Browse content similar to Human, All Too Human. Check below for episodes and series from the same categories and more!
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The 20th century, according to Sigmund Freud, | 0:00:10 | 0:00:13 | |
would see man's capacity for both destruction and technology | 0:00:13 | 0:00:17 | |
bring us close to extinction. | 0:00:17 | 0:00:20 | |
As his prophecy came close to reality, | 0:00:23 | 0:00:27 | |
a new breed of thinker emerged | 0:00:27 | 0:00:29 | |
who would try to steer humanity away from disaster. | 0:00:29 | 0:00:33 | |
What is there is human nature that allows an individual to act | 0:00:40 | 0:00:43 | |
without any restraints whatsoever? | 0:00:43 | 0:00:45 | |
In this series, we'll dig deep into the BBC's archive | 0:00:47 | 0:00:50 | |
to look at how thinkers used broadcasting to fight for humanity. | 0:00:50 | 0:00:55 | |
And we begin with those scientists and psychologists | 0:00:59 | 0:01:03 | |
who put human nature itself under the microscope. | 0:01:03 | 0:01:06 | |
The only real danger that exists is man himself. | 0:01:09 | 0:01:13 | |
-BUZZER SOUNDS -Incorrect. | 0:01:13 | 0:01:16 | |
They would strip bare our subconscious... | 0:01:16 | 0:01:19 | |
LOUD SCREAM | 0:01:19 | 0:01:21 | |
..revolutionise the way we bring up our children... | 0:01:23 | 0:01:26 | |
Lucy knows Linus, doesn't she? | 0:01:26 | 0:01:29 | |
..look to other cultures for guidance... | 0:01:29 | 0:01:32 | |
You studied the tools people used, the lullabies they sang... | 0:01:32 | 0:01:35 | |
..all in the hope of building a better future. | 0:01:37 | 0:01:41 | |
It isn't enough to bring up our children happy | 0:01:41 | 0:01:45 | |
and secure - you've got to have a decent world for them. | 0:01:45 | 0:01:48 | |
In 1938, as Europe stood on the brink of war, | 0:02:13 | 0:02:18 | |
a refugee from Nazi-occupied Austria | 0:02:18 | 0:02:21 | |
arrived in the leafy suburbs of Hampstead. | 0:02:21 | 0:02:24 | |
Already viewed as one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century, | 0:02:27 | 0:02:32 | |
he had spent decades looking into the secrets of the human mind. | 0:02:32 | 0:02:36 | |
His name was Sigmund Freud. | 0:02:38 | 0:02:42 | |
Before Freud, humans had been seen as logical, intellectual beings. | 0:02:44 | 0:02:49 | |
But Freud saw an irrational side to humanity, | 0:02:51 | 0:02:55 | |
which he was determined to put on the couch. | 0:02:55 | 0:02:58 | |
He believed each of us has a powerful unconscious, | 0:03:02 | 0:03:06 | |
shaped in our childhoods, | 0:03:06 | 0:03:08 | |
manifest in our dreams | 0:03:08 | 0:03:10 | |
and ruled by sexual motivations. | 0:03:10 | 0:03:13 | |
Freud made it quite clear | 0:03:15 | 0:03:17 | |
that man was not master in his own home. | 0:03:17 | 0:03:20 | |
He was always at the sway of these instinctual forces, | 0:03:20 | 0:03:25 | |
these desires, wishes and unruly aggressions | 0:03:25 | 0:03:31 | |
which toppled him because they were unconscious. | 0:03:31 | 0:03:35 | |
I think Freud revolutionised the way we think about being human. | 0:03:36 | 0:03:42 | |
We think of ourselves now as having an unconscious. | 0:03:42 | 0:03:47 | |
We think that our dreams have meaning, | 0:03:47 | 0:03:49 | |
we think that our childhoods are terribly important | 0:03:49 | 0:03:52 | |
and how we care for children is therefore much more important than we ever did before. | 0:03:52 | 0:03:57 | |
These are huge changes in the way we see things. | 0:03:57 | 0:04:02 | |
Nobody in the world of psychology has had a bigger effect. | 0:04:02 | 0:04:05 | |
In December 1938, a BBC radio crew visited Freud | 0:04:09 | 0:04:14 | |
and captured an interview with him | 0:04:14 | 0:04:16 | |
just months before he succumbed to throat cancer. | 0:04:16 | 0:04:19 | |
In this, the only voice recording of Freud ever made, | 0:04:25 | 0:04:28 | |
he modestly describes his achievements. | 0:04:28 | 0:04:32 | |
These were the early days of home movie making, | 0:05:14 | 0:05:18 | |
and this family film is the only moving footage of Freud that exists. | 0:05:18 | 0:05:23 | |
The movies show Freud relaxing with his family, | 0:05:30 | 0:05:34 | |
but towards the end of his life, he grew increasingly concerned | 0:05:34 | 0:05:38 | |
about the troubles in society. | 0:05:38 | 0:05:40 | |
Over the course of his career, | 0:05:41 | 0:05:44 | |
he built his theories into an all-encompassing work. | 0:05:44 | 0:05:47 | |
The idea in Civilization And Its Discontents | 0:05:49 | 0:05:52 | |
was that the sexual repression of individuals in the Western world | 0:05:52 | 0:05:56 | |
would lead to the collapse of our society. | 0:05:56 | 0:05:59 | |
Freud died in the month that the Second World War began. | 0:06:46 | 0:06:51 | |
This war saw humanity sink to its lowest levels of violence and destruction. | 0:06:53 | 0:06:58 | |
Freud's warnings had done nothing to avert the catastrophe. | 0:07:00 | 0:07:05 | |
One man was convinced he knew where Freud had got it wrong. | 0:07:05 | 0:07:08 | |
Carl Gustav Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist 20 years Freud's junior. | 0:07:18 | 0:07:23 | |
Although they would go on to have a bitter break-up, | 0:07:23 | 0:07:26 | |
their relationship began with mutual admiration. | 0:07:26 | 0:07:31 | |
In 1959, Jung was interviewed at his home on the shores of Lake Zurich | 0:07:34 | 0:07:39 | |
by John Freeman for the BBC's legendary Face To Face programme. | 0:07:39 | 0:07:44 | |
He described his initial meeting with Freud | 0:07:44 | 0:07:46 | |
and their subsequent relationship. | 0:07:46 | 0:07:48 | |
I went to Vienna for a fortnight | 0:07:52 | 0:07:54 | |
and then we had a very... | 0:07:54 | 0:07:58 | |
..long and penetrating conversations | 0:07:59 | 0:08:02 | |
and that settled it. | 0:08:02 | 0:08:05 | |
And this long and penetrating conversation was followed by personal friendship. | 0:08:05 | 0:08:10 | |
Oh, yes. It soon developed into personal friendship. | 0:08:10 | 0:08:13 | |
What sort of man was Freud? | 0:08:13 | 0:08:15 | |
I liked him very much | 0:08:15 | 0:08:16 | |
but I soon discovered that | 0:08:16 | 0:08:20 | |
when he had thought something, | 0:08:20 | 0:08:23 | |
then it was settled... | 0:08:23 | 0:08:24 | |
while I was doubting all along the line. | 0:08:24 | 0:08:27 | |
And... | 0:08:28 | 0:08:29 | |
it was impossible to discuss something really full. | 0:08:29 | 0:08:35 | |
So from the very beginning, | 0:08:35 | 0:08:39 | |
there was a discrepancy. | 0:08:39 | 0:08:41 | |
Revealing though this conversation was, | 0:08:45 | 0:08:48 | |
Jung had explained more about the break-up with Freud | 0:08:48 | 0:08:51 | |
in a BBC interview conducted four years earlier. | 0:08:51 | 0:08:54 | |
For unknown reasons, this footage was shelved, | 0:08:56 | 0:09:00 | |
and remained buried for decades. | 0:09:00 | 0:09:02 | |
When you're ready. | 0:09:04 | 0:09:06 | |
