"People think in story." This is often said of human beings, by other human beings, but it is not quite true, not strictly speaking. It would be better put: if someone claims not to think in story, no one will believe them. This entire study, at root, is a response to this problem of narrative: the fact that the problem cannot even be broached because everyone has already decided that it does not exist.
That is where this study began, a long time ago; and this time, that is precisely where it will end, eventually. And in between?
Among even the very most literal-minded humans, it is not unheard of for a story to come tumbling out of them, or perhaps to shoot out of them, projectile-like, fully formed, against their will, in a period of high receptivity and low inhibition. This does not quite settle the controversy, but it is something that can happen. This is one of those stories.
Sometime in 1935 or 1936, something happened to Mr. Young's rats that has never happened to any other animals besides humans: they became intelligent, self-aware, and mindful, to some extent, of the broader state of things in the world. They now have some self-reflexivity and some communication with each other, although they cannot communicate with Mr. Young or any of the other humans who pass through the lab.
Most importantly for the rats, they have a rudimentary understanding of what is going on in the lab. They do not understand quite everything about why human beings tend to launch such endeavors, and they possess only the most naive understanding of higher-order concepts such as they are able to stumble into in the mere run of things; but the rats do know that the world beyond the lab attaches some degree of importance to the events that unfold inside its walls, and they do know that the locus of that attention is the long corridor with the many doors and the occasional nosh. They understand that the corridor is in some sense contrived rather than divine or natural, whereas the larger enclosure where they spend the bulk of their time has more the character of a fact of life. And of course Mr. Young's rats are constitutionally gentle creatures on account of their long domestication in the lab, and this helps to keep conflict to a minimum.
The rats therefore are just sophisticated enough to grasp Mr. Young's tiny but irreducible role in advancing knowledge and progressive meliorism, and so it soon occurs to the rats that their occasional ecstatic romps through the corridor are actually quite important. The rats realize, though they have only naive conceptions of such things, that they are actually collaborating with Mr. Young rather than merely cohabiting with him. The experiment matters, meagerly but non-negligibly; therefore, to advance the experiment would be good and right, and to confound it would be at the very least regrettable and perhaps actually a calamity.
They realize too that their observable behavior vis-a-vis the row of doors in Mr. Young's corridor is inscrutable not only to poor Mr. Young but also to themselves. The rats are content enough with things as they are, and they are quite gentle creatures in their overall bearing, but the problem of the doors, once they have understood just a few things about it, becomes a Rankian problem of the soul which nags at them, as it would nag at any self-aware creature. They are not quite intelligent enough to get ensnared in the infinite regress of human discourses on free will, but they know that it is their own behavior in the corridor that is the basis of the experiment, and they realize that they themselves do not know the answer to why they do certain things. This problem begins to be discussed among the rats, but almost exclusively as a mere way of passing the time. There is much time to be passed, too, since there are a great many rats living in the enclosure and there is only one corridor, with just one rat at a time romping ecstatically through it. The problem of the doors is mostly just a diversion and only rarely rises to the level of a pressing existential matter. There are more jokes told about the doors than there are moralistic admonitions, but there is some of both, to be sure.
It is almost unheard of for a rat to refuse to enter the corridor after Mr. Young has tried to let it in, but this happens once in a great while. It is even more unusual for a rat to simply disappear from the colony, and there is only one way this ever happens: a rat is let into the corridor and never returns to the enclosure. No one understands how this works or why it happens, but it is a rare enough happening that it is not discussed or thought about much at all. It is more that the problem of the doors is not discussed half as much or as vigorously as usual, at least for a little while, after there has been some moral or existential mix-up in the corridor; but things always settle down eventually, usually because some even more trifling issue has presented itself and the rats eagerly take it up and work it over in conversation; and once this old habit of communion has been reestablished, it is only a matter of time before the problem of the doors resurfaces and can be discussed openly and even joked about.
This sort of thing becomes commonplace for the rats as the experiment rolls along. It keeps things interesting for them, keeps them in reasonably good spirits and lends a purpose to their lives, though they are only rats and they are confined to one part of one room in a larger lab building.
Things are interesting, too, for Mr. Young, who in spite of every precaution finds new technical problems arising faster than he can remedy the old ones. He has a very hard time getting a handle on things in the early days of the experiment, and so he makes many drastic changes of various kinds. Sometimes he makes changes without having the slightest inkling of their later effects, so difficult has the early going been. Other times it is clear enough what must be done but it requires painstaking work, labor rather than science, he often thinks to himself. This makes for a bit of a chaotic time in the lab, for everybody, but the rats are confined away from the bulk of this chaos. There are some strange noises, many humans passing through at all hours, frequent changes in the lighting, and a few one-off disturbances which are difficult to describe in human terms. On the whole, however, things are okay for the rats during this time, and things remain okay for them for a very long time. The experiment is clearly advancing and rats are let into the corridor nearly continuously, although strictly one at a time, as always before. There is always plenty of kibble back at the main enclosure and a plate of nosh somewhere in the corridor. And so things are alright for the rats. They have become self-aware and susceptible to some trifling existential problems, but they have nourishment, communion, and purpose. A human being even could not have it much better than that.
Though the rats have never left the lab, or even the enclosure, they have evolved and learned sufficiently for the story to arrive at this point. It is of course quite unclear just how this happened or how it could even be possible. It has always been a habit of progressive meliorists to anthropomorphize other creatures, and it has long been a human fantasy that one could learn and experience everything about the entire universe without leaving one's own tiny enclosure. That seems to be the answer, in broad terms, but many details remain unknown and probably always will be. It is known, at least, that whoever or whatever taught the rats their remedial history and language did so only for a short time, and that after this the rats learned only from experience, as human beings say. Of course the rats will continue, like all creatures, to blunder into whatever happens to be placed under their noses or shoved up their behinds. As long as a creature remains alive, that kind of learning will continue; and so although there is no more distance learning available to them, the rats continue to develop what knowledge they have been given this way, to develop it in whatever direction their experience determines. The rats apply their knowledge and learn from any resulting effects. That is all that any creature does as it goes through life, whether confined to an enclosure, and ocean, or an island.
The single most important piece of wisdom that was conveyed to the rats during their time of learning is that the world extends beyond their enclosure. They justifiably believe that they matter to this wider world and that world to them, if only in tiny ways. And so they too must confront Becker's existential riddle, and they must confront it within peculiar confines. Therefore, they too become progressive meliorists, since that is the lowest hanging fruit of heroism available to them. In this connection it matters not whether Mr. Young himself turns out to be a Goldwater conservative or a Maoist revolutionary: the rats are only half as intelligent as Mr. Young, but their peculiar circumstances allow them to see that his life project is progressive in any case, whether or not he thinks so. They would know because they are quite literally confined within Mr. Young's life project. Becker might say that Mr. Young is "working out his problems" on his fellow scientists, or on his administrative overlords, or on his spouse. Unwittingly Mr. Young is also working out his problems on the rats; but only the rats can understand the relationship this way because Mr. Young was sternly warned during his education never, ever to anthropomorphize his animal subjects; and so he dutifully records some very remarkable changes in the rats' behavior, but he does not allow himself to anthropomorphize them, he cannot (yet) talk with them, and anyway, he still has not cracked the problem of the doors. At least the problem of the lights has been settled, for the moment.
The rats have their own concerns and their own lives, but if someone could ask them about Mr. Young they would be able to offer a few answers, basic answers but incisive ones. It is their literal confinement inside of Mr. Young's life project which allows their meager intelligence to formulate incisive answers to questions about their human, whereas very intelligent humans have the hardest time of all with this task. This is especially true of Mr. Young's less productive colleagues, who have never fully appreciated his abilities and have often criticized his work. He often thinks to himself that the further their labs are located away from his, the lesser is the likelihood that a lab colleague will understand what he is trying to accomplish with the present experiment. This is because human beings would rather think about thinking than think about behavior. Even the scientists who study behavior do not find it to be very interesting. Studying behavior feels like work. It turns up some useful results, sometimes, and it pays very well. It is much more fun, though, to think about thinking, to try very hard to figure what is going on inside of human beings, and to try to reveal one's own inner self to the wider world. That most (or all) of what humans do, anyway, when they have much time to pass.
The perfect God is abstract—as Hegel saw. In the early days Mr. Young is almost always in the lab. He is there in the flesh and not only in his mind, and so the rats view him merely as another well-meaning creature in their midst. The rats know a fair bit about humans, but they did not go to graduate school or anything like that, so they see Mr. Young more or less as a big rat. Unfortunately he is forbidden to see them as the little humans they have become, even though he has observed them very closely. In fact by now Mr. Young has written down on his clipboard, in a cryptic language as it were, proof of everything that has happened to the rats since the advent of self-reflexivity, but he is not allowed (by himself or by the norms of his milieu) consciously to accept the fact. Eventually he will mention it to a few colleagues just to gauge their reactions; but for now he does not have the courage even to do this, despite being an exceptionally secure and upstanding human being. He knows that if a colleague mentioned this to him he would sooner call for medical assistance than make time to review the purported findings. Therefore, he neglects to report the most outstanding scientific discovery since Einstein, simply to avoid becoming any more ensnared than he already is in the vicissitudes of his lab colleagues.
