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A Socialism of Love

Searby, Peter 1989. The New School and the New Life: Cecil Reddie (1858-1932) and the early years of Abbotsholme School. History of Education 18(1): 1-21. DOI: 10.1080/0046760890180101 [tandfonline.com]

Between October 1888 and April 1889 the 30-year old socialist Cecil Reddie published his criticisms of the boys' boarding schools in which he had been educated and had taught, and detailed the school that he, with others, intended to open in October. Existing schools, Reddie declared, were microcosms of the competitive capitalist society, whose replacement by the co-operative commonwealth he looked forward to. Their classrooms were factories in miniature, where boys worked at repetitive mechanical tasks, cramming Latin and Greek without understanding them, for the sake of competitive examinations that were the keys to scholarships and success in the commercial rat-race. On the games field they were confined to a few competitive pursuits that excluded individual interests and relegated many pupils to the sidelines as spectators of 'gladiatorial shows'. And like the factory, the school ignored the emotions. Affectionate display between boys was discouraged. The price of repression was impurity, secret pleasures, and lust. Masters pried, and invited boys to tell tales on their comrades. (Searby 1989: 1)

Amazingly, Cecil Reddie is a familiar name! I'm not sure from where but the name definitely rings a bell. The operative keyword here is "co-operative commonwealth", i.e. a socialist state. The overall gist reminds me of this: "In her earlier novels Burdekin had commented on the upper-class English practice of sending boys away to school, and noted the anxiety that boys would otherwise not grow into proper men. She calls attention to the oddity of this beliefs: little girls were assumed to be capable of developing into women whether they are raised by women or men; but special training, involving a separation from women, is necessary in order for a boy to turn into a man. This training typically takes place in what Burdekin calls 'homosexual packs' - single-sex schools, clubs, sports, and, of course, the military. Men thus undergo a more rigid training in the masculine gender role, which, by implication, has nothing 'natural' about it." (Patai 1984: 93)

The emotions and aesthetic sense would be developed through poetry and music, while by making furniture for the school, pupils would help to create their own life-enhancing environment. In short, existing schools promoted the disintegration of the person and of society through competitiveness, while the New School would promote their integration through cooperativeness. (Searby 1989: 2)

Making their own furniture, once again, sounds oddly, vaguely familiar.

He [James Reddie] also had an unofficial career as a scientific heretic, regarding the earth as the centre of the universe and the stars as blobs of gas a few miles away, 'to serve for the adornment and use of earth alone'. Papers criticizing Newton's Principia were regularly refused by learned societies, without, however, denting Reddie's convection of his rightness. Cecil Reddie grew up, therefore, in a home where controversy was contemplated, and where his father offered the role model of polemicist. (Searby 1989: 2)

Oh, a nutjob.

  • Reddie, James 1862. Vis Inertiae Victa, or Fallacies Affecting Science: an Essay to increase our knowledge of some physical laws, and a Review of certain Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. London.
Cecil Reddie, was jesus born a virgin? (Abbetsholme, 1925), 1. By the 1920s Reddie had abandoned the use of capital letters. (Searby 1989: 2, fn 3)

Quite literal anti-capitalism!

A devout Anglican, in 1865 Reddie took a leading part in forming the Victoria Institute, to reconcile science and religion by demonstrating the truths of scripture, and in particular to confute the new idea of evolution. (Searby 1989: 2, fn 5)

No doubt very convincing stuff.

Reddie was restless, wishing to deploy his great energies creatively in teaching but not knowing how best to do so; unfocused talent is implied by his unpopularity at Fettes, his pupils seeing him as a little crazy and taking fright at his claim that he could tell what they were thinking about. (Searby 1989: 3)

A telepath to boot.

There were many pressures on a man like Reddie to transmute his sex drive into other energies, and perhaps some such alchemy explains the impression he made in 1885 on R. O. Moon, a young graduate of New College. Moon's entry in his normally austere diary gives a sense of Reddie's excitation and emotional power. The two young men talked at length, walking from the Serpentine to Holborn, Reddie advancing the 'Idea that the affections are the divine essence within us, i.e. "Love is God"; all our strongest forces from thence, energy not to be stifled but directed upwards'. (Searby 1989: 4)

Not bad. If god be anything, let it be love.

