The Falls of 1972: John B Calhoun and Urban

Pessimism
circulatingnow.nlm.nih.gov/2018/01/11/the-falls-of-1972-john-b-calhoun-and-urban-pessimism/

Circulating Now January 11, 2018

Circulating Now welcomes guest bloggers Jon Adams and Edmund Ramsden. Adams, of
the London School of Economics, and Ramsden, of the University of London, share
insights on the work of renowned National Institute of Mental Health researcher John B.
Calhoun, as captured in a film featuring interviews with Calhoun and footage of the
“mouse universes” he maintained for study. The film is one of several in the Library’s
manuscript collections documenting Calhoun’s work and is currently highlighted in our
Medicine on Screen project.

“Fall, 1972. Scenes Include Last Survivors.”

This is the text on the opening slate. What
have we missed? For now, it’s enough to
know we’ve arrived late in the game. This is
not the event, but its aftermath. This is post-
apocalypse.

We know—we think we know—what the

post-apocalyptic world will look like. We’ve
seen it in the movies (George Miller’s Mad
Max), read about it (Cormac McCarthy’s
The Road), and even played the video
game (Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us). It’s a Dr. Calhoun (right) and his colleagues overlook
place where bands of ragged survivors the mouse enclosure.
roam over a defoliated wasteland, their John B. Calhoun Papers, 1909-1996. MS C 586
engagements marked by the expression of box 142, folder 28.
terrible violence and unchecked sexual
aggression.

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For fiction, the post-apocalypse is a theatre in which to explore humanity’s barely
subdued inhumanity. Functionally, it acts as a counterfactual, a reminder of the fragility of
order, of how much our society depends for its continued operation upon our willing and
mutual consent. Here’s how things would be if we didn’t play by the rules. Because in the
post-apocalypse, nobody plays by the rules. Behaviour is as bad as it can be. The rules
went away with the society they formed, everything now is pure id. Just the base instincts
survive, and survival requires just the base instincts. Kill, steal, rape. This is how the
world looks from the brain stem, this is the view from the cerebellum. Post-apocalypse
represents regression to pre-history, of motivational surrender to the throbbing urgency of
the lizard brain.

Here’s an alternative scenario:

A world of perfectly clean and well tended inhabitants, coexisting harmoniously. No sexual
violence—no sex at all. No violence, either. Lots of grooming. Regular communal meals.
Because this is also a post-apocalypse. These are also the survivors of a societal
collapse. They’re mice, and they’re the only living remnants of Universe 25.

Universe 25 is a nine-by-nine-foot square arena with five-foot high metal walls built within
the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in Bethesda, MD. Its floor is a spindle of
sixteen segments split by low dividers—just tall enough to keep mice from making
contact, but not so high they can’t easily climb over. Good fences make good neighbours.
Its designer, NIMH scientist John B. Calhoun, climbs down into the pen, watched by the
camera that McGraw-Hill educational films have brought to record the interview. The
interviewer stays outside. Calhoun’s daughter would later recall the smell, above all. The
stench of two thousand mice.

But only a few now survived—about 120

specimens. They’re clustered together
around a single feeder, dumbly nuzzling
and preening. Calhoun’s rodents had been
through the Mad Max period: they had
experienced their orgy of ultraviolence,
sexual predation, incest, and cannibalism.
Trapped inside Universe 25 with all their
material needs met, the mice had bred until
the stresses of over-population led them
into a permanent state of fight-or-flight.
Calhoun had termed this “the Behavioural
Sink”—the tipping point after which all
Mice crowding one another to get water.
civility broke down, and the animals were
drawn into an irreversible vortex of self-
destruction, a frenzied mass panic from which only these huddled, withdrawn specimens
now survive.

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For contemporary audiences, that rapid escalation to annihilation might have brought to
mind what nuclear theorist and Kennedy advisor Herman Kahn had recently called
“spasm war” (On Escalation, 1965)—the endgame of the US-Soviet détente, the point at
which everyone pressed all of their buttons.

