Konrad Lorenz, in On Aggression, already insisted on the importance of the ceremonial.
‘The formation of traditional rites’, he wrote, ‘certainly began at the dawn of human culture, just as, at a lower level, the formation of phylogenetic rites established the beginnings of animal social life’.
Every living society presents ‘ritual’ aspects. They constitute one of the preferred fields of ethologists, i.e., specialists in the biology of behaviour. Some essays have been collected by Julian Huxley in a book entitled A Discussion on Ritualization of Behaviour in Animals and Man (Papers presented at a colloquium of the Royal Academy in London).424
Philosopher and scientist, former director of UNESCO, Julian Huxley (1887–1975) was one of the most famous biologists of this time. To him we owe, among other things, the first serious book devoted to the Lysenko affair (Soviet Genetics and World Science),425 a study on the spiritual crisis of the contemporary world (Religion without Revelation),426 and innumerable articles and communications of a scientific nature. He was also one of the pioneers of ethology.
In 1872 Charles Darwin, author of The Origin of Species, devoted an essay to The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals. ‘He realises then’, writes Huxley, ‘that higher animals experience emotions, and that these aspects of subjective consciousness are not simple epiphenomena, but the active elements of an organisation with a unitary structure, combining material or physiological factors with mental or psychological factors’.
In 1901, Edmund Selous indulged in the observation of ‘mutual parades’ in a common bird, the crested grebe. In turn, Huxley, in 1914, studied sexual solicitations, ‘signal-attitudes’, the postures of threat or intimidation among mammals and birds. He observes that certain rites ‘serve to establish an emotional link between the members of the group’.
All this work results in a triple conclusion. The vast majority of animal behaviour patterns have been ritualised. This ritualisation is the culmination of a particular evolutionary process. Finally, there are ‘organs of behaviour’, whose comparative morphology can be studied, exactly like that of the lower members or organs of the small pelvis.
According to Julian Huxley, ritualisation can be defined as ‘the formalisation or adaptive channelling of emotionally motivated behaviour, under the pressure of natural selection’. It is therefore something quite different from mechanistic reactions, or pure reflexes, of which the American behaviourists have made the greatest abuses. This ritualisation fulfils three functions: it improves communication and signalisation, it limits losses or damages at the species level, it reinforces links within the group.
Sexual ‘displays’ respond to the first function. The peacock fans out its feathers. The male crested grebe takes the female’s copulatory position — which leads its partner to take action.
In territorial animals, ‘information’ also bears upon the possession of land. The marking of borders is established by ceremonious flights, as in the woodcock, or by depositing excrement (of which the ‘raised leg’ of the domestic dog is a ‘civilised’ version).
Rites of appeasement or intimidation, substituted for real struggle, enable nature to reduce waste and save lives. The ‘bluff’ of the lizard, the panic of the octopus, bristling fur, shining fangs, grimacing faces: such are the ‘forces of deterrence’ in the animal world. Instinctive aggression is thus limited in its effects.
‘In social predators such as wolves, losses resulting from aggression between members of the same species are almost totally avoided thanks to the special submissive attitudes that the animal adopts in situations of conflict. These attitudes trigger an innate inhibition mechanism in the strongest animal, which finds itself automatically prevented from attacking its adversary.
‘In deer’, Huxley adds, ‘the antlers have a dual function: their arrangement is such that fighting is very rarely fatal or even dangerous, and their allometric growth gives them such prominent dimensions that their sight alone is enough to deter the adversary from engaging in combat’.
In man, the perpetual capacity to learn, historical consciousness, mastery of the environment, make the individual partly free from the constraints of the species. But the choices he must make are only more difficult. A mode of behaviour serves to institutionalise the relationships that one chooses to have with the environment. Ritualisation thus allows one ‘to overcome affective ambivalence’ (Erik H. Erikson). Its consequences then have a much greater scope.
