There are, then, two basic kinds of exploration: panic exploration and security exploration. It is the same for the human animal. During the chaos and upheaval of war, a human community may be driven to inventiveness to surmount the disasters it faces. Alternatively, a successful, thriving community may be highly exploratory, striking out from its strong position of increased security. It is the community that is just managing to scrape along that will show little or no urge to explore.
Looking back on the history of our species it is easy to see how these two types of exploration have helped human progress to stumble on its way. When our early ancestors left the comforts of a fruit-picking, forest existence and took to open country, they were in serious difficulties. The extreme demands of the new environment forced them to be exploratory or die. Only when they had evolved into efficient, co-operative hunters did the pressure ease a little. They were at the ‘scraping by’ stage again. The result was that this condition lasted for a very long time, thousands upon thousands of years, with advances in technology occurring at an incredibly slow rate, simple developments in such things as implements and weapons, for example, taking hundreds of years to take a small new step.
Eventually, when primitive agriculture slowly emerged and the environment came more under our ancestors’ control, the situation improved. Where this was particularly successful, urbanization developed and a threshold was passed into a realm of new and dramatically increased social security. With it came a rush of the other kind of exploration— security exploration. This, in its turn, led to more and more startling developments, to more security and more exploration.
Unfortunately this was not the whole story. Man’s rise to civilization would be a much happier tale if only it had been. But, sadly, events moved too fast and, as we have seen throughout this book, the pendulum of success and disaster began to swing crazily back and forth. Because we unleashed so much more than we were biologically equipped to cope with, our magnificent new social developments and complexities were as often abused as they were used. Our inability to deal rationally with the super-status and superpower that our super-tribal condition thrust upon us, led to new, more sudden, aijd more challenging disasters than we had ever known. No sooner had a super-tribe settled down to a phase of great prosperity, with security exploration operating at full intensity, and wonderful new forms of creativity blossoming out, than something went wrong. Invaders, tyrants and aggressors smashed the delicate machinery of the intricate new social structures, and panic exploration was back on a major scale. For each new invention of construction, there was another of destruction, back and forth, back and forth, for ten thousand years, and it still goes on today. It is the horror of atomic weapons that has given us the glory of atomic energy, and it is the glory of biological research that may yet give us the horror of biological warfare.
In between these two extremes there are still millions of people living the simple lives of primitive agriculturalists, tilling the soil much as our early ancestors did. In a few areas primitive hunters survive. Because they have stayed at the ‘scraping by’ stage, they are typically non-exploratory.
Like the left-over great apes— the chimpanzees, the gorillas and the orang-utans — they have the potential for inventiveness and exploration, but it is not called forth to any appreciable extent. Experiments with chimpanzees in captivity have revealed how quickly they can be encouraged to develop their exploratory potential: they can operate machines, paint pictures and solve all kinds of experimental puzzles; but in the wild state they do not even learn to build crude shelters to keep out the rain. For them, and the simpler human communities, the scraping-by existence—not too difficult and not too easy—has blunted their exploratory urges. For the rest of us, one extreme follows the other and we constantly explore from either an excess of panic or an excess of security.
From time to time there are those among us who cast an envious backward glance at the ‘simple life’ of primitive communities and start to wish we had never left our primeval Forest of Eden. In some cases, serious attempts have been made to convert such thoughts into actions. Much as we may sympathize with these projects, it must be realized that they are fraught with difficulties. The inherent artificiality of pseudo-primitive drop-out communities, such as those that have appeared in North America and elsewhere recently, is a primary weakness. They are, after all, composed of individuals who have tasted the excitements of super-tribal life as well as its horrors. They have been conditioned throughout their lives to a high level of mental activity. In a sense they have lost their social innocence, and the loss of innocence is an irreversible process.
At first, all may go well for the neo-primitive, but this is deceptive. What happens is that the initial return to the simple way of life throws up an enormous challenge to the ex-inmate of the human zoo. His new role may be simple in theory, but in practice it is full of fascinatingly novel problems. The establishment of a pseudo-primitive community by a group of ex-city-dwellers becomes, in fact, a major exploratory act. This, rather than the official return to pure simplicity, is what makes the project so satisfying, as any Boy Scout will testify. But what happens once the initial challenge has been met and overcome? Whether it is a remote, rural or cave-dwelling group, or whether it is a self-insulated, pseudo-primitive group set up in an isolated pocket inside the city itself, the answer is the same. Disillusionment sets in, as the monotony begins to assail the brains that have been irreversibly trained to the higher, super-tribal level. Either the group collapses, or it starts to stir itself into action. If the new activity is successful, then the community will soon find itself becoming organized and expanding. In no time at all it will be back in the super-tribal rat-race.
