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 suc
h 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.
All this has often been said, and repetition tends to blunt rather than sharpen our awareness. The public is aware that there is a problem; it is not aware of the magnitude and the urgency of the problem; it is not aware that we are moving towards a climax which is not centuries, but only a few decades ahead -- that is, well within the lifetime of the present generation of teenagers. What I am trying to prove is not that the situation is hopeless, but that it is indeed unique, unprecedented in man's history. De Beer's parable of the aeroplane which skims along the runway for thousands of miles, but within a mile or two from takeoff changes into a rocket, shooting straight up into the sky, is meant to illustrate what the mathematician calls an 'exponential curve' (Figure 14).
The curve should be extended to the left -- into the past -- for miles on end, along which its rise would only be discernible through a microscope. Then comes the critical moment when Pasteur et al. took the brakes off. The brakes, of course, symbolise the high mortality rate which, balancing the 'lift' of the birth rate, kept the population curve nearly horizontal. It took about a century -- half an inch on our scale -- until the consequences became apparent; from then onward the curve rises steeper and steeper, until, in the second half of our century, it starts rocketing towards the sky. It took our species something like a hundred thousand years to spawn its first billion. Today we are adding a further billion to the total every twelve years. In the first few decades of the next century, if the present trend continues, we shall add a billion every six years. After that, every three years; and so on. But long before that de Beer's crazy aeroplane is bound to crash.
Population curve from the beginning of the Christian era extrapolated to 2035 A.D.
An exponential curve reflects a process with the brakes off, which has got out of hand. Even the draughtsman attempting to extend the curve into the future will be defeated because, as the curve gets steeper and steeper, he must run out of paper -- as the world must run out of food, of Lebensraum, of beaches and river shores, of privacy, of smiles.
The uncanny properties of exponential curves reflect the uniqueness of our time -- not only the population explosion, but also the explosion in power, communications, and specialised knowledge.
To take the last item first, Dr. Ian Morris of University College writes: 'As measured by manpower, number of periodicals or number of scientific papers, science is growing exponentially with a doubling time of about fifteen years. Figure 1 shows the increase of scientific journals since they began in 1665. . . .' The figure shows a curve similar to the one above, indicating that the number of scientific journals in 1700 was less than ten, in 1800 around a hundred, in 1850 around a thousand, in 1900 more than ten thousand, after the First World War around a hundred thousand, and by A.D. 2000 is expected to reach the one million mark. 'The same picture is obtained if the number of scientists or scientific papers is measured, and appears to be comparable for widely different scientific disciplines. During the past fifteen years, the same number of scientists were produced as existed during the entire previous period of science. Thus because the average working life of a research scientist is about forty-five years, seven out of every eight scientists who have ever lived are alive now. Similarly, almost ninety per cent of all scientific endeavour has been undertaken during the past fifty years.' [7] The United States National Education Authority sets the doubling time since 1950 even lower: ten years. [8]
Take power next. Again we have that long flat stretch of the curve from Cro Magnon to about five thousand years ago. With the invention of the lever, the pulley and other simple mechanical devices, the muscular strength of man would appear multiplied, say, five- or tenfold; then the curve would again remain nearly horizontal until the invention of the steam engine and the Industrial Revolution, just two hundred years ago. From then on, it is the same story as before: takeoff, steeper and steeper climb to the rocket-like stage. The exponential increase in the speed of communications, or in the range of penetration into the depths of the universe by optical and radio telescopes, is too well known to need stressing; but the following illustration is perhaps less familiar.
At the end of the nineteen twenties we could impart to atomic particles about half a million electron-volts of energy; in the 1930s we could accelerate them to twenty million electron-volts; by 1950 to five hundred million; and at the time of writing, an accelerator of fifty thousand million electron-volts is under construction. But more bemusing than all these figures is to me an episode in 1930, when I nearly lost my job as a science editor because of indignant protests against an article I wrote on the progress in rocketry, in which I predicted space travel 'in our lifetime'. And a year or two before the first Sputnik was launched, Britain's Astronomer Royal made the immortal statement: 'Space travel is bilge.' Our imagination is willing to accept that things are changing, but unable to accept the rate at which they are changing, and to extrapolate into the future. The mind boggles at an exponential curve as Pascal's mind boggled when, in the Copernican universe, infinity opened its gaping jaws: Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m'effraie.
That is the position in which we find ourselves today. We dare no longer extrapolate into the future, partly because we are frightened, mainly because of the poverty of our imagination.
Two Curves
But at least we can look back over our shoulders into the past, and compare the chart which we have just discussed, showing the explosive increase in people, knowledge, power and communications, with another type of chart indicating the progress of social morality, ethical beliefs, spiritual awareness and related values. This chart will field a curve of quite different shape. It, too, will show a very slow rise during the nearly flat prehistoric miles; then it will oscillate with inconclusive ups and downs through what we call civilised history; but shortly after the exponential curves get airborne, the 'ethical curve' shows a pronounced downward trend, marked by two World Wars, the genocidal enterprises of several dictators, and new methods of terror combined with indoctrination, which can hold whole continents in their grip.
The contrast between these two curves gives certainly an oversimplified, but not an over-dramatised view of our history. They represent the consequences of man's split mind. The exponential curves are all, in one way or another, the work of the new cortex; they show the explosive results of learning at long last how to actualise its potentials which, through all the millermia of our prehistory, have been lying dormant. The other curve reflects the delusional streak,
the persistence of misplaced devotion to emotional beliefs dominated by the archaic paleo-mammalian brain.
To quote v. Bertalanffy once more:
What is called human progress is a purely intellectual affair, made possible by the enormous development of the forebrain. Owing to this, man was able to build up the symbolic worlds of speech and thought, and some progress in science and technology during the 5000 years of recorded history was made. 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 instinctual side that causes 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. [9]
As a further illustration of the gulf between our intellectual and emotional development, take the contrast between communication and co-operation. Progress of the means of communication is again reflected by an exponential curve: crowded within a single century are the invention of steam-ship, railway, motor car, air-ship, aeroplane, rocket, space-ship; of telegraph, telephone, gramophone, radio, radar; of photography, cinematography, television, telstar. . . . The month I was born, the Wright brothers in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, managed for the first time to stay in the air for one entire minute in their flying machine; the chances are that before I die we shall have reached the moon and perhaps Mars. No generation of man ever before has witnessed in its lifetime such changes.