The Ascent of Man (39 page)

The organisation of experience is very far-sighted in man, and is lodged in a third area of human specificity. The
main organisation of the brain is in the frontal lobes and the prefrontal lobes. I am, every man is, a highbrow, an egghead, because that is how his brain goes. By contrast, we know that the Taung skull is not just that of a child that died recently and that we have mistaken for a
fossil, because she still has a rather sloping forehead.

Exactly what do these large frontal lobes do? They may well have several functions, certainly, and yet do one very specific and important thing. They enable you to think of actions in the future, and wait for a reward then. Some beautiful experiments on this delayed response were first done by Walter Hunter round about 1910, and then refined
by Jacobsen in the 1930s. The kind of thing that Hunter did was this: he would take some reward, and he would show it to an animal and then hide it. The results found in the darling of the laboratory, the rat, are typical. If you take a rat and, having shown it the reward, you let it go at once, the rat of course goes to the hidden reward immediately. But if you keep the rat waiting for some
minutes, then it is no longer able to identify where it ought to go for its reward.

Of course, children are quite different. Hunter did the same experiments with children, and you can keep children of five or six waiting for half an hour, perhaps an hour. Hunter had a little girl whom he was trying to keep amused while keeping her waiting, and he talked to her. Finally she said to him, ‘You know,
I think you’re just trying to make me forget’.

The ability to plan actions for which the reward is a long way off is an elaboration of the delayed response, and sociologists call it ‘the postponement of gratification’. It is a central gift that the human brain has to which there is no rudimentary match in animal brains until they become quite sophisticated, well up in the evolutionary scale,
like our cousins the monkeys and the apes. That human development means that we are concerned in our early education actually with the postponement of decisions. Here I am saying something different from the sociologists. We have to put off the decision-making process, in order to accumulate enough knowledge as a preparation for the future. That seems an extraordinary thing to say. But that is what
childhood is about, that is what puberty is about, that is what youth is about.

I want to put my stress on the postponement of
decision
quite dramatically – and I mean the word literally. What is the major drama in the English language? It is
Hamlet
. What is
Hamlet
about? It is a play about a young man – a boy – who is faced with the first great decision of his life. And it is a decision beyond
his reach: to kill the murderer of his father. It is pointless of the Ghost to keep on nudging him and saying, ‘Revenge, Revenge’. The fact is that Hamlet as a youth is simply not mature. Intellectually or emotionally, he is not ripe for the act that he is asked to perform. And the whole play is an endless postponement of his decision while wrestling with himself.

The high point is in the middle
of Act III. Hamlet sees the King at prayer. The stage directions are so uncertain that he may even hear the King at prayer, confessing his crime. And what does Hamlet say? ‘Now might I do it – pat!’ But he does not do it; he is simply not ready for an act of that magnitude in boyhood. So at the end of the play Hamlet is murdered. But the tragedy is not that Hamlet dies; it is that he dies exactly
when he is ready to become a great king.

In man, before the brain is an instrument for action, it has to be an instrument of preparation. For that, quite
specific areas are involved; for example, the frontal lobes have to be undamaged. But, far more deeply, it depends on the long preparation of human childhood.

In scientific terms we are neotenous; that is, we come from the womb still as embryos.
And perhaps that is why our civilisation, our scientific civilisation, adores above all else the symbol of the child, ever since the Renaissance: the Christ child painted by Raphael and re-enacted by Blaise Pascal; the young Mozart and Gauss; the children in Jean Jacques Rousseau and Charles Dickens. It never struck me that other civilisations are different until I sailed south from here out
of California, four thousand miles away to Easter Island. There I was struck by the historical difference.

Every so often some visionary invents a new Utopia: Plato, Sir Thomas More, H. G. Wells. And always the idea is that the heroic image shall last, as Hitler said, for a thousand years. But the heroic images always look like the crude, dead, ancestral faces of the statues on Easter Island
– why, they even look like Mussolini! That is not the essence of the human personality, even in terms of biology. Biologically, a human being is changeable, sensitive, mutable, fitted to many environments, and not static. The real vision of the human being is the child wonder, the Virgin and Child, the Holy Family.

When I was a boy in my teens, I used to walk on Saturday afternoons from the East
End of London to the British Museum, in order to look at the single statue from the Easter Islands which somehow they had not got inside the Museum. So I am fond of these ancient ancestral faces. But in the end, all of them are not worth one child’s dimpled face.

If I was a little carried away in saying that at Easter Island, it was with reason. Think of the investment that evolution has made
in the child’s brain. My brain weighs three pounds, my body weighs fifty times as much as that. But when I was born, my body was a mere appendage to the head; it weighed only five or six times as much as my brain. For most of history, civilisations have crudely ignored that enormous potential. In fact the longest childhood has been that of civilisation, learning to understand that.

For most of
history, children have been asked simply to conform to the image of the adult. We travelled with the Bakhtiari of Persia on their spring migration. They are as near as any surviving, vanishing people can be to the nomad ways of ten thousand years ago. You see it everywhere in such ancient modes of life: the image of the adult shines in the children’s eyes. The girls are little mothers in the making.
The boys are little herdsmen. They even carry themselves like their parents.

History, of course, did not stand still between the nomad and the Renaissance. The ascent of man has never come to a stop. But the ascent of the young, the ascent of the talented, the ascent of the imaginative: that became very halting many times in between.