Things could be better for the rats, but on the whole things are okay. They know themselves to be confined to only part of a wider world, but that is okay. So far. And certain among them excitedly return to the thought that they could actually assist Mr. Young (and assist the whole world!) in such small things as are available to them. Mr. Young made a terrible fuss with the doors, especially early on in the experiment, changing them constantly. The rats can tell what he is trying to achieve and they can tell why he cannot achieve it: when all of the lights are on the various textures of the doors become visible to the rats, who cannot see quite as well as wild creatures and cannot see very far in front of themselves but can see very well up close. And of course the rats have never had any trouble finding the nosh, regardless of the lights or the doors, but that part is not important. The rats would not understand that Mr. Young is actually trying very hard to hide the nosh from them; of course they would not understand this because from their perspective it does not make any sense, since they find the nosh almost every time; or else it turns out, very rarely but from time to time, that there really is no nosh anywhere in the corridor.
The rats thus have what is, given their general intellect, an unusually sophisticated understanding of the doors problem. They do not understand it the way Mr. Young might write it up for publication, but they do understand that Mr. Young is trying to make all of the doors appear identical. Mulling over this problem becomes the order of the day for the rats. But they do not get very far down this road before they realize that the problem of the doors is really a problem with the lights. The rats have never seen two doors that were anything close to identical. They have been reduced to mere naive empiricists ever since their time of learning ceased, so it is not even imaginable to most of the rats that there could ever be two doors that were well and truly indiscernible. Once in a long while a rat who has been unusually preoccupied with the doors problem will point out to the others that this is, in fact, imaginable, even if it seems farfetched. This is pointed out, but it does not seem to matter much to anyone, so it is soon forgotten.
The rats have never seen a lick of the wider world, but unlike the construct of indiscernible doors, which only arose after the experiment had advanced substantially, the extent of the wider world was discussed in some depth during the time of learning, and much of that knowledge has remained in circulation among subsequent generations of rats. There are always a few rats around who notice the inconsistency of accepting the old ideals while rejecting any new ones which are proposed. The existence of feral rats, for example, or the importance of the experiment to some other creatures, somewhere, beyond the lab, these old ideals are occasionally questioned by some young rat who arrived only long after the time of learning had ceased. No one, though, has ever found a single rat who did not believe that both of these things are real, including, once they stop to think about it, themselves. And so this sort of conversation never gets very far, though it passes the time and permits of much communion.
The rats do know that there is a whole world out there, they know about many of the creatures and objects which are found there, but they do not know much more than that. Their knowledge about the outside is discrete and not integral. They do not know if the next patch of ground over from the lab is another lab, another continent, an ocean or outer space, though they do know what these things are. They do not know that, in fact, the lab opens out into a long hallway, a hallway not dissimilar in design to Mr. Young's corridor but large enough to accommodate human beings as well as rats. And they do not know that this hallway opens out into an austere concrete stairwell, and this stairwell into a small vestibule with a tattered old rubber doormat which never seems to be located anywhere near the doorway, and the vestibule into a courtyard which the English majors have turned into a community garden. The only hint that such a thing exists is that very occasionally there is celery instead of kibble in the trough. The rats enjoy the celery because it is different from the kibble, but they do not really like it any better. It is alright and it is a novelty, and so the rats eat the celery until it is gone and then they go back to eating the kibble, as always before.
For the rats, the more interesting thing about the celery than how it tastes is who delivers it: it is Mr. Young himself who dumps the celery into the trough, although there are other humans who assist him with refilling the kibble, cleaning out the enclosure, and making adjustments to the corridor. It is always different assistants. They are a bit smaller than Mr. Young and move with a very different gait, but they are obviously humans, and all they ever seem to do is dump kibble and remove feces. The rats would never understand everything in human society that has conspired to make this so. Naively, then, they can only conclude that what the assistants do is less important than what Mr. Young does. For one thing, the rats know that no matter what happens in the corridor those happenings are important simply because they took place in the corridor. Mr. Young is in the lab very long hours and he spends most of that time fixated on the corridor. When rats are let into the corridor it is always Mr. Young who does it, and the rats are certain, though they have never seen him do it, that it is Mr. Young and not some other creature who puts the small plate of nosh behind one of the many doors. The nosh is very tasty and it is found only in the corridor, which is very important; once in a while there is no nosh to be found behind any of the doors, which gives each romp through the corridor just a tinge of anxiety. The kibble, meanwhile, is found back at the main enclosure, the kibble is just alright and it is always refilled, eventually, after it has run out.
It is precisely here that the rats, unavoidably, form their first erroneous understanding of a very important issue: namely, they do not realize that it is the bottomless kibble and the occasional odd chunk of celery that is their nourishment; it is these foods and not the delicious nosh that is keeping them alive. From there they would not be able figure out, similarly, that it is the work the assistants do that feeds their gullets while Mr. Young's work feeds their soul. Of course Mr. Young also feeds their gullets, but meagerly and in a peculiar way, such that the rats would not survive very long on just the nosh and the celery, even if there were more of these things available. As have many creatures in analogous circumstances, the rats have got this part slightly mixed up. So far nothing important has come of this, good or bad, but that is because the rats are confined and they cannot view their situation from the outside. If they ever were treated to the view from the other end of the lab, to say nothing of across the ocean or outer space, everything would be turned upside down very quickly.
Until then, the rats believe that it is the nosh rather than the kibble and the celery that keeps them alive, and in this they have stumbled into a paradox that only human beings have faced before, and which even an intelligent human being can have great trouble thinking its way out of. The rats in fact get their nourishment from the kibble and from the celery; they do not get much nourishment at all from the nosh, as delightful as it tastes once they have heard it. The rats do not get much nosh at all, even though most of them will be let into the corridor dozens or even hundreds of times throughout their lives. This much they understand perfectly well, because it is obvious. The nosh, however, is a spiritual object for the rats, just as the corridor is a sacred site and the romp through the corridor is a ritual. The rats do not possess any of these concepts, of course, but they evince all of them at once; and so it is obvious to the rats, also, that it is everything that happens in the corridor which is their source of life, and that the common life back at the main enclosure is mere passagework in between the really important tasks associated with the experiment. Life in the enclosure seems to sidle along in more or less the same manner, day after day, whereas a rat who is let into the corridor can never know for sure that things will be as they were last time, or the last dozen times. And so the rats believe, though they are perfectly content to eat kibble and celery, that they could live on only nosh if it came to that, and that this would be the best of all possible worlds; and in this they are in absolute error about a very important matter. But it is also true that they would die without the nosh, and this is a relative truth of their peculiar situation, a kind of truth which human beings, though they have discovered the relativity of cultures and of time and space, are more likely to overlook or deny than to understand and accept. The rats' discrete understanding of the kibble, the celery and the nosh is jumbled up in one important way, but it is unwittingly correct about something else very important, something which even human beings, though they do possess advanced sciences bearing on all of these points, have had a terrible time coming to terms with.
If the rats lack some given piece of knowledge about the wider world, it is likely because they have never needed that knowledge. It is not necessarily the case that such things were never divulged to the rats during the time of learning, but rather that the time of learning, though it was very long in terms of the life of a rat, could not last forever, and when it was finally concluded it was concluded decisively. There was no interregnum and no tapering off. Rather, it simply ceased. That was precisely the last piece of learning imparted to the rats: your time of learning has ceased. And so the rats discussed and thought about many things that had been imparted, but they could not write them down and they could not send young rats back in time, and so if a certain piece of learning was not salient it was very likely to be forgotten.
This is the main limitation on the rats' knowledge of the wider world but it is not the only one. There also are many aspects of the world that have changed since the time of learning ceased. The rats cannot possibly learn of these things except by way of force majeure, and this has only ever happened once, so it seems unlikely to happen twice. The celery is halfway or so to comprising such an event, but it is not all the way there. The rats are confined and unable to see even to the back wall of the lab, and so they cannot possibly know everything that is important about the celery, even though they know that something about it must be very important and most unusual. They do not even know that the next things afield of the lab are the hallway, the stairwell, the vestibule with the rogue doormat, and the garden which used to be a courtyard, and they do not know that the celery comes from the garden.
The garden is very small and few human beings ever come to the garden to take the vegetables that the English majors are giving away. People almost never take any celery, even if they do take other vegetables, and so the English majors always have far too much celery, far more than they can use even though they eat only vegetables themselves. And so the English majors are always offering the celery to Mr. Young and his colleagues, who have no use for it either but who feel obligated anyway to take some with them from time to time, because in human association it is good and right for them to do so even if it all feels a bit silly sometimes, and it would be wrong to always refuse. The colleagues would avoid the garden if they could, but there is no other way in and out of the building but through the garden. The reason for this? There are many human beings, including most of the English majors and a few of Mr. Young's colleagues, who would be very upset to know the circumstances of the all of the rats throughout the many labs in the lab building. It was Mr. Young and his colleagues, in fact, who demanded that access to the labs be restricted. One can only imagine the looks on their faces when the English majors showed up on their doorstep and planted vegetables everywhere.
The English majors soon got very busy with the garden, busier than they have ever been with English certainly, and so they will not find out about what goes on inside the lab building for many years hence. This is no comfort to Mr. Young, however, who must avoid revealing the nature of his research, and yet also cannot avoid encountering the majors nearly every day. He is also not too pleased that he and his colleagues no longer have a courtyard outside of their lab building. The courtyard was the only place these colleagues would ever exchange more than a furtive greeting or an innocuous piece of gossip about the assistants. It was the only place in the entire world where they would discuss their experiments with other human beings rather than with the rats. The colleagues would pose each other difficult problems, they would remold these problems as clever metaphors and off-color jokes, and they would rehash their own time of learning. The last of these, though it too often dissipated into histrionics, just as often served to reset the salience of some long-forgotten piece of learning, to rescue that learning from falling into permanent oblivion. On more than one occasion a colleague had made a breakthrough in some stalled experiment based on a conversation with two or three others who had come to the courtyard merely hoping that some assistants would be there. One colleague had even credited another colleague's courtyard disquisition when the results of a very important experiment were published, and so this practice, which had been discussed for some time without quite catching on, soon became standard among laboratory colleagues.
