The Ghost in the Machine (36 page)

 

 

Prescott then devotes a paragraph to the cannibalistic rites accompanying
the Aztec sacrifices; but immediately afterwards performs a remarkable
mental somersault:

 

In this state of things, it was beneficently ordered by Providence
that the land should be delivered over to another race, who would
rescue it from the brutish superstitions that daily extended wider
and wider, with extent of empire. The debasing institutions of the
Aztecs furnish the best apology for their conquest. It is true, the
conquerors brought along with them the Inquisition. But they also
brought Christianity, whose benign radiance would still survive, when
the fierce flames of fanaticism should be extinguished; dispelling
those dark forms of horror which had so long brooded over the fair
regions of Anahuac. [8]

 

Prescott must have known, though, that shortly after the Mexican conquest,
the 'benign radiance' of Christianity manifested itself in the Thirty
Years War, which killed off a goodly proportion of Europe's population.

 

 

 

The Observer from Mars

 

 

The Scientific Revolution and the Age of Enlightenment seemed to
signal a new departure for man. They did, in so far as the conquest,
and subsequent rape, of Nature are concerned; but they did not solve,
on the contrary they deepened, his predicament. Religious wars were
superseded by patriotic, then by ideological wars, fought with the same
self-immolating loyalty and fervour. The opium of revealed religion was
replaced by the heroin of secular religions, which commanded the same
bemused surrender of the individuality to their doctrines, and the same
worshipful love offered to their prophets. The devils and succubi were
replaced by a new demonology: subhuman Jews, plotting world domination;
bourgeois capitalists promoting starvation; enemies of the people,
monsters in human shape were surrounding us, ready to pounce. In the
thirties and forties the paranoid streak exploded with unprecedented
vehemence in the two most powerful nations of Europe. In the two decades
following the last great war forty minor wars and civil wars have been
fought. At the time of writing, Roman Catholics, Buddhists and Dialectical
Materialists are waging another civil war within a war, to impose the only
True Belief on the people of an Asian nation; while monks and schoolgirls
douse themselves with petrol and burn alive to the clicking of Press
cameras, in a new ritual of self-immolation
ad majorem gloriam
.

 

 

In one of the early chapters of Genesis, there is an episode which has
inspired countless religious painters. It is the scene where Abraham ties
his son to a pile of wood and prepares to cut his throat with a knife,
then burn him for the love of Jehovah. We all disapprove of cutting a
child's throat for personal motives; the question is why so many have for
so long approved of the insane gesture of Abraham. To put it vulgarly,
we are led to suspect that there is somewhere a screw loose in the human
mind, and always has been. To put it into more scientific language, we
ought to give serious consideration to the possibility that somewhere
along the line something has gone seriously wrong with the evolution
of the nervous system of homo sapiens. We know that evolution can lead
into a blind alley, and we also know that the evolution of the human
brain was an unprecedentedly rapid, almost explosive, process. I shall
come back to this in the chapter that follows; for the moment, let us
merely note as a possible hypothesis that the delusional streak which
runs through our history may be an endemic form of paranoia, built into
the wiring circuits of the human brain.

 

 

It is certainly not difficult to imagine that an objective observer
on an alien, more advanced planet, after studying the human record,
would come to this diagnosis. We are of course always willing and ready
to go along with such science-fiction fantasies, so long as we do not
have to take the conclusions literally, and apply them to the reality
around us. But let us try to do just that, and to imagine the observer's
reaction when he discovers that for nearly two thousand years, millions
of otherwise intelligent people were convinced that the vast majority of
our species who did not share their particular creed and did not perform
its rites were consumed by flames through eternity by order of a loving
god. This observation, I realise, is not exactly new. But to dismiss
such singular phenomena simply as indoctrination or superstition means
to beg the question, which is at the very core of the human predicament.

 

 

 

The Cheerful Ostrich

 

 

Before going further, let me try to forestall a frequently met
objection. When you mention, however tentatively, the hypothesis
that a paranoid streak is inherent in the human condition, you will
promptly be accused of taking a one-sided, morbid view of history;
of being hypnotised by its negative aspects; of picking out the black
stones in the mosaic, and neglecting the triumphant achievements of
human progress. Why not select the white stones instead -- the Golden
Age of Greece, the monuments of Egypt, the marvels of the Renaissance,
Newton's equations, the conquest of the moon?

 

 

True enough, this way offers a more cheerful view. Personally speaking,
having written such a lot about the creative side of man, I can hardly
be accused of belittling his achievements. However, the question is not
one of choosing, according to temperament or mood, the brighter or the
darker side; but of perceiving both together, of noticing the contrast,
and inquiring into its causes. To dwell on the glories of man and ignore
the symptoms of his possible insanity is not a sign of optimism, but of
ostrichism. It could be compared to the attitude of that jolly physician
who, a short time before Van Gogh committed suicide, declared that he
could not be insane because he painted such beautiful pictures. A number
of authors, with whose attitude I am otherwise in sympathy, seem to be
writing in the same jolly vein when they discuss the future prospects of
man: C.G. Jung and his followers; Teilhard de Chardin, and the so-called
Evolutionary Humanists.

 

 

A more balanced approach to human history might be to view it as a
symphony with a rich orchestration, played against a background of
persistent drumming by a savage horde of shamans. At times a scherzo
would make us forget it, but in the long run the monotonous beating of the
tom-toms always gains the upper hand and tends to drown every other sound.

 

 

 

Integration and Identification

 

 

Poets have always said that man is mad; and their audiences always
nodded delightedly because they thought it was a cute metaphor. But if
the statement were taken literally, there would seem to be little hope:
for how can a madman diagnose his own madness? The answer is that he
can, because he is not entirely mad the entire time. In their periods of
remission, psychotics have written astonishingly sane and lucid reports of
their illness; even in the acute phases of phychoses artificially induced
by drugs like L.S.D., the subject, while experiencing vivid delusions,
knows them to be delusions.

