The Making of a Counter Culture

ion-such as "the pursuit of truth," "pure research," etc. All these protective strategies are especially compatible with natures that are beset by timidity and fearfulness; but also with those that are characterized by plain insensitivity and whose habitual mode of contact with the world is a cool curiosity untouched by love, tenderness, or passionate wonder. Behind both such timidity and insensitivity there can easily lurk the spitefulness of a personality which feels distressingly remote from the rewards of warm engagement with life. It is revealing that whenever a scientific method of study is brought into play, we are supposed to regard it as irrelevant, if not downright unfair, to probe the many very different motivations that may underlie a man's desire to be purely objective. It is little wonder, then, that the ideal of objectivity can easily be invoked to cover a curiosity of callousness or hostility, as well as a curiosity of affectionate concern. In any event, when I convince myself that I can create a place within me that has been cleansed of all those murky passions, hostilities, joys, fears, and lusts which define my person, a place that is "Not-I," and when I believe that it is only from the vantage point of this Not-I that reality can be accurately perceived, then I have begun to honor the myth of objective consciousness. The essential experience of being In-Here is that of being an unseen, unmoved spectator. Abraham Maslow characterizes the situation in this way: It means looking at something that is not you, not human, not personal, something independent of you the perceiver. . . . You the observer are, then, really alien to it, uncomprehending and without sympathy or identification . . . You look through the microscope or the telescope as through a keyhole, peering, peeping, from a distance, from outside, not as one who has a right to be in the room being peeped into.6 6 Maslow, The Psychology of Science, p. 49. 220 THE MAKING OF A COUNTER CULTURE The spectating In-Here has been called by many names: ego, intelligence, self, subject, reason. . . . I avoid such designations here because they suggest some fixed faculty or psychic entity. What I prefer to emphasize is the act of contraction that takes place within the person, the sense of taking a step back, away from, and out of. Not only back and away from the natural world, but from the inarticulate feelings, physical urges, and wayward images that surge up from within the person. To these "irrationalities" Freud gave the revealing name, "the it": a something which is Not-I, but alien, incomprehensible, and only to be known reliably when it, too, is forced Out-There to become an object for analysis. The ideal of the objective consciousness is that there should be as little as possible In-Here and, conversely, as much as possible Out-There. For only what is Out-There can be studied and known. Objectivity leads to such a great emptying-out operation: the progressive alienation of more and more of In-Here's personal contents in the effort to achieve the densest possible unit of observational concentration surrounded by the largest possible area of study. The very word "concentration" yields the interesting image of an identity contracted into a small, hard ball; hence a dense, diminished identity, something which is less than one otherwise might be. Yet the predilection of In-Here is to remain "concentrated" as long and as often as possible. Curiously, this great good called knowledge, the very guarantee of our survival, is taken to be something that is forthcoming only to this lesser, shriveled-up identity. The scientific observer who comes to feel that Out-There has begun to implicate him personally-say, in the manner of a lover spellbinding one's sympathies so that one cannot tell clearly where one's self leaves off and the other begins -has begun to lose his objectivity. Therefore, he .must fight THE MYTH OF OB JECTlVE CONSCIOUSNESS 221 back this irrational involvement of his personal feeling. Like Odysseus in the presence of the sirens' song, In-Here must be lashed to the mast, or its mission may never be completed. But if body, feelings, emotions, moral sentiment, sensuous enchantment are all to be located Out-There, then who is this In-Here that is so stalwartly struggling against the siren song? It is a weird identity indeed, this In-Here. More and more it looks like Kafka's castle: a stronghold well defended, but manned by . . . parties unknown. I t would be an interesting line of questioning to put to our experts, would it not? Who are "you" when you are being purely objective? How did you manage to bring this purely objective "you" into existence-and how can you be so sure you really pulled it off? Moreover, does this purely objective "you" prove to be an enjoyable identity? Or is that beside the point? (2) The act of psychic contraction that creates In-Here simultaneously creates Out-There, which is whatever gets left behind in the