Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches

by Marvin Harris

  One incident in Castaneda’s second book epitomizes the moral opacity of the shaman’s superconsciousness more than any other. Having achieved fame and fortune with The Teachings of Don Juan, Castaneda tried to find his mentor to give him a copy. While waiting for Don Juan to appear, Castaneda studied a pack of street urchins who lived by eating scraps left on the tables in his hotel. After three days of watching the children darting in and out “like vultures,” Castaneda became “truly despondent.” Don Juan was surprised to hear this. “Do you really feel sorry for them?” he wanted to know. Castaneda insisted that he did, and Don Juan asked him, “Why?”

  Because I’m concerned with the well-being of my fellow men. Those are children and their world is ugly and cheap.

  Castaneda does not say that he feels sorry for the children because they are eating the scraps he has left on the table. What seems to bother him is that their lives are “ugly and cheap.” Hunger and poverty give rise to bad thoughts, or bad dreams. Taking the cue, Don Juan admonished his pupil for supposing that such waifs could not mature mentally and become “men of knowledge”:

  Do you think that your very rich world would ever help you to become a man of knowledge?

  When Castaneda is forced to admit that his affluence hasn’t helped him to become a successful witch, Don Juan nails him:

  Then how can you feel sorry for those children?… Any of them could become a man of knowledge. All the men of knowledge I know were kids like those you saw eating leftovers and licking tables.

  For many members of the counter-culture, the morally most degenerate product of the scientific world view is the technocrat—the heartless, inscrutable technician devoted to expert knowledge, but indifferent as to who uses it and for what end. Yet Don Juan is precisely such a technocrat. The knowledge he imparts to Castaneda carries no moral burden. In becoming a “man of knowledge,” Castaneda’s main concern is to avoid taking something that will flip him into a permanent orbit. For all the moral concern about how Don Juan’s extraordinary powers are to be applied, Castaneda might as well have learned how to pilot a B-52. His relationship to Don Juan unfolds in a moral wasteland in which technology is the supreme good, even if he and his teacher eat “buttons” instead of pressing them.

  I contend that it is quite impossible to subvert objective knowledge without subverting the basis of moral judgments. If we cannot know with reasonable certainty who did what, when, and where, we can scarcely hope to render a moral account of ourselves. Not being able to distinguish between criminal and victim, rich and poor, exploiter and exploited, we must either advocate the total suspension of moral judgments, or adopt the inquisitorial position and hold people responsible for what they do in each other’s dreams.

  As Time magazine reporters discovered while trying to do a story on Carlos Castañeda, Consciousness III can cast an impenetrable fog over the simplest human events. Invoking his freedom of belief, Castaneda either fabricated, imagined, or hallucinated extensive portions of his own biography:

  Born in Peru, not Brazil

  Date of birth 1925, not 1935

  Mother died when he was 6, not 24

  Father a jeweler, not a professor of literature

  Studied painting and sculpture in Lima, not Milan

  “To ask me to verify my life by giving you my statistics,” said Castañeda, “is like using science to validate sorcery. It robs the world of its magic.”

  According to Castañeda, Don Juan is the same way. The world’s most famous shaman doesn’t want to be photographed, tape-recorded, or questioned, even by his apprentice. No one except Castaneda appears to know who Don Juan is. Castaneda freely admits: “Oh, I’m a bullshitter! Oh, how I love to throw the bull around”; at least one friend from Peru remembers him as a “big liar.”

  Don Juan may not exist. Or perhaps we should say Castaneda met a Yaqui witch in “mind” but not in “body.” On the authority of the Inquisition, this might still have resulted in an accurate account of Don Juan’s teachings. Or, perhaps, Castaneda went sometimes in “imagination” and other times in “body.” These are intriguing ideas, but they can make only an imaginary contribution to the improvement of anyone’s moral sensibilities.

  Counter-culture makes claims that extend far beyond the supposed preservation of individual morality. Its advocates insist that superconsciousness can make the world into a more friendly and more habitable place; they see flight from objectivity as a politically effective way to achieve an equitable distribution of wealth, recycling of resources, abolition of impersonal bureaucracies, and the correction of other dehumanizing aspects of modern technocratic societies. These ills allegedly come from the bad ideas we have about status and work. If we stop trying to show off, and if we stop believing that work is a good thing in itself, revolutionary transformation will occur without the need for anyone to get hurt. As in fairyland, “we can make a new choice whenever we are ready to do so.” Capitalism, the corporate state, the age of science, the Protestant ethic—all represent types of consciousness, and they can be altered by choosing a new consciousness. “All we have to do is close our eyes and imagine that everyone has become a Consciousness III: The Corporate State vanishes … The power of the Corporate State will be ended as miraculously as a kiss breaks a witch’s evil enchantment.”

  Consciousness so far out of touch with practical and mundane constraints is, in fact, witchcraft rather than politics. People can change their consciousness whenever they want to. But people usually don’t want to. Consciousness is adapted to practical and mundane conditions. These conditions cannot be imagined into or out of existence the way a shaman makes hundred-foot gnats appear and disappear. As I pointed out earlier in the chapter on potlatch, prestige systems are not created by vibrations from outer space. People learn the consciousness of competitive consumerism because they are constrained to do so by immensely powerful political and economic forces. These forces can be modified only by practical activities aimed at changing consciousness by changing the material conditions of consciousness.