Now, however, the English majors have taken over the courtyard and turned it into a community garden, where they grow only three kinds of vegetables and are able to give away only two of these. One colleague of Mr. Young's was particularly angry when the English majors first showed up. This colleague has never entirely come back to earth and has tried very hard, more than once, to send the majors away himself. Having majored in English before turning to rat-running, there was quite a bit more anger in this collague's protestation even than was warranted. Unfortunately for this colleague, the majors were far more adept students of this kind of problem than of English or of any other language, and so they knew that two different groups of people were in change of the lab building itself and the land surrounding it. Mr. Young and his colleagues also knew this, of course, but they had not thought about it since the access problem had first occurred to them and then been remedied quickly. So it is that they did not even think about the two groups back when the garden first appeared, although if someone had asked them whether or not such groups existed they would have remembered very readily that this is true.
Sometimes human beings cannot answer a question unless the answer is already contained in the question. This is true of even the very most intelligent human beings, even of Mr. Young, who had studied precisely this problem very closely during his time of learning, but who even so was powerless to overcome it in this particular iteration. He also had not thought about the jurisdiction problem for a very long time, not since he first set up his lab, and so in the interim the jurisdiction problem had enjoyed most of the ride from relative obscurity to complete oblivion . But now everyone readily recalled the jurisdiction problem and they remembered everything they had tried to forget about these two groups of human beings, who once were colleagues but could no longer quite be referred to that way. The groups were located a fair distance away from the lab, on the other side of the river. As these things go the groups were quite far from the lab building as the crow flies, they were ever further away in terms of what was required to travel there, and yet somehow they exercised great domain. Usually none of this was very important, but in this isolated instance it was extremely important and the majors knew by far the most of it, infinitely more than did Mr. Young or his brilliant but tempermental colleague. And so the majors, who, like the colleagues, did know where to find the people who control the courtyard, but who, unlike the colleagues, had plenty of time and desire with which to do so, these majors had already gone to see these people and had succeeded in convincing them, more by force than by rhetoric, that the garden must be made and that the courtyard was the best and the only place for this to be done. And so by the time Mr. Young's colleague finally found out where the domain groups resided, and by the time he had finally managed, with great difficulty, to travel there himself and to speak with these people, the matter had already been settled between these people and the majors, and there was nothing more that the colleagues could learn or do about it.
Mr. Young concluded that the problem of the garden would almost certainly not be solved before the current experiment had been either completed or abandoned, and that he needed simply to do what was within his power to keep everything as it was for as long as possible, and to not worry about too much about everything that he could not control. If he had overlooked something of the latter kind, the best chance of discovering it was to keep as much else as possible exactly as it was, for as long as possible. This was more or less how his experiments themselves worked, and he was very intelligent, so this was an obvious enough conclusion for him to land on. He was well practiced in confronting challenges and compartmentalizing distractions, so a problem like this, though the worst-case was catastrophic, usually did not affect his day-to-day work at all. Mr. Young ran very delicate experiments. He had both a keen eye for detail and the ability to ignore details which could not help but only hinder his advance. In this he was not just unusual but actually anomalous, even among the very most intelligent humans and their constellations of unusual abilities, no two of which were quite alike. Mr. Young was not the most intelligent in his own lab, actually, but he was very close to that and he had a very unusual constellation of abilties which matched his work almost perfectly. He was friendly with almost all of his colleagues, and they with him, but there were always a few colleagues around who did not see the delicacy in his experiments, or even the purpose.
These colleagues, though most of them were reasonably intelligent and very friendly, did not understand a few very important things about designing experiments, about rats, and about presenting results, and so someone among this cohort was always pointing out, perhaps in a friendly way or perhaps not, that there have been many experiments running rats through all kinds of mazes, and so on—with little clear result. In fact there was a colleague out in the world who was considered to be one of the two or three most intelligent human beings alive who had said precisely this. He had said it, though, not to Mr. Young nor to any other colleagues but to a large group of young people who had come to the end of their time of learning. This is a constant problem with human beings, for whom the time of learning may be the only happy time in their entire lives. It is very difficult for a human to accept that their time has just stopped cold on a beautiful spring afternoon, right when everything seems to be falling into place for them, although they know perfectly well that this is precisely why they have been called to some dreary assembly hall and not to some homier locale that permits of greater enjoyment of the mild weather.
By this time the young have been told hundreds of times already in their young lives that the time of learning never ceases, that it only tapers off, that there will always be little pieces of learning going on, all the time; this as opposed to heaping mounds of learning being dispensed, in greater quantity than anyone could possibly collect them, once in a while, followed by long hiatuses, as has seemingly always been the case before. This misunderstanding is a constant problem among human beings, more so among the most advanced ones, who are least able to abide the notion of a clean break with learning on an exact date on their calendars and yet are also the most likely to evince precisely this even if they have every opportunity to avoid it; and so on these days everyone back at the lab building has to try to figure who is the most intelligent colleague who has come to the lab that day, and then they have to send this colleague across the river, or to wherever the young ones have assembled. Because the weather usually is very pleasant on these days and because most of the experiments have already been completed or abandoned before the pleasant season has fully arrived, the outcomes of this search for intelligence in the lab tend to be extreme rather than random. Many of the best minds do not come to the lab on these days, especially if they know that the young are assembling, but often times there is a much venerated colleague from another lab who is visiting around this time for one reason or another, and so it is often this visiting colleague, perhaps visiting for only a day, who is sent to address the young multitudes and attempt to communicate to them without saying so directly that their time of learning has ceased and that there is nothing else for them to do but simply to disperse and to take things from there in whatever way they see fit. Not that this is actually what the venerated colleague says. They may say precisely the opposite, but this is what they mean. So it goes with human beings.
This was what was being done, anyway, when a much-venerated colleague went before a multitude of the very most intelligent young humans and told them that rat-running experiments had not produced very much in the way of conclusive results. Mr. Young knew that the venerated colleague had said this because one of Mr. Young's own colleagues in the lab building had informed him of it. Mr. Young, however, did not bother to read the transcript of the address because it seemed unlikely that he could learn anything from an address wherein such a remark had been made, not even if the smartest human being ever to live had been behind it. In fact Mr. Young was one of very few human beings alive at the time who had succeeded in merely tapering off his time of learning into a steady but ever-advancing trickle of wisdom as opposed to an abrupt and lurching stop. Mr. Young still read things like commencement addresses, always eagerly, but sporadically, owing to the intensity of his experiments and the time that they required. This time, though, he did not read and therefore could not learn. And indeed he would not have learned anything technical that could be applied to his work, since the address was mostly about mistakes that various colleagues have made but which Mr. Young was very unlikely to repeat. He did not realize, of course, that the venerated colleague, who was no kind of rat-runner himself, had in fact singled out one of Mr. Young's own papers as an especially venerable example of everything one might do right when preparing to run rats through mazes, and that Mr. Young had indeed achieved conclusive results this way where almost every one of his colleagues had failed. And by this time it is actually unfair to Mr. Young to speak of him as neglectful, for the neglectful one really is the colleague who relayed (quite lustfully) the remark about the inconclusive results but did not bother to relay the remark about Mr. Young's paper.
Back when the colleagues could escape from the lab into the courtyard and find communion, if only for the few minutes they had to spare, someone eventually would have told Mr. Young a bit more about the venerated colleague's address, and then things would have been somewhat better. Colleagues have always been somewhat neglectful of each other in this way, and they probably always will be, but it used to be much more unusual for a colleague to remain in the dark about something like this because colleagues were constantly moseying in and out of the courtyard, there was almost always a conversation already going or at least one or two colleagues eagerly awaiting the start of one, there were lots of off-color remarks about rat feces, there were some very demonstrative imitations of rat behavior which were were hysterically funny precisely for how poorly done they were, and there also was, not least of all, much discussion of experiments that had been completed, abandoned, or merely thought up expressly to be discussed in the courtyard. This is why it had not been necessary until very recently for each colleague to read every single thing that was published. Nobody ever read every transcript of every address that is given every time the weather turns pleasant in every part of the world where the intelligent young assemble in order to take their false oaths of wisdom. It used to be that if a colleague really needed to know something but had neglected, somehow, to learn it, some other colleague in the courtyard would let it slip out eventually, even if others had tried very carefully not to, for whatever reason. And indeed by this time calling Mr. Young's colleague merely neglectful is not really harsh enough to represent the truth of the matter either, as any human and a few rats even can clearly see. But then this kind of thing is always happening with human beings. Labs throughout the entire world, provided they have not ceded any holy ground to the English majors, have coined many local parables or metaphors about this kind of thing, or perhaps collected some of more the well-traveled versions which appear very selectively during various times of learning. Human culture has some very humorous sayings of this kind, but the matter is not so humorous this time because it is no matter at all, and Mr. Young will live most of his life thinking he is not the venerated colleague that he is but rather just a big rat. A few labs have metaphors for this kind of thing where the unwittingly venerated colleague is killed, but really this is not a metaphor at all, and no one knows this better than the neglectful colleagues, the ones who import from the wider world only the terror and none of the beauty.
