THE AGE OF REASON
It took life some 3.5 billion years to finally start to become self-conscious, by all accounts; it took me just seven years. In Catholic doctrine (I was a little Catholic boy, remember), seven is when we reach the “age of reason”—suddenly we’re conscious of ourselves, and of others, so we can tell when we hurt people, and decide to keep going because we care more for ourselves than them, or stop because we know it’s wrong. We’re responsible for our “sins”, in other words. In the Biblical story it’s the day Adam and Eve ate some fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil; they didn’t die, as God had previously predicted, rather their “eyes were opened”, they became aware of themselves and each other, they felt shame. Shortly after that they were expelled from the Garden. Many religious traditions have a corresponding story—an historic loss of innocence, sin of hubris, fall from grace. Typically, the arrival of self-consciousness is seen as having an essentially moral angle, the first awakening, in fact, of moral conscience.
The age of reason is acknowledged also in common law and in developmental psychology, but seeing I’ve just wandered into what looks like some theology, I’ll keep going, so please suspend your disbelief. A key idea in both Jewish and Christian theology is the imago dei, the “image of God”. The creation story of Genesis 1 in the Hebrew Old Testament claims in verse 27 that “God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them”. What exactly is this image? The God of the OT is, as a matter of indisputable doctrine, invisible, unknowable, unapproachable, and there are only fleeting or indirect senses in the text of his physical embodiment—a voice from the heavens or from a burning bush, an angel who speaks either for or as him, a finger writing on a wall, the fact that he is referred to by gendered pronouns—so usually the imago is understood psychologically or spiritually, rather than physically, as something about the human soul rather than the human body.
In fact, there are a variety of non-physical interpretations of the imago in scholarly commentaries, but no single agreed interpretation, in either Judaism or Christianity. Is it human reason, personality, free will, intelligence, a special capacity to relate to God; is it something that makes us God’s representatives on earth, his “vice-regents”[1]? One way or another, writers and commentators in the tradition seemed to be responding to a real, felt sense of human uniqueness, a sort of godlikeness in relation to other living things and the world, a sense of destiny and transcendence. Either they invented a God of whose image they were a good spiritual likeness, or that God invented them as a good spiritual likeness of himself—you decide. They were hopeful, yearning, probably a bit desperate, as human beings are liable to be—this God, in whose image they were hopefully made, had to be their God, their ticket out of poverty, slavery, oppression. He was their Chosen God as much as they were his Chosen People.
But the image, either way, is, as the Biblical story clearly expresses, flawed from the outset. No sooner is it created than it falls. Moral conscience—awareness of oneself as a self, as an intentional actor in the world—seems to contain within itself the seeds of its own demise, a primal propensity for sin. God didn’t help (in fact he seems to have set it all up) by plonking the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil right there, under our noses, in the middle of the Garden, so that all the serpent had to do was to state the obvious, give us a nudge and a wink, and we were hooked.
So, yes, the image wasn’t created perfect; it had a fatal flaw. This seems to be, more or less, the common conclusion of most religious traditions, however imagined and fleshed out. It’s the line of thought ATP will be pursuing, in fact: we’re not so much born bad, as born flawed. We are, somehow, each of us, “a house divided against itself”, torn in two by conflicting motivations. St Paul captures it beautifully:
“I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.”[2]
It’s gripping reading. Sorry to quote scripture at you, but we are all anti-theologists here, open to learning from the amazing history of religion, unwilling to merely reject it out of hand as pure fantasy (even though, as we’ll see in the next chapter, that is essentially what it is). At any rate, for the moment ATP is looking for an evolutionary explanation, not a theological one. The question is, how did we end up in such a hopelessly divided state? Let’s now look closely at the act of self-consciousness itself, this strange “awakening” into a conscious experience of self, to see what might have gone wrong.
TWO NECESSITIES
The critical question is, what really drives human behaviour? All human beings, throughout all human history? Usually we’re looking for one driver, one necessity; but in fact, as ATP has discovered, there are two. We live, as we saw in Chapter 5, in two worlds; so, yes, two drivers, two necessities. Let me now tell you the tale thereof.
The first necessity is the obvious one—the purely physical necessity of survival we inherit from our deep, evolutionary past. This is, as we have seen, the very first thing that living agency has to do—survive first, ask questions later. We (humans) are complex, sophisticated organisms, with all sorts of inbuilt biological mechanisms and external technologies for physical survival at our disposal, which we barely have to think about in our day to day existence, but still we feel physical necessity deep in our bones, and it continues to exert an important influence on our behaviour. It’s really only when our survival seems to be threatened in some way that we experience physical necessity consciously—we’re hungry or thirsty and there’s some problem about getting food or drink right away, we’re ill or injured or a loved one is ill or injured, we have a close shave while driving, we get the sack at work or the share market takes a dive and our superannuation follows suit—suddenly our primal fear of death or ending up on skid-row cuts in, and we rack our brains to work out what in the world we’re going to do next.
