A Species In Denial

wenty three hundred years ago, the great philosopher Plato created his famous analogy of humanity’s alienation from the peaceful, semi-enlightened state of innocence which preceded the angry, egocentric condition we face today. He spoke of our dwelling with our backs to the full light of truth in a Cave where only the flickerings of firelight on the cave walls gave glimpses of a selfless intelligence almost lost. Jeremy Griffith is the latest and one of the most challenging thinkers to tackle and devise a way out of the Cave, even at the cost of derision and scoffing if need be. The theme of this book—his third—is not new. As a biologist by training, the author puts his argument on a sound physical foundation without sacrificing the liberation of the soul from millennia of stifled awareness which can now start to occur. Griffith warns that the massive conditioning which prompts most folk past adolescence to stay in a half-developed state will be hard to reverse. They will have to travel the path of prophets preaching an unfamiliar doctrine even as Christ did. In our conflicted way, we are more at war with our own selves than the outer world itself, but the one is inevitably joined to the other. Hence our constant wars and lack of co-operation.
   The author avoids the dismissive tone of many fundamentalist gurus both in science and religion. Without preaching any dogma, he expresses thanks for Christianity for giving people hope that there is more to life on this troubled planet than dilemmas. But faith, which has sustained us over the centuries, must gradually give way to knowing—not the

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Ronald Conway OAM is a distinguished Melbourne clinical psychologist and former academic. He is the author of a number of books on psychology and philosophy, including ‘The Rage for Utopia’ published in 1992 and is a frequently called upon social commentator.

   A Species in Denial, by Jeremy Griffith.
This volume is not the answer to a cheap paperback stuck in your hip pocket for a day at the beach.
    Griffith is a biologist, successful businessman, and free thinker in the classical sense of the word.
   People like him used to be drummed out of town by the vicar, or whoever, because he dared to ask questions that challenged the very rising of the sun on mankind’s head each morning. Times have changed somewhat, but Griffith would maintain that human beings are still trapped by the way in which they confront their ‘human condition’.
   So, here we have a book that confronts the way we think about life. Throughout the text quotes from eminent thinkers, philosophers, and sources are used on which to build his argument on how it is time for us to take responsibility for the way we think.
   Sections on the human condition, bringing peace to the war of the sexes, the demystification of religion, and so on give the reader of this review a handle on the direction on the volume’s contents.    It would take a brave person to consider that the way of mankind doesn’t need any attention, ranging from fine tuning to a major engine refit — regardless, Griffith gives the serious reader plenty to ponder.
   His stance is that of ‘The Foundation for Humanity’s Adulthood’. His Australian heritage also suggests he does not pull his punches in defence of his beliefs.
   There is never any doubt of his conviction, or the courage of his stance in writing this book

Title: A Species In Denial

Author: Jeremy Griffith

Publisher: FHA Publishing and Communications

RRP: $34.95

Reviewer: Antonia Hilderbrand

One of the main theme’s Jeremy Griffith explores in this book is summed up by General Omar Bradley: The world has achieved brilliance without conscience, he says.
    Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.
     How true this is becomes obvious when newspapers carry stories such as one recently which revealed that George W. Bush is about to overturn an American ban on tests of new and even more dangerous nuclear weapons.
     Jeremy Griffith is an Australian biologist but his range of interests and his store of knowledge seem almost infinite.
     In A Species In Denial he refers to the work and thought of William Blake, Laurens van der Post, W.B. Yeats, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Simone Weill, Dian Fossey and even Banjo Paterson!
     On the subject of high art versus popular art, he is both original and illuminating:
     People have said, Why do you refer to songs,

