animallike. How can one come to terms with an image of humanity copulating relentlessly through all the cataclysms that befall it, or that it has brought upon itself?
Well, there you have it. Keep in mind that it is impossible to summarize a book that reduces human affairs to a minimum — that is, to numbers (there is no more radical method of cramming phenomena together). The book itself is an extract, an extreme abbreviation of humanity. In a review one cannot even touch on the most remarkable chapters. Mental illnesses: it turns out that today there are more lunatics in any given minute than all the people who lived on Earth for the last several dozen generations. It is as if all of previous humanity consisted, today, of madmen. Tumors — in my first medical work thirty-five years ago I called them a “somatic insanity,” in that they are a suicidal turning of the body upon itself — are an exception to life’s rule, an error in its dynamics, but that exception, expressed in the statistics, is an enormous Moloch. The mass of cancerous tissue, calculated per minute, is a testimony to the blindness of the processes that called us into existence. A few pages farther on are matters even more dreary. I pass over in silence the chapters on acts of violence, rape, sexual perversion, bizarre cults and organizations. The picture of what people do to people, to humiliate them, degrade them, exploit them, whether in sickness, in health, in old age, in childhood, in disability — and this incessantly, every minute — can stun even a confirmed misanthrope who thought he had heard of every human baseness. But enough of this.
Was this book necessary? A member of the French Academy, writing in Le Monde, said that it was inevitable, it had to appear. This civilization of ours, he wrote, which measures everything, counts everything, evaluates everything, weighs everything, which breaks every commandment and prohibition, desires to know all. But the more populous it becomes, the less intelligible it is to itself. It throws itself with the most fury at whatever continues to resist it. There was nothing strange, therefore, in its wanting to have its own portrait, a faithful portrait, such as never existed, and an objective one — objectivity being the order of the day. So in the cause of modern technology it took a photograph like those done with a reporter’s flash camera: without touch-ups.
The old gentleman dodged the question about the need for One Human Minute, saying that it appeared because, as the product of its time, it had to appear. The question, however, remains. I would substitute for it another, more modest question: Does this book truly show all of humanity? The statistical tables are a keyhole, and the reader, a Peeping Tom, spies on the huge naked body of humanity busy about its everyday affairs. But through a keyhole not everything can be seen at once. More important, perhaps, is the fact that the observer stands eye to eye, as it were, not merely with his own species but with its fate. One has to admit that One Human Minute contains a great deal of impressive anthropological data in the chapters on culture, beliefs, rituals, and customs, because, although these are numerical agglomerations (or maybe for precisely that reason), they demonstrate the astonishing diversity of people who are, after all, identical in their anatomy and physiology. It is curious that the number of languages people employ cannot be calculated. No one knows precisely how many there are; all we know is that there are over four thousand. Even the specialists have not identified all of them. The fact that some small ethnic groups take their languages with them when they die out makes the matter even more difficult to settle. On top of that, linguists are not in agreement about the status of certain languages, considered by some to be dialects, by others separate taxonomic entities. Few are the cases, however, where the Johnsons admit defeat in the conversion of all data to events per minute. Yet it is just in such cases that one feels — at least I felt — a kind of relief. This is a matter with philosophical roots.
In an elite German literary periodical I came across a review of One Human Minute written by an angry humanist. The book makes a monster out of mankind, he said, because it has built a mountain of meat from bodies, blood, and sweat (the measurements include, beyond excrement and menstrual bleeding, various kinds of sweat, since sweat from fear is different from sweat from hard work), but it has amputated the heads. One cannot equate the life of the mind with the number of books and newspapers that people read, or of the words they utter per minute (an astronomical number). Comparing theater-attendance and television-audience figures with the constants of death, ejaculation, etc., is not just misleading but a gross error. Neither orgasm nor death is exclusively and specifically human. What is more, they are largely physiological in character.
On the other hand, data that are specifically human, such as matters of intellect, are not exhausted, but neither are they explained by the size of the editions of philosophical journals or works. It is as if someone were to try to measure the heat of passion with a thermometer, or to put, under the heading “Acts,” both sex acts and acts of faith. This categorical chaos is no accident, for the authors’ intention was precisely to shock the reader with a satire made of statistics — to degrade us all under a hail of figures. To be a person means, first of all, to have a life of the spirit, and not an anatomy subject to addition, division, and multiplication. The very fact that the life of the spirit cannot be measured and put in statistical form refutes the authors’ claim to have produced a portrait of humanity. In this bookkeeper’s breakdown of billions of people into functional pieces to fit under headings, one sees the efficiency of a pathologist dissecting a corpse. Perhaps there is even malice. Indeed, among the thousands of index entries there is nothing at all resembling “human dignity.'
Another critic also struck at the philosophical roots I mentioned. I have the impression (I say this parenthetically) that One Human Minute threw the intellectuals into confusion. They felt that they had the right to ignore such products of mass culture as the Guinness Book, but One Human Minute confounded them. For the Johnsons — whether they are cautious or only cunning — raised their work to a much higher level with a methodical, scholarly introduction. They anticipated many objections, citing contemporary thinkers who call truth the prime value in society. If that is so, then all truth, even the most depressing, is permissible and even necessary.
The critic-philosopher put his foot in the stirrup held by the Johnsons and mounted that high horse. First he praised them, then found fault with them. We have been treated — he wrote in Encounter — almost literally the way Dostoevsky feared in his Notes from Underground. Dostoevsky believed that we were threatened by scientifically proven determinism, which would toss the sovereignty of the individual — with its free will — onto the garbage heap when science became capable of predicting every decision and every emotion like the movements of a mechanical switch. He saw no alternative, no escape from the cruel predictability that would deprive us of our freedom, except madness. His Underground Man was prepared to lose his mind, so that, released by madness, it would not succumb to triumphant determinism.
But now that flimsy determinism of the nineteenth-century rationalists has collapsed and will rise no more; it was replaced, with unexpected success, by probability theory and statistics. The fates of individuals are as unpredictable as the paths of individual particles of gas, but from the great number of both emerge laws that pertain to all together, though the laws are not concerned with individual molecules or persons. After the fall of determinism, therefore, science executed a circling maneuver and attacked the Underground Man from another side.
Unfortunately, it is untrue that there is no hint of humanity’s spiritual life in One Human Minute. Locking up that life inside the head, so that it will manifest itself only in words, is an understandable habit of professional literati and other intellectuals, who constitute (the book informs us) a microscopic particle, a millionth, of humanity. The life of the spirit is displayed, by 99 percent of people, through actions that are measurable to the highest degree, and it would be a mistake to assume high-mindedly that psychopaths, murderers, and pimps have any less psyche than water carriers, merchants, and weavers.
So one cannot accuse the authors of misanthropy; at the most, one can point to the limitations inherent in their method. The originality of One Human Minute lies in its being not a statistical compilation of information about what has taken place, like an ordinary almanac, but rather synchronous with the human world, like a computer of the type that we say works in real time, a device tracking phenomena as they occur.
Having thus crowned the authors, the critic from Encounter proceeded to trim the laurels he had bestowed as he took up the Introduction. The demand for truth, which the Johnsons wave like a banner in order to defend One Human Minute against charges of obscenity, sounds fine but is unworkable in practice. The book does not contain “everything about the human being,” because that is impossible. The largest libraries in the world do not contain “everything.” The quantity of anthropological data discovered by scientists now exceeds any individual’s ability to assimilate it. The division of labor, including intellectual labor, begun thirty thousand years ago in the Paleolithic, has become an irreversible phenomenon, and there is nothing that can be done about it. Like it or not, we have placed our destiny in the hands of the experts. A
