The ludovico treatment is a kind of aversion therapy in which an individual is strapped in a chair with their eyes kept open and forced to watch a series of violent images while being injected with a drug inducing disgust and nausea at strong levels. The individual is supposed to be conditioned to be repulsed by violence so much that they would forgo acting on their aggressive urges rather than feel the sickness come on.
Alex the main character is sent to prison after the murder of an older woman alone in her home and for two years does not change. He still enjoys violence and aggressive sexuality, but reads the Old Testament to get his jollies instead. He sublimates his desires in a socially acceptable way, and seemingly engages in a reaction formation, of doing the opposite of violence which is quietly reading, exchanging the image for the word. Alex learns of the ludovico treatment through thrown away newspaper clippings and guard talk and wants to volunteer for the radical new treatment. The treatment is being pushed by the current government as a less costly and more humane means of reducing crime than imprisonment. Alex gleefully volunteers for the treatment since it prevent him from serving his full term.
The treatment however backfires. Inadvertently during one of the sessions, Ludwig Van Beethoven's ninth symphony is playing in the background and becomes conditioned with the repulsion. Alex loves Beethoven so this is an omen of what is to come. When Alex comes back home he finds that his room has been rented to a lodger who has become close to his parents. When he tries to react in anger against the gentleman who is an asshole he feels the sickness come on and nearly collapses to the floor while gasping for air. Even the lodger thinks this is humiliating, even if deserved for what Alex did. Alex can't even express anger in the indirect ways of displacement, hitting a table for instance, or projection. The very instinct of aggression is turned inward with no escape but to renounce it. Later he is attacked by a group of homeless men after he is recognized as beating up on of them with his gang of Droogs, and is helpless to defend himself. Two police officers arrived to break it up, and they are none other than two of his former gang who aren't happy to see each other, but they are aware of Alex's treatment. So for revenge on past grievances, they torture Alex in the woods by drowning him in a tub of water while beating him with a club. Alex is in cuffs and they are police so he gets a double dose of the old style of punishment and the ludovico treatment.
Alex finds his way to a solitary home of a paraplegic who invites him in. The man is actually the victim of an attack by Alex's gang which paralyzed him and raped his wife which led to her death. He is willing to help Alex because he is a critic of the government, but Alex accidentally reveals himself by singing in the bathtub the tune he sang on the night of the raid, singin' in the rain. The man locks Alex up in a room upstairs while playing Beethoven's 9th symphony and Alex jumps from the window in a suicide attempt. He is unable to forgive Alex.
Alex survives the fall and his story becomes a news sensation of how the government destroyed a young man's will to live in the attempt to cure him. The treatment is reversed and Alex goes back to his old ways. "I was cured alright."
What the government took away from Alex was more than the instinct of self preservation. They also took away substitutes for aggression learned from social life. The problem with these substitutes like sublimation, displacement, reaction formation is that they are still fueled by some sort of aggression, we can't do what we really want to do so we channel those feelings into other actions. But those activities are precisely what have made civilization possible and contribute to the creation and enjoyment of certain culture and entertainment. Alex without these is less of a human. Taking away his animal nature has meant taking away some of his human nature. A Clockwork Orange visualizes the absurdity of compelling individuals to act altruistically to advance society. Government has to resort to denial of the will to live to accomplish this. His fellow Droogs don't act altruistically and still benefit socially compared to Alex, making the development of self denial not advantageous since not everybody has the ludovico treatment. A Clockwork Orange is a commentary on the liberal welfare state which aims to correct social ills by means of regulation and spending to influence outcomes.
Anthony Burgess wrote A Clockwork Orange in 1962 with the theories of psychologist BF Skinner in mind, which justifes attempts at social engineering. Skinner was a proponent of behaviorism, the theory that psychology should concern itself with observable behavior, which is a pattern of stimulus-response, and not internal mental states. Rather than reforming people with punishment to make them see the error of their ways, we should instead alter behavior by altering the consequences of behavior. When someone does what we want, we should reinforce it with reward. When someone does something unfavorable, we remove what has been given to negatively reinforce behavior. This way Skinner argued is more humane than punishment and blame. Rather than expect people to believe the right thing, we ought just to alter the incentives shaping their behavior. Skinner came out with Beyond Freedom and Dignity in 1971 which argued for doing away with the social obsession with free will and dignity as they can only be ascribed to a "homunculus", little man inside of us, and not behavior which is relevant. An over emphasis on freedom and dignity Skinner thought justified punishment and blame, as we assume people are responsible for everything they do. Freedom and dignity are really an aversion to punishment and not autonomous man.
There is little question that the ludovico treatment is based on behaviorist aversion therapy: negative reinforcement of aggression by association of behavior with negative stimuli. Alex's treatment consists not in him doing the aggressive behaviors but observing others doing them on screen. This reflects the social learning theory, sometimes called neo-behaviorism, of Albert Bandura. Bandura's famous bobo doll experiment showed a recording of an adult hitting a clown doll to children and compared their activity in a room with their own clown doll. The group which saw the adult hitting the doll on video also hit the doll compared to the control group. This suggested that violence in media can inspire violence in real life. After the film adaptation came out in 1971, there were several violent incidents patterned after the film.
The ending of A Clockwork Orange was changed in the edition Americans read. The book had 21 chapters, a traditional age of manhood, which ended with Alex renouncing his evil ways without the ludovico treatment, of his own accord. Kubrick also cut out that ending in the film adaptation, thinking that American audiences would never go for it. Without the ending, which worked better in the book than it probably would've in the movie, what we're left with is the Christian view of man with original sin and the burden of free will without absolution. And Burgess was a Catholic after all.
Stanley Kubrick was not a Christian and was either an atheist or at least didn't believe in a personal god. Kubrick made A Clockwork Orange in 1971 when Darwinian accounts of human society were entering into the mainstream which validated the darker aspects of the Christian view of man. This context I think gave A Clockwork Orange a new social meaning. For a long time even after Darwin, social scientists and anthropologists thought that humans were different from animals and shaped primarily by culture. By the 1960s several influential books like The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris 1967 and The Territorial Imperative 1966 by Robert Ardrey, who influenced Kubrick directly, appeared which posited that millions of years of natural selection aren't transformed by a few generations of social engineering. Civilization comprises about 5% of the existence of our species, compared to 95% of our species' existence being spent in a very different environment with different needs. This environment Ardrey and Morris argued shaped our nature by forcing us to begin eating and eventually hunting meat due to the disappearance of the forests and the colder weather starting with the Pliocene. Man evolved to be a killer ape. By the 1970s a new paradigm of Darwinian thinking popularized by Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene 1976 put the gene as the unit of selection, not the group, and argued that altruism operates according to helping those related to you (kin selection) or helping others so they help you and your genes (reciprocal altruism). Individuals do help others not to advance themselves, but ultimately their genes. The different ending of his film affirmed this new view.
So the answer to my question is that society can't abolish the instinct for self-preservation, and there isn't a limit to how bad our nature allows us to be. The thought that you could do so was based on faulty assumptions of human nature.
No comments:
Post a Comment