Pleasure and pain are the central feelings of human life. They have evolved from the survival instincts of our species. Pleasure is felt when the organism’s systems are at equilibrium one with another. No one system is to excess and thus putting pressure on others. It is the normative mode of the many systems that make up the organism. What humans sometimes call pleasure is mistaken for a kind of extreme pleasure closer to ecstasy where the individual system or process is over-fulfilled leading to excessive feedback to the brain which delivers the good feeling or sensation. This ecstasy can only persist for a short time else it impacts on other systems whose eventual reports to the brain cause the sensations of pain. In extreme cases the local pleasure centers can cancel the pain feedback. A person experiencing orgasm momentarily negates the pain of headache but for it to return even more painfully after the event subsides.
Pain tells the brain that the body systems are not all in equilibrium. It alerts the reactive systems to start their work to bring the system back to its normal state. Pain is part of life and indeed essential to it. Disregard pain at your peril. The message should be heeded.
Theologians struggled trying to explain how a good God could introduce such pain into the world. They saw pain, like evil, to be a disembodied essence. Evil was pain inflicted by the machinations of free will. It was intentional infliction of pain without the concomitant feedback utility. It was senseless pain. Nature accepts pain as part of its reality. The tiger hunts the young fawn and tears its body apart. The fawn dies a horrible death. It feels the pain as the tiger’s teeth sink into its flesh and pulls apart its skin. For many minutes it lives a terrifying death. Where is the feedback for all this senseless Godly pain? Surely an all powerful designer would design out this pointless agony. The terrible pain felt by the fawn serves no purpose as the poor creature dies- too late to learn from any experience. Yet there is feedback but not to the poor fawn. The rest of the herd hear its cries of agony and learn a very strong lesson - avoid tigers like the plague! There is also the lesser feedback to the fawn on the small probability that it survives or escapes. This experience passes into the nature of the animal to impact upon survivability. Those that escape are generally fast enough to only receive a graze from the tiger’s paw and live to pass on their fast genes to future generations.
It is only the pain caused by free will that causes a moral dilemma. The feedback from such pain is not apparent. The origins of such pain infliction go back to the origins of humanity as hunter-gatherers roaming the plains in search of food. The basic unit was the tribe and survival of the tribe was not just dependent on the finding of sufficient food but of competing for it with adjacent tribes. War was the outcome and the free willed infliction of pain. The feedback mechanism from wars is similar to that from the more natural tiger and fawn situation. It meant that to survive the tribe had to be good at war and to breed good warriors. War is part of our evolutionary development. The development of agriculture and the static tribe reduced the incidence of these wars which otherwise may have destroyed the evolution of humanity. Many ancestors of homo sapiens may have died out before this reprieve came along.
It is easy to sanitize war in this way and give it purpose. The reality of war is only known to those who have experienced it. War is about the willful infliction of pain and in a modern sense is morally avoidable. It has developed with the aid of science to a point where pain can be inflicted on the entire human race at the push of a nuclear button. It is still the tribal way of resolving conflict. The message of the potential feedback of such generalized pain is one targeted at the entire human life on the planet and the consequences are dire if it is ignored.
War is not evil. It is the accepted way that human groupings resolve their conflicts. War is avoidable. The modern level of education and knowledge lets leaders see beyond the local impact of war to the greater world of the human race as a common entity. Democracy curbs the powers of rogue leaders to enter into wars without due authority. Wars persist but the proliferation of wars will over time decline as they are seen as primitive responses to conflict situations that are best treated by prolonged negotiation. The realization that there is an ultimate nuclear war in the background has helped to rationalize the minds of modern leaders and governments.
Pain inflicted by free will is not confined to the field of war. It arises in all areas of conflict. It is hot wired into the minds of men in particular. Violence is often a response to threat. Mindless violence is the extreme expression of that inbred desire to inflict pain. Societal violence of this kind is an illness. Society is sick where there is acceptance of high levels of physical violence. There is no feedback mechanism either for the individual or for society. Society no longer places value on the ability to be a great warrior. Pain infliction has long been mechanized and has displaced that value on warrior mentality that underlies most societal violence. That mentality relates back to the tribe where the leader asserts himself violently to prove that he is worthy of being leader as the best warrior. This in-tribe violence did once have a feedback in that the warring abilities helped the survival of the clan. It has been programmed into each of us from our evolutionary development. It is still a major impact on society even in the modern world where being a violent man is not in any way esteemed by the rational. It is an ugly reminder of our primitive past.
