The Reenchantment of the World

by Morris Berman

  What next? What do you do with God once you've found Him? As the phrase "awakening to ecstasy" suggests, the students life is irrevocably altered. The sensation is that of emerging from darkness for the first time, and knowing now (as in the Platonic parable of the cave) how truly unaware one's previous "awareness" really was. All of one's feelings can easily become focused on the teacher, now seen as a father writ large, the person who made this liberation possible. We have all met the person who is constantly quoting his or her therapist ("Well, Tania says that . . . "), a tendency that is a variety of guruism. Direct guruism is much worse; it is adulation of the blindest sort, the very opposite of freedom. What began as liberation ends in worship; the believers life is no longer his or her own. The guru's word is law.

  And what is the guru's word? What is he actually teaching? Usually, that his word is law! It would be bad enough if the process ended with adulation of the teacher, and that was that. The real problem is that the guru, especially in the context of a manipulative society, has a hidden agenda, and it is more often power than money. So the student gets deprogrammed, has his or her Learning II stripped away, sees ultimate reality, and before the dust settles, as Michael Rossman puts it, "is given a full prefab[ricated] structure to put in its place." But there is, Rossman adds, a big difference between worshiping the mystery that is revealed, and worshiping the revealer and his framework. There is always a metacurriculum with a guru, and it is totalitarian -- hardly the type of 'solve et coagula' that the alchemists had in mind.40

  Nor is guruism the type of personality redefinition that Bateson had in mind, and it seems to me that an important potential safety valve is suggested in his work. The concluding pages of "Mind and Nature" reveal that just before his death, Bateson was starting to move toward a theory of aesthetics which could have provided a framework of sacredness or beauty for the evolution from ego-consciousness to something larger. Conceivably, such a theory could have been an open door to the planetary culture described above; it now remains for others to develop. Yet even if an appropriate theory of aesthetics is developed, it is not clear how it could have a serious political impact. It would have to be, as Bateson's own work is, an experience, a mode of living, not a formula. This involves personal choice, in other words; a politics of self-realization may not be possible. A theory of aesthetics might be valuable to the individual explorer who is making the journey from contemporary science to holism; ideally, it would enable him or her to make that journey without falling prey to guruism. But one of the strengths of Bateson's work is its relational quality; it is not enough to discover the "vast ecology" for yourself alone. The converted alcoholic includes in this ecology the other members of Alcoholics Anonymous and their common struggle. This social emphasis is very positive in the case of AA; the problem arises when the organization is not so benevolent, not interested in health or freedom but in political aggrandizement (usually in the name of health and freedom). Unfortunately, the desire to exert power over others is the rule rather than the exception, and it is hard to see how any theory of aesthetics would be able to influence or control the phenomenon of guruism writ large. We need a safety valve that allows the process of Learning III to occur but not get out of hand; and since no one has managed to come up with anything like this, I feel the need to make a few additional comments on the dangers of Learning III and its possible political implications. Strictly speaking, the following discussion is neither a critique of Bateson personally nor of his work. Neither he nor it, as I suggested earlier, had or have any sympathy whatever for the right-wing cultism that Learning III is currently generating. Rather, it reflects my own fears that no holistic philosophy to date has managed to provide adequate safety valves with respect to the Learning III process, and thus that any discussion of the process has to be accompanied by a warning note.

  If the danger of Learning III is one of transference, we should not be surprised at the mental colonization being practiced by numerous right-wing cults, especially in the United States.41 In his book on television, former advertising executive Jerry Mander has done a fine job of explicating the process in the case of Werner Erhard's organization 'est,' though he is quick to point out that his selection of 'est' as an example is virtually arbitrary.42 'Est's' approach includes many of the classic techniques of Zen or yogic training -- meditation, visualization, the deliberate reduction of sensory stimuli -- and the result is not liberation, but a forest of clones. Est followers tend to dress alike, talk alike, and use a jargon eerily reminiscent of Batesonian holism ("Mind," "context," "programming," and so on). The talk is all of "taking responsibility for oneself," but the disciples have an ambiance that bears an uncanny resemblance to that of Erhard, and have been dubbed "talking parking meters" by the California press. The phenomenon of 'est,' writes Rossman, has given us "the spectacle . . . of relatively intelligent people handing over their minds en masse";43 and this willing abandonment of critical faculties on the part of his followers has enabled Erhard to expand his base of operations significantly. His enterprise now includes such public relations gimmicks as a fraudulent "hunger project," and Erhard's appointment as a professor of "context" (!) at Antioch's Holistic Life University. What 'est' teaches, from a political viewpoint, is pure rubbish (victims always choose their fate, presumably even babies napalmed in Vietnam), and need not concern us here. The real cause for concern is that despite their widespread popularity, Erhard, the Reverend Moon (Unification Church), L. Ron Hubbard (Church of Scientology), and their ilk are relative amateurs. Most people have steered clear of these organizations, and the political structure of industrial society has up to this point been untouched by these Learning III racketeers. But we have not seen the last of such false messiahs, and sooner or later one of them, with government encouragement, might catch on as a mass phenomenon. Erhard has tried to court people in positions of influence and power, but without any known success. In Nazi Germany, those adept at manipulating the unconscious did not need to court the govemment; they were the government. "Hitler," wrote the German sociologist Max Horkheimer shortly after the war, "appealed to the unconscious in his audience by hinting that he could forge a power in whose name the ban on repressed nature would be lifted."44 Current conditions hardly rule out the possibility of a repeat performance.

