Hijacking the Future: This Mortal Coil
A Just So Story…
“For while peaceful silence enwrapped all things, and night in her own swiftness was in mid-course, thine all-powerful word leaped into the midst of the doomed land, bearing as a sharp sword thine unfeigned commandment” (Wisdom, 18.15-16).
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 bodily creation lifted us from the pools of a Paleozoic Eden. To these developments we owe thanks for the powers that later enriched our lives.
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 provided the means to receive the sensory input that challenged Mind to respond to gradually increasing complexity.
From the first humble days of this Paleozoic Genesis, the Body and its evolutionary endowment dominated its mental Child & junior partner.
As Patriarch and Warden of the nursery within the prison of the skull, it could come sliding in along secret neural pathways to surprise its Child as did the Lord of Genesis in the cool of evening.
And when It came, It would ask for an accounting; and always, Its loyal pre-cortical 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 creaturely intelligence!
For eons the Brain was merely a servant of the Body and its physical appetites. It began as a crude club of nerve endings which could respond to temperatures, vibrations or light, and thus urge our digestive-tube ancestors toward food or away from danger. But in time Mind was to become one of evolution’s greatest miracles: for when the writhing tube became more complex and sprouted limbs–a colossal development that led eventually to us–the complexity of our brains had to evolve proportionately; almost simultaneously.
From primitive, reptilian brain stem and paleocortex to a primitive mammalian limbic system and mesocortex; from these at last to the spectacularly convoluted neocortex of homo sapiens: the sporadic gifts of evolution boosted us far above the opaque awareness of earlier life forms to be sure.
But the deep fabric of life was never contravened: always bodily 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 and hypostyle hall of the bodily temple. Deep within the darkened sacristy lay the encoded tablets; the Read-Only genetic commandments that compelled a dutiful, at times slavish surrender to the fitness maximizing strategies of organismic life.
There were no exceptions; no violations of orthodoxy; no 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, offering, at times, the ultimate sacrifice of themselves in service of the almighty gene.
This was the invisible God that the Mind had been called into being to serve, and to whom mind 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 borders on reductionist blasphemy to trace the richness of human activity back to the simplicity of lower life forms: 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 metaphysical artifacts are little more than intricate Rube-Goldberg detours along the pathway of creaturely drivenness.
Such reductionism offends because it undermines the overvalued self regard of the hominid god-makers: human vanity licenses its possessor to dream that it has broken all links with the tugging heart of the earth, and is poised to soar with angels.
But the raw boned physics of evolutionary and sociobiological theory pull down the Dagonic pillars of humanity’s vasty achievements.
They tell us, for example, that when the human Brain invents a Declaration of Independence or a Bill of Rights, it is simply devising another strategy for safeguarding the Body. Theocracy, Kingship, Aristocracy, Democracy: despite the cosmetic differences between these systems for control, all share one fundamental aim: maximization of security for a greater or lesser number of number of bodies. The American revolution, Marxist economics, Judaism, Catholicism, capitalism: each has finally to do with the pursuit of power, nourishment, security or reproductive success.
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 Brain and Body are the inventive, but odd couple of evolution– one riding 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 usefulness of the 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 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 rested. Even in its dreams it spent its time grinding dutifully away at the material and psychic problems of existence, while 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 and in the mass of the prefrontal neocortex.
Whatever the cause, the Brain awoke to discover itself transformed. It had dynamoed its power by means of incredible electronic involutions, whereas the old, familiar physics of the Body–the line of the tendon, the lever of the hinged bone and musculature, the gyrating plasticity of the ball and socket– had 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 wheezing, bruisable Parent with new eyes.
But the memes fashioned by this on-board computer did not counter the conservative force 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–perhaps–genetically incorporated by humanity’s earliest myths and religions.
But the creation of agricultural surplus 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, and 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 made possible by the existence of a creature that was becoming ever more deeply divided against itself.
This ability to evaluate the traditions which one had imbibed from the earliest days was probably not widespread. Such a perspective was probably not any more common than the same critical faculty is in the general population today. As we have seen, 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, most members of the species were aware of the dangers inherent in challenging the way things were 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 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, wheezing, defecating, 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, and could have been traced in various, ongoing permutations down through the millennia. Troubling questions would have arisen; questions that would have struck at the docility mechanism, and would have urged–like a speech of Tiberius Gracchus uttered in the Imperial forum–the awakening of the oppressed; the awakening of 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 men and women; 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 for so long. 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, 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 ruminations of the 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 and 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.
It 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. It undergirded the universe’s processes with an imaginary structure of divinely instituted law. 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: final floods or conflagrations should the great truths be violated.
The rituals of the swamp were transplanted into 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 was 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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