The Mindfulness of Man
Modern man has formed a curiously distored picture of himself, by interpreting his early history in terms of his present interests in making machines and conquering nature. And then in turn he has justified his present concerns by calling his prehistoric self a tool-making animal, and assuming that the material instruments of production dominated all his other activities.
There is sound reason to believe that man's brain was from the beginning far more important than his hands, and its size could not be derived solely from his shaping or using of tools; that ritual and language and social organization which left no material traces whatever, although constantly present in every culture, were probably man's most important artifacts from the earliest stages on; and that so far from conquering nature or reshaping his environment primitive man's first concern was to utilize his overdeveloped, intensely active nervous system, and to give form to a human self, set apart from his original animal self by the fabrication of symbols---the only tools that could be constructed out of the resources provided by his own body: dreams, images and sounds.
The very existence of gramatically complex and highly articulated langauges at the onset of civilization five thousand years ago, when tools were still extremely primitive, suggests that the human race may have had even more fundamental needs than getting a living, since it might have continued to do the latter on the same terms as its hominid ancestors. If this is so, what were these needs?
From the moment Homo sapiens, at least, makes his appearance, we find evidences in his attitude toward death, toward ancestral spirits, toward future existence, toward sun and sky, that betray a consciousness that forces and beings, distant in space and time, unapproachable if not invisible, may nevertheless play a controlling part in man's life. This was a true intuition, although it may have taken hundreds and thousands of years before its full import and rational proof could be grasped by the human mind, which now ranges between invisible particles and equally mysterious retreating galaxies.
There seems a likelihood that the earliest peoples, perhaps even before language was available, had a dim consciousness of the mystery of their own being: a greater incentive to reflection and self-development than any pragmatic effort to make a living. Take the mysterious imprints of human hands made upon the walls of caves as far apart as Africa and Australia. These imprints are all the more puzzling because so many of these hands show one or more finger joints missing. Given that there are still tribes equally widely separated where the sacrifice of a finger joint is a rite of mourning: a personal loss to emphasize a greater loss, one can speculate that these imprints were a secondary symbol of grief, tranferred for perpetuation from the short-lived primary symbol of flesh and bone to a stone surface. In these cases, the rite itself reveals an eminent human susceptibility to strong feeling about matters of ultimate concern, along with a desire to retain and transmit that feeling. This must have cemented family life and group loyalty, and thus have contributed quite as effectively to survival as any improvement in flaking flint tools. Although in many other species the parent will on occasion sacrifice its life to protect its mate or its young, this voluntary symbolic sacrifice of a finger joint is a distinctly human trait. Where such feeling is lacking, as so often in the whole routine of our mechanized, impersonal megalopolitan culture, the human ties become so weak that only stringent external regimentation will hold the group together.
During the last half century, this short period has been described as the Machine Age, the Power Age, the Steel Age, the Concrete Age, the Air age, the Electronic Age, the Nuclear Age, the Rocket Age, the Computer Age, the Space Age, and the Age of Automation. One would hardly guess from such characterizations that these recent technological triumphs constitute but a fraction of the immense number of highly diversified components that enter into present-day technology, and make up but an infinitesimal part of the entire heritage of human culture. If only one phase of the remote human past was blotted out---the cumulative inventions of paleolithic man, beginning with language---all these new achievements would be worthless. So much for our boasted one-generation culture.
If tools were actually central to mental growth beyond purely animal needs, how is it that those primitive peoples, like the Australian Bushmen, who have the most rudimentary technology, nevertheless exhibit elaborate religious ceremonials, an extremely complicated kinship organization, and a complex and differentiated language? Why, further, were highly developed cultures, like those of the Maya, the Aztecs, the Peruvians, still using only the simplest handicraft equipment, though they were capable of construucting superbly planned works of of engineering and architecture, like the road to Machu Picchu and Machu Picchu itself? And how is it that the Maya, who had neither machines nor draught animals, were not only great artists but masters of abstruse mathematical calculations?
There is good reason to believe that man's technical progress was delayed until, with the advent of Homo sapiens, he developed a more elaborate system of expression and communication, and therewith a still more cooperative group life, embracing a larger number of members, than his primitive ancestors. But, the only sure evidences of man's presence are the least animated parts of his existence, his bones, and his stones---scattered, few in number and difficult to date.
Material artifacts may stubbornly defy time, but what they tell about man's history is a good deal less than the truth. If the only clue to Shakespeare's achievement as a dramatist were his candle, an Elizabethan mug, his lower jaw, and a few rotted planks from the Globe Theatre, one could not even dimly imagine the subject matter of his plays, still less guess in one's wildest moments what a poet he was.
