The Modern Mind

by Peter Watson

  But, and here we get to the nub of Lasch’s criticism, he argued that the awareness movement had failed, and failed completely. It failed because, in so many words, it had produced a false consciousness. The emancipation that it supposedly brought about was in fact no emancipation at all, but merely a more sophisticated and more subtle form of control. The new awareness still involved old tricks to keep power and control in the hands of – generally speaking – those who had it before. The feminist movement may have brought about greater freedom for many women, but the cost was a huge rise in one-parent families, overwhelmingly a mother and child, which in turn put greater pressures on women and on the children, in many cases breeding a ‘revulsion’ against close personal relationships that made loving friendships more difficult and promoted a dependence on the self. One-parent families are often narcissistic families. In business, too, greater discussion and worker participation led in most cases only to talking shops, which may have made the management more liked but did not substantially change anything else. ‘The popularisation of therapeutic modes of thought discredits authority, especially in the home and the classroom, while leaving domination uncriticised. Therapeutic forms of social control, by softening or eliminating the adversary relation between subordinates and superiors, make it more and more difficult for citizens to defend themselves against the state or for workers to resist the demands of the corporation. As the ideas of guilt and innocence lose their moral and even legal meaning, those in power no longer enforce their rules by means of the authoritative edict of judges, magistrates, teachers, and preachers. Society no longer expects authorities to articulate a clearly reasoned, elaborately justified code of law and morality; nor does it expect the young to internalise the moral standards of the community. It demands only conformity to the conventions of everyday intercourse, sanctioned by psychiatric definitions of normal behavlour.’51

  Modern (i.e., late 1970s) man, says Lasch, is imprisoned in his self-awareness; he ‘longs for the lost innocence of spontaneous feeling. Unable to express emotion without calculating its effects on others, he doubts the authenticity of its expression in others and therefore derives little comfort from audience reactions to his own performance.’52 Both Lasch and Tom Wolfe therefore concur in finding the awareness movement, the obsession with self, and the therapeutic sensibility not only unsatisfying but largely a sham.

  Roszak, Wolfe, and Lasch all drew attention to the way in which, for many, the private, confessional, anonymous nature of traditional religions was giving way to the public, intimate, narcissistic nature of the awareness movement. Another way of putting this is to say that one set of beliefs, one kind of faith, was giving way to another. Not entirely coincidentally, three books in the early 1970s by well-known historians examined analogous times in the past.

  Described by Christopher Hill as one of the most original books on English history, Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971) showed that although the psychological atmosphere of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England was very different from the California or Paris of the late 1960s and early 1970s, nevertheless the parallels were there to be seen in the overlap between rival systems of belief, the link to societal change and political radicalism.53 Thomas explains that magic in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is to be understood as being on a par with, say, drink and gambling as a way of coping with the high number of uncertainties of life, and in particular with uncertainties in the medical sphere. Organised religion itself used many magical practices to enforce its way of life. Miracles were regularly reported until the Reformation.54 In 1591 John Allyn, an Oxford recusant, was said to possess a quantity of Christ’s blood, ‘which he sold at twenty pounds a drop.’55 One of the reasons why the Reformation succeeded was because sceptics no longer believed in the ‘magic’ surrounding Mass, whereby the Host was turned into the body of Christ and the wine into his blood.56 Thus Protestantism represented itself as a direct attempt to take magic out of religion.

  Sects proliferated because their leaders continued to promote supernatural solutions to earthly problems that the Reformation sternly resisted. (One of these, incidentally, was the interpretation of dreams – Thomas Hill’s Most Pleasaunte Art of the Interpretation of Dreames).57 Many women expected to see their future husband in their sleep. With the outbreak of civil war, the number of people claiming to be the Messiah shot up – William Franklin, a London ropemaker who made this claim, appointed disciples in the role of destroying angel, healing angel, and John the Baptist; his activities attracted ‘multitudes of persons’ before he was forced to recant before Winchester Assizes in 1650.58 Thomas believed that the chaos of the age, helped along by technological advance (in particular gunpowder, the printing press, and the mariner’s compass), was helping to create these sects, the avowed aims of which were only part of the attraction. Satisfaction was achieved by many participants simply by taking part in some symbolic, ritualistic action, irrespective of its purpose.59 There were many names for these magicians – cunning men, wise women, conjurers, sorcerers, witches – offering a variety of services from finding lost goods to healing and fortune-telling. Each had a method that involved an intimidating ritual.60

