The Ghost in the Machine (34 page)

Appendix I
.

 

 

We must now turn from order to disorder -- to the predicament of man,
and attempt to diagnose its causes.

 

 

 

 

 

Part Three

 

 

DISORDER

 

 

 

XV

 

 

THE PREDICAMENT OF MAN

 

All our Righteousness are as filthy rags.
ISAIAH lxiv

 

 

The postulated polarity of integrative versus self-assertive potentials
in biological and social systems is fundamental to the present theory. It
follows logically from the concept of hierarchic order -- that venerable
truism which seems so self-evident and turns out to be so fertile if we
take the trouble to work out its implications.

 

 

The integrative potential ofa holon makes it tend to behave as a part of
a larger, more complex unit; its self-assertive potential makes it tend
to behave as if it were itself a self-contained, autonomous whole. In
every type of hierarchy that we have discussed, and on every level of
each hierarchy, we have found this polarity reflected in a
coincidentia
oppositorum
. This sometimes manifests itself in apparently paradoxical
phenomena which have caused bitter controversies among biologists,
because it depended on the conditions of the experiment which of the
opposite tendencies would be more in evidence. In embryonic development,
for instance, a cell tissue may show 'regulative' and 'mosaic' properties
at different stages. In social bodies, the dichotomy between co-operation
and competition is all too obvious -- from ambivalent tensions in the
family, to the agonised coexistence of the United Nations. We must now
turn to its paradoxical and profoundly disturbing effects on the emotive
behaviour of the individual.

 

 

 

The Three Dimensions of Emotion

 

 

Emotions are mental states accompanied by intense feeling and involving
bodily changes of a widespread character. They have also been described
as 'over-heated drives'. A conspicuous feature of all emotions is the
feeling of pleasantness or unpleasantness attached to them, usually
called their 'hedonic tone'. Freud thought that pleasure is derived from
'the diminution, lowering, or extinction, of psychic excitation' and
'un-pleasure [
Unlust
, discomfort, as distinct from physical pain]
from an increase of it'. [1]

 

 

This is, of course, true in so far as the satisfaction or frustration of
urgent biological needs is concerned. But it is patently untrue of the
type of experience which we call pleasurable excitements or thrills. The
preliminaries which precede the sexual act certainly cause an 'increase
in the quantity of excitation' and should therefore be unpleasurable,
but the evidence indicates that they are not. There is no satisfactory
answer anywhere in Freud's works to this embarrassingly banal objection.*
In the Freudian system the sexual drive is essentially something
to be
disposed of
-- by consummation or sublimation; pleasure is derived not
from its pursuit, but from getting rid of it.

 

* For a detailed discussion of Freud's attitude to pleasure,
see Schachtel. [2]

 

The Behaviourist school, from Thorndike to Hull, took a similar attitude;
it recognised only one basic type of motivation, and that a negative one:
'drive-reduction' -- i.e. the diminution of tensions derived from
biological needs. In fact, however, research on 'stimulus-deprivation'
(undertaken to study the reaction of space-travellers to long hours in
monotonous environments) has revealed that the organism needs a continuous
flow of stimulation, that its hunger for experience and thirst for
excitation are probably as basic as hunger and thirst themselves are. As
Berlyne has summed it up: 'Human beings and higher animals spend most
of their time in a state of relatively high arousal and . . . expose
themselves to arousing stimulus situations with great eagerness.' [3]
After bread, the circus games always came next on the list.

 

 

In fact,
Unlust
-- discomfort, frustration, etc. -- is not
caused by an increase of excitation as such; it arises when a drive
finds its outlets blocked; or when its intensity is so increased that
the normal outlets are insufficient; or for both reasons. A moderate
amount of over-heating may be experienced as pleasurable excitement
while anticipating or imagining the act of consummation. The physical
discomforts of strenuous sports are readily accepted in the pleasurable
anticipation of the reward which may be nothing more substantial than
a sense of achievement. Frustration changes into relief the moment
it is realised that the target is within reach, that is, long before
the actual process of satisfying the drive has started. Moreover,
there are
vicarious emotions
, derived from partial identification
with another person, or the heroine on the screen, which are satisfied
by
vicarious rewards
; the consummatory act is lived out in fantasy,
in internalised, instead of overt, behaviour. Thus the 'hedonic tone'
depends on several factors, and could be described as a
feedback report
on the progress or otherwise of the drive towards its real, anticipated,
or imaginary target
.

