The Case for Jeremy Griffith

I’ve written a lot about the case against Jeremy Griffith’s explanation for the human condition. Here I will try to walk with him as far as I can go.

His explanation grew out of his need to reconcile his idealism with what he encountered in the social world around him.

His idealistic behaviour was an expression of his instinctive orientation toward love, which was sheltered by similarly loving nurturing.

From observing himself he deduces that our instincts are toward idealistic behaviour.

In time he will discover that most other people do not behave in this way. People are often selfish, egotistical or cynical. And the world is not run on idealistic principles or it would not be in the mess it is in.

He comes to the conclusion that people become angry, egocentric and alienated when they encounter the message that they should behave idealistically. They are angry at the criticism. They try to defend themselves from the attack on their ego by fortifying it. And they shut their ears to what is being said. If this means blocking their mind from acknowledging certain aspects of reality, then that means they become alienate, i.e. cut off from reality.

It’s worth pointing out that the anger isn’t necessarily one way. Griffith talks about expressing a great deal of anger, in his youth, at what he saw as the wrongness of other people’s behaviour.

Griffith supposes that all children will go through the process of trying to make sense of why the people around them don’t act according to what they perceive in themselves as the correct form of behaviour.

Eventually, he says, they will “adopt resignation”, i.e. find a strategy of adaptation to the non-ideal world they find within them now as well as without.

The state before resignation is innocence.

Sex could be an innocent expression of the loving instincts, but by the time we reach sexual maturity, egotism characterises our behaviour. So Griffith sees sex as “an attack on innocence” - he sees the egotistical element of it.

Perhaps it would be fairer to talk about something like sex (to the extent that one can generalise) being used as an attack on the oppressiveness which originally originated in innocence. There may be sadists who want an innocent one to suffer, but most of us just want guilt to fuck the hell off. And that doesn’t just come from directly from innocence, but censorious prudes who may be anything but innocent.

Anyway, there’s a battle against the oppressive ideals, a battle which is necessary if those ideals are not going to oppress the freedom necessary to find liberating self-understanding.

Griffith came up with a hypothesis to explain what he had experienced in his own life. Our instincts were like him, in his youth, pointing a finger and accusing people of being selfish and superficial. Our conscious mind had to set off to find a defence for itself. Humanity, as a whole, was responsible for the knowledge gathered by science, though it is Griffith who assembles it and finds the liberating truth, thus being a representation of the start of the problem and its finish.

Griffith’s takeaway is that we are the heroes of existence because we were willing to fight a great battle against ignorance.

I don’t remember how much this meant to me when I was supporting Griffith. I know I saw value in it as a “selling point” when writing about Griffith’s book for others.

When I knew him, Griffith had a way of saying “I love your courage” when he hoped that someone would stop doing something. The theory is that, if egotistical behaviour is part of this grand battle against criticism, then the proper response is to show appreciation for the behaviour instead of criticising it.

When he tried it on me it didn’t have any effect. I could see through it as a strategy, but also receiving praise from others is rarely if ever the motive behind something I do.

So, even if Griffith’s explanation for the human condition is correct, will the perception that we are an heroic species have a healing impact on individuals? Isn’t “you’re a hero!” a bit like a cocaine shot to the ego, which burns out as quickly as it hits? And even if it didn’t, isn’t “I’m a hero” just a cage to live in?

What interests me the most is therapy. How do we become free of the embattlement of the ego?

The most beautiful thing in the world is redemption. A redemption story in film or literature is the most likely to move me to tears.

For as long as I can remember I’ve identified with we human beings at our worst. Griffith in his youth may have looked on at egotistical and superficial behaviour with anger at its wrongness. And most of us will tend to view those who commit atrocities as alien monsters.

My imagination has always taken me inside the destructive individual to see someone who is already imprisoned by a character structure which makes them the centre of their own little hell, which they then inflict on others.

I can imagine that something in the human spirit which corresponds with the condemning innocent that Griffith represented in his youth might be the jailer which locked us in our prisons.

Does his explanation of the human condition set us free?

I can only imagine this being the case if it brings on a cathartic release of the frustration pent up within that condition. Maybe some kind of almighty primal scream aimed at the condemning innocence which was the unwitting source of all the horrendous evil and suffering ever committed or experienced by we humans on the planet earth.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            

Why might Australian biologist Jeremy Griffith believe that U.S. biologist E. O. Wilson is "the antichrist"?

Jeremy Griffith at the launch of his book Freedom : The End of the Human Condition at the London Royal Geographical Society on 2 June 2016

The person who has had the biggest influence on the ideas I express in my writing has been Australian biologist Jeremy Griffith. In some cases that has been the kind of influence where you adopt an idea which someone puts forward which proves accountable, but more often it has taken the form of a challenge to find a better way of explaining something after having found Griffith’s interpretation unaccountable in some way.

It seems to me that if we want to understand someone, it can be useful to examine those areas in which their behaviour seems out of proportion in some way. An over-reaction can be a sign of insecurity, of a sore spot.

Griffith claims to identify fellow biologist E.O. Wilson with the figure of “the anticrist” predicted in the Gospel of John and “the beast” spoken of in Revelations. This is very peculiar behaviour for a scientist.

Here is the relevant passage from his book Freedom : The End of the Human Condition :

“And this ‘unity of life and all its manifestations of experience—aesthetic, religious and moral as well as intellectual and rational’ is not the fake offering that E.O. Wilson—that lord of lying, the master of keeping humanity away from any truth; indeed, the quintessential ‘liar…the antichrist’ (Bible, 1 John 2:22), the ‘deceiver and the antichrist’ (2 John 1:7), ‘The beast… given… to utter proud words and blasphemies’ (Rev. 13:5)—put forward in his 1998 book, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, when he proposed that Evolutionary Psychology’s alleged ability to explain the moral aspects of humans meant biology and philosophy, the sciences and the humanities, indeed science and religion, could at last be reconciled.” from paragraph 1155

Now I don’t know any more about E.O. Wilson’s Eusociality theory than Griffith’s account of it. It seems to have to do with the possibility that we could have developed instincts for cooperation because cooperation has a survival advantage for groups. Evolution eliminates the least fit, but being a member of a cooperative group increases fitness because cooperative groups are more likely to survive than groups where the individuals compete at the expense of the group.

