The Ghost in the Machine (47 page)

 

The people of the neighbouring village were simply not considered
as con-specifics; as the stammering barbarians were denied full
human status by the Greeks, the pagans by the Church, the Jews
by the Nazis.
A priori
, one would imagine that the dawn of
abstract, conceptualised thought, its communication by language, and
its preservation by cumulative records -- the beginning of Teilhard's
Noosphere -- would have counteracted these fratricidal, species-disrupting
tendencies. In actual fact, the cliché about the unifying power
of verbal communication represents only half of the truth, and perhaps
less than half. In the first place, there is the trivial fact that,
while language facilitates communication within the group, it also
crystallises cultural differences, and actually heightens the barriers
between groups. The admirable field-observations of monkey societies,
which I have just mentioned, have revealed that Primate groups of the same
species inhabiting different localities also tend to develop different
traditions and 'cultures' -- but this differentiation never goes so far
as to lead to conflict: mainly, one supposes, because of the absence of
separative linguistic barriers. Among humans, however, the separative,
group-estranging forces of language are active on every level: nations,
tribes, regional dialects, the exclusive vocabularies and accents of
social classes; professional jargons. Among the two million aborigines of
New Guinea, to whom Margaret Mead refers in the quotation above, seven
hundred and fifty different languages are spoken. Ever since the Stone
Age, the Tower of Babel has remained a valid symbol. Is it not remarkable
that at a time when Hertzian waves and communication satellites have
transformed the population of our whole planet into a single audience,
no serious effort is being made by responsible bodies (except a few
undaunted Esperantists) to propagate a universal lingua franca; yet
at the same time people are killed in language riots over the primacy
of Maharati or Gujurati in India, Flemish or French in Belgium, French
or English in Canada. An emotionally realadjusted species, we have the
uncanny power of turning every blessing, including language, into a curse.

 

 

The main danger of language, however, lies not in its separative,
but in its magic, hypnotic, emotion-arousing powers. Words can serve to
crystallise thought, to give articulateness and precision to vague images
and hazy intuitions. They can also serve to rationalise irrational fears
and desires, to give the semblance of logic to the wildest superstitions,
to lend the vocabulary of the new brain to the phantasmagorias and
delusions of the old. Lastly, words can be used as explosive charges to
set off the chain-reactions of group psychology. Ali's computer is just
as capable of producing Kant's
Critique of Pure Reason
as the screams
of Hitler. Without a language to formulate religious and ideological
doctrines, closed belief-systems, slogans and manifestoes, we should be as
unable to fight intra-specific wars as the poor baboons. Thus the various
blessings which make for the uniqueness of man form at the same time a
tragic mesh with one common pattern underlying all -- schizophysiology.

 

 

 

The Discovery of Death

 

 

A further factor, which provides one of the main threads in the pattern,
is the discovery of death -- and the refusal to accept it.

 

 

The discovery originates in the new brain, the refusal in the
old. Instinct takes existence implicitly for granted, and defends
it against threats in anger and fear; but it cannot conceive of its
change into non-existence. This refusal is one of the leitmotivs of
history, perpetuating the conflict between faith and reason. In the
oldest primitive cultures, among Australian aborigines or Papuans as
they were in the last century, 'nobody ever dies a natural death. Even
in the case of old people they maintain that death is due to wizardry,
and it is the same thing in all misfortunes that may occur. Has a man had
a fatal fall? A wizard made him fall. Has another been wounded by a wild
boar or bitten by a snake? It was a wizard again. He, too, working from a
distance, can make a woman die in childbed, and so on' (Lévy-Bruhl
[12]).