 

 

Emotions can be classified according to their source, i.e., the nature
of the drive which gives rise to them -- hunger, sex, curiosity, care of
the offspring, and so on. A second factor to be taken into account is
their pleasure-unpleasure rating. To use a coarse but helpful analogy,
let us compare our emotional set-up with a tavern, in which there is a
variety of taps, each serving a different kind of brew; these are turned
on and off as the need arises. Then each tap would represent a different
drive
, and the pleasure-rating would be represented by the
rate
of flow
-- which can be nice and smooth, or impeded by air-locks,
or by too much or too little pressure behind it.

 

 

Now we come to a third factor: the degree of toxicity of each brew. The
self-assertive, aggressive-defensive tendency which enters into a
given emotion shall be symbolised by its toxic alcohol content; the
self-transcending tendency by its content of soothing, neutral liquid. We
thus arrive at a three-dimensional view of emotions. The first factor is
the nature of its source, represented by a particular tap; the second its
hedonic tone -- rate of flow; the third is its ratio of self-assertion
to self-transcendence. It is with this third aspect that we shall be
mainly concerned.

 

 

One of the difficulties besetting this subject is that we rarely experience
a pure emotion. The bar-man tends to mix the contents of the taps:
sex may be combined with curiosity, and with virtually any other drive.
The hedonic tone also tends towards ambivalence; anticipation may make
actual discomfort pleasurable, and the unconscious component of the drive
may give rise to feelings which change a plus into a minus sign; the
pain felt by the masochist on one level of awareness may be experienced
as pleasure on another level. But we are concerned with a third type
of ambiguity. Leaving aside the extremes of blind rage at one end, and
mystic trance at the other end of the spectrum, most of our emotional
states show paradoxical combinations of the two basic tendencies.

 

 

Take an instinct-drive like
care for the offspring
, shared by
virtually all mammalians and birds. Whatever the emotions to which this
instinct gives rise in animals (and some of their manifestations are
rather paradoxical), in man they certainly take an often disastrously
ambivalent form. The child is regarded by its parent as its own 'flesh
and blood' -- a biological bond which transcends the frontiers of the
self; at the same time, overprotective mothers and domineering fathers
are classic examples of self-assertiveness.

 

 

If we turn from parental to
sexual love
, we again find both tendencies
present -- on the one hand, impulses towards aggression, domination,
subjugation; on the other, towards empathy and identification. The mixture
varies from rape to platonic worship, according to its degree of toxicity.

 

 

Hunger
is an apparently simple biological drive, which one would
hardly expect to give rise to complex, ambivalent emotions. The teeth are
symbols of aggression; biting, snapping, attacking and wolfing one's food
are single-minded, crude manifestations of self-assertiveness. But there
is another side to the act of feeding, related to magic and primitive
religion. It could be called empathy by ingestion. By partaking of the
flesh of the slain animal, man, or god, an act of transubstantiation
takes place; the virtues and wisdom of the victim are ingested and a
kind of mystic communion is established. The costumes and rituals varied;
but the principle always involved the transfer of some kind of spiritual
substance between god, animal and man, whether the people in question were
primitive Australian savages, highly civilised Mexican Aztecs, or Greeks
at the height of the Dionysian cult. In the most telling version of the
legend, Dionysius is torn to pieces and eaten by the evil Titans, who
in turn are slain by Zeus' thunderbolt; man is born out of their ashes,
heir to their wickedness, but also to the divine flesh. Transmitted
through the Orphic mystery cult, the tradition of partaking of the
torn god's flesh and blood entered in a sublimated and symbolic form
into the rites of Christianity. Even in the sixteenth century, men were
excommunicated from the Lutheran church because they denied the doctrine
of ubiquity -- the physical presence of the blood and body of Christ
in the consecrated host. To the devout, Holy Communion is the supreme
experience of self-transcendence; and no offence is meant by pointing to
the unbroken tradition which connects ingestion with transubstantiation
as a means of breaking down the ego's boundaries.