  Counter-culture’s glad tidings of revolution by consciousness are neither new nor revolutionary. Christianity has been trying to achieve a revolution by consciousness for two thousand years. Who would deny that Christian consciousness could have changed the world? Yet it was the world that changed Christian consciousness. If everybody adopted a peaceful, loving, generous, noncompetitive lifestyle, we could have something better than counter-culture—we could have the Kingdom of God.

  Politics conceived in the image of Consciousness III takes place in the mind, not the body. The convenience of this form of politics to those who already possess wealth and power should be obvious. To reflect philosophically that poverty is, after all, a state of mind has always been a source of comfort for those who are not poor. In this regard, counter-culture merely brings forward in slightly modified form the traditional contempt expressed by Christian theorists for worldly possessions. Also traditional and within the mainstream of conservative politics is the guarantee that nothing will happen by force. Consciousness III will destroy the corporate state “without violence, without seizure of political power, without overthrow of any existing group of people.” Counter-culture is sworn to attack minds, not capital gains or depletion allowances.

  By definition, counter-culture is the lifestyle of alienated middle-class college-educated youth. Specifically excluded are those who “continue to tend the ashes of the proletarian revolution” and “the militant black young.” The hope that counter-culture will transform society into “something a human being can identify as home” rests on the fact that it is a middle-class movement. What makes it so important “is that a radical rejection of science and technological values should appear so close to the center of our society, rather than on the negligible margins. It is the middle-class young who are conducting this politics of consciousness.”

  Aside from the question of whether a politics of pure consciousness should be called politics rather than w
itchcraft or some other form of magic, two other dubious points should be noted. First, counter-culture does not reject technological values in toto; second, the rejection of a certain kind of science has always been present at the very center of our civilization.

  Counter-culture is not averse to making use of the technological products of “objective” scientific research. Telephones, FM stations, solid-state stereos, cheap jet flights, estrogen birth-control pills, and chemical hallucinogens and antidotes are essential to the good life of Consciousness III.

  Moreover, dependence on high-decibel high-fidelity music has created the greatest degree of subordination of a popular idiom to technology in the history of the performing arts. At least tacitly, therefore, counter-culture accepts the existenee of specialists in the physical and biological sciences whose job it is to design and maintain the lifestyle’s technological infrastructure.

  The most hated forms of science in the perspective of Consciousness III are not the laboratory sciences, but those which seek to apply laboratory standards to the study of history and lifestyles. Counter-culture depicts the turning away from the scientific study of lifestyles and history as if it were a departure from some deeply ingrained pattern. But even among so-called behavioral and social scientists, the prevailing form of knowledge is not and never has been what the counter-culture says it is. How can anyone react to an overdose of the science of lifestyles when the science of lifestyles insists that the riddles examined in the previous chapters of this book have no scientific explanation? Extensive “objectification” in the study of lifestyle phenomena is nothing but a myth of the social dreamwork of the counter-culture. The prevailing consciousness among the majority of professionals concerned with explaining lifestyle phenomena is virtually indistinguishable from Consciousness III.

  If the return of the witch involved turning the physics, chemistry, and biology labs over to people who disdain objective evidence and rational analysis, we would have little to fear. The exercise of the freedom of belief in the laboratory could only be a temporary inconvenience until the charred remains of superconscious experimenters were swept out along with the rubble they created. Unfortunately, obscurantism applied to lifestyles does not self-destruct. Doctrines that prevent people from understanding the causes of their social existence have great social value. In a society dominated by inequitable modes of production and exchange, lifestyle studies that obscure and distort the nature of the social system are far more common and more highly valued than the mythological “objective” studies dreaded by the counter-culture. Obscurantism applied to lifestyle studies lacks the engineering “praxis” of the laboratory sciences. Falsifiers, mystics, and double-talkers do not get swept out with the rubble; in fact, there is no rubble because everything goes on just as it always did.

  In previous chapters I have shown that profoundly mystified consciousness is sometimes capable of galvanizing dissent into effective mass movements. We have seen how successive forms of messianism in Palestine, Europe, and Melanesia carried forward vast revolutionary impulses aimed at more equitable distributions of wealth and power. And we have also seen how the Renaissance Church and state used the witch craze to enchant and befuddle the communitarian radicals.

  Where does counter-culture fit into this? Is it a conservative or a radical force? In its own dreamwork, counter-culture identifies with the tradition of millenarian transformation. Theodore Roszak says the primary goal of counter-culture is to proclaim “a new heaven and a new earth,” and in its formative phase, Consciousness III brought crowds of dissenting youth together at rock concerts and antiwar protests. But even at the peak of its organizational efficiency, counter-culture lacked the fundamentals of messianism. It had no charismatic leaders and it lacked a vision of a well-defined moral order. In Consciousness III, leadership is another trick of the military-industrial complex, and as I indicated a moment ago, a set of well-defined moral goals cannot be reconciled with the amoral relativism of shamans like Don Juan.