This mindless infliction of pain is what we are accustomed to call ‘evil’. Evil exists if we circumscribe its existence with the remnant driving forces of our ancient and primitive selves. It is a driving force without a purpose in the great roll-out of our evolutionary journey. The initial feedback benefits to survival are no longer there. It is the appendix attached to the body of society and, if it gives trouble, must be surgically removed. For most of us it lies dormant, a useless relic of a distant past.
But there is another sort of pain in the world that is purely a human pain - pain of the mind. Very little of the unhappiness in the world is caused by physical pain. Mental turmoil far exceeds the bounds of the physical. The fact that it is purely a human trait suggests that it comes from the pressures of society living. Animals can live in close knit groups and there are tensions between members but these are usually related to leadership roles and mating and are resolved by physical violence that is the forebear of our own physical violent inclinations. There is no evidence that animals have sufficient memory or cognitive ability to bear grudges. Only humans possess this unwholesome trait. It is the ability to have a memory that allows humans to develop the broad spectrum of emotions that ultimately lead to unhappiness and discontent. Humans are not inclined to be happy. Happiness is an oasis seldom visited in the desert of discontent.
Memory allowed our primitive forebears to remember which member of the group was a potential threat to his position within the group. He was able to place himself relatively in the group and set up comparisons that led to envy and jealousy. The parable in the Book of Genesis where Adam takes the apple offered by Eve is very powerful. That apple conveyed on the first couple the ability to remember and they moved from the blissful existence of the ever-now to the realm of time. Past became a player in the equilibrium of the emotions. The Original Sin in taking that apple allowed all the sins of human destiny to flood into reality: envy, lust, hate, deceit, greed and violence. Without the benefit of memory man would not be able to sin.
Memory was an evolutionary step of the greatest importance. It led originally to the conception of all life. In humans its complex development in the brain allowed the development of language which allowed complex human interaction to take place and it is this interaction that is the basis of all our anxieties and mental pain. For the small amount of pleasure gained from social intercourse the balance has to be the overload of social tensions: within families, neighbors, communities and ultimately society. These tensions are only resolved by physical violence in exceptional circumstances and less so as societies develop and advance. The unresolved tensions remain, however, to ferment in t
he solipsistic nightmare of vexations, hang-ups, hates and envies.
Freud was right to the extent that repressing these capacities to sin only leads to mental un-health and ultimately possible insanity. Learning to deal with them and accept them as part of nature, but a part that must be controlled, is what makes an individual mentally healthy. Much of society represses on an organized basis. The religions of the world refuse to talk of these gray areas of human nature shoving them all into the category of sin and ascribing to them an external un-godlike body, the devil. This externalizing them in effect externalizes a part of one’s own nature and leads to life-long conflict and internal dishonesty and in severe cases insanity. Understanding them as part of our make-up removes the sense of guilt that so often is the mark of the faithful. The Freudian route to mental health was to expose our inner demons and get the patient to accept them yet control them, as he controls so many other areas of his being. A lot of the mental turmoil and pain in the world is self-induced in this way.
Philosophy can teach us that there is nothing in human nature that should be shunned as we shun the concept of sin as defined by religions. Sin is a primitive response to the way our ancestors developed their societal structures. It was of use to have envy of the leader. That envy was the driving force that drove challenges to the leader and led to successful and on-going change. A stasis would have led to the leader becoming feeble and putting the group under threat or perhaps passing on bad genes to future generations. These negative emotions were the driving forces of group dynamics of our ancient forebears. They are still the forces that drive change in the modern society of the twenty first century. A politician would not last very long in the maelstrom of modern life if he did not possess a modicum of all these negatives that we abhor on a personal basis.
