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On Growth (1974)

On Growth

(1974)–Willem Oltmans–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

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43. Kenneth B. Clark

Professor Kenneth B. Clark is president of the Metropolitan Applied Research Center in New York City and teaches psychology at the City College of the City University of New York
He was born in the Panama Canal Zone in 1914. He received a Ph.D. in psychology from Columbia University. He has taught at Queens College and joined the faculty at City College in 1942. He has been a visiting professor at Columbia University, at the University of California at Berkeley and at Harvard University.
In 1970-71 Professor Clark was president of the American Psychological Association. He has served as social science consultant to the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) and was awarded the Spingarn Medal by that organization.
In 1955 he published Prejudice and Your Child and in 1965 Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power.

Psychologist Rollo May, in his latest book Power and Innocence,1 discusses in one of the first pages your controversial speech2 before the American Psychological Association in Washington, D.C., in which you proposed that man might use a ‘peace pill’ on the Brezhnevs, Nixons and Maos.

 

The term ‘peace pill’ was a press invention, a misinterpretation of what I said. I can understand the need of the press to compress complex ideas into a form that the general public can grasp immediately, and this is the kind of risk that anyone who deals with complex ideas has to take. What I discussed was the need at this juncture of human history for the psychological sciences to move toward what I call a systematic psychotechnology, that is, to develop a kind of research which gears itself to controlling man's primitive, barbaric, destructive characteristics and enhancing his positive qualities. This is needed, I believe, because the beginning of the nuclear age has projected man into a period of history which not only is unprecedented but for which we are unprepared. The past development of man - his past ideas and concepts - does not give us adequate ability to cope with the present dangers of nuclear destruction.

 

The Nixons and the Brezhnevs, after all, were programmed in the thirties.

 

Yes. What the physical scientists did to us in 1945 was to make the past no longer really relevant to the demands of the future. My thinking is based on the assumption that the engineering feat of the physical sciences, which resulted in exploding man into the nuclear age, almost obliterated past assumptions about the nature of man and what can be expected of him in terms of social and moral development. It projected man into a period in which he could no longer take his chances on trial-

and-error techniques in working out his relationships with his fellow man.

What has now become imperative is for the psychological sciences to accelerate research about the nature of man, towards the immediate goal of controlling man's negative, barbaric aspects which were undesirable but at least tolerable in a pre-nuclear age. But now, in the nuclear age, man's own destructiveness is probably the greatest danger that he faces. The only possible safeguard against this, that I see, is to accept the difficult and controversial, but nonetheless immediate challenge, which goes against almost all of man's previous conditioning, of controlling the primitive and the negative in human beings.

Professor B.F. Skinner3 approaches the same problem but with a method different from mine - he suggests manipulation of the environment, the society, the conditioning. I suggest manipulation of the internal biochemical systems of man as an organic system, because I believe this is what in the final analysis determines man's psyche. Another controversial proposal of mine was that men with power should be dealt with most immediately - not criminals, not lower-status people, because these are not the people who pose the immediate danger to mankind. The people who pose immediate danger are the relatively few human beings who have tremendous power, greater than any other human beings have ever had in the history of mankind. I say these are the people who must be the concern. These are the people whom we must insist are controlled in terms of the maximum of personal and mental health, which I define as the dominance of the positive qualities of love, compassion, empathy, sensitivity. It is my thesis that these are controllable physiologically. This is not a ‘peace pill.’ It is a serious research for a very serious end.

 

Have you done experiments where positive results were gained from biochemical interference with negative inclinations?

 

No, I haven't personally done experiments.

 

It has to begin.

 

It has begun. The tremendous research of Delgado cannot be ignored. Delgado4 has demonstrated, I think beyond question, that there are certain portions of the brain which control specific emotions; some portions which control negative emotions, some which control positive emotions. This is the biochemical basis of feelings, emotions, motivations in man.

Dr. Clark, you were talking about men in power. Anybody who becomes a professor in a university, or a managing director of a company - anybody who takes a position of importance in our modern society - would have to have a basic education, pass examinations, be screened. But in the political system as it runs now, the one with the loudest mouth and the one who cheats the public most gets into political office. We use sixteenth-century methods of ‘choosing’ politicians.5

 

Yes. Twenty-five years ago I wrote a paper for the Association of Psychiatrists in America in which I raised this question of the need to address ourselves to the methods by which leaders are selected or non-selected. By that time I was concerned about the fact that success in the competition for political leadership in democracy seemed to be determined by the degree to which the individual had certain competitive qualities which I felt were not particularly adaptive at that date of human development, however were still being used.

