EDITORIAL:
THE BARBARIANS WITHIN
John W. Campbell
When the Lion shall lie down with the Lamb—the Lion is going to be in serious trouble. The Lamb, of course, can baaaaah happily as it goes gamboling off through its breakfast, lunch, and dinner supply—but the Lion’s in a different spot. He can’t live on grass. His digestive system is intrinsically incapable of extracting nourishment from herbal food supplies. It’s no good trying to persuade him to learn a new way of life, and be happy eating grass, fruits, and twigs; he can’t.
During the hot summer nights last year, race riots broke out in various cities in the Northeast. New York—Rochester—Jersey City—Chicago—Paterson—and other towns had their riots or near-riots as emotions boiled over.
These were undoubtedly true race riots—but I want to suggest that they were not Negro-vs-White riots. They only had that surface appearance.
For one thing, remember that only about 0.05% of the Negroes of Harlem, for instance, participated in the rioting. Moreover, while the New York City riots were essentially one-hundred-percent Negro, this was not the pattern in Rochester, Chicago, and other places. There white juveniles did their rioting, looting, and destroying, too. Once the riots got started, it was a happy orgy of looting, destruction, and outlawry in which all interested were joining the party.
They were race riots, all right—but the races involved were Barbarians vs. Citizens—and neither skin color, religion, or home background had anything whatever to do with it.
Dr. Kenneth Clark, Harlem’s Negro psychologist, of course maintains that it’s the poor home environment of the Harlem Negro youths that leads to such behavior—the frustrations and tensions of rejection, poor education, and slovenly home environment.
That’s open to argument, of course, since it’s proper to ask “Who makes the slovenly home environments?” But skip that problem for a moment, and recognize that full-fledged Juvenile Delinquents come from fine homes, with excellent economic, educational, and social backgrounds.
The Barbarian type is a genetic type—he’s born that way. True, he can be influenced to some degree—but he’s inherently a Barbarian, and he’ll be a Barbarian no matter what his economic, educational, or social background may be.
First off, let’s stop pretending that “all men are born equal”; they aren’t, never were, and never will be. They’re born with vastly different potentials, and vastly different inherent motivations. It’s currently fashionable to say that it’s lack of educational opportunities, economic opportunities, et cetera, that keeps the poor man poor and hopeless. This is utter nonsense, as history proves in any number of instances you want. Abraham Lincoln, maybe, had excellent educational, economic, and social background? Or what’s your particular choice of field of accomplishment? Science? Then how about Michael Faraday? Or try another type of handicap; how about Charles P. Steinmetz? And, on the other side, every millionaire’s son become’s a genius in his own right because of his educational, economic, and social advantages?
The men of great personal accomplishment aren’t necessarily beneficial to the race, of course. But to see that the much-discussed educational, economic, and social advantages don’t seem to matter much—consider Adolph Hitler and Genghis Khan.
Those advantages are helpful—to individuals with the right kind of potential. But the individual must have the potential as a genetic gift.
It’s currently popular to hold that Nurture is Everything, and Nature is an unimportant accident of no real importance. The argument is usually advanced on behalf of the poor, down-trodden, dispossessed, rejected slob who never did anything useful for himself or anyone else.
O.K.—try applying it to the millionaire’s sons. By the nature of the argument, it follows that every millionaire’s son should prove to be a genius. Since they quite obviously don’t, despite having every possible advantage (except inherent nature!) it’s essential for the social-liberal who claims it’s lack of such advantages that makes the poor man poor, to explain why the rich man’s son so frequently turns out to be simply a rich slob. The social-liberal is always quick to hold that the rich man’s son is a selfish, egotistical, useless parasite; is that the effect of every educational and economic advantage? Is that what he wants for the poor man’s son?
Of course, there are rich men’s sons who have turned out to be fully as brilliantly constructive and creative as their sires—but that’s not surprising. There are also poor men’s sons who’ve turned out brilliantly constructive, too. More poor men’s sons turn up as great benefactors than rich men’s sons, for that matter—which is not too surprising, in view of the fact that there are about 100,000,000 poor men having sons for every rich man having a son.
