Stand on Zanzibar

context (5)

THE GRAND MANOR

“Rather painfully, we managed to digest Darwinian evolution so far as physical attributes were concerned within half a century of the initial controversy. (I say ‘we,’ but if you’re a bible-thumping fundamentalist I expect you at this point to take the book by one corner at arm’s length and ceremonially consign it to the place where you put most sensible ideas, along with everything else you decline to acknowledge the existence of, such as mainly shit.)

“We still haven’t digested the truth that evolution applies to mental functions, too—that because a dog is a dog, a dolphin a dolphin, it has an awareness and sense of personal identity distinct from ours but not necessarily inferior. Is an apple inferior to an orange?

“But I’m trying to tell you what’s happening to you, not what’s happening to Crêpe Suzette your neurotic poodle. A good veterinary psychologist can probably be located by calling Information. You wouldn’t believe him if he started telling you how much you have in common with that pet of yours, and likely you won’t believe me. But if I annoy you sufficiently you may at least try to think up arguments to demonstrate how wrong I am.

“Basically, then: you have two things in common. You’re a pack-animal; so is a dog. You’re a territorial animal; so is a dog. (The fact that we mark our manors with walls instead of urine is irrelevant.)

“The depiction of Man the Noble Savage standing off the wolves at the cave entrance, all by himself with a club, while his mate and their young cower in the background, is so much whaledreck. When we were at the stage of taking refuge in caves our habit was almost certainly to congregate in troupes the way baboons still do, and when the dog-baboons move in everyone else—note that everyone!—moves out. I mean like lions will shift the scene, and a lion is not what you’d call a defenceless creature.

“Lions are rather solitary, tending to work by couples over a manor which affords them adequate game for subsistence. Or not, depending on outside pressure from other members of the species. (Try owning a whole tomcat and you’ll see the process in miniature.) Pack-animals have the evolutionary edge—in combination they’re deadly. Lions learn this as cubs and then ignore the practice, which is why baboons can cave them in.

“NB: I said ‘everyone’, not ‘everything’. You wouldn’t recognise your ancestors as people, but they were, and you still are. Those ancestors were arrogant bastards—how else did they become boss species on our ball of mud? You’ve inherited from them just about everything that makes you human, apart from a few late glosses such as language. You got territoriality along with the rest. If somebody trespasses on it you’re liable to turn killer—although if you don’t like the idea you can kill yourself, which is among our few claims to uniqueness.

“Territoriality works this way. Take some fast-breeding animals like rats—or even rabbits, though they’re herbivorous rodents, not carnivores as we are—and let them multiply in an enclosure, making sure at all stages they have enough food and water. Early on you’ll see them behaving in the traditional rat fashion when conflicts arise: the quarrellers will square up to one another, feint, jab, charge and withdraw, the victory going to the more efficient braggart. Also the mothers will take good care, rat-style, of their young.

“When the pen becomes crowded past a certain point, the fights won’t be symbolic any more. There’ll be corpses. And the mothers will start to eat their young.

“It’s even more spectacular in the case of solitary creatures. Put a female ripe for mating into too small a cage that’s already occupied by a healthy male, and he’ll drive her out rather than give way to the reproductive urge. He may even kill her.

“Very baldly, then: shortage of territory, of space to move around and call your own, leads to attacks on members of your own species in defiance even of the normal group-solidarity displayed by pack-animals. Lost your temper with anyone lately?

“However, being a member of a species that’s nothing if not ingenious, you’ve figured out two directions in which you can abstract your territoriality: one is to privacy, the other is to property.

“Of the two, the former is more animal and more reliable. Your base need is to have a manor defined against a peer group, but you don’t have to do as dogs, tomcats and sundry other species do—mark it out with a physical trace, then patrol it constantly to scare away intruders. You can abstract to a small enclosed area where no one else trespasses without your permission, and on this basis you can operate fairly rationally. One of the first concomitants of affluence is a rapid raising of privacy-standards: someone from a comparatively low-income background has to accept that his childhood will be lived in a crowded, busy environment—in contemporary household terms, one room of the dwelling (if it has more than one) will be a family-room and that’s the centre of operations. Someone from a more prosperous home, however, will take it for granted from about the time he learns to read that there’s a room where he can go in and shut the door against the world.

