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 confusion, 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 Weste
rn 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
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 schizophren
ic 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.
The Reenchantment of the World Page 30