Thee Beginning of the End:
This Mortal Coil
A Just So Story…
For millions of years the Body has been the best of our friends.
IT alone withstood the hostile elements;
IT alone drove off competitors or pulled us beyond the reach of danger;
IT alone served as the engine of organismic, rapturous delight.
The integrity of the cell wall; the elaboration of specialized organs for motion and perception–these earliest acts of creation lifted us from the pools of a Paleozoic Eden.
More important for subsequent evolution: It was the Body that first gave birth to consciousness.
IT alone housed the first and simplest Mind;
IT alone evolved those sensory inputs that led to greater complexity.
From primitive, reptilian brain stem and paleocortex, to primitive mammalian limbic system and mesocortex; from these at last to the spectacularly convoluted neocortex of homo sapiens: the sporadic trials of evolution boosted Mind far above the opaque awareness of earlier life forms.
From the first humble days of the Paleozoic Genesis, Body dominated its mental junior partner.
As Patriarch of the nursery within the prison of the skull, It could come sliding along secret neural pathways to surprise its Child, much like the Lord of Genesis suddenly appearing in the cool of evening.
And when It came, It would ask for an accounting. And always, the loyal Son would lisp the only words it knew:
“I do as the Father has commanded me, so that the world may know that I love the Father…” (John 14.31).
What a humble beginning for human intelligence! But the deep fabric of life was never to be contravened. Always bodily survival needs came first, and so always Body was in control.
“Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing” (John, 5.19).
The digestive tube, the anus, the mouth: these were the doors to the Hypostyle hall of the Bodily temple. Deep within the darkened sacristy lay the encoded tablets; the Read-Only geneti scrolls that compelled dutiful surrender to the fitness maximizing strategies that govern all life.
The ruthless calculus of evolution ensured that there would be only a few accidental exceptions; only a few violations of orthodoxy; only a few heretic survivors. The entire cast of creatures, from egg-buriers to sun-baskers, and from these to tree-climbers and, much later, to shelter builders: all were unconsciously linked together in the helix of neural “Sonship”; and each labored the earth in its own specially adaptive way.
The code of these ancient Rules for Survival were the invisible God that the Mind had been called into being to serve, and to whom it owed its ruminative allegiance. This was Brahman, the Eternal One, who hid behind the surface appearances of the world:
“The gene…does not grow senile; it is no more likely to die when it is a million years old than when it is only a hundred. It leaps from body to body down the generations, manipulating body after body in its own way and for its own ends, abandoning a succession of mortal bodies before they sink in senility and death” (Dawkins, 1976).
II
Many believe that it is blasphemy to trace the richness of human activity back to the lower life forms. A “sin” to ally the complex products of human culture with the activities of sea worms, of radiolaria, or of bacteriophages. Or to claim, with an ego-deflating finality, that even the most abstract of human creations are little more than intricate Rube-Goldberg detours along the pathway of cultural achievements.
Such reductionism offends because it undermines the overvalued self regard of the human god-makers. As always, human vanity licenses its possessor to dream that they have broken all links with the tugging heart of the earth. That they are poised to soar with angels.
But the raw boned physics of evolutionary adaptation pull down the Dagonic pillars of our vasty achievements.
They tell us, for example, that when the human Brain invents a Declaration of Independence or a Bill of Rights, or Catholicism it is simply devising another strategy for safeguarding the Body. Theocracy, Kingship, Aristocracy, Democracy: despite the cosmetic differences between these systems, all share the same fundamental aims: social control, and behaviors that maximization fitness for lesser or greater number of selves. The American Revolution, Marxist economics, Judaism, Capitalism: each has finally to do with the pursuit of power, psychic comfort, security and cultural maintenance.
We should keep in mind, says Lumsden (1981),
“That most of the wondrous inventions of science and technology serve in practice as enabling mechanisms to achieve territorial defense, communication of tribal ritual, sexual bonding, and other ancient sociobiologic functions. Curiosity, even the artistic impulse itself, might also fill such a role.”
