When Phædrus first read this passage he felt a kind of eerie feeling — a feeling he might have had if he had passed in front of a strange mirror and suddenly seen a reflection of someone he’d never expected to see. It was the same feeling he got at the peyote meeting. This Zuni Indian was not exactly someone else.
This was not just an isolated tribal incident going on here. This was something of universal importance happening. This was everyman. There is not a person alive who is not in some way or other in the kind of situation this witch was in. It was just that his circumstances were so exotic and so extreme one could now see it, by itself, out in the open.
The story was of a struggle between good and evil, but the koan it raised was, Which was which? Was this person really good or was he perhaps also evil?
At first reading he might seem a model of goodness, a lone, virtuous man surrounded by wicked persecutors, but this was too facile. Circumstances of the story argued against it. One of his tormentors was probably the most important and respected person in Zuni history. If his tormentor was so evil why was he so respected? Was the whole Zuni culture evil? That was ridiculous. There was a lot more to it than that.
Phædrus saw that the question was thrown off by a connotation of witch. This word alone loaded the case against the priests since anyone who calls someone else a witch is obviously a bigoted persecutor. But did they really call him a witch? A witch is a Druid priestess reduced by legend to an old crone who wears a pointed black hat and rides a broomstick in front of the moon on Halloween. Was that what they were calling him?
In his koan-like recycling of the event in his mind Phædrus came to think that Benedict had given the event an interpretation that didn’t do it justice. She was finding stories to support her thesis that different cultures create different personality traits, which is important, and undoubtedly true. But this man was more than just a misfit. There was something deeper than that going on.
Misfit is one of those words that seem to explain things but does not. Misfit says only that something is not explained. If he was a misfit why didn’t he leave? What persuaded him to stay? It certainly wasn’t timidity. And why did the citizens of Zuni change their minds and make this former witch their governor? There’s no indication that he changed or they changed. She said he turned an incidental talent to account in order to satisfy his need for social recognition. Probably so, but Zuni or no Zuni, it takes stronger social forces than a good singing voice and a need for social recognition to turn a misfit and torture victim into a governor.
How did he do it? What were his powers? Was there something special in the way Pueblo Indians think that after ten thousand years of continuous culture they would let a drunkard and a window-peeper get away with this?
Phædrus did not think so. He thought a better name for him might have been sorcerer, or shaman, or brujo, a Spanish term used extensively in that region that denotes a quite different kind of person. A brujo is not a semi-mythical, semi-comic figure that rides a broomstick but a real person who claims religious powers; who acts outside of and sometimes against the local church authorities.
This was not a case of priests persecuting an innocent person. This was a much deeper conflict between a priesthood and a shaman. A passage from the anthropologist, E. A. Hoebel, confirmed Phædrus' idea:
Although in many primitive cultures there is a recognized division of function between priests and shamans, in the more highly developed cultures in which cults have become strongly organized churches, the priesthood fights an unrelenting war against shamans… Priests work in a rigorously structured hierarchy fixed in a firm set of traditions. Their power comes from and is vested in the organization itself. They constitute a religious bureaucracy.
Shamans, on the other hand, are arrant individualists. Each is on his own, undisciplined by bureaucratic control; hence a shaman is always a threat to the order of the organized church. In the view of the priests they are presumptive pretenders. Joan of Arc was a shaman for she communed directly with the angels of God. She steadfastly refused to recant and admit delusion and her martyrdom was ordained by the functionaries of the Church. The struggle between shaman and priest may well be a death struggle.
For weeks Phædrus returned to these questions before he saw that the key lay in the war priest’s statement that his powers had been broken. Something very grave had occurred. The priest refused to return to a priestly office after return from the penitentiary. What had occurred had been enormous.
Phædrus concluded that a huge battle had taken place for the entire mind and soul of Zuni. The priests had proclaimed themselves good and the brujo evil. The brujo had proclaimed himself good and the priests evil. A showdown had occurred and the brujo had won!
Phædrus began to suspect that Benedict missed all this because she was trained in the objectivity of science by Boas. She tried to show only those aspects of Zuni culture that were independent of the white observer.
This explains why the brujo is analyzed only in terms of relations within his own culture, although by her own accounting he was very much in contact with the whites. It was the white man to whom he sent for help and who saved him. It was the white anthropologists, presumably, who took dictation of all his songs and stories and made him well known in books of which his tribesmen could not have been ignorant.
Phædrus concluded that the real reason the people of Zuni made the brujo governor had to be because of this. The brujo had shown he could deal successfully with the one tribe that could easily wipe them out any time it wanted to. It wasn’t just a sweet singing voice that made him governor of Zuni. He had real political clout.
Sometimes you can see your own society’s issues more clearly when they are put in an exotic context like that of the brujo in Zuni. That is a huge reward from the study of anthropology. As Phædrus thought about this context again and again it became apparent there were two kinds of good and evil involved.
