OPUS 21 (11 page)

She had a good-sized mouth with a pretty shape: the lipstick went where the lips were, and nowhere else.

"I wanted to talk to you. I was ready to pester you. That's why I moved next door.

I was going to let you find it out when we came back this evening. I was going to ask you in. I'm not afraid of you."

"Smallest achievement in the history of courage."

"I want to figure out what to do about Rol. You see--I'm still crazy about him."

"Send him to a good psychiatrist."

She exhaled with gentle violence. "Try it!"

"You said he was very upset--promised you anything.

That was your chance to make him promise psychiatry. You seem to have read books about it--"

She shook her head. "Not many, really. You don't understand. Rol wasn't in the least bit upset because of what
he'd
done. He was upset about my attitude over it. He said it was a 'trivial incident'--and told me he loved me--and said I was frigid and what did I expect. He said he didn't consider he'd been unfaithful to me--and talked on and on about being 'human.' Imagine!"

"Are you?"

The blush came again. She spoke in a low voice, "Mostly."

"People," I said, "don't want to know about people, nowadays."

"Did they ever?"

"Here and there--by fits and starts. They had a short spell of wanting to find out about themselves through reason--a couple of centuries ago. Innumerable spells of trying to figure themselves out through religions."

"But not now?" She was sarcastic. "Nobody knows anything now?"

"The average college graduate doesn't even know where he is in relation to other objects. Couldn't point to the ecliptic. Or explain the changing seasons. Couldn't point toward the sun, at night. Friends of mine, well-known writers, belong to a society that believes the earth is flat. There's another buddyship of boobs who think the earth is hollow and we live inside. Till the government began financing research for war, America spent twice as much on astrology as on scientific investigation. The folks would rather, by twice, be fooled than find out the truth."

"We've made a lot of progress."

"Individuals have learned a lot. The people ignore it. They are interested in the applications of science--appalled by the implications. Our civilization is just one more swarm of low cheats. It won't last because cheats can't. Only inertia sustains the current shape of it, and that momentum is encountering more friction every day. A republic of crooked dumbbells can't safely use the instruments of clever men. People not only don't know how to behave, they don't even know they are ignorant. Yet in the main, people are thoroughly satisfied with themselves. In view of sure catastrophes I that loom on every margin toward which they hurry--the very self-satisfaction of people is the statistical guarantor of their doom. Hence that crack about pride going before a fall."

"I think people behave rather well, on the whole."

"Sure. They'll even be decent about doomsday. Blame somebody else as they perish, like flies, but perish heroically. A pity."

"You can't depress me!"

I laughed. "Bear in mind that you brought up that word 'depress.' I'm not depressed. I've had to learn how to get along in the certainty that all I was taught to live for is either rubbish or a dream of a future that lies ages beyond the public expectation.

People don't know--won't know--can't know, in their present frame of mind. Take your little problem, for example."

Her face changed. Interest replaced antagonism. "So all right. Take my problem.

Kick that around awhile!"

"You believe in evolution?"

"A person can still believe in evolution--and in God!"

"Certainly. Something exists in men which they've given the name of all their gods. That's fact. And evolution is a fact, too--a simple reality. A minority of the educated people in our land have accepted the fact that man's body evolved from the bodies of other animals. A still smaller per cent realize that man's mind--personality--

spirit--also must have evolved from animals and the animal equivalent: instinct. The question is, How? Most of such people believe that it is the supreme function of the conscious human mind to repress instinct. That's their answer."

"But not yours!"

"I believe it's the function of consciousness to rediscover instinct, understand it, and pursue it--in the ways that it has to go. That it does go--people by the billions to the contrary notwithstanding. So far, people have made only blind efforts in that direction.

Unconscious efforts. Their religions--according to the soundest hypothesis I've encountered--are the results of such attempts: expressions of animal instinct, as it appears in men--and in men wholly unaware of what they are expressing."