III
Thus Mind and Body are the inventive, but odd couple of evolution. One rides high, head sometimes in the clouds, perched atop the powerful, appetitive and controlling shoulders. The Other pushing off heroically, muscularly, in pursuit of strategies and objects that Mind has targeted as means of maximizing fitness and gaining more life.
Together they swam, slithered, trotted or stumbled forward through the eons, undergoing the periodic costume and scenic changes scripted by chance, death and change: as filter feeders, bloodsuckers, or toothy sets of murderous jaws; now amphibian, now reptile, and most recently as mammal… replicating the digestive tube format in myriad variations until together they arrived at last as Australopithecus, the threshold of this modern world.
As we survey hominid progress from “Lucy” on up through Homo Erectus, branching away into the dead ends known as Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon, we gain a profound appreciation for the useful Mind of our thought-full junior partner. From within the bony prison of the skull, like an engineer at NASA directing the activities of a distant Martian Lander, the Mind cleverly drew upon the body’s sensory inputs from the world. It devised better hunting strategies, discovered the mysteries of the planted grain, mastered the use of fire, performed the thought experiment that attached knapped flint to wooden shafts, and served as an early warning system to protect its Lord & Master from physical harm.
And while in sleep the conscious self slipped beyond reach, the unconscious Mind rarely rests. Even in its dreams it spends its time grinding dutifully away at the material and psychic problems of existence. Meanwhile, the muscular Tyrant slumbered in a shroud of animal skins, safe from the chill of the primal night.
This long spiraling climb through the millennia has not only been the story of these boon companions learning to get what they wanted from a hostile environment. It has also been the chronicle of the dramatic explosion of a specialized human activity–the newly fashioned power to reflect, to analyze and to anticipate, all on a scale far beyond that possessed by those cousins of ours who never made it out of the seas or out of the trees.
It must have been some goddy, body wildness, perhaps some mistake in the transmission of instructions sent to multiplying embryonic cells, that caused the first eruptions in the size of the cranium, as well as in the mass of the prefrontal neocortex.
Whatever the cause, the Mind awoke to discover itself transformed. It had dynamoed its power by means of incredible electronic involutions, whereas the old, wheezing, farting Body was stuck in the past: the line of the tendon, the lever of the hinged bone and musculature, the gyrating plasticity of the ball and socket. These have remained fundamentally the same since the earliest days.
Like a maturing child, Brain at last began to grow up. And as it began to pile up the memic stones of its cultures, it could for the very first time begin to see its defecating, brusable Parent with new eyes.
But the memes fashioned by this on-board computer did not yet counter the conservative commandments of DNA. The culture it produced could at times “consult…but [could not] effectively challenge the Oracle residing within the epigenetic rules” (Ibid, 359).
“The Lord created me at the beginning of his work…Ages ago I was set up…When there were no depths I was brought forth…I was beside him…rejoicing before him always…and delighting in the sons of men…” (Prov. 8.22-31).
IV
The odds were clearly against Brain’s ever becoming Body’s rival. For aeons, the granitic, horribly patient face of natural selection had taught the Body and its oldest Brain that affiliative strategies maximized survival in a hostile world. There was as yet no reason to change that rule.
And where evolution left off, culture soon took up the ancient themes with a renewed intensity. The ancient values burned into the DNA were cast into language and symbol, reified, invested with all the authority of the Totem and then transmitted across the generations. In this way the simple wisdom of the genetic and neural “Fathers” continued to guide the young toward a future that was deliberately structured as a replica of the past.
“I have not spoken on my own authority. The Father who sent me has himself given me the commandment what to say and what to speak” (John 12.49).
Simple behavioral repertoires maximized survival; various forms of in-group allegiance and pseudospeciation made tribes and nations strong. These behaviors enabled our ancestors to navigate successfully though those early, dangerous aeons when curiosity and innovation could have gotten them killed. And so, the first and most ancient commandments urged humanity to submit or perish, to be aggressive or be defeated. Enmity bought these wary creatures space and time to feel amity for a chosen few.