The tribal frame of values that condemned the brujo and led to his punishment was one kind of good, for which Phædrus coined the term static good. Each culture has its own pattern of static good derived from fixed laws and the traditions and values that underlie them. This pattern of static good is the essential structure of the culture itself and defines it. In the static sense the brujo was very clearly evil to oppose the appointed authorities of his tribe. Suppose everyone did that? The whole Zuni culture, after thousands of years of continuous survival, would collapse into chaos.
But in addition there’s a Dynamic good that is outside of any culture, that cannot be contained by any system of precepts, but has to be continually rediscovered as a culture evolves. Good and evil are not entirely a matter of tribal custom. If they were, no tribal change would be possible, since custom cannot change custom. There has to be another source of good and evil outside the tribal customs that produces the tribal change.
If you had asked the brujo what ethical principles he was following he probably wouldn’t have been able to tell you. He wouldn’t have understood what you were talking about. He was just following some vague sense of betterness that he couldn’t have defined if he had wanted to. Probably the war priests thought he was some kind of egotist trying to build his own image by tearing down tribal authority. But he showed later on that he really wasn’t. If he’d been such an egotist he wouldn’t have stayed with the tribe and helped keep it together.
The brujo’s values were in conflict with the tribe at least partly because he had learned to value some of the ways of the new neighbors and they had not. He was a precursor of deep cultural change. A tribe can change its values only person by person and someone has to be first. Whoever is first obviously is going to be in conflict with everybody else. He didn’t have to change his ways to conform to the culture only because the culture was changing its ways to conform to him. And that is what made him seem like such a leader. Probably he wasn’t telling anyone to do this or to do that so much as he was just being himself. He may never have
seen his struggle as anything but a personal one. But because the culture was in transition many people saw this brujo’s ways to be of higher Quality than those of the old priests and tried to become more like him. In this Dynamic sense the brujo was good because he saw the new source of good and evil before the other members of his tribe did. Undoubtedly he did much during his life to prevent a clash of cultures that would have been completely destructive to the people of Zuni.
Whatever the personality traits were that made him such a rebel from the tribe around him, this man was no misfit. He was an integral part of Zuni culture. The whole tribe was in a state of evolution that had emerged many centuries ago from cliff-dwelling isolation. Now it was entering a state of cooperation with the whites and submission to white laws. He was an active catalytic agent in that tribe’s social evolution, and his personal conflicts were a part of that tribe’s cultural growth.
Phædrus thought that the story of the old Pueblo Indian, seen in this way, made deep and broad sense, and justified the enormous feeling of drama that it produced. After many months of thinking about it, he was left with a reward of two terms: Dynamic good and static good, which became the basic division of his emerging Metaphysics of Quality.
It certainly felt right. Not subject and object but static and Dynamic is the basic division of reality. When A. N. Whitehead wrote that mankind is driven forward by dim apprehensions of things too obscure for its existing language, he was writing about Dynamic Quality. Dynamic Quality is the pre-intellectual cutting edge of reality, the source of all things, completely simple and always new. It was the moral force that had motivated the brujo in Zuni. It contains no pattern of fixed rewards and punishments. Its only perceived good is freedom and its only perceived evil is static quality itself — any pattern of one-sided fixed values that tries to contain and kill the ongoing free force of life.
Static quality, the moral force of the priests, emerges in the wake of Dynamic Quality. It is old and complex. It always contains a component of memory. Good is conformity to an established pattern of fixed values and value objects. Justice and law are identical. Static morality is full of heroes and villains, loves and hatreds, carrots and sticks. Its values don’t change by themselves. Unless they are altered by Dynamic Quality they say the same thing year after year. Sometimes they say it more loudly, sometimes more softly, but the message is always the same.
During the next few months that Phædrus reflected he began to transpose the static-Dynamic division out of the moral conflict of Zuni into other seemingly unrelated areas. The negative esthetic quality of the hot stove in the earlier example was now given some added meaning by a static-Dynamic division of Quality. When the person who sits on the stove first discovers his low-Quality situation, the front edge of his experience is Dynamic. He does not think, This stove is hot, and then make a rational decision to get off. A dim perception of he knows not what gets him off Dynamically. Later he generates static patterns of thought to explain the situation.
A subject-object metaphysics presumes that this kind of Dynamic action without thought is rare and ignores it when possible. But mystic learning goes in the opposite direction and tries to hold to the ongoing Dynamic edge of all experience, both positive and negative, even the Dynamic ongoing edge of thought itself. Phædrus thought that of the two kinds of students, those who study only subject-object science and those who study only meditative mysticism, it would be the mystic students who would get off the stove first. The purpose of mystic meditation is not to remove oneself from experience but to bring one’s self closer to it by eliminating stale, confusing, static, intellectual attachments of the past.
