Janus (2 page)
Authors: Arthur Koestler
If this is the probable outlook, what is the point of going on with our
piecemeal efforts to save the panda and prevent our rivers from turning
into sewers? Or making provisions for our grandchildren? Or, if it comes
to that, of going on writing this book? It is not a rhetorical question,
as the general mood of disenchantment among the young indicates. But there
are at least two good answers to it.
The first is contained in the two words 'as if' which Hans Vaihinger
turned into a once-influential philosophical system: 'The Philosophy
of As If'.
[2]
Briefly, it means that man has no choice but to live
by 'fictions';
as if
the illusory world of the senses represented
ultimate Reality;
as if
he had a free will which made him responsible
for his actions;
as if
there was a God to reward virtuous conduct,
and so on. Similarly, the individual must live
as if
he were not under
sentence of death, and humanity must plan for its future
as if
its
days were not counted. It is only by virtue of these fictions that the
mind of man fabricated a habitable universe, and endowed it with meaning.*
now lives on borrowed time, from decade to decade as it were, and the signs
indicate that it is drifting towards the final catastrophe, we are still
dealing in probabilities and not in certainties. There is always a hope
of the unexpected and the unforeseen. Since the year zero of the new
calendar, man has carried a time-bomb fastened round his neck, and will
have to listen to its ticking -- now louder, now softer, now louder
again -- until it either blows up, or he succeeds in defusing it. Time
is running short, history is accelerating along dizzy exponential curves,
and reason tells us that the chances of a successful defusing operation
before it is too late are slender. All we can do is to act
as if
there was still time for such an operation.
But the operation will require a more radical approach than UNO resolutions,
disarmament conferences and appeals to sweet reasonableness. Such appeals
have always fallen on deaf ears, from the time of the Hebrew prophets,
for the simple reason that homo sapiens is not a reasonable being --
for if he were, he would not have made such a bloody mess of his history;
nor are there any indications that he is in the process of becoming one.
3
The first step towards a possible therapy is a correct diagnosis of
what went wrong with our species. There have been countless attempts at
such a diagnosis, invoking the Biblical Fall, or Freud's 'death wish',
or the 'territorial imperative' of contemporary ethologists. None of
these carried much conviction, because none of them started from the
hypothesis that homo sapiens may be an aberrant biological species,
an evolutionary misfit, afflicted by an endemic disorder which sets it
apart from all other animal species -- just as language, science and
art set it apart in a positive sense. Yet it is precisely this unpleasant
hypothesis which provides the starting point for the present book.
Evolution has made many mistakes; Julian Huxley compared it to a maze
with an enormous number of blind alleys leading to stagnation or extinction.
For every existing species hundreds have perished in the past; the fossil
record is a waste-basket of the Chief Designer's discarded models. The
evidence from man's past record and from contemporary brain-research both
strongly suggest that at some point during the last explosive stages of
the biological evolution of homo sapiens something went wrong; that there
is a flaw, some potentially fatal engineering error built into our native
equipment -- more specifically, into the circuits of our nervous system --
which would account for the streak of paranoia running through our history.
This is the hideous but plausible hypothesis which any serious inquiry
into man's condition has to face. The best intuitive diagnosticians --
the poets -- have kept telling us that man is mad and has always been so;
but anthropologists, psychiatrists, and students of evolution do not take
poets seriously and keep shutting their eyes to the evidence staring them
in the face. This unwillingness to face reality is of course in itself an
ominous symptom. It could be objected that a madman cannot be expected
to be aware of his own madness. The answer is that he can, because he
is not entirely mad the entire time. In their periods of remission,
schizophrenics have written astonishingly lucid reports of their illness.
