The Crack in the Cosmic Egg Read online

  Occasionally we hear of people found chained in attics and such places from infancy. Their world view is either scanty or different for they are always feeble minded at best. In 1951 a child was found in an Irish chicken-house, having somehow survived there with the chickens, since infancy. The ten-year old's long hair was matted with filth; he ate at the chicken trough; roosted with the flock; his fingernails had grown, fittingly, to semicircular claws; he made chicken-like noises, not surprisingly; he had no speech and showed no promise of learning any in the time he survived his rescue.

  Forty years ago there was interest in two feral children found in India. They had apparently been raised by wolves. They were taken from an actual wolf den along with some cubs, the older wolves scattering or being killed. One of the children, Kamala they called her, survived for nine years. Only with difficulty was she taught table manners and such niceties as walking on the hind legs. Nevertheless she exhibited a growing awareness of the reward system of her new group, and displayed a strong drive toward such orientation. As with the chicken-child, however, she had missed the formative period of human infant development, and there was no easy or complete going back to retrace the steps. Kamala had formed according to the pattern eliciting response around her during her mirrorhag period. For her first two years of captivity --- or rescue -- she howled faithfully at ten, twelve, and three at night, as all Indian wolves do. She would also, in spite of precautions, manage to get at the chickens, rip them apart alive and eat them raw. Only when the new social reward system grew strong enough to outweigh the earlier rewards did she abandon her early training. --- There has been an accepted disparaging of the reports by Kellog, Gesell, Singh, and others concerning these children, until one now hears this case blithely dismissed as a fraud. No one reading the original publications, studying the photographs, the diaries, and the overall picture will dismiss the case, however.

  What kind of minds did these feral children have? Jung claimed that no one is born a tabula rasa, a blank slate. As the body carries features specifically human yet individually varied, so does the psychic organism. The psyche preserves an unconscious stratum of elements going back to the invertebrates and ultimately the protozoa. Jung speaks of a hypothetical peeling of the collective unconscious, layer by layer, down to the psychology of the ameoba. We can trace a rough parallel in the development of the foetus.

  As the body must be fed to realize the potential built into the genes as a blueprint waiting development, so must the mind. Jung used the term 'archetype' to describe "recurrent impressions made by subjective reactions." We inherit such ideas as part of our potential mind pattern. Archetypes, however, are only a kind of readiness to produce over and again the same mythical ideas. If the readiness is not triggered by a response or a demand, that particular possibility remains dormant and even steadily diminishes.

  Linguists are intrigued by the readiness with which the infant seizes a language, if given the referents. The "readiness" of language can miscarry, as Susanne Langer put it, because of lack of the trigger-response interplay. If this happens, the world view shaped by that language miscarries too and never forms. Then participation in that kind of world is permanently blocked. Leonard Hall writes that our culture and our reality are not separate phenomena. People of different cultures not only speak different languages, but inherit different sensory worlds.

  Lévi-Strauss uses the term "semantic-universe" to describe our intellectual-scientific-technological fabric of reality. Jerome Bruner suggested that language is our most powerful means for performing "transformations" on the world. We transmute the world's shape by metaphoric mutations. We recombine our verbal structures in the interest of new possibilities.

  Susanne Langer considered language to be conception and concept the frame of perception. Thus, for Langer, we live in a "primary world" of reality that is verbal. The word for a thing helps to arrest an infant's visual process and focus it on a specific thing. It is the combination of sensory possibilities, parental focus, and innate drives for ordering, that organizes the child's visual field. Then the word-thing growth becomes exponential, growing like a tree at every tip. Grouping, identifying, correlating, with a constant check with his exemplars, gives the young child an exciting participation and communion, a defining of self and world. Langer calls even nature a "language-made affair," made for understanding, and "prone to collapse into chaos if ideation fails." Fear of this collapse may be the most potent fear in civilized man.

  It is our ideation that shapes our children. We provide an enriched environment, visual, aural, tactile stimuli to furnish the best supply of raw materials, but our own background determines what we decide makes up a "rich environment." And then, quite naturally, we expect our children to shape this material into a pattern verifying our commitments. We look for agreement.

  A "semantic universe" can be built only on a background of language, but a considerable input of raw materials of every kind is necessary to build a language. The mind has to have a world to draw on in order to organize a world-to-view. In my opening broadside I have emphasized thinking as the director of percepts, and surely our developed concepts shape our world. But an initial impingement on perception by a world "out there," of things and people, enters as the other mirror in the two-way interaction of development of mind. Infant thinking is probably autistic, gradually structuring into reality-thinking, but even autistic thinking cannot arise from a vacuum. The mill of the mind is the chief element in reality, but before it can grind, at least for our table, it must have some of our kind of grist. Missing this, a mind might still grind marvelous stuff, but we could never know it.

