OPUS 21

by Philip Wylie

  "And you think God is what might be called the cause in instinct?"

  "The cause, the pattern, the existence of it in animals and man, the physical laws and forms of the universe, and the instincts of living things that match those laws and forms. What's the difference between the laws of instinct--the great drives of life taken with the opposed drives that balance them and the harmony possible in a person who understands these-and other laws? The attraction and repulsion of electrical energy, for instance? We do not regard them as 'mutually exclusive.' What are you going to say about a question like Schrodinger's? He shows that one fragment of one atom hitting another atom in a gene will change the nature of the resulting being. I'd add that the instincts may change, too. Shrodinger shows you that what we know of energy lies at the heart of what we know of form. You can also see that form lies at the heart of what we know of behavior and of consciousness. When they understand the laws of the energy in atoms--

  they'll probably have a brand-new parallel, like that of other natural laws, for instinctual laws. They may even have a potential new insight into instinct. For how can anybody who notices the perfect instinctual pattern that corresponds with every living form, and who sees these forms evolving in awareness down the aeons, doubt that the universe has purpose or wonder what its purpose is? Unfortunately, in this putrid day and age, new discoveries in many fields are military secrets--so we, the people, won't be told them."

  "You sound extremely bitter about that."

  "Bitter? Yes, I'm bitter, in a way. All my life I've devoted myself to following the inquiry into the nature of Nature. This pursuit has led me--by way of psychology--into finding out a great deal about what is popularly called the nature of God. But now, knowledge at the source is restricted, classified, forbidden, secret--to protect the damned atom bomb. My government, as a security measure, has cut off my inquiry into God, my power to extend my own religion, my equivalent of your faith, my access to truth.

  Perhaps I'd never even manage to persuade anybody that the time has come to connect instinct and energy by theory. But the right that I hold most valuable has been taken from me. And from you. And from everybody--if they stopped to think. Freedom--that precious necessity--is actually freedom for the mind. There is no other pure liberty. All other freedoms stem from intellectual freedom--but all others are qualified by the material, social, political, and spiritual desires of people. What we call liberty in America is the right to know and to change: to extend or limit this liberty for the sake of that advantage or because of that prejudice--and then to learn better and shift the position once again--and so on forever. That is all there is to liberty insofar as it concerns behavior. But when the behavior of the mind is circumscribed, liberty is dead in, its one absolute sense. It is dead today. We live in a midnight imposed by fear--a time like all dark ages. Truth and learning have gone underground. I am forbidden to know any more.

  What I think might be centuries in advance of what common people are thinking. It is still--at least potentially--obsolete, or inadequate, in relation to what other men may know--that I am not allowed by my government to find out. Wouldn't you be bitter--or sad--if your church were shut up by the Congress, if you were forbidden to learn more about your God, and if you were obliged to confine even your thinking to bootlegged guesses?"

  "It's a pretty remote argument," he said.

  "Is it? Remote to destroy the source of freedom?"

  "Would you have us tell the Soviets how to make a bomb?"

  "Is that the question? They know how! You have been told and told and told that they know how and have known since the Smythe Report appeared. And even that's not the point. When it became evident that the people of the United States faced the alternatives of maintaining the freedom of knowledge--at the risk of atomic conflict--or of destroying liberty at the source to gain the dubious advantage of a few years' time--the people chose the phony safety of secrecy for a mere unknowable dozens of months. They were too dumb to see they had sold their birthright."

  "What would you have done?"

  I shrugged. "The hell with it! If we had understood science and if we had believed in freedom we would have been willing, the minute the problem appeared, to fight for both-because they're one. We would not have permitted any bleak tyranny to interfere with the world-wide course of knowledge and the existence of our freedom."

  "You're asking a good deal."

  "I ask nothing. I merely point out that the fear of holocaust has been made permanent by our fearful failure to act. Freedom throttled will be difficult to revive. The habit of intellectual tyranny is already seeping into the pores of a world destined to be more panicky each year until either freedom of knowledge is restored or the far more likely chaos ensues. After chaos will come the regimentation, by opportunists, of a world that will have lost its grip on liberty. We bought a little time at the cost of all the values our ancestors piled up for us in the ages. It is a cheapskate civilization."

  The Reverend Socker Melton suddenly chuckled. He had, in the midst of at least mild anxiety, hit on some straw, some philosophical prop. "Don't take it so hard! You sound as if you felt responsible for all the woes of man!"

  "Don't you?"

  "Good Lord! Certainly not!"

  "You are a man, though."

  "Just one man."

  "Just one. But if you had access to instinct, you might realize that each one, to the degree he is aware, is all men."

  "A cold, distant, impersonal idea, I must say!"

  "The hell it is! The idea I'm putting forward involves being and acting what instinct orders in us--and the constant sense of that process. It relates me to every man--to every king and statesman and politician and movie queen and carpenter and garbage man--to every creature that walks and flies and swims and crawls--and to the sea, the setting sun, the stars. I see them all and I find in them the response that rises from being related to them. I consider them in my cortex--but my God consists also in feeling them. I do not stumble about in schisms and dichotomies. An infinite number of aspects of life which seem antithetical to most people seem merely two manifestations of one awareness to me. You're the kind of fellow, reverend, I bet, who goes around saying, like Will Rogers, that you never met a man you didn't like. I can buy that--and still know, besides, I never met a man I did like altogether, including me. I can say, there was never a moment when I altogether liked myself, or disliked. Warm sentiments pervade my coldest thoughts. Heaven and hell are here in this one room.