The antinomies of the biological world had already become ideological truths, mimicked, sanctioned and at last genetically incorporated by humanity’s earliest myths and religions.
But the accidental discovery of agricultural, and the surplus it promised, partially freed the prefrontal cortex from its hectic devotions. In some few individuals it was at last freed to begin to reflect upon itself and its own thought processes (MacLean, 1990). It could now begin to critically contemplate the body which housed it, as well as the culture which it had dutifully labored to erect.
The dangerous potentialities of the dual-inheritance model unfolded themselves at last. The phenomenon anciently known as Mind/Body conflict could only have been imagined by a creature that was becoming deeply slowly divided against itself.
This ability to evaluate the traditions which one had imbibed from the earliest days was not widespread. Such a perspective was not any more common than it is in the general population today. Cultural and evolutionary factors continue to militate against the exercise of the critical faculty–either by guaranteeing that most compulsions will remain screened from consciousness, or that individuals will be selected for docility and ease of indoctrinability (H. Simon, E.O. Wilson, Lumsden, Badcock).
Besides, as already stated, most members of the species were aware of the dangers inherent in challenging the way things were always done. About that, the myths and legends seemed to be in agreement:
“You shall fear the Lord your God; you shall serve him, and swear by his name…For the Lord your God is a jealous God; lest the anger of the Lord your God be kindled against you, and he destroy you from off the face of the earth…” (Deut. 6, 13-16).
But now that it was powerful enough, and now that it had the perspective supplied by the permanence of writing, the Minds of a special few could have begun to walk down the dangerous road that detours from mere reflection into critical self analysis.
Somewhere upon its secret and solitary journey it would have reached a kind of promontory; and from this height, it would have been able to cast a backward glance across the cavalcade of the centuries. Some very few could now begin to see the pathways by which It, and its Master, had come.
And if it did so, it would have made a chilling discovery:
It would have discovered that the greatest products of human intelligence– the wonderful words that it and its cortical siblings had given to religion, philosophy and governments– had always been twisted by body into selfish strategies.
All the brain’s idealistic language had been little more than a verbal smokescreen, lulling the selfish, masticating, death-fearing Body with a metaphysical doublespeak as ancient as the invention of the clause.
For the first time, the gulf between rhetoric and praxis could have become shockingly clear. Troubling questions would have arisen; questions that would have struck at the docility mechanism, and would have urged–like a speech of Tiberius Gracchus in the forum–that awakening of the oppressed: those many who had labored for so few and for so long.
The worm had turned.
V
This discovery would become the deconstructed prototype for a thousand mythologies: a Samson pulling at the pillars of Dagon; a Prometheus stealing fire and giving it to humans; a Serpent whispering god-slaying advice to the innocents in the Garden; a Dragon emerging from the cave, threatening the populace with its irreligious presence. But in this deconstruction, the St. George who comes to the rescue would not be the humanist hero or the friend. He would be the enemy of freedom and individuation: the dragon master come to slay the inquiring mind.
Such knowledge would have exposed the Pharaohs, Prophets, Saints, Kings, Philosophers, Presidents and political saviors in whom so many had placed their childlike trust. These would at last stand revealed as traitorous agents who had acted in service of an ancient, atavistic bodily interest.
For behind their glittering proposals and uplifting ratiocinations–behind Plato’s Republic, behind Medieval scholastic treatises, behind the panoply of testaments, divine revelations, rituals and incense-wafting processionals, behind the metaphysical maunderings of a host of philosophical gurus, behind the stony backdrop of the paintings at Lascaux–lurked the brooding form of the Ancient Tyrant, shrouded in its almost unmanageable fears.
At last, the real meaning of the Totem story would have become clear: the newly emergent critical faculty, cast as the Rebellious Son, and the ancient appetitive self, cast as the Primal Father, would have to come to blows over the shape of the future. History and literature–its multi-faceted Thucydides—would mirror and describe this fundamental conflict again and yet again.
