On My Own

 Last month, I wrote a post on this blog sharing Samuel Butler's delightful, if pseudo-scientific, theory that each life-form comes into the world equipped with an unconscious memory of the accumulated experiences of all the beings that came before it—and that this vast heap of prior experience is what goes to make up the peculiar form of unconscious knowledge we call "instinct." 

One consequence of the theory (which Butler spells out) is that we can only inherit the memories that our parents possessed at the age they had us. Until we reach the age our parents were at our conception, then—we can safely depend upon the backstop of accumulated habit and experience to guide us safely through life. After we cross that invisible threshold, however (age 32, in my case)—then we are on our own. 

The idea made me feel strangely lonely to think about. I felt myself a sudden Ishmael and outcast upon the world. But it also rang true. However little scientific sense Butler's theory makes—it made a kind of autobiographical sense. It explained why I felt subtly homeless in my thirties—in a way that marked a sudden contrast from my twenties. 

In my twenties, I seemed to sail through life with a great deal of instinctual accumulated habit at my back. It was my experience generally that—if one simply allowed nature to take its course—things eventually worked out for the best. The universe was hatching a fate that one could accept.

One of the lines of Samuel Butler's own that most spoke to me at that age—from his Way of All Flesh—was a quote he lifted from Scripture: "We know that all things work together for good to them that love God." Butler meant this in a highly idiosyncratic way, of course—as do I. What the line meant for us was that, for those who trust the universe, and don't try to force anything or exert pressure on fate in one direction or the other, events tend to sort themselves into a favorable pattern on their own. 

Indeed—around the age of twenty-five—my annus mirabilis—the beneficence of fate seemed so inevitable, that of all the passages in William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience—I found the following to be among the most relatable (James is quoting here from another spiritual writer on the subject of the "guided life"): 

[One finds t]hat books and words (and sometimes people) come to one's cognizance just at the very moment in which one needs them; that one glides over great dangers as if with shut eyes, remaining ignorant of what would have terrified one or led one astray, until the peril is past [....] that paths on which one ought not to wander are, as it were, hedged off with thorns; but that on the other side great obstacles are suddenly removed; that when the time has come for something, one suddenly receives a courage that formerly failed, [etc.]

I felt that my life was guided too—not, perhaps, by God; but by instinct; by subconsciousness—by, if you will, the inherited memory of all former lives, just as Butler posits. 

And if true—this of course explains why my life after age 32 has felt so different. Why the universe seems so much more chaotic and hostile and unplanned. Why the things I attempt seem to require more willful and deliberate effort, rather than mere trust in the hands of fate. It makes sense now why I feel this way. I am—for the first time—no longer guided. I am on my own. 

For Butler, this—the age after that of our parents at the time of our conception—was the point at which we cease to live fully and begin our journey to death. Indeed—all of the process of aging—he suggested—may be due to the fact that the body no longer knows how to do things by accumulated habit. And so—we just gradually wither away, from sheer inability to remember how to live past this age. 

All of which is consistent with Butler's oft-stated ideal of the anti-intellectual "gentleman," who is guided by habit rather than thought. The gentleman does not ponder and question. He does not need explanations. He is content merely to exist. He goes through life by means of inherited instinct (and, of course, inherited wealth). As such, he has no need for the artifices and contrivances of mere "consciousness." The secret of life, he knows (without knowing that he knows), lies far deeper than that. 

Meanwhile—the rest of us; the intellectuals; the reasoners—will always be left in the dark as to the answer to life's riddle. The questioner, who sits so sly / Shall never know how to reply, as Blake put it. The "unconscious" people—as Butler puts it in The Way of All Flesh—"are in front of you, and not, as you fancy, behind you; it is you who are the lagger, not they." 

Such was Butler's ideal, then—the anti-intellectual ideal. The irony, however, was that Butler himself was almost the perfect antithesis of his own ideal. He was a reasoner and a questioner; an intellectual rebel that in truth could accept nothing he was told or leave nothing as he found it—not even the authorship of the Odyssey. 

Butler himself was perfectly aware of the irony in this; it obviously amused him. "In that I write at all I am among the damned," as he put it. 

 Very well, then. For some time I have been willing to accept that I am simply among "the damned" too; just like my hero Butler. Unconsciousness has failed me—at least now that I am past the age of 32 (which corresponds eerily, in my case, to the year I quit my previous job and went to law school), and no longer have my parents' accumulated wisdom and experience of living to point me the way. I shall have to spend the rest of my life in feeble reliance on the poor tools of mere intellect and reason. 

But reading the naturalist Loren Eiseley this morning gave me a rather different way of seeing it. In his short but stirring and dreamlike book The Immense Journey, he suggests that the distinguishing feature of humankind—and the source of all our achievements as a species—may in fact be our relative lack of instinct. 