I am all right. | 0:09:06 | 0:09:08 | |
In it, Jung describes how, | 0:09:10 | 0:09:12 | |
after five years' collaboration, he split from Freud. | 0:09:12 | 0:09:17 | |
By 1912, I had acquired a lot of my own experience | 0:09:17 | 0:09:21 | |
and... | 0:09:21 | 0:09:24 | |
a great deal of... | 0:09:24 | 0:09:26 | |
I learned a great deal... | 0:09:26 | 0:09:29 | |
HAD learned a great deal from Freud | 0:09:29 | 0:09:32 | |
and then I saw certain things in a different light. | 0:09:32 | 0:09:35 | |
So you dissociated yourself from Freud. | 0:09:35 | 0:09:38 | |
Well, yes, | 0:09:38 | 0:09:41 | |
because I couldn't share his opinions or his convictions any more. | 0:09:41 | 0:09:46 | |
Whilst working at the Burgholzli mental hospital in Zurich, | 0:09:54 | 0:09:57 | |
Jung had formulated his own ideas. | 0:09:57 | 0:10:00 | |
He believed that each of us has an individual destiny | 0:10:03 | 0:10:06 | |
which we can achieve through a process of individuation. | 0:10:06 | 0:10:10 | |
Individuation is very much about how we become the whole self, | 0:10:13 | 0:10:16 | |
so it's about the integration of the conscious and the unconscious | 0:10:16 | 0:10:20 | |
and how we manage that, to be us. | 0:10:20 | 0:10:22 | |
As each plant, each tree, grows from a seed and becomes in the end, | 0:10:28 | 0:10:33 | |
say, an oak tree, | 0:10:33 | 0:10:35 | |
so man becomes what he is meant to be, | 0:10:35 | 0:10:39 | |
at least he ought to get there. | 0:10:39 | 0:10:41 | |
But most get stuck by unfavourable external conditions, | 0:10:41 | 0:10:49 | |
by all sorts of hindrances, | 0:10:49 | 0:10:54 | |
or pathological distortions, wrong education. | 0:10:54 | 0:10:58 | |
No end of reasons why one shouldn't get there, where one belongs. | 0:10:58 | 0:11:04 | |
FADES | 0:11:04 | 0:11:07 | |
For individuation not to occur, | 0:11:09 | 0:11:12 | |
in a way that's successful for the individual, | 0:11:12 | 0:11:14 | |
would be then why that individual may go on to have | 0:11:14 | 0:11:17 | |
emotional psychological mental health problems, may need therapy, | 0:11:17 | 0:11:21 | |
and the task of therapy to some degree | 0:11:21 | 0:11:23 | |
is to help that person individuate. | 0:11:23 | 0:11:25 | |
In order to reach our full potential | 0:11:31 | 0:11:33 | |
Jung believed each of us must face up to our own dark side. | 0:11:33 | 0:11:36 | |
An unconscious element of weakness and evil. | 0:11:39 | 0:11:42 | |
The only real danger that exists is man himself. | 0:11:46 | 0:11:51 | |
He is the great danger and we are pitifully unaware of it. | 0:11:53 | 0:11:58 | |
We know nothing of man. | 0:11:59 | 0:12:01 | |
Far too little. | 0:12:01 | 0:12:02 | |
His psyche should be studied because we are the origin of all coming evil. | 0:12:04 | 0:12:11 | |
Whilst Jung thought that to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past | 0:12:17 | 0:12:22 | |
we must recognise the evil in each individual, | 0:12:22 | 0:12:25 | |
another thinker would go on to find wickedness, | 0:12:25 | 0:12:28 | |
not in the individual, but in the very structure of society. | 0:12:28 | 0:12:32 | |
Stanley Milgram was born in New York to Jewish parents | 0:12:35 | 0:12:39 | |
who had emigrated from Eastern Europe in the '20s. | 0:12:39 | 0:12:42 | |
In his childhood he was deeply affected | 0:12:44 | 0:12:47 | |
by the plight of European Jews. | 0:12:47 | 0:12:50 | |
Later, as a professor of psychology at Yale University, | 0:12:50 | 0:12:54 | |
he began to ask unprecedented questions | 0:12:54 | 0:12:57 | |
about the human capacity for cruelty. | 0:12:57 | 0:13:00 | |
He brought these questions to the attention of the British public | 0:13:05 | 0:13:09 | |
when he presented a BBC Horizon programme about his work. | 0:13:09 | 0:13:12 | |
In 1944, in the town of Oradour in France, | 0:13:17 | 0:13:20 | |
all the residents of the town were taken into the village church. | 0:13:20 | 0:13:24 | |
The church was doused with gasoline. | 0:13:24 | 0:13:26 | |
It was ignited and everyone was killed. | 0:13:26 | 0:13:29 | |
Another tragedy, you say, another newspaper headline. | 0:13:29 | 0:13:32 | |
But it's more than that, isn't it? | 0:13:32 | 0:13:34 | |
They were real people who actually carried the gasoline to the church. | 0:13:34 | 0:13:38 | |
A real person ignited it. | 0:13:38 | 0:13:41 | |
What is there in human nature that allows an individual to act | 0:13:41 | 0:13:45 | |
without any restraints whatsoever? | 0:13:45 | 0:13:48 | |
So that he can act inhumanely, harshly, severely, | 0:13:48 | 0:13:52 | |
and in no way limited by feelings of compassion or conscience. | 0:13:52 | 0:13:56 | |
These are questions that concern me. | 0:13:56 | 0:13:58 | |
Milgram wanted to know if there was something uniquely wicked about the Nazis. | 0:14:05 | 0:14:10 | |
In the early '60s, he devised a cunning experiment to find out. | 0:14:16 | 0:14:21 | |
He planned to conduct the experiment in Germany, | 0:14:21 | 0:14:24 | |
but first he recruited some ordinary Americans to test it out. | 0:14:24 | 0:14:28 | |
When they got there they were told | 0:14:29 | 0:14:31 | |
it was an experiment on memory and learning. | 0:14:31 | 0:14:33 | |
They were paired up and told one would be the teacher, | 0:14:33 | 0:14:36 | |
and one would be the learner. | 0:14:36 | 0:14:38 | |
Would you open those and tell me which of you is which, please. | 0:14:41 | 0:14:44 | |
Teacher. | 0:14:44 | 0:14:46 | |
Learner. | 0:14:46 | 0:14:47 | |
As this original footage shows, the learner was left in a separate room. | 0:14:48 | 0:14:53 | |
The teacher was then asked to test them on a memory game. | 0:14:55 | 0:14:59 | |
If the learner made an error, | 0:14:59 | 0:15:02 | |
an experimenter told the teacher to punish them. | 0:15:02 | 0:15:04 | |
There was this great big bank of electric shock sizes, | 0:15:05 | 0:15:09 | |
going from 15 volts right up to 450 volts and it said "danger" on that, | 0:15:09 | 0:15:13 | |
and the idea was that they were told, | 0:15:13 | 0:15:15 | |
as they taught them, if they carried on getting it wrong, | 0:15:15 | 0:15:17 | |
they should go higher and higher up the scale. | 0:15:17 | 0:15:20 | |
N. | 0:15:20 | 0:15:22 | |
White. | 0:15:22 | 0:15:23 | |
Cloud. | 0:15:23 | 0:15:24 | |
Horse. | 0:15:24 | 0:15:25 | |
The electric shocks were fake but the teacher didn't know that. | 0:15:25 | 0:15:30 | |
Wrong. | 0:15:30 | 0:15:31 | |
150 volts. | 0:15:32 | 0:15:33 | |
-Answer, horse. -Ow! > | 0:15:35 | 0:15:37 | |
The point was to find out how far people would go before turning | 0:15:37 | 0:15:41 | |
to the experimenter and refusing to deliver any more shocks. | 0:15:41 | 0:15:44 | |
Let me out of here, please! > | 0:15:44 | 0:15:45 | |
< Continue, please. | 0:15:45 | 0:15:46 | |
I refuse to carry on, let me out. > | 0:15:46 | 0:15:48 | |
I wanted to know how people thought they would behave in this situation | 0:15:48 | 0:15:52 | |