  The specter of fascism, of course, is often invoked by those who want to rationalize their opposition to political change, but I sense that in this case it is no idle threat. We are talking about reviving the psychic underbelly not within the context of a traditional society that is still in touch with its grounding, but within the framework of a mobile, rootless, high-technology, sexually repressed, mass society. The parallel with Germany after World War I is close, for that was a society in which myth and symbol, sexuality and occultism, the "natural" and the nonrational, were deliberately cultivated as antidotes to an artificial, over-intellectualized, bureaucratized way of life.45 The psychic energy thus made available was enormous, and was brilliantly colonized by the Nazis at immense rallies held in Nuremburg and Munich -- mimetic performances complete with giant swastikas and klieg lights -- for their own political purposes. "The people" were hardly the winners in this officially sanctioned liberation" from their own repression.

  It was the danger of such mysticism which Immanuel Kant had in mind when he called reason (ego-consciousness) "the highest good on earth," "the ultimate touchstone of truth"; and commenting on this statement in 1945, Lucien Goldmann wrote:

  The last twenty-five years have shown us how penetrating Kant's vision was and how close are the ties which link irrationalism and the mystique of intuition and feeling with the suppression of individual liberties.46

  Given enough social and economic chaos, and the increasing number of self-proclaimed gurus, there is every reason to keep in touch with our old deutero-learning.

  The link between the nonrational and state power in general depends upon an elitism that is implicit in most guruism. Most, but not all. The shaman of tra
ditional cultures spoke the voice of God (when in trance) and that was that. He generally made no bid for secular control. But in a civilization that has lost its own roots, teachers of Learning III do not merely charge high fees for their services; some also, like Erhard, want power of the most absolute sort. Their claim to it lies precisely in the distinction between 'wakers" and "sleepers." There is a spiritual pecking order here, a separation of orthodox from heterodox, the self-realized from those who have not yet "awakened to ecstasy" and who may never do so. William Irwin Thompson recently argued that ego-consciousness being what it is, "we should trust no policy dealsions which emanate from persons who do not yet have [the] habit [of Mind]. We must not let anyone near the political process who has not stepped out of small mind and encountered the fullness of Being."47 Thompson's is an important point, but what is the alternative? Who is the "we" Thompson is referring to? As he himself states in the next breath:

  The difficulty with this idea is that it is a theory of elites. . . . The Elite become the new policy-makers, the new politicians, the new humanity, the new homo sapiens. . . . This globalist elite could then make a rapprochement with the multinational corporation executives to introduce a new authoritarian world-order.48

  Holism, in short, could become the agent of tyranny, but in the name of Mind, Learning III, or (God help us) God. It was not for nothing that Orwell once remarked that when fascism finally comes to the West, it will do so in the name of freedom.

  Reflecting on the mechanical philosophy of the scientific Revolution, Alfred North Whitehead once remarked that with its formulation. the West found itself in the grip of an idea it could live neither with nor without. Surely, the same thing can be said of Learning III, or mimesis in general. The disembodied consciousness of the modern era is barbaric; it is integral to the landscape described in the Introduction. But the attempts to escape such a world by institutionalizing Learning III have often been no less barbaric. The key phrase here is, "such a world." Even total mimesis is not barbaric in a bicameral, or totally primary-process world, as Julian Jaynes has demonstrated.49 The problem arises when worlds collide. As Reich realized, industrial democracy is dry tinder for fascism and the irrational precisely because it is so sterile, so Eros-denying, and because it has been with us now for centuries. Neither in society nor in a single individual can one suddenly remove such fantastic blockage and expect the reaction to be one of smooth and sensible readjustment. We thus confront a choice that must be made and yet cannot be made: the awakening of an entire civilization to its repressed archaic knowledge. It is not likely that the mental world view of Cartesian deutero-learning, which includes traditions such as social democracy, secular humanlsm, and enlightened (or vulgar) Marxism, can make this choice in an intelligent way, because these traditions insist that Mind, or Being, is an obscurantist concept. But as one atypical observer, Ernst Bloch, pointed out in 1931, the Left in Germany was ignoring developments occurring in primitive and utopian trends, thereby leaving a whole territory free for the Nazis to occupy. so Repression works only up to a point; utopian longings stir even in the most subjugated individual, and fascism recognizes those longings and manipulates them to its advantage. As indicated above, the celebration of nature versus artifice is a central tenet of fascist ideology.* The revolt of "natural man" versus technology, the destruction of spontaneity, and the domination of nature are all foolishly ignored by mainstream or "progressive" politics; but when these issues do become central, politics can take on frightening dimensions. "In this light," writes Max Horkheimer, "we might describe fascism as a satanic synthesis of reason and nature -- the very opposite of that reconciliation of the two poles that philosophy has always dreamed of."51 >> * "Blut und Boden"

