The Third Door: A Behaviorist Fairy Tale
(Part 2)
Mr. Young had just begun setting up the experiment when the English majors made their garden in the courtyard. The experiment had not yet advanced very far at all, so it would not have been devastating to abandon it and to quietly petition the domain groups to relocate his lab to the other side of the river. But once Mr. Young had charted a course he was a difficult vessel to turn back to shore. So, as he wrapped up his final study of the problem of mazes and looked forward to cracking the problem of corridors, things were very good for him but things were not alright. And it was in these decisive days and weeks that he was ever so slightly overtaken by the contingencies of his situation and made a very uncharacteristic mistake.
After a short time served in this predicament, Mr. Young realized that his concern about the English majors, about the community garden, about the problem of the celery, about the security of the labs, all of this concern was bothering him a bit more even than it should have been. There was a missing connection, the kind of connection that astute scientists like himself often sense immediately but require much time and reflection to be able to articulate. He knew this feeling well and had learned to listen to it. But what could it all be about?
One day, at the height of the pleasant season, the unexpected cancellation of a committee meeting finally gave him the chance he needed to catch up with the rest of the world. Since he could not escape to the courtyard to watch colleagues impersonate the rats, he instead went to the library, where all the world's goings on were recorded and none of them were studied. Mr. Young too could have no hope of taking in the whole thing, not this afternoon and not in ten lifetimes, but during his own time of learning the young were better instructed on how to deal with this problem than in more recent times, and although it was entirely a different problem nowadays, the old methods, somehow, remained better suited to it. And so Mr. Young already knew where in the library he would begin his afternoon, although he could not know where it would end. And so one of the things he found was a very grave report from a very distant part of the world where the English majors, though that is not what they are called there, had indeed broken into a lab building, not to play with the rats or with each other, but to ransack it so badly that it had to be torn down.
There were no rats in this other lab building, as it turned out, but that part does not matter. A few years prior there had been thousands of them, along with all manner of partitions: mazes, ramps, towers, staircases; there were many conveyances: slides, swings and ladders among them; there were even pools of water, loose blocks of wood, felt-lined climbing walls; and of course endless nosh and kibble, along with the occasional odd tub of celery. There were no corridors, Mr. Young thought to himself. This boded very well for his current work. But his enthusiasm for that possibilty was stopped cold as he read a bit further.
Quite accidentally, and several years after these experiments had been abandoned, the English majors had found out about this and about what had happened to these rats. They found out that each and every rat had died very suddenly in the early days of a new experiment, an experiment which had been planned in haste and had advanced with even greater speed. The colleagues at this lab conspired to keep this a secret, and they were successful in this for a short time, but then, on a seemingly warm day which followed close upon an unusually long and cold season of abandoned experiments, the English majors somehow learned of the die-off and of the conspiracy, and they were so angry that they ransacked the building.
This was not the sort of advance that Mr. Young had hoped to learn about when he paid his occasional visits the library, but now that he had read about it, he had no choice but to confront it. Of course it was immediately unclear to the colleagues on the other side of the world why their rats had all died, and why so suddenly, but because these colleagues knew that their majors would ransack the building if word got out, they and the groups who had domain over all of the lab buildings in this part of the world conspired to keep the die-off a secret for as long as they could. And so the reasons for the die-off were not studied and no colleagues from any other labs could assist with this, since they did not know that it had even happened. But after the lab was ransacked and the secret could no longer be kept, other colleagues from around the world and the groups who had domain over their labs realized the problem with secrets, and so a cautious few of them began to make revelations and to review old experiments. They had barely gotten started when the answer became obvious: the rats had ingested lots and lots of pesticides, a new kind of chemical that had been studied only cursorily and that was often carelessly overapplied to food crops.
Of course Mr. Young's rats get the bulk of their nourishment from the kibble and a tiny supplementation from the nosh. This is plenty of nourishment for the rats, and it is very safe for them to eat it, but as with any creature whose eyes are bigger than its stomach, more kibble goes into the rats than comes out, and so it is necessary for rats, every so often, to eat something that will clear them out but without causing them to become obese. This is why some colleagues would chop up a stick of celery, once in a while, and dump it in the trough where the kibble usually goes. And celery is precisely what the English majors have too much of, and it is precisely the crop they offer to Mr. Young almost every time he enters or exits the lab building. And celery is precisely what was fed to one of the ill-fated rat colonies from one somewhat distant part of the world on an ill-fated day several years prior.
Really Mr. Young has had a celery problem for a long time, a very serious one; he just did not know about it because, fortunately for him, and for the rats, and indeed for the majors too, it just so happens that none of the celery sold at the nearest market has been sprayed with the wrong amount of the wrong thing. But that is little consolation. After all, it is not Mr. Young who grows and sprays the celery, nor is it the rats, nor the majors: it is people from some other part of the wider world, people that no one in the lab or in the garden will ever meet, people living on a patch of ground that no colleagues or majors will ever visit; indeed, some colleagues refuse to visit or even to think about these people and this place, since so few of the assembled young seem to come from there.
The majors are in no better stead, really, when it comes to how they feel, although they too know almost nothing of the objects to which those feelings attach. They know even less than do the colleagues, and yet their entire project takes its cue from something they do claim to know, namely that people in this part of the world have begun applying pesticides to their crops. But almost immediately the majors too have a celery problem, the perfect inverse of Mr. Young's, and one that they too failed to anticipate. They had not talked to anyone from across the river about which vegetables they really needed and wanted. Of course this would not have dissuaded the majors in the least. Any rat can see that they made the garden for themselves; they did not really make it for the people across the river or out in the wider world. But that part will be obvious by the end of the story, so there is nothing more to say about it right now.
