The Reenchantment of the World (42 page)

 

It was my grandfather's fortune to be born and raised in a world in which
the sacred and secular were still closely united. In the cloistered
community. of the Russian shtetl, he never had to face the dilemma
recognized by Weber. But it was also his fate to leave the shtetl,
to emigrate first to England and then America, and thereby be exposed
to the secular tide of the modern world. For the rest of his life,
he was condemned to struggle with the great metaphysical problem of
our age: how to reconcile what he knew in his head, with what he knew
in his heart. Very obviously, I inherited this struggle, and this book
represents at least a part of my attempt at a resolution.

 

 

What do I know in my heart, then? I know that in some relational sense,
everything is alive; that noncognitive knowing, whether from dreams,
art, the body, or outright insanity, is indeed knowing; that societies,
like human beings, are organic, and the attempt to engineer either is
destructive; and finally, that we are living on a dying planet; and
that without some radical shift in our politics and consciousness, our
children's generation is probably going to witness the planet's last days.

 

 

I also know some important things in my head. I know that the occult
revival of our times is a response to these events, and in general
I believe that the archaic tradition, including dialectical reason
and various psychic abilities that all of us possess, are important
things to revive. But for the most part, I see our immediate future in a
post-Cartesian paradigm, not in a premodern one. I know that despite its
abuse, intellectual analysis is a very important tool for the human race
to have, and that ego-consciousness is not without its survival value. And
I know that any meaningful resolution of the fact-value distinction
must go beyond one's own personal individuation; it must be social,
political, environmental. When Sartre wrote that man is condemned to be
free, he meant not this or that man (or woman), but the whole human race.

 

 

My thesis about Bateson is that in terms of resolving these difficulties,
and getting the sacred and the secular back together again, his work
represents the best we have up to this point. This is not to say that
his holistic paradigm is problem-free, and I shall explicate some of
these problems later on in this chapter; but its chief advantage is
that it embraces value without sacrificing fact. It is a mature type
of alchemical/dialectical reasoning adapted to the modern age. I have
spent some time demonstrating its superiority to the Cartesian paradigm,
and suggesting its formal similarities to the Hermetic world view and
traditional systems of thought. I have argued that in Bateson's work,
Mind is abstracted from its traditionally religious context and shown to
be a concrete, active scientific element (process) in the real world;
and that in this way, participation exists, but not in its original,
animistic sense. Before moving on to a critique of that work, then, I
wish to summarize what I regard as the unique triumphs of the Batesonian
paradigm, in particular its superiority to the archaic tradition with
which it nevertheless has much in common.

 

 

The chief advantage of Batesonian holism over the archaic tradition is its
self-conscious character. Mind, as I have noted, is present in the latter,
but in an undifferentiated sense ("God"). Bateson's conception of Mind
is specific; he is able to delineate its characteristics in an explicit
way. Thus he is not advocating a direct revival of archaic knowledge,
but a type of self-conscious
mimesis
in which we would soften and work
with the conscicrus/unconscious dichotomy rather than simply attempt to
dissolve it. Emotion has precise algorithms, and in his studies of the
analogue and relational nature of reality Bateson has given us clear
examples of how this reality can be charted. The differences between
archaic thought, modern science, and Batesonian holism can be seen in
Chart 3. The pure materialism of modern science stands out starkly here,
whereas the nonmaterialism of the first and third columns causes them
to exhibit a formal similarity. For example, consider the schizophrenic
who constantly talks to himself in conflicting, hallucinating voices.2
The approach of Western medicine fails to recognize what both the
theory of possession and the theory of the double bind know: that
this individual got caught up in an alien Mind, or mental system;
that this Mind or system has literally invaded him; and finally, that
it is fully real. A person caught in a schizophrenic double bind, as we
have seen, cannot speak his own mind, for he has learned that there are
severe penalties for doing so. In this sense, the boy put on display by
Kraepelin was indeed possessed by an alien spirit, and had he lived in
the Middle Ages it is very possible that exorcism would have driven it
out. Yet such an explanation is not possible in a scientific age, and
this is where Bateson's approach is so valuable. If we can accept the
notion of consciousness as being fully real, and understand how it got
shaped into a certain type of Mind (mental system) so as to include the
boy
and
his family and their way of relating to him, we are
then in a position to break that double bind and create a different,
and healthier,
Mind. Furthermore, such analysis and resolution is not confined to single
individuals, as is the archaic or scientific approach. As is so clearly
the case in Laing's work, the entire family structure is implicated,
along with the society that is made up of such neurotic (and psychotic)
building blocks. Though exorcism is probably superior to thorazine, and
certainly more humane, neither means is concerned with the political
conditions that produced the craziness in the first place. Batesonian
analysis does not go as far as it could in this regard, but it is an
important start.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chart 3. Comparison of schizophrenia in three world views