E. O. Wilson

Griffith claims this couldn’t happen because it requires the development to cooperativeness in individuals before the benefits can manifest in groups, and cooperativeness could not arise in individuals without the cooperative individuals being exploited by the non-cooperative individuals which would mean they would be less fit and would be eliminated.

I’m no biologist, but I can imagine a way in which cooperative groups could arise. The assumption seems to be that our instincts drive competition, but I don’t see why we would necessarily have to see it that way. Take food. If there is not enough food to go around, we may compete for what food is available, but is it our selfish genes which are making us behave this way or is it the shortage of food. If there were enough food, it would make more sense for us to share it and enjoy the sensual benefits of loving behaviour with other members of the group. So if there were an environment with enough food so that competition would not be necessary, would not the pleasure principle - the impulse to do what feels good and avoid what entails suffering - lead to group cooperation?

I suppose there is also competition for breeding opportunities, but the idea is that those qualities which allow someone to have the most offspring who survive to mate themselves prosper in the evolutionary process. In some species and some contexts, aggressive competitions may determine who breeds the most. But in the context of a group whose members are not fighting over food, is it not possible that females would chose to mate more often with affectionate rather than aggressive mates?

As I say, I’m no biologist. The fact that I can imagine something doesn’t mean there may not be many reasons why it couldn’t have happened that way. And I don’t know what E.O. Wilson is suggesting beyond Griffith’s very brief, and possibly biased, account.

But why is Griffith so angry about Wilson’s theory? He says that it is because Wilson’s theory grounds both our competitive and our cooperative behaviour in our genes, while Griffith sees our problem as a “psychosis” which can be cured. If it is in our genes, it can’t be cured.

I think this actually does highlight a problem in Griffith’s theory. What he is complaining about in Wilson’s theory applies also to his own.

Griffith believes that our instincts are a dictatorial demand for selfless behaviour. If this is true, then the problem he calls “the human condition” is just as insoluble as it would be if Wilson were right about us having competitive instincts, in fact, our situation would arguably be even more intractable.

You can’t change an instinctive orientation and you can’t make it see reason. If our instincts make us feel bad for not being selfless then we can’t get them off our back.

What Griffith is saying is that we now recognise that the “criticism” coming from our instincts was unjust and so we can go back to following them, reassured that we were not bad to deviate from them originally.

The problem with this is that - no matter how sensible it might be to behave cooperatively - if we have to do it because our instincts will make us feel bad if we don’t - that is a kind of internal totalitarianism.

Freedom means choosing our behaviour to best suit what we feel to be our interests. If we are enlightened, we will realise that our best interests and the best interests of those around us tend to align. But we have to feel that it is our choice.

I don’t believe that our instincts are dictatorial. Just because they gave us a way to orientate our behaviour before we developed intelligence, doesn’t mean there need have been any resistance put up by them to more helpful ways of managing our life.

I think the conflict between good and evil in us is a product of different ideas about how we should self manage which have arisen in the intellect and of the emotional turmoil which can result when those ideas are unhelpful ones. This means we are not doomed by our genetic orientation, either one to competition or to freedom-denying idealism.

I think that, sometimes, in these moments in which another’s behaviour confronts us with a key weakness in our own worldview, we may project onto them some disowned aspect of ourselves.

Griffith accuses Wilson of being “the antichrist” and of arrogance and “blasphemies”. It is Griffith who has claimed that his work represents the fulfilment of that which was promised by Jesus Christ. If his theory is wrong, that means he is the arrogant one committing blasphemy and putting himself in the position of the false Christ.

I once experienced an example of this kind of projection in Griffith’s response to me. I had politely and tentatively questioned him about his assessment of my character type. The appropriate response, it seems to me, would have been to say something like : “Perhaps you don’t understand. I’ll try to give you a fuller explanation.” Instead he convened and meeting and told people that I was : “M-a-a-ssively deluded.” Why this over-reaction to someone politely questioning his interpretation? Was he seeing something in me which really applied to himself?

More critiques of Griffith's work.

My personal story of involvement in Griffith's Foundation for Humanity's Adulthood (now the World Transformation Movement).

BOOK REVIEW : THE Interview That Solves The Human Condition and Saves The World! by Jeremy Griffith

 

This is a review of a booklet which is the transcript of an interview. You can watch the interview or download a free copy of the booklet here.

The cover of this booklet tells us that “This world-saving interview was broadcast across the UK in 2020 and is being replayed on radio & TV stations around the world.” I’d love to see more information on which radio and television stations in which countries have played the interview. I’ve done a Google search for “Jeremy Griffith” with “Craig Conway” hoping to get some idea of how people in various parts of the world responded to these broadcasts, but I haven’t come up with much other than the World Transformation Movement’s own promotions and Craig Conway’s social media.

There is such a thing as under-selling and over-selling something. If one presents one’s product without any major promise of its value, it may be that hardly anyone tries it out. As Jesus pointed out, you don’t want to hide your light under a bushel. But if you lay the promises on too thick, you are liable to illicit suspicion in the prospective consumer that you are a snake-oil salesman or that you are blowing your own trumpet so loudly and repetitively in order to drown out your own inner critic. The title of this booklet “The Interview That Solves The Human Condition and Saves The World!” should suffice to bring that light out from beneath any bushel. Make the claim and then deliver on it. What a person says in praise of themselves or their own work should count for very little. What matters is whether it delivers for the reader. Does it enlighten them? Do things make sense in the world that didn’t make sense before? Politicians and priests will make glorious promises expressed in soaring rhetoric. But their aim is not to appeal to the reason, but to stir up an emotional response, often one which overrides the reason. An appeal to reason should be cool and calm and challenge the reader to find fault with it.

The blurb about Griffith in the front of the booklet says that “his work has attracted the support of  such eminent scientists as… Stephen Hawking…” This seems a bit misleading to me. Griffith put together a documentary proposal in 2004, which he distributed widely to scientists. He received a reply from someone representing Hawking saying that Hawking “is most interested in your impressive proposal” and “please let us know further details in due course.” I would not interpret this as meaning that Hawking was a supporter of his work. It sounds more like polite curiosity. Before using someone’s reputation to lend credibility to one’s controversial theory, it seems to me that it is only right to make sure that they understand what that theory is and have publicly expressed some kind of praise for it.

