'1969 and All That' . . .

Went to see the film Avatar some weeks ago. The CGI effects are quite spectacular. Beyond that, it is much as it has been portrayed in the various reviews—a cowboy-and-Indian picture set in outer space. I must say I found the 3D effect somewhat underwhelming, but that may be just a matter of the eyes adjusting to it. The other aspects of the film—the new age and ecological mishmash—have also been extensively dealt with elsewhere. Overall, I would say, it is worth seeing as a well-made and quite undemanding piece of entertainment.

However there is one part of it that arguably has all the appearance of a piece of liberal wish-fulfilment. That is the scene near the end where the forces of the defeated industrialists are embarking and heading for home, and the impression is given that they have accepted the outcome and are going for good. Now if we accept the view of human nature given in some recent mailings—that it is, in general, and at root, selfish, greedy, envious, vengeful, malicious etc.—then that scenario is not at all believeable.

The Battle of the Little Big Horn and the events leading up to it, which the plot of Avatar closely resembles, was not, to adapt the Churchillian phrase, just the end of the beginning for the native American, but also the beginning of the end. It represented both the high point of the tribes’ resistance to the European invasion and the starting point for the ultimate collapse of their power. It may have stayed the impetus of the colonization for a short while—but the fact is that the numbers of white settlers and soldiers and prospectors and buffalo hunters came afterwards in an even greater flood, until the natives were finally subdued.

In terms of the description of human nature given above, and in terms of overall plausibility—especially in circumstances where the ore being mined on Pandora is supposed to be worth $30,000,000 (?) a kilo—then the withdrawal of the industrialists in Avatar could be more truthfully viewed as tactical. They would be withdrawing in order to regroup and increase their firepower with an eye to returning. That would be the visceral, not to mention, logical, reaction . . .

And yet . . .

And yet . . . the other side of the argument given in recent mailings is the contention that our reactions and ideas are predominantly the product of our cultural environment, and that the suggested aspects of human nature mentioned above have little role to play in the matter, if even they exist at all. The sensible view, of course, is that both sources of influence exist and play a part in the formation of human behaviour. The natural or instinctive response to an itch is to scratch it; the fact that in certain circumstances we refrain from doing so is a consequence of acculturation.

Following the Good Friday Agreement there were television pictures of nationalists celebrating and tooting horns in the North and proclaiming that they had ‘won the war’. Of course, there hadn’t really been a war; or if there had, it had been a very strange war, a war that involved one of the sides fighting with an arm, if not an arm-and-three-quarters, tied firmly behind its back. The fact is that had the British Army and British intelligence forces been given absolutely free rein in the North then the likelihood is that they could have wiped out armed Republican resistance fairly quickly, at least for a generation.

Arguably what restrained the British response was sensitivity to world opinion, international law, and probably the reluctance of British governments, for both moral and practical reasons, to open even wider the Pandora’s Box of the Irish situation. In other words, cultural factors, in the broadest sense of the term . . .

Of course, it is possible to pose a notional question here, and ask: Are there any circumstances that might have allowed, or might at some future time allow, the British army to employ a mailed fist policy in the North? And what might those circumstances be?

Well, the first obviously would involve a general collapse in the world order, so that nations would be so deeply involved with their own problems—and also perhaps so compromised in their strategies for dealing with them—that there would no longer be a basis for such a thing as a generalized ‘world opinion’. By the same process, any enforceable idea of international law would equally lapse—especially in a circumstance where international law, as it currently operates, is anything but international, and seems unilaterally to be aimed only at the weaker countries.

As to the role of the British government? Look at present times and we can see the three main parties of British political life—Labour, the Tories, and the Liberal-Democrats—all fighting for the same small corner of what should be a much wider political blanket. Certainly, there is a degree of reassurance in this against any possibility of the type of draconian military measures that we are talking of ever actually occurring.

[Really, I can’t help it—but every time I see the front bench of the new Tory party, for some reason I am automatically reminded of the young prince and his advisers in Braveheart.]

But what if the British economy and social order were to collapse?—admittedly, an unlikely idea, yet at the same time an idea much more entertainable than it might have been, say, two years ago. In such a situation, the one thing that can be said with any certainty is that the three parties mentioned above would disappear fairly quickly into what Marx called ‘the dustbin of history.’ What would happen then would depend on the capacity of Britain to restore a unified rule, and on the exact nature of that rule. In such a situation, if a renewed nationalist itch presented itself in Ireland, it might no longer be unthinkable to scratch it. And the exact nature of such a scratching would depend on the radicalism of the new ruling force and its local allies.

As I say, this is all pure speculation, not prophecy. It is a ‘what if . . .’ type scenario, akin more to a philosophical thought-experiment than to anything else. It is just a matter of following the logic of it—for one’s own amusement, if nothing else . . .