"Is that Freud?"

"It's Jung. Freud never got that far. He merely demonstrated that instinct exists in man. The id--he called it. The raw cravings of the infant. To Freud--the id was pretty much what sin is to a preacher. A disgraceful bunch of bestial lusts and impulses.

Society--through the parents, mostly--disciplined the id by disciplining the infant and the child; this produced the superego--or conscience, according to Freud. As far as Freud could see, man would always live amidst conflicts set up between his id and whatever superego, or culture, had been hammered around it--plus his own common sense, if any.

Dismal view."

"And Jung?"

"Well--Freud showed that instinct exists as a basic motivation of mankind. Not that anybody but a few psychiatrists have ever paid attention to the discovery. But there it was--the beginning of a science of psychological evolution of people. Jung asked what instinct was and how it worked. Jung found out several things Freud only began to realize. For instance, Jung looked at animals and perceived that their instincts unfold in them, individually, as they mature."

"You mean, new-born beavers don't start building dams immediately?"

"Exactly. So the id of infancy is only part of instinct. More instinct appears as the person ages--which is in line with the nature of instinct in all other living beings. Next, Jung noticed that instinct in. animals, and in primitive people who hardly ever use reason and logic abstractedly, takes care of the whole life cycle of every species. So it cannot be viewed as mere lawless, infantile lust. If it were only that, animals, and primitive men, would tear up each other and themselves; all life would commit suicide. From the animal viewpoint--instinct includes whatever animals do that men would call 'good,' 'virtuous,'

'unselfish,' 'self-sacrificing,' and so on. Do you follow?"

"I think so."

"There are--so to speak--checks and balances--compensations--counterinstincts.

That's the idea embodied in Chinese philosophy. In Taoism, for example. That's the concept symbolized by the yin and the yang. It's the idea embodied in Toynbee's theory of history, too-right up till the present, when his own ego confuses its own description of instinct with history. At that point, Toynbee decided that the Church of England--his personal patternization of instinct--might salvage civilization. Which, of course, is pathetic. But let's drag this bundle a little bit further before we drop it and go back to you.

If all animals have a proper pattern of instinct-man has. But man is to some extent conscious--and therefore to some degree able to separate out a personal identity of himself--an ego--from the older, more powerful compulsions and countercompulsions of his instinct. And he has used his consciousness--largely--not to maintain and enhance the liaison between his ego and the forces that drive him statistically forever--but to swell up his ego and to conceal from it those fundamental forces."

"I don't understand that."

"Well--man tries to deny he's an animal. Or to hide the fact. To call everything that is animal subhuman. To call every success he makes his own achievement. To call every disaster no fault of his own. Because he is conscious--he has slowly learned to extend the physical capacities of every kind of animal--for his own, immediate benefits.

He has telescope-microscope-X-ray eyes. He has atomic energy muscles. Brighter light at night than the fireflies. He can fly faster than any bird--speed through the water faster than any fish--store food for decades when a ruminant or a pelican can store it only for days. He has even developed quite a few techniques that have no good animal correlative, though most of man's inventions were made ages before even apes appeared on the planet. Man has merely learned. But he tells himself he discovered and invented. It gives him a preposterous arrogance. And that's largely what he has used consciousness to swell up."

"We just skip his ideals--and philosophies--?"

"No. But we note that, to extend his physical capacities, he has used logic and reason. He has sometimes tried to employ them on his consciousness; but never--except intuitively, till recently--has it dawned on him that he is usually unconscious of his own real motives. That his cultures represent guesses--or trial and error. You take a creature that is governed by instinct--and doesn't realize it--one who confuses instinct with deity and identifies deity with himself--a creature who has made logic work in every dimension of the objective world and is extremely smug about himself in view of the results--and you have an animal cut off from its own nature and hence from Nature itself. Modern men can't tell whether anything they think or say or do is suitable to them, or merely the result of a tradition--as the semanticists claim--or whether, perhaps, their motives rise in a desire to hide instinct, to deny the animal, to inflate ego, or what not."