Griffith says that “the human condition is such a difficult subject for us humans to confront and deal with that I couldn’t be talking about it so openly and freely if it hadn’t been solved.” I think this is false reasoning. Assuming that we can only talk freely about the human condition, as Griffith defines it, if we have a framework of belief (or understanding) which tells us we are not bad, then all that is needed is for Griffith to have a belief which tells him that he is not bad in order to move around smoothly in that framework. The proof of the framework has to be in its explanatory power.

I agree with Griffith that genetic selfishness can’t explain our competitive, selfish and aggressive tendencies. It is very easy to see that differences in these qualities between individuals are often the result of psychological insecurity. And, in a social species, being competitive, selfish or aggressive would only be a genetic advantage in limited circumstance and for limited times. Success in business, or winning a mate and raising a family, etc., is more dependent on the ability to be a cooperative team member than it is on trying to exercise some form of forceful control over others.

But it does seem we have always been an insecure species, always feeling we need to prove something about ourselves as individuals or tribal groups. We develop feelings of resentment which lead us to take out our frustrations by causing the suffering of others.

A capacity for love and cooperation is always there, though, when we are in a situation where we feel safe from criticism. Mutual acceptance and self-acceptance has the power to heal our insecurity and resentment.

Just because our behaviour has a psychological component, however, doesn’t mean that an impulse to propagate our genes may not also be a part of the motivation for our behaviour. It isn’t an either/or.

I see no reason to see our conscience as something instinctive, as Griffith does. Different individuals in different societies have different ideas on morality. They feel guilty about different things. It makes more sense to me to see the conscience as a part of the ego, an internalisation of a learned moral system. A system of expectations we have about ourselves. For me, guilt is always tied up with thinking. I think critically about my behaviour and I feel emotional discomfort. This leads me to concluded that the conscience resides in the conscious mind, i.e. the ego.

How insecure are we actually about being selfish or competitive? I think it depends on the degree to which we have been told we shouldn’t be selfish or competitive. It’s a negative feedback loop. Being criticised makes us more insecure which makes us more selfish. But this is a social phenomenon. I see no evidence that the criticism comes from somewhere below the conscious mind.

Is psychosis the correct term to use to describe the psychological condition which produces our dark side? A psychosis is a mental illness which causes its sufferer to be seriously cut off from reality. But what do we mean by “reality”? I’ve experienced the state which psychiatrist’s call psychosis. I was cut off from reality in the sense that I thought things were going on around me which were not going on around me. Griffith is saying that psychosis is the norm, that we are all cut off from reality as we go about our daily lives. But we have a good enough grasp on reality to do the things we have to do on a daily basis. Of course we are cut off from reality to some degree, because we process the information about the world around us through our conceptual framework which is a product of our view of ourself which may not be an honest one. I prefer to think in terms of neurosis, emphasising the experience of feeling insecure, because that doesn’t require wrestling with the question of whether we can ever experience unfiltered reality and whether it would be advantageous for us to do so. It must be hard to shop for breakfast cereal while your doors of perception are so open that all things appear infinite.

Griffith’s central thesis is that our psychological insecurity and resultant selfish, egotistical and aggressive behaviour is the result of a conflict which broke out early in our development as a species when our newly formed conscious mind came into conflict with a pre-existing instinctive orientation. “A battle would have to break out between the emerging conscious mind that operates from a basis of understanding cause and effect and the non-understanding instincts that have always controlled and dictated how that animal behaves.”

At first, because we know we have some kind of conflict within us, we may find this argument convincing. But is it?

Are instincts dictatorial? Griffith uses the example of a bird’s flight path. If we were to place a major obstacle in that flight path, would the birds be driven by the dictatorial nature of their instinct to fly headlong into it? Or would they fly around it, following their instinct in a way which was responsive to a changing environment? Surely a lion’s instincts can tell her how to hunt, but not where the game is to be found on any particular day. For that she has to allow her behaviour to be guided by the data taken in from her senses.

If this is the case, then why would a conflict necessarily arise between our instincts and our developing conscious intelligence. Intelligence is a tool, like the senses, with which we can pursue the orientation given to us by our instincts. Why should we expect the instincts to fight back against any experiment in new behaviour?

And Griffith claims that our instinct is for loving, cooperative, selfless behaviour. So wouldn’t an instinct of this kind have to lovingly, cooperatively and selflessly surrender to something which took it in a new direction? An aggressive, selfish instinct might fight back, but not one of this kind.

Griffith describes our instincts as “dogmatic”. The definition of “dogmatic” is “inclined to lay down principles as undeniably true”. But this is something only the conscious mind can do. Instincts are stored information which has proven beneficial to the survival of the members of a species. The fact that it has been beneficial in this way is evidence for its accuracy, but to dogmatically insist upon its truth is something only the conscious mind is capable of. Griffith says that our instincts “are going to condemn him [our mythical ancestor Adam Stork] as being bad.” Again, only the conscious mind can condemn someone on moral grounds. Griffith seems to be projecting the nature of the idealistic judgemental human onto our pre-conscious orientating system.

My contention is that we do have a conflict between good and evil going on within us and that we do become insecure in the face of idealism which criticises us, and that this leads to us becoming ego-embattled - egotistical, selfish, aggressive and alienated. But I see idealism as being a product of the experimentation of the conscious mind. The war within is not between our ego and our instincts, but between conflicting influences within our ego. Our ego is the battleground. If we turn off our ego for a while and reconnect with our instinctive orientation, I believe we will find it to be an all-accepting, all-forgiving, non-judgemental openness to loving interaction with others. Of course we need our conscious mind to understand the world and make decisions. Our loving instincts are not sufficient on their own, but we should not project onto them any aspect of the battle going on in our ego.

This problem of treating the instincts as if they are capable of conscious thought runs through Griffith’s Adam Stork story. He says that Adam ideally would have sat down and explained to his instincts why he wasn’t bad. But this makes no sense, because the instincts are incapable of understanding. You can’t explain anything to them. It is Adam who has to explain to himself that he is not bad. If it were a matter of our instincts understanding us, the problem would be insoluble because it would depend on something which is impossible, i.e. instincts understanding anything at all.