None of the ancient rites have disappeared. They have only adapted to the imperatives of time. Calling the astrologer on the phone has replaced prayers to make rain.
A Range of Activities
A group that is too substantial to be consolidated solely by personal ties relies on a number of abstract principles and social conventions for its coherence and its ‘mental unity’. ‘Rites are an insurance against the danger of dissolution’, writes Professor E. Shills of King’s College, Cambridge. Their role is, in the proper sense, ‘religious’: they re-link (from religere) the members of the group to each other. Huxley, who maintains that ‘the God of religions is dead, whereas religion is immortal’, shows that the sense of the sacred is itself but a form of ritualisation. The same applies to ‘good manners’, which may (wrongly) seem useless, but which are in fact indispensable.
The present world thus provides the spectacle of military rites, from the duel to the Geneva Convention; the rites of prestige, such as Labour Day or the parades of Tianjin Square; of medical rites, ranging from the oath of Hippocrates to the traditional illegibility of scripts; of appeasement rites (the handshake); funerary rites, liturgical rites, parliamentary rites, and so on’.
‘All these rites’, writes Julian Huxley, ‘cover a wide spectrum of activities, from the act of scratching the skull in case of perplexity, or lighting a cigarette when you feel slightly frustrated, to the game of golf that we play to avoid making a difficult decision’.
There are also pathological rites: rites of partial insanity and obsession. Delusions of interpretation and neuroses. And also compulsive rites (Huxley recalls that ‘many people avoid walking on the gaps between the sidewalk slabs’).
Spiders administered LSD begin to weave much more regular webs than normal: ‘Like schizophrenics, they retreat, withdraw from exteroceptive stimuli, and the resulting reduction of conscious perceptions prevents them from adjusting their canvases to the irregularities of the site’. The ‘psychedelic’ effect of the drug would thus cause a disturbance of the rites of integration (inability to communicate within the group).
It is significant that the word ‘rite’, purely religious in origin (the ‘reformed rite’), rapidly assumed a wider application. Marxists attribute a superficial character to ‘ritual’ behaviour, which they regard as the fruit of economic superstructures. Ethology provides a forcible denial to this belief.
‘The iconoclast is mistaken’, exclaims Konrad Lorenz.
‘I do not believe’, he adds, ‘that the system of norms and social rites characteristic of cultures owes very much to the wisdom and imagination of men. It has been said that Moses had forbidden Jews to eat pork because of trichinosis. Assuming this to be true, he nevertheless preferred to trust his disciples’ devotion more than their intelligence — since he pronounced a religious commandment rather than instituting a course of parasitology’.
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Le comportement ritual chez l’homme et chez l’animal, essays published under the direction of Julian Huxley.427 Gallimard, 419 pages.
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Julian Huxley died in London on the 14th of February 1975 at eighty-seven years of age. In the course of his career, he had published major works not only on the genetics and biology of behaviour, but also on the history of religions, morals, and philosophy.
In 1961, during a conference organised by the University of Chicago, he stated: ‘The evolutionary point of view must be global, but it must also be based on quality. This must be the dominant concept of our new belief system. Quality and rich
ness versus quantity and uniformity. (…) A domain where individual variety comes to be particularly encouraged is education. In the majority of educational systems, under the pretext of alleged equality, the variety of gifts and talents are systematically discouraged. Our new system of thought must reject the myth of equality. Human beings are not born equal in gifts and in potentialities, and the progress of humankind is based on the very fact of their inequality. “Free, but unequal”, such ought to be our motto — and the diversity of the heights, not conformity or adaptation to the middle, should be the aim of education’.
Konrad Lorenz, the Moralist
‘In correctly insisting on everyone’s right to equal opportunities’, affirms Konrad Lorenz, ‘we have come, in a spirit of pseudo-democratic confusion, to the conviction that the aptitude for utilising opportunities is also the same for everyone, and that anyone could likewise do anything. In order to deny that innate differences exist between men, it has been suggested that it is possible to condition them all. This, thank God, is not the case’.