In October 1943, Heinrich Himmler gave a secret talk in Posen to the Gauleiters [Nazi regional leaders] and certain Reich ministers, where he outlined openly to the broader echelons of the Nazi leadership the extent of the Final Solution of the Jewish Problem. In the course of the speech, he said:

‘I ask that you only listen but never speak of what I am saying to you here today. We, you see, were faced with the question “What about the women and children?” And I decided, here too, to find an unequivocal solution. For I did not think that I was justified in exterminating—meaning kill or order to have killed—the men, but to leave their children to grow up to take revenge on our sons and grandchildren. The hard decision had to be taken to have this people disappear from the face of the earth . . .’

Himmler, of course, was being somewhat tendentious here. The implication is that the Jewish race posed a military, or at least a physical, threat to Germany. Something which had never been the case—if for no other reason than that the lack of a national territory of their own made them a military danger to nobody.

I mentioned in a recent mailing the opinion of Elie Wiesel, a survivor of the extermination camps, to the effect that by allowing the Holocaust ‘to happen, God was telling humanity something, and we don’t know what it was’. This is something I have thought about long and hard, and my conclusion was that if there were lessons to be learned from the Holocaust, then one of them, and maybe the most important of them is: This is how things are going to be!

Whether we like it or not, Hitler put on the modern political agenda the possibility of—or the temptation to—a root and branch annihilation one's 'enemy' population. The Hitlerian adventure may well have ended in disaster for some of its architects (and the whole of the German people), but the idea has nevertheless not disappeared. It is still there, provocative, tempting—especially in circumstances that might suggest the possibility of getting away with it unscathed. Or as a consequence of the dam-burst of some long-suppressed atavism.

Winston Churchill, writing in the 1920s of the changed international landscape at the end of the First World War, could say that the ‘whole map of Europe has been changed . . . but as the deluge subsides and the waters fall short we see the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone emerging once again. The integrity of their quarrel is one of the few institutions that has been unaltered in the cataclysm which has swept the world.’ As I say, that was written in the 1920s—but it might equally have been written almost at any time since.

To follow the thought experiment to its logical conclusion: would it be feasible [again, I have to emphasise, I don’t mean ‘likely’], in the suggested altered circumstances, for a policy analogous to that of the Nazis to be applied in Ireland? Strictly logically, I don’t see why not. Two factors would be especially favourable to its success: one, the relative smallness of the Catholic or nationalist population; secondly, the fact that, unlike the bulk of refugees in today’s world, there is no convenient border to step over as a means of escape, short of drowning.

Again I have to emphasise that all this is purely speculative . . . probably laughably so. If nothing else it is at least an interesting diversion. But it does give rise to two other much more realistically grounded thoughts.

Firstly, if the way we think and act is influenced by cultural and environmental circumstances, then changing those circumstances must logically change, or at least begin to change, the way we think etc. A case in point is the radically different experience East European Jewry had of the German army—changing from favourable to fearful—over the course of the two world wars; the specific factor underlying this transformation being, of course, Hitler and the rise of Naziism.

The second point is that history is not science. Replicate the exact conditions of a scientific experiment and one can repeat it over and over with no alteration of result. But in terms of history, people and circumstances change over time—even from moment to moment—and to the extent that history sometimes seems to repeat itself, it is generally nothing more than a matter of superficial resemblance. Any attempt to take it as being somehow more literal than that is the guaranteed road to disaster.

The Shape of Things to Come (?) . . .

Imagine a building going up on a green-field site. And nobody knows what it is or what it’s for—but in its parts it seems certainly admirable. A magnificent pillar here, something else there—piece by piece it reaches towards completion. And then one day they put the roof on and people suddenly realize that it is a prison.

This could serve as a metaphor for the modern world we live in, with its proliferation of laws, together with a seemingly limitless demand for ever new legislation. Such is the amount of regulation being poured out through local government and state legislatures and bodies such as the EU, not to mention the whole dubious structure of international law, that it is doubtful if any average person can pass a day without being unknowingly in breach of some or other aspect of it.

[Without it technically being law, it is perhaps worthwhile considering in passing the whole concept of employment and safety rules, such as exist in most workplaces. Anyone with experience of such things knows that they are measures designed to come into force only when things go wrong. Such rules in general have only two functions: the first one is to cover the employer against any liability in the event of something happening; and, two, to make it easy to get rid of recalcitrant employees. Outside of such situations, rulebooks are seldom ever mentioned.]

A case can be made for most pieces of legislation—certainly there must be somebody making a case for it, else there would be no reason for it. The problem is not so much with individual measures as with the end-result—sometimes frightening; sometimes ridiculous—when all the independently-generated pieces of legislation come finally to be bolted together.

