Janus: A Summing Up

  1. In one of the early chapters of Genesis, there is an episode which 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 repression 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).

  3. The third symptom is closely linked to the two previous ones: 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 . . . 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]

  The list of symptoms could be extended. But I think that those I have 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 and Behaviour, National Institute of Mental Health, Bethesda, Maryland.

  The theory is based on the fundamental differences in anatomy and function 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 him 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]

  If we substitute for the individual patient mankind at large, and for 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 be 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]

  The 'reptilian' and 'paleo-mammalian' brains together form the so-called 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 exponentia
l 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.

  Thus the brain explosion gave rise to a mentally unbalanced species in which old brain and new brain, emotion and intellect, faith and reason, were at loggerheads. On one side, the pale cast of rational thought, of logic suspended on a thin thread all too easily broken; on the other, the raging fury of passionately held irrational beliefs, reflected in the holocausts of past and present history.

  If neurophysiological evidence had not taught us the contrary, we would have expected it to reveal an evolutionary process which gradually transformed the primitive old brain into a more sophisticated instrument -- as it transformed gill into lung, or the forelimb of the reptilian ancestor into the bird's wing, the flipper of the whale, the hand of man. But instead of transforming old brain into new, evolution superimposed a new superior structure on an old one with partly overlapping functions, and without providing the new brain with a clear-cut power of control over the old.

  To put it crudely: evolution has left a few screws loose between the neocortex and the hypothalamus. MacLean has, coined the term schizophysiology for this endemic shortcoming in the human nervous system. He defines it as

  . . . a dichotomy in the function of the phylogenetically old and new cortex that might account for differences between emotional and intellectual behaviour. While our intellectual functions are carried on in the newest and most highly developed part of the brain, our affective behaviour continues to be dominated by a relatively crude and primitive system, by archaic structures in the brain whose fundamental pattern has undergone but little change in the whole course of evolution from mouse to man. [6]

  The hypothesis that this type of schizophysiology is part of our genetic inheritance, built into the species as it were, could go a long way towards explaining some of the pathological symptoms listed before. The chronic conflict between rational thought and irrational beliefs, the resulting paranoid streak in our history, the contrast between the growth-curves of science and ethics, would at last become comprehensible and could be expressed in physiological terms. And any condition which can be expressed in physiological terms should ultimately be accessible to remedies -- as will be discussed later on. For the moment let us note that the origin of the evolutionary blunder which gave rise to man's schizo-physiological disposition appears to have been the rapid, quasi-brutal superimposition (instead of transformation) of the neocortex on the ancestral structures and the resulting insufficient coordination between the new brain and the old, and inadequate control of the former over the latter.

  In concluding this section, it should be emphasized once more that to the student of evolution there is nothing improbable in the assumption that man's native equipment, though superior to that of any animal species, nevertheless contains some serious fault in the circuitry of that most precious and delicate instrument, the nervous system. When the biologist speaks of evolutionary 'blunders', he does not reproach evolution for having failed to attain some theoretical ideal, but means something quite simple and precise: some obvious deviation from Nature's own standards of engineering efficiency, which deprives an organ of its effectiveness -- like the monstrous antlers of the Irish elk, now defunct. Turtles and beetles are well protected by their armour, but it makes them so top-heavy that if in combat or by misadventure they fall on their back, they cannot get up again, and starve to death -- a grotesque construction fault which Kafka turned into a symbol of the human predicament.

  But the greatest mistakes occurred in the evolution of the various types of brain. Thus the invertebrates' brain evolved around the alimentary tube, so that if the neural mass were to evolve and expand, the alimentary tube would be more and more compressed (as happened to spiders and scorpions, which can only pass liquids through their gullets and have become blood-suckers). Gaskell, in The Origin of Vertebrates, commented:

  At the time when vertebrates first appeared, the direction and progress of variation in the Arthropoda was leading, owing to the manner in which the brain was pierced by the oesophagus, to a terrible dilemma -- either the capacity for taking in food without sufficient intelligence to capture it, or intelligence sufficient to capture food and no power to consume it. [7]

  And another great biologist, Wood Jones:

