The Ghost in the Machine (39 page)

 

 

 

The Split

 

 

Fascist propaganda did not take much trouble to harmonise emotion with
reason; it dismissed logical objections to its doctrines as 'destructive
criticism'. Göring's epigram 'When I hear the word
culture
I reach
for my gun' was a frank declaration of war on the intellect: the rider
must obey the horse. The Leninist theory of Scientific Socialism, on
the other hand, was an offspring, in the line of direct descent, of the
Age of Enlightenment. It was an eminently rationalist credo, based on
a materialist conception of history, which derided all emotionalism as
'petit-bourgeois sentimentality'. How is it to be explained that millions
of adherents of this rationalist doctrine -- including progressive
intellectuals all over the world -- accepted the logical absurdities of
the 'Stalin personality cult', the show trials, purges, the alliance
with the Nazis; and that those who lived outside Russia accepted them
voluntarily, in self-imposed discipline, without pressure from Big
Brother? The Stalin regime is a matter of the past, but its lethal rites
are being faithfully repeated in China and elsewhere, meeting with the
same approval of a new generation of well-meaning sympathisers. At the
time of writing, the end of 1966, China is convulsed by another of the
mass purges which are endemic in the system; and I have before me a
recent cutting with the comments by the official New China agency on
a swim which President Mao Tse-tung, 'the radiant sun that lights the
minds of the world's revolutionary people', took in the Yangtze river:

 

His cross-Yangtze swim was a great encouragement to the Chinese
people and revolutionaries throughout the world, and a heavy blow
to imperialism, modern revisionism and the monsters and freaks who
are opposed to socialism and Mao Tse-tung's thought. [18]

 

I have spoken of the paranoid streak that runs through History. Modern
man may be quite willing to admit that such a streak has indeed existed
among the Aztecs or at the time of the witch-burning mania. He is perhaps
less willing to admit that a comparable delusional element was present in
'the doctrine that nearly all mankind, including all the babies who die
unbaptised, are to receive forever tortures more severe than any earthly
expert can contrive to inflict, with the corollary that to watch the
tortures eternally is one of the delights of the blessed'. [19] Yet this
doctrine (the Abominable Fancy, as Dean Farrar called it) was part of the
collective belief-system of the majority of Europeans well to the end of
the seventeenth century, and for many considerably longer. However, even
those who appreciate to its full extent the mental disorder underlying
such fancies are apt to dismiss them as phenomena of the past. It is not
easy to love humanity and yet to admit that the paranoid streak is as
much in evidence in contemporary history as it was in the distant past,
but more devastating in its consequences; and that, as the record shows,
it is not accidental, but endemic -- inherent in man's condition.

 

 

No matter how much the symptoms vary, the pattern of the disorder is
the same: a mentality split between faith and reason, between emotion
and intellect.* Faith in a shared belief-system is based on an act of
emotional commitment; it rejects doubt as something evil; it is a form
of self-transcendence which demands the partial or total surrender of
the critical faculties of the intellect, comparable to the hypnotic state.

 

* Schizophrenia ('split-mindedness') is usually defined as a state of
mental disorder in which there is dissociation between intellectual
and affective processes. Paranoid schizophrenia is characterised by
persistent, systematised delusions.

 

 

Newton wrote not only the
Principia
but also a treatise on the
topography of Hell. Up to this day we all hold beliefs which are not
only incompatible with observable facts, but with facts actually
observed by ourselves. The hot steam of belief and the iceblock
of reasoning are packed together inside our skulls, but as a rule
they do not interact; the steam does not condense and the ice does
not melt. The human mind is basically schizophrenic, split into
two mutually exclusive planes. . . . The Primitive knows that his
idol is a piece of carved wood, and yet he believes in its power to
make rain; and though our beliefs underwent a gradual refinement,
the dualistic pattern of our minds remained basically unchanged. [20]

 

 