After the atomic age burst upon us, I was even more convinced that the qualities generally considered necessary for leadership - aggressiveness, tough-mindedness, a certain kind of insensitivity which is called realism - had to be reexamined. I suppose at this stage I can be called unrealistic in my strong suggestion that we must now substitute others for those qualities. To be specific, we must replace them with qualities of sensitivity, empathy, kindness, and the ability to translate these into policy and action. These are the qualities of leadership which are now required, but we are still using the old qualities in selecting or in permitting competitors for leadership to be successful. I can understand how my critics would consider this unrealistic, because it really is in a way asking for a -

 

Utopia -

 

I have been accused of being a kind of sentimentalist, an idealistic utopian. But to me that is the only adaptive realism of the present and the future. It seems naive because it is asking man to redefine those qualities which are essential for survival. In a nuclear age the Darwinian concept of survival is antithetical to survival, and a reversal of the Darwinian concept is now hoped for.

 

But would you say that even concepts like capitalism or Marxism are

based on realities of another era? Aren't new frames of reference necessary to plan the future?

 

Unquestionably. I suppose the only contribution that B.F. Skinner and I are making in the face of all the attacks we have attracted is beginning the dialogue necessary for the new frame of reference. I hope we have time.

 

That's what the computers of MIT and Limits of Growth, the study o f the planet as a whole, aim at. But we seem always to be talking about our part of the world. How about China, India, Africa, Asia, Latin America?

 

I want to reply to your question in two parts. First, I am not particularly impressed with computerizing ideas or plans or designs. I know that this is in some areas of science the current fashion. My feeling is that the computer puts out nothing other than what's put in and that man has the ultimate responsibility of putting into the computer what he wants to get out.

I'll remove myself from any further discussion of the computerization of global models. What I am concerned with are individual human beings and their relationships with other human beings and groups of human beings. There is a complicated set of problems and variables that have to be pieced together in order to fully understand how to control man's negative behavior. I welcome the philosophers in the effort. I welcome the empirical scientists. I welcome any group of human beings who recognize this as the critical problem which human intelligence must somehow find a way to solve.

Secondly, I agree with you that this cannot be an isolated effort. The theorizing and the research that has to be done, the mistakes that will inevitably be made, cannot be restricted to the artificial boundaries of nations. I agree with some of my critics who say that it would be devastating to have any one major power with this kind of new perspective when other major powers will be operating in terms of past perspectives. I believe that research on this problem, which I have defined as the significant problem of contemporary human society, should be international. It should not be nationalistic and secretive, like the atomic research. This problem involves the survival of mankind and the best minds of all the nations should be involved in working on it. This would be a built-in

safeguard. I hope this can be a genuine United Nations scientific research project. Probably the most important thing that the United Nations could contribute to the future of mankind is getting into the research and allowing no particular power to dominate it.

 

It is therefore essential that we ‘re-shape life,’ as Boris Pasternak6 said. How then can we improve the direct corelationship between consciousness and concrete reality? Through chemical biology?

 

One of my graduate students recently made an observation that was the first time I had heard this thought vocalized. You are coming close to it. He said, ‘You know, as I read Skinner and you, the thing that is underlying your ideas of necessary psychotechnology is a concept of reality which is different and somewhat disturbing.’ I asked him what he meant and his reply was, ‘Most of your critics define the reality of being human in terms of everything that has happened in the past.’ Bombing Vietnam into obliteration is accepted as a definition of reality. And in the medieval times reality could equally be defined as having plagues.

 

American bombers are a plague -

 

I listened to the young man and I said, ‘Yes, you are right.’ The first part of my paper on psychotechnology really was dealing with the question of the fragility of reality. It was dealing with the inherent fragility of human consciousness; in fact, of human existence. When you get right down to it, the human being, in his conscious and intellectual being - in his thinking and behaving - is totally determined by and dependent upon the degree to which the membranes of the cells in his circulatory system or his brain maintain their integrity. So if we really look at it, the total reality of our existence is determined by fragile forms of biological matter, the basic cells. The nature of that reality is modifiable by intervention, by changing the internal biochemistry within which these cells are operating. Certainly we know that about drugs. We know it about alcohol.

In this regard I guess I am breaking with the logical positivists and with the absolutists. In my paper I referred to human pathos, which to me is man's desperate struggle to try to be an absolute entity. Man can do a lot of damage to himself in his inability to accept his own fragility, in his inability to accept his finite mass. His struggle to be something

absolute can make him impose upon other human beings absurd, fantastically ridiculous cruelty. It is absurd and ridiculous because the individuals who have power can never be successful in using that power destructively because they too will be destroyed. That is my concept of reality. Reality is nothing more than what you are and what the brain can perform. These things are time-limited, they are relative, and they are also in a curious way unpredictable.

