Catastrophe Practice (11 page)

An attempt to describe the style of some new covenant — and incidentally to face the question of the possible forms of man-made selection — has been that of Karl Popper, a philosopher of science. (These names — Husserl, Monod, Popper — are brought in here like harbingers of some spiritual-scientific football team because this is the sort of thing, it seems to me, that they are — having perhaps little direct contact with each other, but forming, in my mind at least, the vastly exciting web of a communal ‘objective' subjective world: it being by such connections, influences, ramifications of attitudes and ideas that life becomes ordered and creative and as it were scores goals.) Scientists are not, Popper says, taking observations and constructing from them a world of objective truth though it is often supposed that they are: what they are in fact doing is making imaginative conjectures and then making observations to test these against experience with the purpose of eliminating those conjectures which are shown to be false. Men learn from a process of making mistakes: ‘the quest for certainty for a secure basis of knowledge has to be abandoned': ‘what may be called positive is
only
so with respect to negative methods'. Even our knowledge of ourselves is all such ‘decoding or interpretation'. But although both ‘the amoeba and Einstein … make use of the method of trial-and-error elimination, the amoeba dislikes to err while Einstein is intrigued by it: he consciously searches for his errors in the hope of learning'.
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The style of a new covenant between scientific method and
daily life, that is, might be something to do with this attitude towards mistakes — to learn how to use them, rather than be haunted by them: to see them as a means for improvement, rather than a being enmeshed But this is not a common attitude: there seems to be a greater attraction, at the moment, in the security of being enmeshed. Popper suggests that there should be a recognition of three distinct worlds — 1. the world of physical objects: 2. the world of states of consciousness: and 3. the world of objective contents of thought — ‘especially of scientific and poetic thoughts and works of art'. This ‘world 3', as Popper calls it, ‘is man's special accomplishment: it is the tangible representation of the world of communal subjectivity in which he can move and have a choice: it is man's creation, yet it has its own autonomy: it is a world of man's ideas, yet held objectively in books and records and symbols. This world 3, perhaps, contains the means by which a man can stand back and see himself: by which he can be in relationship with others without the absurdity of collision. And it is here, perhaps, that natural selection can still properly take place. There can be evaluation and elimination of the products of the imagination: there need be a violation of neither knowledge nor ethics. ‘It is only science which replaces the elimination of error in the violent struggle for life by non-violent rational criticism and which allows us to replace killing (world 1) and intimidation (world 2) by the impersonal arguments of world 3'
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But still, it is in worlds 1 and 2 that people have to live: and it is here that the question again is posed — might there not be some acceptable attitude to selection here, if only there were a language by which humans could embrace the apparent complexities of their nature?

A scientist who moved from a study of societies to a study of personalities (the better, perhaps, to understand societies) is Gregory Bateson — anthropologist, ecologist, psychologist — who in his collection of essays
Steps towards an Ecology of Mind
has suggested how a man's lack of coincidence with himself might be a means of not just accepting but being able to grow in consciousness and learning. There is Learning I (these code-words, like those of Popper's ‘worlds', are the sort
of cries that footballers use when more elegant speech is not useful) — there is Learning I, which is the sort of learning available to animals as well as to humans and which depends on the responses to stimuli becoming habitual There is Learning II, which is an accomplishment of man, and depends on a man's ability to stand back from the processes of Learning I and to see its patterns — and in this at least in some sense to be free of them. And there is Learning III, which is rarely glimpsed by men, but perhaps is that which may be necessary for survival. Learning III is a standing back from the patterns of Learning II — in the same way that Learning II is a standing back from Learning I — it is the chance for a man to see not just the patterns of his behaviour but also the patterns of his ability to see — and by this, not just to be free of patterns, but possibly to influence them. For what he will then be in contact with, Bateson suggests, is a network of ‘propositions, images, processes, natural pathology and what-have-you' that is like ‘some vast ecology or aesthetics of cosmic interaction': not only within the mind, but in connection with the world outside of which the mind is conscious: some circuitry going between, and around, these inside and outside worlds. And insofar as a man knows himself to be part of, representative of, these interactions, then he is not helpless: it is only when he supposes himself to be single and all-of-a-piece that he is. A simple or ‘unaided' consciousness is likely to be ‘only a sampling of different parts and localities of this network' and thus a ‘monstrous denial of the integration of the whole': ‘from the cutting (or limitation) of consciousness, what appear above the surface are
arcs
of circuits instead of either the complete circuit or the larger complete circuit of circuits'. Also — ‘unaided consciousness must always tend towards hate, not only because it is good common sense to exterminate the other fellow, but for the more profound reason that, seeing only arcs of circuits, the individual is continually surprised and necessarily angered when his hard-headed policies come back to plague the inventor'.
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To get beyond ‘good common sense' — beyond the patterns of Learnings I and even II that cause such anguish — to be able to consider some ‘circuit of circuits'
— it is in this effort that there is freedom, fellowship, lack of hate; and thus the chance to survive. But still — how are people who wish to make such an effort not to be wiped out by those who do not?

