![]() Some – the Malthusians – even took the view that as resources ran out, the population would “control” itself through mass deaths until a sustainable population was reached. Throughout this time, concerns have been raised that our numbers may outgrow our ability to produce food, leading to widespread famine. “Over the last few hundred years, the human population of Earth has seen an increase, taking us from an estimated one billion in 1804 to seven billion in 2017. “Calhoun in a mouse utopia in 1970, by White House photographer Yoichi Okamoto” As a leading Cambridge psychiatrist put it in 1978, Ballard’s High-Rise “describes the human equivalent of Calhoun’s rat behavioural sink.” Nevertheless, the particular resonance of Ballard’s novel with Calhoun’s research is striking. Tower blocks were in the air and Ballard had plenty of non-fictional human source material to draw on. Nor were Calhoun’s experiments, described in New Scientist in 1973 as among “the most widely quoted since Pavlov’s dogs first heard the dinner bell”, necessarily a direct influence on High-Rise. He preferred American thrillers and detective serials such as The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Ballard probably did not watch Doomwatch. He also would have known about Calhoun’s experiments – gleaned from his subscription to New Scientist or from the bulging package of research papers he received each week from his close friend, the psychologist and computer scientist Chris Evans. As his daughter Fay vividly recalled at “ Inner Space”, a recent symposium on Ballard at the British Library, the mice “multiplied quickly and then started to eat each other.” She could “still see the bitten headless torsos and separated heads lying in the sawdust.” The mice were kept in a glass box in the front room where the family watched TV and ate together, so her father would have seen them too. In the west London suburb of Shepperton, Ballard’s children kept mice, purchased from a local pet shop. His concept of the “ behavioural sink” chimed with despairing journalistic reports of “sink estates” and “sink schools” in 1970s Britain. As historians Edmund Ramsden and Jon Adams have shown, Calhoun’s rats circulated widely as “scientific evidence” of the dangers of urban overcrowding in human society. Calhoun’s “rat utopia” became a living hell.Ĭalhoun published the early results of his experiments in 1962 in the now-classic Scientific American article, “Population Density and Social Pathology”. Well before the rats reached the maximum possible density predicted by Calhoun, however, they began to display a range of “deviant” behaviours: mothers neglected their young dominant males became unusually aggressive subordinates withdrew psychologically others became hypersexual the living cannibalized the dead. The result was a population explosion followed by pathological overcrowding, then extinction. Calhoun built a “rat city” in which everything a rat could need was provided, except space. Calhoun at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland. It was a rodent and, in particular, the laboratory experiments performed on rats in the 1960s by ethologist John B. The episode concludes with Quist calling for a Royal Commission on the “roots of violence in modern society.” The factory-farmed broiler chicken was, in the early 1970s, as much a novel convenience of modern living as the concrete tower block, and feather pecking and cannibalism were real concerns.īut the most influential example of “ pathological togetherness” lifted from the animal kingdom was not a bird. On the contrary, they become so aggressive that their beaks have to be cut off “to prevent them tearing each other to pieces.” For the episode’s writer, Doctor Who veteran Louis Marks, it was only a short, logical step from aggressive poultry to antisocial people. Towards the end of the episode, head doomwatcher Dr Spencer Quist (John Paul) muses that chickens living in batteries do not become docile as expected. “… The Human Time Bomb”, which first aired in February 1971, also links concerns about high-density housing to animal behaviour. “Calhoun standing above his mice laboratory in 1971”
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