Chapter 7 Attack and Humanity II

The column "Common Sense and General Knowledge" has lasted for a year.Last year's opening topic was "Love and Chemistry". I remember that some people expressed their disapproval to me in private, and some people said that it was so. This more or less shows the importance of common sense.I remember reading a book during the Cultural Revolution. The last few pages were frayed, and there were traces of various food items on the cover. The title of the book was "Tom Paine".This Paine wrote a book called, he said in the book, the concepts of freedom, equality, fraternity, human rights and independence are common sense, and he wants to spread this common sense.Paine later came to the United States and published it.According to legend, during the American War of Independence, many people had this copy in their luggage.

To put it simply, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was a farce in which common sense was lost.That's why I don't think there is anything tragic about the Cultural Revolution. Tragedy happened long ago. "Anti-Rightist" and "Great Leap Forward" have been the continuation period of losing common sense. They are "referring to a deer for a horse", a contemporary version of "why not eat minced meat", "why not make more steel, why not produce more grain". In the face of power, speaking common sense is dangerous to say "the emperor has no clothes", but some people in my father's generation did hide common sense.They came to the school to give a report, saying that they were exploited and oppressed by the landlords before, so they participated in the revolution.If you understand being exploited, you must understand the common sense of how much grain can be produced by one mu of land, right? You must understand that the production of ten thousand catties per mu is too much beyond common sense?

In the elementary school I was in, there was a black lump during the big steel smelting, and the principal personally declared it to be "steel".At that time I had no common sense about steel, so of course I thought it was "steel".Later, there was a class called "Common Sense", which I was most interested in.I am always most interested in common sense. In the face of common sense, don't deceive children.In an era when common sense is lost, to save children is to teach them common sense.The middle school Red Guards of those days now seem to be children without common sense. The reasons they ransacked their homes and beat people to death have now become their common sense in economic life.If you go to raid their homes now, if they say "Why", you can know that common sense has returned a lot.

In the early 1980s, the big slogans on the streets of Beijing called on people to say "please", "sorry" and "thank you", which shows that there was still no common sense in the early 1980s.In a well-known restaurant near my home, there is a service agreement such as "this restaurant does not beat and scold customers" very determinedly, which also points out the degree of common sense. Once upon a time, a man went to a blacksmith's shop to learn how to forge iron.The master said, work hard, the master will tell you the secret of blacksmithing.The apprentice was obedient and worked very hard, hoping that one day the master would reveal the secret formula.But the master kept silent, and the apprentice became a little anxious until one day the master was about to die.

The apprentice said, "Master, didn't you say that you want to tell me the secret of blacksmithing? You see, this kind of day has come..." The master said, "Yes, come here," the apprentice leaned over, and the master said, "Don't touch the hot iron." Mr. Ba Jin said that he wants to build a museum of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. If common sense can be marked everywhere in it, I believe the effect will be very strong, because farce is the most vulnerable to the test of common sense. China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution stripped away ideology, theory, and slogans. It was the same kind of attack that couldn’t be clearer. Overlaying ideology, theory, and slogans was just to stimulate the same kind of attack even more. In other words, It is to release the shackles of the aggressive instinct.I introduced the first half of Konrad Lorenz's "Aggression and Human Nature" in the last issue. Lorenz demonstrated that "homoaggression" is an animal instinct. Other biological scientists have confirmed that the central nervous system does not react before responding. Instead of waiting for a stimulus—like a bell to flip a switch—the central nervous system produces the stimulus itself.This also deepens what Darwin called competition and the evolution caused by competition, which exists between close relatives.Before that, Darwin's "struggle existence" (the struggle for existence) was often misunderstood as a competition between different species.Scientists who study animal behavior have repeatedly observed female chimpanzee cannibalism in the African jungle and filmed it, but I am afraid that the broadcast will stimulate civilized humans, and they will keep silent for a long time.Played it recently and the response has been overwhelming.

Lorenz also argues that the most important function of cannibalism is to equitably distribute the living domain.The antitrust law of the United States is to restrict the large consortia from occupying too large a field, so that the weak at the beginning cannot develop.Microsoft Windows in the United States may break the law at present. Starting from Windows 95, it is obvious that Microsoft plans to cover all personal computer systems.When Microsoft becomes the hegemony, the user's disaster will come, and we can't find a better possibility, because the possible creators can't survive at all because they don't have a fair living space.

Lorenz didn't stop there, he continued. The word "continue" is used imprecisely, because many animal behaviors are observed at the same time, but some are explained first and some later. Lorenz found that, compared with the competition of the same kind, the group life of higher vertebrates evolved a class order, "In this order, each individual in the society knows which is stronger and which is weaker than himself, so that he can leave the strong and the weaker." Subdue the weak." Lorenz's answer to the significance of this class order for the same species is that it can firstly suppress the attack within the group, and secondly lead to weak protection. "Since there is always tension between individuals, social animals are 'status seekers'. The closer two animals are in class order, the higher the tension, and conversely, the farther apart the classes are, the higher the tension." Disappear. Higher-ranking burrowing birds, especially males, like to interfere in every quarrel between lower-ranking birds, so it is to be expected that the participation of higher-ranking birds will benefit the weaker loser."