  The flight from objectivity, amoral relativism, and acceptance of the omnipotence of thought speak of the witch and not the savior. Consciousness III has all the classic symptoms of a lifestyle dreamwork whose social function is to dissolve and fragment the energies of dissent. This should have been clear from the great importance given to “doing your own thing.” You can’t make a revolution if everybody does his own thing. To make a revolution, everybody must do the same thing.

  So, the return of the witch is not a mere inscrutable bit of whimsy. The modern witchcraft revival has definite points of similarity with the late medieval craze. Of course there are many important differences. The modern witch is admired while the old witch is feared. No one in the counter-culture wants to burn anyone either for believing or disbelieving in witches; Reich and Roszak are not Institor and Sprenger; and the counter-culture fortunately has no commitment to any specific body of dogma. Yet we are left with the fact that the counter-culture and the Inquisition stand shoulder to shoulder on the issue of the witch’s flight. Within counter-culture’s freedom to believe, witches are once more as believable as anything else. This belief, for all its playful innocence, makes a definite contribution to the consolidation or stabilization of contemporary inequalities. Millions of educated youth seriously believe that the proposal to kiss away the corporate state as if it were an “evil enchantment” is no less effective or realistic than any other form of political consciousness. Like its medieval predecessor, our modern witch fad blunts and befuddles the forces of dissent. Like the rest of the counter-culture, it postpones the development of a rational set of political commitments. And that is why it is so popular among the more affluent segments of our population. That is why the witch has returned.

  Epilogue

  IF THE WITCH is here, can the savior be far behind?

  A case has been made by Norman Cohn in his book The Pursuit of the Millennium for linking the messianic movements that preceded the Protestant Reformation with the secular convulsions of the twentieth century. Despite their contempt for the specific myths and legends of Judeo-Christian messianism, the lifestyle consciousness of figures like Lenin, Hitler, and Mussolini arose from a set of practical and mundane conditions similar to those responsible for the rise of such religious saviors as John of Leyden, Müntzer, and even—I would add—Manahem, Bar Kochva, and Yali. Secular, atheistic military messiahs share with their religious predecessors a “boundless, millennial promise made with boundless, prophet-like conviction.” Like the Judeo-Christian saviors, they claim to be personally charged with the mission of bringing history to a preordained consummation. For Hitler it was to be the Thousand Year Reich purified of the polypus of the Jews and other in-dwelling witches and devils; for Lenin, it was to be the Communist Jerusalem whose motto was that of the first Christian commune: “And all that believed were together and had all things in common” Or as Trotsky put it: “Let the priests of all religious confessions tell of a paradise in the world beyond—we say we will create a true paradise for men on this earth.” For the alienated, insecure, marginal, pauperized, bedeviled, and bewitched masses, the secular messiah promises redemptipn and fulfillment on a cosmic scale. Not only a chance to improve one’s everyday existence, but total involvement in a mission of “stupendous, unique importance.”

  Measured by the grandiose visions of military-messianic consciousness, counter-culture appears to be a relatively harmless affirmation of the futility of political struggle, either of the right, left, or center. But complacency is an apt response to Consciousness III only in the short run and in the absence of any well-formed discipline capable of explaining the causal processes of history.

  The intended “subversion of the scientific world view” is not dangerous because it actually threatens any part of the technological infrastructure of our civilization. Counterculture enthusiasts are as dependent upon higher energy transport, solid-state electronics, and the mass production of textiles and food as the rest of us, and they lack both the wi
ll and the knowledge necessary for a reversion to more primitive forms of production and communication. At any rate, there is nothing to fear from any sect, class, or nation that fails to participate in the further advance of nuclear, cybernetic, and biophysical technology. Such groups will inevitably suffer the fate of the other Stone Age peoples of the twentieth century. They may survive, but only precariously and at the sufferance of immensely more powerful neighbors—on reservations or in communes protected for their value as tourist attractions. To regress to more primitive stages of technology, or even to hold the line at what the industrial powers now possess, cannot but appear as the most ludicrous and harebrained of proposals to the majority of mankind that grows daily more determined to improve their lives by breaking the Euro-American and Japanese monopoly on science and technology. A million chanting Reichs and Roszaks affect the advance and spread of science and technology about as much as the chirping of a single vagrant cricket affects the operation of an automated blast furnace. The threat of counter-culture lies elsewhere.

  The gurus of Consciousness III cannot conceivably halt or slow down the advance of technology; but they can increase the level of popular befuddlement concerning how that technology is to be made to reduce rather than intensify inequities and exploitation, how it is to be made to serve humane and constructive purposes rather than cause terror and destruction. The deepening confusion, psychic involution, and amorality epitomized in the return of the witch carry with them for anyone aware of the history of our civilization the imminent threat of the return of the messiah. Disdain of reason, evidence, and objectivity—superconsciousness and its heady freedom of belief—are steadily stripping an entire generation of the intellectual means of resisting the next call for a “final and decisive struggle” to achieve redemption and salvation on a cosmic scale.