so I asked them to predict their own performance. | 0:15:52 | 0:15:55 | |
When people are asked to do this, | 0:15:55 | 0:15:57 | |
they give a rather consistent answer. | 0:15:57 | 0:16:00 | |
I'd like to believe that, as soon as I felt the person was in pain, | 0:16:00 | 0:16:04 | |
that I would probably stop. | 0:16:04 | 0:16:07 | |
I don't think I could go to the end. | 0:16:07 | 0:16:09 | |
Why not? | 0:16:09 | 0:16:11 | |
It's another man, and I wouldn't want it done to me. | 0:16:11 | 0:16:13 | |
I'd go to 180, but no higher. | 0:16:13 | 0:16:16 | |
I'd definitely walk out after 180. | 0:16:16 | 0:16:18 | |
-I'd like to think I wouldn't do it. -Why not? | 0:16:18 | 0:16:20 | |
You've got a choice in life to do whatever... | 0:16:20 | 0:16:22 | |
You can't have people telling you what you can and can't do | 0:16:22 | 0:16:25 | |
when it comes to something that vital. | 0:16:25 | 0:16:27 | |
But I am not interested in opinions. | 0:16:27 | 0:16:30 | |
I'm interested in how people actually behave. | 0:16:30 | 0:16:33 | |
Milgram's results would stun the scientific community. | 0:16:34 | 0:16:38 | |
435 volts. | 0:16:38 | 0:16:40 | |
It says danger, severe shock here. | 0:16:40 | 0:16:42 | |
< Continue, please. | 0:16:42 | 0:16:44 | |
All right, 435 volts. | 0:16:45 | 0:16:47 | |
Next one. Brain, woman, soldier, dog, horse. | 0:16:48 | 0:16:52 | |
Answer is woman. | 0:16:54 | 0:16:56 | |
450 volts. | 0:16:56 | 0:16:58 | |
That's it. | 0:16:58 | 0:16:59 | |
What was amazing was that 65% of people who took part | 0:17:02 | 0:17:06 | |
did go all the way and do the 450 volt electric shock, | 0:17:06 | 0:17:11 | |
even though it said "danger". | 0:17:11 | 0:17:13 | |
So conclusive were his results | 0:17:20 | 0:17:22 | |
that Milgram never bothered to take his experiment to Germany. | 0:17:22 | 0:17:27 | |
He had found a key to some of the evil in human nature. | 0:17:27 | 0:17:31 | |
The main thing is that the person does not see himself | 0:17:35 | 0:17:38 | |
as responsible for his own actions. | 0:17:38 | 0:17:40 | |
He sees himself as an agent executing the wishes of another person. | 0:17:40 | 0:17:45 | |
We saw in the experiment how frequently subjects | 0:17:45 | 0:17:48 | |
turned to the experimenter saying, "Am I responsible?" | 0:17:48 | 0:17:51 | |
And as soon as he told them they were not, they could proceed more easily. | 0:17:51 | 0:17:55 | |
What have I learned from my investigations? | 0:17:56 | 0:17:58 | |
It doesn't take an evil person to serve an evil system. | 0:17:58 | 0:18:03 | |
Ordinary people are easily integrated into malevolent systems. | 0:18:03 | 0:18:07 | |
The idea that most of us are capable of performing acts of cruelty, | 0:18:14 | 0:18:18 | |
simply because someone tells us to, | 0:18:18 | 0:18:21 | |
has forced us to ask key questions about how we structure society. | 0:18:21 | 0:18:25 | |
In Britain, a radical Glaswegian psychoanalyst, R D Laing, | 0:18:36 | 0:18:41 | |
was using television to speak out | 0:18:41 | 0:18:43 | |
about his views on the sickness in society. | 0:18:43 | 0:18:46 | |
Their realities are different, yes. | 0:18:47 | 0:18:51 | |
Laing's experiences in the psychiatric profession | 0:18:54 | 0:18:57 | |
led him to believe that the word "insanity" was an over-used and abused term, | 0:18:57 | 0:19:03 | |
often given to individuals | 0:19:03 | 0:19:05 | |
who simply didn't conform to the expectations of society. | 0:19:05 | 0:19:08 | |
Such people sometimes became inmates of mental hospitals. | 0:19:17 | 0:19:21 | |
As film from the time shows, | 0:19:21 | 0:19:23 | |
psychiatric patients could be subjected to brutal treatments. | 0:19:23 | 0:19:28 | |
Psychiatry is a very violent branch of medicine indeed. | 0:19:35 | 0:19:39 | |
Even in the text books, | 0:19:40 | 0:19:43 | |
treatment might be characterised as non-injurious torture. | 0:19:43 | 0:19:47 | |
Treatment was very seldom pleasant. | 0:19:47 | 0:19:53 | |
It usually involved inflicting a lot of pain on people | 0:19:53 | 0:20:00 | |
in the hope that this would get them to stop going on the way they are. | 0:20:00 | 0:20:07 | |
In those days ECT was quite common, straightjackets, | 0:20:12 | 0:20:17 | |
padded cells, early tranquilisers. | 0:20:17 | 0:20:22 | |
It's what people used to call "grug 'em, flug 'em, easy does 'em". | 0:20:22 | 0:20:28 | |
And leucotomies and lobotomies, | 0:20:28 | 0:20:31 | |
and so the whole range of treatments | 0:20:31 | 0:20:34 | |
which he thought were absolutely, totally barbaric. | 0:20:34 | 0:20:37 | |
Laing was a popular and persuasive lecturer who insisted that doctors | 0:20:41 | 0:20:46 | |
should listen to their patients instead of abusing them. | 0:20:46 | 0:20:49 | |
He believed that much of what we call "insane behaviour" | 0:20:50 | 0:20:53 | |
could be explained by family circumstances and life experiences. | 0:20:53 | 0:20:58 | |
To illustrate this, he cited the case of a 13-year-old girl | 0:21:00 | 0:21:04 | |
who had been diagnosed as schizophrenic. | 0:21:04 | 0:21:08 | |
Her mother was frightened that she was slipping away from her | 0:21:14 | 0:21:17 | |
because she had taken to spending two or three hours every so often, | 0:21:17 | 0:21:22 | |
not every day, but every other day, in her room alone | 0:21:22 | 0:21:30 | |
staring apparently at the wall | 0:21:30 | 0:21:37 | |
and not saying anything. | 0:21:37 | 0:21:39 | |
It's certainly one of the best ways that I can think of, | 0:21:40 | 0:21:44 | |
it might have been the only way that she came across | 0:21:44 | 0:21:47 | |
of getting out or in or away from, | 0:21:47 | 0:21:49 | |
for two or three hours, | 0:21:49 | 0:21:51 | |
her family scene when she wasn't allowed to go out. | 0:21:51 | 0:21:55 | |
Even at the height of her staring, she was staring at the wall | 0:21:55 | 0:21:58 | |
much less than her parents were staring at the television set. | 0:21:58 | 0:22:02 | |
LAUGHTER | 0:22:02 | 0:22:04 | |
Her mother was so alarmed | 0:22:07 | 0:22:09 | |
that she was slipping away from her that she arranged, | 0:22:09 | 0:22:13 | |
I mean, it was an arrangement that she made | 0:22:13 | 0:22:15 | |
with the psychiatric facilities, | 0:22:15 | 0:22:17 | |
that they would take her away and put her away. | 0:22:17 | 0:22:21 | |
Are you telling us that she's not sick? | 0:22:24 | 0:22:27 | |
In order to answer that question I would have to start again | 0:22:32 | 0:22:36 | |
and ramble on for another hour to convey that that word... | 0:22:36 | 0:22:43 | |
there are some words that in relationship to such people, | 0:22:43 | 0:22:49 | |
like sickness and madness and psychosis and neurosis, | 0:22:49 | 0:22:54 | |
have become in my mind so confused in their uses that I would prefer | 0:22:54 | 0:23:00 | |
to withdraw them from the currency of my own discourse. | 0:23:00 | 0:23:03 | |
I don't want to apply that attribution to that girl. | 0:23:03 | 0:23:07 | |
APPLAUSE | 0:23:07 | 0:23:09 | |
