The collapse of the science-and-democracy partnership in 1965 may have left the democracy vision in a state of demoralization, but that was nothing compared to the trauma produced in the United States by the Watergate crisis and its aftermath. The steady stream of revelations about the Nixon administration’s misdeeds and the CIA’s abuses of power which poured out from 1972 to 1976 shook the entire nation to its core and provoked an almost inexpressible sense of revulsion and cynicism.

The official conclusion after Nixon resigned was that the system had worked, but it hadn’t really. The Watergate crisis left behind a deep and abiding distrust of government, along with a tendency to see conspiracies everywhere.

That distrust was most intense in the United States, of course — but then, so was the democracy vision itself.

Visions expand their sphere of influence as they develop, but they tend to be nurtured originally in fairly limited regions, and they have the most lasting impact in those same regions. The reason vision, for example, was quintessentially French. The science vision was most strongly rooted in England and Germany. And the democracy vision has been at the core of America’s identity as a nation since 1776.

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I’ve been thinking on and off about the differences between the chaos vision and the creative imagination vision, and it’s occurred to me that one of the most obvious is that chaos is heavily dependent on the concept of the subconscious, while creative imagination isn’t.

Chaos didn’t start out in the 18th century with a theory of the subconscious, but it did focus heavily on the whole range of non-rational mental states, from dream to madness to supernatural terror. And when the chaos vision started getting more organized in the late 1800’s, Sigmund Freud’s concept of the subconscious provided the first really satisfactory explanation for all those anomalous states.

The reason-and-science partnership was at its peak just then, and human beings were seen as primarily creatures of reason. But Freud’s theory suggested that it was only the conscious mind that was rational, while the subconscious was the natural home of everything that reason excluded — sex and violence, nameless fears and inexplicable urges, primitive instincts and childlike wonder.

In the first half of the 20th century, as reason faded and the chaos vision took on greater authority, the subconscious became correspondingly more powerful as well — perhaps even more powerful than the conscious mind. In science fiction stories of the 1940’s and 50’s, the subconscious was frequently represented as either a vast unknown territory, full of ghosts and archetypal presences, or a kind of shadow self with its own knowledge and agenda.

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During the course of the mid-20th century, the holism vision moved through a series of developmental stages. It first gained visibility in the 1920’s as a somewhat fuzzy attempt to formulate a philosophical alternative to scientific reductionism. In the 1930’s, it developed a theoretical framework in the form of systems theory, which provided the basis for both ecology and cybernetics. And in the late 40’s and early 50’s, it started taking on political overtones as a critique of modern industrial civilization.

Throughout that period, aspects of holistic thought found their way into the work of artists, writers, and philosophers, from M.C. Escher and J.R.R. Tolkien to Buckminster Fuller and Rachel Carson. And by the 1960’s, these intimations of a universe that was far more integrated and meaningful than the old universe of scientific materialism were starting to exert a formative influence on a new generation of story-tellers and musicians.

But even in the middle 60’s, holism was not yet perceived as a single thing, and though it formed an essential element in the chaos-based counterculture that emerged in 1964-65, it was not the primary element. The leading members of that counterculture were dedicated to the pursuit of chaos, but no one had yet dedicated themself wholeheartedly to holism as a way of life and determined to follow wherever it might lead.

The first true acolyte of holism was a man named Stewart Brand. And it came upon him quite suddenly.

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I’ve been trying for the most part to present the visions in rational terms, as a series of extended metaphors through which we humans attempt to understand the universe in which we find ourselves.

But I keep being reminded that at the very heart of the visions is something far more mystical and … well … visionary. The visions may provide our best attempts to make sense of the everyday world, but they do so by drawing upon our intimations of a deeply meaningful reality beyond the veil of perception. Every vision represents a fusion of the mundane and the otherworldly, the plausible and the mysterious, and it is that fusion which is the source of their power to convince and to motivate.