“This is why (a) men from wealthy backgrounds make better companions under privative conditions such as a Moon voyage—they don’t feel that their human environment is a permanent infringement of their right to a manor, no matter how thoroughly it’s been abstracted from the original referent of a piece of terrain (b) the standard route out of the slum or ghetto is crime—equals getting your own back on other members of your species who trespass continually on your manor; (c) gangs develop primarily in two contexts—first, in the slum or ghetto where privacy as a counterpart of the manor can’t be had and a reversion takes place to the wild state, with pack-hunting and the patrolling of an actual physical patch of ground; and second, in the armed services, where the gang is dignified by being called a ‘regiment’ or some other hifalutin dirty word but where the reversion to the wild state is deliberately fostered by deprivation of privacy (barracks accommodation) and deprivation of property (you don’t wear the clothes you chose and bought, you wear a uniform which belongs to US!!!). Fighting in an army is a psychotic condition encouraged by a rule-of-thumb psychological technique discovered independently by every son-of-a-bitch conqueror who ever brought a backward people out of a comfortable, civilised state of nonentity (Chaka Zulu, Attila, Bismarck, etc.) and started them slaughtering their neighbours. I don’t approve of people who encourage psychoses in their fellow human beings. You probably do. Cure yourself of the habit.

“We are breeding so fast that we cannot provide adequate privacy for our population. That might not be fatal—after all, it wasn’t until as a species we discovered affluence that the demand for it became overwhelming. But we’re undermining the alternative form of abstraction of territoriality, and deprived of both we’re going to wind up psychotic in the same way as a good soldier.

“The point of abstracting to property is that the manor forms an externalised aid to self-identification. Put a man in a sensory deprivation tank, he comes out screaming or shaking or … We need continual environmental reassurance that we are who we think we are. In the wild state, the manor provides such a reassurance. In the state we’ve been describing a few paragraphs back, the ability to shut ourselves away from the continually fluctuating pressure of our peers enables an intermittent reassessment of our identity. We can lean on a group of objects—a clever surrogate for a patch of ground—but only if they have (a) strong personal connotations and (b) continuity. The contemporary environment denies us both. The objects we possess weren’t made by ourselves (unless we’re fortunate enough to display strong creative talents) but by an automated factory, and furthermore and infinitely worse we’re under pressure every week to replace them, change them, introduce fluidity into precisely that area of our lives where we most need stability. If you’re rich enough you go and buy antiques and you like them as a pipeline into the past, not because you’re a connoisseur.

“The classical slave system survived for a long while despite the paradoxical discontinuity of pan-human identity which is implicit in any such social pattern. The American slave system was already breaking to pieces before the Civil War. Why? The answer is in the Code of Hammurabi, among other places—the first truly elaborate legal code we have any record of. It lays down fines and other punishments for personal injury. Although it’s true that the penalty for injuring a free man is heavier than for injuring a slave, the slave is always there. Under the Romans, a slave had a certain inalienable minimum both of property (NB!) and of civil rights, which not even his owner could infringe. It was thinkable for a debtor to sell himself into slavery and pay off what he owed, in the rational—maybe far-fetched, but not lunatic—anticipation of recouping his fortunes. The first successful banker we know about was a Greek slave called Pasion who made himself a millionaire, bought his freedom and went into partnership with his former bosses.

“In the case of the American negro slave this possibility was not inherent in the system. The slave had the same human rights as a head of cattle—nil. A good master might conceivably manumit a slave who’d done him a good turn, or pension him off with his freedom as a favourite horse would be put out to pasture to spend his declining years in peace. But a bad one might decide to maim the man, brand him, or flog him to death with an iron-tipped cat-o’-nine-tails, and there was no one to call him to account.

“True, you’re not a slave. You’re worse off than that by a long, long way. You’re a predatory beast shut up in a cage of which the bars aren’t fixed, solid objects you can gnaw at or in despair batter against with your head until you get punch-drunk and stop worrying. No, those bars are the competing members of your own species, at least as cunning as you on average, forever shifting around so you can’t pin them down, liable to get in your way without the least warning, disorienting your personal environment until you want to grab a gun or an axe and turn mucker. (This is in essence why people do that.)