Both religion and philosophy fail us by not placing us in our context as a form of life that developed by chance on a rocky planet in an inauspicious part of the universe. Moreover the context of our evolutionary past is crucial to our understanding of our present and how we relate to ourselves and to each other. Modern man needs to be educated to this awareness and the process should start at the earliest point. The child who is aware of the extent of the cosmos and the evolutionary path of life will not be prone to develop phobias about guilt, will not be dishonest with himself and will be open to accepting life as it is - not as an ideal, as promoted by religions and some philosophy. A modern Utopia is one that sets the standard to be attained as one well short of old Utopian goals. The human is not made in the image of God. Homo sapiens is a very imperfect result of four billions years plus of evolution on this particular piece of rock. He is neither good nor bad but just is, as is the swallow or the elephant or the kangaroo. The development of memory has allowed him to conquer his environment and has led unfortunately to much damage to this environment and to other living species. In that, homo sapiens is different to other life. He is the only life that is self -aware and empathetic to the existence of others in a full communicative sense. This has led to complex social interactions against the background of which the primitive emotions can play havoc. The world as we see it is in a state of constant havoc both at the level of the individual and the state. This comes from failing to recognize that these primitive emotions are innate and knowing this and their contextual existence the individual can control them, leading to healthier people and ultimately healthier societies. Education is the key tool to effect this realization but the paradigm that this education reflects has to be different from the current religious paradigm. God and the Devil retire gracefully. Existential man arises.
There is hope that the levels of violence in our lives will steadily decrease. It was felt that the First World War would be the war to end all wars but while that was certainly true for the millions slain, it was not true for those remaining. The twentieth century saw a level of violence on a scale never before seen in the world. The political outcome led to the Cold War that was fought between the two superpowers on successive fronts. It was the development of nuclear weapons and their availability on both sides of the conflict that prevented what, for humanity, would have been an inconceivable Third World War. The tide was turning. The number of democracies in the world was growing and negotiation became a substitute for violence. The huge increase in communications generated by the development of the free internet led to a globalization that removed much of the tribal ignorance and fears of society. Globalization of trade has also been key to reducing conflicts across the globe. States that trade a lot with each other prefer a stable economic climate. The wars that now plague the planet are those related to religious fundamentalism and the struggle to control access to ever decreasing energy supplies. It is possible that the future will see a world without major conflicts as these issues become resolved. The fear of global warming is already shifting the balance away from fossil fuels towards renewable technologies. The rise of fundamentalism can be stemmed by increasing access to free communication whereby isolated societies can see and understand that difference with others is not a threat.
For nearly two million years hominoids lived as hunter gatherers roaming the grasslands of the central continent. For this period the only response to conflict was violence. To run away from violence was to send a message that you were weak and vulnerable. Retreat was not a viable strategy. The conflict had to be met head on. The sparse distribution of tribes meant that geographical isolation was a natural limit to such conflict. The advent of agriculture meant that populations increased and the proximity of potential enemies increased. Full scale wars are a very recent arrival in the human story as agricultural practice is less than twenty thousand years old. While war on this scale is recent, violent conflict has always been a part of human existence and must in some sense be hardwired into our evolutionary development. This is particularly so for the male of the species who is considerably more violent than his female counterpart. If violence were not in some way innate, the levels of male and female violence tendencies should be somewhat equal. The increasing profile of women in world political life should reflect this lack of propensity to act violently and is another source of positive change particularly in western societies. It is interesting to note that in fundamentalist societies the female is allowed little or no role in the world of men. These societies are among the most bellicose on the planet.
While humanity may yet win the war on war, the inner wars waged at the level of the individual cannot be vanquished. Human anxiety is part of being. All response generates some anxiety. It is programmed into the individual from the moment of birth where it takes the sole form of food anxiety. The human baby is born defenseless. It cannot do anything for itself other than think. The ability to think and be aware of himself and his environment is unique to humans and sows the seeds of constant anxiety towards the world. The extent of our anxieties is formed as babies and is shaped during childhood. They remain with us throughout our long life to haunt us whenever we are in situations where we perceive we have little or no control. Our dream world reveals our chaotic anxieties. Anxiety is part of our existential being - for some it becomes a catastrophic part and they pass over the boundaries of sanity.