In later years, after long pondering social issues, Cotterill moved on to call for the replacement of Competition with Co-operation - which would tap the boundless sources for good in human nature and lead to a Socialism of Love, Justice and Kindness. (Searby 1989: 5)

A religion socialism of love.

Practicality would also draw upon the pupil's natural curiosity, that Geddes, following Pestalozzi and Froebel, saw as the chief motor of education: the ideal education was a flower-like unfolding of talents and interests. To use the creative value of play, and to allow the senses to enrich the growing mind, would help to form emotionalyl rounded adults, fitter to create a new world than the starved and stunted beings produced by the rote-learning classroom. (Searby 1989: 6)

Phrase so good.

Until his mid-30s (until, that is, about 1880) Carpenter felt profoundly unfulfilled; he was frequently melancholy and distressed. Alike in their spiritual aridity were the upper-class society of his youth, with its emotional repression and empty ritual concern for appearances, and the Cambridge of his early manhood: its 'everlasting discussions of theories which never came anywhere near actual life, this cheap philosophizing and ornamental cleverness, this endless book-learning, and the queer cynicism and boredom underlying - all impressed me with a sense of utter emptiness'. After abandoning his Cambridge fellowship and holy orders, Carpenter, through much soul-searching, at length came to free himself from his sense of oppression. (Searby 1989: 6)

The good stuff, summarized a little down the page: "Carpenter rejected bookish education" (ibid, 6).

At Millthorpe Reddie became acquainted with men in Carpenter's circle - C. R. Ashbee, G. Lowes Dickinson, Robert Muirhead, Havelock Ellis. In the many-hued socialist flowering of the 1880s, such men stressed not the political or industrial activism that William Morris or H. M. Hyndman favoured as the road to socialism, but the renewal of humankind's co-operative and helpful instincts. Their mood is well caught in the name of the high-minded discussion group Carpenter, Ashbee and Ellis belonged to - the Fellowship of the New Life. To reach the new fraternal and compassionate society they relied on the activity of small close-knit groups that, paradoxically, retreated from the urban industrialism they hoped to change, and were inward-looking because of their remoteness and the comradeship that sustained them. (Searby 1989: 7)

A familiar name - and an unexpected one in this company.

Advanced people of various sorts found Abbotsholme sympathetic. Vegetarians, unusual in the 1890s, welcomed its special diets, and it was a natural school for Emmeline Stapledon, a devotee of Ruskin, to choose for her son Olaf - later to be a maverick socialist and visionary, well known for his novel Last and First Men. (Searby 1989: 12)

The only reason this paper crossed my path. "A maverick socialist", you say?

Abbotsholme had one assistant master of intellectual distinction - J. H. Badley, recruited to the staff in the early days by G. L. Dickinson and Edward Carpenter. Reddie resented his wish to marry, his liking for co-education, and his intellectual independence. After only two and a half years Badley left, acknowledging his great dept to Reddie's ideas, to found Bedales on Abbotsholme principles. Though Reddie plainly regarded his other assistants as second-raters, in fact he made it impossible for better men to stay, and Abbotsholme had a rapid staff turnover. While boys with spirit were welcomed, masters were seen as a potential threat. A less egotistical man would have been gladdened by the spread of his ideas through Bedales. But Reddie wanted loyal colonies, not a school that stressed its departure. (Searby 1989: 13)

Oof. Such egotism while spreading the gospel of co-operation.

Intellectual isolation in his little kingdom, Reddie developed the authoritarian strain in his iedas, and moved away from the romantic socialism he had professed in the 1880s. Feeling, like so many in the 1890s and after, that Britain's imperial pre-eminence was under threat, he responded with a call - urgent and oft-repeated - for a national sense of purpose and organization that would fit Britain for commercial competition with Germany and the USA. Thus, while Reddie saw the well-ordered nation, and the individuals that composed it, as organisms in internal harmony, he saw international relations as necessarily competitive: a co-operative school was to prepare pupils for conflict - another example of the contradictions in Reddie. (Searby 1989: 14)

This may have coloured young Olaf's vision of international relations.