On top of all of this, Mr. Young has a second celery problem nested within the first one, in that the English majors cannot be allowed to find out what he really needs the celery for. The majors may not ransack the lab, but they would be upset enough to do so, and that would be a new kind of problem for Mr. Young, right on his doorstep, a problem which he does not need and knows not how to solve. Of course if pesticides had never been invented Mr. Young would not have needed to dissimulate in the manner of a colleague who has experienced a die-off. He would not need to dissimulate in advance of a die-off happening, the same as if it had happened months or years prior. He would not need to try to prevent something by behaving as if it had already happened. Certainly he would not have to worry that certain among the majors might think they just know what he is thinking and feeling, when in fact they can know only about his bodily comportment and cannot know what is in his soul.
Really no other creature would ever be able to tell, just by observation, that Mr. Young actually is trying very hard to protect the rats from harm. To learn this, it would be necessary to confine Mr. Young to some tiny enclosure and to give him only this problem to think about. Two corridors would be needed, but just one problem, a single problem for them to share. Any more or less than this and the results of the experiment would not be clear. If there are a dozen corridors and a hundred problems then no human being can really learn anything useful about another. If they keep building more corridors and creating more problems, thinking that some piece of learning must emerge from this eventually, they will succeed only in destroying themselves, and they will not learn anything along the way. If they are born into a world that is already built up and full of problems, each one will insist that they can think experiments into existence, along ideal lines, each and every time they need to know something about a member of their species; but really they have just failed to notice the other ten corridors and have ignored ninety-nine of the problems.
And if it was revealed, somehow, that the rats were still alive and that Mr. Young was in fact trying to keep them healthy and alive for as long as possible, that would lead only to further misunderstanding. No creature, or at least no human being, would be able to think its way from here to the truth. They could never guess that Mr. Young cares hardly at all about the suffering of creatures, or about nourishment, or about pollution. Such a thinking creature would be further from the truth, actually, than if nothing had been revealed to them. Of course Mr. Young has put himself in some danger to protect the rats, and not for the first time. He was not the type to worry too much about the problem of suffering, however. It was more that he cared a great deal about human advance, and he cared about human advance because he felt capable of making it, and he cared about this capability of his because this is why certain people he approves of also approve of him in return. The advance must not merely be made, it must also be consolidated; and then people will say that it was made by a man named Young.
In species such as humans, a working level of narcissism is inseparable from a basic sense of self-worth. And so, if you took a blind and dumb organism and gave it a self-consciousness and a name, if you made it stand out of nature and know consciously that it was unique, then already you would have narcissism. It takes only one name, really, but one of something is never enough for a human being. They can bear as many as four or five names, actually, but all the hyphens in the world would not help them to notice what has happened to them by that time. It is at least easier for them to notice this in other creatures than to notice it in themselves, but even this is never assured. So it is that the majors, even, would have especial difficulty putting together just what Mr. Young is up to, even if they knew exactly what he needs the celery for and how urgently he needs it. He is clearly up to something, they would say, but they will not be able to figure out what it is. Of course the worldly-wise ones will just know what it is, and they too will be wrong, just wrong. Merely wrong and not half right. They are just human beings, after all. All they can do is travel in circles. All think they are on the straight and narrow, but in fact they travel in a circular pattern along a spiral path. That is why this species of home-dwellers ends up a bit further from home with each round trip. This is no problem at all, really, except that they do not realize it, nor do they understand why it is happening, nor that it is always happening, nor what to do about it. And it is quite possible for them to learn all of this, but it is not something that very many of them enjoy. They do not want any more problems than they already have. They more look forward to building corridors and planting celery. These sorts of diversions are the only true circles along which a human being may travel. Celery either sprouts or it does not. It is a circular problem, which is to say: a problem that forces humans actually to travel along the path they think they are already on. Still, celery is a problem. It is no kind of solution. If humans begin growing celery as a solution to their other problems, then they will begin to spiral, and they will end with the surplus becoming a worse problem than the ones from which they have tried to escape. That is the whole human thing right there.
In a world without pesticides, celery plants would be smaller and it would be more work to cultivate them, certainly, but all of that is of no consequence to a colleague who has unwittingly committed a die-off, nor to the unfortunate rats who have met a bad end. In any case Mr. Young no longer lives in such a world, nor does he live in a world where it is the least bit strange to entrust your very life and health to people and places you refuse to visit yourself. But there are people growing crops right on his doorstep, people whom he would refuse to visit but cannot avoid, and there is a garden right outside of his lab building with a sign proclaiming, loudly, that no pesticides will ever be applied there; and more celery is grown in this garden than anyone can ever seem to use, and so Mr. Young decides to start accepting the celery somewhat more often when the majors offer it to him, and he is sure to be carrying a jar of peanut butter or a bottle of salad dressing in his tote bag at all times. If some major suspects that the celery is not destined for Mr. Young himself but rather for some other creature, he will open the tote and show them what is inside of it; he will tell this major that he so looks forward to his celery snacks, and that he always has some topping in his tote. And if a colleague notices Mr. Young's rigidity and flightiness and thereby becomes suspicious that Mr. Young has committed a die-off, Mr. Young will allow that colleague to know the real reason he is being so very careful on his way into and out of the lab building each day, and that colleague will understand that if Mr. Young's behavior has changed just this noticeably then what he is saying is most likely to be true. Of course such items of business used to be handled in the courtyard, but now the courtyard is the only place such things cannot be broached. Or they would be handled in the library, but now the library has been expanded beyond the horizon, to where handling some item in this fashion is as good as neglecting to handle it at all. The situation in the labs is now changing faster than the colleagues can adapt to it, and so the item will be handled in the best and only possible manner; that is, reactively, after something has already begun to go wrong.