It is difficult enough in the twentieth century to remain as a genuine primitive community, like the Eskimoes or aborigines, let alone a pseudo-primitive one. Even the traditionally resistant European gypsies are gradually succumbing to the relentless spread of the human zoo condition.
The tragedy for those who wish to solve their problems by a return to the simple life is that, even if they somehow contrived to ‘de-train’ their highly activated brains, such individuals would still remain extremely vulnerable in their small rebel communities. The human zoo would find it hard to leave them alone. They would either be exploited as a tourist attraction, as so many of the genuine primitives are today, or, if they become an irritant, they would be attacked and disbanded. There is no escape from the super-tribal monster and we may as well make the best of it.
If we are condemned to a complex social existence, as it seems we are, then the trick is to ensure that we make use of it, rather than let it make use of us. If we are going to be forced to pursue the Stimulus Struggle, then the important thing is to select the most rewarding method of approach. As I have already indicated, the best way to do this is to give priority to the inventive, exploratory principle, not inadvertently like the drop-outs, who find themselves all too soon in an exploratory blind alley, but deliberately, gearing our inventiveness to the mainstream of our super-tribal existence.
Given the fact that each super-tribesman is free to choose which way he pursues the Stimulus Struggle, it remains to ask why he does not select the inventive solution more frequently. With the enormous exploratory potential of his brain lying idle and with his experience of inventive playfulness in childhood behind him, he should in theory favour this solution above all others. In any thriving super-tribal city all the citizens should be potential ‘inventors’. Why, then, do so few of them indulge in active creativity, while the others are satisfied to enjoy their inventions second-hand, watching them on television, or are content to play simple games and sports with strictly limited possibilities for inventiveness? They all appear to have the necessary background for becoming childlike adults. The super-tribe, like a gigantic parent, protects them and cares for them, so why is it that they do not all develop bigger and better childlike curiosity?
Part of the answer is that
children are subordinate to adults. Inevitably, dominant animals try to control the behaviour of their subordinates. Much as adults may love their children, they cannot help seeing them as a growing threat to their dominance. They know that with ultimate senility they will have to give way to them, but they do everything they can to postpone the evil day. There is therefore a strong tendency to suppress inventiveness in members of the community younger than oneself. An appreciation of the value of their ‘fresh eyes’ and their new creativeness works against this, but it is an uphill struggle. By the time the new generation has matured to the point where its members could be wildly inventive, childlike adults, they are already burdened with a heavy sense of conformity. Struggling against this as hard as they can, they in turn are then faced with the threat of another younger generation coming up beneath them, and the suppressive process repeats itself. Only those rare individuals who experience an unusual childhood, from this point of view, will be able to achieve a level of great creativity in adult life. How unusual does such a childhood have to be? It either has to be so suppressive that the growing child revolts against the traditions of its elders in a big way (many of our greatest creative talents were so-called delinquent children), or it has to be so un-suppressive that the heavy hand of conformity rests only lightly on its shoulder. If a child is strongly punished for its inventiveness (which, after all, is essentially rebellious in nature), it may spend the rest of its adult life making up for lost time. If a child is strongly rewarded for its inventiveness, then it may never lose it, no matter what pressures are brought to bear on it in later years. Both types can make a great impact in adult society, but the second will probably suffer less from obsessive limitations in his creative acts.
The vast majority of children will, of course, receive a more balanced mixture of punishment and reward for their inventiveness and will emerge into adult life with personalities that are both moderately creative and moderately conformist. They will become the adult-adults. They will tend to read the newspapers rather than make the news that goes into them. Their attitude to the childlike adults will be ambivalent; on the one hand they will applaud them for providing the much-needed sources of novelty, but on the other they will envy them. The creative talent will therefore find himself alternately praised and damned by society in a bewildering way, and will be constantly in doubt about his acceptance by the rest of the community.
Modem education has made great strides in encouraging inventiveness, but it still has a long way to go before it can completely rid itself of the urge to suppress creativity. It is inevitable that bright young students will be seen as a threat by older academics, and it requires great self-control for teachers to overcome this. The system is designed to make it easy, but their nature, as dominant males, is not. Under the circumstances it is remarkable that they manage to control themselves as well as they do. There is a difference here between the school level and the university level. In most schools the dominance of the master over his pupils is strongly and directly expressed, both socially and intellectually. He uses his greater experience to conquer their greater inventiveness. His brain has probably become more rigidified than theirs, but he masks this weakness by imparting large quantities of ‘hard’ facts. There is no argument, only instruction. (The situation is improving and there are, of course, exceptions, but this still applies as a general rule.)
At the university level the scene changes. There are many more facts to be handed down, but they are not quite so ‘hard’. The student is now expected to question them and assess them, and eventually to invent new ideas of his own. But at both stages, the school and the university, there is something else going on beneath the surface, something that has little to do with the encouragement of intellectual expansion, but a great deal to do with the indoctrination of super-tribal identity. To understand this we must look at what happened in simpler tribal societies.