He was part of a movement that were trying to say, look, | 0:23:15 | 0:23:19 | |
schizophrenia is a label, it is a stigmatising label, | 0:23:19 | 0:23:22 | |
and if you slap this label on people, | 0:23:22 | 0:23:24 | |
you have a self-fulfilling prophecy. | 0:23:24 | 0:23:27 | |
You can actually drive people crazy | 0:23:27 | 0:23:29 | |
by treating them as if they're schizophrenic, if they're not. | 0:23:29 | 0:23:32 | |
At the height of his powers, Laing was feted as a visionary, | 0:23:37 | 0:23:40 | |
but in later life it seemed he began to struggle with his own dark side. | 0:23:40 | 0:23:46 | |
Accusations of drunkenness and womanising began to eclipse his work. | 0:23:46 | 0:23:50 | |
Though he had written about the dangers of uncaring families, | 0:23:54 | 0:23:58 | |
he himself had neglected his first family, leaving them in poverty. | 0:23:58 | 0:24:02 | |
It's not an unfair stance to take to say to him, "Wait a minute, | 0:24:04 | 0:24:08 | |
"you've written a book that seeks to tie in, on a very subtle level, | 0:24:08 | 0:24:13 | |
schizophrenic behaviour of individuals to the family | 0:24:13 | 0:24:18 | |
so it seems a bit rich coming from somebody who is perceived | 0:24:18 | 0:24:22 | |
to have treated his families in the way that he did, | 0:24:22 | 0:24:25 | |
and I think he has to take that on the chin. | 0:24:25 | 0:24:30 | |
But we went through that | 0:24:30 | 0:24:32 | |
and so I don't have any sort of great personal grudge against him | 0:24:32 | 0:24:36 | |
because I dealt with it with him when he was alive. | 0:24:36 | 0:24:39 | |
It's irrelevant, frankly, as far as I'm concerned, | 0:24:44 | 0:24:47 | |
that Laing was in some respects a disturbed individual himself. | 0:24:47 | 0:24:51 | |
It's just not the point. | 0:24:52 | 0:24:54 | |
The point is he wrote those books, and certainly | 0:24:54 | 0:24:57 | |
what we all take for granted now, | 0:24:57 | 0:24:59 | |
the abolition largely of psychiatric care in mental hospitals, | 0:24:59 | 0:25:04 | |
the acceptance of the idea that we must be very, very careful | 0:25:04 | 0:25:08 | |
about stigmatising or labelling people these are... | 0:25:08 | 0:25:11 | |
A big part of that change was with R D Laing's writings. | 0:25:11 | 0:25:16 | |
Across the Atlantic, amidst the turmoil of the 1960s, | 0:25:21 | 0:25:25 | |
a group of thinkers came onto the scene who believed | 0:25:25 | 0:25:29 | |
that society could be cured and that human behaviour could be improved. | 0:25:29 | 0:25:33 | |
One of these was anthropologist Margaret Mead. | 0:25:35 | 0:25:39 | |
Mead a was huge media figure in the '60s, | 0:25:41 | 0:25:44 | |
using television to promote her ideas. | 0:25:44 | 0:25:47 | |
But she had begun her research into behaviour 40 years earlier | 0:25:50 | 0:25:54 | |
when the study of human cultures was in its infancy. | 0:25:54 | 0:25:59 | |
The word "culture" in the anthropological sense | 0:26:04 | 0:26:07 | |
was hardly known then. | 0:26:07 | 0:26:09 | |
The new anthropological sense | 0:26:09 | 0:26:11 | |
was that you studied the whole shared learned behaviour | 0:26:11 | 0:26:15 | |
of a group of people and you called it "the culture". | 0:26:15 | 0:26:19 | |
The tools people used, the lullabies they sang to their babies, | 0:26:19 | 0:26:23 | |
the way they built houses and buried their dead, | 0:26:23 | 0:26:25 | |
and their religious beliefs were all part of their culture. | 0:26:25 | 0:26:30 | |
Like Laing, Mead suspected that Western anxieties | 0:26:35 | 0:26:38 | |
and problems were caused by the values of our society. | 0:26:38 | 0:26:42 | |
To explore this, | 0:26:43 | 0:26:45 | |
Mead decided to study the turbulent period of adolescence. | 0:26:45 | 0:26:50 | |
She travelled to the most remote place she could find, Samoa. | 0:26:50 | 0:26:54 | |
What Mead was interested in is | 0:26:56 | 0:26:58 | |
is it is always true | 0:26:58 | 0:26:59 | |
that adolescence is a period of turmoil in people's lives? | 0:26:59 | 0:27:03 | |
Does every society have young people | 0:27:03 | 0:27:05 | |
who behave badly or who are not controllable, | 0:27:05 | 0:27:09 | |
or should we always be worrying about adolescence? | 0:27:09 | 0:27:11 | |
So she went and talked to lots of young people, | 0:27:11 | 0:27:15 | |
particularly young girls, | 0:27:15 | 0:27:17 | |
and got them to talk about what they were feeling, | 0:27:17 | 0:27:20 | |
what they were experiencing, | 0:27:20 | 0:27:22 | |
what they were hoping for, and how they saw Samoan culture and society. | 0:27:22 | 0:27:27 | |
After observing these young girls, | 0:27:34 | 0:27:37 | |
Mead concluded that Samoan adolescents | 0:27:37 | 0:27:39 | |
did not seem to suffer the same angst as American youngsters, | 0:27:39 | 0:27:43 | |
as she later explained on the BBC's Horizon programme. | 0:27:43 | 0:27:48 | |
They were not asked to work very hard yet, or make any choices. | 0:27:49 | 0:27:53 | |
They were allowed to pick their lovers fairly freely. | 0:27:53 | 0:27:57 | |
The Samoan children had peeped through the blinds of houses | 0:27:57 | 0:28:01 | |
and seen birth | 0:28:01 | 0:28:03 | |
and they'd watched lovers and they knew what was going on in the world. | 0:28:03 | 0:28:06 | |
So that most of the things that are hard on adolescents | 0:28:06 | 0:28:10 | |
in modern society, | 0:28:10 | 0:28:12 | |
all sorts of conflicts about sex and marriage, | 0:28:12 | 0:28:15 | |
ignorance about life, | 0:28:15 | 0:28:18 | |
these things that made it hard for adolescents here weren't there. | 0:28:18 | 0:28:22 | |
If the confusion and turmoil of adolescence | 0:28:29 | 0:28:32 | |
were not evident in other cultures, | 0:28:32 | 0:28:34 | |
then Mead concluded they were not necessary in Western culture either. | 0:28:34 | 0:28:39 | |
Her description of a Samoan paradise of free love | 0:28:40 | 0:28:43 | |
fuelled the 1960s sexual revolution in the West. | 0:28:43 | 0:28:47 | |
By the time she died, she was an American icon and it seemed | 0:28:51 | 0:28:54 | |
she had answered a key question about how to build a peaceful society. | 0:28:54 | 0:28:59 | |
But shortly after her death, her theories took a terrible blow. | 0:29:06 | 0:29:10 | |
A younger anthropologist called Derek Freeman, | 0:29:12 | 0:29:14 | |
who had also visited Samoa, published a book which challenged her views. | 0:29:14 | 0:29:20 | |
He got much closer to the people in one sense, | 0:29:22 | 0:29:25 | |
in that he learnt to speak Samoan much more profoundly, | 0:29:25 | 0:29:31 | |
much more skilfully than Margaret Mead had done. | 0:29:31 | 0:29:35 | |
And he was told by one informant, by Margaret Mead's informant, | 0:29:35 | 0:29:40 | |
a woman, an elderly woman at that stage, | 0:29:40 | 0:29:43 | |
that they had just told these stories to this curious American lady | 0:29:43 | 0:29:48 | |
who'd arrived because she clearly enjoyed dirty stories, | 0:29:48 | 0:29:52 | |