Of course the English majors did not grow celery at all when they first made their garden. Back then they grew mostly potatoes, beets, and cabbage. Occasionally some major, on their own plot, would plant something else just to see if it would grow, and so from time to time there would be tomatoes or collards or squash, but by the next season that major would have left its lab and returned to its home, and the remaining majors, although they did not mind tomatoes or collards and squash, did not ever think about these unless someone had placed one under their noses, and so these crops would simply be forgotten until some incoming major would declare to the others that this is what they intended to plant.
The majors far spent more time tending their own plots than tending the community plot, although their initial plan was something of the reverse. This made no difference, however, because almost everything that anyone ever planted in the garden sprouted and grew into something edible and nutritious. Neither the majors nor the colleagues nor anyone who visited from the wider world knew why this was, or even that it was. Many years hence, some young colleague, who had not been around for the bitter struggle over the courtyard, became friendly with the majors and offered to test the soil, to try to figure out why it is so fertile and to make sure it is not too toxic. The majors immediately took up this offer, since it caused them to realize that the pollutants they themselves refused to spray on the crops could have been in the soil the whole time. And so when this testing finally was done, the majors and the colleagues and the wider world too gained far more knowledge than is contained in a mere soil analysis or in a whole building's worth of rat-running, or even in a runaway library. But this would not happen for many years hence, and it is not really part of Mr. Young's story.
For now all anyone knew was that if you planted something in the garden it was almost certain, at least, that it would sprout and grow into some small morsel of nourishment, and perhaps into some regal monument to nature's bounty. And so a few human beings from the wider world did in fact cross the river to visit to the garden, if they found that they could not nourish themselves, and in the garden they always found something that would at least keep them going, even if it was just alright. They took mostly the potatoes and took only the occasional bunch of beets or head of cabbage. Cabbage does not offer much nourishment anyway, and beets make a terrible mess, but potatoes alone can at least keep a human being alive, if things have come to that. This has been widely known for a long time. If a human being has only potatoes to eat along with plenty of the world's beauty and plenty of communion with conspecifics, that is not really a worse spot to be in than to have access to every crop and to no communion at all.
Humans possess entire libraries full of such wisdom as this, but it is rare to see any humans inside of those libraries and it is rarer yet to see any who are present actually partaking of the wisdom that is stored there. Occasionally a major who has skimmed some of this literature will make a remark along these lines, just so that the other majors will think that they have read all of those books. The others will not actually believe them, but no one ever tells this major that they are not fooling anyone. And the world people, of course, do not see things this way at all, not now, anyway, that they have made their homes in a place where all crops are grown at all times but where nonetheless it is not always possible for all creatures to nourish themselves sufficiently. The world people become very angry if the majors talk to them in this vein, but because they are in such great need of the potatoes and the majors are the ones who have supplied the potatoes, the world people continue to be very friendly with the majors and to supplement their nourishment with potatoes from the garden. The majors of course will never realize just how much they anger the world people, not until much later, when a world person who has majored in English finally releases their anger rather than holding it inside. This will not begin to happen for a long while yet, and when it does it is an especial shock to the majors not only because the world people had only ever been very friendly but because the majors, though they do not actually read very much English literature at all, have read a few things that the world people wrote before crossing the oceans, and in this literature there is much wisdom dispensed on the virtues of continence, the importance of communion, and the folly of gluttony. There are always one or two majors, the ones who spend the most time working in their labs and the least time working in the garden, who pick up on this apparent reversal of world opinion, but they too have only read about it and would not think to look for it right under their noses unless it was already evident.
Something of the same thing happened with the tomatoes, the collards and the squash. With the arrival of a new season arrived an incoming major who grew all of these on their own plot and ended up having plenty enough to share. The world people came and took a few things, but there was much left over. This major had declared early, exactly as their predecessors had, that these were the crops they intended to grow. They declared beforehand, and loudly, that the other majors should be eager to share in the harvest. But now the bounty had arrived, and anytime the other majors asked after this surplus the major would accuse them of fashioning garments from these vegetables rather than eating them. Nobody quite understood if this was a metaphor or if the major really believed that this was what the others were doing. At first it was just one major who believed this, but then the next season an incoming major of the same persuasion but a different color began growing the same crops. They began with the same declaration and ended with the same surplus and the same accusation against the others.