Butler, of course, makes much of the notion that the best humanity is capable of is found in that which is least conscious—hence, most instinctual. The things we do best are those we think about the least—breathing, eating, swallowing, responding to beauty, etc. It is only once we have already practically forgotten how to do something, he notes, that we have to think—consciously—how to do it. 

And indeed, in the psychologist James Reason's classic book on Human Error—he reaches the empirical conclusion that mistakes—in the operation of complex systems—almost always start from people running a conscious double-check on something that ought to have been instinctual and habitual. 

We see this all the time when we're driving, say—or playing a sport. It's the same phenomenon behind "the yips" in golf or baseball. When one is hardly thinking about what one is doing, it goes smoothly. But when one starts to second-guess one's reactions—to say "should I turn here?" or "how does the swing go again?"—that is when mistakes creep in.

Fair enough, then. Butler is right so far as it goes. The things we do best are the things we do unconsciously—and it would probably go best for us if we could do everything by these subconscious means. 

But—we can't. No animals know by instinct how to create higher works of culture or science. So, we have two options: either not do these things; or try to lean upon the staff of reason and consciousness. 

After all: the other thing that immediately strikes us about Butler's list of the things we do best—is how limited they are; how confined to our most basic animal impulses: chewing, swallowing, breathing. If we aim to achieve more than that as a species, we have always been forced to rely on more than mere instinct; more than mere accumulated habit. 

And indeed—as Eiseley points out—when it comes to instinct, human beings are actually at a seeming disadvantage, relative to the rest of nature. We come into the world prepackaged with far less inherited instinct and unconscious knowledge than our animal forebears. We don't know how to migrate to reach warmer temperatures on our own. Most of what we end up being capable of doing has to be taught to us by other people through a long period of human enculturation. 

Yet, this curiously childlike creature—this being that has to be taught how to do everything; who needs the simplest things to be explained to it, when they seem to come to all other creatures naturally—this animal that is seemingly furthest removed, of all beings living, from Butler's "gentleman"—somehow became the planet's dominant life-form. 

It may be, then, that our apparent disadvantage—our lack of instinct and our forced reliance on the painstaking process of conscious thought—is actually our greatest advantage. 

Other animals can only confront new environments and challenges through the eons-long process of changing their bodily forms and developing new instincts; both of which can only proceed by the slow mechanism of natural selection. Humanity, however—as Eiseley points out—is curiously and uniquely able to speed up this process of adaptation. 

Of all species living, we are least dependent on natural selection. We can use mechanical tools to explore inhospitable new environments, without waiting for changes in our bodily form to make these environments habitable for our naked selves. We can use the processes of human education and culture to pass on new and useful pieces of information, rather than waiting innumerable generations for such insights to be internalized as instinct and passed on to our offspring genetically. 

Indeed, from the standpoint of bodily form—humankind is distinctly inadequate: exposed, hairless, without teeth or claws. As Eiseley points out, we could not survive five minutes on our own, naked, in any of the dangerous environments that our mechanical contrivances regularly allow us to explore (the upper atmosphere; the deep ocean). What permits our survival in all of these unlikely and inhospitable circumstances is the extraordinary development of our brains—our reasoning potential. 

(And it may be this as well that one day permits us to carry oxygenated environments with us into other solar systems; prolonging the existence of our species beyond that even of Earth—much as the first land animals eventually learnt how to carry the sea inside them in order to survive outside of it (as Eiseley points out).)

We are no less inadequate from the standpoint of inherited instinct. But this, Eiseley says, may be our great advantage. 

Humanity, writes Eiseley, "has suffered a major loss of precise instinctual controls of behavior. To make up for this biological lack [...] he has created an invisible world of ideas, beliefs, habits and customs which buttress him about and replace for him the precise instinct of the lower creatures. [... Indeed, i]t is not beyond the range of possibility that this strange reduction of instincts in man in some manner forced a precipitous brain growth as compensation." 

All of which provides me with rather a different outlook on the arduous and painfully self-conscious slog my thirties have been so far. Maybe I am less guided by inherited instinct than I was in my twenties. Maybe I have become less of a gentleman, in Butler's sense of the term. But I have—by the same token—become more human. 

I am on my own now, without the guiding hand of instinct. But such has always been the distinguishing fate of our species—and the source of our great achievements. Everything we have done that has set us apart from other animals has been performed without the aid of instinct—by means instead of reason and consciousness. 

The painful awakening into consciousness of my thirties, then, may just be the start of my greatest intellectual adventure—just as a similar awakening from the unconscious fog of mere instinct is what set the human adventure in motion.