  "There--you see--we get back to the original sin, again: the static standards that must be maintained if the ego is to be kept intact. This is evil--that is good; he is saved--

  she is damned; my opinion is right--yours is wrong; my faith makes me perfect and whole--yours, meaning all the other faiths on earth, is imperfect and fragmentary at best.

  For why? Simply because my faith is mine. Me, me, me. I, I, I. That is what happens--

  that is the tragifarce--of taking instinct away from the brain and being entire, and investing the gigantic force of it in the little front lobes. From then on--'I have faith-and I, alone, am right. I, alone, am God:

  "Well, in my book, I am God, padre, and so are you, and so are all the people on the street down there, and so is the heat wave, and so are scorpions and rattlesnakes and botuli bacilli, and so are the intergalactic clouds. One thing. It is not necessary for me to elevate myself above these--to commit original sin by defining that unity in terms of my fatuous self-admiration. I do not have to give my days, my doings and my dreams to the establishment of the general illusion that I am no animal--whether by fasts or feasts, by fish on Friday or by Easter celebrations, by shutting the door when I tend my body, and especially, dominie, I do not have to pretend the procreative urge in me is superior to that same urge in cosmos--by delimiting it, stylizing it, codifying it, and hiding it wherever and whenever it must have expression. Chastity, celibacy, virginity, purity--these are the lowest terms of original sin. These condemn the animal
to a vile psychological and social beastliness by forcing him to pretend he is not the unashamed pure animal that he is."

  "You want free love—promiscuity--no moral ethic--"

  "Nonsense! I want to build our sex behavior around what is learned to be true nature of man--to establish an aesthetic from instinct--not from the instinct-perverting demands of ego and superego."

  "And what would it be?"

  "Loving, for a start."

  He moved impatiently. "Spiritual love--"

  "I mean the same. What spiritual love has man today? What friendliness toward other men? What regard for Nature? Man fears. Man hates. And as to Nature--he is the hostile parasite on the whole of it, and calls himself its conqueror. Let him conquer his ego--and then--if he should prove to be--in some almost unimaginable era of clean passion--capable of as wide a variety of ways of loving as he is capable of simulating and extending the other faculties of other species--he will have to build his aesthetics around that. Love takes two people. If neither is injured, made less, turned hateful, rendered afraid--if the purposes of instinct, become aware and consciously directed, are not finally frustrated--no specific behavior will offend this dim--seen Nature. Shameless awareness lies far nearer to a way for mankind to grow loving than any so-called love of a Jesus which requires a man to think he is impure, vile, inevitably born a sinner, inferior physically to all other living things in Eden's Garden--and this, so he may publicly proclaim himself and secretly imagine himself to be their 'spiritual' superior. Isn't that clear?"

  "Sometimes I follow you--sometimes not."

  "Look at it this way. You say you've chucked out heaven and hell--or hell, anyhow--you modern religionists. I say, you cannot do so. I say--if your God is a god of what you consider pure goodness--you have to have a devil to balance Him. I say that all the saints and holy men and all the simple, human people who have managed, by one religion or another, to get some sense of the integration of their instincts, have done it because the religions did give them a semantic for instinct--a heaven-hell formulation of their nonverbal impulses--a yang-and-yin for Christianity, so to speak--or a Jehovah-Satan for Taoism. Take that away--and you take away all opportunity for the religious--

  the instinctual--experience. You produce a bunch of gassy bounders who--since hellishness is everywhere but since they've discarded hell--confuse the goodness of the species with goods, good health, prosperity, long life--things that may be possible devils for the species. They lose sight of the inwardness of the nongood and see evil as a material fact, entirely. Modern devil-seekers--men like Sheen, like Niebuhr--are closer to the mechanics of human nature than these idiot modem congregations that throw out Satan and his kingdom and as a result are condemned to evil behavior because they have made themselves blind to evil's source. Closer--but still not very damn close."

  "What, then, is your criterion of good and evil?"

  "I could give you dozens. I give you a sample. When you consider what you are doing, or what any man does, or any group of men--ask yourself whether that particular deed will benefit or injure the chances of future generations to evolve toward increased consciousness."

  "Great heavens, man--most preachers wouldn't be able to decide a question like that! Let alone plain folks!"

  "Sure. Did I say that preachers--let alone plain folks--or any handful of contemporary men--knew what they were doing? Or why? Or what anybody else was doing? They don't know. So they go on by instinct--the statistical sweep of impulses that lop off nations as readily as the wind lops trees. I said we could know. I said we weren't trying. Instinct is the immortal property--the urge in behalf of the future. Ants are doing what they can for ants, bees for bees, fish for fish--without much individual hesitation.

