The Crack in the Cosmic Egg (9 page)

things
so much as other minds. We are shaped by
each other. We adjust not to the reality of a
world
but to the reality
of other thinkers. When we have finally persuaded and/or badgered our
children into "looking objectively" at their situation, taking into
consideration those things other to themselves, we relax since they are
being
realistic
. What we mean is that they have finally begun to mirror
qur commitments, verify our life investments, and strengthen and preserve
the cosmic egg of our culture.
Occasionally we hear of people found chained in attics and such places
from infancy. Their world view is either scanty or different for they
are always feeble minded at best. In 1951 a child was found in an
Irish chicken-house, having somehow survived there with the chickens,
since infancy. The ten-year old's long hair was matted with filth; he
ate at the chicken trough; roosted with the flock; his fingernails had
grown, fittingly, to semicircular claws; he made chicken-like noises,
not surprisingly; he had no speech and showed no promise of learning
any in the time he survived his rescue.
Forty years ago there was interest in two feral children found in
India. They had apparently been raised by wolves. They were taken from
an actual wolf den along with some cubs, the older wolves scattering
or being killed. One of the children, Kamala they called her, survived
for nine years. Only with difficulty was she taught table manners and
such niceties as walking on the hind legs. Nevertheless she exhibited a
growing awareness of the reward system of her new group, and displayed a
strong drive toward such orientation. As with the chicken-child, however,
she had missed the formative period of human infant development, and
there was no easy or complete going back to retrace the steps. Kamala
had formed according to the pattern eliciting response around her
during her mirrorhag period. For her first two years of captivity ---
or rescue -- she howled faithfully at ten, twelve, and three at night,
as all Indian wolves do. She would also, in spite of precautions,
manage to get at the chickens, rip them apart alive and eat them raw.
Only when the new social reward system grew strong enough to outweigh
the earlier rewards did she abandon her early training.
---
There has been an accepted disparaging of the reports by Kellog,
Gesell, Singh, and others concerning these children, until one now
hears this case blithely dismissed as a fraud. No one reading the
original publications, studying the photographs, the diaries, and
the overall picture will dismiss the case, however.
What kind of minds did these feral children have? Jung claimed
that no one is born a tabula rasa, a blank slate. As the body carries
features specifically human yet individually varied, so does the psychic
organism. The psyche preserves an unconscious stratum of elements going
back to the invertebrates and ultimately the protozoa. Jung speaks of
a hypothetical peeling of the collective unconscious, layer by layer,
down to the psychology of the ameoba. We can trace a rough parallel in
the development of the foetus.
As the body must be fed to realize the potential built into the genes
as a blueprint waiting development, so must the mind. Jung used the
term 'archetype' to describe "recurrent impressions made by subjective
reactions." We inherit such ideas as part of our potential mind pattern.
Archetypes, however, are only a kind of
readiness
to produce over and
again the same mythical ideas. If the readiness is not triggered by a
response or a demand, that particular possibility remains dormant and
even steadily diminishes.
Linguists are intrigued by the readiness with which the infant seizes
a language,
if
given the referents. The "readiness" of language can
miscarry, as Susanne Langer put it, because of lack of the trigger-response
interplay. If this happens, the world view shaped by that language
miscarries too and never forms. Then participation in that kind of world
is permanently blocked. Leonard Hall writes that our culture and our
reality are not separate phenomena. People of different cultures not
only speak different languages, but inherit different sensory worlds.
Lévi-Strauss uses the term "semantic-universe" to describe our
intellectual-scientific-technological fabric of reality. Jerome Bruner
suggested that language is our most powerful means for performing
"transformations" on the world. We transmute the world's shape by
metaphoric mutations. We recombine our verbal structures in the interest
of new possibilities.
Susanne Langer considered language to be conception and concept the frame
of perception. Thus, for Langer, we live in a "primary world" of reality
that is verbal. The word for a thing helps to arrest an infant's visual
process and focus it on a specific thing. It is the combination of sensory
possibilities, parental focus, and innate drives for ordering, that
organizes the child's visual field. Then the word-thing growth becomes
exponential, growing like a tree at every tip. Grouping, identifying,
correlating, with a constant check with his exemplars, gives the young
child an exciting participation and communion, a defining of self
and world. Langer calls even nature a "language-made affair," made for
understanding, and "prone to collapse into chaos if ideation fails." Fear
of this collapse may be the most potent fear in civilized man.
It is our ideation that shapes our children. We provide an enriched
environment, visual, aural, tactile stimuli to furnish the best supply of
raw materials, but our own background determines what we decide makes up
a "rich environment." And then, quite naturally, we expect our children
to shape this material into a pattern verifying our commitments. We look
for agreement.
A "semantic universe" can be built only on a background of language,
but a considerable input of raw materials of every kind is necessary
to build a language. The mind has to have a world to draw on in order
to organize a world-to-view. In my opening broadside I have emphasized
thinking as the director of percepts, and surely our developed concepts
shape our world. But an initial impingement on perception by a world
"out there," of things and people, enters as the other mirror in the
two-way interaction of development of mind. Infant thinking is probably
autistic, gradually structuring into reality-thinking, but even autistic
thinking cannot arise from a vacuum. The mill of the mind is the chief
element in reality, but before it can grind, at least for our table,
it must have some of our kind of grist. Missing this, a mind might still
grind marvelous stuff, but we could never know it.
