The Reenchantment of the World

by Morris Berman

  means learning to live-in-place in an area that has been disrupted

  and injured through past exploitation. It involves becoming native

  to a place through becoming aware of the particular ecological

  relationships that operate within and around it. It means

  understanding activities and evolving social behavior that will

  enrich the life of that place, restore its life-supporting systems,

  and establish an ecologically and socially sustainable pattern of

  existence within it. Simply stated it involves becoming fully alive

  in and with a place. It involves applying for membership in a biotic

  community and ceasing to be its exploiter.56

  It is a fine vision, and the authors may be right when they argue that "living-in place . . . may be the only way in which a truly civilized existence can be maintained .57 But whether the rootless, urbanized people of Europe and North America can now create a source of identity around biotic provinces and bioregional loyalties that were largely obliterated centuries ago is an open question.

  And yet, what other choice do we have? Learning III will continue to gain momentum, and the most crucial political issue of the twenty-first century may be how to provide it with a proper context. As we noted earlier, Learning III has been tapped in all traditional cultures by certain techniques of initiation. That this process did not get out of hand was not only a function of having a small-scale, decentralized way of life. We saw that in organizations such as 'est,' once a floating reality is obtained the initiators, or gurus, implant their own reality in the person, usually the worship of the guru and his organization. Now it is clearly the case that all tribal, 'in situ' cultures have their shamans, and the initiation process led by the shaman is also designed to break down Learning II. But in a world that is rooted in bioregional realities, such as these cultures are, the process does not lead to transference and blind obedience to authority. What develops in the Learning III process is not adoration of the shaman, but of the mystery he makes manifest: the God within, and the ecosystem that reflects it. This was the final lesson Carlos Castaneda learned in his initiation at the hands of Don Juan, and it is the message of all nature-based religions.58 It generates what social critics Jerry Gorsline and Linn House describe as "a science of the concrete, where nature is the model for culture because the mind has been nourished and weaned on nature."59 In short, it is my guess that preservation of this planet may be the best guideline for all our politics, the best context for all our encounters with Mind or Being. The health of the planet, if it can be successfully defended against the continuing momentum of industrial socialism and capitalism, may thus be the ultimate safety valve in the emergence of a new consciousness. And it is only in such a world, I believe, that the Cartesian paradigm can be safely discarded, and human beings begin living the lives they were meant to live all along: their own.

  Regardless of its duration as a political entity, every civilization, like every person, is a message -- makes a single statement to the rest of the world. Western industrial society will probably be remembered for the power, and the failure, of the Cartesian paradigm.

  When I was a boy, the Cartesian paradigm seemed infallible to most Westerners, successful without parallel in the history of the human intellect. This way of life was celebrated in space programs, rapid technological innovation of all sorts, and books with titles such as "The Endless Frontier" and "The Edge of Objectivity." By the mid-1960s, it was becoming clear to many that science was, in fact, an ideology; and from that point it was a short step to the recognition that it was not a very healthy ideology at that.

  It is very likely that the next few decades will involve a period of increasing shift toward holism, Batesonian or otherwise. As scientific civilization enters its period of decline in earnest, more and more people will search for a new paradigm, and will undoubtedly find it in various versions of holistic thinking. If we are lucky, by 2200 A.D. the old paradigm may well be a curiosity, a relic of a civilization that seems millennia away. Jung, Reich, and Bateson especially, have each helped to point the way to a reenchanted world in which we can believe. Once again, the secular would be the handmaiden of the sacred, but with at least some ego-consciousness left intact. Yet from the vantage point of an extended time scale, one wonders if an ancillary arrangement will be enough. The period from Homer to the present is not even 3,000 years -- a mere blink of the eye in anthropological terms; the last four hundred years may prove to be only the most aggravated phase of a single evolutionary episode. If so, the next phase in our evolution, that of self-conscious mimesis, may actually be a transitional one. Reenchanting the world, even non-animistically, may ultimately necessitate the end of ego-consciousness altogether. The French psychiatrist Jacques Lacan has argued that the ego is a paranoid construct, founded on the logic of opposition and identity of self and other. He adds that all such logic, which is peculiar to the West, requires boundaries, whereas the truth is that perception, being analogue in nature, has no intrinsic boundaries.60 As our epistemology becomes less digital and more analogue, boundaries will begin to lose definition. Ego, character armor, "secondary process" will start to melt. We may then begin to move back to what Robert Bly calls "Great Mother culture," to cosmic anonymity, a totally mimetic world.61

  If such is indeed our fate, it is nevertheless the case that the transformation will not happen overnight. As I have suggested above, a too rapid devolution would probably spell untold disaster. If we are lucky, the interim period will involve a revival of the unconscious, and the development of relational or holistic perception, but with enough awareness of the subject/object distinction so as to prevent untoward events. We shall need to keep our wits about us, in short, and that means the retention of some ego-consciousness. But ultimately, ego-consciousness may not be viable for our continuation on this planet. The end of alienation may lie not in the reform of the ego, or in complementing it with primary process, but in its abolition.

