"People," I said, "don't want to know about people, nowadays."
"Did they ever?"
"Here and there--by fits and starts. They had a short spell of wanting
to find out about themselves through reason--a couple of centuries
ago. Innumerable spells of trying to figure themselves out through
religions."
"But not now?" She was sarcastic. "Nobody knows anything now?"
"The average college graduate doesn't even know where he is in relation
to other objects. Couldn't point to the ecliptic. Or explain the
changing seasons. Couldn't point toward the sun, at night. Friends of
mine, well-known writers, belong to a society that believes the earth
is flat. There's another buddyship of boobs who think the earth is
hollow and we live inside. Till the government began financing research
for war, America spent twice as much on astrology as on scientific
investigation. The folks would rather, by twice, be fooled than find
out the truth."
"We've made a lot of progress."
"Individuals have learned a lot. The people ignore it. They
are interested in the applications of science--appalled by the
implications. Our civilization is just one more swarm of low cheats.
It won't last because cheats can't. Only inertia sustains the current
shape of it, and that momentum is encountering more friction every
day. A republic of crooked dumbbells can't safely use the instruments
of clever men. People not only don't know how to behave, they don't
even know they are ignorant. Yet in the main, people are thoroughly
satisfied with themselves. In view of sure catastrophes that loom on
every margin toward which they hurry--the very self-satisfaction of
people is the statistical guarantor of their doom. Hence that crack
about pride going before a fall."
"I think people behave rather well, on the whole."
"Sure. They'll even be decent about doomsday. Blame somebody else as
they perish, like flies, but perish heroically. A pity."
"You can't depress me!"
I laughed. "Bear in mind that you brought up that word 'depress.' I'm
not depressed. I've had to learn how to get along in the certainty that
all I was taught to live for is either rubbish or a dream of a future
that lies ages beyond the public expectation. People don't know--won't
know--can't know, in their present frame of mind. Take your little
problem, for example."
Her face changed. Interest replaced antagonism. "So all right. Take my
problem. Kick that around awhile!"
"You believe in evolution?"
"A person can still believe in evolution--and in God!"
"Certainly. Something exists in men which they've given the name
of all their gods. That's fact. And evolution is a fact, too--a
simple reality. A minority of the educated people in our land
have accepted the fact that man's body evolved from the bodies
of other animals. A still smaller per cent realize that man's
mind--personality--spirit--also must have evolved from animals and the
animal equivalent: instinct. The question is, How? Most of such people
believe that it is the supreme function of the conscious human mind to
repress instinct. That's their answer."
"But not yours!"
"I believe it's the function of consciousness to rediscover instinct,
understand it, and pursue it--in the ways that it has to go. That it
does go--people by the billions to the contrary notwithstanding. So
far, people have made only blind efforts in that direction. Unconscious
efforts. Their religions--according to the soundest hypothesis I've
encountered--are the results of such attempts: expressions of animal
instinct, as it appears in men--and in men wholly unaware of what they
are expressing."
"Is that Freud?"
"It's Jung. Freud never got that far. He merely demonstrated that
instinct exists in man. The id--he called it. The raw cravings of the
infant. To Freud--the id was pretty much what sin is to a preacher. A
disgraceful bunch of bestial lusts and impulses. Society--through the
parents, mostly--disciplined the id by disciplining the infant and the
child; this produced the superego--or conscience, according to Freud.
As far as Freud could see, man would always live amidst conflicts set
up between his id and whatever superego, or culture, had been hammered
around it--plus his own common sense, if any. Dismal view."
"And Jung?"
"Well--Freud showed that instinct exists as a basic motivation of
mankind. Not that anybody but a few psychiatrists have ever paid
attention to the discovery. But there it was--the beginning of a
science of psychological evolution of people. Jung asked what instinct
was and how it worked. Jung found out several things Freud only began
to realize. For instance, Jung looked at animals and perceived that
their instincts unfold in them, individually, as they mature."
"You mean, new-born beavers don't start building dams immediately?"
"Exactly. So the id of infancy is only part of instinct. More instinct
appears as the person ages--which is in line with the nature of
instinct in all other living beings. Next, Jung noticed that instinct
in animals, and in primitive people who hardly ever use reason and
logic abstractedly, takes care of the whole life cycle of every
species. So it cannot be viewed as mere lawless, infantile lust. If
it were only that, animals, and primitive men, would tear up each
other and themselves; all life would commit suicide. From the animal
viewpoint--instinct includes whatever animals do that men would call
'good,' 'virtuous,' 'unselfish,' 'self-sacrificing,' and so on. Do you
follow?"
"I think so."
"There are--so to speak--checks and
balances--compensations--counterinstincts. That's the idea embodied
in Chinese philosophy. In Taoism, for example. That's the concept
symbolized by the yin and the yang. It's the idea embodied in Toynbee's
theory of history, too--right up till the present, when his own ego
confuses its own description of instinct with history. At that point,
Toynbee decided that the Church of England--his personal patternization
of instinct--might salvage civilization. Which, of course, is pathetic.
But let's drag this bundle a little bit further before we drop it and
go back to you. If all animals have a proper pattern of instinct--man
has. But man is to some extent conscious--and therefore to some degree
able to separate out a personal identity of himself--an ego--from
the older, more powerful compulsions and countercompulsions of his
instinct. And he has used his consciousness--largely--not to maintain
and enhance the liaison between his ego and the forces that drive him
statistically forever--but to swell up his ego and to conceal from it
those fundamental forces."
"I don't understand that."
"Well--man tries to deny he's an animal. Or to hide the fact. To call
everything that is animal subhuman. To call every success he makes
his own achievement. To call every disaster no fault of his own.
Because he is conscious--he has slowly learned to extend the physical
capacities of every kind of animal--for his own, immediate benefits.
He has telescope-microscope-X-ray eyes. He has atomic energy muscles.
Brighter light at night than the fireflies. He can fly faster than
any bird--speed through the water faster than any fish--store food
for decades when a ruminant or a pelican can store it only for days.
He has even developed quite a few techniques that have no good animal
correlative, though most of man's inventions were made ages before
even apes appeared on the planet. Man has merely learned. But he
tells himself he discovered and invented. It gives him a preposterous
arrogance. And that's largely what he has used consciousness to swell
up."
"We just skip his ideals--and philosophies--?"
"No. But we note that, to extend his physical capacities, he has
used logic and reason. He has sometimes tried to employ them on his
consciousness; but never--except intuitively, till recently--has it
dawned on him that he is usually unconscious of his own real motives.
That his cultures represent guesses--or trial and error. You take a
creature that is governed by instinct--and doesn't realize it--one
who confuses instinct with deity and identifies deity with himself--a
creature who has made logic work in every dimension of the objective
world and is extremely smug about himself in view of the results--and
you have an animal cut off from its own nature and hence from Nature
itself. Modern men can't tell whether anything they think or say or
do is suitable to them, or merely the result of a tradition--as the
semanticists claim--or whether, perhaps, their motives rise in a desire
to hide instinct, to deny the animal, to inflate ego, or what not."
"I'm confused again."
"Put anybody through psychoanalysis--all the way, not just far
enough to scare the wits out of him, and so make him hide his fear
from himself by turning upon and ridiculing psychoanalysis--and that
person will discover there is more instinct in him that he didn't know
about than there is ego that he knew. Awful shock. Then put the same
person through an analysis by a Jungian, and he will get numberless
clues about the images and dreams and the feelings we have which
are intended, by Nature, to make us conscious of the whole of human
instinct _as a pattern_."