The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [538]
3. Various attempts have been made in recent years to provide a scientific definition of the difference between human consciousness and that of other animals. A fundamental flaw in all of them lies in their failure to take account of the consequences arising from the split between ego and instinct. Michael Tomasello, for instance, in The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition (Harvard University Press, 2000), bases his theory on observing the learning processes of apes and human children. He suggests that what makes humans unique is their capacity for empathetic imitation of each other. It is this, he suggests, which enables them to develop and to learn from a continuously evolving `culture. Chimpanzees can learn by imitation to make very simple steps outside the frame of instinctive behaviour (as when they learn to use sticks as `tools' to extract termites from their nests); and, as with other animals, this ability becomes more pronounced when, in captivity, they are trained by human beings to perform non-instinctive actions. But, because their imitation is only based on external imitation and not on empathetic understanding, animals can quickly lose these learned attributes, and cannot develop a 'culture' Tomasello describes this unique human ability to build on the stored and transmitted experience of previous generations as the `ratchet' which makes cultural evolution possible. But, in not allowing for the peculiar problems created by the human ego, he fails to recognise that, as each new `cultural advance' takes Homo sapiens further away from nature and the instinctive frame, a large part of what we generally call `culture' in fact consists of symbolic attempts to reconnect ego-consciousness with the unity of purpose represented by that frame. Nothing reflects this more vividly than our compulsion to imagine stories. In accordance with Tomasello's thesis, stories are certainly based on our capacity to empathise with other human beings (perhaps more graphically than any other expression of the human imagination). But equally they demonstrate that their real symbolic purpose is to overcome the problems created by egotism; and to show how the subjective ego can be reconciled with that `objective' level of the psyche which empathetically connects human beings with the world outside them, giving them their deepest sense of stability and identity.
4. Hence the irony by which, when human beings behave particularly badly and selfishly, they are likened to `animals. They are described as behaving like `brutes' (or more specifically like `pigs, `monkeys', `asses, etc) when it is precisely the peculiarly human rather than animal part of them which lead them to behave in such an `inhuman' (i.e., all too human) fashion.
5. It was one of Jung's most valuable insights, leading to his theory of `psychological types, that consciousness operates in these four basic ways: through what he called the `sensation; `thinking; `feeling' and intuitive' functions. He noted that most people primarily relate to the world through one, their `superior' function, while remaining less developed in others. Thus he came to categorise people as `sensation types, `thinking types, and so forth, noting also that we tend to get caught out in our relationship to the world by those functions in which we are inferior. But Jung did not develop his observations to the point of recognising, as we can learn from storytelling, how the first two of these functions have an essentially `masculine' aspect while the other two are essentially `feminine'. This helps to illuminate both how they can get out of balance with each other and also what is needed for them to brought into that state of balance which allows them to operate effectively.
6. The problem with over-reliance on the thinking function is its tendency to what is known as 'cognitive