One could see it long ago in Deg, who after taking the worst and the best of the army for four years, came back finally and managed a Chicago election where, introducing his distinguished professor Charles E. Merriam to a mass meeting (luckily the Fifth ward had the greatest concentration of intellectuals in the world) he said enthusiastically that he had studied with Merriam 'like Aristotle at the feet of Plato' and then was ribbed by friends and poignantly embarrassed, so that as you see, even now he can remember to tell me about it.
Therefore it is no surprise that thirty five years later he can be treating Charles Darwin and everyone else familiarly, even arrogantly, "What is your opinion of Darwin?" was, of course, the question. The tape spun; Deg picked up his notes and spoke at the machine:
Charles Darwin was an apt hero for nineteenth century biology and the public and scientific mentalities of the nineteenth century. He came from an expanding empire, did his "field work" young; he lived for many years quietly, gestating his ideas; he published at the right moment for coalescing the views of the scientific and cultural world; his theory of natural selection was simple, vague, and in line with what the secular person thought was his own idea.
Now that his ideas are wearing out, the psychiatrists, methodologists, and philosophers have picked him to pieces. He was an uncertain person, never a fully convinced Darwinist. In the contemporary vein, R. C. Lewontin writes that "Darwin's work is filled with ambiguities, contradictions, and theoretical revisions." Velikovsky once pointed out that if Darwin had followed some of his own observations while on the voyage of the Beagle he would have become a catastrophist. He almost became a Lamarckian at one point, so fetching is it when one's own theory is indefinite, to imagine that the soma can be changed permanently by a forceful environment.
"Darwin was ambitious, courted success and successful men, and cared for their approval:" again these are Lewontin's words. So too was Velikovsky. In 1858, just before Darwin published the Origin of Species by Natural Selection, he wrote that he did not yet feel set on the truth of any point of his theory, and was in this state of mind when Alfred Wallace wrote from far away to tell him about his own theory of natural selection.
When he consulted his friends, their solution was to hustle him into publishing his manuscripts along with the essay of Wallace. What else could they do? Otherwise, Wallace would have priority. As Darwin said, "All my originality, whatever it may amount to, will be smashed ... It seems hard on me that I should be thus compelled to lose my priority of many years standing."
But let us be clear...
Ignoring the machine, Deg produced a statement out of his drawer of epigrams; "I used to hate epigrams," he said, but now I collect a few, "especially my own." He read: "Priority in science is a political claim. It is of no interest to scientific advancement that A or B captured a strong point first, so long as it was taken. A proposition is denuded of its generator. It ends life as it began, in anonymity." He spoke feelingly, because a continual annoyance of a generation of the Velikovsky affair was the bickering about claims and predictions.
The lead was unfortunately provided by Princeton physicist Valentine Bargmann and Columbia astronomer Lloyd Motz when they assigned V. a priority on the heat of Venus and the radio noises of Jupiter (upon his instigation) and recommended reading his work for further clues as to what to expect. Such words from an astronomer and a physicist were naughty; they excited V. and his followers and angered other scientists, all the more because they were involved themselves in this racket.
The ideas of 'priority', 'prediction, ' and 'claim' are more political than scientific. The word 'claim' connotes possessiveness -- not a happy human quality. V. liked the term; the press liked it; ambitious scientists like it. and long years of struggle have gone on is such fields as physics and psychology to try to assure people's claims to discovery, as if all of knowledge is of little bits, ever-diminishing bits as well, that are owned by an individual forever.
Darwin need not have worried; his location, his friends, and the ample, ambiguous, diffident qualities of his writing, pitched at the consensus of all-who-mattered, the 'happy few' of the day, would assure his work 'priority. '
Velikovsky's work found no such consensus. Perhaps it deserved no such consensus. Perhaps it earned at that point precisely what it deserved, and what Darwin's work deserved -- an audience, a hearing, a turning of minds, a refurbishing of hypotheses, some of the patient, indulgent, reflective, detailed processing that is supposed to characterize science but does not markedly do so.
Deg's un-darwinian Homo Schizo was present for many years and began with the conviction that man was essentially non-rational. When Deg first joined the faculty of Stanford University in 1952, he was working on the phrasing of Lasswell's law: political man displaces private motives onto public objects and rationalizes them in terms of the public advantage. This conception had burst upon political science in the 1930's, joined with pragmatism and neo- machiavellism, and overran the 2300-year-old positions of rational-legal- institutional political science.