 

 

The refusal to accept death either as a natural or as a final phenomenon
populated the world with witches, ghosts, ancestral spirits, gods,
demi-gods, angels and devils. The air became saturated with invisible
presences, as in a mental home.* Most of them were malevolent and
vengeful, or at least capricious, unpredictable, insatiable in their
demands. They had to be worshipped, cajoled, propitiated, and if possible,
coerced. Hence the insane gesture of Abraham, the ubiquity of human
sacrifice at the bloody dawn of civilisation, the holy massacres which
have continued ever since. In all mythologies, that dawn is steeped in
fear, anxiety and guilt, dramatised by the fall of angels, the fall
of man, by floods and catastrophes; but also in comforting promises
of eternal survival; until even that consolation was poisoned with the
fear of everlasting tortures. And all along reason played the willing
handmaid to perverse beliefs, spawned by the visceral brain.

 

* Thus a contemporary authority, F.M. Berger, writes: 'It is often
stated that there is much more anxiety in modern Western society
than there is among, the more primitive people in the less developed
parts of the globe. [In fact however] Randal (1965) reports that,
in the Congo and other undeveloped parts of Africa, anxiety is
the most common and crippling psychiatric disorder. The Papuans
of the Waghi Valley of Central New Guinea who have not progressed
beyond a Stone Age culture suffer from more anxiety than any modern
industrial civilisation. They also have the highest incidence of
peptic ulcers ever found in any community (Montague, 1961).' [13]

 

There is, of course, another side to the picture. The refusal to believe
in the finality of death made pyramids and temples rise from the sand;
it was one of the main inspirations of art, from the Greek tragedy to
the paintings of the Renaissance, the music of Bach and the Holy Sonnets
of Donne. But what a terrible price to pay for these splendours! There
is a hoary belief that the horrors and the splendours are inseparable,
that one is the precondition of the other, that to paint like Van Gogh
you have to cut off your ear. But this belief itself is symptomatic of
the anxiety-ridden mind, which never catches up on the arrears due to
the heavenly tax-collector.

 

 

 

Summary

 

 

The rise of the human neocortex is the only example of evolution providing
a species with an organ which it does not know how to use.

 

 

The actualisation of its reasoning potentials has been obstructed,
throughout prehistory and history, by the affect-based activities of
the phylogenetically older structures in the nervous system. Inadequate
co-ordination between the old and new structures made man's instinct and
intellect fall out of step. The wide range of intra-specific differences
between individuals, races and cultures became a source of mutual
repellence. Language increased cohesion within groups, and heightened
the barriers between groups. The discovery of death by the intellect,
and its rejection by instinct became a paradigm of the split mind.

 

 

 

 

 

XVIII

 

 

THE AGE OF CLIMAX

 

I come from a country which does not yet exist.
J. Craveirinha

 

 

The Hinge of History

 

 

The present generation is the hinge of history. . . . We may now be in the
time of the most rapid change in the whole evolution of the human race,
either past or to come. . . . The world has now become too dangerous
for anything less than Utopia.' [1]

 

 

This was written by a contemporary American biophysicist, J.R. Platt. We
have heard such warnings before -- Isaiah, Jeremiah, Cassandra, St. John
of the Apocalypse, and so on down the centuries through Augustine,
the prophets of the Millennium, to Lenin and Oswald Spengler. In every
century there was at least one generation which flattered itself to be
'the hinge of history', to live at a time such as never was before,
awaiting the blow of the last trumpet or some secular equivalent of
it. And there was also James Thurber's unforgettable 'Get-ready man',
who wandered barefoot in his nightshirt through the dark streets of
his home town, waking people with the blood-curdling cry: 'Get ready,
get rready, the wurrld is coming to an end.'

 

 

So one ought to be cautious with pronouncements about the uniqueness
ofone's own time. Nevertheless there are at least two good reasons which
justify the view that humanity is going through a crisis unprecedented
in its nature and magnitude in the whole of its past history. The first
is quantitative, the second qualitative.