  But perhaps the strongest parallel was in astrology, which at that time was the only other system that attempted to explain why individuals differed from one another, or to account for physical characteristics, aptitudes, and temperament.61 Even Sir Isaac Newton produced The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended in 1728, which attempted to use astronomical data to reconstruct the otherwise lost chronology of the ancient world, the aim being to explain why various peoples had the character, manners, and laws that they did.62 The appeal of astrology was intended to be intellectual, to provide a coherent and comprehensive system of thought, its other avowed aim being to help men resolve personal problems and to ‘take their own decisions.’63 Again, a number of celebrated figures with an interest in astrology are known to have had sectarian or radical associations – Anabaptists, Ranters, Quakers, and Shakers all included. According to Thomas the existence of rebellious feeling (in the political sense) led to prophecies, wish-fulfilment in effect, and these fuelled supernatural speculation.64 Technological change also had an effect on the idea of progress. This may have arisen from the crafts, where knowledge was cumulative; but it was not until the sixteenth century that the ‘modern’ idea that ‘newest is the best’ established itself, and only then after a protracted battle between ‘ancients’ and ‘moderns.’ It rubbed off with sects, people imagining that, even in religion, newest might be best. For Thomas, magic arises at the weak point of the social structure of the time, whether that be social injustice, physical suffering, or unrequited offences. Ultimately, however, magic was a ‘collection of miscellaneous recipes’ rather than a comprehensive body of doctrine, such as Christianity, which was far more fulfilling overall. The century after the Reformation was a transitional period when magic continued because it offered something for those who found the Protestant notion of self-help too arduous.65 The changes are to be seen as a result of the shifting aspirations of people: as the development of insurance took the threat out of everyday setbacks, and medicine made genuine advances, magic contracted. Today it still clings on in astrology, horoscopes, and fortune-tellers.

  The World Turned Upside Down, published by Christopher Hill in 1972, overlapped with Thomas’s book.66 Hill considers the years in Britain immediately after the civil war, a time when, as in the 1960s and early 1970s, radical political ideas and new religious sects proliferated. Again, without making too much of the parallels, certain similarities may be noted, in particular the left- wing nature of the political ideas; the fact that these new religious notions internalised the spiritual, making God less ‘out there’ or ‘up there,’ more of a personal matter; and thirdly pacifism. Hill even went so far as to use the words ‘counter-culture’ once or twice. It was, he said, a period of ‘glorious flux and intellectual excitement,’ powered by large number
s of ‘masterless men,’ no longer tied to feudal masters – itinerant merchants, peddlers, craftsmen, vagabonds who, beholden to no one, no longer fitted into hierarchical society and therefore provided the backbone of the new sects: Anabaptists, Levellers, Ranters, Quakers, and Muggletonians.67

  Hill discovered several new patterns of thought. One was a belief in the spirit of Christianity – mastering sin – rather than following the letter of the Bible; another was the stirrings of science and a mood of scepticism towards many of the traditional claims of Christianity. There were also many Communist ideas and constitutional criticisms, all of a left-wing kind, as we would recognise them. Property laws were attacked, and squatters appeared (also typical of the 1960s and early 1970s).68 Church services were run along more democratic lines. Members of the congregation were invited to publicly comment on, and criticise, sermons (several ‘riots and tumults’ being the result). With the collapse in traditional beliefs, in hell and heaven in particular, a widespread despair set in, and people talked far more freely than hitherto of suicide (a mortal sin in Catholicism). Many flitted from sect to sect. Hill noted a taste for nakedness and a general attitude to the insane that was a mixture of awe and fear: the mad were routinely regarded as prophets. A number of new schools and universities were started. The change in the status of women was also considerable, as evidenced not only in the higher rate of divorce but in the greater role they had in the sects (compared with the established church), with some sects, like the Quakers, abolishing the vow in the marriage ceremony of the wife to obey the husband, and others, like the Ranters, ceasing to regard sex outside marriage as sinful.69 Indeed, the Ranters’ views at times resembled Marcuse’s: ‘The world exists for man, and all men are equal. There is no after-life: all that matters is here and now…. In the grave there is no remembrance of either sorrow or joy…. Nothing is evil that does not harm our fellow men…. Swearing i’this light, gloriously, and “wanton kisses,” may help to liberate us from the repressive ethic which our masters are trying to impose on us.’70 Hill agreed with Thomas that this was a time when the idea of novelty, originality, ‘ceased to be shocking and became in a sense desirable.’ This was an all-important advance, not only because the acceptance of novelty hastened change, but because it drove man back in on himself, to see ‘what light was inside and how it could be made to shine.’