  Here, then, is an end to the progress in brain building among the invertebrates . . . The invertebrates made a fatal mistake when they started to build their brains around the oesophagus. Their attempt to develop big brains was a failure . . . Another start must be made. [8]

  The new start was made by the vertebrates. But one of the main divisions of the vertebrates, the Australian marsupials (who, unlike us placentals, carry their unfinished newborn in pouches) again landed themselves in a cul-de-sac. Their brain is lacking a vital component, the corpus callosum -- a conspicuous nerve tract which, in placentals, connects the right and left cerebral hemispheres.* Now recent brain research has discovered a fundamental division of functions in the two hemispheres which complement each other rather like Yin and Yang. Obviously the two hemispheres are required to work together if the animal (or man) is to derive the full benefit of their potentials. The absence of a corpus callosum thus signifies inadequate coordination between the two halves of the brain -- a phrase which has an ominously familiar ring. It may be the principal reason why the evolution of the marsupials -- though it produced many species which bear a striking resemblance to their placental cousins -- finally got stuck on the evolutionary ladder at the level of the koala bear.

  * More precisely, the higher (non-olfactory) functional areas.

  I shall return to the fascinating and much neglected subject of the marsupials later on. In the present context they and the arthropoda, as well as other examples, may serve as cautionary tales, which make it easier to accept the possibility that homo sapiens, too, might be a victim of faulty brain design. We, thank God, have a solid corpus callosum which integrates the right and left halves, horizontally; but in the vertical direction, from the seat of conceptual thought to the spongy depths of instinct and passion, all is not so well. The evidence from the physiological laboratory, the tragic record of history on the grand scale, and the trivial anomalies in our everyday behaviour, all point towards the same conclusion.

  5

  Another approach to man's predicament starts from the fact that the human infant has to endure a longer period of helplessness and total dependence on its parents than the young of any other species. The cradle is a stricter confinement than the kangaroo's pouch; one might speculate that this early experience of dependence leaves its life-long mark, and is at least partly responsible for man's willingness to submit to authority wielded by individuals or groups, and his suggestibility by doctrines and moral imperatives. Brain-washing starts in the cradle.

  The first suggestion the hypnotist imposes on his subject is that he should be open to the hypnotizer's suggestions. The subject is being conditioned to become susceptible to conditioning. The helpless infant is subjected to a similar process. It is turned into a willing recipient of ready-made beliefs.* For the vast majority of mankind throughout history, the system of beliefs which they accepted, for which they were prepared to live and to die, was not of their own making or choice; it was shoved down their throats by the hazards of birth. Pro patria mori dulce et decorum est, whichever the patria into which the stork happens to drop you. Critical reasoning played, if any, only a secondary part in the pr
ocess of adopting a faith, a code of ethics, a Weltanschauung; of becoming a fervent Christian crusader, a fervent Moslem engaged in Holy War, a Roundhead or a Cavalier. The continuous disasters in man's history are mainly due to his excessive capacity and urge to become identified with a tribe, nation, church or cause, and to espouse its credo uncritically and enthusiastically, even if its tenets are contrary to reason, devoid of self-interest and detrimental to the claims of self-preservation.

  * Konrad Lorenz talks of 'imprinting', and puts the critical age of receptivity just after puberty. [9] He does not seem to realize that in man, unlike his geese, susceptibility for imprinting stretches from the cradle to the grave.

  We are thus driven to the unfashionable conclusion that the trouble with our species is not an excess of aggression, but an excess capacity for fanatical devotion. Even a cursory glance at history should convince one that individual crimes committed for selfish motives play a quite insignificant part in the human tragedy, compared to the numbers massacred in unselfish loyalty to one's tribe, nation, dynasty, church, or political ideology, ad majorem gloriam dei. The emphasis is on unselfish. Excepting a small minority of mercenary or sadistic disposition, wars are not fought for personal gain, but out of loyalty and devotion to king, country or cause. Homicide committed for personal reasons is a statistical rarity in all cultures, including our own. Homicide for unselfish reasons, at the risk of one's own life, is the dominant phenomenon in history.