Griffith has said that he was extremely idealistic in his youth. Presumably this led to him being very critical of other’s non-ideal behaviour. Is it possible that when he thinks of the instincts he is thinking of his youthful self. He needed people to explain to him why their behaviour was not as ideal as he felt it should be, but they were unable to do this. Is he seeing in the story of humanity the story of his life? This has to be a strong tendency for anyone who sets out to articulate an all-encompassing account of human behaviour.

Griffith relates his theory about this conflict between the instincts and the conscious mind to the Biblical story of Adam and Eve, but he doesn’t deal very thoroughly with that myth. He says that Adam and Eve ate “from the tree of knowledge”. He leaves out the bit about it being the “tree of knowledge of good and evil”. This is misleading. If it is simply the “tree of knowledge” then this suits his theory that the key event was development of the ability to reason. But “tree of knowledge of good and evil” suggests that it is specifically talking about moral knowledge - i.e. idealism, which distinguishes between some forms of behaviour which are categorised as “good” and other forms of behaviour which are categorised as “evil”. General knowledge about how the world around us works need not undermine our self-acceptance and thus make us selfish and ego-centric, but idealistic standards against which we can find our behaviour and that of others wanting does undermine self-acceptance and lead to a negative feedback loop which actually promotes “sinful” behaviour. Hence our fall from grace.

Griffith claims that his work has not been accepted by mainstream science because it conflicts with the prevailing paradigm, but I see no evidence that he presents a credible testable hypothesis.

There is a problem with Griffith’s concept of “love indoctrination”. The idea is that our ape-ancestor’s mothers nurtured them for genetically selfish reasons, but to the infants it looked like selfless behaviour, so they were “love indoctrinated”, i.e. they learned lovingly selfless behaviour. This is supposed to have happened before the liberation of full consciousness, but learning requires a conscious mind. Conscious learning is overlaying and supplanting the underlying genetically selfish instincts. How does this learning from experience end up encoded genetically so that we are born with the orientation? And how can something which is by its nature patient and forgiving become the source of a dictatorial instinct which is intolerant of experimentation?

Is it not possible that what love needs to manifest is simply a niche were it will not be eliminated? Where an animal who doesn’t compete for food dies and the genes of an animal that doesn’t compete to breed are eliminated, evolution selects against love. But in a social animal living in a food rich environment for millennia, there is no evolutionary disadvantage to opening up to the intrinsic pleasure and group advantage of love. The essence of nature is to create through the formation of wholes, so the formation of a loving whole amongst humans goes deeper than instinct to the very heart of the creative principle itself.

This could explain why bonobos developed as such a loving species. In them we may see what our ancestor’s were like before we began to undermine our self-acceptance by applying idealistic moral judgements to ourselves and each other. As Griffith quotes primatologist Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, “If you are a bonobo infant, you can do no wrong…” Idealism is the opposite of nurturing. Forgiveness returns us to our own capacity for love, while judgement against a standard of perfection makes us angry and resentful and drives us on to the kinds of actions which will attract only more judgement.

Because he sees the human condition as arising from resentment of the instinct’s judgement of our non-ideal behaviour, Griffith feels that each of us is a deep well of upset. “And no wonder we have led such an evasive, denial-practising, lying, avoid-any-criticism, escapist, alienated, superficial and artificial, greedy, egocentric, power, fame, fortune and glory-seeking existence.” While we are prone to these things, this seems the view of an idealist who only sees the negatives. I find Wilhelm Reich’s concept of the character armour more helpful for understanding the dark side of our nature, i.e. that our personality rigidifies around the battle to justify ourselves. All that is needed is for us to feel truly safe from criticism for this often very destructive defensive structure to begin to soften. But Griffith builds his description of the human condition out of idealistic criticisms, what he sees as “confronting truths”. This might be acceptable if his theory actually worked, but because it doesn’t, I see his writing as a kind of Trojan Horse which promises to defend us against condemnation and thus encourages us to open up to statements like this one which, taken on their own, sound like condemnation. This may make us all the more desperate to embrace his theory uncritically. After all, now that he has presented us in such a harsh light, we need something to feel good about ourselves again.

But if the problem lies not in our instinctive orientation but in idealism as a cultural phenomena, I think all that negative behaviour Griffith describes can still be explained - idealism does make us egotistical, selfish and aggressive - but the way in which this phenomena plays out in the world can be understood with less of a temptation to resort to simplistic over-generalisations, as Griffith does when tackling such subjects as politics and sexuality. One need only see idealism as a kind of thought virus, taking different forms - religion, communism, Critical Social Justice Theory, etc. - spreading from individual to individual and producing different forms of negative symptom in different contexts. The key factor is that we have a form of idea which leaves those it contacts feeling criticised in a way which, rather than being the source of healthy correction, sows the seeds of resentment and ego-embattlement. By contrast there must be a healthier form of idea which heals and brings us back toward the capacity for reason, the courage needed to face our problems and the love to bring us together as a community. We will know when we have found this idea, because it will spread like wildfire, everywhere transforming the darkness into light. It won’t require effort for people to embrace it. By their fruits shall ye know them.

Griffith talks about socialism, the new age movement, the politically correct movement etc. as “pseudo-idealist”. The definition of “idealism” is “the unrealistic belief in or pursuit of perfection.” Idealism is always a bad thing, because perfectionism poisons any attempt to improve things in the world. The term “pseudo-idealist” would mean someone who is only pretending to have an unrealistic belief in or pursuit of perfection.” Is it worse to be a pseudo-idealist than to be a genuine idealist? They are both negative social phenomena. But is everyone who calls themselves a socialist or a member of the new age movement in pursuit of perfection? There are right wing people who have a perfectionistic view of society which makes them intolerant of others as well. Hitler was an idealist. His ideal was racial purity. The battle between different forms of idealism can not be understood as a simple dualism. Griffith is prone to see it all as an expression of his battle between the selflessness-demanding instincts and the understanding-seeking ego. So he sees the left who call for a fairer society as oppressive of the search for understanding and the right who call for more self-reliance and less regulation as championing the search for understanding, even though someone on the left may be a champion of free enquiry and someone on the right may want to reduce spending on pure research. You can’t simply lay some grand worldview over the struggles of individuals in the world and think you have understood them. You have to acknowledge that there is usually more variety between individuals in particular groups than there is difference between the groups. Griffith wrote an article for a conservative on-line publication “explaining” the irrationality of the left. The readers responded enthusiastically to the claim that the left were crazy, but I doubt if many of them looked more deeply into his work. I’ll be impressed if he gets the same audience to accept his claim that “there’s no longer any reason for the right-wing in politics” and that they should become “effectively…left-wing.” Left or right, you get a lot of people who just want to be told what they want to hear. I put my hope in deep thinkers, some of whom come from the left and some from the right. Left wing examples include James Lindsay and Bret Weinstein, who are at the forefront of the battle to expose Critical Social Justice Theory. There are wise people on the right too, but there are also people who are irrational enough to believe that Donald Trump is the best politician in the world at the moment or who are caught up in bizarre conspiracy theories.

