"The Origin Of The Species" - читать интересную книгу автора (Maclean Katherine)

People came from my operations cured and happy, without that numb animal look that sometimes follows lobotomy. They came out adjusted to life for the first time, not wanting and not missing the things that I bad cut away. They were grateful.

But as I operated, I was trying not to think.

For you see, Jack, I knew what I was doing to each brain. I knew what those delicate grey tissue cells were that I removed with the hissing insufflater tube. I knew what part of the human mind and soul I was taking. Sensitivity to the hurts and loves of others . . . dreams and longings and plans for the future ... the deeper reactions to music and poetry ... the sensitive adjustment of values and motives to new situations ... emotional insight ... creative logic ...

Always it was those sections which were scarred by experience, sending distortion and agony through the mind.

While I work steadily, efficiently, seemingly calm, the thoughts come, and I cannot stop them.

What kind of life is it that I am adjusting this man to, that he will be most sane and adjusted when the best parts of his mind are taken out?

Society is very old, and custom very ancient, and most of our ways were handed to us from far back in the darkness of time. Can some of it be traced back to herds and packs that were not human? Were not the first men born misfit into a society of apes? If children were born into an asylum and raised only by the inmates, would not they become sincerely "mad" in such surroundings, and think at last that everything around them was natural and right? The texture of tradition is learned in early childhood; it grafts itself onto the mind and seems like instinct, too natural to be consciously noted.

I think of George, the archetype of all the children of fact and legend who have been adopted by the animals. He was raised by wolves; they suckled him and were friendly and tolerant, like dogs, and they fed him through the long period of his babyhood.

The first thing for him to learn was to survive. After that, his developing human mind should have been free to continue learning and discovering until he demonstrated his innate human superiority. That is what you would expect.

But first he had to learn to be strong and cunning as a successful wolf. So all the tremendous skill and capacity for creative learning of the human-child mind was poured into learning the tricks and skills of the wolf way of life.

But he was not a wolf. What was natural to them had to be learned painfully by him: to run on four feet instead of on his long hind legs; to sniff with his nose instead of using his eyes; to repress the natural babbling and baby muttering that was so dangerous in this life; to repress the curiosity of a developing mind that wanted to stop and pick things up with his odd un-wolflike front pawsЧand thus risk being left behind by the pack and, with his poor, inadequate sense of smell, become lost. He was a misfit and a cripple by the standards of the wild dogs of the woods. They must have been very patient, indeed.

George managed at last to become a self-supporting wolf. But by that time he was an inferiority-complex, not-very-bright wolf, neurotic and trembling and unable to reason or to adjust his behavior (that is the way with extreme neurosis), a wolf who snapped and snarled at the humans who captured him, who howled lonesomely to be let free to return to the cold woods, and who at last diedЧvery much as an animal in a zoo may die of inability to adjust to life in captivity.

If I had been there then, with the techniques I know now, I could have adjusted George. I could have operated and removed the source of his neurosis, and made him a contented, well-adjusted wolf. But a wolf, not a man. For it was the human parts of his mind that were misfit, scarred and inhibited and rendered useless by repression, left only as sources of pain and insanity.

And so I think again, as I operate on the man now under my knife: what kind of world is it that I am adjusting him to, that he will be most sane and adjusted when the best parts of his mind are taken out?

Were not the first men born misfit, like George, into a society of apes? They might have wanted nothing more than to be happy, well-adjusted apes. But evolution is ruthless and indifferent to individual cost, and it can't be stopped. The original breed of mankind must have multiplied and spread across the Earth because they learned to get by in the world of apes, making a copy, thatЧphysically weak, neurotic, and mentally crippled as it wasЧwas more efficient than the original. Perhaps if George had been born with more intelligence or even genius, he would have been able to make himself into a leader of wolves, ready to breed a race of wolf-imitations. But then he would have been even more of a misfitЧhe would have become mad, a lunatic wolf. I think of the chanting, the ritual, the blood sacrifice of primitive man. Mad . . . a lunatic wolf or a lunatic superape, twisted carbon copies, both of them.

And the twistedness perpetuating itself. The young are born without warp, but what happens when they are born into an asylum and taught to behave like the adults there? Neurotic behavior is intolerant of any other way of behaving than its own. What starts as forced mimicry could soon become completely natural to the learning child. Neurotic behavior is rigid, conservative, obsessive and inflexible. Six million years we have had already, gradually working toward sanity, but God, how slowly and with such relapses! And, in all that time, all that our cortex, our new brilliance, has given us is animal conquest of the other animals, and for the restЧneurosis, frustration, and an inhibition that can make the best portions of our minds give us only pain and distortion.

And all I can do to help is to remove parts of the brain.

One in seven of us will break down and be hospitalized at some point of our lives, and perhaps all of us who walk the streets of the world would be happier without the subtle grey cells I take from brains, the layer of brilliance that is given the unbearable cross of concealing itself so that we may learn, painfully, to be good imitation apes, instead of men. We don't know what it is to be human; we have never been allowed.



This is a long letter, but I will get to the point now.

Yesterday I performed an operation that I had been begged to do. It was the parents who came and begged me, for the sake of their twelve-year-old boy. He was feeble-minded. They had been told that he should go to a training home with others like him, yet they fought against fate, they wanted to believe that he could grow to run and laugh and be bright like any other normal boy. They claimed that he had been a brilliant babyЧperhaps he had sustained a head injury or had a brain tumor, and I must cure him.

I was dubious. All parents seem to think -their first baby is brilliant. No operation can cure a child who is naturally feeble-minded.

They grew desperate and told me stories of remarkable things the child had done before it was two years old, but the stories were of things that only the boy's nurse had seen, probably made up by the nurse to please them. I did not believe the stories, but the parents were sensitive and obviously thoughtful, so I told them that if the boy had shown such an obvious change he might have sustained a head injury.

They begged me, and they were wealthy, and sincerely, pitifully eager for their son. So for their sake, and for the fees they could offer that would help poorer cases, I did it.

The encephalographs had been abnormal. I was expecting perhaps to find a tumor.