An intelligent rat might expect that the first major and the second major would band together in their common cause, but that is not always how human matters turn out, and it is not how they turned out in this case. Rather, the first major, upon learning of the newcomer, grew very angry and began to insist that these crops should not be grown at all except in the part of the world where they originated, or at least by the people who come from there. Perhaps they should not even be grown on both sides of a river but only on one side, or perhaps on the other side, but never on both sides. The second major responded by pointing out that human beings around the world have near-identical nutritional needs and that there is no reason to neglect these needs simply because a nutritious food originated elsewhere in the world. The first major responded by saying that if people eat food from the other side of the world, this must mean that they are trying to turn themselves the people who come from that part of the world, and that this is not right. The second major disagreed with this too: the majors eat mostly food from the market, not from the garden, and all of this market food is grown by people the majors refuse to have any communion with. It is grown in a part of the world which the majors, though they do not agree on everything, are unanimous in refusing even to visit. Still, the majors had not become like these people just by eating their food. Or so this major thought. Anyway, if people think that is that they are doing, then they must not be very smart; and if onlookers think they see this happening, those onlookers also are very stupid and should leave their labs immediately, for such ideas can have no place in a lab.In the ensuing few seasons disputes of this type quickly engulfed the entire garden in mutual recrimination. One day the first major showed up to the garden wearing a romper made entirely of collards, with a few small tomatoes as ornaments. Eventually someone asked about it, and then the major began shouting that this is how ridiculous all the others look when they eat these things, if the eaters do not come from the right part of the world, if they are not the right kind of people. By this time the leaders in the garden realized that they had all but lost control of their life project and had to take action to preserve it. They knew that the garden was not nearly large enough simply to place the warring factions at a safe remove, and that there already were not enough majors working in the garden to keep up with some basic tasks. This much they realized immediately, back when the trouble first started, back when it seemed unnecessary to do anything about it because it had never happened before. What they learned with each passing season is that these sorts of conflicts were becoming more numerous and more viscious. Something would have to be done, or else the garden would go to seed and the colleagues would assume that it again was theirs.
The garden leaders first thought of growing only vegetables which everyone could agree on. The way things were going it was unclear if any such things existed, but there was one possibility the leaders had previously rejected that they now realized might get everyone to agree. Of course the leaders had not really changed their minds at all. They would reject the idea again if they could, as so many times before; they had welcomed the opportunity to reject it again and again, actually, because it seemed wrong enough that one rejection was not enough. They could not reject it now, however, because it seemed like their only hope for a fragile consensus. And so now they remembered, only because they had been prompted to do so, that there were always a few majors around, the ones who sympathized with the agitators but who were too busy in their labs to get caught up in petty disputes, who were very adamant, if anyone ever asked them, that the garden should be growing only carrots, onions and celery. These majors were always pointing out that majors around the world who used to grow only potatoes, beets and cabbage were increasingly growing carrots, onions and celery instead, and that this had been a very good thing. It had been very good for those majors and for their labs, although there was little clear result as of yet; it was good for no other reason than that the domain groups thought it was good, and when the domain groups are in favor of a lab they tend to make expansions to that lab, much as they once did with the library.
Of course the garden leaders were always a bit taken aback when some undeclared major dared to say the quiet part out loud, but in the end they had to confess, if only to themselves, that they too desired expansion and that they could not think of any other way to achieve it but this. It was a solution, but it was not a good one. Nobody can live on these three crops alone as well as one can live on only potatoes, and there were a few world people on the other side of the river who were relying on major potatoes just to nourish themselves. The garden was made for these people. It was not made so that the majors could expand their labs. But the small group of majors who were always proposing this most drastic change were actually the ones who spent the least time working in the garden. They spent all day and night studying English, and they worked in the garden only during certain seasons. They thought that English, and not gardening, is the kind of thing that labs are for. They did not really want to work in the garden at all, if they could help it; that was not why they had left their homes, and their home people would not consider this an advance anyway. That was one human problem they had to confront, but there was another whose solution was contrary to that of the first; for, in fact, these majors could not help working in the garden, because all of the other majors thought differently than they did: the others all thought that lab work was not very important, and that gardens were very important. This cohort of others was not very smart, but they just so happened to be right about this part. Sort of. And the committed majors could see that this cohort was right, or at least that they were not wrong, as humans caught in such a bind like to say. The committed ones certainly did not like being wrong. They could not even broach the possibility, really. They were not the kind of people who were wrong about this kind of problem. At the same time, they were already committed, about which they felt correct, and they felt it was incorrect for all of these other majors to descend upon a lab, really to become the lab, to assume domain over it, if they did not want to work in the lab, and indeed, if they actually thought that labs should not work at all. The committed majors often thought to themselves that undeclared cohorts should not work in labs, and that committed students of English should not get their hands dirty. They also did not like being wrong, however, and they could see that this thought, as soon as they had it, was not quite correct. If they worked in Mr. Young's lab they would realize too that this thought belongs to someone who is in a bad situation; it does not belong to a bad person. If they were students of behavior they would be somewhat more at ease, enough at least to have a chance at finding the courage to bow out of the garden, and to understand, even if no one around them did, that this was best for the garden too, and not only for them, for their commitment, and for the other majors who worked there. But because the cohort of others was very large, and because they really controlled the lab as well as the garden, the committed majors felt obligated to show up at the garden every now and then. They would be judged regardless, both for their commitment and for their lack of commitment. A human being trapped in that kind of maze can never find its way out.
But now there really were majors wearing the crops rather than eating them or giving them away to people who would eat them, and so the tables had turned. This was very nearly the excuse the committed majors had been looking for the whole time. Now no one could have blamed them for leaving the garden and never returning. The problem for the committed majors, however, is that they are human beings, just like the garden leaders, and they can see everything that the garden leaders see. They behold it from the other side of the river, so to speak, but it is as impossible to overlook as a floating city. These majors have the greatest courage of their convictions in the entire garden, though they are outnumbered, and they realize that their solution, the one that the leaders have always rejected before, was the most likely to accepted even though it was not the best, and that usually this is the kind of solution that prevails when a group of human beings finds themselves in a situation they do not really know how to deal with. And so that is how the majors turned to growing celery, along with carrots and onions.