So I agree with Griffith that our species suffers from a psychological insecurity, that some of our distant ancestors were free of this condition, that the human race is not essentially bad but rather heroic and that we can heal the problems of the world with knowledge about the origin and nature of this condition. What I don’t believe is that it originated in a conflict between our instincts and our intellect. I don’t believe our instincts are dictatorial or unforgiving, but quite the opposite and I believe the origins of the problem originated with the development in the conscious mind of our ancestors of idealistic, i.e. perfectionistic, standards for the judgement of moral behaviour. The stricter the standards the more they drive us to the opposite by undermining self-acceptance and generating resentment. Like Griffith I feel we are right on the brink of the abyss. That’s why diagnosing our condition accurately is so important. I don’t feel that he has done so. If he presented his theory as just that and encouraged readers and listeners to find fault with it, I would give this booklet a higher rating, but any work has to be assessed against what it promises. This one literally promises the world, and delivers something far less than that.

What Is The Conscience?

Photo by Holger Harfst

Most of us have a tendency to feel the emotion we call "guilt" when our behaviour fails to conform to an internal vision of how we should behave. We call that internal vision our "conscience".

But what is the source of our conscience? Is it an instinct we are born with? Is it something we learn from others? Or is it the voice of a supernatural being speaking through us? There are many advocates of each of these theories.

What inspires me to try to make sense of the conscience is some debate on the discussion board at Jeremy Griffith's World Transformation Movement website. I'm banned from taking part in the discussion there. Dr. Anna Fitzgerald says : Our conscious self does feel criticism from our instincts, we call it our CONSCIENCE. Everyone knows that, and being shared by us all means it’s instinctive – which Griffith reiterated with Darwin’s affirmation that “the moral sense affords the highest distinction between man and the lower animals”.

This concept that the conscience is simply an instinctive program is one of the key problems I have with Jeremy Griffith's theory that our disturbed psychology is the result of a conflict between the conscious mind, and its need to experiment with self-management, and the dictatorial demands of such a gene-based moral programming.


It may be that everyone, with the possible exception of psychopaths, has a sense of right and wrong. But what is right or wrong differs from culture to culture and individual to individual. While the conscience may not be entirely learned, there is certainly a learned element in the way in which it manifests itself.


Let's see if we can learn something by trying to strip human existence back to its basics. What does it mean to be an organism? The key motive of the organism is self-preservation. It may be that the breeding instinct provides a self-preservation motive on the level of species which supersedes that of the individual, but most of the time our base-line objective is to stay alive, all other things being equal. I may be saying "all other things being equal" a lot, because the less basic motives for our behaviour can override the more basic. Our basic impulse may be one of self-preservation, but that doesn't mean that our mind, freed from the task of keeping us alive for a while, may not arrive at a bad idea which drives us to take our own life.

It is hard to argue with sensory experience. Pain and pleasure speak to us directly, free from the clouding of language and concept. All other things being equal, the first repels us and the latter attracts. Once again, less basic factors can interfere with this. We can arrive at a psychological state in which we shrink from some pleasures and glory in something painful. But that isn't where we start.

So our most basic intentions would be to stay alive, to avoid pain and to experience pleasure.

But we are born into a social context in which we are cared for. If we are one of the lucky ones, we are born into a context in which we are loved. But even the most harshly treated are looked after sufficiently to be kept alive.

Clearly there is an instinct for love. A mother abandoning her baby because its care imposes more suffering than pleasure on her is the exception rather than the rule. And, once again, if we wish to understand such exceptions we need to look to factors which interfere with the natural - e.g. drug addiction or mental illness.

What feels best to us as infants? To have our needs met within a harmonious social context in which there is plenty of affectionate touching and verbal communication.

Our myths  have their grounding in our experience. If we experienced a loving infancy, then it is the basis for our concept of Paradise. All-giving mother Goddesses and stern but loving father Gods also are concepts which carry into adult life the infant memory.

So an instinct for love provides parents with the motive to care for their child, and no doubt shapes the way the child bonds with them. I have said that love can be defined as open, honest, spontaneous and generous communication. It almost doesn't need saying that this is the mode of communication of an individual who is operating in a healthy, unwarped manner. It is not hard to understand how the processes of learning and becoming a social being will be impeded if a child is closed off, a liar, habit-bound or greedy.

All other things being equal, we don't want to abandon paradise. Sometimes we can see directly when we have breached the laws of this paradise. It requires a harmonious social context so, if we upset someone, then we may reasonably feel we have breached those laws. We want to be accepted. To be accepted by those around is to remain in paradise. Parents and teachers may also teach us the rules we must seek to follow if we want to remain there. What makes it difficult is that we can't please everybody. There are times when we are damned by someone if we do and damned by someone else if we don't.

So, I think, there is an instinctive element to the conscience - the instinct for love provides the crucible in which it takes form. But that form is socially determined.

The conscience is that part of our ego - our conscious thinking self - in which we store our expectations about ourselves, those expectations very often being an internalisation of the expectations of others. This is to the extent that the conscience is conscious. It is also possible that some of our expectations are repressed to the level of the subconscious by the fact that they are so painful to look at. But I would contend that they have sunk down from our mind rather than risen from some genetic substrate.

Even if we assume that the reluctance to do something we perceive to be harmful were genetically-based, the intellect is often required to tell us what is harmful. We can't feel guilty about our carbon footprint unless the intellect has worked out how global warming works.

Is there a battle with the conscience going on within the conscious mind? Absolutely.