When we come to the dawn of history, many other parts of human culture were extremely well-developed while his tools were still crude. At the time the Egyptians and the Mesopotamians had invented the symbolic art of writing, they were still using digging-sticks and stone axes. But before this, their languages had become complex, grammatically organized delicate instruments, capable of articulating and transcribing a constantly enlarging area of human experience. This early superiority of language indicates that it is a more persistent and rewarding development.
Though it was by his symbols, not by his tools, that man's departure from a purely animal state was assured, his most potent form of symbolism, language, left no visible remains until it was fully developed. But when one finds red ochre on the bones of a buried skeleton in a Mousterian cave, both the color and the burial indicate a mind liberated from brute necessity, already advancing toward symbolic representation, conscious of life and death, able to recall the past and address the future, even to conceptualize the redness of blood as a symbol of life: in short, capable of tears and hopes. The burial of a body tells us more about man's nature than would the tool that dug the grave.
Man was from the beginning pre-eminently a brainy animal. With the massive growth of the frontal lobe, a complete system was organized, capable of handling a larger portion of the environment than any other animal, enregistering sensitive impressions, inhibiting inappropriate responses, correcting unsuccessful reactions, making swift judgements and coherent responses, and not least storing the results in a capacious file of memories.
Given this organic equipment, man 'minded' more of his environment than any other animal, and so has become the dominant species on the planet. What is even more important, perhaps, is that man began minding himself. The omnivorousness which gave him an advantage over more specialized feeders through many fluctuations in climate and food supply, likewise had its counterpart in his mental life, in his ceaseless searching, his indefatigable curiosity, his venturesome experimentalism. This was restricted at first no doubt to foods, but soon it turned to other resources, since the flint and obsidian that proved the best materials for tools and weapons are not to be found everywhere, and their finding and testing took time. With his highly organized nervous equipment, this brainy creature had, as no other animal shows any sign of, a potential capacity to relate the parts of his experience into organized wholes: visible or remembered, imaged or anticipated. That trait later became dominant in higher human types.
The development of the central nervous system liberated man in large degree from the automatism of his instictual patterns and his reflexes, and from confinement to the immediate environment in time and space. Instead of merely reacting to outer challenges or internal hormonal promptings, he had forethoughts and afterthoughts: more than that, he became a master of self-stimulation and self-direction, for his emergence from animalhood was marked by his ability to make proposals and plans other than those programmed in the genes for his species.
Purely for convenience, I have described man's special advantages solely in terms of his big brain and complex neural organization, as if these were the ultimate realities. But this is only a portion of the story, because the most radical step in man's evolution was not just the growth of the brain itself, a private organ with a limited span of life, but the emergence of mind, which superimposed upon purely electro-chemical changes a durable mode of symbolic organization. This created a sharable public world of organized sense impressions and supersensible meanings: and eventually a coherent domain of significance. These emergents from the brain's activities cannot be described in terms of mass and motion, electro-chemical changes, or DNA and RNA messages, for they exist on another plane. Nothing that happens in the brain can be described except by means of symbols supplied by the mind, which is a cultural emergent, not by the brain, which is a biological organ.
The mind could not come into existence without the active assistance of the brain, but it possesses a special advantage over the brain: for once it has created meaningful symbols and has stored significant memories, it can transfer its characteristic activities to materials like stone and paper that outlast the original brain's brief life-span. When the brain dies, the mind reproduces itself by transmitting its symbols to other intermediaries, human and mechanical, than the particular brain that first assembled them. Thus in the very act of making life more meaningful, minds have learned to prolong their own existence, and influence other human beings remote in time and space, animating and vitalizing ever larger portions of experience. All living organisms die: through the mind alone man in some degree survives and continues to function.
As a physical organ, the brain is seemingly no bigger and little better today than it was when the first cave art appeared some thirty or forty thousand years ago. But the human mind has enormously increased in size, extension, scope, and effectiveness; for it now has command of a vast and growing accumulation of symbolized experience, diffused through large populations. This experience was transmitted originally by impressive example and imitation and word-of-mouth from generation to generation. But during the last five thousand years, the mind has left its mark on buildings, monuments, books, paintings, towns, cultivated landscapes, and, of late likewise upon photographs, phonograph records, and motion pictures. By these means, the human mind has in an increasing degree overcome the biological limitations of the brain: its frailty, its isolation, its privacy, its brief life-span.
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