This is undoubtedly the biological origin of class in human society, but we did not expect it to have the function of protecting the weak.Importantly, we are beginning to see that animals have evolved features that inhibit aggression by their own species.Lorenz went on to talk about the evolution of some forms of action in animal behavior into rituals. The difference between humans and animals is that "when humans no longer acquire habits by themselves, but pass them on through culture, a new and meaningful characteristic is Appeared. First, he no longer knew the cause of particular acts. Second, the venerable lawgiver, because of age, seemed to exist in myth, and they too were mythized, so that their laws seemed to be gods It shows that the offender is guilty." "'Mimic exaggeration' (mimic exaggeration) can lead to rituals. In fact, rituals are very similar to symbolic things, and rituals also have exaggerated effects. This is what Huxley was surprised when he observed the crested duck. . . . There is no doubt that human art is also primarily developed in ritual. The autonomy of 'art for art's sake' is only a second step in the cultural process."

Through Lorenz's discourse, we have approached another step towards the origin of art. But Lorenz's ambition is not here, he said, "the process of phylogenetic evolution of rituals has created a new autonomous instinct, which has independent power to interfere with instinctive impulses. Its original function is to induce mutual understanding among individuals within the race. Avoiding the Bad Consequences of Aggression. Not only humans, but even animals, often cause quarrels because of the false belief that others are harmful to us; in this respect rituals and ceremonies are of great importance to us.  … Rituals can form an independent The force of the attack, in the great council of instinct, successfully confronts the force of the attack. In order for the reader to understand how the ritual prevents the attacking impulse without weakening its force or hindering its protective function, I must first talk about Talk about the organization of instinct. This organization is like a big council, which is composed of many independent factors interacting; its democracy has been developed after a period of evolutionary tests. Even if it cannot achieve complete harmony among various relationships, At least it brings them to a stage of compromise that is tolerable and practical."

For example, laughing, "The prototype of human laughter may be a ritual of seeking forgiveness or welcome. Smiling and laughing, I think, are different degrees of the same behavior, that is, different psychological states respond to the same type of stimulus. "Chimpanzees and gorillas, our closest relatives, unfortunately don't have a human counterpart to laughing, but many macaques have summative gestures in their movements—showing their teeth, turning their heads constantly up and down, smacking their lips and turning their ears together. Swing back. It is worth noting that many Orientals smile in this way as a welcome. But the funniest thing is that when they laugh the hardest, they turn their heads slightly to one side so that their eyes are not straight. Instead of looking into the eyes of the person being welcomed, he glances over him...