In recent decades, there has arguably been a certain direction to social change and the legislative measures often underpinning it. The general thrust is that we are moving towards a more inclusive society, a fairer society etc. etc. Viewed from another direction and it might be seen as the creep towards authoritarianism.

Make no mistake a revolution is underway—a generally peaceful revolution, with no guns or barricades—but a revolution nonetheless. A revolution proceeding cautiously and sneakily in Gramsci-ian (see my previous mailing of November 5th, 2009: Kidding Oneself . . .) terms of not frightening the horses.

Now I am not saying that there is an organized conspiracy underpinning the course of social and legislative developments; but neither am I saying that there isn’t. Certainly at ground level there is an informal conspiracy of what Lenin described as ‘the useful idiots’—you can see them in the ‘alternative’ watering-holes of a weekend, blathering their crap, and emoting—endlessly, emoting , emoting, emoting . . . What the Marquis of Queensbury, had he been around to address the issue, might well with a deep instinctive truth have described as ‘Conformists posing as radicals’.

In Britain we can see how equality legislation—on the face of it, a seemingly innocuous term for a seemingly worthwhile project—is being used as a wrecking ball to destroy those aspects of society that left-liberals most hate. For example, Catholic adoption agencies are having a gun put to their heads over the matter of adoptions by homosexuals—either abide by New Labour equality legislation or else be forced out of existence. No conscience clause here, despite one having been promised by Blair.

Of course, conscience clauses aren’t worth the paper they’re [sic!] printed on. The fact that you need the escape hatch of a conscience clause is a recognition that you have already been beaten. Equally, the fact that it is sometimes promised is usually a matter of playing for time on the part of the dominant party.

Now Ireland is different from Britain, in that it lags somewhat behind in the matter of ‘progressive’ legislation. But anyone with eyes can see that the pressure’s on. As far back as twenty years ago and further, the probable course of developments, in the event that Ireland was to succumb to secularist pressures, was clearly visible. An attempt would be made to negotiate a conscience clause to cover those, especially in education and health, who would have religious objections to resulting changes. And probably it would be granted—but only up to the time that the liberal establishment felt itself fully secure in the saddle. Then the cry would be: ‘What are we paying these people for if they are not prepared to carry out the full range of duties? Either they agree to work the same way as everyone else—or let them get out!’

As I say, there is a revolution in progress, to a certain extent a subterranean revolution, yet one that, if it is not derailed, will have the effect of turning upside down aspects of the innermost structure of society, every bit as much as occurred in the Belorussian forests (see my last mailing) during the Second World War. Should the liberals and the leftists succeed in applying their agenda, then those very things that only a few decades ago were—although they shouldn’t have been—synonymous with respectability and status and success will, gradually or suddenly, turn opposite in their effect.

The liberal agenda and its related legislation involves much more than simply the matters of homosexuality and abortion. There is no limit to the extent of its potential to penetrate into all aspects of human life (something that I may deal with in the next mailing), forcing people to bend their knee to it or else go with their consciences and suffer the consequences.

And what are those consequences likely to be for those who resist? Look at the Coptic Christians of Cairo, once—pre-Islam—the majority population, and beneficiaries of all the advantages that thus accrued. Abandoned, in the wake of the Islamic conquest, as is always the case, by those more interested in jobs and wealth and status, they have over the centuries become reduced to a rump, scratching in the garbage dumps for a living, condemned to poverty and oppression by their refusal to abandon their ancient beliefs.

Could such a thing happen here? Of course it could—the Copts are a case in point of the way such things must always happen. The only difference is that the liberals are likely to prove much tougher masters than the Islamists.

Need it happen? Who knows? Certainly the liberal coalition has a head of steam up at the moment, and, as I said earlier, unless something happens to derail it, who knows what may be the outcome. The positive side of the world financial crisis is that it may indeed supply the necessary nudge. The fact is that the liberals in general are neither working class nor poor nor oppressed—they are instead mainly middle class, comparatively well-off, and with any amount of leisure time to conjure up nonsense and mischief. To the extent that the financial crisis impacts on them . . . Well, we’ll see!

The Kingdom of Heaven . . .

There has been on ongoing debate in the social sciences for quite some time as to what extent we humans are hardwired from pre-history with instincts and emotions. Are such things predominantly the result of genetic inheritance, passed down over thousands of years practically unchanged—so that if we were able to travel back by time machine, we would have no trouble relating to or understanding the basic human types we would find there? Or are the instincts and emotions the product predominantly of environmental and cultural influences, and hence amenable to ongoing change—a change that is increasingly putting distance between ourselves and our more primitive ancestors?

The answer to this question—to the extent that it is a real question—has implications for the whole modern project of social and political reform? If we are programmed by the genes to automatically act and react in certain ways, then what hope does that offer to any prospect of changing human nature and behavior?

