WHO WILL WIN?
Well, anyone with a functioning brain will probably "win" just from watching the intellectual interactions of the "fight." It's sad that so little discussion on this level ever appears on comics-blogs, including that that sell themselves as bastions of critical awareness.
The current argument begins with CWRM's post on a C.S. Lewis essay about the distinctions between "fear" and "dread," which can be read here. CWRM draws on Lewis' illustration, in which he sees "fear" as arising from a knowable threat, like a tiger, while "dread," which is "a different kind" of fear, arises from something not fully knowable, like a ghost. CWRM, who has as Curt points out raised some doubts about the commensurability of archaic and modern emotional states, says to this:
Aside from being an unexpected, but lucid voice in the on-going discussion about the varieties of horror, I also find Lewis's insights interesting for calling into question the common "just so" story that horror, as we now conceive of the emotion that fuels of genre entertainments, has some clear lineage to the psychological lives of ancient ancestors. While he doesn't doubt that our ancestors lived in demon-haunted worlds, he raises the question of whether one could conceive of supernatural forces when one hadn't conceived of a "natural" world. If everything is supernatural, isn't that your natural? And, if that's so, is the uncanny a fear of relatively recent vintage (in terms of the hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution)?
The question as to whether primitive man did or did not conceive of a difference between "natural" and "supernatural" is a vexing one, but though I like Lewis' distinction I don't agree with his logic, for I tend to think that primitive man made such a distinction. I don't think Early Man had more than the most rudimentary version of modern science-based rationales, but as I pointed out in my attack on Steven Grant's distortion of Joseph Campbell, there are many things that primitive man would've witnessed that didn't need mythic explanations. My chosen example was that of the river: whereas one can't see the operations of the sun or moon up close, water flowing on the ground is at least as understandable as a baby's crawl. We perhaps don't know conclusively that primitive man deified rivers, but we know that by the time we get to ancient Sumer, people are mythifying rivers as being the flowing pee-streams of Enki, among other conceits.
So I think it possible that Early Man could have had a rough division separating the profane and the everyday (the world of the tiger) from the world of the sacred and numinous (the world of the ghost). And one of my proofs for that opinion is that something like it seems to crop up in a few of mankind's evolutionary predecessors.
In PHILOSOPHY IN A NEW KEY philosopher Susanne K. Langer recounts the early findings of the primatologists of her time, particularly the 1931 study of Winthrop Kellogg, THE APE AND THE CHILD, in which behaviorist Kellogg attempted to determine the limits of nature and nurture by raising a chimp like a human baby in his own home. Langer says:
"Gua, the little chimpanzee who was given the benefits of a human nursery, showed some very remarkable reactions to objects that certainly had no direct associations with her past experiences," such as toadstools, of which "she stood in "mortal fear."
In related experiments by other primatologists, it was found that "one subject in every three or four" showed this intense aversion to toadstools. Langer says:
"Some are sensitive to the sight, and the rest are not; to some of them it seems to convey something-- to others it is just a thing, a toadstool or what you will."
In my article on horror comics I noted that for a horror comic to be horrifying one had to be "receptive," and this would seem to be even more the case for anthropoids who, lacking language, cannot form more than the most rudimentary associative linkages.
Now, I don't know how modern primatologists would rate the findings of Kellogg or any of the other early authorities Langer cites. But this online article by Frans de Waal (whom, oddly enough, I just finished writing about here) suggests that there's still considerable debate in modern primatology as to the precise degree to which animals have cognitive abilities. Thus I'm going to go on the theory that Kellogg's findings are probably still relevant.
Now, we're no nearer knowing what makes apes react in fear to toadstools, any more than we know what if anything struck terror in the hearts of Early Man. But these early findings on the existence of irrational "ape fear" (so to speak) would seem to support the notion that fear can arise in animals without its connoting danger, as in Lewis' example of the tiger. The toadstools, then, would seem to connote for the apes something that Wolfgang Kohler calls an "aesthetic fright," even coming from creatures who could not frame anything resembling an aesthetic statement.
I tend to see early primitives as having at least as much cognitive ability as their ancestors, and so I don't favor the notion that they looked at tigers and ghosts as the same sort of unknowable or even supernaturally-tinged phenomena. A tiger might be some tribe's totem, but it might not be the totem for every tribe, and to the ones that didn't worship the beast, it was perhaps just that, a beast. A ghost, however, should have been somewhat of a metaphenomenon to any member of any tribe, given that it didn't eat and poop the way other animals did.
And this goes a long way toward explaining why I think that the worlds of archaic and modern man are basically commensurable, whether or not one cares to explore that aspect of horror or not.
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