 

 

Echoes of this ancient communion survive in the various rites of
commensality -- baptismal and funeral meals, the symbolic offering of
bread and salt, the Indian taboo on sharing meals with people of different
caste. Oral eroticism and quaint expressions like 'devouring love', which
occur in most languages, are further reminders that even while eating,
man does not live by bread alone; and that
even the seemingly simplest
act of self-preservation may contain a component of self-transcendence
.

 

 

And vice versa, caring for the sick or the poor, protecting animals
against cruelty, serving on committees, and devoting one's time to
social work, are admirably altruistic pursuits -- and often wonderful
outlets for bossiness and self-assertion, even if unconscious. The family
likeness between hospital matrons and sergeant majors, surgeons and star
performers, do-gooders and hockey-team captains, testifies to the endless
variety of combinations into which the integrative and self-assertive
tendencies may enter.

 

 

To avoid possible confusion, I should point out that according to the
three-dimensional theory of emotions outlined above, self-assertion
and self-transcendence are not specific emotions but tendencies which
enter into all emotions and modify their character according to which
of the two dominates. For the sake of brevity, however, it is sometimes
convenient to talk loosely of 'self-transcending emotions' instead of
'emotions in which the self-transcending tendencies dominate'.

 

 

 

The Perils of Aggression

 

 

To recapitulate: the single individual, considered as a whole, represents
the apex of the organismic hierarchy; considered as a part, he is the
lowest unit of the social hierarchy. On this boundary-line between
physiological and social organisation, the two opposite potentials
which we have encountered on every level manifest themselves in the form
of emotive behaviour. So long as all goes well, the self-assertive and
integrative tendencies of the individual are more or less evenly balanced
in his emotional life; he lives in a kind of dynamic equilibrium with
his family, tribe or society, and also with the universe of values and
beliefs which constitutes his mental environment.

 

 

A certain amount of self-assertiveness, 'rugged individualism',
ambition, competitiveness, is as indispensable in a dynamic society
as the autonomy and self-reliance of its holons is indispensable to
the organism. A well-meaning but woolly ideology, which has become
fashionable on the rebound from the horrors of the last decades, would
proclaim aggressiveness in all its forms as altogether damnable and
evil. Yet without a moderate amount of aggressive individualism there
could be no social or cultural progress. What John Donne has called man's
'holy discontent', is an essential motive force of the social reformer,
the satirist, artist and thinker. We have seen that creative originality
in science or art always has a constructive and a destructive side --
destructive, that is to say, to established conventions of technique,
style, dogma or prejudice. And since science is made by scientists, the
destructive aspect of scientific revolutions must reflect some element of
destructiveness in the scientist's mind, a preparedness to go recklessly
against accepted beliefs. The same, of course, is true of the artist --
even if he is not a 'fauve'. Thus aggression is like arsenic: in small
doses a stimulant, in large doses a poison.

 

 

We are now concerned with the latter, the poisonous aspect of the
self-assertive emotions. Under conditions of stress, an over-excited
organ tends to escape its restraining controls and to assert itself
to the detriment of the whole, or even to monopolise the functions of
the whole. The same happens if the co-ordinating powers of the whole
are so weakened -- by senescence or central injury -- that it is no
longer able to control its parts.* In extreme cases, this can lead to
pathological changes of an irreversible nature, such as malignant growths
with untramelled proliferation of tissues that have escaped from genetic
control. On a less extreme level, practically any organ or function may
get temporarily and partially out of control. In pain, the injured part
tends to monopolise the attention of the whole organism; as a result of
emotional or other stresses, the digestive juices may attack the stomach
walls; in rage and panic, the sympathico-adrenal apparatus takes over
from the higher centres which normally co-ordinate behaviour; and when
sex is aroused, the gonads seem to take over from the brain.