Anxiety casts us as a social being. It is a response to others in terms of their relation to us. A baby clings to its mother, because of food. It develops a special relation with its parents because it gets un-compromized love. The sibling relations are very tenuous because there is little or nothing to be gained from them. Sibling relations are never very strong compared to the primary relations of parent and child. In fact sibling relations are more likely to be the subject of negative emotions such as envy or rivalry. As Freud well theorized, the parental relations are the main generators of anxiety complexes.
That anxiety exists suggests that it has an evolutionary purpose. The purpose is relatively clear for the defenseless baby whose anxiety forces him to cry for help, which is his only possible response to need. When a child learns to communicate and
becomes more independent, the levels of anxiety should recede. Healthy children are those who are independent and can freely communicate. Hang-ups that impede communication are the main cause of anxiety. To be able to verbalize the problem and if needed to ask for help is a sign of a healthy child. The early resorts for assistance are initially to parents. If there are problems in these relationships, the child has no place to turn. The anxiety builds up and can lead to illness or emerges as behavioral problems.
The child first learns to communicate. This is a slow process and the development of complete trust in its parents is essential. Independence is even slower to arrive. It is built up incrementally as the child learns to cope with the minor anxieties of life, always having the safety valve of parental communication if necessary. The child learns to cope with life. The anxieties are still there but they are under control. The child recognizes them as normal and learns how to deal with them without increasing them. The progress to adulthood leads to the fabled normal well-balanced person. There is no such person. Each person struggles with his anxieties on a continuous basis but has learned that they are conquerable. Just as the person who becomes a good public speaker will still admit to nerves before taking the podium, we all have to overcome petty anxieties as part of living. In a healthy mind the anxiety acts as a spur to alert the body or the mind for action. Without it, the blasé approach may lead to danger. Anxiety and alertness go hand in hand. The fawn that is constantly alert may appear anxious but is well-primed to deal with the appearance of the tiger. Humans too are constantly on the alert for danger and anxiety fulfils that role. Certain levels of anxiety are essential. Too much and the mind becomes unhealthy and possibly deranged.
It appears that we humans can thank evolution for making our world painful both physically and emotionally. Pain and anxiety are important tools in our survival both at a primitive level and in the modern world. It is their control or lack of control that leads to wars and emotional conflict. The modern human has learned to control his physical pain to a greater extent than his emotional pain. Yet from that same emotional pain has emerged most of the great works of art, literature and music. Creativity seems to need that emotional imbalance to release other energies that form structures of great beauty. Nothing comes out of equilibrium. Science has taught us that. The heat pump the basis of our biological being needs the dis-equilibrium of a heat source and a heat sink. Hot and cold are essential to life. Temperature both defines and separates them. Anxiety is the temperature difference which drives creativity.
In a life, the vast bulk of pain is not the physical pain of the body but the emotional pain of the mind. It is true our life starts in pain - that of the mother who brings us into this world through violent bodily exertion. We usually end our lives in the pain of a body that is overcome with its physical inadequacies. Between these extremes, unless unlucky, the human generally spends most of life in a state of physical non-pain. The emotional pain - that deeply seated existential pain of being alone in a non-caring world - is there as a constant background that is at best negated by moments of ‘high’. The calm, serene person is that rare being who has come to an acceptance of life and all that it throws up. The rest of us rail at the disregard and unfairness of it all. We rue our lost opportunities and grieve for lost relationships. We live in a constant state of unrequited desire. This leads to a need to search for that nefarious peace. We find it only occasionally and in unexpected places. It visits us briefly then departs leaving a sense of loss and void that makes our real life almost pointless and vacuous. The meaning that we seek is the answer to that great existential question - who am I? The lack of answers is the well of our discontent. Even the simple answers of religion provide only partial solace and ultimately confuse us with their attendant myths and rituals. The voyage through life is truly a personal and verily solipsistic journey. Fellow travelers come and go but our own journey is always with us. The human being is a blind traveler who clumsily knocks about in the unseen background world of his existence.