  In the last chapter I presented evidence against a universal pool of knowledge or a common logic of thinking. Evidence points toward the infant mind being prestructured along clearly marked drives toward communion with others, toward speech, response and so on, but the content for the drives is acquired. Bruner points out that intent precedes both acquisition of knowledge and ability to do. Acquisition of language and the ability to do in an infant are brought about by nurturing and fostering the inborn intent. Raw material must be given the mind; the blueprint must be filled in by responsive and guiding actions and reactions from other minds. The infant mind then makes syntheses of these acquisitions of possibilities.

  The kind of syntheses that can occur, once material is available to mind, is varied, however. Smythies, as mentioned before, assumes that hallucinations are a part of the normal child's psychic experience. As the child grows older, he selectively represses the hallucinatory fabric according to the "current negative social value." Syntheses accepted as the "current social value," and given "positive reward" are considered real.

  Bracken pointed out that the distinction between autistic and reality-adjusted thinking corresponds with the German theory that new and more complex neurological structures, as the mid-brain and cortex, grow as superimpositions upon older and more primitive brain structures, such as the "old brain," or brain-stem. These older thinking devices (there is no being but in a mode of being,) continue to function, however, even after the higher ones are developed. McKeller presumes that A-thinking takes place in these lower centers, and Smythies' hallucinatory psychic experiences of childhood would fall into the same classification. Jung's notion of a collective response would fit in with this kind of representation. The mid-brain, old brain and stem being structures shared by all animals, one can see how the psyche might be peeled layer by layer down to the psychology of lower creatures. Polanyi's "primary process" thinking of animals and children could be understood in this sense.

  Perhaps, then, the education of a child is unlearning as well as learning, and perhaps many possibilities are lost through lack of triggering response, possibilities that may have been of worth. James Old, in his experiments on rats (giving electrode stimulus to various parts of the brain), presumed a kind of ecstacy-response was created by stimulus of a certain area of the mid-brain. In the human, stimulus of this area mak
es "all the bells of heaven ring," as one subject expressed it. Hallucinogens must occasionally stimulate this area, as well as dissolving the ordinary categories of reality.

  This kind of ecstatic experience is negated by logical thinking. Old found that the rapture faded as the stimulus was moved away from the mid-brain and toward the rat's thin layer of cortex. And life has moved toward an abundance of cortex, this thinking material giving us our superior discontinuity over the animals. Our logical process has been bought at too stiff a price, though, and life moves toward the further possibility of getting around the price paid. That is, life moves toward correcting the imbalance of mind that the development of logic has brought on. If balanced, a logical process could then selectively direct an infinite potential.

  At any rate, while we can say the chicken-child was not really human, we cannot say his experience was that of a vegetable. A low level of cortical activity might allow free development of mid-brain experience. We tend to deny cousciousness to other things (or other people), but, as Blake put it:

  How do you know but every bird That wings the airy way Is an immense,world of delight, Closed to your senses five?

  Bruner's Center for Cognitive Studies proposes a "programmed infant mind," a mind only awaiting the proper stimulus to flower. Bruner argues that if language were the result of a learning process alone, man's grasp would be forever limited by what he has already learned to reach. The infant is a bud, ready to bloom. The intention, the will to do, precedes the skill, the ability to do.

  William Blake, in his outrage against the dead world of a John Locke, cried: "Man's mind is like a garden ready planted. This world is too poor to produce one seed." We find, nevertheless, that the specifics of the plantings are given shape by the kind of weeding, thinning, and fertilizing done by other minds. Arnold Gesell noted with wonder that the wolf-child, Kamala, eventually did respond to her human environment in a "slow and orderly recovery of obstructed mental growth." The recovery was only partial, certainly. It took some five years of care before she had reached an approximate age development of an eighteen-month-old; at her death at seventeen, after nine years of human environment, she had reached something approximating a three-year-old level. Scant progress as it seems, this was from a child who had spent her first eight years in a wolf-den, and whose learning and unlearning problems must have been considerable.

  Gesell considered the capacity of an individual to acquire and create culture to be inborn, but he pointed out that the culture which surrounds an individual operates as a "large-scale molding matrix, a gigantic conditioning apparatus." He warned against oversimplifying the complex and interwoven riddle of "nature versus nurture." And surely if only a wolf-culture is offered as the mirroring pattern, this is nevertheless seized upon by the programmed patterns of response and responded to, giving a structured world in which to move.

  An error causing grief in our time is the idea that culture and civilization are recent acquisitions, and that all previous cultures were but crude gestures laying the groundwork for our own enlightened emergence into truth. Erickson denies that primitive societies are "infantile stages of mankind," or arrested deviations from the "proud progressive norms which we represent." They are, he states, a "complete form of mature human living." Levy-Bruhl spoke of prehistoric man not as a protoscientist who arrived at false conclusions, but another type of man entirely, whose mental life differed from ours in kind. I would qualify this by observing that primitive man is not so much a different type as of a different esthetic bent. Lévi-Strauss finds archaic cultures a unified, coherent, intellectual scheme, based on different logical premises from our own. Jensen deplores the theory that early man arrived at totally erroneous conclusions regarding cause and effect.