The second great necessity is a much more recent acquisition, however. It’s a uniquely human thing, which comes about with the advent of self-consciousness and the creation of our second virtual world of memory, imagination, culture. ATP calls it “psychological necessity”. It’s not entirely separate and distinct from physical necessity, however, rather a psychological development of it—our life effort turns to “psychological survival”, which potentially becomes, over time, even more compelling than physical survival.
What is this psychological necessity all about? Well, I should ask you, and you should ask me; we should ask each other! What exactly is it that motivates the play of our imagination during the day, at times when our thoughts are not intentionally focussed on practical matters at hand, work, study or whatever we’re doing? What is it that drives our reverie, even if we are not usually aware of it and don’t often reflect on it, then feeds back into our subsequent actions? Do you know yourself? Well, know thyself.
Let me put forward a hypothesis about psychological necessity, then you can tell me what you think. Something motivates and drives us deep inside, a powerful emotional force. We are sometimes very conscious of it, but even when we aren’t, it still influences us, profoundly, at all times. It is, I would assert, a deep desire, a yearning, a thirst, an obsession, a compulsion—for what? Yes, what is it that we all yearn for more than anything else in the world? Surely the thing we, all of us humans, yearn for, more than anything else, is (I hypothesize) love.
Yes, I’ve said it; you heard right. The L-word, the beautiful four-letter word beginning with L. I’m making the radical claim that the psychological necessity that drives the workings of our inner imaginative, psychological, soul life is the powerful emotional desire for love. Of course, we’re flawed, foolish creatures, so we have all sorts of bad ideas about how to love and be loved—we’ll get to these shortly. But the question is—if you’re suspending your judgement on my hypothesis for the moment—how does self-consciousness achieve all this? In other words, how does self-consciousness turn us from natural creatures whose sole motivation in life is survival, into very unnatural creatures who are obsessed by love, in whatever form we can get it or give it?
It’s in the nature of the act of self-consciousness itself. Prior to being conscious we are immersed, blindly, instinctively in the world, continuous with it, flowing with it, for good or ill. I’m thinking of a little child, or a non-human animal, but I could say the same thing about any non-human organism, even an amoeba or a bacterium. Our living agency is a blind force which acts continuously but we have no awareness of it. Everything changes, however, as we become conscious of ourselves and others. Suddenly, virtually, momentarily, as we have described it, our world splits in two, and, in that moment, we suddenly find ourselves an absolute outsider, looking in on the (physical) world, which is now absolutely other.
It is a profound, ecstatic moment, the beginning of our transcendence as a person, as a species, but also, simultaneously, a moment of absolute existential despair. Why is it so divided, ambivalent? Well, self-consciousness opens us up to the possibility of wielding incredible power—the full power of real, intentional agency—as we have seen; so, right at the outset, in the full flush of that first moment, there is a feeling of utter exhilaration—”I am me, watch me grow, see me standing toe to toe …… !” However, the main thing self-consciousness does to us early on, before we learn to wield it effectively, is make us incredibly vulnerable. Cut loose from the safety and certainty of animal instinct, we find ourselves, suddenly, completely alone and incompetent, bumbling blindly in a world that is utterly alien, utterly indifferent to us. I am me, which is great, but I am only me, which is terrible. It’s just me against the world—help!
This is the trauma we all experience as we gradually emerge out of the somnambulance of infancy into self-conscious life. Usually we are surrounded by the love of our parents and family, who solicitously help us navigate the fears and terrors of our gradually growing self-awareness. With self-consciousness we experience the ability to intentionally control anything and everything around us, but as we try to exercise this control, sooner or later we find it just doesn’t work—we bump into the intractability, the stubborn resistance of reality itself. Suddenly we’re plunged into a feeling of utter frustration, powerlessness, despair. The whole world is against me, and why shouldn’t it be, because it is alien to me, enemy to me, just not-me?
The first of many childhood tantrums ensues, to the dismay of parents, who either calmly help the child deal with the emotional trauma, or react against it, as if the child is just being naughty. The child has to learn that their world can’t be controlled, that it can’t just be forced to give them what they want; but that, rather, a different approach is needed which considers the needs and wants of the world itself. As it begins to play and thereby live its separate, individual life in the world, the child is set on the road to learning the most important lesson of life, that in order to get what you want from the world you have to consider it, respect it—in a word, love it.