poetry, comic strips, cartoons, euphemisms,mythology and the like: shouldn’t you be drawing on academic studies to support your arguments?
     My answer is that I have drawn on science to assemble the biological explanation of the human condition.
     However when it comes to needing denial-free, truthful descriptions of our world I take it where I can find it.
     The fundamental question Griffith poses in his book is a big one. How is it, he wonders, that ethics can co-exist in the same species, in fact in the same human being, with hatred and aggression?
     The Geneva Convention is the best example of what he is referring to; namely, the way in which we make rules to govern the conduct of wars, which are in themselves horrible and barbaric.
     The chapter called Resignation is brilliant in its insight into human nature and what we call the idealism of the young.
     Griffith doesn’t call it that, of course. He sees it all very differently.
     In A Species In Denial Griffith quotes at length from a piece by the South African writer Olive Shriener in which she sets out the thoughts and feelings of a young, sensitive and idealistic child surrounded by the everyday cruelty and violence of the world in which she lives.
     It’s worth reading the book for this essay alone but, of course, there’s so much more.
     Those who need brain food will find it here. It can’t be said of many books that the world looks different after you’ve read them.
     It can be said of this book.

HESE two books present themselves not so much as alternatives as separate ways of confronting the profound Western moral conflicts left over from the 20th century.
    Jeremy Griffith is an Australian biologist turned polymath who offers a challenging work in four large parts with A Species In Denial. He begins by describing most of humanity as mental cave-dwellers watching mere silhouettes of reality by firelight, as Plato suggested 2400 years ago. He then moves to the crippling effects of centuries of adolescence that is cramped by elders into a resigned torpor of unhappy intellectuality from which so much deeper feeling and soul sap has been drained.
    People grow up resigned to a systematic, competitive semi-world in which so many sub-jective experiences cannot be welcomed, developing a habit of daily denial. From this repeated generational tension much of the con-flict between good and evil behaviour derives.
    Griffith’s third essay carries some of these themes into the increasing conflict between the sexes. He considers this conflict so destructive that much of the political turbulence of public life, struggles for power and ego significance, and domestic misery are due to it. The author insists that men and women are different, and their biological differences underpin equally significant spiritual and emotional differences that intellectual cunning alone cannot resolve. One has only to look at the strange role reversals of the sexes during the past half-century to verify the problem.
    Finally Griffith deals with the demystification of religion, where we encounter more difficulty because he is not always mindful of the misleading character of his terms. Mystification is not the same as mystery and should not be used interchangeably. Substituting the concept of god for negative entropy is daringly suggestive since there has been too much anthropomorphism built around the doctrine of the heavenly father. The supernatural might also be dubbed the denied dimension.
    Negative entropy is borrowed from the discovery in physics that the universe is running down. This has echoes from chemistry Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine’s view that the more unstable natural phenomena become, the more open they are to evolutionary fluctuations — some reversing as well as advancing.
    It seems probable that humans have been tethered for too long to science and religion as rigid categories, independent of our experience of them. Several orthodoxies may not be happy with the author’s speculations, but so be it.
    Griffith seems to assume that his is a book the casual seeker should find easy to grasp. Not so. Only repeated reading will unlock many of its insights about the “divided selves” of people in our time. His embedding of famous thinkers and quotations into his text is a great help to understanding. But patience and interest are necessary for a rewarding

A Species in Denial

By Jeremy Griffith, Peribo, 525pp, $34.95

What is Good?