Up to the Revival of Learning in the thirteenth century, this dualism
seems to have caused no particular problem, because it was taken for
granted that the intellect played the subordinate role of
ancilla dei
,
the hand-maid of faith. But the situation changed when St. Thomas Aquinas
recognised the 'Light of Reason' as an independent source of knowledge
beside the 'Light of Grace'. Reason was promoted from the status of
a hand-maid to that of the 'bride' of faith. As a bride, she was of
course still bound to obey her spouse; nevertheless she was henceforth
recognised to exist in her own right. And with that, the conflict
became inevitable. From time to time it reached a dramatic peak: in the
burning of Servetius, the Galileo scandal, the clash between Darwinians
and fundamentalists, the stubborn opposition of the Catholic Church to
birth control. In such climactic moments the smouldering conflict is
brought into the open; they provide the split mind with an opportunity to
become conscious of its split, and to overcome it by taking sides. Such
open confrontations, however, are rare; the normal way of living with a
split mind was and is to patch it up with rationalisations and subtle
techniques of pseudo-reasoning. These were obligingly provided at all
times by dialecticians of various brands, from theologians to Marxian
Evangelists. Thus a modus vivendi is achieved, based on self-deception,
perpetuating the delusive streak. This applies of course not only to the
Western world, but to Hindus, Moslems, and militant Buddhists as well;
Asian history has been as bloody, holy, and cruel as ours.

 

 

 

The Comforts of Double-Think

 

 

To recapitulate: without a transcendental belief, each man is a mean
little island. The need for self-transcendence through some form of 'peak
experience' (religious or aesthetic) and/or through social integration
is inherent in man's condition. Transcendental beliefs are derived from
certain ever-recurrent archetypal patterns which evoke instant emotive
responses.* But once they become institutionalised as the collective
property of a group, they degenerate into rigid doctrines which, without
losing their emotive appeal to the true believer, potentially offend
his reasoning faculties. This leads to the split: emotion responds
to the piercing call of the Muezzin, the intellect shrinks from it. To
eliminate the dissonance, various forms of double-think have been designed
at various times -- powerful techniques of self-deception, some crude,
some extremely sophisticated. Secular religions -- political ideologies
too, have their ancient origins in the utopian craving for an ideal
society; but when they crystallise into a movement or party, they can be
distorted to such an extent that the actual policy pursued is the direct
opposite of the professed ideal. The reason why idealistic movements
-- whether religious or secular -- show this apparently inevitable
tendency to degenerate into their own caricatures can be derived from
the peculiarities of the group mind: its tendency towards intellectual
oversimplification combined with emotional arousal, and its quasi-hypnotic
suggestibility by leader-figures or belief-systems.

 

* William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience is still
the classic in this field. A more recent treatment is offered by
Alister Hardy in his The Divine Flame.

 

I can speak of this with some first-hand experience, based on seven years
(1931-8) of membership in the Communist Party during Stalin's terror
regime. In writing about that period, I have described the operations
of the deluded mind in terms of elaborate manceuvrings to defend the
citadel of faith against the hostile incursions of doubt. There are
several concentric rings of defences protecting the fortress. The outer
defences are designed to ward off unpalatable facts. For the simple-minded
this is made easy by official censorship, the banning of all literature
liable to poison the mind; and by implanting a fear of contamination, or
of guilt by association, through contact with suspected heretics. Crude
as these methods are, they quickly produce a blinkered, sectarian outlook
on the world. Avoidance of forbidden information, first imposed from the
outside, soon becomes a habit -- an emotive revulsion against the dirty
packs of lies offered by the enemy. For the majority of believers, this
is quite enough to ensure unswerving loyalty; the more sophisticated are
frequently forced to fall back on the inner defence positions. In 1932-3,
the years of the great famine which followed the forced collectivisation
of the land, I travelled widely in the Soviet Union, writing a book
which was never published. I saw entire villages deserted, railway
stations blocked by crowds of begging families, and the proverbial
starving infants -- but they were quite real, with stick-like arms,
puffed up bellies and cadaverous heads.