In any case, the social-liberal who is constantly insisting that it’s educational, economic, and social advantages, and only that, that makes the vast difference must—loathe the idea however much he may—explain why the millionaire’s sons aren’t consistently brilliant, creative, constructive, and highly civilized individuals.
Because, quite clearly, despite all those advantages, they aren’t consistently what the social-liberal insists good opportunities would make of everyone!
No—there’s Nature in there, as well as Nurture. And genetics plays a role that education simply cannot do anything about. There’s one very simple fundamental that constitutes an absolute block on the possibilities of education: You cannot teach an organism how to learn.
The ability-to-learn must be genetically endowed; if the ability-to-learn is not already present, then all efforts to teach must necessarily be futile.
Now a chimpanzee can be taught many things—more, and more complex behavior patterns than, for example, a dog. But it cannot be taught to understand and use word-symbols. It lacks the ability-to-learn speech symbology. No amount of patient effort can teach what the chimpanzee’s mind lacks the ability to learn.
How long must one expose a piece of film coated with a sodium chloride-gelatin emulsion to get a picture? A silver-chloride-gelatin emulsion will record a picture in a millionth of a second—but sodium chloride lacks the ability-to-respond-to-light. No amount of exposure will ever produce the desired recording.
Dogs have been selectively bred by Man for about 200,000 years—say 100,000 generations. The modern Border Collie, like other true working dogs, can learn a quite extensive vocabulary of true sound-symbols; they do learn to understand speech. They are not as intelligent as the chimpanzee—but they have one specific ability-to-learn that the chimpanzee simply lacks.
Point: The existence of a high degree of intelligence has no correlation whatever with specific learning abilities.
The chief statistician for one of America’s greatest public utilities once took a series of aptitude tests, to aid psychologists who were trying to calibrate their tests in terms of aptitudes-shown vs. success in fields of work. That is, what aptitudes does an individual who succeeds as an engineer show? A banker? A research chemist? Or, in the case under test, a statistician.
One aptitude he lacked with almost incredible completeness was any sense of spatial geometry. Given a wooden cube, which had been sawed up into nine wiggly, irregular blocks, and asked to assemble the scattered pieces—after forty-five minutes of futile trying, they gave up. Most people need about three minutes; mechanical engineers usually succeed in about forty-five seconds.
Both the psychologists and the statistician were fascinated by this remarkable lack of solid-geometry insight, and agreed to try a teaching program. Over the course of a week or so, the statistician laboriously practiced assembling the wiggly blocks, until he finally was able to do it in about five minutes.
Then they gave him an exactly similar collection of wiggly blocks, but only one-half the size he’d practiced with.
At the end of thirty unsuccessful minutes, he went back to being one of the country’s greatest statisticians, and they went back to aptitude testing.
# # #
Intelligence has nothing whatever to do with specific learning ability.
A specific learning ability can be bred into a genetic line, given time enough, selective breeding, and a reasonable mutability of the organisms being bred. (That’s why dogs now understand speech-symbols.)
Some human individuals can’t learn to be civilized. Genetics being a statistical thing, the son of five generations of highly civilized men may happen to miss the gene-pattern required, while the son of twenty generations of barbarian warriors shows up with it.
The essence of a learning-ability is, it seems to me, a built-in genetic ability to enjoy a specific activity. The Lamb can enjoy eating grass—and, incidentally, gets nourished thereby. If we could somehow make a Lion enjoy eating grass, he would happily chew away at grass, worried only by the extremely inefficient job his carnivore-style teeth did on chewing the stuff. (He would starve to death, of course, but he’d starve happily.)
The scholar enjoys studying. The athlete enjoys physical activity. The two are mutually exclusive only to the extent that both require time, so we find both scholarly athletes, scholarly nonathletes, and athletic nonscholars.
