The Reenchantment of the World (43 page)

 

 

Such changes will enable a parallel shift in the ideal of personality,
specifically a shift in focus from the ego to the self, and they will
encourage the interaction of this self with other selves. The result will
be an emphasis on community rather than competition, on individuation
rather than individualism, and an end to the "false-self system"
and role-playing that have so badly desecrated (desacralized) human
relationships. As for power, it will be the equivalent to centeredness,
inner authority, and not the ability to make others do what you want them
to against their will. Power will be defined as the ability to influence
others
without
pressure or coercion; the phrase "position of power"
will be recognized as a contradiction in terms, for it will generally be
understood that if a person needs a position to feel his or her power,
then what he or she is really feeling is impotence.9

 

 

The future culture will have a greater tolerance for the strange,
the nonhuman, for diversity of all sorts, both within the personality
and without. This increase in tolerance implies a shift from the
Freudian-Platonic to the alchemical notion of sanity: the ideal will
be the "many-aspect" person of kaleidoscopic traits, who has a greater
fluidity of interests, working and living arrangements, sexual and
social roles, and so on. All behavior will be seen as having at least
one complement, or "shadow," in need of legitimate expression. There
may also be experimentation with modes of thought and relationship
which are non-schismogenic -- an attempt to create behavior patterns
that are not cumulative and which are inherently satisfying rather than
dependent upon delayed gratification.10 The principle of diversity will
require the preservation of endangered species and endangered cultures,
as factors that enlarge the gene pool of possibilities and thereby make
life more stable, durable, and interesting.

 

 

Human culture will come to be seen more as a category of natural history,
"a semipermeable membrane between man and nature."11 Such a society will
be preoccupied with fitting into nature rather than attempting to master
it. The goal will be "not to
rule
a domain, but to
release
it"; to have, once again, "clean air, clean clear-running rivers,
the presence
of Pelican and Osprey and Gray Whale in our lives; salmon and trout in
our streams; unmuddied language and good dreams."12 Technology will no
longer pervade our consciousness and its presence will be more in the form
of crafts and tools, things that lie
within
our control rather than
the reverse.13 We will no longer depend on the technological fix, whether
in medicine, agriculture, or anything else, but instead favor solutions
that are long-term and adddress themselves to causes rather than symptoms.

 

 

Politically, there will be a tremendous-emphasis on decentralization,
which will extend to all the institutions of society and be recognized
as a prerequisite to planetary culture itself. Decentralization implies
that institutions are small-scale and subject to local control, and that
political structures are regional and autonomous. Characteristic of such
decentralization are community hospitals and food cooperatives, the
cultivation of neighborhood spirit and autonomy, and the elimination
of such destroyers of community as television, automobiles, and
expressways. Mass production will yield to craftsmanship, agribusiness to
small, organic, labor-intensive farming, and centralized energy sources --
especially nuclear power plants -- to renewable energy options appropriate
to their own regions. Mass education centers teaching essentially one
type of knowledge as preparation for a career will be replaced by direct
apprenticeship, in the form of a lifelong education that follows one's
changing interests. One will not have a career, but a
life
. The blight
of suburbs and urban sprawl, truly the antithesis of city life, will be
replaced by a genuine city culture, one native to its own region rather
than reflecting an international world of mass communication. The city
will once again become a center of life and pleasure, an 'agora' (that
fine Greek word), a market place and meeting place, Philippe Ariès'
"medley of colors." People will live closer to their work, and in general
there will not be much distinction between work, life, and leisure.14

 

 

The economy, finally, will be steady state, a mixture of small-scale
socialism, capitalism, and direct barter. This will be a "conserver"
society, with nothing wasted and a great emphasis, to the extent that it
is possible, on regional self-sufficiency. There will be little interest
in profit as an end in itself. The posture toward others, and toward
natural resources, will be one of harmony rather than of exploitation or
acquisition. As ecologists Peter Berg and Raymond Dasmann have written,
economics will become "ecologics," a subbranch of ecology.15

 

 

