The Long Childhood

The Long Childhood Jacob Bronowski 1begin this last essay in Iceland because it is the seat of the oldest democracy in Northern Europe. In the natural amphitheatre of Thingvellir, where there were never any buildings, the Allthing of Iceland (the whole community of the Norsemen of Iceland) met each year to make laws and to receive them. And this began about AD 900, before Christianity arrived, at a time when China was a great empire, and Europe was the spoil of princelings and robber barons. That is a remarkable beginning to democracy. But there issomethingmore remarkable about this misty, inclement site. It was chosen because the farmer who had owned it had killed, not another farmer but a slave, and had been outlawed. Justice was seldom so even-handed in slave-owning cultures. Yet justice is a universal of all cultures. It is a tightrope that man walks, between his desire to fulfilhis wishes,and his acknowledgement of social responsibility. No animal is faced with this dilemma: an animal is either social or solitary. Man alone aspires to be both in one,a socialsolitary. And to me that is a unique biological feature. That is the kind of problem that engages me in my work on human specificity, and that I want to discuss. It is something of a shock to think that justice is part of the biological equipment of man. And yet it is exactly that thought which took me out of physics into biology,and that has taught me since that a man’s life, a man’s home, is a proper place in which to study his biological uniqueness. It is natural that by tradition biology is thought of in a different way: that the likeness between man and the animals is what dominates it. Back before the year AD 200 the great classic author of antiquity in medicine, Claudius Galen, studied, for example, the forearm in man. How did he study it? By dissecting the forearm in a Barbary ape. That is how you have to begin, necessarily using the evidence of the animals, long before the theory of evolution comes to justify the analogy. And to this day the wonderful From J. Bronowski, The Ascenr ofMan (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973)Chapter 13, pp. 41 1439. Copyright@ EstateofJacob Bronowski. Reprintedby Dermission. work on animal behaviour by Konrad Lorenz naturally makes us seek for likeness between the duck and the tiger and man; or B. F.Skinner’s psychological work on pigeons and rats. They tell us something about man. But they cannot tell us everything. There must be something unique about man because otherwise, evidently, the ducks would be lecturing about Konrad Lorenz, and the rats would be writing papers about B. F. Skinner. Let us not beat about the bush. The horse and the rider have many anatomical features in common. But it is the human creature that rides the horse, and not the other way about. And the rider is a very good example, because man was not created to ride the horse. There is no wiring inside the brain that makes us horse riders. Riding a horse is a comparatively recent invention, less than five thousand years old. And yet it has had an immense influence, for instance on our social structure. The plasticity of human behaviour makes that possible. That is what characterizesus; in our social institutions, of course, but for me, naturally, aboveall in books, because they are the permanent product of the total interests of the human mind. They come to me like the memory of my parents: Isaac Newton, the great man dominating the Royal Society at the beginning of the eighteenth century, and William Blake, writing the Songs of Innocencelate in the eighteenth century. They are two aspects of the one mind, and both are what behavioural biologists call ‘species-specific’. How can I put this most simply? I wrote a book recently called The Identity of Man. I never saw the cover of the English edition until the book reached me in print. And yet the artist had understood exactly what was in my mind, by putting on the cover a drawing of the brain and...