But there was another device ticking

insistently below everyday life: what Paul
Ehrlich had recently called “The Population
Bomb” (1968). The late nineteen-sixties and
early seventies witnessed growing popular
concern over the ability of our planet to
sustain the seemingly unstoppable growth
of the species. The strapline on Ehrlich’s
book read: “Population Control or Race to
Oblivion?” That same year, philosopher
Garrett Hardin popularised the notion of the
“tragedy of the commons,” a demand for
regulated access to public goods that he
Calhoun presents his overpopulation equations.
would later revise into the altogether more
troubling “lifeboat ethics” (1974).
Meanwhile, an Apollo-era public mindful of the need for astronauts to carry all their own
supplies were urged by Buckminster Fuller to think of our own “Spaceship Earth” as a
similarly finite container. It was as if, as one commentator put it, humanity was doomed to
a choice between two bombs: “we shall probably solve the population problem by nuclear
extermination. In any case, the two major problems of our time—nuclear war and the
population explosion—are closely linked together.” Certainly, Calhoun was happy to use
the language of apocalypse—quoting Revelations in the introduction to one paper from
the time. For what might happen aboard the airlocked Spaceship Earth; see Universe 25.

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 A labeled diagram indicating relationships among environment, needs, conditions, and adaptations
within a population.
John B. Calhoun Papers. 1909-1996, MS C 586 box 143, folder 1

Yet if this mouse enclosure modelled our own eventual demise, then it turns out the post-
apocalypse of popular culture was only a transitional phase, a station on route to this
strangely calm dystopia. A blank white space, reminiscent of John Lennon’s video for
1970’s “Imagine,” or the sterile dream-rooms in the final reel of Kubrick’s recent 2001: A
Space Odyssey (1968). The utopian and the dystopian osculate here. Kahn had asked:
after a nuclear holocaust, “will the survivors envy the dead?”

Anchoring it by the tail, Calhoun displays

one of the mice on his palm, he notes its
smooth pelage. It’s a balb-C albino, a
common lab mouse, bred by the NIH
Animal Center and more or less guaranteed
disease-free and behaviourally normal. But
these survivors are third- or fourth-
generation descendants of those original
specimens. In autopsy, their parents and
grandparents had all been laced with scar
tissue, tails chewed to stumps, ragged ears.
Hypertrophy of the adrenal glands. These
mice show none of that trauma. Calhoun
A ‘Beautiful One’ balances on Dr. Calhoun’s
and his researchers came to call them “the hand.
Beautiful Ones.”

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The Beautiful Ones of Universe 25, the Behavioural-Sink survivors, are no less selfish
than the rampaging actors of McCarthy or Miller’s post-apocalyptic universes. But their
particular brand of non-cooperation doesn’t involve destructive interference. Rather, they
avoid the problems of unwanted contact by never developing the complex adult
behaviours that lead to conflict in the first place. The Beautiful Ones broker a form of
mutual peace predicated on a form of extended infantilism. In the film, Calhoun describes
their arrested development: “They never learned to be aggressive, which is necessary in
defense of home sites. They never learned to court, so there was no mating. Being no
mating, there were no progeny.” At the time of filming, Calhoun was preparing a paper he
titled “Death Squared”, in which he describes them in more existential terms:

“Autistic-like creatures, capable only of the most simple behaviors compatible with
physiological survival, emerge out of this process. Their spirit has died … . They are no
longer capable of executing the more complex behaviors compatible with species
survival.”

Sartre: L’ enfer, c’est les autres. Hell is others. In a sense, these remaining mice never
fully acknowledge the existence of the other. The Beautiful Ones survive by adopting the
psychological equivalent of horse blinkers. …

To read the full essay and to see the film go to NLM’s Medicine on Screen: Films and
Essays from NLM, a curated portal including original research on selected films from
NLM’s collection.

Jon Adams grew up in Britain and Saudi Arabia, and studied at Keele and Durham. His
first book, Interference Patterns, examined the possibility of making a science of literary
criticism. As a researcher at the London School of Economics, he worked the
dissemination of science, and the overlap between popular science and popular fiction. In
2011, he was selected as a “New Generation Thinker” by the British Broadcasting
Corporation. He currently looks after his two children, but still works part time at LSE,
where he interviews academics and produces short films about their work.

Edmund Ramsden is a Wellcome Trust University Award Lecturer in the history of science
and medicine in the School of History, Queen Mary, University of London. His current
research is focused on the history of experimental animals in psychology and psychiatry
and on the influence of these fields on urban planning, architecture and design.

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