Deg radicalized the concept. He could not see anything extraordinary about Lasswell's political man except in the intensity of his involvement with power. Too, he was critical of the notion of rationalization, for since boyhood he had found everybody doing nothing but rationalization. Therefore he suspected that reason and rationalism and rationality were really processes of rationalization. When he came in the seventies to ponder the nature of man, he could now perceive a brain structure and personality altogether of the schizoid type. His newer concept was of instinct-delay, blocking, and displacement of the response to a stimulus, forcing terrible self-reflection, and in the control of response to stimulus, forcing terrible self-reflection, and in the control of these reflections -- the polyego -- there occurred the human character. The essential polyego assured an eternal existential fear, whose high level, being constant, goes generally unnoticed.
Homo sapiens, whom he finally termed homo sapiens schizotypus, is most rational when he is acting (thinking being a form of acting) pragmatically, that is, calculating and adjusting to the consequences of his behavior while transacting with an environment, both human and natural. Logic, and hence science, and hence most of what is ordinarily called reason, develops as a means of most efficiently connecting an entering stimulus with an effective response. In this sense, man seemingly farthest removed from the animal kingdom, finds his triumph in emulating instinctive response. He aims at reducing his high level of existential few by logical, "rational", and scientific conduct.
But as the underlaid instinctual apparatus of the animal does not guarantee it against the multiform assaults of nature, whether represented intraspecies or in the transaction with other species and inorganic nature and whether uniformitarian or disastrous, so too man's efforts at reconstructing and reinforcing his less genetic, delayed instinctual apparatus, are continuously ineffective. All the achievements of the calculating and even scientific Homo Schizo cannot win control over the self, others, and the natural world. As in the beginning and even in the most rationalistic technical ages, Homo Schizo continues to rely upon the organization of his far-flung displacements for adjustment and control of himself and the world, so that religion, culture, and the arts are, if not preponderantly his road to "happiness," most useful and welcome companions of pragmatic scientific conduct. Alone or together, the sciences and the arts cannot create a creature other than Homo Schizo. Even if they could, the monsters would be limited to some portion of their own envisioned ideal that they could agree upon, and they would promptly regret having made such a substitute for the unrealized larger portion of their ideal.
I should not try to explain the full theory here, not when two volumes about it are available elsewhere. However, it is appropriate to comment that Deg began his development of the model of Homo Schizo to test the Freud-V. theory that historical traumas produced a character who simply had memory problems but was otherwise "rational" by nature. As I said, Deg was already prejudiced against this idea, and it was no accident that he almost immediately placed the idea of the intelligent evolving savage into a restricted enclosure. He searched instead for the larger meaning of catastrophe, now quantavolution, that formed a different creature to begin with. Primordial man was now catastrophized in two senses, first genetically and second in the sense of reinforcement through repeated catastrophic experiences.
The latter, the reinforcement process, gave Deg no trouble; there was ample evidence of a "law" operating whereby the intensity and duration of an experience (read "catastrophe") determined and varied directly with the amnesia and compulsive sublimated recapitulations of the experience. Further, therapy of such a condition (control over it, that is) was exceedingly difficult, whether of the individual or of the collectivity.
More difficult was the establishment of the genetic basis of human nature. Here Deg found his way, first by undermining the case for gradualist darwinian and anthropological evolution, and second by discovering uniquely human variances in current research on the structure and operation of the central nervous system. He came to attribute humanness to a brief glitch in the stimulus-response system, which I mentioned above. How he visualized it becomes crudely clear in a note from his files, entitled "Making a Chimp Talk: a Suggested Research Project on a key element of Homo Schizo."
MAKING A CHIMP TALK
Premises
1. Homo Schizo theory says that mankind became human and is human today in connection with a millisecond delay interfering with instinctive response.
2. The delay a) diffuses (displaces) percepts, concepts, and memories widely because of lack of immediate response, b) forces the being to sense itself, that is, at least two selves, c) activates existential fear mechanisms because of lack of control of a) and terror from lack of control of b).
3. To tie itself (itselves) together, the being communicates with itself and the result of this communication is inner language, the basis for external language.
4. External or social language occurs as the being continues its inner operations by external means, employing whatever it can, such as gestures, utterances, and other signs and signals.