It is easy for the human to fall into despair. The negatives of life are too many and too frequent. Yet he survives and overcomes the existential drama. Life is composed of the successes over the attempts by nature to defeat it. That is the essential of life. It is what is not defeated and killed by the environment or the cosmos. The cosmos is not friendly to life. In fact it seems to want to kill it at every juncture. There are few places in the known cosmos that life can prosper and survive. One of them, perhaps the only one, is our blue planet. Even on this fecund rock that orbits a suitably long lived sun, the threats to life are immense. The threats are even compounded by life itself. Other life forms eventually overwhelm their neighbors in the quest for the source of energy - food. That life exists at all is an amazing miracle in the story of the physical world. Its brief appearance, a mere microsecond in the day of the cosmos, may just be a tiny flicker of no more relative significance than a grain of sand in the totality of beaches of the world. Life is not the essence of the cosmos but a very parochial phenomenon with no cosmological significance.
The extent of the cosmos in time and in space places the brief existence of cognitive life in a very different philosophical position than that attributed to it by religion or some philosophical streams. Far from being the center of the world, we are not even a bit player. We are a player that must fight constantly with the local scene to allow us deliver our brief lines. The world construes to hurt us with disease, bodily imperfections and mental instability. Our struggle for life is not symmetrical in its impact on the cosmos. The small efforts, that while certainly in modern times have had major impact on our homely planet, have to date had no effect outside our tiny remote solar system and absolutely none on the vast expanse of the universe. Even the frenzied mix of telecommunication waves that escape into space will take billions of years of travel to even cover the nearer parts of our world. The vastness of the space-time means that we are forever doomed to be alone in our struggle to survive.
What is it about the cosmos that makes it want to destroy life as we know it? The question seems odd when one looks at the wild diversity of life on earth. Nature on earth has delivered a visually resplendent world. Where there is water the landscape is lush and green. The wild flowers of the hedgerow deliver colors that any painter can only dream of. The sky at evening is more wonderful a screen than seen in any cinema. Life seems to be flourishing here in this small space of the cosmos. This makes this place very special. The laws of nature must be very propitious in this space. The moon, our sister satellite is totally barren. So also we suspect are all the other planets and their respective moons. Life has flourished here as if by chance. The cosmos that is so anti-life has relaxed its vigilance in this infinitesimal patch of space time. The battle of life is to survive against the incredible odds that are stacked against it. It is these odds that are the origin of pain in life. To struggle is to endure pain. There can be no heaven on earth. In death the struggle is over. The pain is no more.
Yet there is hope in human nature. We do not live to die. The constant featuring of pain in our lives does not defeat us and throw us into a depressive quagmire. Somehow there is always a glimmer of hope that keeps us alive in a positive sense. What is that sense of hope and where does it spring from? Less advanced societies are happy to prescribe belief in a god myth that provides a simple paradigm of a patriarchal figure that watches over us and cares for our destiny. This transplants the familial sense of comfort and protection into the world of adulthood. The hope in life is not the death of pain but the death of death. Immortality seems to give humanity a reason to exist. Enduring presence is justification enough for being. If we accept death we accept pointlessness of life. Religion also gives a sense of respite to the ever present pain and suffering of life. Heaven will be a place where there is no pain - the soul, the disembodied person, will dwell in the aura of love emanating from the patriarchal divine presence. A contrary existence of much increased pain was contr
ived for those who do not live according to the prescribed rules. Here the stick, as opposed to the carrot of peace in heaven, is the lack of hope of escape from an unbearable pain. This idea harks back to early beliefs that catastrophes and disasters were the work of a punishing god who judges his people to have transgressed his law. The origin of pain in life becomes a divine retribution. The eternal retribution of hell can only be avoided by following the laws as prescribed.
This divorced the origins of pain from the direct physical causes which were seen as mere instruments of a higher will. This paradigm has transfixed the human race for all of its short history. In many ways it has led to a stoic acceptance of pain as part of the unavoidable essence of being. This stoicism runs counter to the survival instincts of the species on the level of the individual but may have advantages at the level of society. The prevalence of religious belief in almost all societies would suggest it has. The decline in the basic paradigms of the various religions particularly in the western world leaves a certain vacuum. How does the post-religionist come to terms with the unceasing pain in the world? Whence springs his hope?
Eighteen
Into the Cosmic Future