You start out wanting control, thinking that it is possible, or even easy, to get it, but this quickly turns on its head, and suddenly you’re alone, in despair, and the only thing you can think of is re-connection, of a return to a pre-conscious experience of the world in which you were connected, immersed, flowing with a world of harmony and love—the protective, artificial world that your loving parents create for you (or not, as the case may be). Your impulse is to hurl away your useless personal agency and have the world wait on you hand and foot again. A return to the womb, you might say. But you have no idea how to get back there. So, yes, you spit the dummy, curl up in a ball in the corner of your room, drink alcohol or take drugs to try to make yourself feel better, beat the lover you are insanely jealous of, self-harm with a razor blade, eat a ton of chocolate, join a left or right wing extremist group, do anything you can to change either yourself, or the world that hates you, by the sheer force of your will. All of which is self-defeating and just leads you, if you stick to the plan, in a vicious spiral of further disconnection, along a one-way street that leads you in the direction of death, only death, the ultimate disconnection.
The psychological necessity that drives us, consumes us, therefore, is the desperate yearning to be loved—for the other, the world, life, the universe itself, to be for us, on our side, well-disposed to us, provide the satisfaction of all our needs and desires, and for us to have absolute assurance and certainty of this. It is “psychological”, firstly, because it plays itself out in our psyche—in our mind, our imagination—and also because it is a psychologized, imagined transformation of physical necessity, in that the satisfaction of all our physical needs is experienced as if it were an act of love on behalf of the universe to us. We get the idea of this from how our parents nurture us, ultimately from the experience of the womb itself—our parents provide not just our physical needs, but pour out their love on us, which is a sort of psychological food or nourishment essential for our “psychological survival”.
Think of the worst human being on the planet—a cruel, narcissistic tyrant, a criminal kingpin, a psychopathic killer. Physical power obviously looms large in their motivation, but it’s only a means to an end—it’s power over people they really want. They desperately want to control people, even if that means murdering them and eating them (in the case of certain psychopathic killers). They want to control their victims’ bodies, surely, but much more than this (or rather by doing this) they want to control their minds, their souls. This soul-control is nothing more than a hopelessly distorted attempt to make people love them, and when they inevitably fail in this attempt, they satisfy their twisted desire for love by punishing or killing them. The tyrant, the criminal kingpin, the psychopathic killer—they’re just like you and me, they just want to be loved. But, no, they’re not just like you and me, because they haven’t, poor darlings, learned the most important thing in life: how to truly, effectively, undistortedly, love.
All we want is love. More than anything, because we are conscious, the thing we desire, the thing we desperately yearn for (especially when we’re having trouble getting it), is loving connection with other consciousnesses. As consciousnesses, we go, compulsively, incessantly, in search of validation, recognition, affirmation, completion, acceptance by other consciousnesses. We yearn for oneness, wholeness, unity, identity, transcendence, you name it.
At first it is just with immediate biological family, since they are the only ones around. But quickly the circle grows—extended family, friends, workmates. Some people search for connection on an even wider level, as performers, teachers, leaders, even as monarchs or dictators. And then there is the ultimate love that many of us, throughout history, have imagined might be accessible, and all of us have probably hoped for at some time or other—the love of (how will I put it?) the Universe, or of God. Of course, this ultimate love might just be going around in a circle, as we’ve already suggested—an imagined return to the all-encompassing love of parents in early childhood, or even to the womb—a modern psychological interpretation of God, as Dr Freud might say, a projection of our deepest unconscious desires—we’ll have much more to say of this in our next chapter.
OUR INNER DIALECTIC
The tension is palpable. JM Coetzee refers to the “natural dialectic between a desiring self and a resistant real world”[3]. We want love—this intensely sweet, desirable, ungraspable psychological sustenance—more than anything, more than (physical) life itself, but the very act of seeking it seems to be the very thing that keeps getting in its way. We try to control things, but the only love we can get this way is false, forced, fake love, which rings hollow, never lasts for long, and has more in common with hatred or contempt than real love. We have to find a contrary, paradoxical way; a way of, first, letting go of our pathetic yearning for love, then, from that point of emptiness, opening ourselves to the world, readying ourselves to give love with no hope or expectation of being loved in return. We have to be saints, in other words, or at least aspire to a certain limited degree of saintliness.
Now I really am trespassing into the territory of our next chapter—religion, in other words. The tension, the dialectic, is between our desire to be loved and our actual ability to get it. Or, which amounts to the same thing, between our efforts to get love and our efforts to give it. Or, if you like, between control and power on one hand, and love on the other. It is a dialectic, an unbearable, irresolvable tension, we are born into. With the love and care of our parents and of society around us, we might have half a chance of learning to live with it.
