[This
is Chapter Two of Murphey’s book Understanding the
Modern Predicament.]
Chapter
Two
The gulf that separates the savage
from the civilized man was illustrated with great force by the final scene of
the motion picture Mondo Cane. Cargo planes were shown at an airfield in, I
believe,
The Cargo Cults are the fascinating
subject of Peter Worsley's The Trumpet Shall Sound.l
The cults came into existence independently at several places at the end of
World War II, which gives us to believe that they were symptomatic of the basic
mentality of Melanesian culture. According to Worsley,
they are "religious movements which have as their most characteristic
feature the belief that spiritual agents will at some future date divert
tremendous cargoes of the most sought-after manufactured wealth into the hands
of the cult members." The cults were only partly the result of contact
with the outside world; they reflected the spiritual and intellectual resources
of the natives themselves. "When (the natives)
visited Kainantu and saw the White man actually
emerge from the Bird's belly, they believed them to be reincarnations of the
spirits of the dead." The airplane had been personified into a bird.
The mentality of these primitive
peoples is far removed from that of the engineers in
*****
Such an awareness of man's advance
is a necessary counterweight to the main thrust of my observations, which will
center on the continuing immaturity of humanity. We won't want to lose sight of
the advances we have made while we review that immaturity.
Hardly a day passes, however,
without fresh evidence of the residual immaturity of the human race even in
In everyday life the immaturity
appears in countless petty ways. Few of them amount to anything in themselves,
except for what they tell us about the people involved. The reader will notice
that in giving the examples that follow, I am deliberately staying away from
incidents reported in the newspaper, since the inherent selectivity of
newspapers centers on the unusual. What I wish us to see is that the immaturity
is a standard part of our lives. I am sure the reader can supply a great many
similar examples from his own experience:
* A middle aged woman who lives down
the block showed the immaturity when she threw a cup out of her car window in
front of my house. No doubt the act itself was extremely minor. But its
implications about her are extensive.
*Surely it was evident in the person
who stole bulbs from our outdoor Christmas lights last Christmas.
* It was present in a man at a
football game who occupied the wrong seat and then refused to move for me as
the holder of the season ticket.
* I could see the immaturity in the
father of a teenage boy who had side-swiped my car when the father felt no
concern about the damage that had been done.
* A student told me that while he
was on his motorcycle he had been hit by a car. The driver stopped a block
away, and then drove on.
* One night, sirens woke me and my
wife. The next morning we found that a man had been killed driving the wrong
way on the nearby interstate highway, presumably while intoxicated.
* In the men's restroom near my
office at the University, cigarette butts are frequently ground into the floor
and a drain.
* We used to have neighbors who were
from the
* We bought a house and planted a
lawn. A month or so later a long strip of the lawn collapsed three or four
inches. It took six calls and letters to the contractor to produce the
explanation that the plumber had forgotten to tamp the dirt after he had filled
the ditch for the water pipe. Almost all of the houses in the neighborhood
suffered the same unsightly problem. The concrete driveway has since broken up
completely where the untamped ditch ran beneath it.
* In the Marine Corps the men in my
platoon in boot camp joined in a brawl outside the mess hall early one morning
on the pretext that a member of another platoon hadn't said "please"
when he called for the butter to be passed.
* During my college teaching, the
department chairman (since fired by the president of the University) declared a
faculty slowdown, not allowing students to pre-register for a full load,
because he thought classes were too large. Nine out of the eighteen faculty
members in the department opposed the chairman's actions. They even met at one
of their homes to discuss an opposing strategy. But when it came to a vote at
the faculty meeting at which the chairman was present, eight of those nine
voted to sustain the chairman.
* Quite a nice family my wife and I
have known for several years have come to believe in demons, which they contend
are real and which they go through long sessions "exorcising" from
their bodies. A number of other friends profess a serious belief in astrology.
* The immaturity is evident in the
cheating that goes on in a college classroom. It appears in the practice of law
when at every turn there is pettiness, demagoguery, insensitivity to delay,
inconvenience and cost, and when there is a profound lack of intellectual rigor
on the part of both the bench and the bar. In academic life it is apparent in the
childishness of many professors in their committee work and in the faculty
senates, as well as in the pettiness of their departmental politics and in a
mediocre level of commitment by many faculty members and students. On a broader
level, the immaturity is obvious in the tone of politics in a democracy, not to
mention in a society without a democracy. It shows itself daily in the
catastrophes of the human race, such as have occurred in
To the individual absorbed in his
own life-span, civilization appears quite old. Six to ten thousand years seem a
long time. But this perspective is deceptive; the six to ten thousand years of
recorded history are placed in a more revealing light if in our imaginations we
jump ahead a hundred thousand or even a half a million years. An anthropologist
looking back from such a vantage point will have a difficult time avoiding the
thought that we are simply part of the bare beginnings of civilization. He will
identify us with the beginning era. He may even adopt a classification that
will say that we have not yet started on civilization, but only toward it.