An imperial Ministry of Education should plan the British educational system as a whole - schools and universities - and should control all schools enjoying endowments as well as those directly financed by the State. In this way, Reddie thought, the public schools he so much resented could be brought to heel. The nation's schools would form a unity, and each would be aware of its place in it, but there would be three distinct sorts of school, catering for boys sharply different in intelligence and reflecting the separate traditions of the three classes whence they sprang. Strong links between cultural and intellectual endowment are assumed by Reddie, though he also writes of the need to make provision for movement from one sort of school to another. There would be schools for muscle-workers, for petty officers and for leaders: Primary, Secondary and Tertiary Schools. Abbotsholme, it hardly needs noting, was a Tertiary School, for the Directing Class. (Searby 1989: 14)

So: workmen, guardians, and philosopher-kings.

Only a personality in harmony was fit to lead, yet Reddie saw human beings as liable to inner conflict - not least because, as he learnt from Edward Carpenter, everybody contained male and female elements that were potentially antagonistic. [|] (This was a highly unusual perceptions for the 1890s, though Reddie did not accept its corollary, the equality of the sexes; indeed, he vehemently expressed his disdain for women and for co-education.) (Searby 1989: 14-15)

Bugger. I guess this is what the author meant by "an inner conservatism with a radical face" (ibid, 4).

Boys were taught in groups of not more than a dozen, usually by general subject masters, sometimes by specialists. Reddie himself taught hygiene, which included much physiology and, very unusually indeed in Edwardian England, sex education. It is recalled as sensible and helpful by Old Abbotsholmians. At the time it caused some problems. Boys occasionally fainted at the alarming detail of their own anatomy. In other respects too the curriculum was unlike the usual public school's. There was no classical bias, indeed hardly any Latin at all and no Greek, English, French and German were taught, mathematics and science, and history and geography. There were no marks or prizes. Classwork was uncompetitive and 'general'. Specialist teaching for qualifications or university entrance was regarded as comparatively unimportant. (Searby 1989: 15)

One can just about imagine a personality like Olaf Stapledon being formed by this kind of education.

There were lectures on Greek mythology, trades unions, bee culture and the history of music; these last occupied a term, and were illustrated with pianola pieces. Music was stressed at Abbotsholme - and is remembered by old pupils as having created a lifelong interest. Every boy learnt singing and two-thirds at least one instrument. The school song, specially composed, was a version of Walt Whitman's poem 'The Love of Comrades':
Come! we will make the Continents inseparable,
We will make the most splendid Race the sun ever shone upon
Religious worship was the focus of the school's philosophy, just as it was at Rugby or Fettes. (Searby 1989: 16)

Two points in case: see how much space Stapledon extends for oddly-pythagorean music theory, and his ever-constant emphasis on the improvement of the race.

Abbotsholme, however, offered not conventional Aglicanism but a refraction through Reddie's personal lens. The calendar was dotted with special services detailed in the Abbotsholme Liturgy, a substantial volume sumptuously printed by pupils; on Good Friday there was a reading from Sartor Resartus, and as much about the death of Socrates as Jesus. At the chapel service that concluded each day (there was one on Sunday morning too) Reddie took his readings from Confucius, the Bhagavad Gita, the Daily Mail, and occasionally the Bible, while pupils ransacked Emerson, Ruskin and Carlyle for their favourite passages. (Searby 1989: 16)

The exact two figures who show up in Stapledon's fiction as examples of what humanity should strive for. // Yes, the text reads "the death of Socrates as Jesus".

Midgley, Mary 1980. The Absence of a Gap between Facts and Values. I. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes, 54: 207-223. [JSTOR]

Let us start with Moore's confusions, noticing particularly the wide scope of his claim. Moore said that he had discovered a single simple fallacy, so widespread and fundamental as to vitiate practically all earlier moral reasoning. 'It is to be met with in almost every book on ethics' (Principia Ethica, p. 14), [|] and that apparently not just as an aberration but as a central feature. 'In general, ethical philosophers have attempted to define good without recognizing what such an attempt must mean' (p. 15), and have therefore, if they kept to the point at all, ended by saying in effect, 'Do, pray, act so, because the word "good" is generally used to denote actions of this nature' (p. 12). (Midgley 1980: 207-208)

"Good" is that which people say is good, naturally.

