11. But what was humans’ original instinctive orientation?

Of course humans aren’t birds with an instinctive orientation to a flight path, nevertheless we must have had our particular instinctive orientation to the world we were living in prior to becoming fully conscious which must, to a significant degree, still exist within us. All animals have an instinctive self and so do we. Carl Jung termed humans’ common, shared-by-all instincts ‘the collective unconscious’, as the following quote makes clear: ‘Jung regards the unconscious mind as not only the repository of forgotten or repressed memories, but also of racial memories. This is reasonable enough when we remember the definition of instinct as racial memory’ (International University Society’s Reading Course and Biographical Studies, Vol.6, c, 1940). The question then is what was our species’ original instinctive orientation?

While we humans have an undeniable capacity for brutality, hatred and aggression—which we can now understand is our upset state—it is also true that we have an enormous capacity for love, kindness and compassion. It is further clear that we have an inbuilt awareness that such kind, considerate and caring behaviour is good and to be aspired to—after all, how could we have a sense of guilt, shame and recrimination about unkind thoughts and actions unless some deeper intrinsic part of ourselves felt at odds with such behaviour? The fact that we have called our born-with, instinctive awareness of what we have termed ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ behaviour our ‘moral’ sense, and its ‘voice’, or expression from within us, our ‘conscience’, is indicative of this.

This moral sense, this inclination to be caring and considerate of others, amounts to a social conscience. It is a capacity, in situations where the need arises, to behave altruistically, to put the welfare of others, ultimately of our community, above concern for our own welfare—such as when we are prepared to volunteer to fight and, if necessary, die for our country in war.

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PDF Version While the Holy Grail of the Darwinian revolution has been to explain the dilemma of the human condition, the other, almost equally great mystery facing biologists has been to explain the origins of this moral sense in humans, for it is a truly extraordinary and special part of our makeup. The philosopher Immanuel Kant had these fitting words inscribed on his tomb, ‘there are two things which fill me with awe…the starry heavens above us, and the moral law within us’, while Charles Darwin was no less impressed when he said, ‘the moral sense affords the best and highest distinction between man and the lower animals’ (The Descent of Man, 1871). Darwin is acknowledging here that our moral sense is something distinctive to humans. Biologists have long recognised that there are many examples in nature of organisms behaving selflessly towards each other, such as bees and ants in their respective colonies; however they now recognise that these are situations of reciprocity where favours are given only in return for another, which means they are not truly unconditionally selfless, altruistic acts. In the case of sterile worker bees and ants, while they are unable to reproduce themselves, by selflessly helping their colony and its fertile queen who carries the genes responsible for their existence they are indirectly selfishly ensuring the reproduction of their own genes. Their selflessness is not unconditional because it is done to ensure their reproduction. Such reciprocal selflessness is not altruism but in fact a subtle form of selfishness. In the case of humans, when we sacrifice ourselves for others are we similarly merely concerned with selfishly fostering the reproduction of our genes, or is our moral sense truly altruistic in nature? Both Kant’s and Darwin’s comments infer that our moral sense is something extraordinary in the natural world, that is unique to humans and therefore not the subtle form of genetic selfishness that is common in other social species. The inference is that our moral nature is a truly altruistic, unconditionally selfless capacity to act out of genuine love and concern for the greater good of human society and indeed all the constituents of our planet, be they animate or inanimate.

What will now be biologically explained in the following section of this book is that our moral sense is unique to humans; that we do indeed have an instinctive orientation to behaving in an unconditionally selfless, genuinely altruistic, all-sensitive, utterly cooperative, harmonious, loving way towards each other and indeed our entire planet. It will be further explained that we acquired this ‘awe’-inspiring instinctive orientation during a time before we humans became fully conscious and our upset angry, egocentric, alienated state emerged.