The trouble with the Barbarian is that he specifically enjoys fighting, and specifically hates working for a living. To him, working for a living is dishonorable, unmanly, slavery—anathema. He can enjoy fighting, though he is fully aware that it has a high probability of killing him. (Remember that a nuclear physicist deeply enjoys working with materials that he is acutely aware can kill him. The chemist continues to do research on materials that he knows are extremely explosive, enormously poisonous, or viciously corrosive. Risk stops neither the citizen nor the barbarian.)
The Barbarian can fight for a living, in any variant of the concept of “fight.” These include actual paid-mercenary action, fight-and-loot—which he prefers, of course—or through stealing, swindling, blackmailing, extortion, et cetera. He would, by reason of that general mechanism, rather rape a woman than earn her love, rather seduce her by false promises than marry her—because the latter is a form of slavery, in his opinion. He could not enjoy her love—but would delight in his conquest of her. (And don’t pity the Barbarian woman; she agrees in full!)
Now history has some six thousand years of records showing the essential pattern of Barbarian behavior. It’s quite consistent, whether you study pre-Hellenistic Greek Barbarians as seen by more nearly civilized early Egypt, Mongols as seen by civilized Chinese a thousand years ago, or the problem in central Africa today.
The Barbarian is born with the characteristic that he cannot work for a living. He can’t lie down with the Citizen, and cooperate in a constructive, cooperative, eight-hours-a-day building operation. He can’t—no more than the Lion can live if he lies down with the Lamb.
After the Harlem riots, one Negro rioter said to a newspaper reporter, “They’re killing us psychologically, damn it! They’re killing us slow! If they’re going to kill me, I’d rather they did it with a bullet!”
He was speaking the exact truth. The city-culture is kitting them—the Barbarians—psychologically. It must; it cannot live with them, and they cannot live with it. And the Barbarian would rather die by a bullet; he doesn’t mind the risk of fighting, any more than the dedicated scientist minds the risk of riding a rocket into orbit.
That rioter who’d rather die by a bullet wasn’t saying that because he was a Negro; he was speaking for all the Barbarian rioters, black and white, Jew, Christian, Mohammedan, or Buddhist, in all civilized lands everywhere. He thought he was talking about Negroes, when he said “They’re killing us . . .”—but remember that only a minute percentage of Negroes were actually involved in the rioting, while very considerable numbers of whites joined in the spree of Barbarian-style looting, fighting, and destruction.
# # #
I have a little parlor game I like to play on people; you can try it yourself, if you don’t mind losing a few friends. It’s called “You be Dictator.” It’s quite simple; you simply say to your victim, “You’ve just been appointed Absolute Tyrant Dictator of the Earth. Now tell me—what do you do about this problem . . .” and name the problem he’s sure he knows the answer to.
Like, “Now you’re Dictator—you solve the problem of what to do with the Barbarians in our city-civilized culture!”
The thing that makes it so deadly a problem is that some of those Barbarians the city-culture must kill either psychologically or physically, will be the sons—and daughters—of your own officers and administrators.
The trouble of the Barbarian in the city-culture stems from the fact that they are a race-within-any-and-every-race.
One of the major reasons the Negro people are having so much trouble gaining acceptance is, simply, that the Negroes are not doing an adequate job of disciplining their own people, themselves.
There are three possible forms of discipline in the Universe; any individual or group has a choice of which of the three he will choose—but there is absolutely no escape from the necessity of choosing. Discipline you will get, whether you like it or not; your choice is which form of discipline you want, not whether you’ll accept it or not.
There’s Universe Discipline. If Baby sticks his hand in the boiling water—that’s what he gets. Or, if he crawls out the fifth-story window. Or, if an African tribesman, convinced that his magic charm makes rifle bullets turn to water—he gets Universe Discipline.