By A.C. Grayling, Weidenfeld
& Nicholson, 240pp, $49.95

Ronald Conway

journey. The effort does seem worthwhile.
    Anthony Grayling’s What is Good? The Search for the Best Way to Live should have been prefaced by “What is real?” Countless people will not be satisfied with the writer’s belief that science will help us to embrace a good and happy life. Nowhere in this elegantly written, beguiling volume are there clear acknowledgements that every achievement in science and technology during the past “shameful century” has been abused as much as used. A noble discovery can still be lent to bad purposes and science stands with religion in the same dock on that score.
    Grayling offers his readers a choice between moral value found in common humanist (British?) transactions and the transcendental view standing outside human opinion. This is acceptable if he did not cheat somewhat by forecasting his preference by means of belittling the transcendental (religion) throughout his text. His separation of the humanist and the faith-centred basis for morality is itself arbitrary since Christian humanists have been celebrated in Britain since the day of Thomas More.
    The wasteland for real debate on moral philosophy has been at Oxford since World War I — Grayling’s favoured alma mater. He remarks: “One major role for the future is science [not defined]. The other is the study of history, for to know the past is to understand the present” (but whose history?). Grayling permits himself too many general statements without justifying them.
    Despite his apparent dislike for anything that cannot amount to a sensible or expedient basis for goodness, the author still gives pleasure through his excellent style. He knows his classical philosophers and the chapter on Greece and Rome is excellent. But he unsheathes his dagger when it comes to medieval thought. Scripture offers an easy Aunt Sally for wordsmiths. It is also easy to see Grayling as yet another child of the 18th century Enlightenment and another cheery companion of Locke and Hume, who rejected any profound truths or god to which morality can be anchored. Indeed, we have heard most of this before. To state a bias, I have never before encountered a convincing secular-humanist argument for good moral behaviour, and I do not find it here.

 A SPECIES IN DENIAL

 By Jeremy Griffith

 FHA Publishing and Communications Pty Ltd

 pb 2003

 rrp $34.95

 ISBN 1 74129 000 7

    Like to improve your understanding of the human condition? Ever wondered about our contradictory capacity for good and evil? Jeremy Griffith, an Australian biologist, believes he has the answer to the riddle of humanity. To why humanity’s progress is stalled in a state of unknowing. To how human intellect and instinct produce psychological conflict.
    A Species In Denial, with a foreword by Charles Birch, traverses wide ground indeed. From deciphering Plato’s cave allegory, to human denial, to bringing peace to the war between the sexes, to the denial-free history of the human race and the demystification of religion.
    Jeremy Griffith believes that the human race, allowing for a limited number of exceptions, suffers from an immense psychosis. This has it origins in humanity living in a state of deep denial. It is a denial to which most of us are oblivious. Hence A Species In Denial which offers the path, the author believes, to freedom.
    Strip away the layers of denial and resulting psychosis, Jeremy Griffith believes, and we will mature to a state of psychological freedom. A Species In Denial consists of around 500 pages, with many quotations that are identified in bold print. You’ll get your money’s worth there.
    Jeremy Griffith was raised on a sheep station in central west NSW. He was educated at Tudor House School in NSW, Geelong Grammar in

Victoria and the University of New England and Sydney University.
    His book is dedicated to the Members of the Foundation for Humanity’s Adulthood.

John McConnell is the author of several senior textbooks.

Griffith’s
advance
on denial

A SPECIES IN DENIAL

Jeremy Griffith

Griffin Press, 2003

A SPECIES in Denial is a continuation of Jeremy Griffith’s previous’ Beyond the Human Condition which I reviewed when first published, as making a landmark in the understanding of the present crises in human relationships both at the personal level and in crosscultural affairs.

    Now Jeremy makes significant advances through the work of the FHA - the Foundation for Humanities Adulthood. His references are wide ranging from the teachings of early philosophers to modern day scientists.

    His current thesis is contrasting what he calls the attitudes of mind of “Humans’ Historic Denial of the issue of Human Condition,” with the need for a more creative understanding of the real condition of the human race, through scientific means. It calls for more thought both in the biological and spiritual areas of humankind. Jeremy refers to the issue of which the human species has had to live in ‘psychological denial’ because historically it has been extremely confronting. He describes Plato’s Cave allegory for life in denial, and the need for perseverance in overcoming the ‘deaf effect’ of denial. The reference to Plato’s Republic and the Deciphering of the Cave Allegory, and in the process explaining how the human condition is resolved, forms a model for the arguement of this book. In his essay on ‘Resignation’ he explains how at about 12 years of age humans begin to try to understand the dilemma of the human condition. However, with humanity unable - until now - to explain this deepest of issues, adolescents eventually about the age of 15, learn they have no choice but to resign themselves to a life of denial of this subject.

