Page 24 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

CULTURE OF THE MIND

responses to situations other than predation itself – the sight of violence
or bloodshed occasioned by our fellow humans, for example.
(Ehrenreich 1997: 90–1)

Grief, depression, and helplessness are all experiences of the prey. To escape
these dismal states, folkloric narratives describe how the weak rise up against
the strong, how lions are defeated by foxes and, in general, how small and weak
animals and birds, deemed to be wiser than big animals and birds, are ultimately
victorious in their tasks and struggles (Ehrenreich 1997: 83, 139). Because fear
and anxiety continue to reside in humans today, our thoughts and feelings are
drawn back to the perpetually unfinished revolt of the prey against the predator.
In the fearful struggle to avoid the suffering and death of being prey to
animals or other predators such as bands of people from other cultural groups,
the cerebral cortex of homo sapiens has developed the enduring potential to
construct representations of the ‘other’ – the one who is di fferent from me/us,
and who does not qualify for my/our own identity. ‘Other’ is a representation
originating in dread and pain, nurtured in suffering, and activated by the
innately sensed predator–prey paradigm. The image of the one who is di fferent
is held in the mind as a feeling of terror, a symbolic wild beast.
In the poetry of William Blake (1982), for example, we can experience this
beast in its full terror and beauty, and in its uneasy relation to humankind and
to the deity:

Tiger! Tiger! burning bright
In the forests of the night
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
...
When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Fear and anger
Emotional expression appears in sight, sound, smell, and touch early in the life
of a child. When only a few days old, an infant sees the smile of the mother, and
by the age of two to four months responds in kind. The exchange of smiles
between mother and child reflects the evolutionary origins of emotions as
control mechanisms in human relations (Johnson-Laird 1988: 91). Emotion
saturates and guides interpersonal interaction. To communicate with others
successfully, an individual must have a refined perception of how those others
feel.

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