and that it was just for fun. | 0:29:52 | 0:29:54 | |
Mead had been roundly debunked. | 0:29:55 | 0:29:58 | |
Though some still think her theories have merit. | 0:29:58 | 0:30:01 | |
What we feel about the Mead-Freeman controversy now | 0:30:01 | 0:30:05 | |
is that perhaps Mead had made some errors in her data, | 0:30:05 | 0:30:10 | |
perhaps she had indeed even been lied to by some of her informants, | 0:30:10 | 0:30:14 | |
but that essentially her argument is correct | 0:30:14 | 0:30:18 | |
that the way in which cultures deal with adolescence varies | 0:30:18 | 0:30:22 | |
and consequently the experience of adolescence itself varies. | 0:30:22 | 0:30:26 | |
And Mead's work lives on in another great arena of life. | 0:30:33 | 0:30:38 | |
When she became a mother, Mead chose not to conform to the traditional parenting model of the day, | 0:30:38 | 0:30:46 | |
which demanded a rigid childcare regime. | 0:30:46 | 0:30:48 | |
Instead she imitated the easy-going approach used by Samoan mothers. | 0:30:51 | 0:30:56 | |
She passed these ideas on to her paediatrician, | 0:30:58 | 0:31:02 | |
little knowing that he would become the world's first ever child care guru. | 0:31:02 | 0:31:07 | |
His name was Dr Benjamin Spock. | 0:31:08 | 0:31:11 | |
Later, Spock wrote a book | 0:31:12 | 0:31:14 | |
which changed forever the way we relate to our children. | 0:31:14 | 0:31:18 | |
I think what's profoundly important about Spock | 0:31:22 | 0:31:25 | |
is that he basically said to parents, | 0:31:25 | 0:31:27 | |
you know more than you think you do. | 0:31:27 | 0:31:30 | |
He actually empowered parents to be instinctive in their parenting, | 0:31:30 | 0:31:36 | |
and to feel able to nurture their child in a loving way, | 0:31:36 | 0:31:40 | |
without worrying that it was going to somehow spoil them or make them | 0:31:40 | 0:31:44 | |
lack any sort of moral fibre. | 0:31:44 | 0:31:46 | |
I urged parents not to be intimidated by the rule | 0:31:56 | 0:32:00 | |
that had existed in paediatrics up to that time, | 0:32:00 | 0:32:04 | |
you must never feed a baby off schedule, | 0:32:04 | 0:32:07 | |
not a minute early, not a minute late. | 0:32:07 | 0:32:09 | |
I was one of the first paediatrician to say that's nonsense. | 0:32:09 | 0:32:13 | |
That rule made babies cry but it was even harder on mothers. | 0:32:13 | 0:32:17 | |
They bit their nails in anguish waiting for the clock | 0:32:17 | 0:32:22 | |
to say this is the minute you can feed. | 0:32:22 | 0:32:25 | |
With his straight-talking charm, Spock was a natural broadcaster | 0:32:29 | 0:32:33 | |
and he understood the power of television. | 0:32:33 | 0:32:37 | |
On the BBC's Tonight programme, | 0:32:39 | 0:32:41 | |
he explained that the reason his philosophy had caught on | 0:32:41 | 0:32:45 | |
was because it contradicted the standard childcare guidance. | 0:32:45 | 0:32:48 | |
The general attitude was, "Look out, stupid! | 0:32:51 | 0:32:55 | |
"If you don't do exactly what I say you will kill you child." | 0:32:55 | 0:32:58 | |
You'd be interested that the fan mail I get all is along the same line. | 0:32:58 | 0:33:02 | |
They all say it sounds as if you were talking to me | 0:33:02 | 0:33:06 | |
and as if you thought I was a sensible person. | 0:33:06 | 0:33:09 | |
This makes me almost weep to think that's all parents want, | 0:33:09 | 0:33:14 | |
to be treated with a little respect and friendliness. | 0:33:14 | 0:33:17 | |
In later life, Spock turned his attention from paediatrics to politics. | 0:33:25 | 0:33:30 | |
He fiercely opposed the Vietnam War, | 0:33:38 | 0:33:40 | |
and in 1968 he was prosecuted for assisting draft dodgers. | 0:33:40 | 0:33:46 | |
What's the matter with the government and what's the matter with the war | 0:33:46 | 0:33:50 | |
if they have to go after a 66-year-old paediatrician | 0:33:50 | 0:33:53 | |
and try to throw him in jail?! | 0:33:53 | 0:33:55 | |
It isn't enough to bring up our children happy and secure, | 0:34:00 | 0:34:05 | |
that you've got to have a decent world for them. | 0:34:05 | 0:34:08 | |
This is why I've expanded my horizon. | 0:34:08 | 0:34:11 | |
The people who disagree with me politically say, | 0:34:11 | 0:34:13 | |
"You old goat, why don't you stay in paediatrics where you belong?" | 0:34:13 | 0:34:18 | |
But the people who are on my side say, | 0:34:18 | 0:34:20 | |
"I see what you are talking about, I agree with you." | 0:34:20 | 0:34:22 | |
For Spock's generation, society could be cured | 0:34:33 | 0:34:36 | |
by improving the way parents brought up their children. | 0:34:36 | 0:34:40 | |
Ideas like this would be taken to extremes by a contemporary of Spock. | 0:34:40 | 0:34:44 | |
BF Skinner believed he had found an all-embracing antidote | 0:34:50 | 0:34:55 | |
to the ills in society. | 0:34:55 | 0:34:57 | |
I think today we have reached a point where, | 0:35:01 | 0:35:04 | |
not only can we dream about a better way of life, | 0:35:04 | 0:35:07 | |
but we can make specific proposals | 0:35:07 | 0:35:09 | |
and that's where my own work comes in. | 0:35:09 | 0:35:11 | |
I have been, for 35 years, concerned with behaviour. | 0:35:11 | 0:35:14 | |
A Pennsylvanian psychologist, | 0:35:20 | 0:35:23 | |
Skinner was the most radical practitioner of "behaviourism". | 0:35:23 | 0:35:26 | |
He believed that each person starts out as a blank slate | 0:35:29 | 0:35:33 | |
and is moulded purely by their environment. | 0:35:33 | 0:35:37 | |
He began his work, not with humans, but with pigeons. | 0:35:38 | 0:35:42 | |
He trained them using a system called operant conditioning. | 0:35:45 | 0:35:50 | |
He could get them to display the behaviour he desired | 0:35:50 | 0:35:52 | |
by conditioning them to respond to rewards. | 0:35:52 | 0:35:56 | |
They would peck on the little button | 0:36:03 | 0:36:05 | |
and, if they pecked the right number of times, | 0:36:05 | 0:36:07 | |
they would get a reward, i.e. some seed, | 0:36:07 | 0:36:09 | |
and so they soon learnt that they must peck six times | 0:36:09 | 0:36:12 | |
and very fast and they'd get the seed. | 0:36:12 | 0:36:14 | |
They would do that again and again. | 0:36:14 | 0:36:16 | |
He could train them to do all sorts of things. | 0:36:16 | 0:36:18 | |
He trained pigeons to play ping pong. | 0:36:18 | 0:36:20 | |
No wonder then that Skinner thought | 0:36:27 | 0:36:29 | |
he could also train humans of any age to behave better. | 0:36:29 | 0:36:32 | |
In the early '70s, Skinner set up an experiment at a youth borstal | 0:36:34 | 0:36:39 | |
and the BBC followed his progress. | 0:36:39 | 0:36:41 | |
Here, Skinner describes the inmates at the start of the project. | 0:36:43 | 0:36:47 | |
'Few of them have had families they've lived with closely. | 0:36:51 | 0:36:54 | |
'Almost all have dropped out of school with little or no education. | 0:36:54 | 0:36:57 | |
'Few have held a job for any length of time, | 0:36:57 | 0:37:00 | |