“And there are more of them than ever before—and you’ve grown to expect privacy so that every now and then you can take the pressure off, but that privacy is becoming more and more expensive so that it’s considered normal for even well-paid businessmen to share their apartments in order to enjoy luxuries their own salaries won’t stretch to, such as rooms large enough to hold their private possessions as well as themselves—and you’re being commanded by today’s aggressive advertising to throw out those cherished belongings and get others which are strange to you—and you’re being told day and night from authoritative official sources that people you don’t know but who adhere to some mysterious quasi-religious precepts known as Marxist-Leninist-Maoist dogma and communicate in a language whose characters you can’t even recognise as real writing are trying to trespass on your national gang’s manor—and …

“In the last decade of the twentieth century sales of tranks soared a whopping thirteen hundred per cent. Unless you’ve been living in a country too poor to furnish the supplies, the odds are that two of every five of your acquaintances are dicties—perhaps on some socially acceptable drug like alcohol, but quite likely on a trank that by way of side-effect depresses orgasmic capacity and compels the user to resort to orgies in order to stimulate flagging potency, or on a product like Skulbustium which offers the tempting bait of a totally, untrespassably private experience and entrains senile dementia rather more certainly than tobacco entrains cancer of the lung.

“In short: your life from birth to death resembles the progress of a hopelessly drunk tightrope walker whose act has been so bad up till now that he’s being bombarded with rotten eggs and broken bottles.

“And if you fall off, what they will do is broadly this: they’ll take you out of the environment you’re used to—you don’t like it much, but at least it’s not totally strange—and put you somewhere else you’ve never been before. Your key deprivation is of territoriality; they will shove you in a cell which has nothing whatever about it to help identify you as an individual. Your secondary lacks are of abstracted territoriality-equivalents; they will take away the clothes you chose yourself and give you tattered second- or twentieth-hand garments, and you will have no privacy whatever because on the basis of a time-schedule deliberately randomised so that you can’t even brace yourself for the impact by the clock of hunger you carry in your stomach they will fling open the door and stare at you to see what you’re doing.

“You will wind up inventing a private language because there’s no other way of isolating yourself; you’ll scrawl on the walls with your excrement because nothing else in the place belongs to you except the products of your own body; and they will call you a hopeless case and intensify the ‘treatment’ you’re receiving.

“Don’t say that it won’t happen to you. The odds in favour have been going up daily for a hundred years. You know at least half a dozen people who have been in mental hospitals, and of that half-dozen at least one was related to you, even if no more closely than as a cousin. Again, if this is not the case, that’s because you’ve been living in a country too poor to afford enough mental hospitals for its population on the generally accepted scale.

“Thank heaven for such countries! You might do worse than emigrate to one if what I’ve been saying worries you.”

—You: Beast by Chad C. Mulligan

tracking with closeups (5)

SCENESHIFTER

A little shamefacedly, because of official hostility towards such superstitions, students on their way to the fine tall modern buildings of Dedication University were apt to dodge into a shrine gay with paper streamers and gold leaf, there to light a volcano-shaped cone of incense paste as a propitiation, and concentrate a trifle more fully on their studies as a result.

There had been many changes in Yatakang, but the man who had been personally responsible for most of those which counted shunned publicity. Moreover there was one highly significant factor which had not altered: in Yatakang perhaps more than anywhere else on the face of the globe men felt a sense of divine arbitrariness.

The richness of the country’s vaunted hundred islands was almost incredible. Alone of the nations of Asia it had an exportable surplus of food, mostly sugar and fishmeal. (The particular strain of Tilapia which provided the latter in thousand-ton batches had been modified by Professor Doctor Lyukakarta Moktilong Sugaiguntung.) Its mines made it self-sufficient in products like aluminium, bauxite and petroleum—for plastics, not for fuel. (A bacterium tailored by Sugaiguntung cracked the sticky aboriginal tars into pumpable light fractions all by itself and a mile below ground.) It was the largest country in the world without a single synthetic rubber factory. (Its plantations had been ruthlessly stripped of twentieth-century stocks and re-sown with a strain Sugaiguntung had developed to yield twice the quantity of latex every season.)

But all this, with hardly more warning than the tremor of a needle on a paper tape, might be shattered by the fury of Grandfather Loa, who slumbered beside the Shongao Strait. He had not lost his temper since 1941, but the market in incense volcanoes flourished nonetheless.

“Now what I want you to do,” Sugaiguntung said to the orang-outang, “is this: go to the room with the door painted blue—blue, yes?—and look through the drawers of the desk until you find the picture of yourself. Bring it to me. And be quick!”

The orang-outang scratched himself. He was not a very prepossessing specimen. An unlooked-for side-effect had afflicted him with alopecia, and his belly and half his back were bald. But, having thought over the instructions, he loped obediently towards the door.