5. All of 1. to 4. above occurs with little relation to the size of the brain, with some relation to hemispheric symmetry, and with relation to other possible delaying mechanisms. A person can be raised to behave normally in speech and behavior with 1/ 10 of the brain matter normally encased in the cranium provided that all elements of the brain are represented by proportional fractions.
6. A chimpanzee brain is within the human functional limits so far as size is concerned. Its vocal apparatus and other symbolizing mechanism are adequate. It is highly sociable animal, so "presumably would like to communicate." Chimpanzees and other non-humans can learn many isolated symbols... "but they show no unequivocal evidence of mastering the conversational, semantic, or syntactic organization of language." (H. S. Terrace et al. 206 Science 23 Nov. 1979,891).
Thesis: Chimpanzees do not speak because they do not undergo an internal electro-mechanical compulsion to speak.
Corollary: Chimpanzees would speak if their instinctive brain operations were continuously and unconsciously blocked for milliseconds. [thus supplying the compulsion] Experiment Baby chimpanzee Abel is subjected to partial commissurectomy; insulin injections to arrive at constant 10% higher blood level; and background human videotape television plus human handling as of normal babies of up to 26 months of age.
Hypothesis : Abel will at the age of 26 months emit 50% (rather than 20%) of the expansive adjacent utterances of human infants of the same age (and proportionately more than chimpanzee 'Nein' of that age -- in the Terrace et al. experiment).
Corollary hypothesis: Availability of the conditioned animal will permit application of a full range of tests of humanism, including intelligence, self-awareness, self-images, artistry, aggressiveness, persistency (obsession) in task performances, memory and recall, with special attention to the generation of the several components of schizotypicality, including various tests of insanity.
Here I think that Deg is downright ignorant regarding the possibilities of Dr. Frankenstein's experimentation with apes. The ape is a massive system of unique organic connections and resultant behaviors: unless you get into the gene system and perform a systemic mutation there, you will get nowhere by monkeying (excuse the expression) with the post-natal resultant. He proposes to cause artificially a totally ramifying system of displacements, fear, and ego split when all the settings of the ape's organism are deadset against alteration. The animal will simply die. That is a much more logical and simple response than to undertake the enormous burden of behaving like a human.
Deg's archive carries many another note of different kinds -- sketches, designs, critiques. They begin as a broadly spread-out and miscellaneous aggregate, and then come together as the book is written, but many of them are locked out in the end. Here are three of the excluded ones, let to view:
Deg's Journal, December 20, 1968
What did our homo schizo Deg do socially with his polyego while inventing it? Personal affairs were not easy with him over much of the seventies. The daughters peeled off the family stalk into Bryn Mawr, Smith, and the University of Chicago. The four boys broke off prematurely. They split in every direction. Only Carl went through a university, held on at the Peabody School of Johns Hopkins University by a devotion to music and a character too irritable to knock about abroad. He did spend a while on Naxos, composing extemporaneously at all hours on a piano in the middle of the OldMarket section. The others went here and there in the world: wherever the newspapers were speaking of "endless Summer," of places where the action was, of Denver, Bangkok, Florence, Amsterdam, Australia, Cuba, Morocco, Istanbul and San Francisco, word would also come from them.
Jill decided upon a separation or, perhaps more accurately, redefined her relationship with Deg around 1970 and Deg came thereafter as a visitor to Linden Lane in Princeton and then to his mother, on which occasions he would also see Velikovsky and Sebastian and maybe Tom and Rosalyn Frelinghuysen. The split was not abrupt or devastating; it was a drifting away that he felt less distressing because he was immersed in tides of preoccupation. It was like a pattern that stretched until unrecognizable, and then tore, or like the string tricks people do with their fingers, when with a single movement of the fingers the strings slip into a new form.
Following upon his relatively flushed income of the sixties, when what he wanted to do coincided with what agencies with money wanted him todo -- investment brokers, publishers, Bill Baroody's American Enterprise Institute, the war establishment -- his finances fell into poor shape during the seventies. Despite ordinary and extraordinary family expense, and his contributions to his mother's welfare, he took leave from his University and spent all of his savings and gave his library to the Alpine college. He gave up trying to publish his works on world government in America and published them in Bombay, where his friend, Dr. Rashmi Mayur, was building an Institute. Deg was insisting that a Kalotic World Order movement should come out of Bombay or Istanbul, not the United States.