 

 

The first is the upsetting of the ecological balance. Its consequences
have been summed up by Sir Gavin de Beer in an article commemorating the
bicentenary of Malthus: 'If we go back a million years to the hominids,
or even 250,000 years to Swanscombe Man and his Missus, the curve of
population is like an aircraft taking off: for most of that time it
just skims along the time axis; then, about A.D. 1600, the undercarriage
is raised and it begins to soar; today it is rising almost vertically,
more like a rocket off its pad. A million years to reach 3,250 million;
thirty or so to double it!' [2]

 

 

To be a little more specific: historians have estimated that the
world's population at the beginning of the Christian era was around 250
million. By the middle of the seventeenth century it had doubled, rising
to about 500 million. By the middle of the nineteenth it had doubled
again and reached the first billion mark.* It is at this point that
Pasteur, Lister and Semmelweiss took a hand and changed the ecological
balance of our species by declaring war on the micro-organisms in its
environment -- a change more drastic and far-reaching than all the
technical inventions of James Watt, Edison and the Wright brothers put
together. But the disaster they unwittingly initiated made itself felt
only a century later. By i925 the population had doubled again, to two
billion. By 1965 it was well over three billion, and the doubling period
had shrunk from 1,500 years to about 35 years. [3]

 

* I am following U.S. usage: 1,000 million = one billion.

 

This figure is based on an average global growth rate of 2 per cent per
annum -- 1.6 to 1.8 in industrialised countries, 3 per cent or more in a
number of low-income nations. Thus India, which in 1965 had a population
of 450 million, at the present growth rate will have 900 million mouths to
feed in A.D. 2000. Even for the short period of fifteen years, 1965-80,
to keep up with the estimated population-growth would require an increase
of yield per acre of existing farmland by at least 50 per cent; and
L.R. Brown of the U.S. Department of Agriculture has calculated 'that an
additional 24 million tons of fertiliser a year must be applied to achieve
this performance, but the entire world production of fertiliser is only
28.6 million tons a year'. [4] As for China, with a population of 750
million in 1966, it will, if the present trend continues, at the end of
the century equal the total population of the earth as it was in 1900.

 

 

The explosion is accompanied by the implosion of migrants from rural
areas to the cities, 'not inspired by the call of employment but by
the desperate hope that some menial job or government relief will be
available there. . . . Kingsley Davies estimates that in the year 2000,
the largest Indian city, Calcutta, will contain between 36 and 66 million
people. Calcutta sprawling for hundreds of square miles, with a population
of 66 million inadequately employed people, suggests a concentration of
misery that can only have explosive consequences.' [5]

 

 

Returning to the planet as a whole, the prospect is: 7 billion people
in 2000; 14 billion in 2035; 25 billion a hundred years from now (see
Figure 14). 'But,' as a sober Ford Foundation report says, 'but long
before then, in the face of such population pressure, it is inevitable
that the Four Horsemen will take over.' [6]

 

 

How many people can our planet nourish? According to Colin Clark, one of
the leading authorities in this field, 12 to 15 billion -- but only on
condition that the methods of cultivation and soil preservation in the
whole world are brought up to the high standard of the Netherlands. This,
of course, is nothing short of Utopia; yet even under these optimum
conditions the total population would outpace the total supply in the
first decades of the next century.

 

 

It will be objected that predictions based on existing population trends
are notoriously unreliable. That is our main hope; but since the last
war, this unreliability has worked steadily in favour of the pessimists:
the factual increase surpasses all maximal predictions. Besides, the
great surprises -- such as the stabilisation of the Japanese population
around 1949 by the legalisation of abortion -- which play havoc with
the statistician's predictions have always occurred in higHy developed
countries, which took family planning more or less for granted long
before modern contraceptives came on the market, and were thus able to
break the predicted pattern by adapting the number of their babies to
economic and psychological trends. In contrast to Japan -- the only
Asiatic country with a Western level of literacy -- fifteen years of
intense birth-control propaganda in India has yielded practically no
results. The fast breeders in Asia, Africa and Latin America are by
nature the least amenable to disciplined family planning. They are the
three-quarters of the earth's population which set the pace.