Scientists who deal with physical workings of the brain find some such kinds of circuitry in fact: the brain with its immensely complex system of fibres and connections and branches and switches through which impulses pass and are activated or eliminated or stored is like Popper's World 3 or Bateson's Vast ecology': as a result of scientific observation there appear to be correlations between patterns formed in the brain and patterns perceived in the world outside. J. Z. Young, an anatomist of the brain, has written, ‘The combined evidence from histology, physiology and training experiments shows that there is some connection between the shape of the cells in the nervous system and the thing that can be learned by it.'
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Patterns are formed in the brain: the brain itself works by processes of elimination and selection: innumerable small-scale experiments are carried out to determine what shall live and what shall not. ‘Each cell leads to two possible outputs, and learning consists in closing one of these'. This is the physical counterpart of Popper's suggestion that we learn through our mistakes. There are, in the brain, processes of larger interrelation like Bateson's ‘circuit of circuits' or Learning III — perhaps thwarted at the moment by our present language which finds it difficult to embrace seeming opposites from a higher point of view. There are circuits of interrelation for instance between ‘pleasure' and ‘pain'; between ‘good' and ‘bad' — ‘good' being that which helps an organism to survive but ‘bad' (in the sense of that which gives pain and thus instruction of what to avoid) being necessary too: for without such warning, how could an organism survive? And so ‘bad' can be ‘good': but without an understanding of how to see, and describe, the larger interconnectedness appertaining to these processes — to gain a further vision perhaps of a higher ‘good' and ‘bad' — how can sense be made? And how can an organism not let itself be destroyed in the confusion? But it is in just such areas that there are taboos. J. Z.
Young has noted that there is in conventional thought ‘a resistance to recognising that good and bad, pleasure and pain, need to be considered in one category'.
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There are also the taboos (as Monod noted) in facing the problems, natural or unnatural, of selection. It is ‘a fundamental instruction of every species that from time to time it shall discard nearly the whole organism and start again'.
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It is by means of death (and birth) that there is kept alive the continuing strain which, in terms of evolution, is what matters rather than the individual. The taboos arise because it is difficult for a man to think of himself (once he has broken away from religious and political animism) as anything other than an individual. But the means are there. If he were able to see himself, scientifically, as representative of a potentially greater strain — it is this, as well as providing comfort in the face of individual death, that might enable him, since he would know that part of this potential were inside as well as outside him, to come to terms with himself; and thus, of course, with the world.

The ‘objective' world of ideas has become so vast, and the imagery used to describe even specific corners of it so complex, that it is not surprising that men have not caught up with scientific attitudes in their hearts and daily lives; that they still serve what Monod calls their ‘disgusting farrago'. Popper noted in his World 3 the existence of ‘works of art': Bateson suggested that art was a mode by which glimpses of Learning III could be given expression; J. Z. Young, following practical experiments with the brain, noted ‘art, literature and aesthetics … are major contributors to human homeostasis' (an organism's continual adaptation of itself in order to stay alive). A philosopher who has tried to describe such a relationship between science and art is Susanne Langer. Symbolism is an element, she says, in all cognition — scientists use symbols to formulate their experience — but some further imagery is required for the mind to be able to cope as it were with these symbols. ‘They and they only originally made us aware of the wholeness and overall form of entities, acts and facts in the world: and little though we may know it, only an image can hold us to the concept of a total phenomenon against which
we can measure the adequacy of the scientific terms with which we describe it.' ‘We are actually suffering from a lack of suitable images of the phenomena that are currently receiving our most ardent scientific attention — the objects of biology and psychology This lack is blocking the progress of scientifically oriented thought towards systematic insight into the nature of life and especially of mind.'
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What is required for the evolution of liveliness, that is — for the jump across the gap between scientific attitudes and daily living — is not just the images used by scientists, because these are specialised; but images as it were of these images (where has this cry been heard before?): and it seems possible that men have the ability to provide these, because they can stand back and observe something of the processes of their own minds. The creation of such images, traditionally, has been a function of art. But art, in this age of complex self-awareness and self-reflection, is not, currently, finding its own life-springs, however much these are needed to describe the ‘total phenomenon' of science. But they are there. The ‘image of feeling created by art … seems to me capable of encompassing the whole mind of man, including its highest rational activities. It presents the world in the light of a heightened perception, and knowledge of the world as rational experience. Rationality, in this projection, is not epitomised in the discursive form that serves our thinking, but is a vision of thinking itself — of a vital movement outstripping the sure, deep rhythms of physical life — so its tensions against those rhythms are felt as keen and precarious moments within the very limits of supportable strain.'
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A vision of thinking itself
— this too is a cry, an image, that has been used before — by Brecht, by philosophers and scientists quoted above, by almost anyone who is anxious about the condition of modern living and modern thinking in which art has little content and science little shape. To bring the two together — to provide for both art and science an encompassing covenant — this might be an activity indeed almost as difficult to speak about as the qualities of old (or new) divinities.

