CHAPTER VII
From A.B.'s diary.
Conditioned
reflex. What a lot of satisfaction I got out of old
Pavlov when first I read him. The ultimate de-bunking of all human pretensions. We were all dogs and bitches together. Bow-row, sniff the
lamp-post, lift the leg, bury the bone.
No nonsense about free will, goodness, truth and all the rest. Each age had its psychological
revolutionaries. La Mettrie,
Hume, Condillac, and finally the Marquis de Sade, latest and most sweeping of the eighteenth-century
de-bunkers. Perhaps,
indeed, the ultimate and absolute revolutionary. But few have the courage to follow the
revolutionary argument to Sade's conclusions. Meanwhile, science did not stand still. Dix-huitième
de-bunking, apart from Sade, proved inadequate. The nineteenth century had to begin
again. Marx and the
Darwinians. Who are still with us
– Marx obsessively so.
Meanwhile the twentieth century has produced yet another lot of
de-bunkers – Freud and, when he began to flag, Pavlov and the Behaviourists.
Conditioned reflex: - it seemed, I remember, to put the lid of
everything. Whereas actually, of course,
it merely restated the doctrine of free will.
For if reflexes can be conditioned, then, obviously, they can be
re-conditioned. Learning to use the self
properly, when one has been using it badly – what is it but re-conditioning
one's reflexes?
Lunched with my father. More cheerful than I've seen him recently,
but old and, oddly, rather enjoying it.
Make much of getting out of his chair with difficulty, of climbing very
slowly up the stairs. A way, I suppose,
of increasing his sense of importance. Perhaps also a way of commanding sympathy whenever he happens to
want it. Baby cries so that
mother shall come and make a fuss of him.
It goes on from the cradle to the grave.
Miller says of old age that it's largely a bad habit. Use conditions function. Walk about as if you were a martyr to
rheumatism and you'll impose such violent muscular strains upon yourself that a
martyr to rheumatism you'll really be.
Behave like an old man and your body will function like an old man's,
you'll think and feel as an old man. The lean and slippered pantaloon –
literally a part that one plays.
If you refuse to play it and learn how to act on your refusal, you won't
become a pantaloon. I suspect this is
largely true. Anyhow, my father is
playing his present part with gusto. One
of the great advantages of being old, provided that one's economic position is
reasonably secure and one's health not too bad, is
that one can afford to be serene. The
grave is near, one has made a habit of not feeling anything very strongly; it's
easy, therefore, to take the God's-eye view of things. My father took it about peace, for
example. Yes, men were mad, he agreed;
there would be another war quite soon – about 1940, he thought. (A date, significantly, when he was practically certain to be
dead!) Much worse than the last war, yes; and would probably destroy the
civilization of