Of course, the argument isn’t as black and white as this—sensible people accept that we are products of both heredity and environment, and that the question at issue—again to the extent that there is a real question—is exactly what mix of the two is needed in order to produce the best cocktail.

Personally, I believe that there are elements buried deep in human nature that are almost impossible to alter. Almost impossible . . . for if it was impossible to alter them it would make redundant the whole social message of, say, Christianity: turn the other cheek, love your enemies, humble rather than exalt yourself, lay down your life for your friend etc. etc.

The question is: which specific traits of human nature constitute those least susceptible to eradication or transformation? Unfortunately we can’t go back by time machine to examine the mores of our most distant ancestors. Nor can it be really done by sociological experiment—because such experiments are, I think, intrinsically flawed (and as potentially skewing of the end result as contaminated test-tubes in a laboratory environment) by the very fact that they are not real life situations, are ultimately artificial, no matter how cleverly they may be devised.

All that is left is the possibility of taking advantage of situations within our own historical period—situations well-attested to and documented—where people found themselves in circumstances where the veneer of civilization and culture was stripped away down to the bedrock of whatever it was that was left.

The best such example is the fate of the Jews of Europe during the Second World War. Elie Wiesel, a survivor of the camps, writes that ‘by allowing this [the Holocaust] to happen, God was telling humanity something, and we don’t know what it was’. We can, however, perhaps guess at, at least, some aspects of it. And one, I would suggest, is a demonstration of the consequences of the average human nature left to its own devices, a human nature untrammeled by any considerations other than purely terrestrial ones.

A film came out last year—I think it is on Sky now at the moment—Defiance, a film about the Jewish Bielski otriad or partisan group, which operated in the forests of Belorussia during the war. The movie itself is more or less par for the course—but it is based on a book of the same name, written by Nechama Tec, and first published in 1993. While it covers the usual ground of such books, what is important about Tec’s contribution is that it can be read also as an almost forensic study of human nature under circumstances of terrible hardship and the threat of extinction.

So what does it tell us about human nature—or rather, what does it confirm? For really what I am talking about here is the result of years of reading, thinking and life experience; and I introduce Tec’s evidence only to the extent that it reinforces my own conclusions—which almost universally it does.

The first thing it tells us is that the human tendency (indeed, the social animal tendency) to organize ourselves in castes and classes and all different sorts of social gradations is part of our deepest evolutionary programming. In the forests of Belorussia, the Jews—mainly escapees from the ghettoes, and survivors of all sorts of horrors—fell, arguably by reflex, into recreating anew the classical structure of a social system; and with it (in exacerbated, and arguably pure, form, unabated by the restraint of social niceties) all the other old familiar elements of social life: pursuit of status, different standards of living according to status, snobbery, contempt for the lower orders, envy of the higher orders, jealousy, mutual enmity, treachery etc. etc.

The interesting thing was that while a social structure (created, if you like, under pressure of the instincts) immediately established itself, the nature of that structure (arguably under influence of environmental factors) was totally different from what it had been in peacetime life. The new ‘aristocracy’ consisted in the main of ordinary men, of little or no education, but whose life and background had trained them for the hard task of practical survival in the hostile forest environment; the old upper-class and intellectual elements, by contrast, found themselves reduced to the status (or lack of status) of what were called malbushim or ‘clothes’—rather along the lines, one imagines, of the way the ‘sixties counterculture used to talk of ‘uniforms’ and ‘suits’ as a way of disparaging and dehumanizing those they disliked.

To be a malbush was, in the context of the Bielski camp, to be a dead weight, another useless mouth to feed, and beneath the social notice of the new upper orders. To quote a typical instance:

‘A young girl, a teenager, describes her father who used to have a high position in the brewery in Lida. “In the otriad he became a malbush, he did nothing . . . he was intelligent, educated, but not resourceful at all. He was dirty, neglected. He was not counted as a human. No one would have recognized him. There were many disappointed people like him”’

And this, it seems, is a typical picture. Up to 50% of the partisan camp inhabitants, who in total numbered over twelve hundred by the end of the war, came within the category of malbushim, including displaced women and children and the elderly. At any stage, it seems clear, had a plebiscite been taken amongst the upper 50% of the camp, the decision would have been to jettison these additional mouths and let them take their chance.

What stopped this happening, and what allowed the camp to become a place of refuge for all Jews, irrespective of age or status, was the authority and influence of a handful of people—mainly the Bielski brothers, or at least some of them, who had founded the otriad in the first place. Especially Tuvia Bielski, the eldest and the leader, who, in the context of the times, appeared to represent a different and superior human type to the general run of his followers.

How does one account for this difference in human types? And for the disparity in numbers between them? For the fact that the individual charisma, natural authority and conscience of one or two was more than sufficient counterweight to the ruthless individualism of hundreds? Can evolution account for this? I don’t know.

