"The use of religions, in effect, has been to conceal and deny the
animal nature of man. That is perverse. Man eats--a simple, animal
activity. How many religious rituals--turned into social functions in
how many cases--could you list, all of which were designed to give a
nonanimal cast to eating? Hundreds?"
"I suppose you mean feasts and fasts and such?"
"Food taboos, food rituals, food symbols--like your bread and
wine--religious dietary laws. Sure. Man--like the beasts--must eat.
But he has tried ten thousand tricks to make it seem nonanimal, or
'godlike.' Now. Consider sex--another human function which is exactly
like its animal counterpart. Here there is less exigency than in
eating--more time-lag for ritual and style. Man went passionately into
the business of developing systems which would conceal the animal and
instinctual nature of sexuality and lend to it the superior qualities
of his various gods, religions, his self-glorifying self-images."
"I think I begin to see--"
"Exactly. By now--we dwell amid a species that is twenty or thirty
or forty thousand years away from the contemplation of its instincts
as germane to animal instincts. The distance in time is matched by
countless steps in illusion. It is hardly possible for a man to think
of himself as an animal in the true sense, any more. It is all but
impossible for him to feel, to experience, his animal fact. And--since
I believe instinct seen locally in time and space is as 'good' as it is
'evil'--and that, in sum, it is _all good_--I find this long attempt to
translate natural instincts into ridiculous and unnatural dogmas and
god-images--is a very sad mistake. A very great sin--the 'original' sin
of assuming a superiority toward terrestrial, psychological, and cosmic
Nature.
"Each new religion may be--usually is--an 'improvement' in some
way upon its discarded or waning predecessor. But each is, always,
founded on the premise that man is 'above' that which works within
him and occurs around him. So, in the end, even though intelligent
religious premises may benefit humanity in many ways--for instance,
the search for truth inspired by Jesus, led haltingly to the birth
of the scientific method--the fundamental premise is _always false_
and the benefits are finally fouled by the basic blunder. Instinct
frustrated by the delusions of Believers of all sorts _has_ to go into
autonomous operation on the multitudes, simply because they deny and
repress instinct until this society or that--and all of them--fails to
meet their instinctual needs. And instinct, acting in violent fashion,
upon such blind, willful repudiators of necessary process--always
brings calamity. It _has_ to wipe out or at least reduce each new
aggregate of the self-deceived. So another civilization topples. Then
another creed arises and we begin again. Until we get straightened
out about _what instinct is_--get, so to speak, a real picture of our
inner selves, of what it is in us that we have made into all gods and
theology--a picture congruent with such truths as we _can_ see and
_can_ admit--we're bound to operate in this roller-coaster fashion."
"In other words, your Original Sin is the church itself!" He sounded
disturbed.
"It's--any ism. Any person or group with sure-fire dogmas that you have
to accept on faith--as offering ends justifying physical means and
psychological means that are illogical, unethical, unreasonable, that
fail to take into account the innate facts of our animal instinct, that
exclude valid opposites to their tenets, and so on."
"And you think God is what might be called the _cause_ in instinct?"
"The cause, the pattern, the existence of it in animals and man,
the physical laws and forms of the universe, and the instincts of
living things that match those laws and forms. What's the difference
between the laws of instinct--the great drives of life taken with
the opposed drives that balance them and the harmony possible in a
person who understands these--and other laws? The attraction and
repulsion of electrical energy, for instance? We do not regard _them_
as 'mutually exclusive.' What are you going to say about a question
like Schrodinger's? He shows that one fragment of one atom hitting
another atom in a gene will change the nature of the resulting being.
I'd add that the instincts may change, too. Schrodinger shows you that
what we know of energy lies at the heart of what we know of form. You
can also see that form lies at the heart of what we know of behavior
and of consciousness. When they understand the laws of the energy in
atoms--they'll probably have a brand-new parallel, like that of other
natural laws, for instinctual laws. They may even have a potential new
insight into instinct. For how can anybody who notices the perfect
instinctual pattern that corresponds with every living form, and who
sees these forms evolving in awareness down the aeons, doubt that the
universe has purpose or wonder what its purpose is? Unfortunately, in
this putrid day and age, new discoveries in many fields are military
secrets--so we, the people, won't be told them."
"You sound extremely bitter about that."
"Bitter? Yes, I'm bitter, in a way. All my life I've devoted myself
to following the inquiry into the nature of Nature. This pursuit has
led me--by way of psychology--into finding out a great deal about
what is popularly called the nature of God. But now, knowledge at
the source is restricted, classified, forbidden, secret--to protect
the damned atom bomb. My government, as a security measure, has cut
off my inquiry into God, my power to extend my own religion, my
equivalent of your faith, my access to truth. Perhaps I'd never even
manage to persuade anybody that the time has come to connect instinct
and energy by theory. But the _right_ that I hold most valuable has
been taken from me. And from you. And from everybody--if they stopped
to think. Freedom--that precious necessity--is _actually_ freedom
for the mind. There is no other pure liberty. All other freedoms
stem from intellectual freedom--but all others are qualified by the
material, social, political, and spiritual desires of people. What we
call liberty in America is the right to know and to change: to extend
or limit this liberty for the sake of that advantage or because of
that prejudice--and then to learn better and shift the position once
again--and so on forever. That is all there is to liberty insofar as it
concerns behavior. But when the behavior of the mind is circumscribed,
liberty is dead in its one absolute sense. It is dead today. We live
in a midnight imposed by fear--a time like all dark ages. Truth and
learning have gone underground. I am forbidden to know any more. What I
think might be centuries in advance of what common people are thinking.
