Does It Matter? by Alan W. Watts

Author:Alan W. Watts
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781577315858
Publisher: New World Library

THE SPIRIT OF VIOLENCE

AND THE MATTER OF PEACE

The idea that man has an instinct for violence must be questioned. Instincts, whether for violence, survival, reproduction, or food, would seem to be causes or explanations of the same type as humors, demons, or “acts of God”—that is to say, mythical agents or starters for processes that we do not fully understand, like the mysterious “it” in “it is raining.” It is of great interest that many behavioral scientists now prefer to speak of drives rather than instincts, implying that when people feel angry, hungry, or lusty they feel like puppets, driven by forces beyond themselves. But this implies that “myself ” is something less than my whole body and all its processes—a notion which I find absurd, however much it may correspond to our normal, but socially conditioned, ways of thinking and feeling.

Almost all civilized peoples have been brought up to think of themselves as ghosts in machines, as Koestler put it: as souls or spirits in alien bodies, as skin–encapsulated egos, or as psychic chauffeurs in mechanical vehicles of flesh and bone. We have learned to identify ourselves exclusively with that part of the brain which functions as a sort of radar or scanning apparatus and which is the apparent center of conscious attention and voluntary action. Although this center feels responsible for deliberate thinking, walking, talking, and handling, it knows next to nothing of how it manages to accomplish these actions. Furthermore, it experiences all the so–called involuntary functions of the body as events which simply happen to it. Thus it feels driven and passive with respect to strong emotions, to the circulation of the blood, and to the secretion of adrenalin.

There are those who feel that this separation of ego from body is the distinctively human achievement. They feel that it enables us, within certain limits, to subject nature to reason and to control what “merely happens” by the disciplines of art and science; and that it enables us to stand aside from ourselves and be critical of our own behavior, in short, to be selfconscious. Above all, it is supposed to be that unique function which “raises us above the animals,” a boast which is beginning to sound increasingly hollow, since no mere animal seems to be preparing to destroy the planet as a by–product of war against its own species.

My home is at present a large boat in a quiet harbor where we are surrounded with birds—wild duck, grebes, pelicans, terns, and gulls galore. The latter are so ravenously hungry that they sometimes appear to me to be winged tubes with internal organs like a vacuum cleaner. Why do I feel that this world of birds is in some way more sane than the world of people? It must be hard work to be a bird, having to process enormous quantities of food through those short intestines. From the way gulls scramble and jostle each other for bits of bread, you would imagine that a single gull would be most happy to eat alone.

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