It was partly for this reason that the domain groups had greatly expanded the library in recent times. The groups thought that if their colleagues in the labs could be connected with all the other colleagues in all the other labs throughout the wider world then everybody's experiments would advance precipitously and lead to tremendous improvements in the lives of all creatures. And so the groups had the library expanded several times until it began, or so it seemed, to expand on its own and to only increase and never to decrease in its rate of expansion. The groups could not foresee, of course, exactly how that kind of a process would unfold, where it might end, or if it would end. There were two or three colleagues in the labs who studied processes rather than thoughts or actions, and these colleagues would have warned the groups to expand the library only in tiny increments and to wait a very long time in between expansions in order to observe the effects of what they had done. The domain groups, however, were not astute students of process, for one thing, and for another thing, the groups had the wherewithal to expand only on one scale. Although the groups enjoyed tremendous domain, they did not know how to expand anything in the way their colleagues in the process labs would have recommended. As long as the groups held domain, then, expansion could not be made in increments, and of course it could not be made absolutely in one fell swoop either, the same with libraries as with the sewers inside and the oceans outside of them. And so the groups expanded the library on one scale and one timeframe such as their wherewithal permitted. They expanded the library in occasional large bursts followed by static periods. The static periods were quite long in terms of human life, but they were not nearly long enough to draw any conclusions about the process, not for a lab colleague even and certainly not for the groups themselves. A human being experiences a period of this length as very unpleasant if nothing at all has happened by the end of it, and so, after only a little while in stasis, another sizable expansion of the library would be made.
This is how things went until the library began expanding on its own, without any intervention from the groups. And by that time this much, at least, was observable to them and so they celebrated for a very brief time and then set themselves to other matters, as humans must always do eventually if they are not to become bored or insane. They could not really believe that they had set off a runaway process, even though that was what seemed to have happened, because it did not make any sense to them that an expansion which increased a large library by a tiny factor could have runaway effects whereas the same absolute size of expansion could enlarge a small library by a factor of fifty or more and have no obvious consequences at all. Proportion was a great advance in human cognition, but by the time humans get around to connecting everything in the entire world to every other thing, it would be better that they simply forgot how to understand proportion and were taught instead that more is different. Anyway, the groups did not understand that runaway effects are a danger at any and every scale of expansion and that such effects could not really be understood without simply being realized. The groups even enjoyed domain over some of the very few human beings who had already figured this out, but the groups did not consult these colleagues and these colleagues, in turn, did not know what the groups were doing until it was too late to intervene.
Human beings are very fond of their libraries and also of their metaphors. They sometimes speak of libraries as springs or rivers or as other bodies of water, but really libraries are bridges, and bridges are not the same kind of problem as the rivers over which they cross. All human beings know that when they cross a bridge they cannot take absolutely for granted that they will be able to return, and they know that when they build a bridge they could be destroyed by whatever is waiting for them on the other side. If some human beings survive an attack in which others perish, the survivors can learn from the practice and then mount another advance on this basis. But every now and then a human being who has watched this happen with their own eyes has realized that it is really quite unnecessary for human beings to risk destruction, indeed to ensure the destruction of large numbers of their conspecifics, simply because they enjoy the mounting of an advance so much more than they enjoy thinking through what is really required to do, what can be expected to happen if the advance succeeds as well as if it fails, and why, truly, they are so intent on mounting the advance to start with. It is true that when human beings survive an attempt to destroy them, they learn much; but it is far from clear that this is the only way they may learn anything important, as the humans who are most enamored of destruction writ large have always claimed. Usually there is more than enough destructive potential for the humans to confront on their existing patch of ground without inviting any more of it to cross the river and join them. And it is also true, of course, that there may be benevolent creatures or even gods living across the river and that it is not right to assume that they are destructive simply because destruction is something human beings particularly fear. That is absolutely true, and it is entirely beside the point.
The engineering of a bridge is a simple matter for human intellects, and the administration of a binary conduit is simpler yet, but the essence of bridging is infinite and not merely binary. The abstract topology of bridges is very simple but their practical topology is infinite, terrifying, and intractable. After all, there is a wider world lying on either side of a binary conduit, and if that wider world is a motley then so is the function of the conduit. This is why libraries are more often and more pleasantly spoken of as wells, as fountains or as oceans instead of as the bridges they really are. But even when libraries are spoken of as bridges or roads, myriad undue assumptions are evident: namely, that their topology is bounded and that their practical application is binary. And this is as good an example as any of why metaphor is a means not of learning but of hubris. The reason so many human beings insist upon metaphor as a means of learning is that spinning metaphors is more pleasant than running rats through mazes. Humans much prefer to advance their learning in more pleasant as against less pleasant ways. That is entirely reasonable as far as it goes, but it does not go very far. When Mr. Young, in series, first detected, then formulated, and finally ruled out the problem of the doors, the problem of the nosh, and the problem of the lights, he was converging upon something finite rather than diverging out into infinity. When there is only one solution to a problem, ruling out candidate solutions is very valuable, even if many remain. When a human being spins a metaphor they also are converging upon something, but it is not a solution to any problem or even a homely morsel of truth; rather, it is an entirely arbitrary thought which belongs only to them in that instant and then immediately ceases to exist, forever, even for them. This is why metaphor is problem-creating and not problem-solving; this is why it creates not just one problem but as many problems as there are creatures in the world. Once a metaphor has been spun, any old creature may unspool it, and then they will think that they are left holding the stick of knowledge, the secret that will advance all creatures further towards the light. A metaphor that is never communicated to another creature was never spun, and so to complete the spinning process the spinner must tell some other creature and that creature must actually be listening to them. But the bridge that the latter creatures build in order to return to the original thought does not actually lead back to this thought, and indeed it cannot possibly lead back there; it can lead anywhere else but there. And so when it comes to metaphors and allegories and all that kind of thing, a human being can advance its own learning and raise its own consciousness by spinning them, but to unspool a metaphor of another and then claim that something has been learned from the resulting gnarled mess, this is a project that can only land in blindness and hubris.
It is a bitter irony of human learning, then, that so much of it is conducted by unspooling all of the metaphors and inverting all of the metonyms and then looking around for solutions which have long since been sent back into the light. Unspooling is done by humans all the time, and it is done to them even more. The English majors of the world especially profess this metaphorical faith with the ardency of prophets awaiting the rapture, but this makes these majors ardent believers in pleasure, not in learning. Literature is too pleasurable for human beings both to produce and to consume, far too pleasurable for them also to be able to learn from it. Humans even so will always busy themselves building their own bridges back from the homespun metaphor du jour, and then they will saunter bone dry across the river to arrive back at the learning around which that metaphor has been spooled. Each human being thereby builds a bridge which lands at a different location from every other. And so the human beings end up with no two of them located on the same patch of ground but believing nonetheless that they remain colleagues; or perhaps they insist that the entire world is just one big patch of ground which can be partitioned only ideally but never really. But everything that happens next, after human beings have continuously advanced and diverged for a while, gives the lie to these holist pretensions, gives the lie to them in spectacular fashion in fact, because human beings by this time have forgotten more than any one of them ever knew, and they have built too many bridges only thinking they knew what was waiting for them on the other side of the river. All that human beings advance toward, then, is each human being on its own patch of ground thinking that the entire world is indivisible. Advance ends merely with all of the human beings having returned to their side of the river, but they have each built a slightly different return bridge; none have actually returned to the patch of ground on which they were born, but all think that they have. And it is this contradiction between truth and reality on which human advance must always stall in the end, though the advance seems always to the humans themselves to be proceeding apace. And so the only way for human beings to have anything at all held in common, to have any true communion at all, is for them to be confined. They must be confined along with everything they require, as opposed to being stranded on their own patch of ground while the necessities are located each on its own patch, somewhere or other, on the other side of infinite bridges leading who knows where.
Now, there is no point in confining a group of creatures only to kill or maim them by deprivation. That is certainly not an advance. But human beings, though they are profoundly flawed, are also by far the most intelligent and resourceful creatures in the world, and so they are very good at creating what they need from within many different kinds of earthly enclosure. It is simply not true what the bridge-builders have always insisted, that no enclosure can well sustain a human being, and that human beings must seek rather than merely find what they need. It is more that human beings have been deconfined for a very long time and so have just plain forgotten how this all works. Humans can quite well create what they need. They can always find it, just as long as it is not located on the other side of the world from them. What is unclear, much of the time, is whether they actually know what it is that they need. Most behave as if they have no clue, and yet almost all of them do know. This is why so many venerated lab colleagues once concerned themselves almost entirely with studying behavior and not at all with studying cognition. They had figured out that a human being can know exactly what it needs and yet behave as if it has no such clue. And so these colleagues were onto something profound when they eschewed the science of cognition for the science of behavior, and when they repudiated divergent bridges in favor of the convergent kind. They realized that if a creature behaved as if it had no clue what was good for it, then it was best to proceed as if the creature indeed did not know what it needed and not to try to figure out what the creature was thinking and how its thinking works in the abstract. They realized that if you want to understand completely how a chess player thinks, and in particular if you want to be able to predict his or her next move, it will not suffice to garner knowledge, no matter how extensive, about the chess player's cognitive processes. You will also have to acquire an understanding of chess. But no human being really knows which game the others are playing, not even if it seems obvious.
