness.
Julian Jaynes’ thesis comes in here. In his book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, he advanced four related hypotheses: that consciousness is rooted in language; that preceding the dawn of consciousness humans possessed, or were possessed by, a different mentality (the bicameral mind) based on auditory hallucinations; that the beginning of modern consciousness dates, in the West, to around the end of the second millennium BC (3000 years BP); and that the bicameral mind is or was an artefact of the double- or split-brain neurological model.
A simpler way of saying it: for most of our history on this earth, we humans acted unconsciously, at the behest of auditory hallucinations that were understood to be the voices either of gods or ancestors or both; and the origin of these voices was not external but internal, they emanated from the right brain and were heard by the left. It wasn’t until we began to use written language to construct the mind-space we (mostly) take for granted today, that the hegemony of the voice(s) of god(s) began to pass away.
Jaynes was a psychologist but he was also a man of theatre who spent two long periods in Salisbury, England, writing, directing and acting in plays of unknown provenance and character; the texts and other traces of this activity have not yet been published or even much written about. Some of his evidence for the historical validity of his theories is literary; for example, he sees the transition from bicamerality to modern consciousness figured in contrasts between The Iliad and The Odyssey. In the first, the gods manifest, speak and are obeyed; in the second, human agency, human motivation, has begun to take over from the old dispensation. Odysseus has himself tied to the mast so that he may hear the song the sirens sing and yet survive: the first man ever to do so. He goes down into the Underworld and there asserts himself too, refusing to offer the cup of black blood to his own mother until he has heard what the blind seer, Tiresias, has to say about his fate. There are many other examples.
The death of the gods, the silencing of the oracles, the whole long melancholy tale, from Homer to the last prophecy of the Delphic Oracle, told in the drama and poetry of Greece, can therefore be read as a Jaynesian lament for our lost bicamerality; by the same token, the afflictions of schizophrenia, the intermittent illuminations offered by psychotropic drugs, the uncanny knowings of precognition, clairvoyance and other forms of extrasensory perception … these are all aspects of our ancient bicamerality thrusting through into the light of modern rational consciousness. The Gaelic an da shealladh, the second sight, which really means two sights, may then be understood as the ability simultaneously to entertain both forms of consciousness, bicamerality and rationality, at once.
Jaynes himself turns out to be, as C had said, and as the long biographical essay that begins Reflections confirms, a curious and eccentric man. He was born in 1920 in West Newton, Massachusetts, the son of a Unitarian minister who was a graduate of the Harvard School of Divinity. He, the father, also Julian, was a New Englander born on a pre–Civil War plantation in Virginia which had been bought by his own Connecticut-born father in order that the slaves thereupon might be freed. Julian junior’s mother, Clara, was thirty years younger than her husband and his second wife; there were two other children of the marriage, an older sister Helen (who became mentally ill and an alcoholic) and a younger brother, Robert. When Julian junior was two, his father, aged sixty-six, died of a heart attack on a train as the family were travelling north to their summer home on Prince Edward Island in Canada; he was brought up largely by his mother. Nevertheless, as he said, he was always in the presence of his father: in the third-floor study of the family home were forty-eight bound volumes of Julian senior’s sermons, which the son read and re-read, both in manuscript and in the selection, called Magic Wells, his mother published as a memorial to her husband in 1922.
In one of them the Rev. Jaynes remarks, as if plotting the course of his son’s work: On and on we go—more burdens, more temptations, more crosses! And through it all, what? A poor, worn-out, mutilated life? No! But an ever increasing capacity—wider visions, stronger powers, tenderer sympathies, better knowledge of ourselves, better knowledge of what life means, a quickening in the thrill and stir of holy war, and moments of spiritual exaltation, moments of divine peace, moments of conscious victory that are worth more than a million years among the flowers and sweetmeats of the dreamed-of Paradise.
Julian Jaynes left high school in 1937 and went on to further study at the University of Virginia; the next year he transferred to Harvard and later to McGill University in Montreal, Canada, from which he graduated in 1941 with a bachelor’s degree in psychology. In 1939, lest America go to war, he registered as a conscientious objector; in 1942, while at graduate school at the University of Toronto, he enlisted CO for the draft and was sent to a Civilian Service work camp near Thornton, New Hampshire. Three months later he wrote to the Attorney-General of the United States: I am now leaving camp and refusing allegiance to a law which I cannot conscientiously comply with. Can we work within the logic of an evil system for its destruction? Jesus did not think so; neither did Debs, or Gandhi in India. Nor do I.
