The Ghost in the Machine (49 page)

 

 

The bomb has given us the power to commit genosuicide; and within
a few years we should even have the power to turn our planet into a
nova
, an exploding star. Every age has had its Cassandras and
Get-Ready Men, and mankind has managed to survive regardless of their
sinister prophecies. But this comforting argument is no longer valid,
as no past age, however convulsed by war and pestilence, had possessed
our newly acquired power over life on the planet as a whole.

 

 

The full implications of this fact have not yet sunk into the minds of
even the noisiest pacifists. We have always been taught to accept the
transitoriness of individual existence, while taking the survival of
our species axiomatically for granted. This was a perfectly reasonable
belief, barring some unlikely cosmic catastrophe. But it has ceased to be
a reasonable belief since the day when the possibility of engineering a
catastrophe of cosmic dimensions was experimentally tested and proven. It
pulverised the assumptions on which all philosophy from Socrates onward
was based: the potential immortality of our species.

 

 

But new insights of a revolutionary nature cannot be assimilated
at once. There are periods of incubation. The Copernican theory of
the earth's motion had to wait eighty years before it took root. The
unconscious mind has its own clock, and its own ways of digesting what
the conscious mind has rejected as indigestible. The leaders of the
French Revolution were well aware of this fact; to hasten the process
of assimilation, they introduced a new calendar, starting on the day
of the proclamation of the Republic: September 22, 1792, became the 1st
of Vendémaire of the year 1. It would perhaps not be a bad idea
if we all kept a second calendar, at least in our minds, starting with
the year when the new Star of Bethlehem rose over Hiroshima. Calendars
imply convictions about the fundamental importance of certain events:
the first Olympiad, the founding of the city of Rome, the birth of Jesus,
the flight of Mohammed from Mecca. The positing of a year zero provides
a time scale, a measure of an age, of the distance covered from the real
or assumed starting point of a given civilisation.

 

 

Thus I am writing this in the year 22 p.H. -- post Hiroshima. For there
can be little doubt that in that year a new era started. The human race
is facing a challenge unprecedented in its history -- which can only
be met by taking action of an equally unprecedented nature. The first
half of the preceding sentence is now more or less generally accepted,
but the second is not. Even the thinking minority still believes that
a peril unique in its novelty can be averted by time-worn traditional
remedies, by appeals to sweet reason and commonsense. But such appeals
are powerless against the militant ideologies of closed systems, whose
true believers are convinced as a professor at Peking University wrote
recently -- that 'respect for facts and for other people's opinions must
be exterminated from man's soul like vermin'. [11]

 

 

All efforts of persuasion by reasoned argument rely on the implicit
assumption that homo sapiens, though occasionally blinded by emotion,
is a basically rational animal, aware of the motives of his own
actions and beliefs -- an assumption which is untenable in the light
of both historical and neurological evidence. All such appeals fall on
barren ground; they could take root only if the ground were prepared
by a spontaneous change in human mentality all over the world -- the
equivalent of a major biological mutation. Then, and only then, would
mankind as a whole, from its political leaders down to the lonely crowd,
become receptive to reasoned argument, and willing to resort to those
unorthodox measures which would enable it to meet the challenge.

 

 

It is highly improbable that such a mental mutation will occur
spontaneously in the foreseeable future; whereas it is highly probable
that the spark which initiates the chain-reaction will be ignited sooner
or later, deliberately or by accident. As the devices of atomic and
biological warfare become more potent and simpler to produce, their
spreading to young and immature, as well as old and over-ripe, nations
is inevitable. An invention, once made, cannot be dis-invented; the
bomb has come to stay. Mankind has to live with it forever: not merely
through the next crisis and the next one, but forever; not through the
next twenty or two hundred or two thousand years, but forever. It has
become part of the human condition.