I shall now venture to propose a summary list of some of the outstanding
pathological symptoms reflected in the disastrous history of our species,
and then proceed from the symptoms to a discussion of their possible
causes. I have confined the list of symptoms to four main headings.*
has inspired many great paintings. It is the scene where Abraham ties
his son to a pile of wood and prepares to cut his throat and burn him,
out of sheer love of God. From the beginnings of history we are faced with
a striking phenomenon to which anthropologists have paid far too little
attention: human sacrifice, the ritual killing of children, virgins,
kings and heroes to placate and flatter gods conceived in nightmare
dreams. It was a ubiquitous ritual, which persisted from the prehistoric
dawn to the peak of pre-Columbian civilizations, and in some parts of the
world to the beginning of our century. From South Sea islanders to the
Scandinavian bog people, from the Etruscans to the Aztecs, these practices
arose independently in the most varied cultures, as manifestations of
a delusionary streak in the human psyche to which the whole species was
and is apparently prone. To dismiss the subject as a sinister curiosity
of the past, as is usually done, means to ignore the universality of
the phenomenon, the clues that it provides to the paranoid element in
man's mental make-up and its relevance to his ultimate predicament.
2. Homo sapiens is virtually unique in the animal kingdom in his lack of
instinctive safeguards against the killing of con-specifics -- members
of his own species. The 'Law of the Jungle' knows only one legitimate
motive for killing: the feeding drive, and only on condition that predator
and prey belong to different species.
Within
the same species competition
and conflict between individuals or groups are settled by symbolic
threat-behaviour or ritualized duels which end with the flight or
surrender-gesture of one of the opponents, and hardly ever involves lethal
injury. The inhibitory forces -- instinctive taboos -- against killing
or seriously injuring con-specifics are as powerful in most animals --
including the primates -- as the drives of hunger, sex or fear. Man is
alone (apart from some controversial phenomena among rats and ants)
in practising intra-specific murder on an individual and collective
scale, in spontaneous or organized fashion, for motives ranging from
sexual jealousy to quibbles about metaphysical doctrines. Intra-specific
warfare in permanence is a central feature of the human condition. It
is embellished by the infliction of torture in its various forms, from
crucifixion to electric shocks.*
it is manifested in the chronic, quasi-schizophrenic split between reason
and emotion, between man's rational faculties and his irrational,
affect-bound beliefs.
4. Finally, there is the striking disparity, already mentioned, between
the growth-curves of science and technology on the one hand and of ethical
conduct on the other; or, to put it differently, between the powers of
the human intellect when applied to mastering the environment and its
inability to maintain harmonious relationships within the family, the
nation and the species at large. Roughly two and a half millennia ago, in
the sixth century B.C., the Greeks embarked on the scientific adventure
which eventually carried us to the moon; that surely is an impressive
growth-curve. But the sixth century B.C. also saw the rise of Taoism,
Confucianism and Buddhism -- the twentieth of Hitlerism, Stalinism and
Maoism: there is no discernible growth-curve. As von Bertalanffy has
put it:
mentioned indicate the essence of the human predicament. They are
of course inter-dependent; thus human sacrifice can be regarded as a
sub-category of the schizophrenic split between reason and emotion,
and the contrast between the growth-curves of technological and moral
achievement can be regarded as a further consequence of it.
4
So far we have moved in the realm of facts, attested by the historical
record and the anthropologist's research into prehistory. As we turn from
symptoms
to
causes
we must have recourse to more or less speculative
hypotheses, which again are interrelated, but pertain to different
disciplines, namely, neurophysiology, anthropology and psychology.
The neurophysiological hypothesis is derived from the so-called
Papez-MacLean theory of emotions, supported by some thirty years of
experimental research.* I have discussed it at length in
The Ghost
in the Machine
, and shall confine myself here to a summary outline,
without going into physiological details.
between the archaic structures of the brain which man shares with the
reptiles and lower mammals, and the specifically human neocortex, which
evolution superimposed on them -- without, however, ensuring adequate
coordination. The result of this evolutionary blunder is an uneasy
coexistence, frequently erupting in acute conflict, between the deep
ancestral structures of the brain, mainly concerned with instinctive and
emotional behaviour, and the neocortex which endowed man with language,
logic and symbolic thought. MacLean has summed up the resulting state
of affairs in a technical paper, but in an unusually picturesque way:
the psychiatrist's couch the stage of history, we get a grotesque,
but essentially truthful picture of the human condition.
In a more recent series of lectures on neurophysiology, MacLean offered
another metaphor:
limbic system which, for the sake of simplicity, we may call the 'old brain',
as opposed to the neocortex, the specifically human 'thinking cap'. But while
the antediluvian structures at the very core of our brain, which control
instincts, passions and biological drives, have been hardly touched by
the nimble fingers of evolution, the neocortex of the hominids expanded
in the last half a million years at an explosive speed which is without
precedent in the history of evolution -- so much so that some anatomists
compared it to a tumorous growth.
