A Perfect Vacuum (17 page)

In the year 2041, throughout the length and breadth of the U.S.A., not a man can eat a chicken, fall in love, heave a sigh, have a whiskey, refuse a beer, nod, wink, spit—without higher electronic planning, which for years in advance has created a pre-established disharmony. Without realizing it, in the course of their competition the three billion-dollar corporations have formed a One in Three Persons, an All-Powerful Disposer of Destiny. The programs of the computers make up a Book of Fate; arranged are political parties, arranged is the weather, and even the coming into the world of Ed Hammer III was the result of specific orders, orders that in turn resulted from other orders. No one any longer can be born or die spontaneously; no one any longer can on his own, by himself, from beginning to end, live anything, because his every thought, his every fear, his every pain, is a short sequence of algebraic calculations run through the computer. Empty now are the concepts of sin, retribution, moral responsibility, good and evil, because the full arrangementation of life excludes nonnegotiable values. In the computerized paradise created thanks to the hundred-percent utilization of all the human qualities and their incorporation into an infallible system, only one thing was missing—the awareness of the inhabitants that this was precisely how things stood. And therefore the meeting of the three corporate heads has been planned also by the main computer, which—providing them with this information—presents itself now as the Tree of Knowledge lit up with electricity. What will happen next? Should this perfectly arranged existence be abandoned in a new, second flight from Eden, in order to “start once more from the beginning”? Or should man accept it, renouncing once and for all the burden of responsibility? The book offers no answer. It is, therefore, a metaphysical burlesque, whose fantastic elements nevertheless have some connection with the real world. When we disregard the humoristic humbug and the elephantiasis of the author's imagination, there remains the problem of the manipulation of minds, and particularly of that kind of manipulation which does not lessen the full subjective sense of spontaneity and freedom. The thing will certainly not come about in the form shown in
Being Inc.,
but who can say whether fate will spare our descendants other forms of this phenomenon—forms perhaps less amusing in description but not, it may be, any less oppressive.

(Universitas Verlag, Berlin)

 

Civilization as Mistake
by Privatdozent W. Klopper is a work without doubt remarkable—as an original hypothesis in anthropology. I cannot refrain, however, before I proceed to the discussion, from indulging in a comment as regards the form of the discourse. This book—only a German could have written it! A fondness for classification, for that scrupulous t-crossing and
i
-dotting that has begotten innumerable
Handbücher,
makes the German mind resemble a pigeonhole desk. When one beholds the consummate order displayed by the table of contents of this book, one cannot help thinking that if the Lord God had been of German blood our world would perhaps not necessarily have turned out better existentially, but would have for sure embodied a higher notion of discipline and method. The perfection of this orderliness quite overwhelms one, although it may arouse reservations of a substantive nature. I cannot here go into the question of whether that purely formal penchant for muster and array, for symmetry, for front-and-center and forward-march, might not have exerted a real influence also on certain conceptions that typify German philosophy —its ontology in particular. Hegel loved the Cosmos as a kind of Prussia, for in Prussia there was order! Even the esthetics-inflamed thinker that was Schopenhauer showed what an expository drill looks like in his treatise “Uber die vierfache Wurzel des Satzes vom zureichenden Grunde.” And Fichte? But I must deny myself the pleasure of digression, which is all the more difficult for me in that I am not a German. To business, to business!

Klopper has provided his two-volume work with a foreword, a preface, and an introduction. (The ideal of form: a triad!) Going into the merits of the matter, he first takes up that understanding of civilization as mistake which he considers to be false. According to that misguided (says the author) view, typical of the Anglo-Saxon school and represented—notably—by Whistle and Sadbottham, any form of behavior of an organism that neither helps nor hinders the organism's survival is a mistake. For the sole criterion of sensibleness of behavior is, in evolution, survivability. An animal that behaves in such a fashion that it survives more capably than others is behaving, in the light of this criterion, more sensibly than those that die out. Toothless herbivores are senseless evolutionarily, for hardly are they born before they must perish from hunger. Analogously, herbivores that indeed possess teeth but employ them to chew stones instead of grass are also evolutionarily without sense, for they, too, must disappear. Klopper goes on to quote Whistle's famous example: let us suppose, says the English author, that in some herd of baboons a certain old male, the leader of the herd, by sheer accident acquires the habit of addressing the birds he devours from the left side. He had, say, an injured finger on the right hand, and when he brought the bird to his mouth he found it more comfortable to hold the prey by the left. The young baboons, watching the leader's behavior, which for them is a model, imitate it, and before long—that is, after a single generation—every baboon in the herd is starting in on his captured bird from the left. From the point of view of adaptation this behavior is senseless, for baboons can with equal advantage to themselves attack their meal from either side; nevertheless, precisely this pattern of behavior has. established itself in the group. What is it? It is the beginning of a culture (protoculture), being behavior adaptationally senseless. As is known, this idea of Whistle's was developed not by another anthropologist, but by a philosopher of the English logical-analytical school, J. Sadbottham, whose views our author—before taking exception to them—summarizes in the next chapter (“Das Fehlerhafte der Kulturfehlertheorie von Joshua Sadbottham”).