He stayed at Washington Square when in New York, became intimate friends with Nina Mavridis who lived in his building, he taught his courses, wrote steadily, and put together the college in Switzerland with the help of several students. Nina was generous, but could hold her professorship at La Guardia College for only a year. They married after a time but separated after several years of being together, and she moved to Berlin. He moved from Washington Square Village to 110 Bleecker Street, where he spent little time. He stayed with Dick Cornuelle, he moved into Ken Olson's loft in Little Italy, and he visited happily with Donna Welensky for a while.
In Europe he lived in Switzerland and in Naxos. He was close to many people during the seventies. Although a gypsy he gave the impression of being fixed somewhere and of soberly pursuing a reasonable plan -- people knew not exactly where -- except that the where was not where they were. One month he would be in Vietnam, then he would be staying for a week at a little hotel in Sion where the barmaid and he became fast friends and at odd hours he would tell her of many things and she would tell him of her Algerian mother and what the people of Valais were like and how they regarded her. Then he would be in Naxos, buildings without the means to build, fixing with crude tools, and writing. Friendship would be struck up with those who came by his isolated place and people would come from town and he would go to town. Sandy came from Australia and might even have swum from there, a blond eel, and he heard of culture and society "Down Under," and they traveled together to America; he laughed to watch her tapdance. Sigrid Schwartz came from the Black Forest with her little boy who carved the surface of his marble table with a neolithic flint while Sigrid told of her mother who asked to be carried to the grave with a jazz band playing "The Saints Come Marching Home," and so it was done. He spent a good deal of time underwater in a diving mask and knew the bottom like his own land, and could pluck a bit of pottery out of its rock fastenings any time and give it to a pleased Hamburgian, Londoner, or Trondheimer.
Wherever he went in the world, he never truly wandered, but was always bent upon something to do with study, business, politics, education, and everything else seemed to be related. He was sometimes impatient, pressed by perceived obligations, but never at odds with himself. And wherever he went, half of his baggage consisted of folders, full of reprints, chapters in progress, manuscripts, proofs, correspondence and notes, never less than thirty pounds of these, including the folders that dealt with the job he was on. Hence he was never bored, nor even idle when he wanted to be idle, for he could hardly wait for the day to dawn in New York, London, Tokyo, Saigon, Bangkok, Bombay, Cochin, or Paris so that he could write and read in order to write.
Many were the occasions, though, when the needed piece of paper had been left behind or a needed book was on a faraway shelf. Nor could he half control the crazy-quilt appearance of his work in progress, paper of different sizes and quality made in different countries; handwriting altered by different writing surfaces, some on vehicles in motion; writing in pencils and pens of blue, black, red and green.
His psychological counterpart, Jean-Yves Beigbeder, would turn up or he would find Jean in Paris or at Nevis in the West Indies, and they would celebrate life and make great plans, until one day Jean slipped into the sea from a stalled motorboat off St. Kitts to swim ashore for help and was lost into the night and forever. So he had many friends, good friends, he thought, most of them going unnamed, like Carl Stover, Rashmi Mayur, Kevin Cleary and his gang who hated their enemies more than they loved him and wounded the college, Jay Hall, Barbara Schmidt, Christine Ressa, Peter and Annette Tobia, Charles Billings, Carl Martinson, Phil Jacob, Ken Olson, Levi Fournier, Dick Cornuelle, Jay Hall, Savvas Camvissis, Stephanie Neuman. Even to mention them is not fair to his wishes, for he will complain bitterly that each person means everything to him when they are together so that he cannot stand seeing them on a list, where they may seem like numbers of the days on the calendar of a long-gone year, deprived of all the riches that they presented to each day.
Life carved its channel more narrowly after Anne Marie Hueber came upon the Naxos scene. They lived in comfortable poverty, traveling irregularly and eccentrically, along the path of Washington, New York, London Paris, Alsace, Florence, Athens, and Naxos. Great energy now went into the Quantavolution Series, while she wrote her novels and lent him a hand.
All this I wanted to say, though briefly; creativity is always in context -- whether Marco polo in his vast Asia or Immanuel Kant in his little garden -- and I fear not so much being irrelevant as that I will convey neither the context nor the created substance, whether in themselves or as they meshed together. Whatever he was up to and wherever he was, by the late sixties, Deg, like many another but in his personal style, was radicalized. He not longer believed in small solutions -- whether laissez-faire in economics, gradualism in politics, or incrementalism in biological and cultural development. Pursuant to many early signs, holospheric quantavolution took possession of him.