I once wrote a program for an experiment of one of my friends. The idea was to simulate, in a computer, families of neutral beings; they would be homeostats, cognizant of their “environment” but possessing, initially, no “emotional” or “ethical” qualities. These beings multiplied — only in the machine, of course, therefore in a way that a layman would call “arithmetically” — and after a few dozen “generations” there continually appeared, over and over again, in each of the “specimens,” a characteristic that made no sense at all to us, a sort of equivalent of “aggression.” After many painstaking but fruitless checking calculations, my friend, at his wit’s end — really grasping at straws — began examining the most trivial circumstances of the experiment; and then it turned out that a certain relay had reacted to the changes of humidity in the air, and thus those changes had become the hidden producer of the deviation.
I cannot help thinking of that experiment as I write, for is it not possible that social evolution lifted us from the Animal Kingdom in an exponential curve — when we were fundamentally unprepared for the ascent? The socialization reaction began when the human atoms had barely given evidence of their first cohesiveness. Those atoms were a material strictly biological, a material made and prepared to satisfy typically biological criteria, but that sudden movement, that upward shove, seized us and carried us off into the space of civilization. How could such a start not have bound onto that biological material accidental convergences, much as a probe that, lowered to the ocean floor, scoops up from it, along with the desired object, debris and chance pieces of junk? I recall the damp relay in the sophisticated computer. And the process that engendered us — why, pray, must it have been in every respect perfect? Yet neither we nor our philosophers dare consider the idea that the finality and singularity of the existence of our species do not at all imply a perfection under whose aegis the species originated — just as such perfection is not present at the cradle of any individual.
It is a curious thing that the marks of our imperfection, which identify the species, have never been, not by any faith, recognized for what they simply are, that is, the results of uncertain processes; on the contrary, practically all religions agree in the conviction that man’s imperfection is the result of a demiurgic clash between two antagonistic perfections, each of which has damaged the other. The Light collided with the Dark, and man arose: thus runs their formula. My conception sounds ill-natured only if it is wrong — but we do not know that it is wrong. The friend whom I mentioned caricatured it; he said that according to Hogarth humanity is a hunchback who, in ignorance of the fact that it is possible not to be hunchbacked, for thousands of years has sought an indication of a Higher Necessity in his hump, because he will accept any theory but the one that says that his deformity is purely accidental, that no one bestowed it upon him as part of a master plan, that it serves absolutely no purpose, for the thing was determined by the twists and turns of anthropogenesis.
But I intended to speak about myself, not about the species. I do not know where it came from or what caused it, but even now, after all these years, I find within myself that malice, as vigorous as ever, because the energies of our most primitive impulses never age. Do I shock? Over many decades now, I have acted like a rectification column, producing a distillate composed of the pile of my articles as well as of the articles occasioned by them — hagiography. If you say that you are not interested in the inner workings of the apparatus which I unnecessarily bring out into the light, note that I, in the purity of the nourishment I have vouchsafed you, see the indelible signs of all my secrets.
Mathematics for me was no Arcadia; it was, rather, a court of last resort, a church that I entered, unbelieving, because it offered sanctuary. My principal metamathematical work has been called destructive, and not without reason. It was no accident that I called into question, irreversibly, the foundations of mathematical deduction and the concept of the analytic in logic. I turned the tools of statistics against these basic notions — until at last they crumbled. I could not be a devil underground and an angel in the light of day. I created, yes, but on ruins, and Yowitt is right: I took away more truths than I ever gave.
For this negative balance the epoch was held to account, not I; because I had followed in the steps of Russell and Gödel — after the former had discovered the cracks in the foundation of the Crystal Palace, and after the latter had shaken it. It was said that I had acted in the spirit of the time. Well, of course. But an emerald triangle does not cease to be an emerald triangle when it becomes a human eye in an arranged mosaic.
More than once I have wondered what would have become of me had I been born within any one of the four thousand cultures we call primitive, which preceded ours in that gulf of eighty thousand years that our lack of imagination contracts to the foreground, the foyer, of history proper. In some of them I would no doubt have languished; but in others, who knows, I might have found greater personal fulfillment, as one visited, as one creating new rites, new magic, thanks to the talent I brought into the world, that of combining elements. Perhaps, in the absence of a restraining curb, which in our culture is the relativism of every conceptual entity, I could have consecrated, with no trouble, orgies of havoc and debauchery, because in those ancient societies they practiced the custom of a temporary, periodic suspension of daily law, by dissolving their culture (it was the bedrock, the Constant, the Absolute of their lives, and yet, remarkably, they knew that even the Absolute required holes!) in order to give vent to the festering mass of excesses that could not be fitted into any codified system, and of which only a portion found expression in war masks and family masquerades, under the bit and bridle of morality.
They were sensible, rational, those severings of societal bonds and rules, the group madness, the pandemonium liberated, heightened by the narcotics of rhythm and poison. It was the opening of a safety valve, out of which poured the factor of destruction; through this particular invention barbarity was adapted to man. But the principle of a crime from which one could retire, of a reversible madness, of gaps rhythmically repeated in the social fabric, has been done away with, and now all those forces must go in harness, work treadmills, play roles that are too tight for them and always ill-suited. So they corrode everything quotidian; they hide in every place; for nowhere is it permitted them to emerge from anonymity. Each of us is, from childhood, fastened to some publicly allowed piece of himself, the part that was selected and schooled, and that has gained the consensus omnium; and now he cultivates that fragment, polishes it, perfects it, breathes on it alone, that it may develop as well as possible; and each of us, being a part, pretends to be a whole-like a stump that claims it is a limb.
As far back as I can remember, no ethics ever took root in my sensitivity. Cold-bloodedly I built myself an artificial ethics. But I needed to find a reason to do this, because setting up rules in a desert is like taking Communion without faith. I am not saying that I planned out my life in as theoretical a manner as I present it here. Nor did I attach axioms to my behavior retroactively. I proceeded always in the same way, at first unawares; the motivations I later guessed.
Had I considered myself a person who was basically good, I would have been quite unable to understand evil. I would have believed that people perpetrated it always with premeditation — that is, that they did what they had resolved to do — because I would have found no other source of vileness within my personal experience. But I had better knowledge; I was aware of my own inclinations, as well as of my blamelessness for them — blamelessness because I was, after all, the way I was to begin with, and no one had ever consulted me in the matter.
Now, for one slave to strangle another slave to satisfy the forces implanted in both; for one blamelessness to torture another if there existed any chance whatever to resist such a compulsion — to me this was an offense against reason. We are given to ourselves and it is fruitless for us to question what is given, but if there should open up the minutest chance to oppose the Way Things Are — how can one not seize it? Only such decisions and such actions are our exclusive human property, as is the possibility, also, of suicide. This is the sector of freedom where our unasked-for inheritance meets with contempt.