The transcendent power of each vision reaches its greatest extent at the peak of the counterculture based on that vision — when for a brief moment, it appears that all boundaries can be transgressed and all opposites can be reconciled. But the world-as-it-is can never fulfill those expectations, so each vision is fated first to overreach and then to collapse like a punctured balloon and shrink down to its most mundane and practical aspects.

That was what happened to the chaos vision when it faltered and lost its way in the late 60’s. But by then chaos had built up as an enormous charge of psychic energy — and the excess had to go somewhere once chaos was no longer large enough to contain it.

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During the peak countercultural years of the 60’s, when all the old verities were breaking down and nothing could be taken for granted, the newest visions formed a center of active speculation. Holism, multiculturalism, and the first intimations of the creative imagination vision all developed rapidly between about 1966 and 1972.

This intellectual turmoil faded in the 70’s, however, as the culture turned its attention to the urgent problem of reestablishing stability. And the first step in that process of renormalization was the domestication of chaos.

In the 1960’s, chaos had been perceived as dangerous, threatening, and destructive — but also as inspiring, liberating, and even intoxicating. The promise of chaos unleashed was what made the 60’s so memorable. It offered the enticement of everything that was forbidden and everything that was desired. It was the sum of all possibilities and all fears.

But as the 1970’s wore on, the chaos vision lost its aura of danger and turned into just one more way of organizing personal experience. It still emphasized intuition, flexibility, and “doing your own thing,” but in a toned-down form that no longer constituted a serious challenge to the existing order.

This deflation of chaos was no doubt inevitable. It is the way all countercultural periods end. We humans have a need for stability, and it appears that we can only function for a limited amount of time in the absence of a dominant partnership. Soon the strain becomes overwhelming and a new dominant partnership must be constructed.

But there was no going back to the old ways. Science had been discredited, democracy thrown into doubt, and chaos had to step into the breach and assume the leadership of society. The king is dead, long live the king.

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I’ve covered most of the major changes of the 1960’s by now, with one glaring exception — and that is what became of the democracy vision between the collapse of the science-and-democracy partnership in 1964-65 and the formation of the democracy-and-chaos partnership around 1976.

Frankly, I’ve been kind of baffled on that point. I’d assumed for years that the moment democracy was freed from the embrace of the science vision, it began to move closer to chaos, recovering much of its original authenticity and idealism in the process. But when I started looking for actual signs of such a renewal, I realized that was not what had happened at all.

Instead of being renewed in the late 60’s, it seems that the democracy vision became increasingly stuck in place. The presidential election of 1968, for example, was fought out between the old-school liberalism of Hubert Humphrey and the old-school conservatism of Richard Nixon — both of whom seemed determined to pretend that science-and-democracy was still a going concern. Meanwhile, the hippies and anti-war protesters just stood on the sidelines, watching the trainwreck.

I finally concluded that as soon as the science-and-democracy partnership collapsed, confidence in democracy all but evaporated as well. It was this near-total breakdown of both halves of the dominant partnership that made the late 60’s so liberating for some and so threatening for others.

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As I was finishing up the previous entry, it struck me that we ought to be noticing the first signs of a successor to holism around now — and in trying to think of possible examples, I was reminded of a paradox I’ve been wrestling with for the past several weeks.

Last month, I quoted Mario Savio’s famous address during the Sproul Hall sit-in at Berkeley in 1964: “That brings me to the second mode of civil disobedience. There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can’t take part! You can’t even passively take part! And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus – and you’ve got to make it stop!”

I assumed that Savio had come up with this image of the government as a out-of-control machine specifically to evoke the tension between a faltering science-and-democracy partnership and the disruptive power of chaos. But it also occurred to me that if I was looking for insight on the emergence of the chaos vision, it would be worth checking out what Henry David Thoreau had said about civil disobedience when he invented the concept in the 1840’s as a means of protesting slavery and the Mexican War.