One is reminded of the passage of the gospels, where: ‘He told them another parable. “The kingdom of heaven is like leaven which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal, till it was all leavened”’ (Matthew 13:33). According to one commentary, ‘The Kingdom of God is compared to a bit of leaven—something small and simple, but with the power to transform the entire environment into which it is introduced.’

It is a topic that in a general sense I hope to return to . . .

Smoke gets in your thighs . . .

Driving from down the country last Sunday, I accidentally tuned in to the Gay Byrne programme on Lyric FM. From time to time, in similar circumstances, I’ve caught the odd snatch of it before. And really the more you listen to it the more you become convinced that, in his present incarnation, or at this current stage of his incarnation, Gay Byrne has arguably become the most boring man in Ireland—certainly if this programme is anything to go by.

And what about this sub-Woganesque love-fest he seems to be engaged in with his listeners?—who by the sound of it are all people of a certain age and background. The image one gets is almost of a team huddle before a football match: all looking in and nobody looking out, all intent on mutually reinforcing the illusion that the world hasn’t changed and isn’t changing, and that things will continue on, much as they’ve continued on in the past, forever.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’ve nothing against such people—I’m sure they see themselves, and others see them, too, as salt of the earth types. Retired, or getting on in years, and with a nostalgic vision of how it is going to be with them for the rest of their lives. Better for them, I think—although I doubt they would agree with me—if they were to die now, before time and events rob them, not alone of their illusions, but of their financial security and comfort, not to mention, possibly, even their lives.

The signs of it are already there—indeed, in the logic of underlying economic developments the catastrophe is already here. Anyone reading the papers recently, especially the British papers, will have come across articles, almost like ranging shots, blaming the generation of those who were born in the years immediately after the war for the situation that the rest of society finds itself in. The tenor of these articles is that like a crooked trustee, the baby-boomers guzzled the inheritance that was meant to be handed down the generations.

As Bob Dylan says: ‘You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows . . .’

The fact is that the society that we grew up in is cracked and irrecoverable; people are looking round for someone to blame, but that is only a prelude to looking for someone to compensate them, especially the young, for the loss of their expectations. The old cry used to be ‘the world owes me a living’; the new one is more likely to be ‘it’s people of a certain age and lifestyle that owes [sic!] it to me’.

That is if there is anything left after the government have finished their depredations—and really the exactions of government are only another manifestation of the tendency outlined above.

There has been a popular optimism that it is only a matter of time until economically things get back to normal. If nothing else, the crises of recent days should cause people to think twice. The fact is there is no going back to normal. We live in changed times—it’s just that consciousness tends to lag after events, and, short of a gun being put to their heads, people tend only to see what they want to see.

If the situation arises—and there is a strong risk of this—that at any stage the country finds its credit exhausted and is unable to borrow money; or if the burden of debts to be repaid radically outstrips the shrinking tax-base, then government—whatever government—will (EU permitting) start scrabbling around for money with all the indiscriminate ferocity of a junky burgling an OAP dwelling.

And what form might this take? Well, the first thing that needs to be said is that if you want feathers you don’t go looking for frogs. If a government finds itself short of money, and in a desperate situation, it will automatically go to wherever it knows the money is. In somewhat analogous circumstances, the Argentinian government, in 2008, began moves to nationalize private pension funds. Could it happen here? Who knows? But if it does, then it is the start of a process that logically could end up with the raiding of bank accounts.

The irony of it all! . . . a sort of communism imposed from above—likely by the very forces who spent most of the last one hundred years anathemising it!

And what role might the grey-power movement that forced a government reversal on the medical card scheme play in all of this? None. The government’s climbdown on that occasion was prompted by electoral considerations. In the situation I am outlining, electoral considerations would no longer be a factor—or if they were then only a very small factor. Instead the government would be acting out of pure fear of the consequences of not acting

But this is to a large extent speculative. What isn’t speculative though is the fact that under impact of the economic crisis violent break-ins, burglaries, kidnappings etc. are on the increase. The criminal class and the desperate are already implementing their own ‘five-year plan’, as it were. And being generally professional at the game, they don’t need details of pension funds or bank accounts to help them follow the money. A look at your house or your neighbourhood or your general lifestyle is indication enough. And as the economic downturn festers, so also will this aspect of things grow.

Of course, there is nothing new in any of this. In the France of the 19th and early 20th centuries, there was a phenomenon called the ‘Chauffeurs de la Drôme’ or ‘chauffeurs’, for short. This phenomenon was prompted by the peasant habit, owing to a generally bad experience of banks, of keeping their money hidden, metaphorically, ‘under the mattress’. The ‘chauffeurs’ were bands of outlaws who roamed the countryside preying on the peasants. Having been already ‘burnt’ by the banks, the peasants now found themselves being literally burned over slow fires—the customary ‘chauffeur’ practice—until they revealed where they had hidden their gold.