  Nevertheless, I believe our evolution toward Learning III is inevitable, and if so, the real question becomes: What is a safe context for it? What institutional structures would be beneficial to its healthy flowering? To some extent, this question has already been answered in our earlier discussion of planetary culture. A decentralized set of autonomous regions is the very opposite of the rootless, mass society that makes Learning III such volatile stuff. Self-determination, strong local community ties, neighborhood spirit -- all of these would break down the globalist monolith and thus serve to contain any revival of the archaic which threatened to turn into a mass movement. The whole process of balkanization has its problems, of course, but I doubt that global totalitarian mimesis is one of them. The Third Reich, for example, was hostile to regional sentiment. It was a nation-state ultimately made possible by Bismarck's forced unification of the small German states, and it countered regional sentiments with its policy of Lebensraum, which aimed to force neighboring territories into a centralized, German world-order. By itself, decentralization cannot eliminate guruism, but it can certainly limit its influence. A rooted society is protection not only against alienation -- which is the product of the attempt to control everything -- but also against its opposite, which involves the complete loss of control.

  What shall such a society be rooted in? Traditionally, regional or community politics was the politics of ethnicity. One had loyalty to one's clan, kinship system, race, or language group. It is doubtful that the ethnic model can work anymore in a world that has seen several centuries of global communication and fairly violent culture contact. And this may be all to the good, for regional ethnicity can easily turn into a provincial type of ethnic chauvinism, which finally results in a narrowing of human possibilities. Cosmopolitanism is still a fine ideal, and thus the need is not merely for rootedness, but for a rootedness that also encourages planetary interdependence and cultural exchange. Given the disruption of familial and local bonds over the last few centuries, many people in Western industrial societies now seek new sources of communitarianism which do not also threaten to close off their mental horizons. There are no easy answers forthcoming, and there may be no way out of this dilemma. 'In situ' cultures are not congenial with the "Gutenberg galaxy."

  The irreconcilability of planetary versus globalist world views, or what has been termed ecosystem versus biospheric cultures, has of late been elaborated upon by ecologist Raymond Dasmann.52 The former depend on the local ecosystem for food and materials, and environmental protection is guaranteed through religious belief and social custom. Such people, the American Indians for example, have (or had) awesome in-place skills. They know the local animal species, the meaning of the slightest shift in the wind, and have a rich lore of herbs and their preparation. Their lives are tailored to an optimum relationship with their particular region, or what Peter Berg terms bioregion, in which "culture is integrated with nature at the level of the particular ecosystem and employs for its cognition a body of metaphor drawn from and structured in relation to that ecosystem."53 Recent research indicates that historically, such people lived relatively abundant lives, and did so with far less work than we do today.54 Biospheric people, on the other hand, take the entire globe as their province, drawing on vast networks of trade and communication. There is nothing place-specific about their knowledge, and they can do whatever they want to any particular region they choose. Whereas ecosystem people might deal with water shortages by building rooftop collectors and storage tanks, attending to the local vegetation, and maybe holding a rain dance or two (all at trivial economic and ecological expense), biospheric people build giant dams and canal systems that disrupt the environment and cost millions. As we know, in order for biospheric people to have what they want, ecosystem people must sell out or, as is more typically the case, be wiped out. But the truth, says Dasmann, is that the biospheric people are ultimately the losers in this global shell game, because their "victory" involves the loss of a vast network of skills and habits that have enabled man to sustain himself on the planet for millennia. The economies of biospheric societies are not sustainable and are now in chaos, argues Dasmann; American resource policies are an example for the rest of the world of what not to do. "I would propose," he concludes, "that
the future belongs to those who can regain, at a higher level, the old sense of balance and belonging between man and nature." Rootedness, in short, must become biotic, not merely ethnic, and Dasmann has constructed a map of the "biotic provinces of the world," showing what political boundaries would be like if they followed the lines of natural geography and species density variation.55 The bioregional model of Berg and Dasmann is posited on the distinction between occupying a region and inhabiting it; or, for us now, reinhabiting it. "Reinhabitation," write Berg and Dasmann,