This brain explosion in the second half of the Pleistocene seems to have
followed the type of exponential curve which has recently become so familiar
to us -- population explosion, information explosion, etc. -- and there
may be more than a superficial analogy here, as all these curves reflect
the phenomenon of the acceleration of history in various domains. But
explosions do not produce harmonious results. The result in this case
seems to have been that the rapidly developing thinking cap, which endowed
man with his reasoning powers, did not become properly integrated and
coordinated with the ancient emotion-bound structures on which it was
superimposed with such unprecedented speed. The neural pathways connecting
neocortex with the archaic structures of the mid-brain are apparently
inadequate.
piecemeal efforts to save the panda and prevent our rivers from turning
into sewers? Or making provisions for our grandchildren? Or, if it comes
to that, of going on writing this book? It is not a rhetorical question,
as the general mood of disenchantment among the young indicates. But there
are at least two good answers to it.
The first is contained in the two words 'as if' which Hans Vaihinger
turned into a once-influential philosophical system: 'The Philosophy
of As If'.
[2]
Briefly, it means that man has no choice but to live
by 'fictions';
as if
the illusory world of the senses represented
ultimate Reality;
as if
he had a free will which made him responsible
for his actions;
as if
there was a God to reward virtuous conduct,
and so on. Similarly, the individual must live
as if
he were not under
sentence of death, and humanity must plan for its future
as if
its
days were not counted. It is only by virtue of these fictions that the
mind of man fabricated a habitable universe, and endowed it with meaning.*
* Vaihinger's (1852-1933) philosophy should not be confused either withThe second answer is derived from the simple fact that although our species
Phenomenalism or with American Pragmatism, though it has affinities
with both.
now lives on borrowed time, from decade to decade as it were, and the signs
indicate that it is drifting towards the final catastrophe, we are still
dealing in probabilities and not in certainties. There is always a hope
of the unexpected and the unforeseen. Since the year zero of the new
calendar, man has carried a time-bomb fastened round his neck, and will
have to listen to its ticking -- now louder, now softer, now louder
again -- until it either blows up, or he succeeds in defusing it. Time
is running short, history is accelerating along dizzy exponential curves,
and reason tells us that the chances of a successful defusing operation
before it is too late are slender. All we can do is to act
as if
there was still time for such an operation.
But the operation will require a more radical approach than UNO resolutions,
disarmament conferences and appeals to sweet reasonableness. Such appeals
have always fallen on deaf ears, from the time of the Hebrew prophets,
for the simple reason that homo sapiens is not a reasonable being --
for if he were, he would not have made such a bloody mess of his history;
nor are there any indications that he is in the process of becoming one.
3
The first step towards a possible therapy is a correct diagnosis of
what went wrong with our species. There have been countless attempts at
such a diagnosis, invoking the Biblical Fall, or Freud's 'death wish',
or the 'territorial imperative' of contemporary ethologists. None of
these carried much conviction, because none of them started from the
hypothesis that homo sapiens may be an aberrant biological species,
an evolutionary misfit, afflicted by an endemic disorder which sets it
apart from all other animal species -- just as language, science and
art set it apart in a positive sense. Yet it is precisely this unpleasant
hypothesis which provides the starting point for the present book.
Evolution has made many mistakes; Julian Huxley compared it to a maze
with an enormous number of blind alleys leading to stagnation or extinction.
For every existing species hundreds have perished in the past; the fossil
record is a waste-basket of the Chief Designer's discarded models. The
evidence from man's past record and from contemporary brain-research both
strongly suggest that at some point during the last explosive stages of
the biological evolution of homo sapiens something went wrong; that there
is a flaw, some potentially fatal engineering error built into our native
equipment -- more specifically, into the circuits of our nervous system --
which would account for the streak of paranoia running through our history.
