On Monkeys, Machines, and Mothers

ON MONKEYS, MACHINES, AND MOTHERS ROBERT CANCRO, M.D., Med.D.Sc* Technology has suffered the inverse fate of religious leaders in that it has gone through a cycle of deification and subsequent vilification. If one wishes to join with "idealistic" youths on this month's ramparts , he will attack technology as an evil perpetrated by avaricious capitalists on the gentle masses. As attractive as this fantasy may be, it impinges on reality in only a minimal fashion, since the benefits that technology has brought to the vast majority of the people are obvious. Many of its severest critics would not be alive today to denounce technology but for its benefits. Yet, many of us share a concern over some of the negative consequences of technology. My personal emphasis is on the relationships between technology and a variety of social institutions which help man to adapt psychologically to the environment. These relationships are multiple, complex, and changing. I shall, for the sake of brevity and focus, omit certain important considerations so as to restrict my comments to issues relevant to a technologically advanced Western society. I shall attempt to delineate certain relationships between technology and the evolution of a particular social institution—the family. The family is being used as an illustrative, rather than exclusive, example of the intimate relationship between the development of technology and social structures . Primitive forms of technology are almost certainly as old as man. It is impossible to set a precise date for the beginning of more advanced forms, but it is fair to say that the total advancement in technology up until 10,000 years ago was minimal. This is not meant to deprecate early man's efforts but, rather, to recognize the slow and gradual evolution of the capacity to alter and control the environ- * Department of Psychiatry, University of Connecticut Health Center, 2 Holcomb Street, Hartford, Connecticut 06112. 312 I Robert Cancro · Monkeys, Machines, and Mothers ment. Undoubtedly, the relative harshness of the environment, for example, during the ice ages, contributed to the slow rate of early man's acquisition of the necessary capabilities. He also had to go beyond accidental discovery to conscious control over a process. There is an enormous difference between assigning certain selected individuals to guard a fire fortuitously made by lightning and developing a technology that permits one to build a fire at will. In more recent millennia, especially since the Bronze Age, man has begun a more rapid development of his technological capacities. Many biologists believe that man has not changed his inherent physical and mental endowment in any fundamental manner over the last 100,000 years. Many physical anthropologists believe that if a Late Stone Age man were magically to appear today, he would be indistinguishable from any other short man. While these theoretical positions are debatable and cannot be tested directly, there is no doubt that Cro-Magnon man buried his dead much as we do and that his implements fit our hands. Perhaps the most telling arguments for the basic similarity are that despite the rigors of early man's life he felt the need to create art on the walls of his caves and that this art moves our emotions today. Man is a creature who simultaneously differs greatly and not greatly from other species. Man is not a quasi-divine, biologically unprecedented entity that is far removed from the other organisms with which he shares this planet. Rather, he is a directly related evolutionary form. We must recognize the relatedness in terms of a common ancestry between man and all other earth creatures. In addition to this common evolutionary history, there is an interdependence between all forms of life that has only recently begun to be appreciated by the average scientist and, to a lesser extent, by the average citizen. In population terms, man's primary function in the biosphere —as with all living matter—is to perpetuate his species and thereby contribute to the maintenance of the stability of the total system. Very simple organisms such as paramecia are able to care for themselves at the moment of birth. Even quite complex systems such as certain species of mammals produce...