So I dug up a copy of “Resistance to Civil Government” (1849), and to my astonishment I found Thoreau writing, “If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go: perchance it will wear smooth — certainly the machine will wear out. If the injustice has a spring, or a pulley, or a rope, or a crank, exclusively for itself, then perhaps you may consider whether the remedy will not be worse than the evil; but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.”

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It’s not easy to introduce a new vision that goes against the grain of all conventional assumptions. Especially in fiction, it may be necessary to smuggle much of it in under banners that read “this is only a joke” and “don’t take this too seriously.”

That was more or less what Horace Walpole did when he offered intimations of the chaos vision in The Castle of Otranto to a generation living under the sway of reason. He had to pretend that he was just doing his best to accurately represent a superstitious past era and explain apologetically that “belief in every kind of prodigy was so established in those dark ages, that an author would not be faithful to the manners of the times who should omit all mention of them.”

Walpole’s pretense of embarrassment over the prodigies which were the very heart of his story might seem laughable now — except that Alexei and I did something very similar in “The Sons of Prometheus” when we located our man of wisdom on a backward and superstition-ridden colony planet. The hapless do-gooder from the ships might gain insight from contact with such a man, but he could never share his beliefs or understand the source of his wisdom.

In the same way, it was possible to imply strange beliefs on the part of a wacky alien like Torve the Trog, but only as long as there was no chance Villiers would ever manage to fathom Torve’s thought-patterns, much less emulate them.

And yet, despite these barriers, the question of how someone with a late 20th century mindset might make the transition to a level of higher understanding became our chief preoccupation in one story after another through the early 70’s.

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Shortly after I wrote Alexei that fan letter on Star Well in October 1968, Richard Nixon was elected president — and from that point on, the world grew steadily darker and more paranoid.

Alexei had begun working on the third Villiers book by then, and where the first two had poured out of him quickly and easily, this one came slow and hard. It was darker as well — a story set entirely at night — and there was an air of doubt and apprehension underlying the wackiness. By the time he finished, just before our wedding that June, it was clear that to push on with the fourth book would only lead further in the direction of negativity, violence, and disintegration.

All we knew at the time was that real-world events were making it difficult to hold onto the light-hearted spirit these books required. But in retrospect, there was something deeper going on. The chaos vision, which had provided the central organizing principle for the Villiers books, was breaking down under pressure, falling into self-doubt and turning bleak and violent and increasingly paranoid.

Alexei was faced with a choice between two paths. One was to follow the chaos vision into decadence and despair, as so many did over those next few years. The other was to set chaos aside, along with the Villiers books, and focus instead on holism, multiculturalism, and the successor to chaos, all of which retained their idealistic sheen. And in the course of 1969-70, that was exactly what he did.

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When Alexei and I got married in 1969, we each brought with us a set of Russian nesting dolls. Mine had been bought for me when I was little, purchased by my mother at a store on Broadway on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and they are larger and shinier and rather crudely made. His, I believe, were brought back by his father from a trip to Russia. They are more delicate and contain many more layers to be stripped away before reaching the final almost shapeless pea-sized doll at the center.

But large or small, elegant or crude, there is something mystical about Russian dolls. Like the progression of ever-smaller cats in Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat Comes Back, they suggest that if we could only follow the sequence to its final vanishing point, that tiniest of seeds would be revealed as the ultimate source of creative power and truth.

The visions can feel that way, too. There is a sense that each one pulls back the curtain a little bit further. And it is that feeling which drives some people on to want to know more and see more — while at the same time, it makes others inclined to pull up short and start hammering in warning signs saying “Here Be Dragons!” and “Abandon All Hope!”

That dichotomy was very apparent around 1968-76, when holism and multiculturalism and the first intimations of a successor to chaos were all developing rapidly. There were some who feared anything that was new and different and wanted things to stay just the way they were. And there were others who had no attachment to things-as-they-were and wanted nothing more than to push ahead.

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