Mill had tried to avert the disaster by minor repairs, but had only diminished scandal at the price of increasing confusion. Could anyone do better with essentially Humian methods? Yes, said Moore, but only by making a drastic choice between the two central strands of Hume's philosophy. We must abandon the belief in human nature as a universal explanatory system, so boldly proclaimed in the Introduction to the Treatise and so well used elsewhere. Instead we must cling only to the belief in universal contingency taught chiefly in Treatise Book I. Accordingly, Moore ruled that good was both the only moral predicate and 'indefinable' in the sense of primitive, conceptually isolated like a Humian simple idea. (Midgley 1980: 210)

Concerning taking "human nature" as granted, stable and ever-lasting. That is, as having been made (creationism).

For Moore, the conceptual cordon sanitaire round goodness is provided by its being an ultimate simple - 'one of those innumerable objects of thought which are themselves incapable of definition' (pp. 9-10). For Hare it depends on something quite different, on our moving from the speech-act of describing to that of prescribing. But no reason is given why distinct speech-acts should take us into distinct conceptual universes. (Midgley 1980: 212)

I think I know some of these words.

Example. Nietzsche tells us that war is good, or that malice is a good quality in philosophers. We might, of course, respond like contentious schoolboys by just saying 'prove it'. But we see reason to take him more seriously than that. So we say 'Explain yourself. In what way are these things good? What's good about them?' Nietzsche replies that they are good because they are stimulating, because they wake you up and increase your awareness, because they remind you of your insecurity and promote independence. (Midgley 1980: 213)

A philosopher who has some bone to pick is less boring to read, I guess?

Moore, like Locke (and unlike Hume) counted them both as simple notions along with specific sense-properties like 'yellow'. But their kind of simplicity is radically different. 'Simples' like yellow are conceived as atoms of experience, irreducibly particular sensations. (This is confused, but let it pass.) (Midgley 1980: 215)

Okay.

I go, we will say, to an empty house, to find out whether the previous tenants have left any furniture there. This is evidently a factual question. Various objects are lying around. How do I know whether they are furniture? On the pattern which Moore seems to have taken as normal for every term but good, and which his successors still indicate, all I ought to need is the dictionary definition of 'furniture'. The OED, letting me down badly, says 'Movable articles in a dwelling house, place of business or public building'. This seems to cover the bricks and broken glrass on the floor, the rats running around and the corpse in the bathroom, but not the wardrobe, which I cannot shift. (Midgley 1980: 217)

Can you move the corpse? No, it's too heavy? Then it's not furniture. It's part of the house.

What we mean is that their goodness, as a whole, is of countless kinds, so interrelated that the whole really is inexpressible. But this, again, would be true of general factual predicates too. No doubt there are special mysteries about goodness, touched on by Plato, which arise in certain very important moral contexts. But they do not concern its general logical status, and cannot be solved by trying to use it without specification. (Midgley 1980: 222)

No doubt, no doubt.

Clark, Stephen R. L. 1980. The Absence of a Gap between Facts and Values. II. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes, 54: 225-240. [JSTOR]

Moral debate is possible, and people are sometimes persuaded, rationally, that they were wrong. Factual enquiry is often uncertain, inconclusive and defeasible, while moral argument is often conclusive as to be doubted only by philosophers and the insane. "Some theses about what is good are not mere sentiments, but are rationality itself' (C. S. Lewis The Abolition of Man p. 25). I share Midgley's antipathy to the thinkers who have left a generation with no defence against the twin demon of indifferentism and psychotic libertinism. (Clark 1980: 226)

"Indifferentism is the belief held by some that no one religion or philosophy is superior to another." | Libertinism is "A lifestyle or pattern of behavior characterized by self-indulgence and lack of restraint, especially one involving sexual promiscuity and rejection of religious or other moral authority." - Demons, you say?