wake of the contraction. The line which divides In-Here from Out-There now becomes a line between a place where it is desirable and secure to be (In-Here) and a place that is untrustworthy, perhaps downright dangerous (OutThere). In-Here is the center of reliable knowledge; it knows what it is doing; it learns, plans, controls, watches out cunningly for threats and opportunities. The alternative to being in a place of reliable knowledge is, obviously, to be in a place of drift, unpredictability, stupidity. Such is what Out-There becomes. Now, in fact, anyone, even the most objective scientist, would fall into a state of total paralysis if he really believed that Out-There (beginning with his own organism and unconscious processes) was totally stupid. Nevertheless, InHere is committed to studying Out-There as if it were completely stupid, meaning without intention or wisdom or pur222 THE MAKING OF A COUNTER CULTURE poseful pattern. In-Here cannot, if it is to be strictly objective, strive to empathize in any way with Out-There. It must not attribute to Out-There what cannot be observed, measured, and-ideally-fonnulated into articulate, demonstrable propositions for experimental verification. In-Here must maintain its alienative dichotomy at all times. And like the racist who cannot under Jim Crow conditions come to see the segregated black man as anything but a doltish and primitive nigger, so In-Here, as the unmoved spectator, cannot feel that OutThere has any ingenuity or dignity. Under this kind of scrutiny, even the other human beings who inhabit OutThere can be made stupid, for they were not made to function within laboratory conditions or according to the exacting needs of questionnaires and surveys. Under the eyes of an alien observer they also begin to lose their human purposefulness. As soon as two human beings relate in detachment as observer to observed, as soon as the observer claims to be aware of nothing more than the behavioral surface of the observed, an invidious hierarchy is established which reduces the observed to a lower status. Of necessity he falls into the same category with all the stupid things of the world that fill OutThere. For consider the gross impertinence of this act of detached observation. Psychologist confronting his laboratory subject, anthropologist confronting tribal group, political scientist confronting voting public . . . in all such cases what the observer may very well be saying to the observed is the same: "I can perceive no more than your behavioral facade. I can grant you no more reality or psychic coherence than this perception allows. I shall observe this behavior of yours and record it. I shall not enter into your life, your task, your condition of existence. Do not turn to me or appeal to me or ask me to become involved with you. I am here only as a temporary observer whose role is to stand back and record THE MYTH OF OB JECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS 223 and later to 'make my own sense of what you seem to be doing or intending. I assume that I can adequately understand what you are doing or intending without entering wholly into your life. I am not particularly interested in what you uniquely are; I am interested only in the general pattern to which you conform. I assume I have the right to use you to perform this process of classification. I assume I have the right to reduce all that you are to an integer in my science." At the extreme, this alienated relationship is that of the Nazi physician experimenting upon his human victims, learning interesting new things about pain, suffering, privation. One cringes from the reference and protests, "That was an abnormal case. Normally, research involving human subjects stops short of inhumanity. And, in any event, whatever laboratory work is involved takes place in limited episodes; it is not a total way of life for experimenter or subject." Unhappily, however, the ethos of objectivity has gotten well beyond limited research episodes. Already legions of scientists and military men throughout the world, the products of careful training and selection, give themselves to whole lives of ultimate objectivity. They systematically detach themselves from any concern for those lives their inventions and weapons may someday do to death. They do their job as they are ordered to do it ... objectively. For them the world at large has become a laboratory-in the same sense that when they enter upon their professional capacity, they leave their personal feelings behind. Perhaps they even take pride in their capacity to do so, for indeed it requires an act of iron will to ignore the claims that person makes upon person. When In-Here observes Out-There, it is with the intention of giving order to what it perceives. The order can be understood to be that of "law," or statistical generalization, or classification. This orderliness is what sometimes leads scientists to speak of the "beauty of nature" -a notion to which 224 THE MAKING OF A COU