I wanted--I always want--to continue that line of explanation. It seems
logical to me that man would have in his head the means to recover a
consciousness of instinct--and to find, in that recovered awareness,
not just the psychological history of the past, as man finds history in
his body, but intimations of the future, which also exist in his body,
as countless extrapolating anthropologists have shown. There must be
some way, I have always thought, to shove aside the immature id and
also the disguising images, taboos, compulsions, and descriptions of
the modern superego, and to see what lies beyond them both--looking
backward and looking forward. Having at long last followed Jung's
inquiry into this process, having grasped his techniques and repeated,
through idioms of my own personality, the same empirical experiences
which Jung has demonstrated in hundreds of other human beings as well
as in societies seen as wholes--I have been afflicted with an urge to
bring the steps to wider attention and understanding.
And I suppose I shall try to do so, sporadically, all my life. But I
realize now the futility of the effort as a "cause."
I am the man who wanted, from childhood's earliest dreams, to know what
men would think in the future. And now that I believe I know I find
that--save for individuals--present men cannot even reach toward such
ideas and concepts. Could they, the better world would be at hand,
and not a mere ignorant wish. It is a simple irony--an operation of
the very law I learned--the law that I imagine all men will finally
discover. And, while it supplies me with hope for my species, it
condemns me to general incomprehensibility.
If you wished for the future--and were given it--you couldn't use it
today. Because it is the future.
Physicists feel this way--and rightly--concerning their urgent,
brilliant, all-but-fruitless efforts to explain ideas in comparatively
familiar and acceptable fields--ideas such as Relativity or the Quantum
Theory. How much more, then, will psychologists feel it! The wide world
of their awareness has as yet not even a basic glossary among people;
they do not yet even use the arithmetic of that science in their daily
lives.
Indeed, the psychiatrist, the practitioner of certain known principles
of human psychology, the physician, is still prone to dodge the central
fact of his science. "Psychology," he says, dogmatically identifying
his opinion with the science, "does not conflict or interfere with
religion. There are areas in which the minister or priest is better
equipped to deal than the psychologist. Psychiatry does not attempt
to change a man's beliefs. And it is not 'all sex'--as is so often
claimed. It is not concerned with sex morals, or any moral law."
So, in his time, the churches made old Galileo lie, too. Made him lie
to live at all.
And so the same churches in our day cause comparably enlightened men to
lie concerning their knowledge--in order that any people may benefit by
it at all. In order, truly, to go on living. It is one more expedient
dishonor of scientists.
For psychology--though a thousand Presbyterian and Roman Catholic
practitioners of its minor branches may not admit it--and though ten
thousand better psychologists lie their faces black--has already put
a period to orthodox religion. The old astronomers did away with the
old cosmology for all the churches. The new investigators of awareness
have done away with the ancient theologies and "moral" systems as
completely--whether it takes the people a generation or a thousand
years to find it out. Psychology is the scientific investigation of
what man calls awareness and of what prompts him that he is unaware
of. As such, it inevitably must analyze and resolve all man's beliefs,
religions, faiths and the mechanisms of them, as well as his politics,
his economics, the motives of his arts, his morals, ethics and sex
manners. Why should anybody be surprised that science, turned finally
upon man's inner self, should disclose different shapes from those
held real by Stone Age man, barbarians, and a few later millenniums of
men who decree that they are Christian but act more viciously than any
beast?
The disavowing psychiatrists, opportunist weaselers or men who do not
see that their science has set philosophy aside, will be historically
remembered. Their acts will prove the shocking superstitiousness
of the twentieth century and--in some cases--represent the public
persecutions, the subjective witchburnings, which show this era to be a
continuum of the Dark Ages.
As I said earlier, a smug people cannot even find the motive for asking
if a science of psychology exists, let alone what it has learned.
And we Americans are probably the most self-satisfied people who
ever appeared. The whole world starves, brawls, perishes around us.
Our own philosophy of progress is leading us to swift, continental
exhaustion--to the resourcelessness of our own progeny. Yet we believe
we are doing right and thinking rightly--a great, good, wonderful,
near-perfect nation.
It will take generations of disaster to crack the hull of such
preposterous self-satisfaction. Only through despair and amidst ruins,
in all likelihood, will men discover that humility which may lead to
the honest assessment of man's vanities, his insane traditions, pompous
faiths, patriotisms, and excesses. But there is not much use talking
about it or trying to explain. Knowledge cannot fend where the people
refuse to know.
"Did you ever raise dogs?" I asked Yvonne.
She had been quietly eating lobster bisque--glancing at me from time to
time while I reflected and while I ate, too. She nodded. "Several."
"Then you've noticed that pups behave in every single way that would,
in people, be called sinful, immoral, and perverse."
"That's the nastiest thing I ever heard in my life! How could animals
be perverted!"
"Did I say they were? I merely said--or tried to--that dogs exhibit all
the same curious activities your Professor Kinsey found abundant in
human behavior."
"They do not!"
I grinned. "Perhaps yours didn't. Perhaps--whenever you saw in your
pups a symptom of any sort of sex activity--you yelled at them. Pulled
them apart. Swatted them with a switch--"
"I never used a thing but rolled newspapers!"
I laughed until she saw why. She flushed. I went on. "You imposed, by
force, your sex manners--Episcopalian?--I thought so--on your dogs. If
you left them alone--as I do mine--you'd see that pups are every bit as
'perverted' as people. Grown dogs, too, sometimes. So are wild animals.
Put a bunch of male monkeys together--without females--"
"I detest monkeys!"
"They won't mind. Anyhow--segregate the males and they'll turn
homosexual. My caustic acquaintance, Dr. Hooton, the anthropologist,
has reported it. He says it is 'disgusting'--a curiously unscientific
term. The monkeys weren't disgusted, after all. Just having fun,
getting relief, being excited."
"What are you trying to prove now?"
I shrugged. "That mammalian sexual behavior has a pattern and men
belong in it."
"What nonsense! Men know what they are doing! Animals don't!"
"Then why was Kinsey able to show that men do just exactly what the
dogs and monkeys and all the other mammals do--in spite of church, law,
state, parents, culture, schools, society, and every other restraint
they can dream up, consciously?"
"Some men--maybe."
"All I have been trying to point out, Yvonne, is that people who don't
know where they are in space--people as ignorant of simple, cultural
fact as the average American college graduate--obviously cannot know
anything much about their real sex natures, since these have been
honestly examined only recently and only by a few men, and since sexual
enlightenment is the great taboo in this era. To that I merely add that
men do behave sexually like mammals, which has been shown, and mammals
do not behave in any fashion resembling the sex mores of this age."
Her gray eyes were bitter. "You think, then, that it would be perfectly
acceptable, if you felt like it, to attack me right here and right now?"
"Yvonne. Even if I didn't have vestiges of your Episcopalian superego,
or its equivalent, and ideas of my own besides--all the other people
here do have your attitude. And I'm not a lunatic."
"You think, though"--her eyes went burningly around the room in search
of effective illustration--"it would be perfectly all right for me to
get a yen for the cashier, and show it, and let the cashier see it,
too! Nobody should mind that--?"
She spoke with such emotion that I leaned forward to see why she'd
selected the cashier. The cashier was a dark-haired girl, a pretty
girl, leaning into the rays of a desk lamp to add up a dinner check.