What the garden leaders did not realize is that these majors' onions were not yellow or white, and their carrots were not orange. There was only one kind of celery that anyone in the garden had ever heard of, so that part was straightforward, but the other two crops did not look very much like what everyone thought they had agreed upon. These veggies were every imaginable color and grew to many unusual shapes and sizes. If there was a basket of carrots and onions sitting on the garden path it was not always easy to tell which was which; it was not always easy to imagine these bizarre artifacts serving in the same fixed capacity as an orange carrot or yellow onion had served for thousand of years prior. A few majors had tried this out and found that it was possible to do but that it took a lot of extra work and a kind of imagination that not everyone possesses, so much that it was not worth the trouble, not when there was a market right down the street when conventional carrots and onions were sold for very cheap, along with all the other vegetables which used to be grown in the garden before the agitators demanded rules against this.
It was not long before the world people stopped coming to the garden, before no major dared propose that any other crops be grown, and before vegetables piled up for which few people anywhere could have any use. The majors had plenty of all three crops but were embarrased to offer the carrots and the onions to anyone for fear that people would not even know what they were being offered. They offered the celery, at least, to the lab colleagues because it was recognizable and would not perplex anyone. That is how the celery that the English majors grew in their community garden, the garden that used to be a courtyard, found its way into the kibble trough of some unsuspecting rodents, sometime in 1935 or 1936, around the same time that a new experiment was launched and a new kind of rat emerged.
The rats, intelligent and self-reflexive as they are, of course are blissfully ignorant of all of this human commotion. They have no inkling of the human drama unfolding right on their doorstep, though they have a rudimentary knowledge of certain things that lie across an ocean or a galaxy. They do not control the hallway, the upstairs, or the outside, and do not even know of its existence. They control nothing that lies across a continent or an ocean, though they do know of some of it. They cannot do anything about any of this, and yet they are conscious of it and enmeshed in it. Humans in particular will find the following example apt: when the rats defecate the feces are removed to the hallway, or to who-knows-where after passing in and through hallway. The rats are aware of this too and feel vaguely uneasy at the thought that someone somewhere else might be suffering these vast piles of rat feces so that they, the rats, do not have to. But for now this merely intensifies their progressive meliorism and provides it with a rationalization that is independent of their parasocial chumship with Mr. Young. The problem of the feces, like the problem of the doors, first seemed like an entirely discrete problem, but the rats are beginning to realize that everything is connected. Somehow. It is all a bit scary, but the rats have enough agency to find solace. It is comforting to think that if the problem of the doors could be solved this would ever so slightly contribute to the building of a better world. That is the kind of thing that keeps self-reflexive creatures going.
The rats dwell on such existential questions only in occasional idle moments, but they do dwell on them. As presently confined there is no obvious way to for them to dispose of their own feces, but they begin to wish that there was. They have limited intelligence but great worldliness, and so they can see that in some abstract sense, taking responsibility for one's own feces frees someone else of a trouble which indeed should not be theirs to bear. The rats, then, have become naive believers in two things which no single human seems able to believe at the same time: they believe in abolishing class, at least in some limited domain; and they believe in a radical kind of individual responsibility. But because of their confinement rather than in spite of it, they arrive at this latter belief not as individualists (paradoxically) but rather as communitarians. And because the rats are aware that they are the ones constantly defecating while someone else is tasked with sending the feces away into the light, they realize that it is possible (if unlikely) that whoever is in charge of the lights might actually be in the same position as they are. This light creature may wish them no ill will but may not be able to know how the lights are impacting every other corner of the room, to say nothing of the wider world. Of course the creature may be all knowing and the problem of the lights could be beyond even Mr. Young's comprehension. The rats are just smart enough to think of that, and also to realize that they would not be able to do anything about it.
Because the rats have self-reflexivity, and because they have learned a little bit about the world, they are able to tie certain ideas together in neat little packages, sort of like human beings do but not quite as cleverly. And so the rats realize that, ideally, the light creature, presuming there is one, could hypothetically agree to dim the lights, just so, during Mr. Young's working hours; the rats, in exchange, could agree to take custody of their own feces; and then they could finally get on with the door problem, or so they think. Of course the rats do not yet have a solution to the feces problem, and they are just smart enough to see that the total lack of obvious solutions combined with the grave consequences of ever-mounting refuse make this a much scarier problem than the others. It is scarier even than the possibility of a malign light creature, simply because feces are known to be a real problem whereas light creatures are not. But anyway, the light problem has prompted a few of the rats to consider all of this transactionally, and many others quickly grasp the concept. The rats are self-aware and self-reflexive, and so they have a naive transactional culture of back-scratching, literally and otherwise, within the confines of their intelligence. The lack of a solution to the feces problem limits their clout in a hypothetical transaction with the light creature, a hypothetical that is very unlikely to arise in reality; and anyway, it is dubious to agree to take custody of the feces with no existing solution to the problem this creates. Hence no transactions in feces seem likely to materialize in reality. And yet this hypothetical is discussed eagerly and passionately, albeit without advancing much at all.
The rats are not quite smart enough to anticipate that the solution to the feces problem could merely become a new confounder of the door problem. Only Mr. Young is that smart, and he is friendly with the rats but he cannot yet communicate with them in the strictest human sense of the term. This turn of events would be devastating, of course. Any peripeteia of the doors would have a poignance and salience to intensify the sting of any purely practical problems that had been created by this blunder, such that the stinging is remembered forever and the problems mostly ignored or repressed. The rats would learn the hard lesson that a little bit of knowledge is dangerous; but a little bit of knowledge is all they have, it is even fun to play around with it, they do not really thirst for any more of it, and this is part of what allows them to be content with their lives despite also being aware of their extreme confinement. In the wake of a peripeteia there would be far less discussion of the light problem and the door problem, certainly, since this would only remind the rats of their darkest hour. What discussion there would still be would not be as spirited as before, and this would deprive the rats of a major vehicle of communion upon which they have come to rely, without realizing just how or how much they rely on it. These rats are becoming worldly-wise indeed, but they are not gaining any new possibilities for agency.