 

 

Archaic tradition Cartesian paradigm Batesonian holism
----------------- ------------------ -----------------
Interpretation Possession by Organic disease Deutero-learning
spirits (genetics, brain (in the family)
chemistry, etc.) into a pattern
that masks the
nature of
metacommunication
(the double bind)

 

 

Treatment Exorcism (purely Alteration of Work on the
spiritual) the molecular schizophrenic system
operation of through family
the brain with therapy, so that
drugs or shock person starts to
(purely metacommunicate
mechanical) properly.
Therapist takes the
role of pointing out
double bind, so that
it can be broken.

 

 

Results Probably mixed. Effective in Too early to tell,
Resolution is suppressing beyond Laing's work
individual, symptoms. and that of a few
personal, Soul or spirit others.
internal. crushed; person Effectiveness depends
becomes a on disrupting the
"productive member schizophrenic system,
of society." i.e., revealing
Resolution the organized
individual, but pathology of the
externally family. These are
imposed. internal changes
with radical social
implications.

 

 

Type of Spiritual/ Scientific/ Self-realizing;
society religious materialistic, one immersed in
implied organized around primary process
the notion of and analogue
productivity and communication.
efficiency. Extended family
Logical end point: system with
a reified, awareness of wide
uniform, relational reality
dystopian and the importance
nightmare. of healthy
metacommunication.
Goal of this society
neither God
(salvation) nor
achievement, but
healthy relations.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Similarly, the archaic tradition understood certain things about light
and color (Goethe being its last modern representative), or electricity
and gravity, that modern science has left out; but it is no longer
possible for us to see these phenomena in teleological terms, or as
direct manifestations of God or a life-force. Nor would a purely spiritual
interpretation open up any fruitful line of inquiry in such cases.3 But
as I suggested Chapter 6, analysis of these phenomena which proceeds
in terms of a "detached observer" is also obsolete. Batesonian holism,
on the other hand, could offer a nonspiritualist, process-oriented
mode of investigation. One could see such phenomena cybernetically,
or systemically, as part of a Mind that includes the investigator
(including his or her affective responses) in it. A Batesonian analysis
would study not just the quantitative relations but the qualitative ones:
the essential arrangement present, the levels of Mind and the nature of
their interaction.

 

 

It should also be noted that the essence of cybernetic explanation
itself, the insistence on the relational nature of reality, which
is absent from the Cartesian paradigm, is also present in the
archaic tradition. Traditional cultures had an intuitive grasp of the
cybernetic concept of circuitry through practices such as totemism and
nature worship, and in this way managed to preserve and protect their
enviromnent. By explicating the interrelations between the sub-Minds
around us on a Batesonian model, we could learn not to pollute Lake
Erie because the resulting chain reaction would be immediately evident
to us. The advantage here is sane, holistic behavior without a return
to complete
mimesis
. In a Batesonian framework, as opposed to archaic
consciousness, we can actually focus on the circuit, not just be immersed
in it. The hope is that archaic knowledge, especially the recognition
of Mind, will emerge under an aesthetic rubric, so that our science
(knowledge of the world) will become artful (artistic). The hope is that
we can have both
mimesis
and analysis, that the two will reinforce
each other rather than generate a "two cultures" split. Only through a
mimetic relationship with your environment (or anything you address,
for that matter), can you obtain the insight into reality which will
then form the center of your analytical understanding. Fact and value
merge and Mind is revealed as both a value and a mode of analysis.