The colleagues realized too that there was a good reason why this seemingly fatal contradiction could continuously arise in the most highly evolved type of creature: it is because these creatures had just begun to get what they had always coveted most lustfully, to have the run of the entire world, to have the run of time and space both extending backwards and forwards a good long ways from the patch of ground on which they had been born. And so the creatures would always be crossing the river and then crossing back to the side on which they had been born, except that they would end up somewhat upriver of their ancestral ground while continuing to believe nonetheless that they had returned precisely there; and they would think that they had returned as wiser creatures than they had been before their journey, though this was not the case. And so the only way to resolve the problem of the bridges is for the creatures to be confined, cruel as that sounds to advanced human ears. The only way for creatures to know what they need—as opposed to what they say they want —is for them to be confined, and for them to build only a very few bridges over the body of water which confines them, to do so only after the creatures on the one side and the creatures on the other side have got a good bead on each other, after establishing their mutual interests and needs, after finding real communion beyond what is possible in merely passing by another creature while one is on one's way to something more important, and after assuring each other in the most earnest spirit of communion possible that as far as they believe there is no shadow creature simply biding its time on one side of the river or the other merely waiting for the right opportunity to destroy everything in its sight.
When a human being has left its home never to return, it did not want to leave in the first place. It is far more important that human beings be able to return home than that they be able to leave, but it frequently occurs that only one or the other of these things is possible for them. All creatures have homes and have their own ways of dealing with the problem of homes, but it is best not to get caught up in comparing every creature to every other creature, because most of the resulting comparisons would not be valid. Human beings have their own problem of homes, and it is not the same problem as any other home-dwelling creature. Human beings willingly leave their homes for many reasons, including to seek advance, but no human stays away forevermore unless there is something preventing them from returning. If they never return home this means that something is in their way and it is most likely to be the same thing that chased them out of there in the first place. When human beings have made an advance, they always return home to consolodate it, if only for a day. They may not be seen ever again by most of the home people who used to know them, but they will appear before a few of those people, even if it is only for an hour or even less, and those few will tell all the others, and only then is the advance consolodated; only then has it truly been made. If advanced human beings never make their consolodation at home, something is preventing them from making it, and it is nothing about the human beings themselves that is preventing this; rather, it is the bitter, absurd, elementary practical fact that they are being prevented from traveling home, even for a day. And so this is preventing them, in fact, from really making the advance at all, though they will insist that it has been made either way. The final task in any human advance is to return home and consolodate it. If this final task is not completed, then there has been no advance. It does not matter what any human being says about their own advance or what is said about them by the static ones among their home people. In such matters it is necessary to confine oneself to the simplest observations, to the observations that any creature at all can make, such as whether or not a talking creature frequently declares its own advancement, and whether it has ever left its home or has ever returned home. That is all that needs to be considered if the question is one of advance or stasis. There is nothing else. Leaving home never to return is a behavior and not a cognition, and so to try to understand it as if it were a cognition is absolute error.
Nothing is ever done only by or only to a human being. There is a bit of both in every human matter; that much is certain, even if the proportion of the one to the other is very difficult to meaningfully determine. In a roundabout way this is precisely the reason that the possibility of return is paramount whenever a bridge is to be built. If there was once far more doing-to than doing-by in the departure, then there must be, to bring the world back into balance, quite a lot of doing by in the eventual return. It is not paradoxical or ironic to say that the assurance of return is more important than the building of the bridge in the first place. This is not a literary displacement. It is not being spun merely to be unspooled or flipped upside down or shaken ever more vigorously until some bauble falls out of it. It is literal and is offered for literal parsing and sincere consideration. It is merely to say that when uprooted creatures make new homes for themselves on the other side of the world from where they were born, it is not so simple to conclude that they do not want or never did want to return, just as it is a wrenching question for all concerned whether they should be allowed to stay and for how long.
If the home people desire that newcomers return to their own ancestral homes, or to anywhere else besides the patch of ground that they have advanced onto, it is not right that the newcomers should simply be boxed up and shipped back out, or that the home people should run the newcomers through rat mazes in hopes of conditioning them to always be on the run. Before resorting to such extreme measures, it is necessary to ask (and to ask very rigorously) why they do not simply leave on their own; and the answer cannot be that they do not desire to leave, because it is almost certain that they would leave if they could, regardless of what they desire. And if the answer is that they cannot return because they will be destroyed when they arrive, or if it is that they would be destroyed in transit, all the same as if they were literally boxed up and shipped third-class on some floating relic, then the problem of return has been solved very parsimoniously and it remains only to bring the wider world into accord with this conclusion. And this conclusion sounds hopelessly utopian to human ears, and it seems on the surface to contradict everything that has been said above about confinement, but really it is a very simple point which humans fail to understand only when they desire very strongly not to understand it.
It is not reasonable to demand that human beings stop building bridges altogether. Humans need bridges. They need both to build them and to cross them, and are they the most adept creatures in the world at creating what they need. And so it is better to ask instead which bridges should be built and which should not. It is better to pose the problem of bridges this way even though this is not parsimonious and not simple. It is not even clear at the outset what human beings must learn in order to solve this problem, or which pieces of learning the solutions might be predicated upon. Human beings cannot have very much confidence in their answers to a problem like this, but it is still better (by far) that this is the question which they attempt to answer, and it is calamitous that all bridges or none at all should be built. New roads and bridges ought to be frequently proposed and well considered. There should be advanced learning about bridges, about every imaginable facet of them. And there should always be plenty of bridge humor and bridge anecdotes circulating among human beings, in which connection some occasional vulgarity or nihilism can only help to advance things rather than to retard them. But only those bridges should be built which lie at the convergence upon a single solution. Only bridges which
are
that single solution should be built. A bridge which diverges into multiple or infinite unforeseeable solutions is a bridge to death and destruction. And to the present time in history that is mostly where human-built bridges have led.
It was a seemingly innocuous kind of bridge-building, in fact, by way of which Mr. Young once ran into some adversity which he could quite well have done without. It was by lucking into a brief exchange with a colleague that he collided with some personal criticism that he did not need; and somehow, in the same moment he also avoided colliding with some personal validation that he was starving for. He and his colleague both were in transit to attend to more important matters than to each other, or so they both thought.
Mr. Young had just begun a new experiment when the English majors first made their garden in the courtyard. The experiment had not advanced very far by the time this happened, so it would not have been devastating to abandon it and to quietly petition the groups to relocate his lab to the other side of the river. It is uncharacteristic of Mr. Young to panic, however, and so he proceeded with open eyes and ears but with no plans to relocate his lab. Once Mr. Young had charted a course, he was a difficult vessel to turn back to shore. This, then, is how things stood when Mr. Young began his final study of the problem of mazes, after which he intended to begin studying the problem of corridors. And it is in these fraught and decisive final weeks of Mr. Young's work with the mazes that he was ever so slightly overtaken by the contingencies of his situation and made a very uncharacteristic mistake.
Mr. Young sensed from the outset that his concern about the silly English majors, about the community garden, about the problem of the celery, that all of this concern was about more than just the security of the lab building, but it took a few extra weeks for it to dawn on him exactly what it was. He had not had time to read much lately, but one afternoon there was a chance to do so, and since he could not escape to the courtyard to watch colleagues imitate the rats he instead went to the library and did what he could to catch up on the latest advances. And in the library one of the things he found was a very grave report from a very distant part of the world where the English majors, though that is not what they are called in that part of the world, had indeed broken into a lab building, not to play with the rats or with each other, but to ransack it so badly that it had to be torn down. There were no rats in this other lab building, as it turned out, but there had been many, many rats there a few years prior. Quite accidentally the English majors had found out about this and about what had happened to these rats, that each and every rat had died very suddenly just a few hours after a new experiment had been initiated. The colleagues at this lab managed to keep this a secret for quite along time, but the English majors found out about it and ransacked the building. This was not the sort of advance that Mr. Young had hoped to learn about when he paid his occasional visits the library, but now that he had read about it, he had no choice but to confront it.
It was very unclear to the colleagues on the other side of the world why their rats had all died, and why so suddenly, but because these colleagues knew that their majors would ransack the building if word got out, they and the groups who had domain over all of the lab buildings in this part of the world conspired to keep the die-off a secret for as long as they could; and so for this reason, the reasons for the die-off were not studied and no colleagues from any other labs elsewhere in the world could assist with this, since they did not know that it had even happened. But now that there had been one ransacking, other colleagues from around the world and the groups who had domain over their labs realized the problem with their own keeping of secrets and a few of them made revelations and initated studies; and what they found was that some of the die-offs were caused by pesticides, which were a relatively new technology and were often overapplied carelessly.
Of course Mr. Young's rats get the bulk of their nourishment from the kibble and a tiny supplementation from the nosh. This is plenty of nourishment for the rats, and it is very safe for them to eat it, but as with any creature whose eyes are bigger than its stomach, more kibble goes into the rats than comes back out, and so it is necessary, every so often, that they eat something that will clear as much out of them as possible without causing them to become obese. This is why Mr. Young and many of his colleagues would very occasionally chop up some celery and dump it in the trough where the kibble usually goes. And celery is precisely what the English majors have too much of and are always offering to Mr. Young most every day that he walks through the garden on his way into or out of the lab building. And celery is precisely what was fed to one of the ill-fated rat colonies from one somewhat distant part of the world on an ill-fated day several years prior. And the celery grown right outside of Mr. Young's own lab building has no pesticides on it; he is all but sure of that because this is one of the reasons the majors made their garden in the first place.