The only proof that something is risible is that people laugh at it, but what a cruel or psychotic person laughs at is not risible. It would make no sense to say that my jokes are very risible although no-one, not even me, ever laughs at them (or rather, it would be a joke to say this). The sane, or sensible, or normal person is our criterion here, as it was Aristotle's. That a thing could be desirable though no one at all desired it, nor any concomitant of it, is as "idle and vacuous" a suggestion as Midgley could wish. (Clark 1980: 226)

One of those neat coincidences just occurred to me. I'm downloading music parallel to my reading this, and the very next band I entered from a list I have prepared beforehand is A Wish For A Maniac. I still don't know what to call these coincidences, when, for example, you are reading something and people are having a conversation within hearing distance, and you meet something they just said on the very page you're reading. It's a common enough experience, I think, to merit a name. (I'm not weird, I'm sure this is fairly common.)

In this dispute Moore took a middle way. That being true should be equated with "being accepted upon adequate evidence" (J. Dewey Essays in Experimental Logic p. 63), or with the facts that "the rules of confirmation embedded in the conversations of our current conceptual framework fully authorize our asserting (what is then called "true")" (R. Almeder "Fallibilism and the Ultimate Irreversible Opinion": N. rescher (ed). Studpies in Epistemology pp. 33f. (after Peirce)), seemed to him quite wrong. (Clark 1980: 227)

Peirce and fallibilism, of course.

The first response of the anti-naturalist may be to doubt that [|] such a thing as human nature exists at all. Are we not indefinitely fluid creatures, born without preconceived ideas and ready to take whatever colour may be poured on us by parents and society, "liberated" (in the pretentious phrase) "from our biological straitjacket"? To this the answer is quite simply and obviously, no. We are not indefinitely fluid, though we can put on a great many forms. We are, as Aristotle said, creatures born to society and to choice, abut not just any imaginable choices, any imaginable society would do as well to satisfy our ingrained needs and assumptions. (Clark 1980: 233-234)

We are not very fluid creatures synchronically. Seen diachronically, perhaps there is more fluidity than meets our limited eyes.

The reply must come that it is an illusion to suppose that human agency here is something beyond "nature": beavers build as we do - that's their nature. It's ours to make the best we can of the material - the best in terms of our wants and needs. Such making and mending is not unnatural nor anti-natural: what is unnatural is to disrupt the possibility of achieving a balanced, integrated system of soul and society and biosphere. Such actions are pathological manifestations because they work against our nature and the world's. (Clark 1980: 234)

My soul, our society, this biosphere.

If we conclude with Claude Bernard that natural entelechies are essentially sefish and that this runs against the law of charity, might we not conclude that we ought to act unnaturally? If "Christianity is a rebellio nagainst natural law" (A. Hitler, Hitler's Table-Talk (ed. H. Trevor-Roper) p. 51; see also J. L. Mackie "The Ethics of the Jungle", Philosophy 53, 1978), why not rebel? Bernard's position here, so to interpret it, is essentially Gnostic. (Clark 1980: 235)

And that is why Christians are the "untouchables" in Burdekin's Swastika Night (cf. Patai 1984).

A species is indeed more than an arbitrary set of vaguely similar individuals: it is a real and relatively stable pattern. But not for over a century have many of us believed that species were absolutely stable. If we suppose that they sprang full-formed from the mind of God we might believe them ordained for ever. But most of us, including Midgley, suppose that species evolve. Our ancestors of fifty million years ago did not have thes ame natures as ourselves, or not exactly - though we share some features. We cannot know that we will have descendants in a million or ten thousand or a hundred years, and if we have we cannot know that they will have our natures, that they will be of one same species with us. (Clark 1980: 235)

Approaching Stapledon.