This is the hideous but plausible hypothesis which any serious inquiry
into man's condition has to face. The best intuitive diagnosticians --
the poets -- have kept telling us that man is mad and has always been so;
but anthropologists, psychiatrists, and students of evolution do not take
poets seriously and keep shutting their eyes to the evidence staring them
in the face. This unwillingness to face reality is of course in itself an
ominous symptom. It could be objected that a madman cannot be expected
to be aware of his own madness. The answer is that he can, because he
is not entirely mad the entire time. In their periods of remission,
schizophrenics have written astonishingly lucid reports of their illness.
I shall now venture to propose a summary list of some of the outstanding
pathological symptoms reflected in the disastrous history of our species,
and then proceed from the symptoms to a discussion of their possible
causes. I have confined the list of symptoms to four main headings.*
* This section is based on The Ghost in the Machine, Part Three,1. In one of the early chapters of Genesis, there is an episode which
and its résumé in a paper read to the Fourteenth Nobel Symposium
('The Urge to Self-Destruction', reprinted in The Heel of Achilles).
has inspired many great paintings. It is the scene where Abraham ties
his son to a pile of wood and prepares to cut his throat and burn him,
out of sheer love of God. From the beginnings of history we are faced with
a striking phenomenon to which anthropologists have paid far too little
attention: human sacrifice, the ritual killing of children, virgins,
kings and heroes to placate and flatter gods conceived in nightmare
dreams. It was a ubiquitous ritual, which persisted from the prehistoric
dawn to the peak of pre-Columbian civilizations, and in some parts of the
world to the beginning of our century. From South Sea islanders to the
Scandinavian bog people, from the Etruscans to the Aztecs, these practices
arose independently in the most varied cultures, as manifestations of
a delusionary streak in the human psyche to which the whole species was
and is apparently prone. To dismiss the subject as a sinister curiosity
of the past, as is usually done, means to ignore the universality of
the phenomenon, the clues that it provides to the paranoid element in
man's mental make-up and its relevance to his ultimate predicament.
2. Homo sapiens is virtually unique in the animal kingdom in his lack of
instinctive safeguards against the killing of con-specifics -- members
of his own species. The 'Law of the Jungle' knows only one legitimate
motive for killing: the feeding drive, and only on condition that predator
and prey belong to different species.
Within
the same species competition
and conflict between individuals or groups are settled by symbolic
threat-behaviour or ritualized duels which end with the flight or
surrender-gesture of one of the opponents, and hardly ever involves lethal
injury. The inhibitory forces -- instinctive taboos -- against killing
or seriously injuring con-specifics are as powerful in most animals --
including the primates -- as the drives of hunger, sex or fear. Man is
alone (apart from some controversial phenomena among rats and ants)
in practising intra-specific murder on an individual and collective
scale, in spontaneous or organized fashion, for motives ranging from
sexual jealousy to quibbles about metaphysical doctrines. Intra-specific
warfare in permanence is a central feature of the human condition. It
is embellished by the infliction of torture in its various forms, from
crucifixion to electric shocks.*
* Torture today is so widespread an instrument of political repression3. The third symptom is closely linked to the two previous ones:
that we can speak of the existence of 'Torture States' as a political
reality of our times. The malignancy has become epidemic and knows no
ideological, racial or economic boundaries. In over thirty countries,
torture is systematically applied to extract confessions, elicit
information, penalise dissent and deter opposition to repressive
governmental policy. Torture has been institutionalised . . .'
(Victor Jokel, Director, British Amnesty, in 'Epidemic: Torture',
Amnesty International, London n.d., c. 197S).
it is manifested in the chronic, quasi-schizophrenic split between reason
and emotion, between man's rational faculties and his irrational,
affect-bound beliefs.