I don’t at all blame people for seeking a little solace in the situation they find themselves in—a little denial, a little nostalgia, a little make-believe. I suppose it depend on your make up. But sometimes it is better to open the window and let a little fresh air in. Even if only for a little while . . .

Getting to the Root (2) . . .

G. I. Gurdjieff, drawing, it seems, on a much more ancient wisdom, saw the average man as being composed of different independently functioning ‘centers’: there was basically the intellectual center, the emotional center, and, combining the physical and instinctive, an instinctive-moving center. These centers tended in general to be out of balance with each other, with consequent knock-on problems for the health, sanity and stability of the ordinary man. A fundamental aspect of the Gurdjieff system involved reconciling the centers, helping and training them to function like a well-oiled team, and no longer at odds one with the other.

This, of course, is to a certain extent a simplification of what Gurdjieff taught—but it is sufficient for the moment to our purposes here.

In several of the last few mailings, I have suggested that the wellsprings of our actions lie more with the instincts (and, indeed, the emotions too) than with our rational mind or will. In one mailing, I suggested that the existence of ethics demonstrated how it was possible to bring the instincts under conscious control. But as it generally works, this represents a fairly brutal control. A stamping on the instincts rather than a co-operation, much in the way that one would morning-after put a campfire out.

Looking at your typical ‘ethical’ man, the impression one often gets is of a rather dry old stick, who having succeeded in strangling his natural instincts, is rather proud of the fact. Yet an argument can exist that often he is deceiving himself, that rather than being in control of the instincts he is in fact a victim of their deviousness—or the deviousness of at least one of them.

In a recent mailing I mentioned the almost instinctive drive of man’s need to make sense of the world, to create a world vision, whether it be true or false, that will allow him the illusion of being in control of things. Of a comparable power is the drive to ‘belong’—something discussed in an even earlier posting. Those that claim to know about these things—the experts—say that the social instinct in man shares the same neural pathways as are involved in physical pain, so that the urge to belong operates arguably on the same reactive level as that which compels the fool to pull his finger back from the flame.

And lest you think I exaggerate, a recent report, for what it’s worth, in the Daily Telegraph, carried the following: ‘Love really does hurt, according to scientists, who found that breaking up can cause physical pain. Researchers discovered a genetic link between physical pain and social rejection . . .’ (DT, 5/12/2009).

What I am suggesting is that the outward probity of individuals has often less to do with an ethical approach to life than with the compulsive desire to belong. The strength of specific impulses varies from individual to individual—but if in any particular instance the overriding one happens to be the desire to belong, then there is not necessarily any virtue underlying the adoption of an ethical stance. What is involved is simply a roundabout way of satisfying the ruling instinct—much as in the case of the serial masturbator or the compulsive coward.

Now I am not saying that the ethical life is not possible—of course it is. But what I am suggesting is that often what appears to be an ethical life is only a simulacrum of it, much in the way that in nature the, say, harmless scarlet kingsnake is an at-first-glance copy of the venomous coral snake—though perhaps the analogy should be other way round.

The ethical man (if such a creature there be) arrives at his principles through the confluence of his desires, conscience and a perception of the broader social needs. The pseudo-ethical man arrives at his ‘principles’—the principles of the ‘social ethic’, as I described it in an earlier posting—as a consequence of his being inwardly driven to embrace them. And the dangerous thing is that in his panic to belong he tramples ruthlessly underfoot any aspect of his nature that might seem threatening to the paradigm of respectability that he craves. A third option, of course, is that of drawing a cloak about the privacy of one’s ‘sins’—rather like the figure on the Sandeman’s Port bottle—and surmounting it with a pious face.

In the mailing cited immediately above, I also mentioned the Ten Commandments and the sins or tendencies they were logically intended to curb—tendencies that are in themselves not directly instinctive, but are rather expressions of an innate and more basic animal/human drive to individual survival and self-expression. If you look at the list closely, they are all personal sins. If they have a social context at all, it is only to the extent that everybody has a propensity to them. They are expressions purely of individual self-interest, and as such ultimately at war with all other individual self-interests.

Yet there are circumstances where such self-interests can combine together to their mutual advantage. One thinks, for example, of the vast herds of wildebeest etc. that migrate up and down the Serengeti Plain, where the individual’s chance of survival is greatly increased through the sheer mass of numbers involved.

And something similar occurs in human life. In an earlier posting—and I’m sick at this stage of citing earlier postings—I mentioned the human propensity under threat to ‘circle the wagons’. For the fact is that there is an instinctive human reaction when nervous and scared to fold like sheep. Walter Laqueur, in his book, The Terrible Secret, reports a standard response among ghettoized East European Jews to news of massacres and exterminations as ‘“they can’t kill us all”’.