'and all have violated the law so often or so violently | 0:37:00 | 0:37:04 | |
'that it has been necessary to lock them up.' | 0:37:04 | 0:37:06 | |
In the borstal, basic food and accommodation were provided. | 0:37:08 | 0:37:12 | |
Skinner's master stroke was to introduce a reward system. | 0:37:12 | 0:37:16 | |
If the youngsters behaved well and attended lessons, | 0:37:16 | 0:37:20 | |
they could earn points and improve their living conditions. | 0:37:20 | 0:37:24 | |
Your room was dirty a couple of days, and you went out improperly dressed. | 0:37:24 | 0:37:32 | |
-See if you can't do better next week. All right? -I'll really try, sir. | 0:37:34 | 0:37:37 | |
-Try a little harder. -All right. | 0:37:37 | 0:37:40 | |
'Points could be exchanged for more delicious food at meal times, | 0:37:40 | 0:37:45 | |
'admission to game rooms, | 0:37:45 | 0:37:46 | |
'the rental of a private room or television set, | 0:37:46 | 0:37:49 | |
'or even a short vacation away from the school. | 0:37:49 | 0:37:52 | |
'The results were dramatic. | 0:37:54 | 0:37:56 | |
'Boys who had been convinced by the school system they were unteachable discovered that they were not. | 0:37:56 | 0:38:01 | |
'They learned reading, writing and arithmetic and acquired manual skills. | 0:38:01 | 0:38:05 | |
'They did so without compulsion. | 0:38:05 | 0:38:08 | |
'The hostile behaviour characteristic of such institutions quickly disappeared.' | 0:38:08 | 0:38:12 | |
Skinner's successes were seen as momentous achievements. | 0:38:22 | 0:38:26 | |
And his work lives on in every child's star chart | 0:38:31 | 0:38:34 | |
and employee rewards scheme around the world. | 0:38:34 | 0:38:37 | |
Skinner believed he had found a catch-all explanation | 0:38:40 | 0:38:43 | |
for every facet of human behaviour. | 0:38:43 | 0:38:45 | |
But when he turned his attention to language, | 0:38:47 | 0:38:50 | |
he was to come very publicly unstuck. | 0:38:50 | 0:38:54 | |
What's that there? | 0:38:55 | 0:38:57 | |
At this time, many scientists were asking | 0:38:58 | 0:39:01 | |
where our remarkable ability for learning speech comes from. | 0:39:01 | 0:39:06 | |
That's a kangaroo. | 0:39:06 | 0:39:08 | |
Skinner's answer was relatively straightforward. | 0:39:09 | 0:39:12 | |
He said language is acquired by a system of operant conditioning. | 0:39:12 | 0:39:16 | |
That is to say, children come into the world and they cannot speak. | 0:39:16 | 0:39:20 | |
They have no language and they acquire it | 0:39:20 | 0:39:23 | |
by imitation from their parents, | 0:39:23 | 0:39:25 | |
and it is reinforced by a system of rewards and punishments. | 0:39:25 | 0:39:28 | |
The kind of rewards that operate in daily life | 0:39:28 | 0:39:30 | |
and which parents give them without even knowing that they do so. | 0:39:30 | 0:39:34 | |
This idea, and it's a persuasive idea, was challenged. | 0:39:37 | 0:39:43 | |
Linguists of the day thought this was too simplistic | 0:39:46 | 0:39:49 | |
and that more subtle forces were at work. | 0:39:49 | 0:39:53 | |
In the early '70s, | 0:39:54 | 0:39:56 | |
the BBC's Horizon programme decided to settle the debate. | 0:39:56 | 0:39:59 | |
First the old lady will talk... | 0:40:01 | 0:40:03 | |
Skinner was asked to sit in on a language experiment | 0:40:03 | 0:40:07 | |
designed to show that copying and rewards are not enough | 0:40:07 | 0:40:10 | |
to make young children absorb complex grammar. | 0:40:10 | 0:40:13 | |
Here an older child is tested to see if she can copy what she has heard. | 0:40:13 | 0:40:18 | |
So the dragon goes first. | 0:40:18 | 0:40:20 | |
Lucy knows Linus, doesn't she? | 0:40:20 | 0:40:23 | |
Lucy knows Linus, doesn't she? | 0:40:23 | 0:40:25 | |
But in another test a younger child can't do it. | 0:40:27 | 0:40:31 | |
You say whatever I say. | 0:40:31 | 0:40:33 | |
Lucy is on the box. | 0:40:35 | 0:40:37 | |
Lucy is on the box. | 0:40:37 | 0:40:39 | |
Lucy's being on the box pleases me. | 0:40:39 | 0:40:43 | |
Lucy's on the box pleases me. | 0:40:45 | 0:40:48 | |
That Linus is lying down pleases me. | 0:40:50 | 0:40:52 | |
That Lucy's is... | 0:40:54 | 0:40:55 | |
That Linus is lying down pleases me. | 0:40:56 | 0:40:59 | |
Is... | 0:41:01 | 0:41:02 | |
I'm getting everything mixed up. | 0:41:04 | 0:41:08 | |
OK. Very good. Very good, dragon. The little boy can fly an airplane. | 0:41:08 | 0:41:12 | |
It appeared that small children could not copy everything they had heard, | 0:41:12 | 0:41:17 | |
no matter how rewarding the experience. | 0:41:17 | 0:41:19 | |
And now the old lady says... | 0:41:19 | 0:41:21 | |
I am willing to admit that I can not account for | 0:41:21 | 0:41:25 | |
all the verbal behaviour of a child. | 0:41:25 | 0:41:27 | |
But I don't feel it's accounted for either | 0:41:27 | 0:41:29 | |
by inventing some fictional explanation. | 0:41:29 | 0:41:32 | |
I'm not suggesting you do, I don't think you do. | 0:41:32 | 0:41:35 | |
The best thing is simply to say there are still areas in which we're ignorant. | 0:41:35 | 0:41:38 | |
What Skinner seemed to have missed | 0:41:45 | 0:41:47 | |
was that humans are not simply blank slates. | 0:41:47 | 0:41:50 | |
Each of us is born with innate qualities which affect our behaviour. | 0:41:52 | 0:41:56 | |
In the latter part of the 20th century | 0:41:57 | 0:42:00 | |
a group of British thinkers emerged | 0:42:00 | 0:42:02 | |
who would offer radical new ideas about what makes humans tick. | 0:42:02 | 0:42:06 | |
These thinkers would take their cues not from humans, | 0:42:09 | 0:42:13 | |
but from animals. | 0:42:13 | 0:42:15 | |
Enter Desmond Morris who started his career as a zoologist. | 0:42:25 | 0:42:29 | |
But it was through his books and his TV programmes that he became famous. | 0:42:30 | 0:42:34 | |
What are the chances they won't like each other? | 0:42:35 | 0:42:38 | |
Very slight, I should think. | 0:42:38 | 0:42:40 | |
Chi-Chi is extremely sex-starved and An-An seems a very friendly animal | 0:42:40 | 0:42:44 | |
so my hopes are high. | 0:42:44 | 0:42:46 | |
Here in the Mediterranean, about seven years ago, | 0:42:52 | 0:42:55 | |
I was sitting talking with a friend | 0:42:55 | 0:42:56 | |
and I was pointing out to him the way in which people behave. | 0:42:56 | 0:42:59 | |
I said, "Look at that woman over there. | 0:42:59 | 0:43:01 | |
"She's folding her arms in an unusual way, | 0:43:01 | 0:43:04 | |
"and that couple over there, the way they're gesticulating | 0:43:04 | 0:43:07 | |
"could only come from this part of the world. | 0:43:07 | 0:43:09 | |
"And the way that old lady is clasping her hands." | 0:43:09 | 0:43:12 | |
And as I was talking he said, | 0:43:12 | 0:43:14 | |
"You know, you look at people the way a birdwatcher looks at birds." | 0:43:14 | 0:43:19 | |
I said, "Yes, I suppose in fact you could call me a manwatcher." | 0:43:19 | 0:43:22 | |
The book that made Morris's name was The Naked Ape | 0:43:30 | 0:43:34 | |
