If, then, we cast our minds back to the days of Parson Grimshaw, then forward to modern California, we can see precisely what has gone wrong. California has a pleasant climate, an excellent social welfare system, a tolerance of social rebels and a thriving drug traffic. Taken together, these elements combine into a powerful acid that can dissolve most of the prohibitions that society has set up for its own protection. The result is bound to be an increase in ‘magical thinking’ and in the violence that springs from it. And it is difficult to see how such a trend could be reversed, or prevented from gradually spreading across the whole of our civilisation.
If this description of the situation is correct, then the outlook certainly seems bleak. The problem seems to be man’s deep-seated assumption that he has a right to ‘freedom’, and his inability to make use of it when he has it. The philosopher T. E. Hulme expressed it when he remarked that man habitually overrates his capacity for freedom. In our muddled romanticism we believe ‘that man, the individual, is an infinite reservoir of possibilities; and if you can so rearrange society by the destruction of oppressive order then these possibilities will have a chance, you will get Progress…’ But the truth, said Hulme, is the reverse. ‘Man is an extraordinarily fixed and limited animal whose nature is absolutely constant. It is only by tradition and organisation that anything decent can be got out of him’ (Speculations, p. 116). Or, to put it another way, human beings go to pieces without discipline. And, according to Spengler’s Decline of the West and Toynbee’s Study of History, this explains the breakdown of civilisations. They become powerful as hardship drives them to self-discipline. Then they become successful, the need for discipline vanishes, and they slide into decadence. The history of crime in the past century suggests that our civilisation has now reached this stage.
There is obviously a great deal of truth in this analysis, but is it the whole truth? Hulme, for example, is obviously going too far when he says that man’s nature is ‘absolutely constant’. We know that man has, in fact, evolved faster than any other creature on earth. Spengler and Toynbee are clearly correct when they say that all civilisations go through the same cycle of rise and decline; but this does not mean that all civilisations are fundamentally alike – otherwise we would be literally repeating the history of ancient Sumeria. If man evolves, then so does civilisation. To grasp what is really happening, we need to look at the problem from an evolutionary perspective: not merely the history of civilisations, but the history of man himself.
We can begin from the observation that there have been a number of watersheds in human history: events so important that they have created a basic variation in human behaviour. These include the beginning of agriculture, the building of the cities, the invention of writing, the rise of astronomy, the founding of the great religions, the creation of the drama, the discovery of philosophy, the triumph of Christianity, the rise of science and the development of the novel. A glance at the list reveals that most of these are intellectual. Man has evolved faster and farther than any other animal because he has learned to use his mind.
We have seen that this depended on the development of a kind of mental microscope, the ability to examine problems with precise attention. But this ability, which assured man’s survival, also turned him into a criminal, for it narrowed down his consciousness so that he became a bad-tempered obsessive. Man exchanged the bird’s eye view, which is natural to all animals, for a worm’s eye view. He developed the left-brain ego, with its craving for esteem and respect. The earliest tyrants murdered out of a ruthless egoism. And civilisation is now faced with an acute crime problem because it has now reached the self-esteem level – the ego level – of Maslow’s hierarchy, and there are millions of ruthless egoists.
The worm’s eye view has introduced another complication: it has made man far more ‘hypnotisable’. We hypnotise an animal by narrowing its attention. Man’s attention is almost permanently narrowed. Hypnosis is basically a loss of the sense of reality (clinically speaking, this is known as schizophrenia). Man spends most of his life in a semi-hypnotised state. And this, as we have seen, explains a great deal of violent crime. The hypnosis makes us feel trapped in triviality. Rupert Brooke welcomed the First World War, and compared it to the experience ‘of swimmers into cleanness leaping’. Violence usually has this effect – like a thunderstorm that clears the air. Violence is the snap of the hypnotist’s fingers.
It begins to look, then, as if the development of ‘double consciousness’ was one of man’s greatest mistakes. For crime is basically an attempt to escape the narrowness of left-brain consciousness. This applies particularly to sex crime. There is a passage in My Secret Life in which Walter describes picking up a middle-aged woman and a ten-year-old girl. Back in her lodgings, he persuades the woman to allow him to penetrate the girl. Then he stands in front of the mirror, holding her against him, so he can actually see himself doing it. He is trying to make himself realise it is actually happening. Some couples have mirrors attached to the bedroom ceiling for the same reason.
Let us look more closely at the mechanism involved here. The philosopher A. N. Whitehead pointed out that we have two ‘modes’ of perception, which he called ‘presentational immediacy’ and ‘causal efficacy’. ‘Immediacy’ could be described as ‘close-up perception’, the worm’s eye view. But we have another mode of perception which corresponds to the bird’s eye view. As you read this paragraph, you take it in sentence by sentence. If the argument is too complicated, or badly presented, you will remain in this state of ‘worm’s eye’ perception. This could also happen simply because you are very tired, and fail to make the act of connection between the sentences. This act of connection – of linking them together in a sequence of cause and effect – allows a leap from the worm’s eye view to the bird’s eye view. This is what Whitehead calls ‘causal efficacy’. It would be simpler to call it ‘meaning perception’.
Sartre’s novel Nausea is about a man whose perception is always collapsing into the ‘worm’s eye view’. Reality suddenly seems stupid and meaningless. Sartre argues that ‘nausea’ is truer than ‘meaning perception’, because we add the meaning to life by a kind of act of faith – or delusion. A man falls in love with a girl, and believes that she is the most exquisite and desirable creature in the world. He marries her and they go on honeymoon. That first night is not a disappointment – in fact, it is very enjoyable. Yet it is not quite the rapture he expected; it is somehow too real. And a year after they are married, he makes love to her as a matter of routine; sometimes he even allows his mind to wander and pretend it is somebody else. If he recalls that early adoration, he smiles wryly; it seems to be based upon a lack of insight into her actuality.
Yet what of those occasions when the delight suddenly returns – when, for example, he comes back from a long business trip, finds her looking radiant, and falls in love all over again? If this is illusion, it must be a singularly persistent one to triumph over experience.
What has happened, in fact, is simply that the two modes of perception have once again combined; immediacy perception and meaning perception have fused together.
In The Dam Busters, the story of the wartime RAF squadron, Paul Brickhill explains how they succeeded in destroying the Moener dam. The bombs were spherical, and had to bounce along the surface of the lake to strike the dam from the side. But in order to do this, they had to be dropped from an exact height above the water. The altimeters were not accurate enough, and any form of measuring device suspended from the plane – like a rope of the right length -would blow backwards. Then the inventor Barnes Wallace came up with the solution – to place two lights in the nose and tail of the plane, focused so that their two beams would blend into a single circle at the correct height. When a single circle appeared on the water, it was time to release the bomb.
In moments of excitement, our two modes of perception also focus into a single point, and we experience a sense of total reality. The bird’s eye view and the worm’s eye view combine. When a man is feeling tired, he is flying at the wrong height; so although he is holding his wife in his arms, he is not aware of her reality. His immediacy perception is focused, but his meaning perception is blurred.