Consider Stapledon's postulate (in Last and First Men) that a future species of hominids will serve as ancestors for the animal kingdom of a whole world, and our descendants occupy every ecological niche from sea-squirts to supermen. Even if we grant that [|] our present needs and wants are what they are and cannot be too roughly over-ridden without a disaster that will lose us any chance even of those goods in whose name we have distorted our natures - even so there is enough variation within our kind to permit further evolution. Which way should we wish evolution to go? "t some time in the future it will be necessary to decide how human we wish to remain" (E. O. Wilson: A. Caplan (ed) The Sociobiology Debate p. 301). Stapledon's devil-worshipping supermen are a possibility; so are other would-be master-races; so, to be sure, are courteous folk, "the meek". (Clark 1980: 235-236)

The first ~500 million years "humanity" spends on Neptune it degenerates and variegates into subhuman predatators and prey. A human-descended-creature will be a wolf to a human-descended-creature.

Their natures will be other than ours, their ethical assumptions other. Perhaps they will not share even our unreasoned love of life, our optimism about what will be, and find it their full satisfaction to destroy all life they can. (Clark 1980: 236)

Conatus.

If this approach is right, then the best that purely naturalistic ethics can manage is a new form of Protagorean relativism. Morality is a matter of nomoi, agreement, within a group whose nature it is to seek to live together for the satisfaction of their needs and wants. With groups whose nomoi are quite otherwise we may choose to fight, but we have no moral quarrel with them. There are no thesmoi, things decreed to al of us and binding on us all, by which we may assess their/our agreements. To be right in ethics is simply to be going along with the agreed conventions of our local group. (Clark 1980: 237)

A summary of moral relativism.

Morality can indeed be naturalistic, and stem from the impulses and needs of our mammalian heritage: that what has growth from these roots is true, objectively, is credible only if our evoliton has been directed to its discovery. If it has not, we cannot count on what we thought we knew, and must make what agreement then seems bearable.
Some of our descendants may yet be sea-squirts. (Clark 1980: 240)

Ending this philosophical paper about ethics with a psalm from the gospel of Stapledon.

McLaughlin, William I. 1983. Human Evolution in the Age of the Intelligent Machine. Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 8(4): 307-319. DOI: 10.1179/isr.1983.8.4.307 [tandfonline.com]

In general, evolutionary analyses have remained remarkably free from contact with other disciplines; in his recent synoptic work, The Growth of Biological Thought, the eminent Darwinian Ernst Mayr devotes only three pages to the origin of life. The Darwinian machine receives a dab of biological material from somewhere and working over aeons of time spews out a million species of animals and plants. (McLaughlin 1983: 307)

Panspermia?

It is not necessary to leave the Earth in order to find a potential evolutionary competitor: the modern digital computer is rapidly closing the gap between uninspired computation and adaptive response, as anyone who has lost a game of chess to a machine can attest. The speed with which electronic developments are taking place argues that a new and potent specise may soon be born and enter the evolutionary race. (McLaughlin 1983: 307)

The first personal computers enter the home and some are already thinking, "yeah, this will be our ruin."

Any analysis of the future is perforce an inexact endeavor, and the most that can be hoped for is a broad outline of trends. Also, such studies cannot aspire to proof, so that plausibility becomes the goal, and, under these circumstances, analogy, metaphor, and informed opinion are tools which are not to be neglected. (McLaughlin 1983: 308)

Add to this the influence of cultural context: trends are extrapolated from existing conditions. Stapledon's milieu lacked intelligent machines, thus he pays very little mind to the role of artificial intelligence in his imagination of the distant future.

There is no lack of theories of human nature, from the earliest speculations of the Greeks through modern systems of psychology. For the purposes of the present review it is useful to employ a model of human behavior that relates functions to evolutionary variables. Such a model is the triune brain developed by Paul D. MacLean.
In its simplest form the triune model resolves the human brain into there sub-brains, each sub-brain being relatively autonomous and possessed of its own memory, subjectivity, and set of goals. The origin of these sub-brains is derived from evolutionary history. The most primitive of these, the reptilian sub-brain, located immediately around the brain stem, is a remnant of our reptilian ancestors and retains many of their traits in its interest in ritual and violence. The second sub-brain, the limbic system, is inherited from early mammals and is one source of our emotional capacities. The neocortex, achieving its greatest development in humans, is the foremost reasoner of the three neural masses and has almost completely enveloped the brain in its rapid growth over the last million years. (McLaughlin 1983: 308)

"Since the 1970s, the concept of the triune brain has been subject to criticism in evolutionary and developmental neuroscience[1] and is regarded as a myth." - Parts of the soul extrapolated unto the anatomy of the brain, with first (love/emotion) and second (power/competition) rearranged.