 

 

Any attempt at a diagnosis of the predicament of man must proceed in
several cautious steps. In the first place, let us remember that all our
emotions consist of 'mixed feelings' in which both the self-assertive
and the self-transcending tendencies participate. But they can interact
in various ways -- some beneficial, some disastrous.

 

 

The most common and normal interaction is mutual restraint: the two
tendencies counterbalance, equilibrate each other. Competitiveness
is restrained by acceptance of the rules of civilised conduct. The
self-assertive component in sexual desire seeks only its own satisfaction,
but in a harmonious relationship it is combined with the equally strong
need to provide pleasure and satisfaction to the other. Irritation,
caused by a person's obnoxious behaviour, is mitigated by empathy -- by
understanding the motives of that behaviour. In the creative scientist
or artist, ambition is balanced by self-transcending immersion in
the task. In an ideal society, both tendencies would be harmoniously
combined in its citizens -- they would be saintly and efficient, yogis and
commissars at the same time. But let tensions wax or integration wane,
and competition turns into ruthlessness, desire into rape, irritation
into rage, ambition into ego-mania, the commissar into a terrorist.

 

 

However, on the historic scale, the ravages caused by the excesses of
individual self-assertion are, as already suggested, relatively small
compared to those which result from misplaced devotion. Let us inquire
a little closer into the causative processes behind it.

 

 

The integrative tendencies of the individual operate through the
mechanisms of empathy, sympathy, projection, introjection, identification,
worship -- all of which make him feel that he is a
part
of some
larger entity which transcends the boundaries of the individual self
(
p. 190
). This psychological urge to belong, to
participate, to commune, is as primary and real as its opposite. The
all-important question is the
nature
of that higher entity of
which the individual feels himself a part. In early infancy, symbiotic
consciousness unites the self and the world in an indivisible unit. Its
reflection survives in the sympathetic magic of primitives, the belief in
transubstantiation, the mystic bonds which unite a person with his tribe,
his totem, his shadow, his effigy, and later with his god. In the major
Eastern philosophies, the 'I am thou and thou art me', the identity of the
'Real Self' with the Atman, the all-one, has been preserved throughout
the ages. In the West it only survived in the tradition of the great
Christian mystics; European philosophy and science, from Aristotle
onward, made every man an island. It could not tolerate those vestiges
of symbiotic awareness which survived in other cultures; the urge for
self-transcendence had to be sublimated and canalised.

 

 

One way of achieving this was through the transformation of magic
into art and science. This made it possible for the happy few to
achieve self-transcendence on a higher turn of the spiral, by that
sublime expansion of awareness which Freud called the oceanic feeling,
which Maslow calls 'the peak experience' [9], and which I called the
AH-reaction. But only a minority qualifies for it. For the others,
there are only a few traditional outlets open to transcend the rigid
boundaries of the ego. Historically speaking for the vast majority of
mankind, the only answer to its integrative cravings, its longing to
belong and to find meaning in existence, was identification with tribe,
caste, nation, church or party -- with a social holon.

 

 

But now we arrive at a crucial point. The psychological process, by means
of which this identification was achieved, was mostly of the primitive,
infantile kind of projection which populates heaven and earth with
angry father-figures, fetishes to be worshipped, demons to be execrated,
dogmas to be blindly believed. This crude form of
identification
is something quite different from
integration
into a well-ordered
social hierarchy. It is a regression to an
infantile
form of
self-transcendence; and in extreme cases almost a shortcut back to the
womb. To quote Jung for a change: 'Not only do we speak of Mother Church,
but even of the "womb of the Church" . . . Catholics call the baptismal
font
immaculata divini fontis uterus
.' [10] However, we need not
go to these extremes to realise that mature, sublimated expressions of
the integrative tendency are the exception rather than the rule in human
society. In looking at the historic record, men at all times seem to have
behaved like Konrad Lorenz' 'imprinted' geese, which forever follow the
keeper in misguided devotion because he was the first moving object they
saw after hatching, cunningly substituted for the mother goose.

 

 

As far as we can look back on history, human societies have always been
fairly successful in enforcing the sublimation of the
self-assertive
impulses of the individual -- until the howling little savage in its cot
became transformed into a more or less law-abiding and civilised member
of society. But at the same time they singularly failed to induce a
similar sublimation of the
self-transcending
impulses. Accordingly,
the longing to belong, left without appropriately mature outlets,
manifested itself mostly in primitive or perverted forms. The cause
of this important contrast between the development of the two basic
tendencies will, I hope, become apparent later on. But first, let us
have a closer look at its psychological and social consequences.

 

 

 

The Perils of Identification

 

 

How does identification work? Let us consider the simplest case,
where only two individuals are involved. Mrs. Smith and Mrs. Brown are
friends. Mrs. Brown has lost her husband in an accident; as Mrs. Smith
sheds compassionate tears, she participates in her friend's sorrow,
becomes partially identified with her by an act of empathy, projection
or introjection -- whatever you like to call it. A similar process takes
place when the other person is not a real individual but a heroine on the
screen or in the pages of a novel. It is essential, however, that we make
a clear distinction between two different emotional processes involved
in the event, although they are experienced at the same time. The first
is the act of identification itself, characterised by the fact that the
subject has, for the moment, more or less forgotten her own existence
and participates in the existence of another person, who may even live
at another place in another time. This is clearly a self-transcending,
gratifying and cathartic experience for the simple reason that, while
it lasts, Mrs. Smith has quite forgotten her own worries, jealousies
and grudges against Mr. Smith. The act of identification temporarily
inhibits the self-asserting tendencies.