Certainly there is recognition of this pre-conscious ‘Golden Age’ in all our mythologies. Hesiod, the 8th century BC Greek poet, wrote in his poem Theogony: ‘When gods alike and mortals rose to birth / A golden race the immortals formed on earth…Like gods they lived, with calm untroubled mind / Free from the toils and anguish of our kind / Nor e’er decrepit age misshaped their frame…Strangers to ill, their lives in feasts flowed by…Dying they sank in sleep, nor seemed to die / Theirs was each good; the life-sustaining soil / Yielded its copious fruits, unbribed by toil / They with abundant goods ‘midst quiet lands / All willing shared the gathering of their hands.’ In the Christian Bible a passage in Ecclesiastics says, ‘God made mankind upright [uncorrupted], but men have gone in search of many schemes [understandings]’ (7:29). Similarly, Christ talked of a time when God ‘loved [us] before the creation of the [upset] world’ (John 17:24), and a time of ‘the glory…before the [upset] world began’ (John 17:5). The story of Adam and Eve in Genesis tells us we were ‘created…in the image of God’ (1:27), presumably meaning we were once perfectly orientated to the cooperative, selfless, loving ideals of life, then Adam and Eve ate ‘from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil’ (2:9&17) because it was ‘desirable for gaining wisdom’ (3:6) and would ultimately lead us to becoming ‘like God, knowing good and evil [understanding the upset state of our human condition and through doing that ameliorating it and returning to the cooperative, Godly ideal state]’ (3:3), but in the process we had to suffer being ‘banished…Page 40 of
PDF Version from the Garden of Eden [idyllic state]’ (3:23) because of ‘sin [our upset state which had to one day be understood]’ (4:7). Zen Buddhism also recognises the loss of an uncontaminated, pure state due to the intervention of the conscious mind, referring to ‘the affective contamination (klesha)’ of ourselves by ‘the interference of the conscious mind predominated by intellection (vijnana)’ (Zen Buddhism & Psychoanalysis, D.J Suzuki, Erich Fromm, Richard Demartino, 1960, p.20). In the 1990 edition of Memories & Visions of Paradise, an extensive collection of references from mythologies of this ‘paradisal’ time in our past, author Richard Heinberg summarised that: ‘Every religion begins with the recognition that human consciousness has been separated from the divine Source, that a former sense of oneness…has been lost…everywhere in religion and myth there is an acknowledgment that we have departed from an original…innocence…the cause of the Fall is described variously as disobedience, as the eating of a forbidden fruit, and as spiritual amnesia [alienation]’ (pp.81—82 of 282). In his best selling book of 1987, The Songlines, the explorer and philosopher Bruce Chatwin wrote: ‘Every mythology remembers the innocence of the first state: Adam in the Garden, the peaceful Hyperboreans, the Uttarakurus or “the Men of Perfect Virtue” of the Taoists. Pessimists often interpret the story of the Golden Age as a tendency to turn our backs on the ills of the present, and sigh for the happiness of youth. But nothing in Hesiod’s text exceeds the bounds of probability. The real or half-real tribes which hover on the fringe of ancient geographies—Atavantes, Fenni, Parrossits or the dancing Spermatophagi—have their modern equivalents in the Bushman, the Shoshonean, the Eskimo and the Aboriginal’ (p.227 of 325). In his writings about the relatively innocent Bushmen people of the Kalahari desert, Laurens van der Post acknowledged that, ‘There was indeed a cruelly denied and neglected first child of life, a Bushman in each of us’ (The Heart of The Hunter, 1961, p.126 of 233), describing their relatively uncorrupted sensitivity thus: ‘He [the Bushman] and his needs were committed to the nature of Africa and the swing of its wide seasons as a fish to the sea. He and they all participated so deeply of one another’s being that the experience could almost be called mystical. For instance, he seemed to know what it actually felt like to be an elephant, a lion, an antelope, a steenbuck, a lizard, a striped mouse, mantis, baobab tree, yellow-crested cobra, or starry-eyed amaryllis, to mention only a few of the brilliant multitudes through which he so nimbly moved. Even as a child it seemed to me that his world was one without secrets between one form of being and another’ (The Lost World of the Kalahari, 1958, p.21 of 253). Elsewhere in his writings, van der Post describes how ‘before the dawning of individual consciousness’ humans lived in a state of ‘togetherness’; a state to which we have had such a hunger to return to from our immensely upset state that it has been ‘like an unappeasable homesickness at the base of the human heart’: ‘This shrill, brittle, self-important life of today is by comparison a graveyard where the living are dead and the dead are alive and talking [through our soul] in the still, small, clear voice of a love and trust in life that we have for the moment lost…[there was a time when] All on earth and in the universe were still members and family of the early race seeking comfort and warmth through the long, cold night before the dawning of individual consciousness in a togetherness which still gnaws like an unappeasable homesickness at the base of the human heart’ (Testament to the Bushmen, 1984, pp.127—128 of 176). Van der Post further recognised the battle between our original innocent instinctive self and our newer intellect when he wrote, ‘I spoke to you earlier on of this dark child of nature, this other primitive man within each one of us with whom we are at war in our spirit’ (The Dark Eye in Africa, 1955). In The Songlines, Chatwin also acknowledged our state of original innocence and the subsequent ‘contradiction’ that emerged between our instinct and intellect, writing: ‘[the 3rd century theologian Origen argued that] at the beginning of human history, men were under supernatural protection, so there was no division between their divine and human natures: or, to rephrase the passage, there was no contradiction between a man’s instinctual life and his reason’. Novelist and poet D.H. Lawrence recognised that, ‘In the dust, where we have buried / The silent races and their abominations [their Page 41 of
PDF Version confronting innocence] / We have buried so much of the delicate magic of life’ (Son of Woman: The Story of D.H. Lawrence, D.H. Lawrence, 1931, p.227 of 402). Philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau similarly noted that ‘nothing is more gentle than man in his primitive state’ (The Social Contract and Discourses, 1755; tr. G.D.H. Cole, pub. 1913, Book IV, The Origin of Inequality, p.198 of 269). William Wordsworth also wrote evocatively, in the aforementioned and extraordinarily honest and insightful poem Intimations of Immortality, that ‘trailing clouds of glory do we come’.

To answer this great biological question of how our ancestors could have developed an ‘awe’-inspiring instinctive orientation to living in an unconditionally selfless, truly altruistic, gentle, loving, harmonious moral state, that all these references suggest we once did live in and from which our moral sense today could have originated, it is necessary to first introduce the concept of integrative meaning.