He did leave camp and was soon arrested, tried and sentenced to four years’ jail in the US Penitentiary at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, a medium-security prison where many conchies were incarcerated. He served three of the four years, spending his time reading, studying and writing, working in the prison hospital, playing the organ in the Protestant chapel. With the spring, he wrote to his family, quite a few birds have come to this part of Pennsylvania—in all 3 of the prisons I have been in, I have found many bird enthusiasts. I guess they are an unconscious symbol of freedom for prisoners. And, retrospectively, in 1984: It will be 40 years at least since I was there, where so much of my life was determined, since that event out in the stockade one spring when I remember picking up a worm in the grass. There was so little grass there in the stockade and I remember vowing that I would devote my life to finding out the difference between the insensate earth, the sensitive worm and my thinking self.
Prisons breed obsessives but in Jaynes’ case it probably only exacerbated tendencies he already possessed: Over the next three years, 1946 to 1949, Jaynes lived, breathed and thought experimental research on animals … he slept in a large sleeping duct underneath Yale University, where he put himself on a work schedule independent of the sun and stars. His dis
sertation was on the maternal behaviour of animals of different species, including invertebrates; his MA was awarded in 1948 and he should have received his PhD the following year, except he refused to pay the twenty-five dollars demanded by Yale.
Behind this refusal was a principled objection to the conformity that the strictures attendant upon higher degrees can impose upon free thought; and a practical objection to changing, at the behest of a senior faculty member, something in his work he knew to be correct. Soon afterwards, Jaynes left by ship for England to begin his first stint of work in the theatre. At the time, his biographers note, he was deeply saddened by the manic-depressive illness of Martha Dimock, the woman he loved. He never married.
Jaynes was, like Shakespeare, an actor as well as a playwright; his plays include Night is My Kingdom, about Edward the Confessor and his rivals, the brothers Tostig and Harold Godwinson—the Harold who died, allegedly from an arrow in the eye, at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. The king no more understands their heroic patriotism and code of honour than do they understand his sentimental love of all mankind and his religious view of life. Other titles include: The Liar, The Lover, The Hater, The Holy Grail, The Battle of Bluebird Lane and Thomas Masaryk: A Tragedy in Two Acts (about the Czech democrat, philosopher and statesman, not the painter of illusions). It’s unclear how many of these works were actually performed nor how, if they were, they played. They seem to have been allegorical farces, perhaps resembling the works of Ben Jonson more than anything in the Shakespearean corpus. The Lover, which features reciprocal accusations of infidelity indulged in by a Mr and Mrs Scrutable, takes place in the city of Camelot in the legendary present.
Jaynes returned to Yale as an instructor and lecturer from 1954 to 1960, working in the field of ethology—the behaviour of animals in their natural habitats rather than as observed, and modified, by behaviourists and their ilk in the laboratory. He authored three studies of maternal retrieving in rats, three more on neural mediation of mating in male cats, and others upon imprinting in neo-natal chicks. He followed with particular interest the emotional changes in the chicks, ranging from distress to contentment, hypothesizing that they ‘may act as a kind of autoreinforcement in the acquisition of filial responses’. But animal learning did not answer his questions about the nature of consciousness and so, in late 1960, he went, again by ocean liner, back to Salisbury to continue his work in the English theatre.
He was enticed back into academic life by the offer of a commission to write a 120-page history of comparative psychology for a series planned by Basic Books. The offer came from a retired professor at Harvard, Edwin G. Boring, but it originated with Frank Beach, Jaynes’ mentor at Yale in the 1940s. Jaynes took up a research associate position at Princeton, with an office and workspace included, and that became his academic home for the next three decades.
What should a man do? he wrote to Boring. He should choose the work he puts to his hand by some rule of uniqueness, of what he, of all lives in the world, and he alone, can best do … a psychologist enters his profession almost like taking a religion, making himself a part of his own subject matter and baring his soul to the cruelty of objectivity. It was the projected history of comparative psychology, which exists as 500 pages of fragments, which formed the template for Jaynes’ major work; but that work is an investigation not of animal behaviour, but of the human mind.
Jaynes worked compulsively and lived frugally; he slept alone in a single room and was usually in his office from late morning until ten in the evening, when he would go out drinking and socialising with friends. Sometimes he worked through the night. Sometimes, like his mentally ill sister, he drank too much. He never gave up alcohol but did, late in life, manage to kick the habit of smoking small cheroots. His method of composition was unconventional; he preferred to speak his thoughts into a dictaphone and then leave the tapes with a departmental secretary for transcription. His early presentations of what he called A New Theory of Consciousness were also oral rather than written; they were given in a series of lectures in 1969 and, while he was assembling the material to support his theory—split-brain research, big-eyed idols, hypnosis, language, children’s imaginary playmates—he also wrote and directed a play about the crucifixion, Journey to Golgotha, which was staged at the Princeton University Chapel over Easter, 1969.
