That is a moving story, and this is a moving book. And if you like it, read Nine Stories. The tales are all small gems whose message echoes that of The Catcher in the Rye.
JULIAN JAYNES
1920–1990
The Origin of Consciousness in the
Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
Julian Jaynes was born in Massachusetts in 1920 and was educated at both Harvard and Yale. He was a professor of biology at Princeton for twenty-five years and was a popular teacher and lecturer. I’m not surprised to learn that. He must have been a fascinating man. He certainly wrote a fascinating book with a fascinating title: The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. I don’t remember who first told me about it, but I immediately became interested. I bought the book and read it as fast as I could—which wasn’t very fast because the thesis is tightly reasoned and carefully documented. And then I read it again and again. You have to keep your mind focused on what he is saying on every page.
Here is the idea. It seems very likely that at some time in the past humans did not have conscious minds like ours today. They didn’t think as we do, any more than an ape does. Did they just suddenly start to be conscious of themselves as thinking beings? Or was it a long, drawn-out process, starting in a kind of darkness and ending in such light as we possess today?
Nevertheless, there must have been a time when some humans, at least, had minds more or less like ours even if most did not. That is, some must have been conscious of themselves even if most were not. Consciousness may then have been an evolutionary advantage, and those who possessed it would pass it on to their children, and so on and so forth.
All of this is conjecture, though it seems likely. But two questions immediately arise. First, why did this change take place? And when did it happen?
Julian Jaynes answers both questions. He writes about the Time of Troubles that occurred in the Middle East around 1000 BCE or a little before. Horsemen from the east descended on the more-or-less civilized cities and cultures of the Near East, killing, burning and destroying simply because they could. For the first time, says Jaynes, the inhabitants of the Near East were presented with threats that were entirely new. The Barbarians, as they called them, had no law and no mercy; they seemed like wild animals. Above all, they did not recognize the authority of the gods that had cared for the inhabitants as long as they could remember.
For centuries these gods had “spoken” to the peoples of the Middle East; they had heard their words in their heads, in their minds, even if they couldn’t see the gods except in the costumes worn by priests and shaman. The gods did not speak publicly, but they were there in each mind, warning, teaching, rewarding good deeds and punishing the bad. But now they seemed to have disappeared, leaving their people desolate and lost. Many stone tablets have been found from that time, on which are written pleas for forgiveness and mercy: Why have you abandoned us? Come back to us in our despair!
Jaynes didn’t mean that people of that time did not think or reason, but rather that they did so unconsciously. We are familiar with that. Many of the routine daily things we do, like walking or dreaming or even driving a car, are done unconsciously. Driving is a particularly good example. We can carry on a conversation with a passenger in the next seat, think about what he or she is saying and what we are saying in reply, worry about where the conversation is going and whether we are saying too much or too little, and all the time guide the car, stop at red lights and turn corners, more or less unconsciously. This is perfectly normal and doesn’t mean we are bad drivers, because if there is an emergency of some kind we can snap back into consciousness to deal with it. Only very rarely do we fail to do so, in which case we have an accident.
We do not experience the voices in our heads that Jaynes describes—that is, most of us don’t, but schizophrenics do. In that case we—or they—may commit surprising or dreadful acts, like killing someone or burning down a house or, less dramatically, experience hallucinations of many kinds: visual, auditory, sensory. We don’t have to be schizophrenic for this to happen. Think about it. How often have you sensed something that really isn’t there? And when it happened did you think you were crazy? Of course not. Usually the hallucination disappears almost immediately, leaving no trace, not even in your memory.
Jaynes goes further than we ordinarily do. He finds many examples in The Iliad of Homer and in the Hebrew Bible. In the first book of The Iliad, for example, Achilles, mortally insulted by King Agamemnon, reaches for his sword. But he hears the goddess Athene in his head, demanding obedience to her rule, and he replaces the sword. Homer does not specify that the voice is a hallucination, and Jaynes says it really isn’t one. He believes that the voice is the voice of Achilles’ right brain speaking to his left. Achilles, like almost everyone else at the time, is accustomed to hearing such messages, and he is not surprised when it happens to him at this juncture of the plot. And, according to Jaynes, experiments with schizophrenics have confirmed that one side of the brain can “speak” to the other.
Something else happens toward the end of The Iliad, when King Priam comes to the tent where Achilles is mourning the death of his friend and begs him to let him have the dead body of his son so he can give him a proper funeral. Achilles is still almost mad with grief but when he sees Priam kneeling before him, reaching for “the hands that had killed so many of his sons,” he thinks of his own father, Peleus, in far off Thrace, and he relents, his heart moved, tears in his eyes. The god is not speaking to Achilles now, he is thinking about himself, accepting his existence, aware of his relation to at least one other person. And Achilles gives back the body to the father of his mortal enemy, whom he pities.
According to Jaynes, these two scenes in The Iliad represent a change that was occurring in the minds of some men during this time. He also points out that on many occasions in The Odyssey, which was certainly composed later than The Iliad, there seems to be evidence of the kind of introspection that is found only at the very end of the earlier poem. And from that time on more and more humans became conscious in the way we are conscious, although this did not happen all at once.
But what was really going on? Why did the gods depart, as the poet Lucretius said in his poem On the Nature of Things? According to Jaynes, it was because in the desperate danger of the Time of Troubles the connection between the two halves of the brain was broken, as it had to be if the victims of the Barbarian hordes were to survive. If the deadly horsemen descended on your village it was not enough to ask this god or the other for help, you had to help yourself, make your own decisions, find your own way to safety. In so doing you became conscious “in the breakdown of the bicameral mind.”