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  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,

  and its résumé in a paper read to the Fourteenth Nobel Symposium

  ('The Urge to Self-Destruction', reprinted in The Heel of Achilles).

  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 hypot
hesis 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 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.

  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.