The most important of Dr. Sugaiguntung’s four visitors, and the only one sitting down, was a heavy-set man in a plain off-white jacket and trousers, his close-cropped scalp lidded with the traditional black skull-cap. In the hope of an immediately favourable comment, Sugaiguntung addressed him.

“You’ll appreciate, I’m sure, that this demonstrates his ability to follow spoken commands, as well as to distinguish colours not normally perceived by his species, and moreover to identify his own image among a number of others—an achievement which in the time available and considering the complexity of the problem we…”

The visitor carried a short cane. When he wanted the subject changed he slapped the side of his boot with it. He did so now, with a noise like a cracking whip. Sugaiguntung fell silent with Pavlovian responsiveness.

The visitor rose and for the fifth or sixth time made a tour of the laboratory, his attention lingering on the two framed items decorating the wall. There had been a third, and a patch of unfaded paint still betrayed its former location, but it had been intimated that even a citation for the Nobel prize in chemistry was an unpatriotic thing to put on show. What remained were a map of the world and a portrait of Marshal Solukarta, Leader of the Guided Socialist Democracy of Yatakang.

The visitor said abruptly, “You’ve looked at this map lately?”

Sugaiguntung nodded.

The cane flicked up to become a pointer, rapping on the glass overlying the map.

“It remains like a sore on the body of Yatakang, this ulcer of American imperialism, this memorial to their barefaced rapacity! I see,” he added with marginally more approval, “that your map at least does not perpetuate the name of Isola.”

It was a pre-Isolan map, but Sugaiguntung did not feel he could claim credit for that. He remained silent.

“And”—the pointer swung to the north-west—“while our friends and neighbours the Chinese are as Asian as we are, it is to be regretted, don’t you think, that they have been for so long the victims of a European ideology?”

Sugaiguntung expressed vigorous agreement. That was not the official line, because the pullulating mass of the Chinese was much too close and much too powerful to offend, but it was one of the permissible inner-party attitudes.

The visitor’s cane described a banana-shaped loop which encompassed the sprawling islands of Yatakang. “It is coming to be accepted,” he murmured, “that the time is ripe for a genuinely Asiatic contribution to the future of this part of the planet. Within our boundaries we have two hundred and thirty million people who enjoy a standard of living, a standard of education, a standard of political enlightenment second to none. What’s happened to that monkey of yours?”

With a sinking sensation Sugaiguntung dispatched one of his assistants in search of the orang-outang. He attempted to point out that all the animal’s experimental predecessors had killed themselves, so that merely to have the creature alive at this stage would be an achievement, but the visitor slapped his boot again. There was an ominous silence until the youth returned, leading the ape and scolding him.

“He’d found the picture of himself,” he explained. “Unfortunately there was a picture of his favourite female in the same drawer and he’d stopped to look at it.”

From the orang-outang’s physical condition—distressingly obvious owing to the baldness of his belly—it was clear he had developed a strong sense of two-dimensional image identification, an advanced talent which many human groups such as Bushmen and Bedouin had had to be taught by outsiders. But Sugaiguntung decided it was small use trying to impress that factor on his visitor.

The latter snorted. He said, “Why are you working with such unpromising material?”

“I don’t quite follow you,” Sugaiguntung ventured.

“A monkey’s a monkey whether you adjust his chromosomes or not. Why not work on a level where much of the work has already been done for you?”

Sugaiguntung still looked baffled.

The visitor resumed his seat. He said, “Listen, Professor Doctor! Even enclosed in this laboratory you remain aware of the outside world—don’t you?”

“I do my duty as a citizen. I devote part of every day to a study of the world situation, and I attend regularly at information meetings in the area where I live.”

“Good,” the visitor approved with sarcasm. “Moreover you have pledged yourself to our national goals, the incorporation of the American-dominated Sulu Islands into our country where they rightfully and historically belong, the establishment of Yatakang as the natural pathfinder of Asiatic civilisation?”

“Naturally.” Sugaiguntung clasped his hands.

“And you’ve never flinched from contributing to those goals?”

“I think my work testifies that I have not.” Sugaiguntung was growing annoyed, or he would never have trespassed so close to bragging.

“In that case you’ll fall in with the suggestion I’m about to make, especially since the Leader”—a sketched salute towards the picture on the wall—“has personally selected it as the most promising path out of our present temporary difficulties.”

Later, having lost the argument, Sugaiguntung found himself wishing—not for the first time in recent months—that the tradition of honourably joining the ancestors had not been outlawed as inappropriate to a twenty-first-century state.