HUMAN POTENTIAL IN THIS CENTURY

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29342, 22 October 1960, Page 10

HUMAN POTENTIAL IN THIS CENTURY

Nature v. Nurture [By ALDOUS HUXLEY} we consider human potentialities, we have to start by considering this very remarkable fact that, as far as the biologists can tell us, there has been almost no biological change in man since the time of the upper paleolithic, about 30,000 years ago. Indeed we are essentially the same in physical Endowment as our ancestors were, then. *

The gigantic differences which divide ourselves from those remote ancestors of ours are due entirely to the development of human potentialities over the years, a development, of course, which is mainly due to the fact that alone of all animal species man has invented language and so has enabled himself to pass on accumulated knowledge from one generation to another. The inheritance of acquired characteristics is not possible on the biological level, but it is possible on the psycho-social level, on the cultural level. We can pass on things which have been acquired in one generation to the generation which follows. Obviously immense advances have been made in realising our potentialities, and probably there is just as vast a field awatiing exploitation.

Hothouse; Prison Now, the relationship of individuals to their culture “Is an ambiguous one. A culture is both the hothouse which permits human potentialities to flower, but it is also the prison which confines them. We are at once the beneficiaries and the victims of our culture. We can’t go beyond its limits; at the same time we owe it an immense debt because it has permitted us and does permit us to develop potentialities which in a less developed culture would be completely unrealisable.

Consider, for example, what would have happened to children of say 170 I.Q. bom into a paleolithic society. These children were undoubtedly born into such societies. But what could they do? What could they become in such a culture?, Well, quite obviously they could become nothing more than hunters and food gatherers, whereas children born into a complex and rich culture such astour own can become an almost indefinite number of things. They can become paleontologists with a taste for music; they can become Presbyterian engineers; they can become artistic, logical positivists. There’s absolutely no limit to. the number of permutations and combinations that' the human individual can turn into a complex society like ours.

And I must start by saying that I personally believe very strongly in the value of a rich, complex, pluralistic society such as we have. I am not at all anxious to go back to the unified, traditional society which many people now seem to hanker for.

It seems to me that within—only within—a complex society such as 'ours can we hope to realise all the immense scores of human potentiality which still lie within us.

Potentialities For Evil / Unfortunately as we’ve seen m recent history, it is possible for a society to foster the realisation of aH kinds of extremely undesirable potentialiti'e? *? r ev il- I, of course, am only for greater intelligence, for greater enjoyment of life, more loving kindness. Now, it’s pretty obvious that it is only in a perfect society that the maximum number of desirable potentialities in individuals can be realised. This, of course, casts an important light on the ancient controversy of nature versus nurture. Which is the more important, our hereditary make-up or our environment? The answer, of course, is that both are equally important, that both the. behaviourists who insisted only on environment and the early eugenists who insisted only on heredity, are both of

them wrong. If you are a good eugenist, you must also be a good social reformer, because it is only in a desirable society that the desirable potentialities of individuals, the potentialities, with which they are born, can actually be realised. We must always bear in mind that these two aspects of man, the nature aspect and the nurture aspect, work together; they cannot be separated, and a good environment is essential if we are to realise our native potentialities. I shall make no attempt to draw a blueprint of the kind of ideal society which is necessary to realise all our best potentialities, but shall content myself with discussing what can be done within the kind of society we have at present, that is to say a complex, pluralistic society with a high scientific culture and the usual human weaknesses. Let me begin first of all with the importance of human differ-

ences. The biologists tell us that variability within a species tends to increase as we go up the evolutionary ladder and that the species with the highest degree of individual variability is the human species, where every individual is unique. Each Is Unique If all human beings were essentially alike, then it would be perfectly all! right for one person to dictate a pattern of behaviour to all because what suited him would suit everyone else; but it is precisely because human beings are unique, because they differ from one another profoundly, that democracy is a useful method of organising society, that tolerance is an extremely important virtue, and that liberty is one of the absolute values, personal liberty. And it is indeed a fact that these things are the corollaries -of this basic biological fact of our differences.

We already pay some attention to the intrinsic differences between individuals. We already make use of some degree of differential education; we give a special kind of education to children who are especially backward and also we are beginning to give special attention to specially gifted children, but I would say that this is still rather a rudimentary beginning. We tend, I think, even with our awareness of human differences, to wish to impose upon all human beings too standardised a pattern.

