ANXIETY, A DISEASE OF CIVILIZATION
By GODWIN BAYNES
FROM a point of view on the surface the variety and: r profusion of the maladies to which the civilized mind is liable seem unlimited. .A mere inventory of so-cane& nervous diseases would occupy the whole of my allotted space. But even if I were to attempt a description of one or other aspect of the neurotic mechanism, we should not be appreciably nearer the heart of the problem. For the most perfect clinical description of a disease can only demonstrate how a man is sick : says nothing about why he is sick.
Psychological medicine has elaborated a number of explanatory systems, all of which, in their several ways,' attempt to answer this question. But however hotly we may differ in our conceptidn of the cause of nervous' diseases, all medical psychologiSts are agreed that the prevailing emotional state underlying every kind of' neurotic manifestation is that of anxiety. Civilized life provides innumerable devices and diversions where-.' with this most insidious enemy may be camouflaged, but: if we scrutinize the faces of our fellow-men we are forced to admit that the civilized mind is literally hauntect by anxiety. We may say to -ourselves that the stress of keeping pace with the enormously expanded machinery. of industrial organization is responsible for it ; or we may peer, with Freud, down the age-long avenue of the` past and agree with his conclusion that we share unwit2 tingly in the first ineradicable deed of parricide. But whichever of these views we adopt, we are equally: doomed, since we can neither modify the first nor expiate the second.
" Anxiety is a mood that knows not what it fears. If' we know what it is we fear we can reason- with it, an& even learn from it, Our first - taSk, therefore, must be to give a name to the nameless dread.
. There are many races who are still living in the primordial food-gathering state of pre-civilized mankind.' These indigenous peopleS, such as the Eskimo, certain. tribes of Californian Indians, .the Bushmen, of Africa,; the Punan of Borneo, the Andamanese, &c., live on the outskirts of the. world, in small communities, with :scarcely a vestige of the 'hierarchy of social' power that characterizes the collectivized nations ancFespecially those that created civilization. They have- obstinately rejected every civilizing means of safeguarding, or improving upon, their precarious mode of life. ' Observers who have lived among them all agree7that they'are rich in positive human virtue. Women have equal rights With men ; children and- the aged are respected. They are not cruel, avaricious, or quarrelsome. They cannot be enslaved, and among these peoples anxiety is unknown. The element of fear is naturally present :in. theiOives ; but it is focussed and purposive, producing alertness to danger and immediate, effective response:* In contrast with this picture we have sure evidence, in the Sumerian epic of Gilgamish, that already in the dawn of civilization the new god was bearing so heavily upon the human spirit that the forward moving stream was checked and a contrary, renegade tendency broke free. This tendency is perSonified in the myth as the primordial human being, Enkidu, who drinks and pastures with the wild animals. He is created out of clay by Aruru the . earth-goddess, in response to the prayers of the oppressed people of Erech, and he is so cunning that no man can come near him. Gilgamish,t however, is able to ensnare him by sending one of the sacred girls of Ishtar's temple to the drinking place, where he is seduced :from his state of primordial inno- cence. When Enkichi sees that the animals who before accepted him, now flee at • his approach, he has no alternative but to follow the girl back to Erech. Here he fights for mastery with Gilgamish, who bears him to the ground " like a woman." After this, a pact is sealed between them, and the civilizing passion of Gilgamish enlists the support of Enkidu in fresh con- quests over nature. Yet throughout the epic - there prevails the dread of outraged-Nature, the primordial goddess, who is symboliZed as a monster -ofUnbelievable power and frenzy, whom no one but a divinely assisted hero could overcome. When-Enkidu dies, punish- ment for his sin Of hybris against' the goddess Ishtar, Gilgamish is left a solitary, haunted being.: Bereft %of his heroic mettle, he has nOthing with which to stave off the ultimate fate of mortals, and his Soul is robbed of all pleasure in life. .