and it had a shocking new claim at its heart. | 0:43:34 | 0:43:38 | |
Much of our normal human behaviour is derived from our animal ancestry. | 0:43:39 | 0:43:45 | |
Despite mankind's great advances | 0:43:48 | 0:43:49 | |
with abstract ideas and manufactured objects, | 0:43:49 | 0:43:54 | |
we remain nonetheless creatures of vigorous animal action. | 0:43:54 | 0:43:59 | |
So he looked at human beings as if, as a zoologist would do | 0:44:00 | 0:44:05 | |
as if they were a strange animal | 0:44:05 | 0:44:07 | |
and they didn't listen to what they said, what did they actually do. | 0:44:07 | 0:44:11 | |
And that produced some extraordinary insights into human behaviour | 0:44:11 | 0:44:17 | |
which a lot of people resented. | 0:44:17 | 0:44:19 | |
They felt it was actually reducing human beings to the status of animals. | 0:44:19 | 0:44:25 | |
For some people, | 0:44:33 | 0:44:35 | |
direct comparisons of this kind are insulting to human dignity. | 0:44:35 | 0:44:39 | |
To others, they're merely amusing. | 0:44:39 | 0:44:41 | |
But the manwatcher is quite serious when he sees people as animals. | 0:44:43 | 0:44:47 | |
For him, this approach is in no way degrading. | 0:44:47 | 0:44:51 | |
Whether we like it or not, | 0:44:51 | 0:44:52 | |
we are animals and should be studied as such, | 0:44:52 | 0:44:54 | |
but this doesn't mean we're the same as other animals. | 0:44:54 | 0:44:58 | |
Every species is unique. | 0:44:58 | 0:44:59 | |
In 1976, | 0:45:07 | 0:45:09 | |
Morris made the first of his numerous appearances on Parkinson | 0:45:09 | 0:45:13 | |
and explained there what he believes we can learn | 0:45:13 | 0:45:16 | |
from studying humans as if we are simply another animal. | 0:45:16 | 0:45:19 | |
APPLAUSE | 0:45:19 | 0:45:21 | |
We learn, I think, that we are animals. | 0:45:26 | 0:45:30 | |
People get insulted if I say "you are an animal". | 0:45:30 | 0:45:34 | |
I hate the way judges always say "behaving like young animals", | 0:45:34 | 0:45:37 | |
it's one thing they are NOT behaving like, usually, | 0:45:37 | 0:45:40 | |
they are behaving very much like people. | 0:45:40 | 0:45:42 | |
Animals don't go around torturing and murdering. | 0:45:42 | 0:45:46 | |
And what we do learn, I think, by looking at us as animals | 0:45:46 | 0:45:52 | |
is that we have predispositions to behave in certain ways, | 0:45:52 | 0:45:57 | |
and that those cultures that have lost sight of the fact | 0:45:57 | 0:46:01 | |
that we have certain animal qualities... | 0:46:01 | 0:46:03 | |
which are not bad qualities, they are good qualities most of them, | 0:46:03 | 0:46:06 | |
they have helped us to survive for millions of years. | 0:46:06 | 0:46:09 | |
If we deny those qualities too much, we are pretty flexible, | 0:46:09 | 0:46:12 | |
but if we deny them those qualities too much then we're in trouble. | 0:46:12 | 0:46:16 | |
Morris showed that insights | 0:46:22 | 0:46:25 | |
into human behaviour could be gleaned | 0:46:25 | 0:46:27 | |
by looking at humans through the eyes of a zoologist. | 0:46:27 | 0:46:30 | |
And the study of animals themselves would also reveal to us | 0:46:30 | 0:46:34 | |
how our own nature works, as another of our thinkers would show us. | 0:46:34 | 0:46:39 | |
Jane Goodall fulfilled a childhood ambition | 0:46:45 | 0:46:49 | |
when she travelled to Gombe in Tanzania | 0:46:49 | 0:46:52 | |
to study the behaviour of wild chimpanzees. | 0:46:52 | 0:46:55 | |
I remember the first day I arrived at Gombe, | 0:46:57 | 0:47:00 | |
going along the shore of the lake in the little boat. | 0:47:00 | 0:47:04 | |
And I looked up at the hillsides | 0:47:05 | 0:47:09 | |
with the thick valleys of forest in between. | 0:47:09 | 0:47:13 | |
And I remember thinking, how will I find the chimps? | 0:47:13 | 0:47:16 | |
I felt so tiny. | 0:47:16 | 0:47:17 | |
Despite having no zoological training Goodall did find them. | 0:47:19 | 0:47:23 | |
Day after day, often alone in the jungle, | 0:47:25 | 0:47:28 | |
she studied their behaviour, | 0:47:28 | 0:47:30 | |
as she told to Valerie Singleton on Blue Peter in 1971. | 0:47:30 | 0:47:35 | |
Were you ever really very frightened? | 0:47:37 | 0:47:40 | |
Sometimes I was frightened, especially of things like leopards | 0:47:40 | 0:47:44 | |
but it was the kind of life I had always dreamed of myself living | 0:47:44 | 0:47:47 | |
and it was so fascinating that nothing could deter me. | 0:47:47 | 0:47:50 | |
-You weren't put off at all? -No. -How long did it take you before you got really close to the chimps? | 0:47:50 | 0:47:55 | |
It took six months before I could get to within 100 yards | 0:47:55 | 0:47:58 | |
and it was two years before I could make really close up, detailed observations | 0:47:58 | 0:48:02 | |
without them being scared. | 0:48:02 | 0:48:04 | |
Goodall's patience paid off. | 0:48:10 | 0:48:13 | |
High up in the ancient African forests, she made a startling discovery | 0:48:14 | 0:48:19 | |
which would revolutionise how we view the origins of human behaviour. | 0:48:19 | 0:48:24 | |
Archaeologists in trying to define the difference between a human being and an ape | 0:48:30 | 0:48:37 | |
had said in years gone by that human beings | 0:48:37 | 0:48:42 | |
actually made tools | 0:48:42 | 0:48:43 | |
and people thought that that was | 0:48:43 | 0:48:45 | |
a defining characteristic of human beings. | 0:48:45 | 0:48:49 | |
Goodall's revelation came when she observed, for the first time, | 0:48:49 | 0:48:53 | |
chimps making and using tools. | 0:48:53 | 0:48:56 | |
I remember so vividly walking through the long, tangled vegetation. | 0:48:58 | 0:49:05 | |
It had been raining. | 0:49:05 | 0:49:06 | |
And I suddenly saw a black shape hunched over | 0:49:06 | 0:49:09 | |
this beautiful golden colour of a termite mound. | 0:49:09 | 0:49:13 | |
I peered with my binoculars | 0:49:13 | 0:49:15 | |
and it was a male chimp with his back to me | 0:49:15 | 0:49:18 | |
and I could see his hand reaching out | 0:49:18 | 0:49:20 | |
and picking pieces of grass and poking them at the heap. | 0:49:20 | 0:49:25 | |
And that in one stroke demolished the old definition | 0:49:31 | 0:49:35 | |
that archaeologists had of what made a human being. | 0:49:35 | 0:49:39 | |
And Goodall noticed other human traits in chimpanzees, | 0:49:48 | 0:49:52 | |
like affection and grief. | 0:49:52 | 0:49:56 | |
But it was her observations of the darker side of chimpanzee life | 0:49:57 | 0:50:00 | |
that would be most controversial. | 0:50:00 | 0:50:03 | |
Goodall discovered chimps with violent behaviour patterns. | 0:50:10 | 0:50:14 | |
Not everyone was pleased when she announced her findings. | 0:50:17 | 0:50:21 | |
When I first began describing brutal aggression, | 0:50:23 | 0:50:26 | |
there were certain scientists | 0:50:26 | 0:50:28 | |
who actually criticised me for publishing it. | 0:50:28 | 0:50:32 | |
They said that if these kind of facts were published | 0:50:32 | 0:50:36 | |