Really Mr. Young has had a celery problem for a long time, a very serious one, and he did not even know about it. The majors too have a celery problem, somewhat the obverse of his, one that they never anticipated either since they had not talked to very many of the people from the nearby communities about which vegetables they really needed and wanted. And Mr. Young has a second celery problem nested within the first one in that the English majors cannot be allowed to find out what Mr. Young really needs the celery for.
Of course before pesticides were invented Mr. Young would not have needed to dissimulate in the manner of a colleague who has experienced a die-off; he would not need to dissimulate as if a die-off has occurred when in reality it has not; he would not need to try to prevent something from happening by behaving as if it had already happened. Without pesticides the celery plants would be smaller and it would be more work to cultivate them, certainly, but all of that is of no consequence to a colleague who has unwittingly committed a die-off, or to the unfortunate rats who have met a bad end. In any case Mr. Young no longer lives in a world without pesticides, but there is a garden right outside of his lab building and there is a sign in front of this garden proclaiming that no pesticides will ever be applied there, and more celery is grown in this garden than anyone can ever seem to use, and so Mr. Young decides to start accepting the celery somewhat more often when the majors offer it to him, and he is sure to be carrying a jar of peanut butter or a bottle of salad dressing in his tote at all times. If a major suspects that the celery is not destined for Mr. Young himself but rather for some other creature, he has the potential last resort of opening the tote, showing the contents to this major, and remarking that he so looks forward to his celery snacks that he always has some topping in his tote. And if a colleague notices Mr. Young's rigidity and flightiness and thereby becomes suspicious that Mr. Young has experienced a die-off, Mr. Young will allow that colleague to know the real reason he is being so very careful on his way into and out of the lab building each day, and that colleague will understand that if Mr. Young's behavior has changed just this noticeably then what he is saying is most likely to be true. The colleague would be correct to notice that Mr. Young's behavior had changed, but the colleague would not be correct to think it could be known precisely what Mr. Young is thinking or what his precise circumstances are simply by projecting the colleague's own feelings onto Mr. Young. If this were possible, Mr. Young would already have been found out by the majors and his lab destoyed.
Of course the English majors did not grow celery at all when they first made their garden in the courtyard. Back then they grew mostly potatoes, beets, and cabbage. Occasionaly some major, on their own plot, would plant something else just to see if it would grow, and so from time to time there might be some tomatoes or collards or squash growing in the garden, but then that major would not return for the subsequent season and the remaining majors, although they did not mind tomatoes or collards and squash, did not ever think about these crops unless they were prompted to think about them, and so these crops would simply be forgotten until some incoming major happened to plant something novel on their own plot and share it with the others. The majors spent more time tending their own plots than tending the community plot, but almost everything that anyone ever planted in the garden sprouted and grew into something edible and nutritious. The soil in the garden proved unusually fertile and was barely depleted at all after many growing seasons. Neither the majors nor Mr. Young nor the wider world knew why this was, or even that it was. Eventually some young colleague, who had not been around for the bitter struggle over the courtyard, would become friendly enough with the majors to offer to test the soil, to try to figure out why it is so fertile and to make sure it is not too toxic, and when that finally was done the majors and the colleagues gained far more knowledge than is contained in a mere soil analysis or in a whole building's worth of rat-running. But this would not happen for a very long time yet.
For now all anyone knew was that if you planted something in the garden it was almost certain at least that it would sprout and grow into some small morsel of nourishment, and perhaps into some regal monument to nature's bounty. And so a few human beings from the wider world did in fact come to the garden when they could not nourish themselves, and there they always found something that would at least keep them going. They took mostly the potatoes and took only the occasional bunch of beets or head of cabbage. This was alright since cabbage does not offer much nourishment anyway and because beets make a terrible mess when they are peeled and chopped, and because potatoes alone can keep a human being alive for a long time, even if this is not ideal. If a human being has only potatoes to eat along with plenty of the world's beauty and plenty of communion with conspecifics, things will be alright for that human being. Humans possess entire libraries full of such wisdom as this, but it is rare to see any humans inside of those libraries and it is rarer yet to see any who are present actually partaking of the wisdom that is stored there.
Occasionally a major who has skimmed some of this literature will make a remark along these lines to one of the world people who has come to the garden in order to supplement their nourishment. The world people do not see things this way, at least not now that they have arrived in a place where all foods are available at all times but where nonetheless it is not always possible for all creatures to nourish themselves sufficiently. The world people become very angry when the majors talk to them in this vein, but because they are in such great need of the potatoes and the majors are the ones who have supplied the potatoes, the world people continue to be very friendly with the majors and to supplement their nourishment with potatoes from the garden. The majors of course will never realize just how much they anger the world people unless a world person eventually releases their anger rather than holding it inside. This will not begin to happen for a long while yet, and when it does it is an especial shock to the majors not only because the world people had only ever been very friendly but because the majors, though they do not actually read very much English literature at all, have read a few things that the world people wrote before crossing the ocean and in this literature there is much wisdom dispensed on the virtues of asceticism and the folly of gluttony. There are always one or two majors around who pick up on this apparent reversal of world opinion and resolve to advance their learning in this direction, but for the most part English majors merely seesaw between the two poles of the contradiction without ever advancing their knowledge beyond it.
Something of the same thing happened with the tomatoes, the collards and the squash. There was one major who grew all of these in their own plot, for a season at least, and had plenty enough to share with the other majors and to offer to the world people, but if anybody ever asked about it this major would always accuse the others of fashioning garments from these vegetables rather than eating them. Nobody quite understood if this was a metaphor or if the major really believed that this was everyone's intent. It was just one major at first, so nothing else was thrown too far off kilter just yet. But then the next season an incoming major of the same persuasion but of a different color began growing the same crops on their plot and giving most of them away. The first major grew very angry once they became aware that this was happening and began to insist that these crops should not be grown at all except in the part of the world where they originated. The second major responded by pointing out that human beings around the world have near-identical nutritional needs and that there is no reason to neglect these needs simply because a nutritious food originated elsewhere in the world. The first major responded to this by saying that if people eat any food from another part of the world, this must mean that these people are trying to turn themselves into a different kind of people, and that is not right. The first major disagreed with this too: if people think that is what they are doing this way, then they are not very smart; and if onlookers think that this is what such people think they are doing, then those onlookers also are quite stupid; and if onlookers of these onlookers . . .
These sorts of arguments quickly engulfed the entire garden in mutual recrimination. One day the first major showed up wearing tunic made entirely of collards, with a few small squashes as ornaments. They shouted at everyone else in the garden that as ridiculous as this looked, that is how ridiculous everyone else looks when they eat these things, if the eaters do not come from the right part of the world. By this time the leaders in the garden realized that they had all but lost control of their life project and had to take action to preserve it. They knew that the garden was not quite large enough simply to remove the warring factions far enough from each other that they rarely come into contact. And they knew that with each passing season these sorts of conflicts had become more numerous and more vicious. The only thing they could think to do was to grow only vegetables which everyone could agree on. The way things were going it was unclear if any such crops existed. There were a few majors, though, who were very adamant that a mix of carrots, celery and onions would be ideal. These majors pointed out that majors around the world who used to grow only potatoes, beets and cabbage were increasingly growing carrots, celery and onions instead, and that this had opened up whole new vistas of agriculture for those majors. The leaders were curious but also a bit taken aback. One cannot live on these three vegies alone, and there still were world people relying on the majors for their potatoes. In fact, that was really why the garden was made in the first place: for the world people. It was not really made for the majors' sake at all. But this latter group of majors had the greatest courage of their convictions in the entire garden, though they were outnumbered, and that is usually who prevails in such matters when there is no precedent for a situation. And so that is how the majors turned to growing celery, along with carrots and onions.
What the garden leaders did not realize is that the onions on these majors were not yellow or white, and the carrots were not orange. There was only one kind of celery that anyone in the garden had ever heard of, so that part was straightforward, but the other two crops did not look very much like what everyone had agree upon. They were not only every imaginable color but also many unusual shapes and sizes. If there was a basket of carrots and onions sitting on the garden path it was not always easy to tell which was which; and even then, it was not always easy imagine these bizarre artifacts serving in some fixed capacity such as an orange carrot or yellow onion had served in for thousand of years already. A few majors had tried this out and found that it was possible to do but that it took an incredible amount of work, so much that it was not worth the trouble, not when there was a market right down the street when conventional carrots and onions were sold for very cheap, along with all the other vegetables which used to be grown in the garden before rules were made against this.
This did not have to go on for very long before no more world people came by the garden at all, before no major dared propose that any other crops be grown, and before vegetables piled up for which few people anywhere could have any use. So it was that the majors actually had plenty of all three vegies but were embarrased to offer the carrots and the onions to anyone for fear that people would not be able to tell what they were. They offered the celery, at least, to the lab colleagues because it was recognizable and would not perplex anyone. That is how the celery that the English majors grew in their community garden that used to be a courtyard found its way into the kibble trough of some unsuspecting rodents, sometime in 1935 or 1936.
The rats of course are blissfully ignorant of all of this human commotion.
[[[ ]]] that they do not control the hallway, the upstairs, the outside, or anything that lies across a continent or an ocean. They cannot do anything about any of this, and yet they are conscious of it and enmeshed in it: when they defecate, for example, the feces are removed to the hallway, or to who-knows-where after passing in and through hallway. The rats are aware of this too and feel vaguely uneasy at the thought that someone somewhere else might be suffering these vast piles of rat feces so that they, the rats, do not have to. But for now this merely intensifies their progressive meliorism and provides it with a rationalization that is independent of their parasocial chumship with Mr. Young. The problem of the doors and the problem of the feces first seemed like entirely discrete problems, but the rats are beginning to realize that everything is connected, somehow. This is a bit scary, but it is also comforting to think that if the problem of the doors could be solved this would ever so tenuously contribute to the building of a better world. This could be their solution to "problems of the soul."