  A further shift took place in the nineteenth century, and it was this change that was described and analysed by Owen Chadwick in The Secularisation of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century (1975).71 Chadwick divided his book into two. In part 1, ‘The Social Problem,’ he considered the effects of economic liberation, Karl Marx’s materialism, and a general anticlericalism. This ‘unsettlement’ was also the result of new machines, new cities, massive transfers of population. In part 2, ‘The Intellectual Problem,’ he looked at the impact of science on men’s minds, at the effects of new historical (including archaeological) researches and Comtean philosophy, and at the ethics that developed out of these and other changes. Certain trends, he says, are clear, like churchgoing statistics. There was a downward turn in France, Germany, and England in the 1880s; the larger the town, the smaller the proportion of people who attended church on a Sunday; a cheap press enabled more atheistic literature to be published. But Chadwick’s more original point is that as the nineteenth century wore on, the very idea of secularisation itself changed. To begin with it could be described as anticlericalism, and a fairly aggressive anticlericalism at that.72 With the passage of time, however, Christianity, while undoubtedly weaker, adapted to the new forms of knowledge, so that by the end of the century the secular world was in effect a separate realm from that of the faith. There were still areas of life, or experience, like mourning or providence, which were left to religion, but in general the heat and fury had gone out of the debate; the agnostics and atheists went their own way, following Marx, Darwin, or the radical historians; the religious moved in and out of science, accepting what they wished to accept.73 The secular world thought it understood religion, as a phase or stage on the way to a fully secular society, and the religious denied that science and history could ever address the matter of faith. Despite the tide, Chadwick’s book was in fact a chronicle of the tenacious hold that religion had on many people, the need for a spiritual mystery at the heart of existence.

  The works of Galbraith, Bell, Roszak, and Lasch, on the one hand, and of Thomas, Christopher Hill, and Chadwick on the other, complement each other. Two things stand out from the historical studies, as a prerogative for a change of sensibility: new modes of communication (which help change self-awareness), and new forms of knowledge, scientific knowledge especially, which threaten old explanations.

  Galbraith and Bell recognised this. No sooner had their analyses appeared than the most important of their predictions were confirmed. In the spring of 1975, two young men quit their regular positions, one as a computer programmer at Honeywell in Boston, the other as a student at Harvard, and started their own company, writing software for the new generation of small computers that had just been announced. A few months later, in 1976, a young microbiologist in San Francisco was approached by an equally young venture capitalist, and they too launched their own company, this one to synthesise a specific protein from strands of DNA. The first two were called Paul Allen and Bill Gates and they named their company Microsoft. The second two were Herbert Boyer and Robert Swanson, and because neither Boyer & Swanson nor Swanson & Boyer was acceptable, they named their company Genentech. As the last quarter of the century arrived, the new information technology and the new biotechnology were spawned in tandem. The world was about to be turned upside down again.