What I call "the human neurosis" is the divided state of the ego. Paradise lay in being accepted and being able to accept ourselves. To not be accepted, in some way, by others, can inflict a wound upon the ego, and the ego will become focused on a counter argument as to why it is acceptable, or not to blame for what has led to the rejection. But even more painful is the sense of self-betrayal, when we find ourselves unable to avoid breaching the rules and so we split into a fiery accuser with the pointing finger - "you fucked it up for yourself" - and the cringing supplicant - "I couldn't help it!" In either case response to the critical voice can go either way - contrite depression or defiant anger.

What is the nature of malevolence? Why are we capable of inflicting cruelty for its own sake? I believe malevolence is conscience-driven behaviour. If our self-acceptance is undermined to too great a degree, we can end up feeling totally backed into a corner, our conscience making demands of us which we no longer have the generosity of spirit to fulfil. The more self-accepting we feel - the more relaxed and carefree within ourselves - the more enthusiasm we have for generosity. But current suffering tightens us up. Think of some time when you were suffering greatly and somebody asked something of you. Did it not make you angry that they would ask for something when you had nothing to give? The darkest place we can go is that corner where we hate the dictatorship of our conscience so much - for having eaten away all the love we have and still be wanting more - that we have to have revenge - we have to try to stab it to death by doing the one thing which it says would be the worst thing we could do.

If our conscience were in our genes it would always oppress us. Our ego and our society are adaptable, they are capable of adjusting to new knowledge. Genes can't forgive, and healing lies in the power to forgive. It is the intellect which has the power to make sense of our dilemma and find the way home. 

When the conscience's criticism causes a level of insecurity which drives further breaches of its dictates, the negative feedback loop which results spreads a social poison far beyond the individual. If we can find an easily replicable way of untying this knot, the world will be swept with an enthusiasm for solving all other problems. 

The Christian religion talks about redemption. Our sins are forgiven and we are instructed to go and sin no more. If following the conscience is an act of will, we will always tire. We need to return to our awareness of how it worked in our first paradise. The joy of accepting and being accepted was the source of our enthusiasm. Our mistakes needed to be both learned from and forgiven. Where things went wrong was when we stopped being able to forgive ourselves and thus became split into prosecution and defence in our own internal trial.

In the scheme of things, those trials are trivialities. We are looking to the past and concentrating on our "sins", giving them primary importance. What really matters is what we want and how we can get it. If we want a world in which we thrive together, then we need to concentrate on finding ways to untie the knots that impede the flow of loving communication between us, and the malfunctioning conscience is the king of such knots.

BOOK REVIEW : The Murder of Christ by Wilhelm Reich

This book by controversial psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich is unlikely to appeal to traditional Christian believers. Reich theorises that Jesus must have had sex with one or more of the women who surrounded him during his ministry. If Jesus was a naturally loving individual, Reich concludes, he must have exhibited the free genital expression intrinsic to a healthy character structure. 

Reich was not a traditional believer. He views Jesus as a man whose presence had a profound impact on the world because he was so healthy and the rest of us are so sick. The very tendency to interpret his specialness as something otherworldly, something supernatural, and to create myths of magical events such as virgin birth and resurrection from the dead around his memory, is evidence of how alienated we are from the functioning of our own bodies. 

We are born with primary instincts which direct us toward loving behaviour through the pleasurable streaming of the life energy in our bodies. But we are born into a society which is antagonistic to such feelings. The frustration of the primary instincts causes them to be re-channelled into secondary drives. These can take many forms, including various kinds of egotism, aggression, anxieties, etc.

What Reich admits he cannot explain is how this occurred in the beginning. The story of Adam and Eve gives this change from healthy functioning to antagonism towards the free operation of the life force, i.e. God, a mythological expression. We are caught in a terrible trap and that trap is our own neurotic character structure, which alienates us from each other and from nature. In the first chapter Reich gives a description of The Trap and the various ways we try to reconcile ourselves to imprisonment within it. Religion is one source of solace, a promise of a life outside the trap after death.

But Reich presents Jesus as a man who never entered The Trap. A man with a healthy character structure, a man who unselfconsciously gave expression to our original loving instincts. His wisdom was the honest clear thinking anyone would exhibit who was not impeded by the fears and frustrations that come with being divided against one’s own life energy.

Central to this condition is fear of our sexual feelings. This is the hook on which our loving instincts get snagged.

In Western culture things have changed a lot since Reich’s death in 1957. We are more honest about sexuality. He played a role in opening things up. It was he who coined the term “Sexual Revolution”. But that doesn’t mean that the problem he highlighted is any the less with us. What he felt was repressed in us was not so much sex itself but the loving expression of “the genital embrace”. It’s possible to have sex several times a day and still be a denizen of The Trap. Reich uses the term “four-lettering” to describe compulsive neurotic sex - the “wham bam thank you ma’am” kind of copulation that is all the world away from the gentle process which builds slowly and naturally to an orgasm which frees the soul to meld with that of one’s partner.

Maybe attitudes to adolescent sexuality are more enlightened than they were in Reich’s day. He talks of the sexual agony of the adolescent. This is something I could identify with. Even though I had sexually liberal parents, I was greatly disturbed by the onrush of powerful sexual desires at puberty. I remember wishing at one point that my sexual desires could be medically removed, because they were such a source of terrible anxiety. Why? I don’t know. Reich felt that young people were psychologically damaged by the sex negative attitudes of parents, teachers and the church, which caused them to fight against and repress their sexual desires instead of expressing them in a healthy way. Thus one generation of sexual cripples cripples the next.

Once again, the fact that young people today are more sexually active would not necessarily be a positive sign for Reich. Compulsive unloving sex is just another neurotic symptom.

In this book, which was written only a few years before he was imprisoned and died, Reich doesn’t try to make a carefully reasoned or evidenced argument about human nature or about the life and death of Jesus. This is written more in the mode of the prophet crying in the wilderness. His early work was supported with references to case studies and anthropological research. Here he simply states what he strongly believes to be true and it is up to us to either feel that it makes sense of our own experience and what we have read in the gospels about Jesus or that it doesn’t. Given that, in the middle of his career, Reich claimed to have discovered scientific evidence of the life energy, which he called “orgone” - evidence which was taken seriously by very few other scientists - perhaps this less scientific approach is preferable. One need not agree with everything Reich says to gain from the stimulation of his iconoclastic thought. We all need to be shaken up from time to time.