The neocortex is largely directed toward the external world. Taken together, the two older brains are more inward-directed and mediate much of our visceral awareness. The ancient antithesis between the reason of the mind and the reason of the heart is rooted in this distinction. (McLaughlin 1983: 308)

The neocortex is, according to this model, our referential equipment.

Negative behavioral consequences of the triune brain arises from incomplete integration of the three components. 'With its imagination that travels in excess of the speed of light, man's new brain may be able to keep up with the present accelerated tempo of life through speedreading, the help of computers, and other contrivances, but his two animal brains, which forever tag along, must be presumed to move at their own slow pace. They seem to have their own biological clocks and their own sequential, ritualistic way of doing things which cannot be hurried. (McLaughlin 1983: 308)

You are jet-lagged because your body makes it to your destination in an unnatural speed and your soul is lagging behind the plane's trail at a more natural pace. (From Gibson's Pattern Recognition, via Tomberg 2023.)

Man per se may be an evolutionary dead end with his incompletely integrated brain. In his words of Arthur Koestler, 'the disastrous history of our species indicates the futility of all attempts at a diagnosis which do not take into account the possibility that Homo sapiens is a victim of one of evolution's countless mistakes. (McLaughlin 1983: 309)

Going for that existential blunt force trauma, I see.

The line leading to man has evolved by adding new brain structures to older ones, rather than extensively changing the older ones. On the principle that the future is likely to resemble the past, this mode of evolution provides a clue to how subsequent evolution may proceed. (McLaughlin 1983: 309)

Stapledon's Tenth Men, the rabbit-like ones, develop "a new organ, which overlaid and swallowed up" the older layers of brain (cf. Stapledon 1937: 243).

The ferment of art, philosophy, science and mathematics in classical Greece powered the Roman consciousness and through it also shaped the Middle Ages, with an infusion of religious ideas from the Middle East and Arabia. The stasis of the Middle Ages yielded in the 14th century to new modes of thought forged by the Italian Renaissance. Our modern world is largely an intellectual product of the Renaissance and a physical product of the Industrial Revolution. (McLaughlin 1983: 309)

If I'm not too much mistaken, the Renaissance occurred because of the sack of Constantinople c. 1453, which forced many Byzantine intellectuals (along with their travel chests containing Plato's extant dialogues) to flee to Italy, where Marsilio Ficino was taught Greek for the express purpose of translating them into Latin (cf. Halfwassen 2023: 224-225). To oversimplify, the Renaissance was, from this very limited viewpoint, "the Greeks, again".

However, Jaynes' most surprising conclusion is that man only became conscious in the last few thousand years when effective integration of the two hemispheres took place! He has analyzed the language of the Iliad and concluded that the heroes of Homeric Greece were not conscious; rather, their right hemispheres directed their left hemispheres in a way that was interpreted, by them, as the voices of the gods commanding them. As Jaynes states: 'It is one God [|] who makes Achilles promise not to go into battle, another who urges him to, and another who then clothes him in a golden fire reaching up to heaven and screams through his throat across the bloodied trench at the Trojans, rousing in them ungovernable panic. In fact, the gods take the place of consciousness.' (McLaughlin 1983: 309-310)

So that's where this piece of trivia comes from! I legitimately thought it was some psychology-minded classicist from the early 1900s. The theory is obviously weak because it is based on literary evidence.

  • Jaynes, J. 1976. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. [Internet Archive]
Perhaps machines will achieve a purely electrical solution to the problem of intelligence, in the sense of being able to pass a Turing test by winning the imitation game, but there is another possible route to machine intelligence that is suggested by the triune model of the human brain: addition of new machine structures to older human ones. The older human structures would then provide motivational and integrating functions for the man-machine organism, as the old animal brains inside the human head do now. The historical development and the structure of this hybrid intelligence will be examined in some detail below in the section 'The Passing of Man'. It will henceforth be referred to as the hyborg, for hybrid organism. The term obviously derives from cyborg, the cybernetic organism. (McLaughlin 1983: 310)

Just shove a motherboard inside the cranium. No biggie.