— Dr John Champness
Psychologist

By John C. F. Burnside

   Are you one of those people seeking answers?
   Ever wonder why people can’t be nice to each other all the time? Why people are uncooperative and divisive? Ever wonder why as a teenager the world seemed so full of promise, then full of gloom?
   Then Jeremy Griffith’s ‘A Species in Denial’ will give you a new perspective to consider.
   Australian author Jeremy Griffith explores something called the ‘human condition’, that makes us what we are. Whether or not you agree doesn’t really matter, what matters is that his work, one in a series, definitely provides food for thought for those who are seeking answers.
   ‘A Special In Denial’ has been praised by John Morton, University of Auckland Emeritus Professor of Zoology and author of ‘Man, Science and God’. ‘It brings out the truth of a new and wider frontier for humankind.’
  He is not the first writer/researcher to consider the ‘human condition’. Plato did as well. In fact much of Jeremy’s book refers to the Cave Allegory from Plato’s ‘Republic’, where people who had only known existence in a cave discovered the sun-filled outside world, but their fellow cave dwellers disbelieved and denied them.
  The book is about a new view of life: how human existence is very much cavelike and how humans tend to ostracise and even kill people who think differently. Jesus Christ is one - if Christianity has been preaching light and love for 2000 years, how come we haven’t got it right yet? Is religion simply a palliative for humans’ inability to come to terms with their divisive existence? Jeremy says adult humans live in a corrupted state, whereas children live in the ideal innocent state. He quotes Chinese philosopher Mencius:

‘The great man is he who does not lose his child’s-heart.’
   Humans have a capacity for both good and evil. ‘Historically there has been no explanation for the riddle of the human condition; for why humans have been competitive, aggressive and selfish when the ideals are to be cooperative, loving and selfless.’ The only choice, says Jeremy, has been to block the whole issue from their minds because not to was to become dangerously, even suicidally, depressed. He sees a correlation between high teen suicide figures and the ‘human condition’.
   Songwriters have written about the dream of living in a better world. Artists view the world in the different light, but are often ridiculed: the Beatles’ ‘Imagine’, U2’s ‘I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For’ and more. The Doors Jim Morrison is quoted as saying: ‘Nobody gets out of this world alive.’ As Jeremy points out, many artists commit suicide through frustration with the world.
   Jeremy proposes that humans are alienated from their real ‘integrative, selfless, loving, co-operative’ selves. Our inability to cope with the ‘human condition’, a conflict between our genetic, instinctive and conscious selves, results in our predilection for selfishness and aggression. Humans have resigned to their divisive life and live in denial of their true path.
   Jeremy says we have lost touch with, or overridden, our instinct.
   D. H. Lawrence touched on a similar vein in ‘Apocalypse’ when he wrote that man had lost touch with the natural order. However, a myriad of writers have touched the subject.
   French educationalist Jean-Jacques Rousseau believed that humans had a pure, instinctive altruistic awareness within them.
   Buddha’s awakening saw him focus on ‘anguish’ as man’s

major problem, so he created four paths to rid the world of it.
   Jeremy contends that good nurturing can ameliorate the need for people to continue denying the ‘human condition’.
   He quotes Roman poet Virgil: ‘As the twig is bent so the tree inclines.’
   One interesting fact he cites is that California’s Silicon Valley is home to more autistic children than anywhere in America. Autism, claims child psychiatrist and psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott, results from emotional trauma experienced by the child caused by the parents’ antipathy to having the child. ‘Autism is a highly sophisticated defence organisation. What we see in invulnerability. There has been a gradual build-up towards invulnerability...The child carries around the (lost) memory of unthinkable anxiety, and the illness is a complex mental structure insuring against recurrence of the conditions of the unthinkable anxiety.’
   Jeremy quotes South African Olive Schreiner often.
   ‘All the world seemed wrong to me. Why did everyone press on everyone and try to make them do what they wanted? Why did the strong always crush the weak? Why did we hate and kill and torture?’ These questions Olive asked. If you have asked the same, then this book will provide some answers. It will also spur you to further reading. Jeremy in 1983 founded the Foundation for Humanity’s Adulthood and published his first book ‘Free: The End Of The Human Condition’ in 1988. His career has included tracking the Tasmanian Tiger or Thylacine in a six-year search that ended in concluding that the animal was extinct. He has a science degree in biology from Sydney University and also began a furniture manufacturing company which he sold to form the FHA. And yes, it is possible to overcome living in denial....