"At any rate, this welcome smile, which we often interpret as a pardoning ceremony, is similar to the victory ceremony of the goose. The victory ceremony is produced in a modified threat ceremony... "When several young boys laugh at one another or boys who are not part of the same group, the behavior is quite aggressive. Most of the jokes are established when a tension is suddenly broken. Many animal welcome ceremonies also have Very similar situation. Dogs and geese or other animals give a strong welcome when an unpleasant conflict situation is suddenly resolved... "Rituals bind individuals together against a hostile world. Having the same purpose - such as having to resist outsiders - is what forms the 'knot'. Fish resist the same domain and offspring, scientists the same idea Resistance, and most dangerously fanatics resist for the same concept. In all these cases, attack is necessary in order to increase cohesion." Laughter is thus a ritual product of inhibiting aggression, which is associated with the aggressive instinct.Do you still remember the revolutionary model play "Taking Tiger Mountain by Outsmart"? "Don't be afraid of the mountain eagle screaming, but the mountain eagle laughing." The positive and negative roles in the play, Yang Zirong and Zuo Shandiao both use laughter to convey the attack signal .Chinese idioms warn us that "a knife is hidden in a smile", "a tiger with a smiling face", and even the poems, "When you meet, smile away all kindness and enmity", put laughter and attack together. Lorenz observed that the aggressive instinct of animals is suppressed by the ritual, but the ritual is not properly controlled, and the ritual has a reverse effect, which instead causes aggression among the closest acquaintances. "This excruciating anger can only be explained, in part, by the fact that the two parties know each other too well to be afraid of the other. Human beings, too, for the same reason, make for the most horrible conjugal quarrels. I believe that every true love In cases where there is a high degree of aggression dormant, usually suppressed by knots, once the knots are broken, horrible phenomena such as hate appear. There is no love without aggression, no hate without love .” The latter observation is very interesting: "The victor never pursues the defeated, and we have never heard of a second war between two male geese. Instead, they avoid each other excessively, and when large flocks of geese forage on the swamp, Friends who have quarreled are always on the other side of the periphery. If they do not find each other in time by accident, or get close to each other according to the experiment, I see them showing embarrassment! They dare not look at each other. Male geese look here and there. , or primly attracting their love-hate counterpart, then jumping away, as if a hand had been bounced off a hot iron. And both geese were constantly preening their feathers, shaking their beaks at imaginary objects, and they just couldn't simply go Well, no matter what the cost is to 'save face', there must be no sign of how to escape. We can't help but sympathize with them in this embarrassing situation. "We know animals that are completely non-aggressive...One would think that such animals must have eternal friendship and bonding, but these qualities have not yet been found in these animals, and their bonding is not seen at all. Friendship is only in found in animals that highly develop intraspecific aggression. In fact, the stronger the knot, the more aggressive it is. "Intraspecies aggression predates friendship and love by millions of years. In the long epoch of the earth, there have been truly fierce and aggressive animals. Almost all reptiles today are highly aggressive... individual structure Only in certain bony fishes, birds and mammals, that is to say, before the Tertiary period, there were no animals that appeared in groups. In this way, there is no such thing as 'love', and there is no such thing as intraspecific attack. can exist, but conversely, there is no love that is not offensive." "The friendship between gentlemen is as light as water", this is the most experienced saying.Hooking shoulders and backs, doing it back and forth is fist and kick, and there are plausible words. From the plausible words, we can hear that the original part of the mutual attack was known when the shoulders were hooked, "I don't want to say it." After a long observational narrative, Lorenz turns to man himself. "Some people think that the same kind of attack is an insult to human beings. People are willing to regard themselves as the center of the universe, and think that they do not belong to nature, but special higher creatures separated from nature. Many people think that this is absurd. Seeing reluctance and disregarding the wisest admonition a man has ever spoken, Chilon's 'know thyself' is often attributed to Socrates. What is the factor Make people not listen to this sentence? "There are three obstacles, and they're all triggered by strong emotions. "First, people think that they can be easily overcome with the help of human understanding; "Secondly, it is at least honorable, though with adverse consequences; "Third, from the perspective of cultural history, it is understandable and therefore forgivable, but it is the most difficult to get rid of. "All three are closely related to the most dangerous human trait, which, as the saying goes, has a period of brilliance before it falls, namely—pride. "The first obstacle is the most primitive. Humans inhibit themselves from understanding their own evolutionary roots, thus preventing self-knowledge. "The second obstacle is our reluctance to accept the fact that our actions are governed by the laws of natural causality. . . determined by the higher will. "The third obstacle, at least in Western culture - is the nature of idealist philosophy. Human beings divide everything into inner and outer things. The former is worthless according to idealism, and the latter is contained in human thought. Inside, value exists only by virtue of thought. This division caters to the lofty arrogance of human beings.... The terms 'idealism' and 'realism' originally symbolized philosophical attitudes, but have now been applied to moral ones. value judgement. "The reason why people are afraid of discussing the cause may be that they are afraid that after realizing the cause of the phenomenon of the universe, they will find that human free will is just a product of an illusion. In fact, my will is like my existence, which cannot be denied. A deeper understanding that my own behavior is controlled by a series of physiological reasons does not at least change the fact of 'I will do', but may change 'I will do'. "If people believe that human behavior, especially social behavior, is not only determined by reason and cultural traditions, but also obeys all laws of instinctive behavior. Regarding these laws, we have learned a lot from the study of animal instinctive behavior. Knowledge.... Human society is very much like a rat, a social and peaceful creature within its own group, but a completely devil-like face towards those of its kind that are not part of its own group....Rats are reaching overcrowding It will automatically stop reproducing under certain circumstances, but humans have no feasible way to prevent population expansion.” Lorenz also deals with the phenomenon of puberty, illustrating the dangerous period that everyone must pass through adolescence and the short period thereafter, and mentions in particular what he proposes to name "aggressive enthusiasm." "Aggressive passion is, in fact, a special form of spontaneous aggression. . . . Anyone with strong emotions can experience first-hand the subjective phenomena that accompany aggressive passion: the body trembles from top to bottom, both sides The outside of the arm is the same, proudly disregarding all restraints. In this special moment, be ready to give up everything but to meet the task that is considered sacred. No obstacle is to be feared, and unfortunately, it is forbidden to injure or kill a fellow man The instinctive restraint is also greatly lost. At this time, all rational thinking, criticism, and reasonable controversy are silenced. They not only appear weak, but also base and dishonorable. When people participate in murderous events, they also have The sense of integrity, and even the joy of feeling that sense of integrity, as the proverb says: 'When the flag flies, all is righteous to the trumpet'." Lorenz identified four situations that stimulate aggressive enthusiasm. One, individuals in social groups feel threatened by the outside world.They will paint the menace, and the groups they serve, from sports clubs to nations, to scientific truth, to the claims of justice and incorruptibility; Two, the appearance of an abominable enemy, and this enemy threatens the above-mentioned "values"; Third, the image of the leader. Any political gathering cannot do without a large leader image, even an anti-fascist party; Fourth, there are many participants, and all of them are inspired by the same emotion. Presumably we are all familiar with the above description? It was a hot summer in 1966. Lorenz believes that the necessary condition for controlling the instinctive behavior pattern is to have sufficient knowledge of the stimulating situation that releases it.There are still different opinions on the understanding of the situation of the Cultural Revolution. Some say that they were deceived, but it shows that there is no understanding; some say that it is an ideal, but this ideal will destroy the other ideal.I think the so-called "sufficiency" depends first on whether the situation restrains or releases our aggressive instinct, and reaches a level of loss of common sense.