In the imitation game, since, in the author's opinion the average man can write only doggerel, the machine should not have much difficulty in competing by the use of elementary rules of syntax. (McLaughlin 1983: 311)

A brutal takedown of the average man.

So far, machines have not operated in autonomous modes to any substantial degree. Hence their analytical powers have been concentrated on the solution of problems already formulated by man. The true gulf between man and intelligent machines will become apparent when autonomous machines apply their powers to the formulation of problems. (McLaughlin 1983: 311)

If every human second indeed amounts to something like 3 years for the intelligent machine, it may very well strive towards a final solution to its predicament via nuclear armaments. Problem — existence.

The idea of alien intelligence, machine or extraterrestial, has a long history in literature, which affects present attitudes towards it. (McLaughlin 1983: 311)

A very valid point. Exactly what I was aiming at somewhere above with "cultural context".

The natural tendency of most individuals is to assume a principle of uniformitarianism and so to believe, at least at an informal level, that extraterrestial intelligence exists. (McLaughlin 1983: 312)

Also a bunch of people who have been abducted or have seen unexplainable aerial phenomena, and now the U.S. government with its videos and testimonials.

Nothing in the above considerations shows, however, that life will in fact arise in many places in the Universe. Perhaps it is indeed a very difficult process to get started. If true, would this condition make the existence of extraterrestial life improbable? No. One of the primary characteristics of life is its tendency to reproduce, to send out seeds. Clearly, life began somewhere in the Universe (we exist), and it is very natural to assume that seeds, in a genaral sense, would be sent out from centers of origin to other places in the universe. Francis Click, co-discoverer of the molecular structure of DNA, has argued that life originated on Earth as a result of primitive materials being sent here from other worlds by intelligent beingS: 'directed panspermia', as the theory is termed. (McLaughlin 1983: 313)

Panspermia? Panspermia!

The answer frequently given is that we don't see extraterrestials because they don't exist: we are alone in the galaxy. An ingenious alternative answer is the so-called 'zoo hypothesis', which postulates that the solar system has been set aside as a zoo or game preserve by the galactic civilization at large in order to preserve our culture. (McLaughlin 1983: 313)
If one views the content of dreams as largely, or at least significantly, originating from the old animal brains in our head, then the transmission of this content to the neocortex can be viewed as a form of interspecies communication. The mode of transmission is by means of symbolism. (McLaughlin 1983: 314)

Maybe if the triune brain theory wasn't hokum.

Whether or not a vertically unintegrated brain, of the triune variety or otherwise, is common amongst hominids in the galaxy cannot be determined. However, the evolutionary mismatch between the primitive neural circuitry of hominids and the speed-of-light transactions of machines should ensure the triumph of machines on all planets. (McLaughlin 1983: 315)

Speed is key for survival?

However, if man is left to make mischief for 100 000 years or more, it seems likely that he will destray himself - conceivably, genetic or chemical alterations to the triune brain could change this conclusion. (McLaughlin 1983: 316)

What's the alternative? Machine or extraterrestial overlords?

For an imaginative look at the future history of man and the problems that arise when great intelligence interacts with lesser intelligence, the works of W. Olaf Stapledon are unsurpassed. (McLaughlin 1983: 317)

Earthlings destroy both martians and venusians. Unsurpassable.

The analysis is complete. Is it a work of pessimism or optimism? Of course, any work which purports to show the end of man as a species cannot be located in the traditional vein of optimism. (McLaughlin 1983: 317)

The Moon will not fall next thursday. It'll be a while. There's that.

(McLaughlin 1983: 317)

Sind das die Borg?

W. O. Stapledon (1886-1950), the British philosopher and novelist, wrote pioneering novels in the domain of science fiction. Last and First Men and Star Maker are future histories while Odd John and Sirius focus upon superior intellects. Star Maker is a wonderful elixir to administer to a flagging imagination. (McLaughlin 1983: 319, n 36)

Good endnote.

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