Writers have been quoted by random selection here — Popper, Monod, Bateson, Young, Langer — random in that
they were come across by this writer at least without plan but selected in that, it seemed, they all were connected by the same authority and liveliness and thus seemed to form, and not just in the writer's mind, their psycho-celestial football team. And this was the sort of occurrence that the writers themselves seemed to describe — the way that out of the activities of randomness there are formed structures as of a mind and by a mind: that such is life: all these writers in their different disciplines so unpremeditatedly but so luminously making connections — a state of affairs like Hermann Hesse's Glass Bead Game, the cosmic interaction of some World 3 Cup or indeed the conception and parturition of these plays. Or like a molecule of DNA — the structuring and ordering of cells for survival — while most of the rest of the world — the world of running down, of entropy — goes its way. Means of communication have become so deafening: what is called ‘negative entropy (life!) so bemused: that perhaps language has had to become more and more a protection (see
After Babel
by George Steiner, that notable winger): and those who still wish to communicate truly — who wish to move in a world other than the conditioning-and-response of Bateson's Learnings I and even II — have to live as it were in an occupied country; cautious of speech in case it will be too easily understood and misinterpreted; tapping on cell walls for their communication; the walls of language being thus useful, even if they are for protection. And this coded language being called a meta-language (such phrases are bleak enough, goodness knows, to put off stray enquiry agents) in that it will be talking not only about facts but also the language usually used to talk about (or hide?) the facts: ‘If we want to speak about the correspondence of a statement to a fact we need a meta-language in which we can state the fact (or the alleged fact) about which the statement in question speaks, and in addition can speak about the statement in question' (Popper).
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And only thus are we dealing with the question of ‘truth'. Well, what jailer will understand that? But the point of all this is that it is only by such practice, by such sleight-of-mind, that statements can be given a form beyond individual predilection: that beyond
cacophony there can be living connections. Higher abilities of learning, of consciousness, can in truth be like components of a genetic code: the authority that they carry, and transmit, may survive — even within, and going on from, a body that has sickness. A body may have to have sickness — may have to die — so that, through the code, what lives is re-shuffled and re-formed — for evolution. That which a body itself has learned of course may not survive — for this there has to be some concurrence with chance, a concurrence between what occurs genetically and what, in the world, has happened that will make such a result of chance be best fitted for survival. Acquired characteristics cannot be handed on: what can occur is that what has been learned can become the ground upon which one chance seed (of which there are myriads) rather than another might grow. And so, still, it can be upon what has been learned, upon what has been made of the environment, that the distinction between what will survive and what will not will largely depend And so it is as if there were some ability to hand down what has been learned; since that which is not fitted to experience may simply die. And experience can be chosen. And there can be an environment either friendly, or hostile, to seeds, not just in the world, but in minds. Nowadays there are few illusions about the attractiveness of death in the outside world; also in the mind. We live in societies in which death is the chief allurement and entertainment guns hang down like breasts on street corners; legs on posters explode like wounds. It is as if some tired old species knew it had to die: was thus just arranging in the usual way (extinction) for its improvement. What is not known, of course, is whether the whole species has to die — or just attitudes which have made death so attractive. In either case, genetically, processes remain the same — something has to be broken up, re-shuffled, re-formed, for survival. To describe that which survives — for which the reshuffling, breaking up, takes place — there can be symbols of symbols: DNA, germ-cells, negative entropy, even divinities! But the characteristics of persons who choose to become involved in such liveliness rather than deathliness — in a chance of survival — will be, roughly, the same: the ability to
move between different levels of consciousness; the attempt at language capable of embracing seeming opposites from a higher point of view; the acceptance of errors as the purveyors of learning rather than traps; the becoming at home in such systems and codes of transformation. It may be, of course, that the invasions of entropy will be too strong: the lively, along with the deathly, will be destroyed. But at least there is the hope (in the mind?) that subtlety (like that of a wrestler?) will result in the violence of deathliness being turned back only to destroy itself. For it is in subtlety, in art, that there can be said — All right, if you want to die, do it! — with the intention, perhaps, of achieving the opposite. On the grid, the riddle, of chance, of evolution, there is anyway nothing better to be done: men have to hang on, like sperms (do not thousands have to die? in the womb? in the mind?) for the sake of the survival of — everything.