 

Professor Delgado is preoccupied with the question of how to safeguard the original man. He believes that man's ideological and emotional setup is original, and in order to safeguard dignity and freedom, to use Skinner's phrase, the original man should be preserved and promoted.

 

My reservation is that I really don't know what original man is. One could define that as primitive man. I agree with Professor Delgado that any form of psychotechnological intervention cannot create characteristics in the human organism. The potentials of the human organism are limited by a whole host of determinants from the evolution of the species. But basically what one would be dealing with - and certainly my ideas would be based upon this - are potentials that are inherent in this organism and particularly in the governing system of the organism, the nervous system. But the destructive, nonadaptive characteristics of man appear to be stronger than the potentially positive characteristics. I think Freud was right when he talked about the id, the unconscious qualities of man which in the past did seem to have positive adaptive functions, in that they made it possible for human beings to survive in a competitive structure. The primacy of those functions, which are no longer adaptive, make them clearly stronger. I think that it's a general principle in biology that the more primitive the structure and the function in the organism, the greater the strength, the greater the persistence. However, the positive potentials, the potentials for love and kindness, are more recent in the evolutionary process of this organism, clearly dependent upon higher ascendancies of the nervous system. But they are there in potential.

What I am suggesting is that we accelerate their development, that we don't wait, because we cannot wait for the normal evolutionary process to give them a dominance over the subcortical membrane functions. I am suggesting that we determine how we can make them stronger and more dominant, and once we have determined this, that we apply our knowledge. This is what we do in medicine. The great danger to man now is not medical ignorance, it is ignorance of the organism and

of psychology, which we have to deal with in order to prevent psychological plagues which can result in the destruction of mankind.

 

C.G. Jung7 once said that the destruction of Hiroshima was not a disaster in technology but a disaster in psychology.8

 

Yes, I am in complete agreement with that. What fascinates me is that so many of my colleagues in psychology refuse to face this understandably difficult reality. The Vietnam disaster is as psychologically backward in the latter part of the twentieth century as the medical sciences were in the sixteenth century. We cannot afford it any longer.

 

How hopeful are you that Faustian9 man will not drag himself to doom by his own machines and his own supertechnology?

 

I don't know whether the shackles of the past - such as man's obsession with dominance, thus his obsession with technological progress - can be overcome by man. I know these are very powerful shackles. They are the shackles of the mind. If you saw some of the letters that I receive! Some of the most venomous letters come from members of the clergy, almost suggesting flagellation. I read these letters and I do not take them personally, I just take them as further evidence of the nature of the problem that we have to deal with, the fact that the reality of the present is determined by the reality of the past. People's perceptions of themselves and society, of cruelty and barbarity, are still determined by the special interests, the special pleadings, the rationalizations of the past. And if one were to concentrate on that, one would say it's hopeless.

 

Would you agree that in the past four or five years - actually parallel to the increased war activities since 1965 in Vietnam - a frightening development has taken place in the United States?

 

Yes, this is again another example of psychological disaster. As America has bombed the North Vietnamese with the greatest destruction imposed upon any people anywhere, a group of nonindustrialized people who are unable to retaliate against our cities, we have in return bombed our own minds. We have devastated our ability to understand fundamental moral and human problems. And this is the only explanation for the pervasive and to me quite dangerous apathy among the vast majority of

the American people, in the face of continuing crimes of devastation which we have inflicted upon the North Vietnamese.

 

That's probably also why the 1972 presidential campaign was the most depressing of the past twenty-five years of my reporting in the United States. People seem to feel that whether you vote for one candidate or the other, there's nothing to be done, everyone is lying anyway. Where is the faith in America that I knew in the forties?

 

Faith in America seems to have been transformed into a curious kind of apathetic pragmatism, being sold as political realism, which I suppose is another symptom of what I call the bombing of our minds. This is what happened in Germany, with the rise of Nazism. I think what it reveals is the pathos, the absurdity, the tragedy of man, because this is the kind of power that in my thinking can only be defined as a sort of self-perpetuating tragedy. It is a use of power to justify the tragedy of past uses of power. You get into this kind of cycle that I don't see as just the extension of power, but as a sort of psychological devastation, a psychological bleakness, an acceptance of immorality as if there is no difference between immorality and morality.

You know, power is not only corrupting, it is what causes a whole species to disappear. That kind of power to me eliminates the possibility of any future vitality.


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