Of course there were great civilisations. Who am I to belittle
the civilisations of Egypt, of China, of India, even of Europe in the Middle Ages? And yet by one test they all fail: they limit the freedom of the imagination of the young. They are static, and they are minority cultures. Static, because the son does what the father did, and the father what the grandfather did. And minority, because only a tiny fraction of all that talent that mankind produces
is actually
used; learns to read, learns to write, learns another language, and climbs the terribly slow ladder of promotion.

In the Middle Ages the ladder of promotion was through the Church; there was no other way for a clever, poor boy to go up. And at the end of the ladder there is always the image, the icon of the godhead that says, ‘Now you have reached the last commandment: Thou shalt
not question’.

For instance, when Erasmus was left an orphan in 1480, he had to prepare for a career in the Church. The services were as beautiful then as now. Erasmus may himself have taken part in the moving Mass
Cum Giubilate
of the fourteenth century, which I have heard in a church that is even older, San Pietro in Gropina. But the monk’s life was for Erasmus an iron door closed against knowledge.
Only when Erasmus read the classics for himself, in defiance of orders, did the world open for him. ‘A heathen wrote this to a heathen,’ he said, ‘yet it has justice, sanctity, truth. I can hardly refrain from saying “Saint Socrates, pray for me!”’

Erasmus made two lifelong friends, Sir Thomas More in England and Johann Frobenius in Switzerland. From More he got what I got when I first came to
England, the sense of pleasure in the companionship of civilised minds. From Frobenius he got a sense of the power of the printed book. Frobenius and his family were the great printers of the classics in the 1500s, including the classics of medicine. Their edition of the works of Hippocrates is, I think, one of the most beautiful books ever printed, in which the happy passion of the printer sits
on the page as powerful as the knowledge.

What did those three men and their books mean – the works of Hippocrates, More’s
Utopia, The Praise of Folly
by Erasmus? To me, this is the democracy of the intellect; and that is why Erasmus and Frobenius and Sir Thomas More stand in my mind as gigantic landmarks of their time. The democracy of the intellect comes from the printed book, and the problems
that it set from the year 1500 have lasted right down to the student riots of today. What did Sir Thomas More die of? He died because his king thought of him as a wielder of power. And what More wanted to be, what Erasmus wanted to be, what every strong intellect wants to be, is a guardian of integrity.

There is an age-old conflict between intellectual leadership and civil authority. How old,
how bitter, came home to me when I came up from Jericho on the road that Jesus took, and saw the first glimpse of Jerusalem on the skyline as he saw it going to his certain death. Death, because Jesus was then the intellectual and moral leader of his people, but he was facing an establishment in which religion was simply an arm of government. And that is a crisis of choice that leaders have faced
over and over again: Socrates in Athens; Jonathan Swift in Ireland, torn between pity and ambition; Mahatma Gandhi in India; and Albert Einstein, when he refused the presidency of Israel.

I bring in the name of Einstein deliberately because he was a scientist, and the intellectual leadership of the twentieth century rests with scientists. And that poses a grave problem, because science is also
a source of power that walks close to government and that the state wants to harness. But if science allows itself to go that way, the beliefs of the twentieth century will fall to pieces in cynicism. We shall be left without belief, because no beliefs can be built up in this century that are not based on science as the recognition of the uniqueness of man, and a pride in his gifts and works. It
is not the business of science to inherit the earth, but to inherit the moral imagination; because without that man and beliefs and science will perish together.

I must bring that concretely into the present. The man who personifies these issues for me is John von Neumann. He was born in 1903, the
son of a Jewish family in Hungary. If he had been born a hundred years earlier, we would never have heard of him. He would have been doing what his father and grandfather did, making rabbinical comments on dogma.

Instead, he was a child prodigy of mathematics, ‘Johnny’ to the end of his life. In his teens he already wrote mathematical papers. He did the great work on both the subjects for which
he is famous before he was twenty-five.

Both subjects are concerned, I suppose I should say, with play. You must see that in a sense all science, all human thought, is a form of play. Abstract thought is the neoteny of the intellect, by which man is able to continue to carry out activities which have no immediate goal (other animals play only while young) in order to prepare himself for long-term
strategies and plans.

I worked with Johnny von Neumann during the Second World War in England. He first talked to me about his
Theory of Games
in a taxi in London – one of the favourite places in which he liked to talk about mathematics. And I naturally said to him, since I am an enthusiastic chess player, ‘You mean, the theory of games like chess.’ ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘Chess is not a game. Chess
is a well-defined form of computation. You may not be able to work out the answers, but in theory there must be a solution, a right procedure in any position. Now real games’, he said, ‘are not like that at all. Real life is not like that. Real life consists of bluffing, of little tactics of deception, of asking yourself what is the other man going to think I mean to do. And that is what games
are about in my theory.’

And that is what his book is about. It seems very strange to find a book, large and serious, entitled the
Theory of Games and Economic Behavior
, in which there is a chapter called ‘Poker and Bluffing’. How surprising and how forbidding, moreover, to find it covered with equations that look so very pompous. Mathematics is not a pompous activity, least of all in the hands
of extraordinarily fast and penetrating minds like Johnny von Neumann. What is running through the page is a clear intellectual line like a tune, and all the heavy weight of equations is simply the orchestration down in the bass.