  But not men for men. Men today are trying either to get themselves into heaven, or to make a mint, or just to get by, as individuals. The future, to most men, means their own here-or their reward in heaven. To instinct, the future means the future of awareness, and men are but its most conspicuous exponents here and now. If we began to plan life for our progeny--what a world!"

  I was getting sick of the guy. Sick, rather, of myself--my endless efforts to put a simple idea in some form that would perfuse skulls hardened against it-sometimes even by what they imagined to be open-mindedness. "Look. You believe, don't you, that you could sit down and write out a mode of behavior satisfactory for man to the end of time?"

  "I could take a crack at it," he said.

  "Well--I don't. I believe that future men should be left free to make up their minds without consulting any bulls and fiats from me. I get some sense of orientation, a raison d'être, from giving thought to the rights of the species now and to come. Not saving adult souls for present bliss--or spiritual cradle-snatching, either--but forwarding the whole, rolling business of biology on this sin-drenched planet, is the fun--for me."

  "You are totally pessimistic about the present scene, apparently."

  I looked out the window. It was getting on toward sunset. "Excepting for a few physical technologies--are we so different from our human predecessors? Crueler, it may be. And weaker physically, perhaps. Otherwise--not any different. And has there ever been a time in our past history when optimism for even one era or one society was warranted? History says not--the record. It is hardly an encouraging fact."

  "No hope, then? No fringe of lining on the cloud--?"

  "I didn't say that. The record has at least--continued. I hardly expect mankind to be blotted out. I just don't have a very high opinion of man's present works in relation to what he really is, desperately needs, and someday could be. There are compensations. I give you one. We won't be missed."

  He began putting on his dickey. It plastered itself against his sodden undershirt.

  He ran his thick fingers around his collar.

  "You're a hard person, Phil."

  "I am a very gentle guy, Socker. The men of the earth are hard. They have confused another instinct here--and think to be hard is estimable."

  "Somehow, I believe you're all wrong."

  "Of course. So much of what I think is the opposite of what you do. And then--I believe a lot that Jesus said. While you don't believe any of it at all."

  He Hushed. ''I'm not sure I'd want you to talk to my young people."

  "You relieve me. And you've been very decent to listen--yourself."

  "Oh," he said, fairly jovially, now that he was about to be gone, "I listen to them all. Crackpots, nuts, psychiatrists, anybody--"

  "Listen to yourself, once."

  Suddenly he was sore. "Who in hell do you think you are?"

  "Somebody," I answered, "whose religion doesn't insist it knows all about all truth for all people for all time. Somebody who isn't a stuck-up, luxury-struck, fatuous, patronizing jerk in a black vest who carries around God's credit card in his hip pocket and keeps in the collection-plate business by holding smut sessions in the church gymnasium.

  Now, for God's sake, get out of here and let me work."

  He stood at the door. He smiled again. ''I'm sorry for you, Phil. Truly sorry.

  You're a brave man--in a way--and so arrogantly blind."

  "Sure. We all are."

  "Do me one favor?"

  "Do me one. Cross the hall--poke the bell--"

  "Pray."

  "You pray. Wear holes in the sky. Tell God you're coming, soon. And tell Him I am, too, while you're at it. See you there!"

  When he was gone, I felt washed out.

  Why had I bothered to try something that couldn't come off? Didn't I know the work I'd done--the hells I'd gone through to get my Inkling--would never tempt that fat bastard past the first six steps of a million rugged miles?

  Houses on sand

  paper roofs

  putty pillars

  no brains

  What is conscience but fealty to truth?

  What man can have good conscience if his beliefs conceal the smallest truth--or especially if they conceal himself from himself? />
  With honesty toward science--and toward the inner sciences--man and ethic are one.

  Ethos is, indeed, what man has, and is.

  Come off it, Wylie! The serial!

  4

  But I couldn't work, any longer.

  I filled my tub, instead, with the coolest water in the tap.

  You pray.

  He would, too.

  A lugubrious joke uttered itself within me. Father, bring insight to this sincerely mistaken man--

  (Taking the words out of my mouth: you right--me wrong) Or,

  Spare us the ineffable harm of the intellectual, the Antichrist--

  (All who oppose us oppose Jesus--but didn't He say, In my house are many mansions?)

  Prince of Peace!

  (Peace, in a pig's eye.)

  A mighty fortress.

  Onward, Christian soldiers.

  The Son of God Goes Forth to War.

  He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword--All the clayfaces, upturned to the ceramic excellence of the dominie

  Let us pray:

  Father, forgive them--

  The hypocrites!

  Perhaps some--the widow kneeling in the stained-glass effulgence--clutching her mite--

  debating love against appetite--a possibly hungrier widow against bread and her own belly--she might see God there--

  Our organ cost thirty-six thousand dollars and has five keyboards God,

  we migrants, traveling with galaxy, sun, slogging sphere, geological budge of continent, movement of races, American transportation, feet, we

  on our journey-forever in time-space

  are sure as hell, unmistakably, definitely--as the saying goes--

  en route.

  Hence,

  I deem the status quo of ego

  unimaginative.

  Is this a sin?

  A sin to hunger for more Light?