The story of the life and murder of Christ is, arguably, the most important story in Western history. Even those of us who are not Christians know its major events. It permeates our culture. It doesn’t matter that Reich is no Biblical scholar. Even if this were a fictional story, it is one which embodies the central human dilemma. Reich is using the basics of the story as a way of contemplating and illustrating the human condition. And he doesn’t hide the fact that he identifies aspects of his own situation with that of Christ. He too, at least in his own mind, is a speaker of truths unwelcome to the authority figures of his time. He too had reluctantly taken on a leadership role.

Reich presents Christ as a man who only gradually discovers that he is special. He has to learn that others are not free in the way that he is. His psychological freedom and loving nature make him very attractive to those around him. He wants to help them. But he doesn’t understand that their character structure is such that they will suck up whatever love he shows them and then resent him because they can’t be like him. They will seduce him into becoming a leader - into marching on Jerusalem - but it will all be for nothing. He will be killed because those with a sick character structure always have a murderous resentment for those who are still truly alive inside themselves.

It is this tendency which is the central subject of the book. For Reich, the murder of Christ is something that happens all over the world ever day. Christ was an embodiment of our original loving instincts as they are expressed in the body. And the Murder of Christ continues through the stifling of the expression of those instincts in every child. Who is the murderer of Christ? Reich points the finger at all of us.

Like Listen Little Man!, another book Reich wrote in the latter part of his life when he was at the centre of much hostility, The Murder of Christ is often a harshly accusatory book, but we may gain much through our encounter with its thorniness. Today we know more about the chemistry of love. We know that there are forms of intimacy, sexual or otherwise, which cause our bodies to produce the chemical Oxytocin. The experience of this chemical in our blood stream, which produces warm feelings of affection and bonding and thus, no doubt, works to melt the rigidity of our angry, frightened or resentful ego structure, is perhaps what Reich and his patients experienced as the flow of “orgone energy”. Perhaps it is true that a significant element in the dark side of our life as humans - aggression, sexual predation, greed, depression, loneliness - arises through a fear of bodily sensations which, were we less troubled by them, could lead us to a more loving society.

Eva Reich, Jerome Siskind, Peter Reich, Wilhelm Reich and Ilse Ollendorff in Maine

BOOK REVIEW : Steps to an Ecology of Mind by Gregory Bateson

Gregory Bateson (1904-1980) was an anthropologist amongst many other things. His central project was the application of systems theory or cybernetics (defined by Norbert Weiner in 1948 as “the scientific study of control and communication in the animal and the machine”) to the fields of anthropology, psychology, history and ecology. This collection of academic papers and public lectures presents his thinking over the period from 1935 until 1971. The title is a description of his aim. Just as ecology is the study of the interrelationship between living things in natural systems in search of an understanding of what allows those systems to persist as healthy functioning wholes, Bateson is operating according to the belief that the problems of society and the functioning of the natural world can only be understood by achieving “an ecology of mind” in which ideas fit together in an integrated system.

Some of the papers in this book make for challenging reading. Bateson is asking us to consider a different framework for viewing the world, to think outside the box. The box being our deeply ingrained misperceptions about the world. Living things, including ourselves, are systems which exist within larger systems. These systems are interconnected wholes within which all parts are in dynamic relationship with each other. Nothing can truly be understood out of context, and no change in the system can occur without change to the whole system. 

I found some of the abstract concepts to which Bateson introduced me a little hard to wrap my head around at times, but it is worth the effort. This book left me wondering why systems theory, particularly as Bateson applies it to learning and communication, is not taught in high school. Surely being able to understand how we think and communicate and the principles which determine our relationships with others are crucial to our ability to successfully manage life. 

But there is a reason why concepts so useful are not widely appreciated. They would represent a revolution, because faulty thinking goes to the very roots of our society. A mass breakout of sanity in the populations of the world would shake every aspect of our culture and economic activity to the very core. It would be the end of the world as we know it and the beginning of an adventure into the unknown.

Part I : Metalogues

“A metalogue is a conversation about some problematic subject,” Bateson explains. These are conversations between himself and his young daughter which playfully examine important ideas. One which I found particularly thought provoking was “What is an instinct?” in which Bateson points out that concepts like “instinct” and “gravity” are “explanatory principles” - “…an hypothesis tries to explain something but an explanatory principle — like ‘gravity’ or ‘instinct’ — really explains nothing. It’s a sort of conventional agreement between scientists to stop trying to explain things at a certain point.”

Part II : Form and Pattern in Anthropology

Bateson did research on indigenous cultures in New Guinea and Bali, the latter work in collaboration with his wife Margaret Mead. From these studies he identified the phenomena of “schismogenesis” in contact between different cultures, a phenomena which also applies to relationships between individuals. 

This is a kind of negative feedback loop in which the behaviour of one individual or group toward another elicits the kind of response from the second which elicits more of the same from the first. Schismogenesis can take a symmetrical form - in which each individual or group has similar aims and are competing with each other - or a complimentary form in which there is a relationship of difference between the two, such as dominance and submission or exhibitionism and spectatorship. 

A simple example is an arms race. One country builds some nuclear weapons, so another country builds some so there is a deterrent against the first country using theirs against them. The first country views this as threatening, so they build more of their own, and so on. The negative feedback leads to a world endangered by a plethora of nuclear weapons. 

It is easy to see how relevant an understanding of these kinds of processes is. Marriage breakdown is no doubt generally the result of some form of schismogenesis. Little irritating behaviours which illicit irritating behaviours from the other party which perpetuate the phenomena, gradually escalating until the relationship becomes untenable. 

Or consider relationships between subcultures within our society. The prejudices of one group against another group can inspire retaliatory behaviour which reinforces the prejudice, etc., etc. One need only look at the behaviour of people of opposing political beliefs on the internet to see how this plays out.

Part III : Form and Pathology in Relationship

What particularly attracted me to reading Bateson was his double bind theory of schizophrenia. 