He will not be far amiss if he thinks of us as having been still groping toward
a dim and distant light. No doubt such an anthropologist will give us credit
for our moon trips and organ transplants, and in fact for the entire gulf that
separates us from the cargo cultists; but the converse is also true, that he
will not fail to notice our totalitarianisms, wars, cultural vulgarity and
general immaturity.
Those who have read Robert Ardrey's African Genesis will recall that he
expressed a similar perspective. He asked his readers to imagine that they were
standing on the beach west of
It can be little wonder that man as
a civilized creature is immature. Civilized man is the barest infant. It would
be surprising if we were not to have gaping voids in our moral, intellectual
and spiritual fabric. Because of this immaturity, mankind's condition is bound
to be mixed; it inevitably contains the contrasts of creativity and
destruction, nobility and servility, grandeur and pettiness, clear-sighted
vision and muddled obscurantism. We are the child-man.
Of course, it would be a mistake to
make too much of this. We cannot deny the many excellent things in life. I am
painting a picture of residual cosmic immaturity, not complete barbarism. Our
friends who take astrology so seriously are immature in their reversion to the
mentality of the cargo cultists, but they are fine, compassionate, honest,
hard-working people, far from a total re-creation of pre-historic primitivism.
But while this is so, it is impossible to understand human life without taking
into account the continuing child-like nature of men.
This immaturity is separate from the
attributes of a given culture; it is not rooted in a certain time or place. A
cultural relativist may argue that I am generalizing from characteristics I see
around me daily in a secular, hedonistic, extroverted culture. But my reading
of history convinces me that immaturity has never been absent among the human
race. The eighteenth century was not free of it. Nor was the sixteenth during
the Religious Wars. Nor
An author surprised the reading public
in
But if we approach
Our perspective of civilization is
similar to that of the Denverites; our eyes are not
trained to see the continuation of past forms. We look back over the
Renaissance, the Middle Ages and classical times and
see the trees, the streams, the golden sunlight of civilized culture -- and we
count ourselves as part of an advanced civilization far removed from the Stone
and Bronze Ages.
If we were able, though, to travel
back in time and could live among the peoples of the past -- of a hundred
thousand years ago, twenty five thousand years ago, ten thousand years ago; and
then among the men of Phoenicia, Carthage and Rome --, we would be surprised by
what we would see. Many of the outlines of earlier times would appear to
continue unabated by the patchwork historic man has been able to put on them.
It would seem that we have not completely revolutionized the human condition,
but only irrigated, fertilized and pruned it. Much of the original human
substratum would appear in the faces, the laughter, the neuroses, the
strivings, the gaieties and tragedies, the hopes and fears and superstitions of
men. From such a perspective we would wonder not so much about why mankind has
turmoil, war, enslavement and oppression, as about how it has been able to
achieve the many great things it has. It would be possible to appreciate that
the events, both happy and tragic, of human life are rooted in the quality of
the human material, and that this qualitative level is slower to change than
are institutions, laws, ideologies and cultural forms.
*****
Many thinkers have said what I am
saying here. My observation of the residual child-like nature of mankind is by
no means original.
Emerson expressed it in his essay
"Politics" when he said that "we think our civilization near its
meridian, but we are yet only at the cock-crowing and the morning star. In our
barbarous society the influence of character is in its infancy.”2
The seventeenth century French
author LaBruyere wrote a single paragraph on the
subject. "If the world is only to last a hundred million years," he
said, "it is still in all its freshness, and has but just begun; we
ourselves are so near the first men and the patriarchs, that remote ages will
not fail to reckon us among them. But if we may judge of what is to come by
what is past, what new things will spring up in the arts, sciences, in nature,
and, I venture to say, even in history, which are as yet unknown to us: What
discoveries will be made! What various revolutions will happen in states and
empires! What ignorance must be ours, and how slight is an experience of not
above six or seven thousand years."3
In The Betrayal of the
Intellectuals, Julien Benda
said that "I cannot sufficiently admire the rare mental value displayed by
LaBruyere” in the passage just quoted.4
A hundred years ago Sir Henry Maine
saw the continuity between the savage and the civilized man. In a passage in Popular
Government he said that "...the differences which, after ages of
change, separate the civilized man from the savage or barbarian, are not so
great as the vulgar opinion would have them. Man has changed much in Western
Europe, but it is singular how much of the savage there still is in him,
independently of the identity of the physical constitution which has always
belonged to him...Like the savage, he indulges in endless deliberation; like
the savage, he sets an extravagant value on rhetoric; like the savage, he is a
man of party, with a newspaper for a totem, instead of a mark on his forehead
or arm; and, like a savage, he is apt to make of his totem his God."5
Herbert Spencer believed man is
changing his "moral constitution," but that he has as yet only
partially lost his savage propensities: "It is an indisputable fact that
the moral constitution which fitted men for his original predatory state, differs
from the one needed to fit him for this social state to which multiplication of
the race has led. In a foregoing part of our inquiry it was shown that
adaptation is effecting a transition from the one constitution to the other.
