The Problem of Communication

Extract

The terms in which this essay is written, and the examples used to illustrate various points, are for the most part not specifically Catholic. One reason for this is a desire to present the problem in the idiom of the world with which Catholics want, or should want, to communicate, since they exist partly for its sake.

It looks as though the most primitive forms of communication were non-conscious and non-voluntary. Investigators working on animal communications as they are found in such creatures as sticklebacks, and even in more highly developed beasts like ducks, believe the evidence warrants their assuming that both stimulus and response as shown, for instance in patterns of aggression or mating behaviour, are almost automatic. Investigators conditioned by methods of modem scientific research are of course prone to believe in automatism, since it is a concept which makes their task of abstraction and generalization very much easier than would ideas of spontaneity and of feeling: and the outside observer may conclude that they are tempted to minimize the influence of factors they cannot measure and even sometimes to deny that they exist. It is incidentally fascinating to notice how, when they extend to human behaviour the methods and presuppositions of their earlier work, they seem to rationalize the belief that when man fell he fell away from the glorious liberty of the children of God into an animal automatism; an automatism which, since he is not wholly an animal, set him under the domination of the idea of mechanism and of the machines his brain created, from prayer-wheels to electronic brains and a concept of the State based on the image of a robot Leviathan.