Then there’s Other-People Discipline. That’s what Baby gets when Mama slaps its hand away as it reaches for the boiling water, or grabs Baby as he starts out the window. Or what the tribesman gets if he’s arrested and jailed before he gets a chance to charge the machine gun.
Then there’s Self-Discipline. Which is what you use when you get tired of getting your hand burned by the scalding water, and also get tired of having people slap it away from what you want to reach. It’s what you achieve when you recognize that the magical charms won’t work, and charging machine guns won’t give you even a chance of surviving the fighting, and, somehow, learn to enjoy working your way up to having your own machine guns.
The disappointing part about Self-Discipline is that, when you finally achieve what you set out for, you find your wants have changed, and your achievement is, somehow, unimportant. Like the kid who, at age ten, promised himself that, when he grew up and had all the money in his pocket that adults had, he was going to have an ice cream soda and a bag of popcorn every time he wanted one, by gosh.
Well . . . in a sense, he does. He just doesn’t seem to want five sodas and fifteen bags of popcorn a day now that he’s grown up.
So by the time the African tribesmen grow up to the Self-Disciplined civilization level of producing their own precision machine tools to produce precision machine guns, and the high-level chemical industry necessary to produce the metals and the explosives required to earn their own machine guns . . . they’ll be disappointed. They’ll be all equipped with a high-level military technology—and no desire, any more, to use it. They’ll be citizens, and citizens, unlike Barbarians, just don’t enjoy fighting.
The Barbarian’s inevitable and highly suicidal error is to think that, because the citizen obviously hates fighting, the citizen must be unable to fight well.
So . . . there you are, Absolute Tyrant Dictator of the world.
How are you going to make the Barbarians in your city-cultures learn to enjoy discipline—and choose Self-Discipline?
But remember—the true Barbarian can’t learn that—any more than the Lion can learn to lie down with the Lamb.
Oh, by the way—heroin and cocaine may be very useful to your program. They’ll keep a Barbarian happy with delusions and illusions. If you just see to it he has an ample supply, he will cause you very little trouble. It has the advantage, moreover, of killing him both psychologically and physically, without arousing any protest on his part.
But you’re the Dictator!
What’s your brilliant solution to the problem of the born Barbarian in your own family . . . ?
(A reader replies:)
Dear Mr. Campbell:
I agree with your January editorial, but it won’t do the people it’s aimed at any good.
Since you contend that the Barbarian is a genetic type, it must also be true that the “social-liberal” is a genetic type—he enjoys fooling with Barbarians, just as physicists and chemists enjoy fooling with dangerous materials. The Barbarian can’t learn to like working constructively, and the “social-liberal” can’t learn that the Barbarian is a hopeless case.
Therefore the “social-liberal” will keep banging his head against the brick wall of the Barbarian’s character until something gives—either the liberal’s skull, or society’s patience with the Barbarian.
When society becomes sufficiently impatient with the Barbarian for his brutality toward the citizen-social-liberal, the Barbarian will simply have to go—whether through spontaneous actions of mass emotion, or through the passage of new laws, written or unwritten, making it a crime to be a Barbarian.
R.H.R
Atlanta, Georgia
That isn’t the way history has answered that problem. What has happened—Roman Empire for example—is that the Barbarians take over the civilization, squander the accumulated wealth for a few generations, then amuse themselves fighting among the ruins. This kills off the soft-headed Citizen type that produces the social-liberals, a large percentage of the pure barbarians, and the hard-headed citizen types that—as post-graduate barbarians—can out-fight, out-organize, and out-think the barbarians regain control and start rebuilding.
That full cycle, in its pure form, doesn’t often get a chance to manifest itself; usually citizen-dominated surrounding cultures step in when the barbarian induced anarchy disintegrates the culture. Rome demonstrated the full cycle, because there weren’t any rival nearby citizen-cultures extant at that time.
The fully developed Citizen actually seems to be every bit as hard-headed, ruthless, and dangerous a fighter as any barbarian—he just uses his ruthless determination wisely instead of egocentrically.