Living then, as we do, in the midst of this transition, we must expect to find
traits of nature which are explicable only on the hypothesis that humanity is
at present partially adapted to both these states, and not completely to either
-- has only in a degree lost the dispositions needed for savage life, and has
but imperfectly acquired those needed for social life."6
At another point he wrote that
"...the lingering instincts of the savage are at this moment exhibited by
about an equal percentage of all classes.”
John Ruskin exclaimed that “truly,
it seems to me, as I gather in my mind the evidences of insane religion,
degraded art, merciless war, sullen toil, detestable pleasure, and vain or vile
hope, in which the nations of the world have lived since first they could bear
record of themselves -- it seems to me, I say, as if the race itself were still
half-serpent, not extricated yet from its clay.”7
Countless other thinkers over
thousands of years have expressed disappointment at the qualitative level of
men. The Roman historian Tacitus commented on the
"utter poverty of thought" around him;8 Jonathan Swift
characterized men as barbarous Yahoos;9 Shakespeare wrote of the
human condition as containing "the oppressor's wrong, the proud man's
contumely," all amounting to a "weary life."10 Edward
Gibbon made a pessimistic observation about human capability when he commented
about education that "the power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy,
except in those happy dispositions where it is most superfluous."11
We recall Schopenhauer's mournful lament about the quality of human life.12
Mankind usually looks on these
things with dangerous simplicity. We are inclined to look for scapegoats. We
seek men with "black hats" and compare them unfavorably with good men
wearing "white hats." This in turn feeds the fires of human division
and obscures an appreciation of what is behind the dysfunctions in human life.
It would be more sophisticated to
pull back from mankind bitterly and say "a plague on both your
houses." If we cast a negative vote, we must condemn virtually all of
mankind for sharing the qualities that produce so much horror. It is not simply
the active participant in horror who is responsible; those are responsible also
who do not do all they can to elevate themselves and to provide in a principled
way in advance to mitigate the horrors of mankind.
But without giving up our capacity
for righteous anger, there is another more beneficial attitude to adopt. This
is the attitude stated so profoundly by Christ on the cross: "Father,
forgive them; for they know not what they do."
What better summarizes the human
condition? What more compassionately points to the child-like nature of
mankind? We may detest the malignancy of men and may strive all our lives to
overcome it and work diligently to be decent ourselves, but over and above all
the "sound and the fury" we are well advised to accept with ultimate
serenity the tragic, the mundane and the joyful; they are all part of life as
we know it.
In "Fiddler on the Roof,"
the playwright showed the simultaneous vulnerability, lovableness
and limitation of ordinary people. We cannot ignore the follies and vices of
mankind -- do not wish to ignore them -- and would be forfeiting our
responsibility were we to do so, but it leads to greater mercy and
reconciliation if we permit ourselves to view humanity compassionately.
1. The
quotations here from Worsley are from Peter Worsley, Trumpet Shall Sound (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1957), pp.
44 and 201. See also the Encyclopedia Brittanica, 1966,
entry on "Cargo Cults."
2.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Portable Emerson (Viking Press, 1946), p. 201.
3. LaBruyere, Characters, trans. Henry Van Laun (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), pp. 238-9.
4. Julien Benda, The Betrayal of
the Intellectuals (Boston: The Beacon Press, 1930), p. 158.
5. Sir
Henry Sumner Maine, Popular Government (New York: Henry Holt & Co.,
1886), pp. 143-4.
6. Herbert Spencer, Social Statics
and Man Versus the State (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1897), pp. 88, 102.
7. Peter Quennell, Selected
Writings of John Ruskin (London: Falcon Press, 1952), p. 88.
8. Tacitus, The Complete Works of Tacitus (New York: Modern Library, 1942), p. 761.
9. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels (New
York: Modern Library, 1931), pp. 251-337.
10. Hamlet's "To be or not to be"
soliloquy in William Shakepeare's Hamlet.
11. Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776), Vol. I, Chap. 4, para. 3.
12. Arthur Schopenhauer, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer (New York: Modern Library, 1928), p. 376.