I don’t suffer from this condition myself, but I have experienced a bipolar psychotic breakdown as a result of finding myself in a double bind. A double bind is a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation. I was in a position where I put all of my faith in someone who insisted on the importance of honesty. Honesty is a strong conscientious principle for me, so I agreed with this. But when I expressed honest criticism of this individual, I was told I was “deluded”. When I pretended to be sorry for what I said, i.e. I lied, I was warmly rewarded. It was important to me to be honest and I wanted to please the person who asked me to be honest, but I had to lie to please him. As a result of this relationship I ended up becoming delusional, being locked up in a mental hospital and becoming so depressed I needed shock therapy. 

So I can relate to Bateson’s accounts of people who end up suffering schizophrenia as a result of demands made of them by a parent giving mixed messages. A mother feels anxious about affectionate contact with the child and backs away from him when he shows natural affection. Unable to face such feelings in herself, she compensates with overt declarations of love. The child doesn’t know what to base his behaviour on - the withdrawal or the pretence of warm feelings. This is a very simplistic description of a situation Bateson analyses in great detail. 

There is a strong connection between what he has to say here and both R. D. Laing’s work on psychosis and the family and Wilhelm Reich’s ideas about the effect that the neuroses of adults have on children. 

Bateson also gives a fascinating explanation for the cryptic verbal communication often exhibited during schizophrenic psychosis. 

Schizophrenia has a genetic basis, and Bateson gives consideration to the implications of this for identifying a predisposition for the “covert” schizophrenia betrayed by the parent and the “overt” schizophrenia which arises in their child.

Part IV : Biology and Evolution

Bateson scolds biologists and boards of education for “empty-headedness” in their battle with Creationists, pointing out that it is important for students to know about the evolution of understanding of evolution in order to properly recognise the problem of explanation it is trying to solve, and there is something to be appreciated in the way that the Book of Genesis framed the question : “Where does order come from?”

“In modern terms, we may say that this is the problem implicit in the Second Law of Thermodynamics: If random events lead to things getting mixed up, by what nonrandom events did things come to be sorted? And what is a ‘random’ event”. 

He also explores the implications of somatic change for evolutionary theory. Somatic change is adaption to an environment. If people go to live at a high altitude, at first they pant to deal with the thin air, but over time their lung capacity increases and breathing becomes easier. 

Can this kind of adaptation end up as a genetic change? 

Lamarck’s theory involving inheritance of acquired characteristics was discarded, but Bateson hypothesises that a random mutation may come after somatic change which gives the organism survival advantage by allowing what had been achieved by greater effort to be achieved without that effort. 

In order to survive an organism’s body has to be flexible to change, so if giraffes’ necks get gradually longer due to beneficial mutations which have survival advantage, their hearts will also have to be pumping more blood. This change in the demands on the heart is a somatic change. But at a later stage another random mutation may increase the size of giraffe hearts, this mutation having survival advantage because it reduces the effort needed and makes the giraffe more flexible to meet other challenges. In this way inheritance of acquired characteristics might appear to occur, even though it is not what is really happening.

In discussing dolphin language, Bateson points out that animal communication is all about relationship. In developing our own language, we humans acquired the ability to talk about specific things, and so our communication with each other about relationship is mostly conveyed by subtext and body language. Dolphins don’t have our body language repertoire, since they don’t have facial expressions or hands, so he surmises that dolphin language is a very complex, sophisticated language of relationship.

PART V : Epistemology and Ecology

Cybernetic explanation, Bateson tells us, is focused not on explaining why something is, but why something else isn’t. Natural selection is a perfect example. It explains the process of change in species by looking at how other outcomes were eliminated as unfit. 

Everything is looked at as potential information. There is redundancy in information to the extent that a message can be conveyed without some of that information being present. For instance if I type “sh*t”, the missing letter doesn’t stop you from knowing what I mean. Information can provide the form of something, redundancy within that form and the restraint that makes it that form and not another. All else “is noise, the only possible source of new patterns.”

How is it that we are an expression of a self-regulating balanced ecological system, and yet we are psychologically out-of-balance and bringers of chaos to that larger system? Bateson re-examines the Adam and Eve myth to see if we can learn something about how the conscious purpose for which we have such an advanced capacity compared to other animals has set us against nature — our own deeper nature and nature as a whole — and how it produces a projection by which we blame either ourselves or the system - “I have sinned” or “God is vengeful.” 

To address this dilemma we need to bring the unconscious into consciousness. Bateson sees art as particularly important in this process. He touches on the use of psychedelics, but with some scepticism. “What is required is not simply a relaxation of consciousness to let the unconscious material gush out. To do this is merely to exchange one partial view of the self for the other partial view. I suspect that what is needed is the synthesis of the two views and this is more difficult.”

He points out a great error in Darwin’s account of evolution, and that was to present the individuals or their family lines or the subspecies as the units of survival. The unit should actually be thought of as individual plus environment or family line plus environment etc., because those who destroy their environment end up destroying themselves. 

Similarly we can’t understand mind if we see it as contained simply in the brain of the individual. The concept of “mind” has to be flexible according to what we wish to explain. It is the realm of ideas. An idea is “a difference which makes a difference.” The ideas we perceive through our senses are parts of the whole which is our mind at that moment. 

But Bateson expresses the view that, just as there is a global ecosystem of which all subsystems and all species and all individuals are a part, so there is a larger Mind of which all of our minds are a part. “This larger Mind is comparable to God and is perhaps what some people mean by ‘God,’ but is still immanent in the total interconnected social system and planetary ecology.”

Part VI : Crisis in the Ecology of Mind

What are the harmful ideas which dominate our culture?

“(a) It’s us against the environment.

 (b) It’s us against other men.

 (c) It’s the individual (or the individual company, or the individual nation) that matters.

 (d) We can have unilateral control over the environment and must strive for that control.

 (e) We live within an infinitely expanding “frontier.”

 (f) Economic determinism is common sense.

 (g) Technology will do it for us.”

We need to think in terms of flexibility, Bateson insists. New technologies can allow us to support increases in population, but the more we push the limits of the system and the more we depend on such technologies, the less flexibility we have. The same thing applies for individuals, our ability to survive and to thrive depends on our flexibility, the ease with which we can change our thinking and our behaviour in the light of changing realities.

Steps to An Ecology of Mind is a book overflowing with profound thinking about what really matters. I only wish it were less relevant today than it was when it was first published.