The human species is currently going through a period of ‘moulting’ and ‘transformation’. An ancient order is dead. A new order is yet to be born. It is the interregnum: the moment before the regeneration and the ‘turning’ (Umschlag)428 of history.
The aptitude for culture is perhaps threatened the most. Now this aptitude, says Lorenz, is none other than the ‘organ of civilisation’.
‘We find’, he explains, ‘the duality of two antagonistic mechanisms, one of which tends to fix what has been acquired, while the other aims at gradually suppressing what is fixed in order to replace it by a higher reality. Lack of fixity causes the formation of monsters, both in the field of genetic inheritance and the domain of cultural tradition. Lack of change leads to the loss of adaptive power, the death of art as well as culture’. In other words: too much order ossifies, too much disorder destroys.
Conclusion: ‘Each generation must recreate a new equilibrium between the maintenance of tradition and the rupture with the past’.
It is precisely because this mechanism is flawed that Konrad Lorenz, as a moralist, is concerned about the deterioration of the ‘quality of life’.
A Being of Culture
In the book that he published in 1973, Civilized Man’s Eight Deadly Sins (followed by The Reverse of the Mirror at the end of 1975),429 Lorenz enumerates the eight principal ‘mistakes’ that not only threaten our immediate future, but the very existence of our species.
He has this formula: ‘Humanity is, for the moment, a functional whole which has wandered completely astray from its path‘.
Some of these ‘deadly sins’ cover threats that have already been noted by others: overpopulation and (especially) demographic imbalance, pollution and the sacking of natural resources, stress caused by the fear of ‘no longer being in touch’ (alienation), the nuclear threat, and so on. It is not on these dangers that Lorenz insists the most, but on other, less well known threats which appear to him all the more formidable because they correspond to ‘disruptions of a behaviour that may have originally had value for the maintenance of the species’.
In the first place, there is the rupture of the equilibrium between aggressive impulses and traditional inhibitions.
In previous works, Lorenz had established that the aim of aggression, far from being a ‘pathological’ impulse, was the survival of individuals or groups at the expense of a reactive struggle against the environment. In a world where antagonism is the rule, the more an organism is deprived of aggressiveness, the more vulnerable and unfit for life it is.
Aggression, like most instinctive impulses, involves spontaneously triggered, affective emotional reactions (considered ‘animal’). These have their seat in what physiologist Paul MacLean has called our ‘old brain’ (located in the hypothalamus) by contrast with the neocortex, the seat of rational and ‘human’ reactions.
In the normal individual, the impulses that are formed at the level of the paleocortex are generally more or less controlled by the neocortex. In the opposite case, the hypothalamus blocks the cortex, and reason is paralysed: which explains certain characteristics of mass psychology.
Within society, we find the same interaction between order and disorder, rational impulses and affective impulses.
‘As Gehlen rightly said’, remarks Konrad Lorenz, ‘man, by his nature, that is, his phylogenesis, is a being of culture. In other words, his natural impulses and their conscious control, imposed by society, form a unique system in which these two factors are complementary’.
In Natural Law,430 Robert Ardrey wrote: ‘Without order, which only society can create, the vulnerable individual perishes. However, without a certain disorder allowing and favouring the full development of the diversity of its members, society declines and disintegrates into competitions of group selection’.
Usually, between these contradictory tendencies, an equilibrium is established by a phenomenon of internal regulation quite analogous to the principle of retroaction or feedback from cybernetics.
Konrad Lorenz thinks that this equilibrium is broken, and that we are going through ‘oscillations’ of a formidable magnitude.
‘The opinion that rises against a widespread opinion is almost always right’, he observes. ‘But in this confrontation, the opposition adopts exaggerated forms, which it would never have taken if it did not have to compensate for the opposite opinion. If the reigning opinion suddenly collapses, which routinely happens, then the pendulum swings in the opposite direction towards an equally exaggerated position’. Passions and ideologies accentuate this phenomenon, which lead either to dictatorship or anarchy.