  Culture is not an autonomous venture; autistic thinking remains autistic until modified by another mind which is also modified by the relation. But the capacity and drive to create a culture is innate. It is an enormous formative potential that realizes itself against the most extreme odds.

  Oversold on the splendors of "realistic," tough-minded thinking, we are led to believe that current methods represent discovery of universal truths and are thus sacred, rather than particular esthetic choices. Notions of what we are, and of what our capabilities are, change with a marvelous disregard for consistency. Yet these world views tend to bring about the very state of mind they hold to be the case. We become what we behold.

  The danger of accepting a programmed infant mind is that we might decide the mind was really programmed for our particular show, and that all the dark ages preceded this final light. We must, rather, realize the program capacity to be the universal, the current programs the particular, and that particulars are variable, flexible, even expendable, and never sacrosanct.

  The child's mind is autistic, a rich texture of free synthesis, hallucinatory and unlimited. His mind can skip over syllogisms with ease, in a non-logical, dream-sequence kind of "knight's-move" continuum. He nevertheless shows a strong desire to participate in a world of others. Eventually his willingness for self-modification, necessary to win rapport with his world, is stronger than his desire for autonomy. Were it not, civilization would not be possible. That we succeed in moulding him to respond to our criteria shows the innate drive for communion and the flexibility of a young mind. It doesn't prove an essential and sanctified rightness of our own constructs.

  Maturity, or becoming reality adjusted, restricts and diminishes this "knight's-move" thinking, and tends to make pawns of us in the process. The kind of adult logic that results is dependent on the kinds of demands made on the young mind by parents and society. If we believe our social view sacred and made in heaven, we tend to shut off a deep potential in which many of the terrors and shortcomings of our logic and reason might be averted. Exclusion of possibility is necessary to narrow and hold the mind to a world of others. The price of excluded possibility buys a prism that opens on specialized worlds. We lose and gain. But the autistic mode of mind offers a way around severe loss.

  Benjamin Lee Whorf recognized cultural agreement as implicit and unstated, but absolutely obligatory. Agreement determines the way we organize nature into concepts giving nature significance. Agreement underlies our codified patterns of language. We cannot talk at all, Whorf claimed, except by "subscribing to the organization and classification of data which the agreement decrees." Whatever this agreement decrees is what then makes up reality. Cultural agreements are automatic and unconscious, built-in and unquestioned, furnishing the "obvious facts" of experience. These are the other factors moving into and synthesizing our "visual world" from the visual field.

  We force our children, consciously and unconsciously, to selectively ignore certain phenomena and look for and nourish other phenomena. The child's capacity for imagination may put up a struggle. All of us "attend the world" only from necessity or specific reward. The mind wanders into byways every second it can. Its moments of attention are fragmented. Concrete things do not impinge on this flux of mind very much. Defensively tending to the world can be handled mechanically, but other people cannot. Jean-Paul Sartre spoke of hell as "other people," and his hell was well placed. Without others I could reign supreme, except that I must have others to reign at all.

  All parties in a reality event are modified by each other. All create the common denominator through which they relate. To take part in society we must accept the social definitions and agreements that make up the society's reality picture. Our definitions outline the socially acceptable framework for what shall be considered real. This network of definition changes from culture to culture and period to period. It is arbitrary to an indeterminable degree, but is always the form for the only reality available.

  Langer was one of the first to question the old concept of speech as a survival technique of evolution. Thirty years ago she wrote of the beginnings of speech as purposeless lalling-instincts, "primitive aesthetic reactions, and dreamlike association of ideas," all of which sound autist
ic. Langer denies that speech was a "natural adjustment." (Recent studies of the cultures and esthetics of the higher apes by C. E. Carpenter and others lend an interesting overtone to Langer's proposal.) Our dreamlike autistic quality is structured into a world of categories and logical shapes through language. The stage of this development lasts throughout infancy and early childhood. The word and the concept become fused in that early period of development and grow up together.

  If language is not built in during this formative period, it cannot be built at all. Bruner'refers to the child as father to the man in an irreversible way. Piaget's stages of learning make clear that it is not just a lack of phonetic material (Langer's 'lalling') that blocks language learning later on. More important than this is the fact that the emerging mind will have mirrored whatever model it had during that formative period. The pattern formed in this plastic stage becomes firm. It hardens into the functional system of representation-response we call a world view. Once done, there is no undoing of the system except by metanoia resyntheses, that capacity for mutation which will occupy the next portion of this book. Even this mutation is dependent on the materials available for mutation -- conversion is a creative process, but not magical.

  This pattern formed by the mirroring of child mind and social pressure is not only the means then available for coping with a world and other people, it largely determines what shall be coped with. This world view is then the screen allowing only related data in, as well as the synthetic process determining the final cognitive shape of that admitted material. The pattern shapes the kind of world to respond to, and the world response that must then be made.