   In 1967, 27-year-old Australian science undergraduate Jeremy Griffith took time out from his studies in New South Wales and hitchhiked to Tasmania to search for the Thylacine (Tasmanian Tiger), thought to be extinct. Griffith spent six years in the Tasmanian wilderness, hunting the elusive marsupial before giving up hope of its existence.

   Eight years later in New South Wales, Griffith, now a zoology graduate and furniture-maker, embarked on another search. It was a search that would see him return to the wilderness both literally and figuratively.

   And once again, he would be searching for something that had eluded mankind: an understanding of the human condition.

   Griffith’s preoccupation with questions about our capacity for good and evil saw him devote the next 28 years of his life to this work. He spent 3-4 hours each day thinking and writing on the subject; often out in the Australian bush. In 1983, he established the Foundation for Humanity’s Adulthood (FHA), an organisation dedicated to improving our understanding of the human condition. His first book “Free: The End of the Human Condition” was published in 1988 and was followed by “Beyond the Human Condition” in 1991.

   Griffith believes that conflict between our genetic, instinctive, selves and our conscious, intellectual, selves causes us to suffer from a guilt which manifests itself as selfishness and aggression, or what he calls “divisive behaviour”. He says we cannot progress as a species until this burden of guilt is lifted.
   In his third book, “A Species in Denial”, he says that our denial of this condition has arrested our development as a species, locking us into a state of adolescence. He

Author Jeremy Griffith

begins the book by introducing the human condition, drawing a parallel between our tendency to hide in the dark from the truth and Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. He then examines our resignation to our condition and considers how things might be if we could overcome this.

   The book has sold more than 5000 copies since it was launched in June and made it on to the best seller shelves in major book stores in Australia and New Zealand.

   Some sections of text have been removed from the book because they were the subject of a defamation suit against the Australian media when the book went to print.

“A Species In Denial” by Jeremy Griffith. Published by FHA Publishing & Communications Pty Ltd. RRP $41.99 (incl. GST).

A SPECIES IN DENIAL, by
Jeremy Griffith, FHA
Publishing, RRP $34.99

BEING able to understand why humans have been and continue to be so competitive, aggressive and selfish would alleviate the insecurity present in most humans.

   Reconciliation between instinct and intellect, soul and mind, subjectivity and objectivity, mysticism and rationalism, religion and science, faith and reason, innocence and corruption and so on, all depend on truth that is ultimately understanding.

   The above is paraphrased from A Species in Denial a seminal book about how humans have coped with the psychological burden of their contradictory mindset by living in denial of it.

   An introduction about the human condition is followed by four lengthy essays—Deciphering Plato's Cave Allegory, Resignation, Bringing Peace to the War Between Sexes and the Demystification of Religion.

   Jeremy Griffith uses many

quotations from famous philosophers, thinkers and religious sources, most of which deserve essays in themselves to establish background and extract detailed meaning.

   Griffith’s experience in scientific writing enables the reader to access the thoughts of many in a painless way.

  It would be comforting to think this book and its message could bring about the psychological maturation of the human race, so ending conflict.

   This book is a must read for all who wish to learn more about the great thinkers and interpreters. All quotations are referenced.