Thus, and to circle back to the start of this chapter, we’re not born bad, but we are born, completely naturally, self-centred, self-absorbed. This is not Original Sin—sin comes approximately seven years later, when we are self-conscious and capable of intentionally in a way that we know will hurt someone—just a simple, necessary fact of our existence. We’re born as separate, individual creatures, with no awareness of anyone or anything else in the world, not even ourselves. All we have is our evolutionary inheritance, a powerful living agency hellbent on physical survival. We’re incapable of thinking about anyone else but ourselves—well, at first we’re incapable of thinking at all—so we just get on with it. Absolute self-absorption. It’s only as we gradually become self-conscious that we start to notice anything else exists apart from ourselves. We’re born to think of ourselves, we have to learn to think of others. If we’re lucky, and our parents love and careful teaching go according to plan, we gradually make the beautiful transition from naturally self-centred creatures to unnaturally selfless creatures, capable of occasional or even frequent acts of kindness, care and love.
So, it’s a dialectic, essentially, between psychological and physical necessity, and, yes, they are at cross-purposes, because the act of satisfying one might vitiate the other—physical necessity might cause us to reach out to control things, but controlling things often drives love away; whereas psychological necessity requires us to learn to let go of things, to open ourselves up to the world, to be vulnerable, but this might have negative consequences for us, physically. The tension, the paradox, is real, and we have no choice but to try to find ways of resolving it in our lives, because, well, we do have to survive physically first, before we can think of love—like the oxygen mask the in-flight safety video advises you to put on before you help your child put on theirs. It takes us a while to learn to love, a whole lifetime really. We’re slow learners—we are born naturally very good at receiving love, but giving it is unnatural, against our (physical) nature. We learn it, hopefully, through the hard work and persistence of our parents, our extended family, our teachers and society, religion, culture around us.
The same goes for humanity in general. Love is hard fought and a long time coming. It takes ages but we’re gradually getting there—humanitarianism, universal human rights, universal suffrage, democracy, anti-racism, anti-discrimination, the welfare state, the free market, maybe one day universal basic income and/or universal job guarantee. The problem—the tension—is that our ability to give love always or often lags behind our desire to get it. This lagging behind creates all sorts of distortions and false forms of love, which waylay us and lead down endless blind alleys. At first humans don’t really understand how love works, and seek it through control, power, possession. We quickly start to realize that this doesn’t deliver the goods, however—it only ever gives a temporary form, an illusion, of love. So we start doing simple things, like noticing how our possessive actions really hurt the other person, or imagining ourselves in the shoes of the other person—the sort of thing only self-conscious creatures can do. The rest is, literally, history—the long human historical quest to learn to live together positively, to learn how to give love as well as receive it.
Finally, there is an amazing question we can ask about all this, which will lead us into the next amazing chapter in ATP’s search for the Holy Grail, “The God who doesn’t exist”. We can say with virtual certainty that a human child will never develop beyond its natural self-centredness without the determined support and guidance of its parents, or if not of the parents (as sometimes happen), then of other people in society who intervene to help the child. So much of it hangs, for each human child, on their inheritance, both nature and nurture, from their parents and from society around them. But what about the human race as a whole, which also starts out naturally self-centred? In the early days of homo sapiens, intentionally unselfish behaviour would have been almost unknown, and wouldn’t have gone much beyond the unconscious, instinctive care of parents for their offspring. How is it
The human race itself, therefore, like the individual human child, born naturally self-centred, has to, somehow, learn to be kind, selfless, loving. But unlike the individual human child, the human race has no parents to teach it, no precursors who have already been to the well and come back to tell the story of it.
So, what does it (the whole human race) do? What can it do? Can it be its own teacher? Can it somehow evolve itself out of self-centredness, pull itself up by its own bootstraps. There’s a lot hanging on it right at the moment, in case you haven’t noticed, all our self-centredness chickens seemingly suddenly coming home to roost—a little matter of international conflict, climate change, environmental destruction, species extinction, even the prospect of nuclear Armageddon.
Historically—and this will be the central theme of the next chapter—humanity has in fact had someone, or at least imagined it has had someone, to teach it out of its natural self-centredness—God, no less. God—either an imagined idea or a transcendent living reality outside ourselves—is who or what teaches humanity to love. But does such a God exist? Well he (or she or it) had better, because we might be in big trouble without him (or her or it). Lately God has gone missing, of course, along with the human soul. We’ve done a good job so far at recovering the soul, however, so now let’s go looking for the God. On with the show, this is it!
January 2022
[1] G J Wenham, World Biblical Commentary, Volume 1, Genesis 1-15, 1987, Word Books, Texas, page 29-32.
[2] Romans 7:15-20.
[3] JM Coetzee, Inner Workings—Essays 2000-2005, 2007, Vintage, London, page 287.