1970 Geloof en Wetenschap : Orgaan van de Christelijke vereeniging van natuur- en geneeskundigen in Nederland - pagina 113

A. H. ESSER

85

2. Social Pollution: the results of our attempts to replace sponta^ neous with deliberate behavior * For the sake of argument, we may simplify by saying that our animal past, our organic evolution, has defined the manner of our sporvtaneous interactions with the environment. These interactions reflect our basic behavior principles, they deal with what is required from us in our daily life to provide shelter, food and interspecies contact, human interaction. They represent the ways in which environmental factors mold our behavior. And, as we have seen, physical and social factors prevailing early in evolution forced many of these necessary behaviors to crystallize into patterns of dominance and territoriality, incorporated as mental images in our contemporary mind. Consciously, we cannot trace in ourselves how our early conduct, in terms of being territorial and trying to find a position in a dominance hierarchy, must have been — times change, and we change with them! — It is only in animals, especially in the rodent and possibly in infrahuman primates such as baboons and gibbons, that we see illustrated the reasons for such formalized behavior and discover parts of what could have been stages in the evolution of our social behavior. Our cultural evolution has made possible increasingly the deliberate interactions between man and his environment. These reflect the change in us, which, thanks to our technology, results in a changed environment. This deliberate behavior is not based on what is required for mere survival, but constantly opens up new vistas of what is possible in man's dealing with nature; these interactions represent the ways in which human behavior molds the environment. Problems arise when our deliberate behavior, based on the creative images of invention, social justice or the improvement of our standard of living brings about changes in the environment. These changes in turn, evoke spontaneous behavior, resting on previous images, which resist change (this is the reason for our being conservative). The problems arising from the divergence between deliberate, forward looking action on the environment and spontaneous, conservative reaction to the envuonment, can be categorized as pollution. Pollution,

* Or, if we want to phrase it differently, the result of the incompatability of our social interactions with our technological means (5).

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