How are we going to get there? From the present vantage point, the
vision of a future in which fact and value are once again reunited, in
which men and women have control over their own destinies, and in which
ego-consciousness is more reasonably situated within a larger context of
Mind, seems utopian in the extreme. Yet as Octavio Paz observed, the only
alternative is suicide. Western industrial society has reached the limits
of its own deutero-learning, and much of it now is in the midst of the
social analogue of either madness or creativity, that is, re-creation
(Learning III). Given this situation, how utopian is such a vision? Of
course, if one believes that only violent revolution produces substantive
change, and that such a transformation can be accomplished within a
few decades, then planetary culture does not have much of a chance. If,
however, we are talking of a change on the scale of the disintegration
of the Roman Empire, such as has been suggested by Theodore Roszak,
Willis Harman, and Robert Heilbroner, among others, then our utopian
vision starts to appear increasingly realistic.16 In fact, one of the
most effective agents of this set of changes is the decay of advanced
industrial society itself. Thus Percival Goodman writes in "The Double
E" that the conserver society will not come about because of voluntary
effort, but because the planet simply cannot support the world of an
ever-expanding Gross National Product. Industrial economies are starting
to contract. We may choose to make a virtue out of what has been called
"Buddhist economics," but we shall have to return to a steady-state
economy whether we like it or not.17

 

 

Social change is also being generated by millions of individuals who
have no interest in change per se, but have effectively undertaken
an "inner migration," or withdrawal. Both Harman and Heilbroner have
pointed to the fact that the industrial economies are going to face a
severe economic crunch at the very time that their workers, both blue
and white collar, have found their work so devoid of intrinsic value
that they are increasingly finding meaning elsewhere, and privately
withdrawing their allegmnce from their jobs. The Protestant work ethic,
the spiritual support of our present way of life, will not be there when
the economy needs it most. A 1975 report of the Trend Analysis Program
of the American Institute of Life Insurance predicts a weakening of
"industrial era philosophy" during the next two decades, with concomitant
worker alienation, slowdowns, sabotage, and riots. "We may," concludes
the report, "be somewhere in the middle of a turbulent transition to a
new, or at least somewhat different culture," beginning about 1990.18

 

 

On the political level, decay will probably take the form of the breakup
of the nation-state in favor of small, regional units. This trend,
sometimes called political separatism, devolution, or balkanization,
is by now quite widespread in all industrial societies. The number of
new nations has risen dramatically since 1945, ahd other societies are
beginning to fragment into provincial and sectarian subunits. Leopold
Kohr predicted this trend (enthusiastically) as early as 1957 in his book,
"The Breakdown of Nations"; official culture, such as "Harper's", is now
terrified of it. More soberly, a group of about 200 European experts,
in the book "Europe 2000," sees the revolt of a regional periphery as
very likely.19 There are now strong separatist movements not only in the
United States (Northern California, Upper Michigan, Idaho's Panhandle),
but in Scotland, Brittany, Pays Basque, and Corsica; and many other
countries are also experiencing strong regional sentiments, so much so
that the Europe of 2000 A.D. may well look like a mosaic of very small
states. This process represents a reversion to original political
boundaries that existed prior to the rise of modern nation-states:
not France, but Burgundy, Picardy, Normandy, Alsace, and Lorraine; not
Germany, but Bavaria, Baden, Hesse, Hanover; not Spain, but Valencia,
Aragon, Catalonia, Castile; and so on. In general, writes Peter Hall,
what at all levels

 

 

used to be called separatism and is now usually called regionalism --
fundamentally the desire and willngness to assume more direct control
over one's own destiny -- is perhaps the strongest political drive
now operating: it is the main cause of the "crisis of authority"
and the weakening of centralized control.20

 

 

Holistic society is thus coming upon us from a variety of sources that
cut across the traditional left-right political axis. Feminism, ecology,
ethnicity, and transcendentalism (religious renewal), which ostensibly
have nothing in common politically, may be converging toward a common
goal. These holistic movements do not represent a single social class, nor
can they even be analyzed in such terms, for by and large they represent
the repressed "shadows" of industrial civilization: the feminine, the
wilderness, the child, the body, the creative mind and heart, the occult,
and the peoples of the nonurban, regional peripheries of Europe and North
America -- regions that have never bought into the ethos of the industrial
heartland and never will. If there is any bond among the elements of this
"counterculture," it is the notion of recovery. Their goal is the recovery
of our bodies, our health, our sexuality, our natural environment, our
archaic traditions, our unconscious mind, our rootedness in the land,
our sense of community and connectedness to one another. What they
advocate is not merely a program of "no growth" or industrial slowdown,
but the direct attempt to get back from the past what we lost during the
last four centuries; to go backward in order to go forward. In a word,
they represent the attempt to recover our future.