4. Finally, there is the striking disparity, already mentioned, between
the growth-curves of science and technology on the one hand and of ethical
conduct on the other; or, to put it differently, between the powers of
the human intellect when applied to mastering the environment and its
inability to maintain harmonious relationships within the family, the
nation and the species at large. Roughly two and a half millennia ago, in
the sixth century B.C., the Greeks embarked on the scientific adventure
which eventually carried us to the moon; that surely is an impressive
growth-curve. But the sixth century B.C. also saw the rise of Taoism,
Confucianism and Buddhism -- the twentieth of Hitlerism, Stalinism and
Maoism: there is no discernible growth-curve. As von Bertalanffy has
put it:
What is called human progress is a purely intellectual affair . . .The list of symptoms could be extended. But I think that those I have
not much development, however, is seen on the moral side. It is
doubtful whether the methods of modern warfare are preferable
to the big stones used for cracking the skull of the fellow --
Neanderthaler. It is rather obvious that the moral standards of Laotse
and Buddha were not inferior to ours. The human cortex contains
some ten billion neurons that have made possible the progress from
stone axe to airplanes and atomic bombs, from primitive mythology
to quantum theory. There is no corresponding development on the
instinctive side that would cause man to mend his ways. For this
reason, moral exhortations, as proffered through the centuries by
the founders of religion and great leaders of humanity, have proved
disconcertingly ineffective. [3]
mentioned indicate the essence of the human predicament. They are
of course inter-dependent; thus human sacrifice can be regarded as a
sub-category of the schizophrenic split between reason and emotion,
and the contrast between the growth-curves of technological and moral
achievement can be regarded as a further consequence of it.
4
So far we have moved in the realm of facts, attested by the historical
record and the anthropologist's research into prehistory. As we turn from
symptoms
to
causes
we must have recourse to more or less speculative
hypotheses, which again are interrelated, but pertain to different
disciplines, namely, neurophysiology, anthropology and psychology.
The neurophysiological hypothesis is derived from the so-called
Papez-MacLean theory of emotions, supported by some thirty years of
experimental research.* I have discussed it at length in
The Ghost
in the Machine
, and shall confine myself here to a summary outline,
without going into physiological details.
* Dr Paul D. Maclean is head of the Laboratory of Brain Evolution andThe theory is based on the fundamental differences in anatomy and function
Behaviour, National Institute of Mental Health, Bethesda, Maryland.
between the archaic structures of the brain which man shares with the
reptiles and lower mammals, and the specifically human neocortex, which
evolution superimposed on them -- without, however, ensuring adequate
coordination. The result of this evolutionary blunder is an uneasy
coexistence, frequently erupting in acute conflict, between the deep
ancestral structures of the brain, mainly concerned with instinctive and
emotional behaviour, and the neocortex which endowed man with language,
logic and symbolic thought. MacLean has summed up the resulting state
of affairs in a technical paper, but in an unusually picturesque way:
Man finds himself in the predicament that Nature has endowed himIf we substitute for the individual patient mankind at large, and for
essentially with three brains which, despite great differences
in structure, must function together and communicate with one
another. The oldest of these brains is basically reptilian. The
second has been inherited from the lower mammals, and the third is
a late mammalian development, which . . . has made man peculiarly
man. Speaking allegorically of these three brains within a brain,
we might imagine that when the psychiatrist bids the patient to lie
on the couch, he is asking him to stretch out alongside a horse and
a crocodile. [4]
the psychiatrist's couch the stage of history, we get a grotesque,
but essentially truthful picture of the human condition.
In a more recent series of lectures on neurophysiology, MacLean offered
another metaphor:
In the popular language of today, these three brains might beThe 'reptilian' and 'paleo-mammalian' brains together form the so-called
thought of as biological computers, each with its own peculiar form
of subjectivity and its own intelligence, its own sense of time and
space and its own memory, motor and other functions . . . [5]
limbic system which, for the sake of simplicity, we may call the 'old brain',
as opposed to the neocortex, the specifically human 'thinking cap'. But while
the antediluvian structures at the very core of our brain, which control
instincts, passions and biological drives, have been hardly touched by
the nimble fingers of evolution, the neocortex of the hominids expanded
in the last half a million years at an explosive speed which is without
precedent in the history of evolution -- so much so that some anatomists
compared it to a tumorous growth.
This brain explosion in the second half of the Pleistocene seems to have
followed the type of exponential curve which has recently become so familiar
to us -- population explosion, information explosion, etc. -- and there
may be more than a superficial analogy here, as all these curves reflect
the phenomenon of the acceleration of history in various domains. But
explosions do not produce harmonious results. The result in this case
seems to have been that the rapidly developing thinking cap, which endowed
man with his reasoning powers, did not become properly integrated and
coordinated with the ancient emotion-bound structures on which it was
superimposed with such unprecedented speed. The neural pathways connecting
neocortex with the archaic structures of the mid-brain are apparently
inadequate.
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