  There is a famous papyrus in the Berlin Museum, No. 3024, titled "Rebel in the Soul," and dating somewhere from 2500 to 1991 B.C. This was the so-called Intermediate Period of Egyptian history, between the Old and Middle Kingdoms, a time of total social breakdown, widespread chaos, and disruption. It reflects an age similar to our own, in which old values had collapsed and new ones not yet taken their place. The document records something unheard of in bicameral culture -- an identity crisis. Its author is preoccupied with the meaning of life, his self (ego), the conflict between reason and emotion, and possible suicide. The papyrus is hardly typical of hieroglyphic texts, and many Near Eastern experts regard it as the only ancient Egyptian document of its kind. Its emergence during the Intermediate Period is evidence for Julian Jaynes' central argument, that when the subject/object distinction did occur in ancient times, its function was a crisis function, the sounding of an extreme alarm. What I have tried to argue in the present work is that since 1600 A.D., and most visibly since the Industrial Revolution, the West has been in a perpetual crisis, an unstable society in a state of extreme alarm. Thus modern schismatic consciousness is regarded as normal, but the times have not been "normal" for centuries. The correspondence with the Egyptian Intermediate Period is clear here, but with a peculiar twist. The lonely author of "Rebel in the Soul" was probably an enigma to his contemporaries, in that he found his ego, whereas we tend to regard psychotics today as enigmatic for having lost it. In other words, we may now be moving toward health, whereas the Egyptians of the Intermediate Period were at least temporarily moving toward pathology. Reading the text, we cannot help but recognize a modern voice; to our ears, for example, his words are often heroic. "Brother," says his soul to him, "as long as you burn you belong to life." This is effectively what Teiresias tells Odysseus when the latter visits him in Hades and asks the prophet to show him the way home and put an end to his restless search. But Teiresias is disapproving of this twenty-year search for the Self; he h
ints to Odysseus that a life that is equivalent to "burning" might be well worth giving up.62 Contemporary existentialist philosophers such as Rollo May, by contrast, have made a career out of the notion that such anxiety, and preoccupation with identity, is a sign of health. They never seem to grasp that we, like the author of "Rebel," live in times so crazy that 'Angst' and vitality get mistaken for one another. Surely, as Christopher Hill would say, our is a world turned upside down.63

  The end of ego-consciousness hardly necessitates the end of life, culture, or meaningful human activity. The existentialist position of equating meaning with anxiety can only be maintained by ignoring the major part of man's history on this planet. Ego-consciousness, let alone the tradition of modern individualism, is a phenomenon with a comparatively short history; it is hardly essential for human survival or for a rich human culture, and may ultimately be inimical to both. Thus ecologist Paul Shepard has pointed out that it was a devolution in the Neanderthal brain which gave rise to the smaller-brained Cro-Magnon man (ca. 40,000 B.C.) and Aurignacian civilization (ca. 23,000 B.C.), a period remarkable for cave painting, the invention of nearly two hundred kinds of tools, and a general burst of cultural activity.64 As Julian Jaynes has pointed out, the neurology of consciousness is hardly set for all time. We may be on the verge of such a period of dynamic devolution, in which what is emerging is not merely a new society, but a new species, a new type of human being. In the last analysis, the present species may prove to be a race of dinosaurs, and ego-consciousness something of an evolutionary dead end.

  "When you bring your flesh to rest," the author of "Rebel" is told by his soul,

  And thus reach the Beyond, In that stillness shall I alight upon you; then united we shall form the Abode.

  Who shall live in that Abode, and how they shall live, will be for future historians to say. But given such a world, they may not feel the need to do so.

  NOTES

  Introduction: The Modern Landscape

  1. Morris Berman, Social Change and Scientific Organization (London and Ithaca, N.Y.: Heinemann Educational Books and Cornell University Press, 1978).

  2. Russell Jacoby, Social Amnesia (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975), p. 63.

  3. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), pp. 9, 154.

  4. Studs Terkel, Working (New York: Avon Books, 1972).

  5. Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb, The Hidden Injuries of Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), pp. 168ff.

  6. The elaboration of this process is perhaps the greatest contribution of the Frankfurt School for Social Research, whose most familiar representative in the United States was Herbert Marcuse. A summary of their work may be found in Martin Jay, The Dlalectical Imagination (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973). On the popular level, Vance Packard has provided much evidence for this view of the totally manipulated life in books such as The Status Seekers, The Hidden Persuaders, and several others.

  7. Joseph A. Camilleri, Civilization in Crisis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), pp. 31-32. The incredible emphasis on sexual technique, as opposed to emotional content, is reflected in the voluminous proliferation of sex manuals in the last fifteen years, by now a multimillion dollar business.