There was no question as to who had to win.
The body saw this too–eavesdropped in its own heavy-lidded way on the dangerous ruminations of the newly critical faculty.
Long ago it had planted its agents in the brain–in those physical structures that formed the foundation stones of the neocortex itself. This was one way of keeping track of the ambitious Junior Partner, for long ago body ruefully recognized that the usually tractable “reason” could sometimes fall in love with itself. Could sometimes attempt to “defy the selfish genes of our birth, and if necessary, the selfish memes of our indoctrination” (Dawkins, 1976).
“We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.”
Long ago, the loyal Mind received a command from the muscular Tyrant: “Allay my fear,” it said.
Loyal Mind went busily to work, embellishing the hunger-borne images of primary process thinking with the all the rhetoric and artifice at its disposal. It elaborated triumphant theological doctrines–guaranteeing an eternal afterlife of Bodily enjoyment. It peopled the skies with the attachment figures, shadows and gigantic actors called devils, angels and gods. And it obscured the vision of mortal annihilation by blinding itself with the swirling smoke rising from the laburnums of myriad faiths.
The governing secrets of the animal kingdom were projected into the skies where they appeared as great chains of being, celestial seats of judgment, threats of divine displeasure: Floods or fiery punishments should the great truths be violated.
The ancient rituals of the swamp were transplanted the Milky Way, and the animal vocabulary of submissive display became the prostrate prayer, the beautiful oratorio or hymn, the inaugural address and the genuflection.
As such, cultures were ultimately held in thrall by atavistic commandments and processes; mimicking a kind of shoaling behavior or other defensive maneuver.
A herd of musk ox, bound rump to rump in the Arctic, is a pretty effective deterrent to wolves. It is also a pretty effective (albeit illusory) deterrent against the greatest predator of all: Death.
The harsh conditions of reality suggested the antidote instantly, and so the loyal Brain poured its finest efforts into elaborating an increasingly intricate and deceptively beautiful form of reality denial: a mythology of origins and eschatology that accounted for, and mitigated, the fear of–death. Amphibians do not built cathedrals; but after the hominid neural revolution, people did. And in pretty short order. A heightened awareness of place and time, a sense of history and fragility–these were the painful curses that came along with the skull-packaging that housed the more powerful brain–and a cathedral is a first-rate anodyne, to be sure.
But the antidote for Death–metaphysics–produced a toxin more dangerous than the Death it was designed to deny. The terribilita of existence urged human beings on into a monumental masochism: the life that was sentenced to die had to be reduced and thereby controlled. Holiness addicted men and women among the most zealous in this regard: life itself was abreacted, defiled, profaned, and then transformed into a living death, a counter-death.
Such strange metaphysical intervolutions–and they shall become our focus later on–were perhaps the most important and perverse–project that Body and Mind had ever undertaken together. More important than their cities and laws, more important than their inventions and works of art–more important, even than breathing, physical existence itself.
But to make the existential nexus of guilt and ambivalence “stick,” one thing above all was required: a conspiracy of silence and forgetfulness: The still loyal neocortex must never acquire the skeptical attitude; never doubt the benefits that religious practice and patriotic submission promised. If Mind ever did come to doubt, then the Body’s deoxy-ribonucleic culture project was threatened.
The newly critical Reason, if allowed to ruminate unchecked, threatened to topple the pantheon of gods by showing the body its fate in a handful of dust. It threatened to play physician to the diseases produced by doctrines of salvation by offering the patient the physic of cold, rationalistic truth. It threatened to set the Body free from its self-created, addictive terror by giving it back to itself.
Burnings at the stake, ideological purges, all the varieties of moral and intellectual censorship, the holy Crusades– these had been the perennial, superficial traces of an ancient, ongoing struggle; a struggle which like a coal fire far below the surface of the earth, burns ferociously, out of control, and usually out of sight.
Our ancestors saw the smoke, perhaps felt some of the heat–but few among them knew the cause.
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