But, of course, they could—or nearly so. And this points to a danger implicit in the operation of any unconscious instinctive mechanism: automatic reactions that historically have aided survival may, through time and the development of technology, turn into their opposite. This is not to say that the idea of safety in numbers is not necessarily a correct one—most times it is; but there are circumstances where it may not be so.

The reason I raise this point is that I think it illustrates the possibility for a fruitful cooperation between the instincts and the intellect, as opposed to a knock-down-and -winner-take-all type of relationship.

Imagine some vague sense of danger that has the effect of setting people nervously milling and gathering together out of instinct; then allow also for an individual who is influenced by the general mood. The immediate unconscious impulse is for him to gather together with the rest. But it is within the power of his rational mind, if it understands the implicit fallibility of the instinctive response, to put up a hand, as it were, to the impulse and say: Wait a while—you may well be right. But there are circumstances where this particular response may be wrong. Let’s just discuss it for a moment . . .

It may turn out that he after all goes with the crowd, it may turn out that he doesn’t. And it may turn out that whatever decision he makes, it will be the wrong one. But the fact is that whatever conclusion he reaches will be as a result of a partnership between the two separate aspects of his nature, the intellectual and the instinctive; and that fact alone may give him the slightest of edges when it comes to deciding on the right course.

We have concentrated here on only one aspect of the instincts—the human tendency to crowd together under threat. But if that one can sometimes be iffy, then it opens up the possibility that under differing circumstances so also may all the instincts. And the knowledge that we cannot automatically depend on the instincts to do the right thing by us in changed situations makes it sensible that we adopt alternative strategies. It allows for the introduction of the intellect as friend, intimate or counselor to the instincts, and not necessarily as enemy—a cooperation in aid of what was after all the fundamental purpose of the instincts: our individual survival and opportunity for self-assertion.

Last week’s Sunday Times, under the headline “Turkish farmers ‘fathered the Irish’”, detailed how genetic research had shown the roots of the Irish race to lie in the geographical area of Turkey.

I remember reading some forty years ago a book (the name now escapes me) by Leonard Cottrell that spoke of an ancient people called the Danae (at least, I think that was the spelling) migrating at some stage from the region of Turkey and seemingly disappearing from history. Immediately, an association sprung to mind with the Tuatha de Danaan.

Some years later I was reading a book (the name of which also escapes me) from the library on Turkey and was struck by the resemblance between certain words of Turkish and certain Irish words that would have had a more or less related meaning. The only one that sticks in my mind now is oglum, apparently the Turkish for ‘young man’.

Of course, there was no proof of anything here, nor would I have been competent to make any claims on the basis of it even if there had been—just two signposts pointing in an interesting direction had anyone in the ethnographic field connected them and been interested in following them up.

Funny enough, the only other thing I remember from the book about Turkey was the description of the area between the Black and Caspian Seas as constituting on of the great marching grounds of history, i.e. a geographical funnel for the march and countermarch of invading armies over thousands of years. The author made the point that over the period of recorded history the region had known nothing more than the odd fifty or so snatched years of peace. And when one pondered the statement, one realized in retrospect the futility of human effort in the face of war upon war upon war.

But equally one also realized, especially given the limited lifespans of previous ages, that it would have been possible for someone to live out their life from cradle to grave in just such a lacuna of peace, and no doubt persuade themselves at the same time that things had changed forever for the better.

[The promised second part of yesterday’s mailing will appear in the next day or two.]

Getting to the Root (I) . . .

‘But the fact is that neurological science has by now shown exhaustively that it is possible to trace the evolution and existence of a thought before we become consciously aware of it.’

I wrote this in the posting before last, and since then someone has challenged me to prove the fact. Now I have not Googled it—but I have no doubt that if you choose to Google it, you will find fairly extensive background to the claim. There have been various studies and various methodologies used in researching the matter, including the tracking of minute blood flows in the brain and sequences of cerebral electronic impulses etc.

But there is a much more, to my mind, elegant indication—I hesitate to use the word ‘proof’—of the reality of what I have been describing. This involves the phenomenon called the post-hypnotic suggestion. Hans J. Eysenck, who in his time was one of the most famous and respected clinical psychologists in the world, describes it in the following terms:

‘This is a very curious phenomenon, which has been known for well over a hundred years. A suggestion is given to a person in the hypnotic trance, telling him that after waking up he will carry out a certain act. The suggestion may be to the effect that he will go out of the room, pick up an umbrella, bring it back and open it up in front of an audience at a given time, say when the clock chimes five, or when the experimenter [hypnotist/psychologist] blows his nose. The subject will in almost every case carry out the suggestion. If asked later why he did this particular thing, he will rationalize his conduct by some kind of semi-reasonable explanation . . .’ (Uses and Abuses of Psychology: H. J. Eysenck, Pelican, 1967).