 

I reacted to the brutal impact of reality on illusion in a manner
typical of the true believer. I was surprised and bewildered -- but
the elastic shock-absorbers of my Party training began to operate
at once. I had eyes to see, and a mind conditioned to explain away
what they saw. This 'inner censor' is more reliable and effective
than any official censorship. . . . It helped me to overcome my
doubts and to re-arrange my impressions in the desired pattern. I
learnt to classify automatically everything that shocked me as 'the
heritage of the past' and everything I liked as 'the seeds of the
future'. By setting up this automatic sorting machine in his mind,
it was still possible in 1933 for a European to live in Russia
and yet to remain a Communist. All my friends had that automatic
sorting machine in their heads. The Communist mind has perfected the
techniques of self-deception in the same manner as its techniques of
mass propaganda. The inner censor in the mind of the true believer
completes the work of the public censor; his self-discipline is as
tyrannical as the obedience imposed by the regime; he terrorises his
own conscience into submission; he carries his private Iron Curtain
inside his skull, to protect his illusions against the intrusion of
reality. [20a]

 

Behind the curtain there is the magic world of double-think.
'Ugly is
beautiful, false is true, and also conversely.'
This is not Orwell;
it was written, in all seriousness, by the late Professor Suzuki, the
foremost propounder of modern Zen, to illustrate the principle of the
identity of opposites. [21] The perversions of Pop-Zen are based on
juggling with the identity of opposites, the Communist's on juggling
with the dialectics of history, the Schoolman's on a combination of Holy
Scripture with Aristotelian logic. The axioms differ, but the delusional
process follows much the same pattern. Facts and arguments which succeed
in penetrating the outer defences are processed by the dialectical method
until 'false' becomes 'true', tyranny the true democracy, and a herring
a racehorse:

 

Gradually I learnt to distrust my preoccupation with facts, and to
regard the world around me in the light of dialectic interpretation.
It was a satisfactory and indeed blissful state; once you had
assimilated the technique, the so-called facts automatically took on
the proper colouring and fell into their proper place. Both morally
and logically, the Party was infallible: morally, because its aims
were right, that is, in accord with the Dialectic of History, and
these aims justified all means; logically, because the Party was
the vanguard of the proletariat, and the proletariat the embodiment
of the active principle in History. . . . I now lived in a mental
world which was a 'closed system', comparable to the self-contained
universe of the Middle Ages. All my feelings, my attitudes to art,
literature and human relations, became reconditioned and moulded to
the pattern. [22] *
* This was written in 1952. Fifteen years later the scene has shifted,
but the pattern repeats itself: 'According to the Chinese Press,
quoted in the Literary Gazette, Shakespeare's plays are
"fundamentally opposed to socialist realism". . . . As for the
composer Bizet, his opera Carmen is decried as an attempt
"to sell sex and individualism". The trouble with Beethoven's Ninth
Symphony was that it was infused with a concept of "bourgeois
humanist love". Interest in bourgeois classical music can only
"paralyse revolutionary resolution". Chinese critics also discerned
a "revisionist outlook" in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina'. [23]

 

 

The most striking feature of the paranoiac's delusional system is its
inner consistency, and the patient's uncanny persuasiveness in expounding
it. Much the same applies to any 'closed system' of thought. By a
closed system I mean a cognitive matrix, governed by a canon, which
has three main peculiarities. Firstly, it claims to represent a truth
of universal validity, capable of explaining all phenomena, and to have
a cure for all that ails man. In the second place, it is a system which
cannot be refuted by evidence, because all potentially damaging data are
automatically processed and reinterpreted to make them fit the expected
pattern. The processing is done by sophisticated methods of casuistry,
centred on axioms of great emotive power, and indifferent to the rules
of common logic; it is a kind of Wonderland croquet, played with mobile
hoops. In the third place, it is a system which invalidates criticism
by shifting the argument to the subjective motivation of the critic,
and deducing his motivation from the axioms of the system itself. The
orthodox Freudian school in its early stages approximated a closed system:
if you argued that for such and such reasons you doubted the existence
of the so-called castration complex, the Freudian's prompt answer was
that your argument betrayed an unconscious resistance indicating that
you yourself have a castration complex; you were caught in a vicious
circle. Similarly, if you argued with a Stalinist that to make a pact with
Hitler was not a nice thing to do, he would explain that your bourgeois
class-consciousness made you unable to understand the dialectics of
history. And if a paranoiac lets you in on the secret that the moon
is a hollow sphere filled with aphrodisiac vapours which the Martians
have put there to bewitch mankind; and if you object that the theory,
though attractive, is based on insufficient evidence, he will at once
accuse you of being a member of the world conspiracy to suppress truth.