The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence (69 page)

But the immaterial pea of consciousness at the center of things, watching and thinking, would be largely forgotten or ignored. Indeed, as the Western concentration upon the study of matter came to prove more and more fruitful, there was a tendency on the part of the heirs and successors of Descartes to identify completely with matter and to lump mind with spirit as an ephemerality that was outside the scope of legitimate scientific investigation. Mind was something that couldn’t be seen, heard, touched, smelled or tasted. At best, it could only be inferred. Perhaps it was some kind of effervescent froth bubbling up spontaneously out of matter. Or maybe it was all an illusion. In any event, to a good simple materialist, mind was a very doubtful area of inquiry.

Psychology—a word that was used to mean knowledge of the soul before it was adapted to changing times and employed to mean the study of the mind—was the last of the major scientific disciplines to be established, arising in the Nineteenth Century out of natural philosophy and medicine. And, perhaps because it was so lacking in material substance and so vulnerable to suspicions of being spiritualism in covert guise, psychology struggled all the harder to establish itself as serious exact science.

Thus it was that in the early Twentieth Century psychometricians would come forward with tests that were claimed to measure human mental capacity with precision. And by the early Twenties, the victory of matter over spirit would even lead to the establishment of one American school of psychology, the behaviorists, that would attempt to model itself upon the prototypical hard science—Nineteenth Century cause-and-effect physics.

The behaviorists would recognize no necessity at all for the hypothesis of mind. They would completely repudiate both consciousness and purpose. Instead, they would presume to account for all human behavior in terms of external stimulus-and-response.

The founder of behaviorism, Dr. John B. Watson, would say: “Psychology, as the behaviorist views it, is a purely objective, experimental branch of natural science which needs introspection as little as do the sciences of chemistry and physics.”
⁵⁶⁰

At this very moment, contemporary physicists like Eddington might be rising to declare that the Nineteenth Century verities on which the science of behavior had so recently been founded—materialism, mechanism, determinism and objectivity—actually amounted to no more than irrelevant imaginings spun by the underlying mind-stuff. But to behavioral engineers like Watson, or his Atomic Age disciple and successor, Harvard University’s B.F. Skinner, remarks such as this could only appear dismayingly mentalistic, a craven retreat from the clarity and certitude of objective science into some very thinly disguised last-minute attempt to hang on to spirit.

However, there would be other Techno Age scientific investigators of mind who would be led in the opposite direction from behaviorism by the failure of spirit and the triumph of matter, toward a widening instead of a narrowing of their subject. These would mainly be physiologists and psychiatrists—medical doctors—rather than academic psychologists. These medical men had practical experience of the sometimes untidy facts of actual human thinking and behavior, as well as intimate experimental knowledge of the functioning of the human brain, sense organs, and nervous system, not merely thumbs grown calloused from clicking stopwatches over the heads of laboratory rats being taught to run through mazes.

The more doubtful spirit came to appear, the less possible these doctors found it to continue lumping the phenomena of mind in with spirit as a convenient way to dismiss them without having to give them serious consideration. To men like this, it was evident that even if spirit were to be thrown out completely as a legitimate explanation of anything and everything, all the strange thoughts, beliefs, practices and happenings associated with the mind would continue to remain as something requiring careful scientific investigation and explanation.

A. Merritt’s friend and instructor, Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell, is an example of one such physician. So early in the game was his work done that he wouldn’t be known as either a physiologist or a psychiatrist, but rather as a specialist in nervous disorders. To Dr. Mitchell, it would be apparent that the human mind was a mystery, and he would attack the problem both through the direct examination of the human brain and nervous system and through the investigation of bizarre and anomalous mental phenomena. For example, he would be the first to describe the effects of peyote in a scientific paper.

Techno Age physiologists would directly address the question of how the brain gathers data from the sensory organs, and at every step in the process they would find limitation and the possibility of error:

First, years of experimentation demonstrated that the discriminating powers of the human senses are distinctly limited, both in comparison with the sensory powers of other creatures and in comparison with the ranges of data detected by scientific instruments.

It was also shown that sensory data encountered by human beings had first to be turned into nerve impulses that then travel at finite speed to the brain—and only there become processed into the sights and sounds and smells we believe ourselves to be experiencing directly.

Physiologists and their psychologist allies would further demonstrate that of the limited data that are received by the senses and passed along to the brain, only a comparatively small portion actually make their way through the mental veils of awareness into conscious attention.

And, finally, they would prove again and again that human beings could be tricked by illusion, ambiguity, unexpectedness, and their own preconceptions into seeing and hearing what wasn’t there and into misinterpreting what actually did occur. It would become a favored ploy of instructors in Twentieth Century introductory psychology courses to stage some sudden unanticipated dramatic happening as a means of showing students what partial and subjective witnesses they actually are.

Taken in sum, these various physical and perceptual investigations amounted to a heavy assault on the unexamined bases of modem Western science. Certainly, they cast considerable doubt on René Descartes’ initial conclusion that the essence of a human being like himself was some remote objective intelligence that could operate alone and apart from the body and examine the nature of matter with a rational and dispassionate eye.

We might recall that Descartes’ initial sense of himself as a disembodied mind had had its origin in a dream—certainly not the most rational and dispassionate of mental states. And, indeed, at the beginning of the Twentieth Century, the Viennese psychiatrist Sigmund Freud would take studies of the mind into a whole new dimension through a close examination of the unconscious significance of dreams.

Freud’s study of dreams would convincingly demonstrate their non-rational nature. Beyond this, he would show the existence of a number of mental processes whose existence and import were not known to the ordinary conscious awareness.

