One of the central themes in Philip Wylie’s book, The Magic Animal, is that, owing to the established fact of man’s territoriality, and since he has entered the dimension of time-awareness, he stakes out his territory in time, so to speak; that is to say, he defends the imaginary territories described by his ideologies, beliefs, and ideas just as animals defend their physical territory (as man does, as well).
One of the things that separates man from animals in that respect, however, is that man kills and destroys to defend his territory (and to acquire more territory), instead of the ritualized (i.e., moral) fight/flight response that prevails in the rest of the animal kingdom. This idea was discussed in depth by the ethologist Konrad Lorenz, in his book, On Aggression, to which Wylie refers.
With that in mind, let’s continue (see my previous post below) Wylie’s description of man’s imaginary world:
“Perhaps it would be of use, here, to consider specifically how we attribute reality to what is imaginary, and what that leads us to fabricate as objects for our imagined ends. To some, the following example will have been understood. But for many it may be a little new and so, a little helpful. Once it is seen (or, correctly imagined) that even our sensory and other animal awarenesses are but dreams on which dreamed territory is founded and spuriously held — the record of what all man has, is, does, did, and intends will take on so many new and more nearly proper shapes, that everything will be an example of that new means of understanding.
Once that image of our condition is adopted, all morals will need revision, all ideas and artifacts, review.
Let us imagine, however, a man looking from a window of his home at a typical suburban scene.
Does he realize that most of what he sees derives from a moral fantasy so incorrect and ill-conceived as to be a threat to his very species? Does he even recognize another truth, that the “who” looking on is his own invention, not real, and in its main part anti-real? Is he even able to consider that what he thinks of it is a set of feelings, rationalized into his notion of sense?
Does he note that his reactions to the scene are not real, either? Not real but a product of beliefs, ideals, and values that were, themselves invented by other men? Or by himself? Hardly!
What he beholds is therefore not even felt by any other man exactly as he feels it. But they employ parallel processes.
The houses, streets, and vehicles are presumed to furnish the best currently possible means to his own and his neighbors’ needs, comforts, luxuries, and aesthetic or other desires.
But many of these objects have their form and function because the owner was induced to imagine he needed or wanted them, not because that was the actual case. Many, also, were fabricated to enhance his and his neighbors’ sense of status on a purely imagined value scale, dreamed up for the end of making him believe he had a need, or a want, till he bought the thing claimed to fulfill synthetic desire.
And all these artifacts are imagined valuable by him in short term ways, alone.
Only recently, and only a little, has this looker-out even been able to be aware that what he has thitherto imagined as wholly good in this scene isn’t. The exhaust of passing cars, the fecal trail of jet planes overhead, the silent surge of his own and his neighbors’ sewers, the waste that the city garbage trucks collect, the smoke from a visible backyard incinerator, the DDT a man across the way is spraying on his shrubs, and endless other items connected with the scene are not pure boons but partly malign. What should have entered the imagining, here so incompletely exploited, now somewhat shows the suburban achievement is not sound.
But even a more than ordinarily imaginative beholder will hardly increase his use of imagination enough to contemplate his view in a broad relation to its net cost for future men, through waste and pollution and irretrievable devastations of earth’s resources.
Likely, the traditional American values of the man in the window — and false logics he has accepted — will prevent him from any true evaluation of what he considers reality. The Great Society will emerge, in his dream, as more and more people are born, to consume more and more goods and employ more and more services. The absolute cost and self-limiting fact of such a fantasy will not much register with him, if at all. He will reason, as did a young woman, who recently said to me as I spoke of these matters, “They’ll think of something.”
“They” will “think”, then, of ways to reduce the pollution and to repair the ruin of man’s terrestrial environment. Of substitutes for whatever is being or will be annihilated or exhausted of the materials man derives from living species and inert matter. Ways, she meant, that would allow the crescendo of human consumption by that ever-accelerated proliferation of commodities and services. And of people.
The young lady, when I asked, could not “think of something,” herself. She plainly felt my question both unwarranted and mean. Yet she was a college graduate, and as I was told by the lady who introduced us, “very brilliant.” Her brilliance was the near-universal American sort, flashy and so, small-gauge, a fixed point of present-time dazzle, scanning nothing else. Its irresponsible focus is as minute as near universal and will write the signature of our doom if it persists much longer in that meager degree. What she imagined as logical and true, what she assumed from our tradition, was as mistaken as faith in human sacrifice for the appeasement of the God Bubb.