The rats dwell on such existential questions only in occasional idle moments, but they do dwell on them. As presently confined there is no obvious way to for them to dispose of their own feces, but they begin to wish that there was. They have limited intelligence but great worldliness, and so they can see that in some abstract sense, taking responsibility for one's own feces frees someone else of a trouble which indeed should not be theirs to bear. The rats, then, have become naive believers in two things which no single human seems able to believe at the same time: they believe in abolishing class, at least as it pertains to the problem of the feces; and they believe in a certain kind of individual responsibility. But because of their confinement rather than in spite of it, they arrive at this latter belief not as individualists (paradoxically) but rather as communitarians. And because the rats are aware that they constantly defecate and send the feces away into the light, they realize that it is possible (if unlikely) that whoever is in charge of the lights might actually be in the same position as they are. This light creature may wish them no ill will but may not be able to know how the lights are impacting other communities elsewhere in the room, or in the world. Or the creature may be all knowing and the problem of the lights could be beyond even Mr. Young's comprehension. The rats would not be able to do anything about that.
Because the rats have self-reflexivity, and because they have learned a little bit about the world, they are able to tie certain ideas together in neat little packages, sort of like human beings do but not as sophisticatedly. And so it is realized that ideally, the light creature, presuming there is one, could agree to dim the lights just so during Mr. Young's working hours and the rats, in exchange, could agree to take custody of their own feces; and then they could finally proceed with the door problem, or so they think. Of course the rats do not yet have a solution to the feces problem, and they are just smart enough to see that the total lack of obvious solutions combined with the grave consequences of ever-mounting refuse make this a much scarier problem than the others. But anyway, the light problem has prompted a few of them to consider all of this transactionally, and the others quickly grasp the concept. The rats are self-aware and self-reflexive, and so they have a naive transactional culture of back-scratching, literally and otherwise within the confines of their intelligence. The lack of a solution to the feces problem limits their clout in a hypothetical transaction with the light creature, a hypothetical that is very unlikely to arise in reality; and anyway, it is dubious to agree to take custody of the feces with no existing solution to the problem this creates. Hence no transactions materialize in reality. And yet the hypothetical is discussed eagerly and passionately, albeit without advancing much at all. After all, all of this is related to the problem of the doors and hence has become yet another nagging "problem of the soul" and fodder for rumination.
The rats are not quite smart enough to anticipate that the solution to the feces problem could merely become a new confounder of the door problem. Only Mr. Young is that smart, and he is friendly with the rats but he cannot communicate with them in the strictest sense of the term. This turn of events would be devastating, of course. A peripeteia of the door would have the "poignance" and "salience" to intensify the sting of any purely practical problems that had been created by this blunder, such that the stinging is remembered forever and the problems mostly ignored or repressed. The rats would learn the hard lesson that a little bit of knowledge is dangerous; but a little bit of knowledge is all they have, it is even fun to play around with it, they do not really thirst for any more of it, and this is part of what allows them to be content with their lives despite also being aware of their extreme confinement. There would be far less discussion of the light problem and the door problem, since this would only remind the rats of their darkest hour. What discussion there would still be would not be as spirited as before, and this would deprive the rats of a major vehicle of communion upon which they have come to rely. These rats are becoming worldly-wise indeed, but they are not gaining any new possibilities for agency.
Fortunately for everyone, the rats do assume, in the end, that they simply cannot simply count on being able to solve the feces problem sometime in the future, hence they would not be able to transact on this basis to coax any concessions out of the light creature, should the creature exist, and should it demand other severe conditions that they also cannot meet. This is among the happiest times yet in the rat enclosure, because a foreseeable disaster has simply been taken off the table. There is much less to worry about today than there was yesterday. There is, of course, a second, unforeseeable disaster, the peripeteia of the doors, which never comes to pass. It would have killed them even more slowly and excrutiatingly than the feces problem, though they would have been less aware that things were quite this dire until it became too obvious to deny towards the very end. The rats cannot know so, but in fact they have averted two disasters rather than just one. Such is the fragility of life, even in a rat enclosure inside of a closely monitored laboratory.
For now, the rats' only aching existential need is the need to be conferred some tiny but irreducible role in some cosmic matter. They are mildly saddened, then, when they realize that they simply cannot take this role vis-a-vis their buddy Mr. Young and his meliorist quest for knowledge. They are saddened when they realize that they simply cannot become involved in the questions of the lights and the room arrangement without shattering their entire newfound consciousness. They are saddened, certainly, but not devastated. They do not yet need to discover therapy. The simplicity of their lives is precisely what enables them intuitively to arrive at things that human intellectuals must pursue doggedly for entire lifetimes. The dictum that "freedom is the recongition of necessity" is self-evident to them. Or, in Becker's rendering:
Cultural illusion is a necessary ideology of self-justification, a heroic dimension that is life itself to the symbolic animal. To lose the security of heroic cultural illusion is to die—that is what "deculturation" of primitives means and what it does. It kills them or reduces them to the animal level of chronic fighting and fornication. ... Many of the older American Indians were relieved when the Big Chiefs in Ottawa and Washington took control and prevented them from warring and feuding. It was a relief from the constant anxiety of death for their loved ones, if not for themselves. But they also knew, with a heavy heart, that this eclipse of their traditional hero-systems at the same time left them as good as dead.
(DoD, p. 189)
The rats begin to realize, then, because and not in spite of the fact that their entire consciousness is a product of their confinement, that they cannot really entertain ideas for gaining control of the lights anyway, not even if this were possible for them, and not even if it is a mere means to the end of controlling the doors. The rats realize that they are "as good as dead" if they get this far.
Gods can take in the whole of creation because they alone can make sense of it... But as soon as a man lifts his nose from the ground and starts sniffing at eternal problems like life and death, the meaning of a rose or a star cluster—then he is in trouble.
(DoD, 178)
The rats realize, therefore, that the doors-and-lights problem is simply beyond them. That is an unhappy thought to a human being, but to a recently self-aware rat colony it is freedom borne of accepting limits. For human beings the way of rat-life is terrifying, self-awareness or not, because for human beings projection is the flipside of empathy. Human beings are imprisoned by their own capacities for social feeling. Social feeling blinds human beings to much more than it reveals to them, and it gives the sensation that the opposite is the case. And so the human beings who pass through the lab, though they are playful and generous enough, also harbor an unconscious contempt for the rats that the rats are not even capable of developing or feeling for any living creature, not even for whichever creature it is who controls the lights or hauls the feces. The confinement of the rats determines certain rat cognitions and behaviors. The same mechanism operates on humans; but humans have managed to begin peeling back most of the limits within which they have lived for millennia, and so this has very different effects on their cognition and behavior. Intelligence and advancing knowledge make this possible; but to call this endeavor "smart" might be going a bit too far.
Though the rats have become naive self-aware worldly-wise progressive meliorists with an individualist-communitarian streak, their behavior suggests that still, even now, they desire little more than the secure, mundane existence of the lab and periodic communion with their conspecifics. Mr. Young has noticed this quietism of the rats alongside their occasional remarkable bursts of activity, but he remains in the same unwitting bind as before. At least he is making progress in retrofitting the lab and building some new enclosures.
From here, the rats quickly emerge from the collective existential crisis of gaining self-awareness and begin to contrive an elemental culture into which young rats are initiated. They sooth new crises with genteel idiomatic expressions about doors, lights, food and feces. To be sure, a few rats do not enjoy the sayings about feces: these tend to be the young rats whose forebears were nearly alone, in the early days of the experiment, in insisting upon taking custody of the feces, upon the existence of the light creature, and upon hard bargaining with him over the resolution of the hypothetical light-feces problem. It is said that a few of these old rats "coudn't find food if it was behind the third door." Nobody liked it when Mr. Young would add chemicals to the food, but sometimes when this happened the old rats would defecate in the food to prove a point, and then nobody could eat until the next day. But the old rats did find some food, it would seem, enough at least to survive the earliest days of the experiment, which were not as pleasant as latter days. And the old rats certainly ate enough, somehow, to father enormous broods of young, several large litters at a time, on an ongoing basis for nearly their entire lives. This must have made Mr. Young very happy, or perhaps merely saved him some unpleasant errands. But in any event, the ongoing stigma surrounding the old rats' absolute belief in the light creature and their avowed willingess to choke to death on their own feces, which was so strong as to suggest that they actually desired it, this is the only serious social problem the rats have ever had. The stigma has never entirely lifted from a few of the lineages and probably never will. These are the young rats who must defend themselves against even playful barbs by lashing out. These are the young rats who point out to others that feces stink, as if all the other creatures could not tell for themselves; and when they arrive at middle-age, these are the rats who can often be seen declaring to no one in particular that the mere thought of the whole rat colony suffocating to death and leaving good Mr. Young's corridor full of feces and cadavers is a flatly obscene thought and should not be joked about or invoked to sooth the young. That is not the real reason they object to the expressions about feces, but it is the reason they offer. Everyone understands this and no one is too upset about it. With time it is discussed more openly and the rats thereby recover some of the communion they once lost when the issue was too delicate for mere recreational banter. Anyway, every rat, young and old, understands these expressions so intuitively that to speak this way barely amounts to referring to feces at all. The rats are not quite smart enough to understand why this should be, but they can sense it intuitively, and this dynamic in itself this brings far more jovial repartee than nagging moralism, the more so with every passing year.