The important point lies in the section I have emphasized. F.L. Marcuse, another eminent clinical psychologist and contemporary of Eysenck’s, describes this specific aspect of the phenomenon as follows: ‘Spurious reasons (rationalizations) for post-hypnotic acts may often follow as a sequel to the post-hypnotic behaviour, especially if the individual has no memory of the suggestion’s origin. This occurs in all probability because we prefer to think of our behaviour as being the result of fully-conscious motives’ (Hypnosis - Fact and Fiction: F.L. Marcuse, Pelican, 1970).

Now what is being said here is that the person who has been hypnotized into carrying out the behaviour (for handiness sake, we will from here on call him the ‘patient’) will generally come up with some rationally-sounding excuse as to why he has done what he has done. Some rationally sounding gibberish, in other words: for the reason given is a purely an after-the-event concoction, one with absolutely no causal connection to the action carried out.

An interesting point is the suggestion made by Marcuse, above, that the motivation for the post-operative rationalization has to do primarily with shoring up the patient’s sense of self, his belief to the effect that he is a consciously rational being.

Now here I have to make a certain leap—not much of a leap, given the scientific evidence, which anyone interested can look up for themselves—and suggest that the post-hypnotic-suggestion process and its aftermath are not very different from what goes on in the general everyday operation of the human psyche. Logically, it seems to me, that that the whole hypnotic process, and especially the possibility of suggestion implicit in it, is something that taps directly into whatever chain of communication exists normally between the unconscious (or instinctive) mind and the conscious mind.

We are creatures who like certainty, routine, who don’t particularly like surprises. Certainly we don’t like unexplained dissonances in our world. If, say, someone you have been acquainted with suddenly starts behaving towards you in an untoward way, then of course you can ask them about it, and receive an answer or not receive an answer, as the case may be. But if for whatever reason you fail to enquire, this I can guarantee: you will instead trawl and trawl through your memories until you come up with a reason for the other person’s attitude—no matter how objectively silly that ‘reason’ may be. And once you have locked on to that reason, you will experience a sudden satisfaction. You may not be any happier, but at least the logical parameters of your world have been restored.

I hesitate to call it an instinct, for instincts are generally those things that tie us to the animal. Yet that is what it may well be. What I am talking about is a fundamental and all encompassing individual human need to make sense of one’s environment, especially one’s social environment. We demand a clear cause and effect in our world, rather like a child with building blocks. If I do this, then this will follow; if such and such a thing has happened, then it is logically because of this something else that . . . etc. etc.

And over time we build up a whole system of tried and trusted 'certainties' regarding people and things, certainties as fundamental and necessary to our individual selves, and to our view of ourselves, as the axioms of mathematics. We demand and need a stable and calculable view of the world around us, especially the social world, and our place in it, even at the cost often of inventing it. And any collapse in this fabric of logical interconnections that make up the backdrop to our personal experience is likely to have the most terrible effects.

As I say, it is an inexorable human need; perhaps even an instinct. It is akin to a bird building a nest. In detail no nest is quite like any other; but the fact is that all—or most—birds build nests. Equally there is a species of crab that scuttles about the ocean floor, disguising its shell with the detritus of the seabed, so that externally no two crabs look alike, though under the shell they are all still sisters and brothers.

It is a universal and an individual process— this underlying process of personally and unconsciously orienting ourselves within the world as we perceive it. It is only when for whatever reason the framework we have created begins to break down that we are forced into the process of rationalization—of consciously reacting to that breakdown, in a way often analogous to that of a patient in the wake of a post-hypnotic suggestion.

It has often been suggested there is an innate human propensity to ‘curiosity’ underlying all our efforts, scientific and artistic and philosophical, at explaining the world. I would suggest it is less a matter of curiosity and more a matter of a compulsive need to make sense of things, to find some point at which our feet hit at least the illusion of solid ground and we can begin building upwards. We hate mysteries, we hate unknowns, we hate the sense that there may be things that do not fit into the general scheme of our knowledge. Perhaps it is this obsessive facet of our natures that accounts for the perennial popularity, in book, TV and film, of the who-dun-it.

I mentioned earlier how any collapse in the illusions that form our unique individual view of the world can have a terrible effect on the person at the receiving end of it. To illustrate this, two very perceptive movie instances spring to mind:

The first involves Harold Shand (Bob Hoskins) in The Long Good Friday; the other, Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) in Coppola’s The Conversation. In both cases, these men find their assumptions regarding the world and their place in it turned suddenly and menacingly upside down. For each of them it is a watershed moment: one that throws them naked and unprepared into a new reality, while at the same time barring any comforting return to their old way of thinking. The closing scenes of both films are, I would suggest, masterpieces of psychological observation.

[This is the first part of a somewhat longer thread of related discussions. The second part, if anyone’s interested, will appear in the course of the next few days.]