It is still--at least potentially--obsolete, or inadequate, in relation
to what other men may know--that I am not allowed by my government to
find out. Wouldn't you be bitter--or sad--if your church were shut up
by the Congress, if you were forbidden to learn more about your God,
and if you were obliged to confine even your thinking to bootlegged
guesses?"
"It's a pretty remote argument," he said.
"Is it? Remote to destroy the source of freedom?"
"Would you have us tell the Soviets how to make a bomb?"
"Is that the question? They know how! You have been told and told
and told that they know how and have known since the Smythe Report
appeared. And even that's not the point. When it became evident that
the people of the United States faced the alternatives of maintaining
the freedom of knowledge--at the risk of atomic conflict--or of
destroying liberty at the source to gain the dubious advantage of a few
years' time--the people chose the phony safety of secrecy for a mere
unknowable dozens of months. They were too dumb to see they had sold
their birthright."
"What would you have done?"
I shrugged. "The hell with it! If we had understood science and if we
had believed in freedom we would have been willing, the minute the
problem appeared, to fight for both--because they're one. We would
not have permitted any bleak tyranny to interfere with the world-wide
course of knowledge and the existence of our freedom."
"You're asking a good deal."
"I ask nothing. I merely point out that the fear of holocaust has been
made permanent by our fearful failure to act. Freedom throttled will
be difficult to revive. The habit of intellectual tyranny is already
seeping into the pores of a world destined to be more panicky each year
until either freedom of knowledge is restored or the far more likely
chaos ensues. After chaos will come the regimentation, by opportunists,
of a world that will have lost its grip on liberty. We bought a little
time at the cost of all the values our ancestors piled up for us in the
ages. It is a cheapskate civilization."
The Reverend Socker Melton suddenly chuckled. He had, in the midst of
at least mild anxiety, hit on some straw, some philosophical prop.
"Don't take it so hard! You sound as if you felt responsible for all
the woes of man!"
"Don't you?"
"Good Lord! Certainly not!"
"You are a man, though."
"Just one man."
"Just one. But if you had access to instinct, you might realize that
each one, to the degree he is aware, is all men."
"A cold, distant, impersonal idea, I must say!"
"The hell it is! The idea I'm putting forward involves being and acting
what instinct orders in us--and the constant sense of that process. It
relates me to every man--to every king and statesman and politician
and movie queen and carpenter and garbage man--to every creature that
walks and flies and swims and crawls--and to the sea, the setting
sun, the stars. I see them all and I find in them the response that
rises from being related to them. I consider them in my cortex--but
my God consists also in _feeling_ them. I do not stumble about in
schisms and dichotomies. An infinite number of aspects of life which
seem antithetical to most people seem merely two manifestations of one
awareness to me. You're the kind of fellow, reverend, I bet, who goes
around saying, like Will Rogers, that you never met a man you didn't
like. I can buy that--and still know, besides, I never met a man I did
like altogether, including me. I can say, there was never a moment when
I altogether liked myself, or disliked. Warm sentiments pervade my
coldest thoughts. Heaven and hell are here in this one room.
"There--you see--we get back to the original sin, again: the static
standards that must be maintained if the ego is to be kept intact.
_This_ is evil--_that_ is good; he is saved--she is damned; my opinion
is right--yours is wrong; my faith makes me perfect and whole--yours,
meaning all the other faiths on earth, is imperfect and fragmentary at
best. For why? Simply because my faith is mine. Me, me, me. I, I, I.
That is what happens--that is the tragifarce--of taking instinct away
from the brain and being entire, and investing the gigantic force of it
in the little front lobes. From then on--'I have faith--and I, alone,
am right. I, alone, am God.'
"Well, in my book, I am God, padre, and so are you, and so are all
the people on the street down there, and so is the heat wave, and so
are scorpions and rattlesnakes and botuli bacilli, and so are the
intergalactic clouds. _One thing._ It is not necessary for me to
elevate myself above these--to commit original sin by defining that
unity in terms of my fatuous self-admiration. I do not have to give
my days, my doings and my dreams to the establishment of the general
illusion that I am no animal--whether by fasts or feasts, by fish on
Friday or by Easter celebrations, by shutting the door when I tend my
body, and especially, dominie, I do not have to pretend the procreative
urge in me is superior to that same urge in cosmos--by delimiting it,
stylizing it, codifying it, and hiding it wherever and whenever it
must have expression. Chastity, celibacy, virginity, purity--these are
the lowest terms of original sin. These condemn the animal to a vile
psychological and social beastliness by forcing him to pretend he is
not the unashamed pure animal that he is."
"You want free love--promiscuity--no moral ethic--"
"Nonsense! I want to build our sex behavior around what is learned to
be true nature of man--to establish an aesthetic from instinct--not
from the instinct-perverting demands of ego and superego.'
"And what would it be?"
"Loving, for a start."