In the last chapter I presented evidence against a universal pool of
knowledge or a common logic of thinking. Evidence points toward the infant
mind being prestructured along clearly marked drives toward communion
with others, toward speech, response and so on, but the
content
for
the drives is acquired. Bruner points out that
intent
precedes both
acquisition of knowledge and ability to do. Acquisition of language
and the ability to do in an infant are brought about by nurturing
and fostering the inborn intent. Raw material must be given the mind;
the blueprint must be filled in by responsive and guiding actions and
reactions from other minds. The infant mind then makes syntheses of
these acquisitions of possibilities.
The kind of syntheses that can occur, once material is available to
mind, is varied, however. Smythies, as mentioned before, assumes that
hallucinations are a part of the normal child's psychic experience. As
the child grows older, he selectively represses the hallucinatory
fabric according to the "current negative social value." Syntheses
accepted as the "current social value," and given "positive reward"
are considered real.
Bracken pointed out that the distinction between autistic and
reality-adjusted thinking corresponds with the German theory that new
and more complex neurological structures, as the mid-brain and cortex,
grow as superimpositions upon older and more primitive brain structures,
such as the "old brain," or brain-stem. These older thinking devices
(there is no being but in a
mode
of being,) continue to function,
however, even after the higher ones are developed. McKeller presumes
that A-thinking takes place in these lower centers, and Smythies'
hallucinatory psychic experiences of childhood would fall into the same
classification. Jung's notion of a collective response would fit in with
this kind of representation. The mid-brain, old brain and stem being
structures shared by all animals, one can see how the psyche might be
peeled layer by layer down to the psychology of lower creatures. Polanyi's
"primary process" thinking of animals and children could be understood
in this sense.
Perhaps, then, the education of a child is unlearning as well as learning,
and perhaps many possibilities are lost through lack of triggering
response, possibilities that may have been of worth. James Old, in his
experiments on rats (giving electrode stimulus to various parts of the
brain), presumed a kind of ecstacy-response was created by stimulus of a
certain area of the mid-brain. In the human, stimulus of this area makes
"all the bells of heaven ring," as one subject expressed it. Hallucinogens
must occasionally stimulate this area, as well as dissolving the ordinary
categories of reality.
This kind of ecstatic experience is negated by logical thinking. Old
found that the rapture
faded
as the stimulus was moved away from the
mid-brain and toward the rat's thin layer of cortex. And life has moved
toward an abundance of cortex, this thinking material giving us our
superior discontinuity over the animals. Our logical process has been
bought at too stiff a price, though, and life moves toward the further
possibility of getting around the price paid. That is, life moves
toward correcting the imbalance of mind that the development of logic
has brought on. If balanced, a logical process could then selectively
direct an infinite potential.
At any rate, while we can say the chicken-child was not really human, we
cannot say his experience was that of a vegetable. A low level of cortical
activity might allow free development of mid-brain experience. We tend
to deny cousciousness to other things (or other people), but, as Blake
put it:
How do you know but every bird
That wings the airy way
Is an immense,world of delight,
Closed to your senses five?
Bruner's Center for Cognitive Studies proposes a "programmed infant mind,"
a mind only awaiting the proper stimulus to flower. Bruner argues that if
language were the result of a learning process alone, man's grasp would
be forever limited by what he has already learned to reach. The infant
is a bud, ready to bloom. The intention, the will to do, precedes the
skill, the ability to do.
William Blake, in his outrage against the dead world of a John Locke,
cried: "Man's mind is like a garden ready planted. This world is too
poor to produce one seed." We find, nevertheless, that the specifics
of the plantings are given shape by the kind of weeding, thinning, and
fertilizing done by other minds. Arnold Gesell noted with wonder that the
wolf-child, Kamala, eventually did respond to her human environment in a
"slow and orderly recovery of obstructed mental growth." The recovery
was only partial, certainly. It took some five years of care before she
had reached an approximate age development of an eighteen-month-old; at
her death at seventeen, after nine years of human environment, she had
reached something approximating a three-year-old level. Scant progress
as it seems, this was from a child who had spent her first eight years
in a wolf-den, and whose learning and unlearning problems must have
been considerable.
Gesell considered the capacity of an individual to acquire and create
culture to be inborn, but he pointed out that the culture which surrounds
an individual operates as a "large-scale molding matrix, a gigantic
conditioning apparatus." He warned against oversimplifying the complex
and interwoven riddle of "nature versus nurture." And surely if only a
wolf-culture is offered as the mirroring pattern, this is nevertheless
seized upon by the programmed patterns of response and responded to,
giving a structured world in which to move.
An error causing grief in our time is the idea that culture and
civilization are recent acquisitions, and that all previous cultures
were but crude gestures laying the groundwork for our own enlightened
emergence into truth. Erickson denies that primitive societies are
"infantile stages of mankind," or arrested deviations from the "proud
progressive norms which we represent." They are, he states, a "complete
form of mature human living." Levy-Bruhl spoke of prehistoric man not as
a
protoscientist
who arrived at false conclusions, but another type
of man entirely, whose mental life differed from ours in kind. I would
qualify this by observing that primitive man is not so much a different
type as of a different esthetic bent. Lévi-Strauss finds archaic cultures
a unified, coherent, intellectual scheme, based on different logical
premises from our own. Jensen deplores the theory that early man arrived
at totally erroneous conclusions regarding cause and effect.
Culture is not an autonomous venture; autistic thinking remains autistic
until modified by another mind which is also modified by the relation. But
the capacity and drive to create a culture is innate. It is an enormous
formative potential that realizes itself against the most extreme odds.
Oversold on the splendors of "realistic," tough-minded thinking, we are
led to believe that current methods represent discovery of universal
truths and are thus sacred, rather than particular esthetic choices.
Notions of what we are, and of what our capabilities are, change with
a marvelous disregard for consistency. Yet these world views tend to
bring about the very state of mind they hold to be the case. We become
what we behold.