 

 

In the first twenty years of the post-Hiroshima era -- 1946-66 according
to the conventional calendar -- men had fought, as already mentioned,
forty 'minor' wars and civil wars tabulated by the Pentagon. [12] More
than half of them were fought between Communists and non-Communists
(China, Greece); the others were either 'anti-colonial' wars (Algeria,
Indo-China), 'imperialist adventures' (Suez, Hungary, Bay of Pigs), or
'classical' wars between neighbours (India-Pakistan, Israel-Arabs). But
this Pentagon list does not include crises like the Berlin blockade of
1948, and coups d'état like the defenestrations in Prague, 1948.
As a French diplomat has put it: 'There are no longer such things as
war and peace, just different levels of confrontations.'

 

 

These wars and civil wars were fought with conventional arms, mostly
by nuclear have-nots. But at least on two occasions -- Berlin, 1948,
and Cuba, 1962 -- we were on the brink of nuclear war; and all this
in the first two decades since the year zero p.H. If one extrapolates
from these data into the future, the probability of disaster approaches
statistical certainty.

 

 

A further aggravating factor is that nuclear devices, like other gadgets,
will undergo the process of progressive miniaturisation: they will
become smaller and easier to make, so that in the long run effective
global control of their manufacture will become impracticable on these
grounds alone; in the foreseeable future they will be made and stored in
large quantities, from windswept Alaska to sunny Stanleyville. It is as
if a gang of delinquent children had been locked in a room filled with
inflammable material, and provided with match-boxes -- accompanied by
the warning not to use them. Some social scientists have indeed estimated
(to quote J.R. Platt again), that

 

our 'half-life'* under these circumstances -- that is, the probable
number of years before these repeated confrontations add up to a 50-50
chance of destroying the human race forever -- may be only about
ten to twenty years. Obviously this is not an objectively testable
number. Nevertheless the idea is clear. This is the first time in
the history of the human race that babies -- all babies everywhere,
forever -- have had such a slim chance of survival. [13]
* The term is borrowed from atomic physics: 'half-life' is the time
taken for half the atoms of a radioactive isotype to disintegrate.

 

There is indeed no convincing reason which could lead us to believe
that the conflicts, crises, confrontations and wars of the past will
not be repeated in varying parts of the world in the years, decades and
centuries to come. Ever since the Second World War, the ideological,
racial, ethnic tensions have been on the increase in Africa, Asia, Latin
America. In the United States, in spite of all genuine efforts to find a
solution, the racial problem is becoming more intractable; even Israel,
prime victim of racial persecution, has its own underprivileged majority
of coloured Jews. The lessons of the past have been wasted; history not
only repeats itself, it seems to be labouring under a neurotic compulsion
to do so. Thus in 1920 a town named Danzig on the eastern fringes of
Europe was made into an enclave which could only be reached by a narrow
corridor through foreign territory. This absurd arrangement became the
pretext for World War Two. While it was still on, a town named Berlin, in
the heart of Europe, was made into an enclave which could only be reached
by a narrow corridor through foreign territory. This absurd repetition
became the pretext which has already once brought us to the brink of war,
and will in all probability do so again. Hegel wrote: 'What experience
and history teach us is this -- that people and governments have never
learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.'

 

 

It has been said that the blood of martyrs fertilises the earth. In fact
it has been running down into the sewers, with a monotonously gurgling
sound, as far as man can remember; and at whatever part of the world we
look, there is scant evidence which would encourage us to hope that the
gurgling will diminish or stop. If we discard the comforts of wishful
thinking, we must expect that the motives and loci of potential conflict
will continue to drift across the globe like high-pressure areas over
a meteorological chart. And our only precarious safeguard against the
ballooning of local into total conflict, mutual deterrence, will always
remain dependent on uncontrollable psychological factors -- the restraint
or recklessness of fallible key individuals. Russian roulette is a game
which cannot be played for long.

 

 

So long as we believed that our species as such was virtually immortal,
with an astronomical lifespan before it, we could afford to wait patiently
for that change of heart which, gradually or suddenly, would make love,
peace and sweet reason prevail. But we no longer have that assurance
of immortality, nor the unlimited time to wait for the moment when the
lion will lie down with the lamb, the Arab with the Israeli, and the
Commissar with the Yogi.

