The Reenchantment of the World (41 page)

 

 

The so-called energy crisis is an equally cogent example of the addictive
spiral. The columns of our newspapers are filled with articles that
express concern over the coming disappearance of fossil fuels, and insist
on the need to develop new sources of energy -- especially nuclear energy
-- to meet the increasing demand. The voices suggesting that we might
be "hooked" on energy, and that we had better move toward withdrawal
rather than the next available "fix," have been largely drowned out by
industrial interests that are committed to increasing the dosage of the
"fix." Meanwhile, the negative feedback is becoming louder and louder,
the near meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in 1979 being
only the most spectacular example. People living near freeway systems,
according to one study done in Switzerland, are more likely to contract
cancer than those farther away from high pollution density. Radioactive
wastes are leaking out of containers buried deep in the ocean. Major
blackouts' occur in industrial areas, accompanied by widespread looting,
while international conflicts over oil supplies and prices grow more
intense. In short, the economy based on ever-expanding energy consumption
is showing signs of severe strain. Modern industrial society is in effect
trying to cheat the First Law of Thermodynamics, which says that it takes
energy to deliver energy; that you never, in physics, get something for
nothing. Using energy to solve the problems of industrial society is all
of a piece with the mental framework of addiction. If Blake told us that
energy was eternal delight, he also said that wisdom can be the result
of pursuing folly to the limit. But once again, it may be too late. Our
addiction may have brought the planet to the point of extinction.

 

 

Finally, the question of addiction can be applied to the whole style
of Western life since 1600 A.D. To take an example from our earlier
historical discussion, the Hermetic traition was one of self-corrective
feedback. Rational consciousness, especially in its emphasis on
manipulating the environment, was kept in check (optimized), because it
was simply one variable in a system organized around the idea of sacred
harmony. With the advent of the Scientific Revolution came the attempt
to maximize this particular variable. It was abstracted from its sacred
context, and within a few generations what was once regarded as perverse
came to be seen as normal. Unlimited expansion, ideologically ratified by
the French Enlightenment and the economic theory of laissez-faire, began
to make sense, and the need for an increasingly larger "fix" was regarded
as part of the natural order of things rather than as aberrant. We are
by now completely addicted to maximizing variables that are wrecking our
own natural system. The emergence of holistic thought in our own time
might itself be part of the general process of self-corrective feedback.

 

 

The preservation of diversity, point (4), which is crucial to the survival
of all biological systems, is directly related to these problems,
because it involves retaining flexibility rather than addictively
consuming it.17 Population geneticists have long been aware that
the evolutionary unit is not homogeneous. Randomness, chance, is the
source of anything new. Without diversity, there could be no emergence
of new behaviors, genes, or organs for natural selection to operate
upon. A wild population of any species has a wide variety of genetic
constitutions spread throughout its individual members, and it is
this heterogeneity that creates the potential for change essential for
survival. Homogeneous situations, including the rigidity of addictive
thinking, do not possess this resilience. Hence flexibility is itself
part of the unit of survival, and of Mind. Love, wisdom, circuitry,
optimization -- all of these add up to an ethics of diversity, and it
is this ethical system that Batesonian holism stands for. Yet all of
Western industrial society, socialist or capitalist, officially strives
for homogeneity, for unity of thought and behavior. In cities, Westem
man achieves single-species ecosystems, especially in architecture,
design, and middle-class ideals of the "good life." In agriculture,
he strives toward monoculture: fields upon fields of corn or soybeans,
batteries of fowl producing eggs on the model of an assembly line. His
ideas seem diverse, but they all ultimately stem from a Judeo-Christian
tradition and the secular humanism of the Renaissance: the Golden Rule;
survival of the fittest; premises of challenge (schismogenesis) and
individual achievement; the nature of human "character traits" as fixed
"entities," and so on. Some of these ideas may even be good (whatever
that means), but having our heads filled with only one type of thinking
cannot possibly be. Ultimately, this monomania is extended to everything
and everyone we meet. As Lévi-Strauss wrote in "Tristes Topiques," Western
secular humanism, in the name of respect for man, prescribes a sIngle way
of life and a single type of man. The joy of being with another person
might be the aesthetic one of recognizing him or her as a human ecology
different from oneself, manifesting the conscious/unconscious relationship
in his or her own special way (each person is a song, as Gary Synder has
put it), but we typically hate the Other and demand that it be like us:
safe, predictable, and in reality, a cliché.

 

 

And what is the truth, the ethics, that diversity speaks? It is, as
Mary Catherine Bateson stated recently, and Nietzsche long before her,
that we each have our own mythology, our own real possibilities to live
out; that we are each "our own central metaphor." In the biological
and ecological world, homogeneity spells rigidity and death. The
natural world avoids monotypes because they tend toward weakness;
they cannot produce anything new, and having little flexibility are
easily destroyed. Systems that are reduced in complexity lose options,
become unstable and vulnerable. Flexibility in personality types and
world views provides, instead, possibilities for change, evolution,
and real survival. Imperialism, whether economic, psychological, or
personal (they tend to go together) seeks to wipe out native cultures,
individual ways of life, and diverse ideas -- eradicating them in order
to substitute a global and homogeneous way of life. It sees variation as
a threat. A holistic civilization, by contrast, would cherish variation,
see it as a gift, a form of wealth or property.