In his major work, Sadbottham declared that human communities produce cultures through mistakes, false steps, failures, blunders, errors, and misunderstandings. Intending to do one thing, people in reality do another; desiring to understand the mechanism of a phenomenon through and through, they interpret it for themselves wrongly; seeking truth, they arrive at falsehood; and thus do customs come into being, mores, faith, sanctification, mystery, mana; thus come into being injunctions and interdictions, totems and taboos. People form a false classification of the surrounding world, and totemism results. They make false generalizations and thus arrive first at the notion of mana, and afterward at that of the Absolute. They create mistaken representations of their own physical construction, and thus arise the concepts of virtue and sin; had the genitalia been similar to butterflies and insemination to song (the transmitter of hereditary information being specific vibrations in the air), these concepts would have taken a completely different form. People create hypostases, and thus arise concepts of divinities; they make plagiarisms, and thus arise eclectic interpolations of myths—or doctrinal religions. In other words, in behaving any which way, inappropriately,
imperfectly
with respect to adaptation, in misinterpreting the behavior of other people, and their own bodies, and the objects in Nature, in considering things that happen accidentally to be things that aie determined, and things that are determined, to be accidental—that is, in inventing a growing number of fictitious existences, peopie wall themselves in with the edifice of culture, they alter their model of the world to fit its conclusions and then, after millennia pass, they are surprised that in such a prison they do not feel altogether comfortable. The beginnings are always innocent and even, on the face of it, trivial—take, for example, the baboons who eat birds always from the left side. But when from such odds and ends emerges a system of meanings and values, when the mistakes and misunderstandings accumulate enough so that they can, by their totality, in their entirety,
close
—to use the language of mathematics—then man himself already has become imprisoned in what, though it is the most fortuitous sort of miscellany, appears to him as the highest necessity.

A scholar of much erudition, Sadbottham backs his assertions with a multitude of examples drawn from ethnology; his tabulations, too, as we recall, caused quite a commotion in their day, especially those charts of “chance versus determinism,” on which he juxtaposed all the different cultures' mistaken explanations of natural phenomena. (And in fact, a great number of cultures consider the mortality of man to be the consequence of a particular instance of bad luck: man was, according to them, originally immortal, but he either deprived himself of this attribute by a fall, or else was deprived of it through the intervention of some evil power. Conversely, that which is the work of chance—the physical appearance of man, shaped in evolution—all cultures have provided with the name of inevitability; to this day the leading religions teach that man is in the aspect of his body unaccidental, since fashioned in God's image, after His likeness.

The criticism to which Herr Dozent Klopper submits the hypothesis of his English colleague is neither original nor the first. As a German, Klopper has divided his criticism into two parts: immanent and positive. In the immanent he only negates Sadbottham's thesis; this section of the work we pass over as being less material, since it repeats the objections already known from the professional literature. In the second half of the criticism, the positive, Wilhelm Klopper finally proceeds to set forth his own counterhypothesis of “Civilization as Mistake.”

The exposition begins, in our opinion effectively arid aptly, with the supplying of an illustrative example. Different birds build their nests out of different materials. What is more, the same species of bird in different localities will not nest-build using exactly the same materials, because it must rely on what it finds in the vicinity. As to which material, in the form of blades of grass, flakes of bark, leaves, little shells, pebbles, the bird is going to find most readily, that depends on chance. And so in some nests you will have more shells and in some, more pebbles; some will be stuck together primarily out of little strips of bark, some, out of pinfeathers and moss. But whatever building material makes its unmistakable contribution toward the shaping of the form of the nest, one cannot with any sense say that nests are the work of pure chance. A nest is an instrument of adaptation, howsoever constructed out of randomly found fragments of this and that; and culture also is an instrument of adaptation. But—and here is the author's new idea—it is an adaptation fundamentally different from that typical of the plant and animal kingdoms.

“Was ist der Fall
?” asks Klopper. “What is the situation?” The situation is this: in man, considered as a physical being, there is nothing inevitable. According to the knowledge of modem biology, man could be constructed other than he is; he could live six hundred and not sixty years on the average; he could possess a differently shaped trunk or limbs, have a different reproductive system, a different digestive system; he could, for example, be exclusively herbivorous, he could be oviparous, he could be amphibious, he could be able to breed only once a year, in a period of rut, and so on. Man, it is true, does possess one characteristic that is inevitable, to the extent, at least, that without it he would not be man. He possesses a brain that is able to produce speech and reflection; and, gazing upon his own body and upon his fate, which is circumscribed by that body, man leaves the realm of such reflection greatly discontented. He lives but briefly; on top of this his powerless childhood is of long duration; his time of ablest maturity is a small portion of his entire life; hardly does he achieve his prime when he begins to age, and, unlike all other creatures, he knows to what end aging will lead him. In the natural habitats of evolution life is lived under incessant threat; one must be on one's toes in order to survive; it is for this reason that the gauges of
pain,
the organs of
suffering
—as signaling devices to stimulate the development of self-preserving activity—have been by evolution very strongly pronounced in all living things. On the other hand, there has been no evolutionary reason, no organism-shaping force, to balance this situation “fairly,” endowing life forms with a corresponding quantity of organs of enjoyment and pleasure.

Everyone will admit, says Klopper, that pangs of hunger, the torments caused by thirst, the agonies of suffocation, are incomparably keener than the satisfaction one experiences in eating, drinking, or breathing normally. The sole exception to this general rule of asymmetry between anguish and delight is sex. But this is understandable: were we not bisexual beings, had we a genital system arranged along the lines of, say, the flowers, then it would function apart from any positive sensory experience, for a goad to action would then be totally unnecessary. The fact that sexual pleasure exists and that above it have spread the invisible edifices of the Kingdom of Love (Klopper, when he ceases being dry and factual, immediately turns sentimentally poetic!) derives entirely from the circumstance of bisexuality. Erroneous is the supposition that Homo hermaphroditicus, were such a being to exist, would love himself erotically. Nothing of the sort; he would care for himself strictly within the bounds of the instinct for self-preservation. That which we call narcissism and picture to ourselves as the attraction a hermaphrodite might feel for himself is a secondary projection, the result of a ricochet: such an individual mentally connects with his own body the image of an external, ideal lover. (Here follow about seventy pages of profound cogitation on the question of uni-, bi-, and multisexual facultative possibilities for shaping human erotic nature; this large digression, too, we pass over.)