In many cultures children at puberty have been subjected to impressive initiation ceremonies. They are taken away from their parents and kept in groups. They are then forced to undergo severe ordeals, often involving torture or mutilation. Operations are performed on their genitals, or their bodies may be scarred, burned, whipped, or stung with ants. At the same time they are instructed in the secrets of the tribe. When the rituals are over, they are accepted as adult members of the society.
Before we see how this relates to the rituals of modern education, it is important to ask what value these seemingly damaging activities have. In the first place they isolate the maturing child from its parents. Previously it could always run to them for comfort when in pain. Now, for the first time, the child must endure pain and fear in a situation in which its parents cannot be called upon for assistance. (The initiation ceremonies are usually performed in strict privacy by the tribal elders and the rest of the tribe is excluded.) This helps to smash the child’s sense of dependence on its parents and shift its allegiance away from the family home and on to the tribal community as a whole. The fact that at the same time he is allowed to share the adult tribal secrets strengthens the process by giving a fabric to his new tribal identity. Secondly, the violence of the emotional experience accompanying his instruction helps to bum the details of the tribal teachings into his brain. Just as we find it impossible to forget the details of a traumatic experience, such as a motor accident, so the tribal initiate will remember to his dying day the secrets that were imparted to him on that frightening occasion. The initiation is, in a sense, contrived traumatic teaching. Thirdly, it makes it absolutely clear to the sub-adult that, although he is now joining the ranks of his elders, he is doing so very much in the role of a subordinate. The intense power which they exercised over him will also be vividly remembered.
Modem schools and universities may not sting their students with ants but, in many ways, the educational system today shows striking similarities to the earlier tribal initiation procedures. To start with, the children are taken away from their parents and put in the hands of super-tribal elders— the academics— who instruct them in the ‘secrets’ of the super-tribe. In many cultures they are still made to wear a separate uniform, to set them apart and strengthen their new allegiance. They may also be encouraged to indulge in certain rituals, such as singing school or college songs. The severe ordeals of the tribal initiation ceremony no longer leave physical scars. (German duelling scars never really caught on.) But physical ordeals of a less vicious sort have persisted almost everywhere until very recently, at least at the school level, in the form of buttock-caning. Like the genital mutilations of the tribal ceremonies, this form of punishment has always had a sexual flavour and cannot be dissociated from the phenomenon of Status Sex.
In the absence of a more violent form of ordeal stemming from the teachers, the older pupils frequently take over the role of ‘tribal elders’ and administer their own tortures on ‘new boys’. These vary from place to place. At one school, for instance, newcomers are ‘grassed’, having bundles of grasses stuffed inside their clothing. At another they are ‘stoned’, being bent over a large stone and spanked. At another they are forced to run down a long corridor lined with older pupils who kick them as they pass. At yet another they are ‘bumped’, being held by arms and legs and banged on the ground as many times as their age in years. Alternatively on the day a new pupil wears his first school uniform, he may have his flesh pinched once for each new article of clothing, by each senior pupil. In rare cases, the ordeal is much more elaborate and may almost approach a full-scale tribal initiation ceremony. Even today, occasional deaths are reported as a result of these activities.
Unlike the primitive tribal situation, there is nothing to stop a tortured boy from complaining to his parents, but this hardly ever happens because it would bring shame to the boy in question. Many parents are not even aware of the trials their children are undergoing. The ancient practice of alienating a child from its family home has already begun to work its strange magic.
Although thèse uno
fficial initiation rites have persisted here and there, the official punishment of caning by teachers has recently lost ground, due to the pressure of public opinion and the revised ideas of certain teachers. But if official ordeal by physical means is disappearing, there always remains the alternative of the mental ordeal. Throughout virtually the whole of the modern educational system there now exists one powerful and impressive form of super-tribal initiation ceremony, which goes under the revealing name of ‘examinations’. These are conducted in the heavy atmosphere of high ritual, with the pupils cut off from all outside assistance. Just as in the tribal ritual, no one can help them. They must suffer on their own. At all other times in their lives they can make use of books of reference, or discussions over difficult points, when they are applying their intelligence to a problem, but not during the private rituals of the dreaded examinations.
The ordeal is further intensified by setting a strict time limit and by crowding all the different examinations together in the short space of a few days or weeks. The overall effect of these measures is to create a considerable amount of mental torment, again recalling the mood of the more primitive initiation ceremonies of simple tribes.
When the final exams are over, at university level, the students who have ‘passed the test’ become qualified as special members of the adult section of the super-tribe. They don elaborate display robes and take part in a further ritual called the degree ceremony, in the presence of the academic elders wearing their even more impressive and dramatic robes.
The Human Zoo: A Zoologist's Study of the Urban Animal Page 22