However, Freud’s own explanatory model of what he discovered would still be limited and mechanistic in its origin. He would think in terms of compartments, pipes and valves, as though the mind were a kind of steam boiler, and he would see the new dimension of mind as an overload chamber into which materials that the conscious mind was unable to handle, primarily sexual, could be shunted to relieve excessive pressure.

Freud’s one-sidedly sexual orientation and the narrowness and rigidity of his mechanistic and deterministic thinking would eventually cause all of his earliest allies and disciples to leave him and go off on their own paths.

In 1912, Freud’s most favored early disciple, the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, would break with him after five years of connection. To all appearance, the disagreement would be over the significance of dreams and how they were to be interpreted. But this would only be the outward sign of a more fundamental unspoken quarrel between them about the nature and scope of the new mental dimension.

Dreams for Freud were symptoms of repressed thought. But for Jung, dreams were messages from the unconscious, not always immediately comprehensible because they were couched in the language of symbol, but nonetheless purposeful in their structure and intention.

The real difference between the two pioneer psychiatrists, however, was that Freud perceived the new unknown aspect of mind as a
sub
conscious, a closed auxiliary basement chamber. For him, dreams were clues to the sexual sludge that must be cleaned out of the system if the conscious were to function properly.

Jung, however, visualized the new reaches of mind as an
un
conscious, a great undiscovered country much vaster in its dimensions than the meagre territory encompassed by the individual conscious mind. Some of what might be discovered there assuredly did consist of thoughts repressed by the individual, but by far the greater part of the unconscious was common to the collectivity of man. For Jung, dreams were messages from out of this darkness, demanding interpretation.

Dreams would not be his only clues. Jung would look everywhere for points of entry into the labyrinth of the unconscious. He might be thought of as a medically trained investigator sifting through all the purported evidences of transcendent mystery that had been collected by the Romantics during the previous century, but then left to gather dust in the attics of the Western world. Among these were alternate states of consciousness, anomalous happenings like poltergeist phenomena, the expressions and beliefs of past cultures and foreign cultures, literary and artistic symbology, myth and religion.

To Sigmund Freud, Jung could only seem a prodigal son who had elected to turn his back on Freud’s authority and the certainty of material science in order to go scrambling and panting after that old whore
spirit.
In truth, however, it was in the realm of the unconscious mind and not in the spirit world that Jung was searching for contemporary transcendence. It wasn’t that he was using mind as a veil for old-fashioned religiosity so much as that he was attempting to preserve for his time whatever was still viable in former vocabularies of transcendence and to translate this into the new terms of mind.

To Jung, accepting the plunge into the unconscious was the necessary road to self-transcendence—the overcoming of limitations and the attainment of higher states. For the patient, the hope was for the integration of the conscious and the unconscious mind. For the artist, the aim was acts of genuine creativity. And for Western culture in general, the goal was the successful surmounting of the current state of excessive rationality.

On each of these levels, Jung would have his natural allies. These would include all of those who had sufficiently come to terms with the new existential Twentieth Century reality that they were prepared to trust their own individual experience above received authority of whatever stripe—and who had come to recognize mystery in the workings of their own minds. Included, too, would be all of those artists and writers of the day, from James Joyce and Pablo Picasso to A. Merritt, who were starting to look to consciousness for their orientation and inspiration. And finally, included would be the new quantum physicists with their challenge to the completeness and sufficiency of Western science and their tendency to suggest that the apparent material world is spun out of mind-stuff.

In the end, Jung would be able to progress about as far in his line of inquiry as the quantum physicists would get in theirs. That is, both of these new areas of study—the psychology of the unconscious and quantum mechanics—demonstrated the existence of heretofore unrecognized aspects of being lurking as near to us as the napes of our own necks. Both of these unknowns would persistently elude precise rational scrutiny. Both called into question the basic assumptions of modern Western thought. And, ultimately, the two might even be identical, even though one was nominally the understructure of matter and the other was nominally the night side of mind.

Taken together, quantum mechanics and Twentieth Century psychology—the psychology of the unconscious, in particular—may be understood as the first steps in the emergence of a new phase in Western social and psychic evolution that could be termed post-materialistic.

SF, dealing as it always does in best knowledge and in the areas of mystery beyond best knowledge, could not be oblivious to these new developments. But recognizing what they meant and then applying the implications to science fiction stories was no simple and obvious task. Not only would it take years to assimilate the new physics and the new psychology, but in the process SF literature would be altered into something different from the fiction of transcendent science that it had formerly been.

The first major agent of this change—in part knowingly, but in even larger part despite himself—would be John W. Campbell, the editor of
Astounding.
For exactly as long as he was able to hold together states of mind that were ultimately incompatible through a pure faith that he would be able to make them come out even in the long run, Campbell was the perfect person to oversee the transformation of materialism into emergent post-materialism. The contradictions in his own thought and character were exactly suited to the needs of this moment.

The inner conflict that was the driving force of John Campbell’s nature was that he loved science, but hated finality and constraint.

John Campbell was born the son of a scientific man in the midst of an era of unprecedented scientific and technological achievement.
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For someone living in this hour and raised in this family, science was the only possible path to follow. And at some very early moment in his life, John did make a fundamental identification with the precision of science, the curiosity of science and the practical power of science to get things done.

At the same time, however, the young Campbell deeply resented his father’s authoritarian style, his claims of scientific objectivity, and his automatic presumption in any conflict that he must be the possessor of the true facts. John gradually discovered that the way to successfully oppose and confound his father was to be more scientific than he was—to be more objective, to know more of the actual facts of the matter, and to argue them better.