   While it makes rather demanding holiday reading, a sustained effort would be most rewarding.

— Helen Bissland

A Species in Denial

By Jeremy Griffith

FHA Publishing, $34.95

THE author’s introduction sets out to explain the purpose of this book, ie, to identify the “human condition”, recognise it and explain it.

    Here he implies that it is the misfortune of the human species to have such a condition.

    What is the human condition? Is it the paradoxical riddle of human nature? Why are we capable of immense love and sensitivity on the one hand, and capable of greed, hatred, brutality, murder and war on the other?

    The introduction was quite difficult to understand, lost in repetition and an abundance of words. Then there he was, the author, challenging the reader by saying that if the reader was having trouble understanding what was written it was not because the writing was repetitive and lost in an abundance of words but that it is the reader’s mind that is in denial, thereby preventing comprehension. I had to chuckle.

    We read on to find a fascinating book full of cross-references to the many writings of Plato, the Bible, Sir Laurens van der Post, Jesus Christ,

Stephen Hawkins and many others, even to the lyrics of Bono and Dylan.

    Did they really know what they were reflecting when they wrote these words, or do we all in our own lifetime re-enact man's evolution? Was JDF Jones’ assassination of Sir Laurens van der Post, as his biographer, akin to Salieri’s relationship to Mozart? Does a good person always have a bad one on hand?

    To the voracious thinker this chapter is a feast.

    The chapter on resignation describes a state of mind and its ramifications on those nearby, thoughts on nurturing and hope for the future maturation of mankind.

    There is an essay on bringing peace to the war of the sexes. Why are men and women so different from each other?—read on.

    Finally, the demystification of religion. Here we have it. Surely the author has to be a brave man to attempt to explain religion. Or is he a contemporary prophet?

    This is a big book with plenty of material to startle, stimulate, possibly explain or even demystify the ethereal concept the author calls the “human condition”. It’s well worth the read.   

— Joe Hermon

Book offers solution instead of bandaid

    OFTEN I read letters in this column that despair of the destructive, unstable state of the world today. The youth drug/alcohol abuse problem, suicide, the breakdown of the family unit, poverty in Third World countries and environmental abuse, for example.
    Other times I read letters that offer solutions to these problems and ways that we can solve them. I’ll use the youth drug/alcohol problem as a recent example as quite often there are readers who share their ideas on what is causing the problem, and how society should tackle this worsening crisis.
    It’s true. There IS a drug and alcohol problem in our community. However, this problem is not simply a result of poor drug education in schools, boredom, the desire to experiment, less than ideal family units, keeping the wrong company, low self esteem, lack of direction or religious faith — all reasons that are thrown around from time to time. The problem is much, much greater. These are all just symptoms of a much bigger problem.
    The trouble is none of these “solutions”, actually reach

the core of the problem. For example, the real problem is not that kids are binge drinking at thirteen and spraying walls with profane outbursts or that girls and boys are having sex resulting in unwanted pregnancies. These are simply the result of the bigger problems facing mankind. Superior drug/ alcohol or sex education in schools won’t go close to addressing this problem.
    In today’s world we don't have to look far to know that we need a solution, not a band-aid. It’s time we all understood the crux of the problem here on earth. Human beings are capable of the most atrocious acts, but they are also capable of incredible acts of love. Good and evil, if you like.
    We’ve seen people fly planes into buildings, Mothers and Fathers murder their own children and massive wars. There is an explanation for this suffering and pain and there is a solution, that is neither short- sighted or a band-aid. It’s no longer good enough for people to hide behind faith and band-aid solutions. It really is time to take a step back and take a good look at the big picture. The good intentions of so many individuals and organisations are simply that. They are not going to solve the biggest problem of humankind.