It is most likely in this sense that the problem of demography should be appreciated. For ‘it is not only a matter of knowing how many men the Earth can feed, but of what density, and at what proximity, men begin to hate one another’.
What can be done to prevent aggressiveness from taking pathological forms? Lorenz emphasises that it is futile to hope to dispel it by removing the ‘stimulating situations’ in which aggressive behaviour is triggered, or by opposing it with a moral veto: ‘The application of either of these two methods would equate to the desire to eliminate the increasing pressure in a boiler by closing the safety valve’.
It is better to redirect natural aggressiveness towards forms of activity that allow a ‘cathartic discharge’: scientific competitiveness, sport which provokes ‘militant enthusiasm’, and so on.
The ‘Fatal Tepidness’ of the Modern World
Another danger: the deviation of the innate sentiment that causes every normally constituted individual to protect the weakest and to revolt against injustice.
In the natural state, this sentiment also contributes to the survival of the group. In an evolved society, where natural selection no longer plays a role, it can also cause its disappearance.
In 1940, Konrad Lorenz wrote: ‘In the prehistoric period of humanity, selection for hardness, heroism, social utility, etc., was solely achieved by hostile external factors. Today, this role must be taken up by a human organisation’ (Zeitschrift für angewandte Psychologie und Charakterkunde).431
In a 1972 interview with Friedrich Hacker (Aggression and Violence in the Modern World),432 he further remarked: ‘The interests of the species are unfortunately opposed to humanitarian requirements’.
In 1973, he adds: ‘The feeling of humanity which we ought have for each person in particular is opposed to the interests of the human species as a whole. The compassion we feel towards the antisocial among us, whose inferiority perhaps stems from irreversible wounds dating from early childhood, or from hereditary defects, prevents us from protecting normal beings. Moreover, we can no longer use the qualifications “superior” or “inferior” when speaking of men, without being suspected of pleading for the gas chamber’.
Example: ‘In his lectures at the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Hacker cited the case of a young murderer subjected to psychotherapeutic treatment
, considered cured, and then released. He immediately committed another murder, followed by three others. It wasn’t until the criminal killed his fourth victim that a society imbued with democratic and behaviourist humanitarian principles admitted that he represented a public danger’.
‘The conviction, elevated to the rank of religion’, continues to Lorenz, ‘that all men are born equal, and that the defects and flaws of the criminal are due to a neglect in education, undermines and annihilates the natural sense of good and evil, first of all in the culprit, who feels sorry for himself and is considered a victim of society (…) The individual who is deficient in the affective and social domain is an unfortunate, an unhealthy person worthy of compassion. But deficiency is evil in itself’.
Lorenz, then draws attention to the ‘fatal tepidity’ (Wärmetod, the ‘warm death’) which reigns in the present world.
In nature, ‘each learning of a behaviour that is confirmed by a reward pushes the organism to accommodate itself to painful situations in order to obtain pleasure. In other words, the organism accepts without flinching situations which, prior to training, would have provoked reactions of aversion and inhibition. A wolf or a dog, for example, in order to catch an enticing prey, does many things that they would normally loathe. They run through thorns, leap into cold water, and expose themselves to dangers which they notoriously dread.
In short, the more one wants something, the more one is willing to pay to obtain it. This balance between ‘pleasure’ and ‘displeasure’ is the basis of every economy.
Over the centuries, men too have given all the more value to things that they had more difficulty procuring. ‘Harsh weeks, pleasant holidays’, said Goethe. This time has passed. ‘Due to the progressive domination of its environment, modern man has, by dint of circumstance, displaced the pleasure-displeasure balance in favour of a growing hypersensitivity to any painful situation, to the point where his capacity for enjoyment is blunted’.
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