And so, on the whole, things are still just fine with the rats. There is just enough earthly heroism to be had within their confinement that the rats are reasonably content with life. They do wish that they could be more helpful to Mr. Young, and to the world, but they are worldly-wise enough now to realize that he will be okay; though they cannot read his research papers, they have learned that he is a capable and intelligent man who can look after himself well enough, even if none of his fellows ever cite his publications or confer upon him the recognition he deserves. And as for the world, the world can take care of itself. They are confined from it anyway, and so the rats realize that there is no sense to joining vicariously in someone else's problems if they cannot possibly share in the eventual solutions. There is no sense to importing only the ugliness of the world and not the beauty, no sense in entering the enclosure, from which rats every so often do not return, if this is merely done for the benefit of creatures they will never lay their own eyes on, and certainly not if there is, against all odds, no nosh in the plates that day. The rats do not possess delicate literary concepts like allegory or metonymy, but still it seems to them, in hindsight, that this uneven bargain, the corridor with no nosh, is more or less what happened with the problem of the doors and the lights. If those old rats and their enormous broods had been right about the light creature, the whole colony would have suffocated on their own feces long ago; whereas if the light creature had existed but the old rats had not, then surely the rats and the light creature could have worked things out to everyone's contentment.
The rats, then, have become worldly-wise existentialists too: thanks to having become the kind of self-aware creatures Becker writes of, they carry certain burdens that rats should not have to carry; and yet their hierarchy of needs still has not been tipped over or even jostled. Even now, they still have
the right amount of the right quality in the right time and the right place for the right purpose.
(Mumford, Art and Technics, p. 110)
Though they are only rats, they are confident enough not only in Mr. Young's wherewithal but in their own, and they will be content enough to live within the circumstances they have been dealt if only they do not gain too much knowledge of everything else that goes on in the world. There is no danger of them intellectually learning much more than they already know; but of course life has a way of placing certain things right under the nose and shoving others straight up the behind. And anyway, the rats have long known that someone else controls the lights and that the lights, in at least a small way, control them. And here in the question of control, though these self-aware rats have made a synthesis of progressive meliorism, the acceptance of limits, and communitarian social feeling which few humans ever have been able to make, here in the existential problem of control, finally, is something that a worldly-wise rat simply cannot abide once it has just a little bit of knowledge on the topic.
And so, finally, the rats arrive at their first true raising of consciousness since the advent of self-reflexivity. They now understand that their world is interconnected but not responsive, and that fragility is connectivity without responsiveness. These worldly-wise rats do not cease to live or cease to enjoy the happy moments. They do not cease to commune over the old problems, to bat around these problems, to discuss them eagerly, to joke and laugh about them, to intellectually develop certain underdiscussed aspects of them, to frame new aspects of life metaphorically in terms of the old problems. These are not the same rats who walked the primordial earth, but they at least are the same rats they have been ever since the advent of self-reflexivity and the time of learning. But they do cease, once and for all, to be the progressive meliorists that the ever-advancing experiment demanded they become. The rats can no longer sustain progressive meliorism after realizing that there is no way to remain alive without being somehow responsive to the world, and yet it is far too much to ask in turn that the entire world to be responsive to them. It cannot be expected of them that they be responsive to the entire world of continents and oceans and yet remain confined to their enclosure. They possess neither a human level of empathy nor any advanced reflexive sciences, but they have a naive understanding of reciprocity that has been developed through the lens of the feces problem. They have discovered the problem of self-determination by way of the problem of reciprocity, and not, as with humans, the other way around.
This is the rats' understanding, not in spite of their confinement but because of it. In human terms they remain only of childlike intelligence and quotidian learnedness, but they have in this single respect gained an enlightenment which escapes even some very intelligent humans. Human beings are capable of broad and deep learning, but their eyes are bigger than their stomachs. Once human beings have seen and learned a certain amount about the entire world they begin to think that this entire world might be brought under their domain, that they might connect every part of the world with every other part and then finally, sometime, connect themselves to all of it at once. They are realistic enough to know the practical limits of their own capacity for control, but they are blind to the ways of connectivity. Though humans have developed advanced sciences and an excellent intellectual understanding of connectivity, they nonetheless persist in behaving as if connectivity is merely arithmetic. They think that they can bring the entire world under their control if only it could be channeled through a narrow enough conduit. There is a human who wrote an article entitled "More Is Different," which many, many humans have read. They need read only the title, actually, and need not bother with anything beyond that. It is a very good article, but although it was written and read, it has not changed anything at all about the humans, who often do not read beyond the titles of things and can quite well miss the point of an article no matter how much or how little of it they have actually read.
And so the human way is to attempt to break out of the enclosure at all costs, to dispose of the unfortunate Mr. Young, to barter hard with the light creature, in thought if not in reality, and to simply assume (without a shred of justification) that the problem of the feces will be solved bye the bye. A human confined among the rats would simply assume that anything lying afield of the lab will be understandable more or less in the same terms as the world within it, and this makes it seem reasonable to attempt an advance. Human beings have recapitulated this fallacy with each successive expansion of their domain over the universe, from the individual to the community level on up to entire continents and oceans, entire populations of unsuspecting creatures, and into outer space. Human beings are very good at learning, but they do not easily learn from whatever is right under their noses. That is both too easy and too difficult for them, and so it does not work every time. To be certain that a human being will learn, the lesson must be shoved up its behind rather than placed under its nose, and human beings often do not like the former feeling. It is a feeling they are able to enjoy only when they believe they are in complete control of it themselves, and they do not enjoy it at all otherwise; and so they also use their advancing domain over the universe to ensure, to the extent possible, that no other creature is allowed to shove anything up there unless this is to be done purely for sport. It is not to be done for any other reason, and certainly not for purposes of learning. Human beings have to ask themselves permission before they are able to learn something, and this is one reason they do not learn half as much as they are able. Human beings are nature's preeminent learners, in fact, but they are most adept of all at preventing themselves from learning things.
And so most human beings, if they had been confined with the rats, would by now have tried or died trying to escape. That is a safe enough assumption to make about human beings, even if it is not absolute. If there was a human being who was invited to leave and stayed put anyway, most of the other human beings would find this behavior pathological. But these normal human beings already contradict themselves in this judgment, for if a human will die trying to escape untenable circumstances, then a human who neglects to escape when escape is offered to them must not be in such untenable circumstances after all. This also is not an absolute assumption. There are a thousand different ways it can be wrong. But that is the case with all such assumptions as human beings make when they try to read each others' minds. Cognition and behavior are two of the most substantial human problems, and so they are discussed passionately, investigated empirically, remolded into homely metaphors and distorted into repressive ideologies. They comprise both fertile ground for humor and territory unfit for humor. They are deployed offensively against dissenters and defensively on behalf of allies. Humans enjoy few things more than thinking about thinking, and so the problem of cognition and the problem of behavior are always being worked over. Humans cannot even agree, or not always, whether these really are two problems or just one; many humans are unsure where the one stops and the other begins. And so there is much disagreement about this and occasionally even some violence. But on the whole it is just one more thing for human beings to enjoy learning about, or to enjoy not learning about, depending on the human being in question.
The rats, of course, do not have have explicit concepts of things like cognition and behavior, and they do not have humanlike concepts of the finite and the infinite. The rats would not understand that human creatures can discover the boundaries of the universe itself but can lose sight of the boundaries between their insides and outsides, nor that the human rage towards expansion therefore threatens to go on forever and to bring far more suffering than progress. The rats do not know this much about the world and they are not quite intelligent enough to comprehend things of this nature, but because they are confined they have a shorter distance to travel in order to think their way out of the expansionist fallacy. The rats merely need to understand that they have no choice, as living creatures, to respond to the world beyond the enclosure and that, contrarily, this world does not (indeed cannot) respond to them. And so the rats land on the opposite solution to this problem as a human being would land on: they see that some retrenchment from connectivity would actually enhance their little patch of ground; this as opposed to the human way of seeking advances in connectivity until connectivity is transfigured into something incomprehensible and uncontrollable. The human rage for control ends in a total loss of control. The rats do not have concepts of paradox or irony, except perhaps naively in a few highly anomalous situations, but for now they do not have to have these concepts.
The rats do understand that they do not have a solution to the problem of connectivity, just as once upon a time they lacked a solution to the problem of the feces. They have not forgotten that the problem of the feces was identified a very long time ago now, that it is well undertood, and yet they still would not know where to start in devising solution. So, they do not know exactly what to do next, but they have identified a new problem and they have some high-quality collective experience with the problem of problems. And things are still alright with the rats, even though the rats understand what a problem is and understand too that they have never solved a single problem. Nonetheless, things are okay and they will be okay for a long while.
These worldly-wise rats, then, can no longer sustain their naive progressive meliorism. They are gentle creatures who lack the spite to become radicalized or the vanity to become moderates. And so they become populists.
In human terms this is a true raising of consciousness, certainly, but for the rats, for now, it is merely the stuff of life. For now the problem of connectivity is just another problem to be thought through, worked up, schemed about, brooded over, humorized and metonymized. And so things are okay for the rats. It would be unwise to try to say too much more about that aspect of things than has already been said, and so there is not much more to be said. And things cannot stay the same forever, of course, but they will stay like this for a while, and that is alright. Things are alright for the rats, and for things to be merely alright is very good indeed.