Fortunately for everyone, the rats do conclude, in the end, that they simply cannot count on being able to solve the feces problem sometime in the future, given that they presently have no inkling whatsoever as to how this could be done; hence they ought not transact on this basis to coax any concessions out of the light creature, should the creature exist, and should it demand other severe conditions that they also cannot meet. This is among the happiest times yet in the rat enclosure, because a foreseeable disaster has simply been taken off the table. There is much less to worry about today than there was yesterday. There is, of course, a second, unforeseeable disaster, the peripeteia of the doors, which never comes to pass. It would have killed them even more slowly and excrutiatingly than the feces problem, though they would have been less aware that things were quite this dire until it became too obvious to deny towards the very end. The rats cannot know so, but in fact they have averted two disasters rather than just one. Such is the fragility of self-reflexive life, even in a rat enclosure inside of a closely monitored laboratory.
For now, the rats' only aching existential need is the need to be conferred some tiny but irreducible role in some cosmic matter. They are mildly saddened, then, when they realize that they do not have the one they thought they had, that they simply cannot take this role vis-a-vis their buddy Mr. Young and his meliorist quest for knowledge. They are saddened when they realize that they simply cannot become involved in the questions of the lights and the room arrangement without shattering their entire newfound consciousness. They are saddened, certainly, but not devastated. They do not yet need to discover therapy or pharmaceuticals. The simplicity of their lives is precisely what enables them intuitively to arrive at things that human intellectuals must pursue doggedly for entire lifetimes. The dictum that "freedom is the recognition of necessity" is self-evident to them.
The rats begin to realize, then, because and not in spite of the fact that their consciousness is a product of their confinement, that they cannot really entertain such ideas as gaining control of the lights, not even if this indeed seems possible in whatever way, and not even if their intervention actually succeeds in solving the problem of the doors. The rats realize that they are as good as dead if they advance this far. They realize that gods can take in the whole of creation because they alone can make sense of it; but as soon as a creature lifts his nose from the ground and starts sniffing at eternal problems, that creature is in trouble.
The rats realize, therefore, that the doors-and-lights problem is simply beyond them. That is an unhappy thought to a human being, but to a recently self-aware rat colony it is freedom borne of accepting limits. For human beings the way of rat-life is terrifying, self-awareness or not, because for human beings projection is the flipside of empathy. Human beings are imprisoned by their own capacities for social feeling. Social feeling blinds human beings to much more than it reveals, though it gives the sensation of revealing all. This goes too for the human beings who pass through the lab, though they are playful and generous enough, also harbor an unconscious contempt for the rats that the rats are not even capable of developing or feeling for any living creature, not even for whichever creature it is who controls the lights or hauls the feces. The confinement of the rats determines their consciousness. This is not the worst thing. The same mechanism operates on humans, but humans have culture, and so they have managed to peel back most of the limits within which they previously lived for millennia. Their environment then has very different effects on their cognition and behavior. Intelligence and advancing knowledge make this possible; but to call this endeavor "smart" might be going a bit too far.
Though the rats have become naive self-aware worldly-wise progressive meliorists with an individualist-communitarian streak, their behavior suggests that still, even now, they desire little more than the secure, mundane existence of the lab and periodic communion with their conspecifics. Mr. Young has noticed this quietism of the rats, alongside their occasional remarkable bursts of activity, but he remains in the same unwitting bind as before. At least he is making progress in retrofitting the lab and building some new enclosures.
The rats are now advancing, and this is both good and bad. They quickly emerge from the collective existential crisis of gaining self-awareness and begin to contrive an elemental culture into which young rats are initiated. They sooth new crises with genteel idiomatic expressions about doors, lights, food and feces. To be sure, a few rats do not enjoy the sayings about feces: these tend to be the young rats whose forebears were nearly alone, in the early days of the experiment, in insisting upon taking custody of the feces, upon the existence of the light creature, and upon hard bargaining with Him over the resolution of the hypothetical light-feces problem. It is said that a few of these old rats "coudn't find the nosh if it was behind the third door." Nobody liked it when Mr. Young would add chemicals to the food, but sometimes when this happened the old rats would defecate in the kibble trough just to prove a point, and then nobody could eat until the assistants made their rounds the next morning. But the old rats themselves did find enough food, it would seem, enough at least to survive the earliest days of the experiment, which were not as pleasant as latter days. And the old rats certainly ate enough, somehow, to father enormous broods of young, several large litters at a time, many times over for nearly their entire lives. This must have made Mr. Young very happy, or perhaps merely saved him some unpleasant errands. But in any event, the ongoing stigma surrounding the old rats' absolute belief in the light creature and their avowed willingess to choke to death on their own feces, which was so strong as to suggest that they actually desired it, this is the only serious social problem the rats have ever had. The stigma has never entirely lifted from a few of the light lineages and it probably never will. These are the young rats who now must defend themselves against even playful barbs by lashing out. These are the young rats who point out to others that feces stink, as if all the other creatures could not tell for themselves; and when they arrive at middle-age, these are the rats who can often be seen declaring to no one in particular that the mere thought of the whole rat colony suffocating to death and leaving good Mr. Young's corridor full of feces and cadavers is a flatly obscene thought and should not be joked about or invoked to sooth the young. That is not the real reason they object to the expressions about feces, but it is the reason they offer. Everyone understands this and no one is too upset about it. With time it is discussed more openly and the rats thereby recover some of the communion they once lost when the issue was too delicate for mere recreational banter. Anyway, every rat, young and old, understands these expressions so intuitively that to speak this way barely amounts to referring to feces at all. The rats are not quite smart enough to understand why this should be, but they can sense it intuitively, and this in itself this brings far more jovial repartee than nagging moralism, the more so with every passing year.