She could never look across a suburban street and perceive that what her eye beheld was a scene not real, not logical, not true, as purpose, but only a clutter of imagined artifacts created without consideration for future-time. Solid enough in seeming and as things, but the spawn of dangerous dreams in fact. And she’d not ever discern how false her feelings were.
How insubstantial are all our values!
Return, for illustration, to the homeowner looking at his suburban scene. The house across the street was built, let’s say, by a Mr. Williams. He and his lovely wife, two charming sons, and two delightful daughters lived there till recently. Then Mr. Williams sold the house to Mr. Johnson. Who has a lovely wife, charming boys, girls, etc. Both men are high school superintendents. Mr. Johnson, the new resident owner, is more learned than Mr. Williams, more talented, handsomer, and better paid. Mrs. Johnson is far lovelier than Mrs. Williams. In every measurable way, the new neighbors are either like the former people or superior to them. There is one difference, but it is minute, a matter of their relative amounts of dermal melanin. The Johnsons are Negroes, and the first Negroes to buy and occupy a house in this suburb.
Now, how do the values of the man at the window change?
Again, suppose we are not looking out that window but showing an album of photographs, taken there, to a bright boy fifty years from now.
How will his imagination evaluate the same scene?
Will he exclaim, as the album leaves turn, “All that room for just one family! Look! The people getting into that car — going to the city, you said — forgot to take along their breathing gear. They’ll have to come home. Or smother! All those men in that other car, the ones you told me were leaving for New York — a thousand miles away? Have they got throughway permits? And assigned times for entering the throughway? You mean anybody could go anywhere on any road, without a permit or a starting time? Imagine!
“And all the kinds of trees and bushes and vines and flowers growing completely outdoors! My, it must have been confusion when so many things could grow that they practically made a jungle in anybody’s yard! And — let me see — two, three, four kids. In that one family! They sure must have gotten a high gene rating on the federal tests to be allowed so many! I wish my father and mother had passed that high. Then maybe I could have a brother. Or a sister. Still. People in those olden days had worse problems then we have now. Like — cancer. And all those diseases. Hardly anybody lived a hundred years, either. And now, most everybody can, and millions already are a hundred.”
Will that be the sort of reaction of a youngster, in half a century, to our small scene?
Will such a boy go on, this way, “All that what-you-call-it? Yard! It’s about a thousand times the square meters we get in our flat. And people cooked at home, too! Whatever they wanted to eat! Even outdoors on that — that — barbecue? I’d like, just once not to be handed the standard meal from the air chute. And I’d like — once, anyway — to be able to start walking in any old direction as far as I pleased, and no permit, and come, even, to the end of the city, and then go on in that noplace, any direction, where there might not be people, or crops and machines, and I might even perhaps come to wild trees, finally!“
That?
Or would such a boy say, of the same pictures:
“My! That was really ancient times! Look at the smoke! Look how close together people were! How they could even see into each others’ houses! And the raw meat they half-cooked on that fire-thing. The lousy prepared food they ate! And the waste! Think of mining and raising all that junk, just to build crummy hovels like those! Ugly, uncomfortable — and, you said? — torn down in twenty years? Out of style already? How crazy could people have been? Why make anything not to last? Look at those clothes, too! And warm day, I’d say! Boys and girls, all in those sex costumes. And, didn’t I read, not allowed even to undress together? Were they nuts? Didn’t the mother and father even like sex? The kids, too?
The fifty years have passed since Wylie wrote those words, and we haven’t quite reached the extent of over-population and air pollution he foresaw — yet. But those circumstances are near — and probably nearer than we think, as we carry on our daily lives mostly oblivious to those rapidly approaching conditions.
If you think your rights are being infringed by wearing a mask or being vaccinated to protect our public health from a pandemic virus, imagine what life will be like with the necessary restrictions described by the hypothetical boy viewing the photo album. And these are relatively small examples of how easily objective reality is refuted and rationalized by many folks today.
For an example of the confrontation with psychic reality, read here.