 

 

What is remarkable in many of these developments, also, is the attempt
to create a politics that does not substitute one set of rulers for
another, or even one political structure for another, but which reflects
the basic needs of mind, body, sexuality, conmmunity, and the like. The
goal, notes that ancient Chinese oracle, the "I Ching," is

 

 

a satisfactory political or social organization of
mankind. [Therefore] we must go down to the very foundations of
life. For any merely superficial ordering of life that leaves its
deepest needs unsatisfied is as ineffectual as if no attempt at
order had ever been made.21

 

 

In various ways, this has become the goal of all holistic politics; a
politics that would be the end of politics, at least as, we know it today.

 

 

If all of these changes, or even a third of them, came to pass, the anomie
of the modern era would surely be a closed chapter in our history. Such
a planetary culture would of necessity erase our contemporary feeling
of homelessness, and the sense that our personal reality is at odds with
official reality. The infinite spaces whose silence terrified Pascal may
appear to men and women of the future as extensions of a biosphere that
is nurturing and benevolent. Meaning will no longer be something that
must be found and imposed on an absurd universe; it will be given, and,
as a result, men and women will have a feeling of cosmic connectedness, of
belonging to a larger pattern. Surely, such a world represents salvation,
but only in the sense that there is no need to be saved in the first
place. A loss of interest in the traditional opiates would likely follow,
and even psychoanalysis would be seen as superfluous. What would be
worshipped, if anything, is ourselves, each other, and
this earth
-- our
home
, the body of us all that makes our lives possible.

 

 

This, then, is the llberatory version of a planetary politics that is
congruent with the epistemology of Batesonian holism. It is my hope
that the social and political developments of the next century move us
closer to such a world. However, as indicated earlier, things are not
that simple, because a number of Bateson's concepts are double-edged. I
do not mean to suggest that consciousness by itself makes history (there
is
no consciousness by itself!), but that the two form a gestalt,
and that Batesonian holism is potentially congruent with political
configurations less benevolent than the one outlined above. In fact,
should political developments make ideological use of holistic concepts,
and wind up emphasizing certain aspects of these as opposed to others,
we could be victimized by a rather grim twist: the specter of holistic
consciousness as the agent of even more alienation, more reification,
than we have at present. This possibility merits further investigation.

 

 

The original context of Batesonian holism was hardly (in Theodore Roszak's
phrase) the "Taoist anarchy" sketched above, but the rigid hierarchical
society of the British aristocracy. We have seen that most of Bateson's
scientific concepts were adumbrated in the work of his father; and in his
exposition of William Bateson's work, William Coleman correctly identifies
the ingrained political conservatism that characterized the context of
that work.22 The England of the late nineteenth century was in the
grip of a profound pessimism: a disenchantment with utilitarianism,
democracy, and parliamentary politics. The glittering promise of
Crystal Palace (1851) had not materialized, and the pervading mood
was one of civilization in collapse. The intelligentsia and the upper
classes reacted by returning to traditional values, notably aesthetic
sensibility, intuitionism, and an organic conception of society. These
three traditional conservative themes, says Coleman, were central to
William Bateson's thought. His emphasis was on the genius, the exceptional
person, whose developmnt would never be encouraged in an egalitarian
society. William Bateson's interest was in vision and inspiration, not
in ambition and calculating reason, hence his revealing remark at the
end of the Great War: "We may have made the world safe for democracy,
but we have made it unsafe for anything else." As Coleman notes, he saw
the world of commerce and democracy as a veritable dark age. For the
elder Bateson, the natural hierarchy of function in the biological world
validated class society, and he held that correct political solutions were
those that managed to preserve inequality, to coordinate the different
and unequal parts of society in the performance of their proper job.