then certain irresponsible scientists and journalists | 0:50:36 | 0:50:40 | |
would seize upon that information and say, "Ah, that means aggression | 0:50:40 | 0:50:45 | |
"is deeply rooted in our human phylogenetic ancestry, | 0:50:45 | 0:50:49 | |
"if we concede a common ancestor six million years ago or so, | 0:50:49 | 0:50:53 | |
"and therefore aggression, warfare, violence | 0:50:53 | 0:50:57 | |
"in our own species are inevitable." | 0:50:57 | 0:50:59 | |
Goodall did publish, | 0:51:07 | 0:51:08 | |
and some did draw the conclusion that violence in humans, | 0:51:08 | 0:51:12 | |
and chimps, is impossible to avoid. | 0:51:12 | 0:51:15 | |
But the question remains, is that true? | 0:51:15 | 0:51:19 | |
Are we slaves to our natural instincts | 0:51:21 | 0:51:24 | |
or can we master our behaviour? | 0:51:24 | 0:51:27 | |
Freud and Jung told us we are prey to innate drives | 0:51:28 | 0:51:33 | |
buried in our unconscious minds. | 0:51:33 | 0:51:35 | |
Mead believed our cultures mould us. | 0:51:39 | 0:51:42 | |
Skinner proved that elements of our behaviour can be altered | 0:51:42 | 0:51:45 | |
if we change the environmental conditions. | 0:51:45 | 0:51:48 | |
Morris and Goodall showed us how aspects of our behaviour are driven by our animal ancestry. | 0:51:51 | 0:51:57 | |
But it would take a great thinker at the end of the 20th century | 0:52:01 | 0:52:06 | |
to bring forward a theory which seemed to many to offer | 0:52:06 | 0:52:09 | |
an all-encompassing explanation for why humans are the way we are. | 0:52:09 | 0:52:13 | |
My name is Richard Dawkins. I'm a zoologist from Oxford. | 0:52:19 | 0:52:23 | |
In 1976 Dawkins published one of the most successful science books of all time. | 0:52:25 | 0:52:32 | |
The Selfish Gene, was a radical updating of evolutionary theory. | 0:52:32 | 0:52:37 | |
It was a view that we are just vehicles for our genes. | 0:52:40 | 0:52:47 | |
It's the genes' interests that matters, it's not us. | 0:52:47 | 0:52:51 | |
And that he showed has all sorts of new consequences | 0:52:51 | 0:52:55 | |
for the way in which we view human behaviour. | 0:52:55 | 0:52:59 | |
And it was a wonderful, radical new vision set out in sparkling prose | 0:52:59 | 0:53:05 | |
and above it all this wonderful metaphor... | 0:53:05 | 0:53:09 | |
The Selfish Gene. | 0:53:09 | 0:53:11 | |
That title though has had serious implications. | 0:53:17 | 0:53:21 | |
Dawkins was accused of providing a justification for a greedy, selfish, ruthless society | 0:53:22 | 0:53:30 | |
where the law of the jungle rules. | 0:53:30 | 0:53:32 | |
But Dawkins says that the book is not advocating selfishness. | 0:53:38 | 0:53:43 | |
According to him, genes often stand the best chance of survival | 0:53:43 | 0:53:47 | |
if, rather than fighting it out, | 0:53:47 | 0:53:49 | |
individuals cooperate and look after each other. | 0:53:49 | 0:53:53 | |
In the late '80s Dawkins appeared on the BBC's Thinking Aloud programme | 0:53:57 | 0:54:02 | |
and he explained his ideas. | 0:54:02 | 0:54:04 | |
Individual human beings are there as machines | 0:54:09 | 0:54:13 | |
for propagating their genes. | 0:54:13 | 0:54:15 | |
That is a kind of quasi purpose. | 0:54:15 | 0:54:17 | |
The language of purpose works in evolution as you look at nature | 0:54:17 | 0:54:21 | |
you can see organisms as purposeful machines. | 0:54:21 | 0:54:24 | |
They look as if they have been constructed for a purpose of reproducing, passing on their genes. | 0:54:24 | 0:54:29 | |
That is precisely what we are here for. | 0:54:29 | 0:54:31 | |
And Dawkins faced up to the charge that his book | 0:54:33 | 0:54:36 | |
was about humankind's selfish nature. | 0:54:36 | 0:54:39 | |
The Selfish Gene made very extravagant claims, | 0:54:40 | 0:54:44 | |
at least to a general reader, | 0:54:44 | 0:54:46 | |
about the selfish coding of our biological inheritance. | 0:54:46 | 0:54:49 | |
The Selfish Gene never made claims about the selfishness of human psychology | 0:54:49 | 0:54:55 | |
or any detailed claims about human psychology at all. | 0:54:55 | 0:54:58 | |
To be sure misinterpretations of The Selfish Gene have made just such claims. | 0:54:58 | 0:55:04 | |
What precise claims do you make... Why did you call it that book, | 0:55:04 | 0:55:07 | |
why did you give it that title? | 0:55:07 | 0:55:09 | |
Because I was wanting to conjure up in the mind of the reader | 0:55:09 | 0:55:12 | |
the image of the organism including ourselves | 0:55:12 | 0:55:16 | |
as a machine for passing on genes. | 0:55:16 | 0:55:18 | |
It is the selfish gene but not the selfish individual. | 0:55:18 | 0:55:20 | |
For Dawkins then, humans are not simply selfish individuals | 0:55:24 | 0:55:29 | |
who will do whatever it takes to reproduce our genes. | 0:55:29 | 0:55:33 | |
Evolution has also given us big, complex brains | 0:55:35 | 0:55:39 | |
which means we can override our inbuilt genetic compulsions. | 0:55:39 | 0:55:43 | |
In humans the brain has taken over, | 0:55:47 | 0:55:49 | |
in such a big way, | 0:55:49 | 0:55:52 | |
that it becomes positively misleading | 0:55:52 | 0:55:55 | |
to try to attempt to explain human behaviour | 0:55:55 | 0:55:59 | |
in a simple-minded naive vehicle for the genes kind of way. | 0:55:59 | 0:56:05 | |
So you're not going to get anywhere if you say, | 0:56:05 | 0:56:08 | |
"Well, what good does it do your genes | 0:56:08 | 0:56:10 | |
"to compose a symphony or write a book or score a goal in football?" | 0:56:10 | 0:56:14 | |
What governs how humans behave | 0:56:17 | 0:56:21 | |
is an extremely complicated mixture of our genetically-provided brains, | 0:56:21 | 0:56:29 | |
overlain by a massive infusion of culture. | 0:56:29 | 0:56:35 | |
And if you try to understand human psychology and human behaviour | 0:56:39 | 0:56:45 | |
in terms of either culture on its own or genetic evolution on its own, you're going to fail. | 0:56:45 | 0:56:50 | |
Because they're both there, they're both extremely important. | 0:56:50 | 0:56:53 | |
This is where a century of enquiry into human behaviour, | 0:57:03 | 0:57:08 | |
fought out on the airwaves, has brought us. | 0:57:08 | 0:57:10 | |
We are undoubtedly products of our biology | 0:57:13 | 0:57:16 | |
and the potential for human failing will always be there. | 0:57:16 | 0:57:20 | |
But that doesn't mean we're slaves to our nature. | 0:57:21 | 0:57:25 | |
The sophistication of the human brain | 0:57:25 | 0:57:28 | |
and the ways in which we live together have given us | 0:57:28 | 0:57:31 | |
the power to recognise and master our worst impulses. | 0:57:31 | 0:57:35 | |
This, after all, is what being human is all about. | 0:57:37 | 0:57:41 | |
Make the connections between Great Thinkers | 0:57:45 | 0:57:49 | |
and discover some surprising new ones with The Open University at: | 0:57:49 | 0:57:57 | |
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd | 0:58:17 | 0:58:20 | |
Email [email protected] | 0:58:20 | 0:58:23 |