Thus, on the one hand, we find indigenous primordial man, facing a life of constant peril and exposure with a sense of guaranteed security. On the other hand, we see the civilizing mind, divided between slavish anxiety and high-handed conquest ; and the more the conqueror fortifies his position, • by every conceivable device, the more is he a prey to anxiety., There are numbers of neurotic individuals whose constant aim is to create an absolutely insulated_ existence into which .the hazards and changes of life shall never enter, until finally they are imprisoned in a ring of dread. The more they labour to exclude, the more they are possessed.
We can hardly escape the conclusion that civilized man has a had conscience. It is written in plain charac- ters upon the_ features of the power-loving tribal deities who have always been avid for the blood of human victims. In eqectivized societies there must always be scapegoats, updfi whom the gnat of the renegade is set. But though the victims may placate, they never appeaSe * A fuller portrait of the indigenous, natural man is to be found in Elliot Smith's valuable work, Human History.
t One of the first kings of Erech : he is described in the myth as being two-thirds divine and one-third human. the jealous deity, as the Western nations learned afresh in 1914.
The renegade tendency, then, is that dreaded shadow of the civilizing genius which ever and anon breaks away, threatening to forsake or undermine the whole complex experiment. Modern literature and dratha abounds in this theme ; and was not D:41. Lawrence himself a pas- sionate renegade who, like Enkidu, fled back again to the arms of the primordial goddess ?
This retrograde undertow Which inailifests itself, not only in the political archaism of Fascism, .Communism and Hitlerisin, but alsolh the priiiiitive.-psychology of Christian Science and the-OXford Group movement, not to mention the nostalgia for the -primitive in modern painting, sculpture and -inusie, is :surely the cultural recoil that was bound to Conte—when -the millennial momentum, that has carried the ark of Christendom for the last two thousand years, was spent. Naturally, - when we stand spell-boiihd before the scientific and in- dustrial achievements of modern man, we do not observe signs of fatigue or despair ; but, if ice turn to the debit side, the army of neurotics, The unadapted, the ex- patriated, the warped and twisted lives, the hosts of the unemployed, we must realize_ .that the problem of the 'renegade tendency haunts civilization today just as it did in the time of Gilgamish. .
Whether or not mankind will find a way'to make peace with outraged nature in the unconscious, collective way, it is impossible to foretell. But no One who has ever looked below the surface of civilized life can deny that we have become estranged from our original birthright. We cannot go back on our tracks as Lawrence intended, since our cultural inheritance and goal are as vital to us as is the earlier and deeper loyalty to Nature. We are conditioned by these two loyalties, and it serves us little to conceive 'enirgelVes as the favoured-children of the later god, if we therewith ignore the fact that, compared with the natural piety of our food-gathering ancestors, Me are the arch-criminals in the older kinship of nature. Or, expressed differently,rwhat kind satisfaction does a Man get from outstanding suCcess in business or public life, if his love-nature is dwarfed and the soul within him petrified ?
The major problem of the civilized mind today is not essentially different from that of earlier epochs. It is greater in extent because the momentum of civilization has brought us farther from our original base, and the impetus of the two-thousand-year plan-is spent. The renegade tendency which expresses this recoil can develop in two ways. It can either become a childish negation of the value of civilization, or ,a conscious and ileliberate quest fOr the original state of unity within the totality of nature. Anxiety being the Of this psychic disunion, the only possible healing of the civilized malady is to submit to the two loyalties. Those -individuals in whom nature and culture are grandly wedded are the free citizens of the earth, and the hope of civilization would seem to rest upon the possibility that the efficacy of this combination in the .eoliscious few will galvanize the inertia of the unconscious many.
The prevalence of anxiety in all its protean manifesta- tions merely affirms the existence of the problem of the inherited unconscious, because contemporary civilization Offers the individual, no fundamental s_guarantee The icollective attitude to this problem is .to ignore its exist- ence ; but the individual who realizes that wholeness of being can only rest' upon an invulnerable foundation is bound, in some way or another, -to-come .to terms- with the unconscious. These, whether they know it or not, may be the pioneers of a new epoch.
Previous page