 

 

Sometime ago, I had the pleasure of seeing a photography exhibit
of European portraits from the 1920s and 1930s. The people in these
pictures were "ordinary" people, not celebrities. What struck me most
about the photographs was that it was absolutely clear that these were
all distinct personalities, genuine individuals. One wanted to know them,
for the eyes belied a sensation of complexity and idiosyncrasy that
might take years to unfold. I found the contrast between such faces,
and the hollow, absent expressions of most contemporary urban dwellers,
overwhelming. This same sort of organic diversity is celebrated by the
American writer John Nichols in novels such as "The Milagro Beanfield
War," or by Fellini in a film like "Amarcord," where almost everyone
in the town has eccentricities that one might consider outrageous,
but which, from another perspective, are quite splendid. Members of
these communities fight endlessly over these differences, yet within the
context of an instinctive understanding that they are all part of a larger
ecology. The fighting becomes vicious only when the social ecosystem
is threatened: in Nichols' case by capitalist notions of progress, in
Fellini's by Fascism. If each character possesses (from our viewpoint)
more than a slight touch of irrationality, the whole structure is itself
rational, organic, whole. By contrast, in Western industrial societies
each person is enjoined to fit a "rational," homogeneous, yet somehow
"individualistic" (actually egotistic) stereotype, and the total effect
is what both Bateson and Marcuse have described: senseless, crazy, a vast
alienation rather than a vast ecology. It is the streamlining of life,
whether in a Kansas wheatfield or in this year's graduating class at
the University of Peking, which has, in its destruction of diversity,
so impoverished human life.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

9
The Politics of consciousness

 

 

The sterility of the bourgeois world will end in suicide or a new form
of creative participation. This is the "theme of our times," in Ortega
y Gasset's phrase; it is the substance of our dreams and the meaning of
our acts.
-- Octavio Paz, "The Labyrinth of Solitude" (1961)

 

 

 

 

In 1883 or 1884, when my maternal grandfather turned five, he was sent by
his parents to the 'cheder,' or Jewish elementary school, where he would
learn to read the Hebrew language and the Old Testament. It was the custom
among the Jews of the province of Grodno (Grodno Guberniia) in Belorussia
that each boy was given a slate upon entry to the cheder. It was his
personal possession, on which he would learn to read and write. And
on that first day, the teacher did something quite remarkable: he took
the slate, and smeared the first two letters of the Hebrew alphabet --
'aleph' and 'beys' -- on it in honey. As my grandfather ate the letters
off the slate, he learned a message that was to remain with him all his
life: knowledge is sweet.

 

 

And yet, the message is far more complex than this, for the act is
almost an anthropological ritual with a rather layered symbolism. At the
obvious level, the slate will be used for learning discursive Hebrew
grammar and vocabulary, a literal, nonemotive type of knowledge which
is necessary for our functioning in the world. But the fact that the
letters are tasted evokes an older, poetic use of language which is
especially characteristic of Hebrew: the power of the Word. Hebrew is an
unusually onomatopoeic language. The words often come close to creating
an emotional resonance with what they represent conceptually. One of
the messages being delivered in this honey-tasting ceremony is that
real knowledge is not merely discursive or literal; it is also, if
not first and foremost, sensuous. In fact, it is very nearly erotic,
derived from bodily participation in the learning act. 'De gustibus
non est disputandum,' goes a Scholastic saying; about things eaten,
there can be no argument. Or as the Sufis put it, those who taste, know.

 

 

 

Plate 20. Fons van Woerkom, Illustration for Chapter 6 of Paul
Shepard's "The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game" (1973).

 

 

 

There is, furthermore a deliberate fusion here, even
con
fusion, between
discursive and sensual modes of knowing. As we have seen, identification
(mimesis) and discrimination are both present within the physiological
response system of the human organism. At the very moment that the child
is introduced to the symbolic system that makes abstract thought, and thus
categorization, possible, he performs the primal act of identification,
the act of the infant, who puts everything in its mouth. Thus union and
separation, self and other, are irrevocably intertwined in this first
formal acquaintance with the learning experience.

 

 

Finally, there is a third level of meaning present here, one reminiscent
of some of the insights of Lévi-Strauss. What is real here is ingested,
taken into oneself. The symbolism is that of making the unfamiliar
familiar: we literally eat the other, take it into our guts, and as a
result are changed by it.

 

 

The recognition of these two last levels of knowledge is almost wholly
absent from the institutions of official culture and education in
contemporary Western society, steeped as they are in scientism and purely
discursive knowing. Indeed, it is an immense irony that the "information
explosion" of the modern era actually represents a contraction of our
knowledge of the world, as the quote from Octavio Paz, in the epigraph to
this book, clearly points out. Bateson, Reich, Jung, and a very few others
represent the healthiest possible response to this state of affairs:
the attempt to fight our way out of the cognitive corner into which
we have painted ourselves. Theirs, as Theodore Roszak once remarked,
is the search for live options, not the pursuit of moribund research
which typically characterizes the "advanced" thinking of our modern
university system. Digital knowledge is not necessarily wrong in itself,
but pathetically incomplete, and thus it winds up projecting a fraudulent
reality. University personnel, and more broadly the techno-bureaucratic
elite of Western culture, are paid pretty much in proportion to their
ability to promote and maintain this world view. In this way, analogue
reality is suppressed, confined, or at least domesticated.

 

 

Yet the whole situation is unstable for reasons already indicated. Not
merely does our analogue side fight back, but purely digital knowledge,
since it is never "ingested," never "sticks to our ribs." The whole
situation is a charade, because no real emotional commitment beyond
economic payoff and ego-gratification is involved. We have been bewitched
into believing that these rewards are fundamental, but a deeper, nagging
voice tells us otherwise. Indeed, the danger of such a bloodless type
of knowledge, and of the fact-value distinction in general, was not
lost on one of its greatest defenders, Max Weber, in his classic essay,
"The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism": "Specialists without
spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has
attained a level of civilization never before achieved."1