And so, on the whole, things are still just fine with the rats. There still is just enough earthly heroism to be had within their confinement that the rats are reasonably content with life. They do wish that they could be more helpful to Mr. Young, and to the world, but they are worldly-wise enough now to realize that he will be okay. They cannot read his research papers, nor do they so much as possess the concept of a research paper, but they have learned that he is a capable and intelligent man who can look after himself well enough, even if none of his fellows ever cite his publications or confer upon him the recognition he deserves. And as for the world, the world can take care of itself. They are confined from it anyway, and so the rats realize that there is no sense to joining vicariously in someone else's problems if they cannot possibly share in the eventual solutions. There is no sense in importing all the world's ugliness and none of its beauty, no sense in entering the corridor, from which they may not return, if this is merely done for the benefit of creatures they will never lay their own eyes on, and certainly not if there is, against all odds, no nosh in the plates that day. The rats do not possess delicate literary concepts like allegory or metonymy, but even without such concepts, still it seems to them, in hindsight, that this uneven bargain, the corridor with no nosh, has something important in common with the problem of the doors and the lights. If the old rats and their enormous broods had been right about the light creature, the whole colony would have suffocated on their own feces long ago; whereas if the light creature had existed but the old rats had not, then surely the rats and the light creature could have worked things out to everyone's contentment.
The rats, then, have become worldly-wise existentialists too. They carry certain burdens that rats should not have to carry, yet their hierarchy of needs still has not been tipped on its side, as was done for humans long ago when the first problem of surplus was confronted. Even now, they still have the right amount of the right quality in the right time and the right place for the right purpose. Though they are only rats, they are confident enough not only in Mr. Young's wherewithal but in their own, and they will be content enough to live within the circumstances they have been dealt if only they do not gain too much knowledge of everything else that goes on in the world. There is no danger of them intellectually learning much more than they already know; but of course life has a way of placing certain things right under the nose and shoving others straight up the behind. And anyway, the rats have long known that someone else controls the lights and that the lights, in at least a small way, control them. And here in the question of control, though these self-aware rats have made a synthesis of progressive meliorism, conservative realism, and communitarian social feeling, though they have made a synthesis that few humans ever have been able to make, here in the existential problem of control, finally, is something that a worldly-wise rat, even, cannot quite abide. Things may still be okay for a long while yet, but the rats now have another new problem to confront. The problem of new problems is becoming more urgent by the day, although hardly anything about life in the enclosure seems ever, actually, to have changed.
And so, finally, the rats arrive at their first true raising of consciousness since the advent of self-reflexivity. They now understand that their world is interconnected but not responsive, and that fragility is connectivity without responsiveness. These worldly-wise rats do not cease to live or cease to enjoy the happy moments. They do not cease to commune over the old problems, to bat around these problems, to discuss them eagerly, to joke and laugh about them, to intellectually develop certain underdiscussed aspects of them, to frame new aspects of life metaphorically in terms of the old problems. These are not the same rats who walked the primordial earth, but they at least are the same rats they have been ever since the advent of self-reflexivity and the time of learning. Now, however, they do cease, once and for all, to be the progressive meliorists that the ever-advancing experiment demanded they become. The rats can no longer sustain progressive meliorism after realizing that to be alive is to be responsive to the world, and yet it is far too much to ask in turn that the entire world to be responsive to them. As long as they remain confined to their enclosure, they cannot be accountable to continents and oceans they have only heard about, no matter who says they must or how forcefully they say it. If the assistants who haul the feces turned out to be dumping them in the ocean, or on the doorstep of some other creature's home, there is nothing the rats can reasonably do about this; there is only the thoroughly unreasonable solution of hoarding the feces until the enclosure is full to the ceiling with refuse and corpses.
The rats possess neither a human level of empathy nor any advanced reflexive sciences, but they have gained a naive understanding of reciprocity, developed through the lens of the feces problem. They have discovered the problem of self-determination by way of the problem of reciprocity, and not, as with humans, the other way around; and this not in spite of their confinement but because of it. Human beings are capable of broad and deep learning, but their eyes are bigger than their stomachs. Once human beings have seen and learned a certain amount about the entire world they begin to think that this entire world might be brought under their domain, that they might connect every part of the world with every other part and then finally, sometime, connect themselves to all of it at once. Most of them know the practical limits of their own capacity for control, but even they remain blind to the ways of connectivity. Though humans have developed advanced sciences and an excellent intellectual understanding of connectivity, they nonetheless persist in behaving as if connectivity is merely arithmetic. They think that they can bring the entire world under their control if only it could be channeled through a narrow enough conduit. There is an article entitled "More Is Different," which many, many humans have read. They need read only the title, actually, and need not bother with anything beyond that. It is a very good article, but although it was written well and read widely, it has not changed anything at all about the humans, who often do not read beyond the titles of things and can quite well miss the point of an article even if the entire point is contained in the title.