 

 

Finally, Bateson's concept of Learning III, the psychological
breakthrough to a "vast ecology," is nearly identical to the religious
conversion of the archaic tradition, whether in Christian mysticism,
the Zen satori, or the final stage of alchemical transmutation. Bateson
does not explicitly advocate any of these practices, yet it is clear
that in Learning III, as in these traditions, the central event is a
redefinition of personality. One breaks through to a new level and gets
a perspective on his or her own character and world view. There is,
however, an important difference between Bateson's notion of Learning
III and traditional self-realization: Bateson's concept is an integral
aspect of the search for community and fraternity, not (as in Norman
O. Brown, for example) merely a personal ecstatic vision. In Bateson's
study of Alcoholics Anonymous, the Higher Power to which the alcoholic
finally surrenders is not only "God" (or the unconscious), but the
other members of AA. He makes himself a part of their social reality,
their common struggle. Thus no matter how or where you discover Mind,
says Bateson, "it is still immanent in the total interconnected social
system and planetary ecology."4

 

 

I wish now to turn to a critique of Bateson's work, but must first
share with the reader a quandary I have about doing so. In attempting
to draw up a critique, I quickly discovered that it was not possible to
construct one in an abstract, conceptual way. The critique rapidly became
political, and perhaps this is not surprising. Historically, politics
and epistemology have had an uncanny way of reinforcing each other; and
in the case of Bateson's work, the union of fact and value is so close
that to explicate epistemology is necessarily to explicate ethics, and
thus unavoidably, politics. As I am sure the reader understands, much
of my interest in Bateson stems from the hope of finding a liberatory
epistemology; which also means, as far as I am concerned, a liberatory
politics. Although liberation is clearly implied in the Batesonian
paradigm, its formal similarities to the dialectical tradition make
it liable to the type of political ambiguity which has bedeviled this
tradition historically. One gets a left-wing Reich and a right-wing Jung;
the revolutionary religious cults described by Christopher Hill,5 and the
authoritarian self-realization groups ("est," the "Moonies," the Church
of Scientology) which currently plague the American scene. Although
Bateson personally had no truck with right-wing politics, a number of
his concepts are double-edged; they have the potential for oppression as
well as liberation. Political ambiguity and epistemological ambiguity
go hand in hand here, and it is this ambiguity that is the focus of
my critique. Before the critique can be made with any clarity, then,
it will be necessary to sketch out the liberatory political vision that
is consonant with the Batesonian paradigm.6

 

 

One of the most obvious characteristics of a future "planetary culture"
will be the straightforward revival and elaboration of analogue modes
of expression, a process that will involve the deliberate cultivation
and preservation of (digital) incompleteness. Such a culture will
be dreamier and more sensual than ours. The inner psychic landscape
of dreams, body language, art, dance, fantasy, and myth will play a
large part in our attempt to understand and live in the world. These
activities will now be seen as legitimate, and ultimately crucial,
forms of knowledge, and will be accompanied by a direct cultivation of
psychic faculties: ESP, psychometry and psychokinesis, aura reading and
healing, and others.7 Simultaneously, there will be a strong shift in
medical practice toward popular and natural healing; an avoidance of
drugs and chemical manipulation; and a near merger with ecology and
psychology, since it will be widely recognized that most disease is
a response to a disturbed physical and emotional environment. Birth
will not take place on the "assembly line" of the modern hospital,
but at home, so that the gentle birth practices described in Chapter 6
can once again shape childhood development.8 In general, the body will
be seen as part of culture, not a dangerous libido to be kept in check,
a change in perception which will involve a drastic reduction in sexual
repression, and a greater awareness of ourselves as animals. This future
culture will also see a revival of the extended family, as opposed to
the competitive and isolating nuclear family that is today a seedbed of
neurosis. The elderly will be mixed in with the very young, rather than
dumped in old-age homes for the "unproductive," and their wisdom will
be a continuing part of cultural life.