' I'm confused again."

"Put anybody through psychoanalysis--all the way, not just far enough to scare the wits out of him, and so make him hide his fear from himself by turning upon and ridiculing psychoanalysis--and that person will discover there is more instinct in him that he didn't know about than there is ego that he knew. Awful shock. Then put the same person through an analysis by a Jungian, and he will get numberless dues about the images and dreams and the feelings we have which are intended, by Nature, to make us conscious of the whole of human instinct
as a pattern."

Yvonne shook her head. "Let's talk about me."

I wanted--I always want--to continue that line of explanation. It seems logical to me that man would have in his head the means to recover a consciousness of instinct--and to find, in that recovered awareness, not just the psychological history of the past, as man finds history in his body, but intimations of the future, which also exist in his body, as countless extrapolating anthropologists have shown. There must be some way, I have always thought, to shove aside the immature id and also the disguising images, taboos, compulsions, and descriptions of the modern superego, and to see what lies beyond them both--looking backward and looking forward. Having at long last followed Jung's inquiry into this process, having grasped his techniques and repeated, through idioms of my own personality, the same empirical experiences which Jung has demonstrated in hundreds of other human beings as well as in societies seen as wholes--I have been afflicted with an urge to bring the steps to wider attention and understanding.

And I suppose I shall try to do so, sporadically, all my life. But I realize now the futility of the effort as a "cause."

I am the man who wanted, from childhood's earliest dreams, to know what men would think in the future. And now that I believe I know I find that--save for individuals-

-present men cannot even reach toward such ideas and concepts. Could they, the better world would be at hand, and not a mere ignorant wish. It is a simple irony--an operation of the very law I learned--the law that I imagine all men will finally discover. And, while it supplies me with hope for my species, it condemns me to general incomprehensibility.

If you wished for the future--and were given it--you couldn't use it today. Because it is the future.

Physicists feel this way--and rightly--concerning their urgent, brilliant, all-but-fruitless efforts to explain ideas in comparatively familiar and acceptable fields--ideas such as Relativity or the Quantum Theory. How much more, then, will psychologists feel it! The wide world of their awareness has as yet not even a basic glossary among people; they do not yet even use the arithmetic of that science in their daily lives.

Indeed, the psychiatrist, the practitioner of certain known principles of human psychology, the physician, is still prone to dodge the central fact of his science.

"Psychology," he says, dogmatically identifying his opinion with the science, "does not conflict or interfere with religion. There are areas in which the minister or priest is better equipped to deal than the psychologist. Psychiatry does not attempt to change a man's beliefs. And it is not 'all sex'--as is so often claimed. It is not concerned with sex morals, or any moral law."

So, in his time, the churches made old Galileo lie, too.

Made him lie to live at all.

And so the same churches in our day cause comparably enlightened men to lie concerning their knowledge--in order that any people may benefit by it at all. In order, truly, to go on living. It is one more expedient dishonor of scientists.

For psychology--though a thousand Presbyterian and Roman Catholic practitioners of its minor branches may not admit it--and though ten thousand better psychologists lie their faces black--has already put a period to orthodox religion. The old astronomers did away with the old cosmology for all the churches. The new investigators of awareness have done away with the ancient theologies and "moral" systems as completely--whether it takes the people a generation or a thousand years to find it out.

Psychology is the scientific investigation of what man calls awareness and of what prompts him that he is unaware of. As such, it inevitably must analyze and resolve all man's beliefs, religions, faiths and the mechanisms of them, as well as his politics, his economics, the motives of his arts, his morals, ethics and sex manners. Why should anybody be surprised that science, turned finally upon man's inner self, should disclose different shapes from those held real by Stone Age man, barbarians, and a few later millenniums of men who decree that they are Christian but act more viciously than any beast?