In a subject-object metaphysics morals and art are worlds apart, morals being concerned with the subject quality and art with object quality. But in the Metaphysics of Quality that division doesn’t exist. They’re the same. They both become much more intelligible when references to what is subjective and what is objective are completely thrown away and references to what is static and what is Dynamic are taken up instead.
He found an example within the field of music. He said, imagine that you walk down a street past, say, a car where someone has the radio on and it plays a tune you’ve never heard before but which is so fantastically good it just stops you in your tracks. You listen until it’s done. Days later you remember exactly what that street looked like when you heard that music. You remember what was in the store window you stood in front of. You remember what the colors of the cars in the street were, where the clouds were in the sky above the buildings across the street, and it all comes back so vividly you wonder what song they were playing, and so you wait until you hear it again. If it’s that good you’ll hear it again because other people will have heard it too and have had the same feelings and that will make it popular.
One day it comes on the radio again and you get the same feeling again and you catch the name and you rush down the street to the record store and buy it and can hardly wait until you can get it home and play it.
You get home. You play it. It’s really good. It doesn’t quite transform the whole room into something different but it’s really good. You play it again. Really good. You play it another time. Still good, but you’re not so sure you want to play it again. But you play it again. It’s OK but now you definitely don’t want to play it again. You put it away.
The next day you play it again, and it’s OK, but something is gone. You still like it and always will, you say. You play it again. Yeah, that’s sure a good record. But you file it away and once in a while play it again for a friend and maybe months or years later bring it out as a memory of something you were once crazy about.
Now what has happened? You can say you’ve gotten tired of the song but what does that mean? Has the song lost its quality? If it has, why do you still say it’s a good record? Either it’s good or it’s not good. If it’s good why don’t you play it? If it’s not good why do you tell your friend it’s good?
If you think about this question long enough you will come to see that the same kind of division between Dynamic Quality and static quality that exists in the field of morals also exists in the field of art. The first good, that made you want to buy the record, was Dynamic Quality. Dynamic Quality comes as a sort of surprise. What the record did was weaken for a moment your existing static patterns in such a way that the Dynamic Quality all around you shone through. It was free, without static forms. The second good, the kind that made you want to recommend it to a friend, even when you had lost your own enthusiasm for it, is static quality. Static quality is what you normally expect.
* * *
Soon after that Phædrus ran across another example that concerned neither art nor morality but referred indirectly to mystic reality itself.
It was in an essay by Walker Percy called The Delta Factor. It asked,
Why is a man apt to feel bad in a good environment, say suburban Short Hills, New Jersey, on an ordinary Wednesday afternoon? Why is the same man apt to feel good in a very bad environment, say in an old hotel in Key Largo, in a hurricane..? Why is it that a man riding a good commuter train from Larchmont to New York, whose needs and drives are satisfied, who has a good home, loving wife and family, good job, and enjoys unprecedented cultural and recreational facilities often feels bad without knowing why?
Why is it that if such a man suffers a heart attack and, taken off the train at New Rochelle, regains consciousness and finds himself in a strange place, he then comes to himself for the first time in years, perhaps in his life, and begins to gaze at his own hand with a sense of wonder and delight?
These are haunting questions, but with Quality divided into Dynamic and static components, a way of approaching them emerges. A home in suburban Short Hills, New Jersey, on an ordinary Wednesday afternoon is filled with static patterns. A hurricane in Key Largo promises a Dynamic relief from static patterns. The man who suffers a heart attack and is taken off the train at New Rochelle has had all his static patterns sha
ttered, he can’t find them, and in that moment only Dynamic Quality is available to him. That is why he gazes at his own hand with a sense of wonder and delight.
Phædrus saw that not only a man recovering from a heart attack but also a baby gazes at his hand with mystic wonder and delight. He remembered the child Poincare referred to who could not understand the reality of objective science at all but was able to understand the reality of value perfectly. When this reality of value is divided into static and Dynamic areas a lot can be explained about that baby’s growth that is not well explained otherwise.
One can imagine how an infant in the womb acquires awareness of simple distinctions such as pressure and sound, and then at birth acquires more complex ones of light and warmth and hunger. We know these distinctions are pressure and sound and light and warmth and hunger and so on but the baby doesn’t. We could call them stimuli but the baby doesn’t identify them as that. From the baby’s point of view, something, he knows not what, compels attention. This generalized something, Whitehead’s dim apprehension, is Dynamic Quality. When he is a few months old the baby studies his hand or a rattle, not knowing it is a hand or a rattle, with the same sense of wonder and mystery and excitement created by the music and heart attack in the previous examples.
If the baby ignores this force of Dynamic Quality it can be speculated that he will become mentally retarded, but if he is normally attentive to Dynamic Quality he will soon begin to notice differences and then correlations between the differences and then repetitive patterns of the correlations. But it is not until the baby is several months old that he will begin to really understand enough about that enormously complex correlation of sensations and boundaries and desires called an object to be able to reach for one. This object will not be a primary experience. It will be a complex pattern of static values derived from primary experience.
Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals Page 13