    The biggest problem that faces human kind IS human kind itself. Our problems, and the state of the world are counter effects of a much more significant problem, namely human beings and our human condition. The human condition being our ingrained insecurity arising from our inability to reckon with and understand our capacity for acts of good and evil.
    Only once we address the much larger, all consuming challenge of bringing dignifying understanding to the human condition, will we witness the subsidence of the problems facing mankind today.  
    I challenge any one who is sceptical about what I am saying, to get a hold of the book A Species In Denial (Jeremy Griffith 2003), to read it, digest it and then see if it doesn’t knock your socks off. This particular book is already a bestseller and it’s no wonder. There really is only one solution to the massive problem facing the world today. This problem is explained in the book and the solution is there for anyone brave enough to look at it.

Sophie Leyden
OGILVIE ST
DENMAN

A Species in Denial: A Foundation for Humanity’s Adulthood

by Jeremy Griffith, $41.99

WHERE countless others have sought to improve the human situation, Jeremy Griffith sets out to resolve the human condition: to address what he describes as humanity’s “immense historic psychosis”.

    This has arisen, he says, as a result of a psychological discord in the species, caused by our capacity to commit both good and evil acts.

    Because of this apparent contradiction in human nature the common reaction, since the dawn of consciousness, has been to studiously deny it - and to confine ourselves to Plato’s Cave of Darkness.

    If the progress of the species is compared with the development of the individual, as he or she passes through childhood and adolescence, the angst in the cave is a sign that homo sapiens has yet to achieve adulthood. We are stalled - forever insecure, forever picking at our pimples.

    But help is at hand, we learn. In fact, it has almost always been at hand. Every era and civilisation has produced a few people, usually known as prophets who have been able to confront reality. By word and example they have been able to cut through our adolescent evasiveness and offer a cure for, or at least a

insight into, the sense of alienation that this engenders.

    Griffith says the dualism of the species is not to be externalised, invested with a cosmological significance and then ritually destroyed through the obscenity of Armageddon. Rather, it is to be resolved through an understanding of who we are and why we are the way we are.

    The informed reader will probably find him or herself in agreement with the broad thrust of Griffith’s thesis, but may disagree with him over his evaluation or interpretation of certain people, writings and historical events. His high opinion of pop antipsychiatrist R D Laing, for examp1e, will not be shared by many of those with a knowledge of the advances in the assessment and treatment of psychiatric disorders since the 1960s.

    E FullerTorrey, an American authority on schizophrenia, describes the Laingian view of the psychotic episode as an attempt to break free from an alienated system, and the implication that the schizophrenic is expressing the pathology of the family, as “pure British bumpkin”. Laing himself seems, in later life, to have realised that he was wrong.

    “I was looked to as one who had the answers but I never had them,” Laing told an interviewer in 1982, seven years before he died.

ALAN IRELAND

A SPECIES IN DENIAL
By Jeremy Griffith
FHA Publishing and Communications

  Jeremy Griffith is an Australian biologist who sees human beings as mental cave dwellers hiding away from their true nature. In fact, so backward

in coming forward to our true selves are we that we cannot progress as a species until we see the true light of our existence.
  And so Griffith goes on a voyage of self-discovery, taking in such subjects as deciphering Plato’s cave allegory, why we as a species resign ourselves to a life of denial, the war between the sexes

and the demystification of religion. Heady stuff.
  At the centre of all our problems, it seems, is the guilt we feel as supposedly flawed beings.
Like Luke Skywalker, if we can learn to break free from this dark side of self-doubt and ignorance, then we are strong and invincible. Give in to it, and we go along much as we are now. At each other’s—and Darth Vader’s—throats.

   This is not an easy book. Too many quotes from seemingly hundreds of thinkers, social commentators and pop stars. They often become distracting rather than illuminating. Too much repetition and rambling discourse. Not enough straight to the chase argument and illustration. And what of the whole pages of dots because text had to be withdrawn because it deals with issues before the courts? Strange.

   There is a lot to think about in this book, and much that I am sure would benefit from a second or even a third reading. It is just a shame that it is such hard work.

— Stephen Mitchell