  34

  GENETIC SAFARI

  In 1973 the Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology was given to three men. Two of them had been on different sides of the Nazi divide in pre-World War II Germany. Karl von Frisch had suffered at the hands of Nazi students because he was never able to prove that he was not one-eighth Jewish. He survived only because he was a world authority on bees at a time when Germany was suffering a virus that threatened its bee population, and badly needed his help to bolster food production. Konrad Lorenz, on the other hand, had fully subscribed to the prevailing Nazi ideology about ‘degeneration’ among the German-Jewish population and willingly taken part in various highly dubious experiments, particularly in Poland. He was captured as a Russian prisoner toward the end of the war and not released until 1948. Subsequently he apologised for his prewar and wartime activities, apologies that were accepted by colleagues, the most important of whom was the third in the trio to share the Nobel Prize in 1973. This was Nikolaas Tinbergen, a Dutchman, who spent the war in a hostage camp in danger of being shot in reprisal for the activities of the Dutch underground. If Tinbergen accepted Lorenz’s apologies, he must have been convinced they were genuine.1 The award of the prize was recognition for a relatively new discipline in which each man had been a founding father: ethology, the study of animal behaviour with a strong comparative element. Ethologists are interested in animal behaviour for what that might reveal about instinct, and what, if anything, separates man from all other forms of life.

  Tinbergen’s classic work, carried out since the war (and after he had moved from Leiden to Oxford), elaborated on Lorenz’s ideas of ‘fixed action patterns’ and ‘innate releasing mechanisms’ (IRMs). Experimenting with the male three-spined stickleback, Tinbergen showed the crucial importance of why at times the fish stood on its head to display its red belly to the female: this stimulated a mating response. Similarly, he showed the significance of the red spot on a herring gull’s bill: it elicited begging from a chick.2 It was later shown that such IRMs were more complicated, but the elegance of Tinbergen’s experiments caught the imagination of scientists and public alike. John Bowlby’s research on maternal attachment drew inspiration from this ethological work, which also helped stimulate a great burst of fieldwork with animals phylogenetically closer to man than the i
nsects, birds, and fish examined by the three Nobel Prize winners. This fieldwork concentrated on mammals and primates.

  Since 1959, when Mary Leakey discovered Zinj, the Leakeys had made several other significant discoveries at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania. The most important of these was that three hominids had existed at the same time – Australopithecus boisei, Homo erectus (Louis now conceded that Zinj was actually an especially large form of Peking Man), and a new find, dating from the early 1960s, which they had named Homo habilis, ‘Handy Man,’ because he was found associated with slightly more advanced stone tools. Mary Leakey, in her scientific volume entitled Olduvai Gorge, analysed 37,000 Olduvai artefacts, including twenty hominid remains, 20,000 animal remains, and many stone tools.3 All this revealed Olduvai as an early, primitive culture with Homo erectus giving way to Homo habilis with more refined but still very primitive tools, and many species of extinct animals (such as hippos).

  An American author and playwright, Robert Ardrey, drew yet more attention to Olduvai, and Africa. In a series of books, African Genesis (1961), The Territorial Imperative (1967), and The Social Contract (1970), Ardrey did much to familiarise the idea that all animals – from lions and baboons to lizards and jackdaws – had territories, which varied in size from a few feet for lizards to a hundred miles for wolf packs, and which they would go to extreme lengths to defend. He also drew attention to the rankings in animal societies and to the idea that there are a wide variety of sexual arrangements, even among primates, which, he thought, effectively demolished Freud’s ideas (‘Freud lived too soon,’ Ardrey wrote). In popularising the idea that man originated in Africa, Ardrey also emphasised his own belief that Homo sapiens is emotionally a wild animal who is domesticating himself only with difficulty. He thought that man was originally an ape of the forest, who was defeated by the other great apes and forced into the bush: Australopithecus robustus, a vegetarian, evolved into A. africanus, a carnivore, who then, as Homo sapiens (or even earlier), evolved the use of tools – for which Ardrey preferred the word weapons. For Ardrey, mankind could only survive and prosper so long as he never forgot he was at heart a wild animal.4 The fieldwork that lay at the heart of Ardrey’s book helped establish the idea that, contrary to the view prevailing before the war, humanity originated not in Asia but in Africa and that, by and large, it emerged only once, somewhere along the Rift Valley, rather than several times in different places. A sense of urgency was added to this reorientation, because ethological research, besides showing that animals could be studied in the wild, also confirmed that in many cases numbers were dwindling. Ethology, therefore, became a contributor to the ecological movement.