 

 

The conclusions, if we dare to draw them, are quite simple. Our biological
evolution to all intents and purposes came to a standstill in Cro-Magnon
days. Since we cannot in the foreseeable future expect the necessary
change in human nature to arise by way of a spontaneous mutation, that
is, by natural means, we must induce it by artificial meam. We can only
hope to survive as a species by developing techniques which supplant
biological evolution. We must search for a cure for the schizophysiology
inherent in man's nature, and the resulting split in our minds, which
led to the situation in which we find ourselves.

 

 

 

'Tampering with Human Nature'

 

 

I believe that if we fail to find this cure, the old paranoid streak in
man, combined with his new powers of destruction, must sooner or later
lead to genosuicide. But I also believe that the cure is almost within
reach of contemporary biology; and that with the proper concentration
of efforts it might be produced within the lifetime of the generation
which is now entering on the scene.

 

 

I am aware that this sounds over-optimistic, in contrast to the seemingly
over-pessimistic views just expressed on the prospect ahead of us if we
persist in carrying on in our paranoiac ways. I do not think these
apprehensions are exaggerated, and I do not think that the idea of a
cure for homo sap. is utopian. It is not inspired by science fiction,
but based on a realistic assessment of the recent advances in several
convergent branches of the life sciences. They do not provide a cure,
but they indicate the area of research that may produce it.

 

 

I am also aware that any proposal which involves 'artificial tampering
with human nature' is bound to provoke strong emotional resistances. These
are partly based on prejudice, but partly on a healthy aversion against
further intrusions into the privacy and sanctity of the individual by
the excesses of social engineering, character engineering, various forms
of brainwashing, and other threatening aspects of the air-conditioned
nightmare surrounding us. On the other hand, ever since the first hunter
wrapped his shivering frame into the hide of a dead animal, man has
been tampering with his own nature, creating for himself an artificial
environment which gradually transformed the face of the planet, and an
artificial mode of existence without which he can no longer survive. There
is no turning back on housing, clothing, artificial heating, cooked food;
nor on spectacles, hearing aids, forceps, artificial limbs, annesthetics,
antiseptics, prophylactics, vaccines, and so forth.

 

 

We start tampering with human nature almost from the moment a baby is
born, for one of the first routine measures is the universal practice
to drop a solution of silver nitrate into the baby's eyes to protect
it against ophthalmia neonatorum, a form of conjunctivitis frequently
leading to blindness, caused by gonococci which, unknown to her, may
have lurked in the mother's genital tract. This is followed, later on,
by preventive vaccinations, compulsory in most civilised countries,
against smallpox, typhoid and so on. To appreciate the value of these
tamperings with the course of Nature, let us remember that the prevalence
of smallpox among Red Indians was one of the main causes which made
them lose their continent to the white man. In the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries it constituted a hazard to which everybody was
exposed. Its ravages might have been even worse but for that intrepid
lady, Mary Wortley Montagu who learnt the ancient oriental practice
of 'inoculation' from the Turks, and introduced it to England at the
beginning of the eighteenth century. It consisted in infecting the person
to be immunised with matter taken from mild smallpox cases -- a rather
dangerous procedure, but with a much lower fatality rate than 'natural'
smallpox (the risk vanished only when Jenner discovered that vaccination
with the attenuated virus of cowpox gave immunity against smallpox).

 

 

A less well-known case of tampering is the prevention ofgoitre and of
a certain variety of cretinism associated with it. When I was a child,
and was taken for the holidays to the Alps, the number of inhabitants
of mountain valleys who had monstrous swellings in front of their necks,
and the number of cretinous children in their families was quite
frightening. Today there is not a single case of goitre in the Tyrolean
village where I spend part of the year, nor in the neighbouring valleys.
It has been found that goitre is associated with a deficiency of iodine
in the thyroid gland, and that the water in regions where the disease used
to be endemic was hard and poor in iodine. Thus iodine was periodically
added in small quantities to the drinking water or diet of the children,
and goitre became virtually a thing of the past.