His central insight came soon after this, as he travelled north to Canada to oversee his mother’s move to the family summer house at Keppoch near Charlottetown on Prince Edward Island. He stopped for the night at Fredericton in New Brunswick and, as he looked out his hotel window watching the ice break up on the St John River, his theory at last came together. After the first major presentation of his ideas, at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association in Washington DC, Jaynes went on the road as a peripatetic and itinerant lecturer, ranging the East Coast of the US, up into Canada and down as far as Florida, and also out into the Midwest. He spent a lot of time in hotel rooms with his dictaphone, assembling a vast array of material, most of which remains unpublished and perhaps unpublishable.
Jaynes thought that subjective conscious mind is an analogue of what is called the real world. It is built up with a lexical field whose terms are all metaphors or analogues of behaviour in the physical world … like mathematics, it is an operator rather than a thing or a repository. And it is intimately bound up with volition and decision. Its crucial features, he noted, include spatialisation, excerption, the analogue ‘I’, the metaphor ‘me’ and narratisation. And then there is the question of whence this operator came: For, if consciousness is based upon language, then it follows that only humans are conscious, and that we became so at some historical epoch after language was evolved.
He points out that in The Iliad, nous, mind, meant ‘recognition’; and that psyche meant ‘life’; their modern meanings only developed after the inner life began. Before that was a world inhabited by noble automatons who know not what they do. The gods were auditory hallucinations as distinctly heard by the Iliadic heroes as voices are heard by schizophrenic patients today. Cities, markets, rule by cruelty, the breakdown of the authority of the gods, and the origin of narratisation in epics all happened together, even if at different times; the Aztec and the Inca, he believed, were still bicameral when the Spanish arrived. Deceit itself begins here—for without consciousness, long-term treachery is not possible. Rather than behaviourism’s stainless-steel promise of a handful of reflexes and conditional responses, consciousness involves, decisively, the difference between what others see of us and our sense of our inner selves. It is a mystery irreducible to terms not its own (the analogue I, the metaphor me, the silent you); and one of those terms is what today we sometimes call history and sometimes fiction, which might both be rendered otherwise simply as recollection. Or memory.
I had told C that I didn’t want to pursue the history of Australia’s detention centres and I meant it; but, as is sometimes the way, that history seemed intent on pursuing me. This took some odd forms. When, the weekend after C’s visit, my sons came down to stay with me, the older boy, who was thirteen, had something he wanted me to look at on the internet; this wasn’t unusual, but the subject matter was. Instead of an animated cartoon about a depressed unicorn called Charlie whose vital organs are being medically harvested by malevolent horses, or another instalment of Beached Az, an affectionate Australian satire on New Zealand accents and mores, the item was something he and his school friends had seen on Hungry Beast, an ABC current affairs program for kids.
The report was about what The Guardian called the biggest company you’ve never heard of, and consisted of an intro by a woman who looked a bit like a blonde Julia Roberts, followed by a two-minute video, with voice over and graphics, detailing some of that company’s activities. The graphics resolved at the end, cleverly, to show a picture of a spider at the heart of a web. The original outfit was founded in 1929 as the UK division of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) and initially provided services to t
he cinema industry. In 1986 RCA was taken over by General Electric and broken up; the next year the UK division changed its name to Serco (which stands simply for service corporation), listed on the stock exchange and was then (2010) an extremely successful multinational enterprise which operated in more than thirty countries worldwide, with about 50,000 employees, most of them ex-bureaucrats, and a handsome annual turnover (three billion pounds in 2008) with profits in the order of a hundred million pounds per annum.
Serco described itself as an international service company which combines commercial know-how with a deep public service ethos. We improve services by managing people, processes, technology and assets more effectively. We advise policy makers, design innovative solutions, integrate systems and—most of all—deliver to the public. The then CEO was one Christopher Rajendran Hyman, an Indian Pentecostal Christian from Durban, South Africa, who grew up under the Apartheid system and cites his own father, who established a lucrative business selling used cars, as a major influence on his life. Hyman liked to say that he was directed in all he did by God. His approach to business was considered eccentric by some, in that he believed that his first duty was to make sure his employees were happy and that everything else—meaning, presumably, efficiency and profits—would flow from that. I suppose it might depend upon the quality of the employees and what exactly made them happy. Hyman was a racing-car driver in his spare time; in 2009 he drove a Ferrari in the British GT Championship.
Serco had railways in the UK, Dubai and Australia, where they ran both the Ghan and the Indian Pacific, as well as Adelaide’s bus system. They owned and operated speed cameras in the UK, designed the software that controls the matrix, traffic signals, emergency roadside telephones and monitoring devices on England’s motorway network, including the National Traffic Control Centre. They managed the UK’s National Physical Laboratory, the measurements standards lab, and were responsible for the maintenance of Greenwich Mean Time.
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