  8. R.D. Laing, The Divided Self (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1965; first publ. 1959).

  9. For a report on a study of performance anxiety among first graders, which was carried out by William Kessen of Yale University, see Barbara Radloff, "The Tot in the Gray Flannel Suit," New York Times, 4 May 1975. "You have to play by the rules of the game if you are going to survive," she states, "in a corporation, or in first grade." The distinction between inner vitality and outer sterility which is familiar to all high school students formed a persistent theme in the rock music of the 1950s. Chuck Berry's songs, such as "School Days" and "Sweet Little Sixteen," are perhaps the prototype.

  10. Camilleri, Civilization in Crisis, p. 42. Information such as this can be collected, at this point, by merely reading daily newspapers and popular journals. My own sources include: Newsweek, 8 January 1973 and 12 November 1979; National Observer, 6 March 1976; San Francisco Examiner, 24 March 1977 and 10 July 1980; San Francisco Chronicle, 29 March 1976 and 10 September 1979; New York Times, 16 March 1976; Cosmopolitan, September 1974; and a general survey of such articles provided in John and Paula Zerzan, Breakdown, which was published in abridged form in the January 1976 issue of Fifth Estate. The quotation from Darold Treffert is from this pamphlet. For an extended critique of American drug use, see Richard Hughes and Robert Brewin, The Tranquilizing of America (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979).

  11. According to a 1972 Finnish study, Poland, the Soviet Union, and Hungary are respectively first, second, and third in world per capita consumption of hard liquor. See San Francisco Chronicle, 8 September 1978. My information on French and German suicides comes from a 1979 report of San Francisco's Pacific News Service by Eve Pell, "Teenage Suicides Sweep Advanced Nations of the West."

  12. Dr. Edward F. Foulks, a medical anthropologist at the University of Pennsylvania, has argued that madness may be a way by which the human species protects itself in such times of crisis, and hence that psychosis may be a form of cultural avant-garde (see the report on his work in the New York Times, 9 December 1975, p. 22, and the National Observer, 6 March 1976, p. 1). Much of the work of R. D. Laing points in this direction, and it has been a theme in a number of Doris Lessing's novels. See also Andrew Weil, The Natural Mind (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972).

  13. Robert Heilbroner, Business Civilization in Decline (New York: Norton, 1976), pp. 120-24.

  14. Willis W. Harman, An Incomplete Guide to the Future (San Francisco: San Francisco Book Company, 1976), chap. 2.

  CHAPTER 1. The Birth of Modern Scientific Consciousness

  1. Christopher Marlowe, The Tragedy of Doctor Faustus, ed. Louis B. Wright and Virginia A. LaMar (New York: Washington Square Press, 1959), p. 3; reprinted by permission of Simon and Schuster.

  2. Francis Bacon, New Organon, Book I, Aphorism XXXI, in Hugh G. Dick, ed., Selected Writings of Francis Bacon (New York: The Modern Library, 1955). This and subsequent excerpts printed with the permission of Random House, Inc.

  3. "Pure" historians of ideas have tended to see Bacon as irrelevant, or even detrimental to the growth of modern science, partly due to their own reaction against Marxist historians such as Benjamin Farrington (Francis Bacon: Philosopher of Industrial Science [New York: Collier Books, 1961; first publ. 1949]), who see Bacon as a cultural hero. The most extreme expression of this is C.C. Gillispie, The Edge of Objectivity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), pp. 74-82.

  4. In addition to Farrington's work, good discussions of this point can be found in two books by Paolo Rossi: Francis Bacon, trans. Sacha Rabinovitch (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968), and Philosophy, Technology and the Arts in the Early Modern Era, trans. Salvator Attanasio (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1970). See also Christopher Hill, Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution (London: Panther Books, 1972), chap. 3.

  5. Bacon, New Organon, Book I, Aphorism LXXIV.

  6. Ibid., Aphorism XCVIII.

  7. There is, of course, a large literature comparing Eastern and Western science and modes of thought. A fine one-volume summary is Joseph Needham, The Grand Titration (London: Allen & Unwin, 1969).

  8. This and all of the quotations from Descartes are taken from his Discourse on Method, trans. Laurence J. Lafleur (Indianapolis: The Liberal Arts Press, 1950; original French edition, 1637).

  9. A spirited discussion of this disparity can be found in Pierre Duhem, The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory, trans. Philip P. Wiener (New York: Atheneum, 1962; original French edition 1914), chap. 4.

  10. Descartes, Discourse, p. 12.

  11. A.R. Hall, The Scientific Revolution (Boston: Beacon Press, 1956), p. 149. My earlier statement, that for Descartes "all non-material phenomena ultimately have a material basis," is thus not strictly true. For Descartes, 'res co
gitans' and 'res extensa' were distinct entities; it was Descartes' disciples who made mind epiphenomenal and attempted to swallow up the former by the latter -- as is commonly done in science today. Despite Descartes' original sophistication, mainstream Cartesianism came to be identified with materialist reductionism.

  12. I am adopting the distinction between critical and dialectical reason made by Norman O. Brown in Life Against Death (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1970; orig. publ. 1959).

  13. The best one-volume discussion of Galileo's work, to my mind, is Ludovico Geymonat, Galileo Galilei, trans. Stillman Drake (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965).