And so the standard human solution to the feces problem is to attempt to break out of the enclosure at all costs, to dispose of the unfortunate Mr. Young, to barter hard with the light creature, in thought if not in reality, and to simply assume (without a shred of justification) that the problem of the feces will be solved bye the bye. A human confined among the rats would simply assume that anything lying afield of the lab will be understandable more or less in the same terms as the world within it, and this makes it seem reasonable to attempt an advance. Human beings have recapitulated this fallacy with each successive expansion of their domain over the universe, from the individual to the community level on up to entire continents and oceans, entire populations of unsuspecting creatures, and into outer space. Human beings prefer to learn about outer space and to ignore whatever is right under their noses or on their doorstep. To be certain that a human being will learn, the lesson must not be placed under its nose but rather shoved up its behind, and human beings often do not like the former feeling. It is a feeling they are able to enjoy only when they believe they are in complete control of it themselves, and they do not enjoy it at all otherwise; and so they also use their advancing domain over the universe to ensure, to the extent possible, that no other creature is allowed to shove anything up there unless this is to be done purely for sport. It is not to be done for any other reason, and certainly not for purposes of learning. Human beings have to ask themselves permission before they are able to learn something, and this is one reason they do not learn half as much as they are able. Human beings are nature's preeminent learners, in fact, but they are most adept of all at preventing themselves from learning things.
And so most human beings, if they had been confined with the rats, would by now have tried or died trying to escape. Moreover, if there was a human being stuck in there who was eventually invited to leave, to escape, and stayed put anyway, most of the other human beings would find this behavior pathological. But these normal human beings already contradict themselves in this judgment, for if a human will die trying to escape untenable circumstances, then a human who neglects to escape when escape is offered to them must not be in such untenable circumstances after all. They must be at home in there, somehow or other. This also is not an absolute assumption. There are a thousand different ways it can be wrong. But that is the case with all such assumptions as human beings make when they try to read each others' minds. Cognition and behavior are two of the most substantial human problems, and so they are discussed passionately, investigated empirically, remolded into homely metaphors, and distorted into repressive ideologies. They comprise both fertile ground for humor and territory unfit for humor. They are deployed offensively against dissenters and defensively on behalf of allies. Humans enjoy few things more than thinking about thinking, and so the problem of cognition and the problem of behavior are always being worked over. Humans cannot even agree, or not always, whether these really are two problems or just one; many humans are unsure where the one stops and the other begins. And so there is much disagreement about this and occasionally even some violence. But on the whole it is just one more thing for human beings to enjoy learning about, or to enjoy not learning about, depending on the human being in question.
The rats, of course, do not have explicit concepts of things like cognition and behavior, and they do not have humanlike concepts of the finite and the infinite. The rats would not understand that human creatures can discover the boundaries of the universe itself but can lose sight of the boundaries between their insides and outsides, nor that the human rage towards expansion therefore threatens to go on forever and to bring far more suffering than progress. The rats do not know this much about the world and they are not quite intelligent enough to comprehend things of this nature, but because they are confined they have a shorter distance to travel in order to think their way out of the expansionist fallacy. The rats merely need to understand that they have no choice, as living creatures, to respond to the world beyond the enclosure and that, contrarily, this world does not (indeed cannot) respond to them. And so the rats land on the opposite solution to this problem as a human being would land on: they see that some retrenchment from connectivity would actually enhance their little patch of ground; this as opposed to the human way of seeking advances in connectivity until connectivity is transfigured into something incomprehensible and uncontrollable. The human rage for control ends in a total loss of control. The rats do not have concepts of paradox or irony, except perhaps naively in a few highly anomalous situations, but for now they do not need to have them.
The rats do understand that they do not have a solution to the problem of connectivity, and that this is a more general problem of which the problem of the feces is just one part. They have not forgotten that the problem of the feces was identified a very long time ago now, that it is well undertood, and yet they still would not know where to start in devising solution. So, they do not know exactly what to do next, but they have identified a new problem and they have some high-quality collective experience with the problem of problems. And things are still alright with the rats, even though the rats understand what a problem is and understand too that they have never solved a single problem. Nonetheless, things are okay and they will be okay for a long while.
These worldly-wise rats, then, can no longer sustain their naive progressive meliorism. They are gentle creatures who lack the spite to become radicalized or the vanity to become moderates. And so they become populists.
In human terms this is a true raising of consciousness, certainly, but for the rats, for now, it is merely the stuff of life. For now the problem of connectivity is just another problem to be thought through, worked up, schemed about, brooded over, humorized and metonymized. And so things are okay for the rats. It would be unwise to try to say too much more about that aspect of things than has already been said, and so there is not much more to be said. And things cannot stay the same forever, of course, but they will stay like this for a while, and that is alright. Things are alright for the rats, and for things to be merely alright is very good indeed.
NOTES
" . . . any creature whose eyes are bigger than its stomach . . . "
See 0-2, "Eye-Stomach Dualism."
" . . . as good as dead . . . "
Ernest Becker, quoted in 0-4.
" . . . gods can take in the whole of creation . . . "
Becker, The Denial of Death, p. 178.
" . . . the right amount of the right quality . . . "
Lewis Mumford, Art and Technics, p. 110.
" . . . connectivity without responsiveness . . . "
Yaneer Bar-Yam, private correspondence. Quoted in Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile, p. 458.
" . . . More Is Different . . . "
The title of an article by P.W. Anderson.
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