Different cultures, of cotirse, have different ideals to which they attempt to make their members conform, and this is especially true, of course,, of primitive

cultures, where you will get, as anthropologists have shown, one kind of ideal in the Indians of the Pueblos, another in the plains Indians and yet another in the Indians of the north-west, the Kwakiutis. Rigid Ideals In a primitive society these ideals were extremely rigid and people were made to conform to them and, of course, one of the horrors, I think of a/ totalitarian regime is that it is a kind of deliberate attempt to force a pluralistic, multiple society back into the unified, monolithic concept which governed the workings of a primitive society. It is an attempt to make people conform to one particular pattern. In fact there are many patterns to which people may conform and to which they have every right to conform if their temperaments and their physiques happen tb fit them to this kind of pattern. In effect we find within the great religious traditions recognition of this fact of the difference, the different kinds of patterns to which people should conform. Within the Christian tradition, for example, we have the two basic polar patterns, the pattern of Martha and the pattern of Mary, the pattern of the active and the pattern of the contemplative, which corresponds pretty closely to the extroverted and the introverted in Jungian terms. Oriental Religions A little more realistically in the Oriental tradition there is the

division of those who practise the Bhakti yoga, devotion; Kharma yoga, the path of action, and Jnana yoga, the path of intellect and contemplation. Even granting an infinite degree of uniqueness in every human being, I am quite sure that we can develop a whole system of training and special education, which will elicit the particular gifts of each person belonging to each of these three main types of human beings. Before I discuss this, let me briefly touch upon another rather curious field which is developing at the present time, the field of pharmacology. It was announced two or three years ago .that the Russians were in the middle of a five-year plan aimed at increasing human intelligence, increasing the attention span, increasing the endurance of people’s ability to work at any given subject, by pharmacological means, and my pharmacological friends assure me that this is probably not an impossibility. There has been, of course, a startling advance in pharmacology in recent years, resulting in the production of a number of mind-changing substances which can perform in an extraordinary way upon the mood and the capacities of human beings without unduly affecting the body. Mind-Changing Substances Such mind-changing substances, of course, are very old. Human beings have always resorted to them, but in the past,

all of them have been more or less poisonous to the body. Opium, for example, alcohol, co-caine—-all of these can certainly change the mind and produce temporary stimulation or temporary relaxation, but at enormous cost to the body. We have seen in recent years the production of more or less harmless tranquilisers and more recently we have seen the production of powerful psychic energisers which can considerably increase intelligence and attention span without imposing the painful strain on the body which the older energiser produced.

Here again, I think, we see a field which possibly within the next 25 years may lead to very considerable increases in human intelligence and human good behaviour.

For example, suppose some pharmacologist comes up with, a completely harmless euphoric; then we shall have a means by which human beings can do their work in what empirically is obviously the best condition, the best psychological conditions. ,

We do our best work probably in a moment of crisis; we can do extraordinary things in moments of crisis, but moments of crisis cannot be prolonged because after a time the mind body simply breaks down under the strain, but the next best condition under which people can do their work is undoubtedly a condition of joy, and in a harmless way we can produce a sense of cheerfulness and joy, we have, quite apart from any direct stimulation of the intelligence, done a great deal. Well, this is a point which is as yet of no great significance except in psychotherapy where these mind-changing drugs have already achieved very remarkable results, but I think without any doubt it is going to be an important field of development within the next generation.—Associated Newspapers Feature Services. (To be concluded.)

with exhibits and models tracing the airline’s 32 years of flying history, an electronic flightinformation board, and an observation walkway for visitors. The eight-lane roadways to the terminal can handle 1800 cars an hour.

To the motorist approaching the terminal by day the illusion of a parasol is enhanced by the riblike girders that spread, spokelike fashion, beneath the umbrella roof. There are two clusters of vertical members holding up the roof—an outer oval of 32 re-inforced-concrete piers and an inner hub of six tension columns. The uprights are anchored in thousands of tons of concrete and sand, and the entire structure is equipped to withstand winds above 150 miles an hour.

Banker Dies.— Mr Junius S. Morgan, director of J. P. Morgan and Company Incorporated, the United States banking firm, died last night in hospital in Simcoe. Ontario, of an acute attack of ulcers. He was aged 68. Mr Morgan was the son of the famous John Pierpoint Morgan, who built one of the greatest financial empires in American history.— Toronto. October 20.