Alexei suggested it would be useful to have some kind of simple crib sheet to help follow all the different visions and their changes through time. I’ve got mixed feelings about that — whenever I make things too schematic, all the juice seems to leak out — but I’ll admit that even I’ve had to resort to counting on my fingers at times to keep track of where I’m at.

(“Let’s see, if it’s 1850, then chaos must be emergent. Or do I mean holism? No, way too early for holism. Definitely chaos.”)

At any rate, I’ve done up a basic timeline, starting with the reason-based counterculture in the early 1700’s. It has links to the entries in which I’ve discussed each period, so it can serve as a kind of index to the series, as well.

There are a lot of blank areas in the chart, particularly before 1915, that I haven’t written about because they’re not relevant to the story I’ve been trying to tell, which is mainly that of chaos and holism. I may get back to those areas at some point — but at the moment, just figure they’re there for the sake of completeness.

The timeline is here. I’ll keep updating it as I go, and I’ll also link to it at the bottom of entries from now on.

Update: Alexei said the timeline was nice but what he really had in mind was a list of all the visions in order and their periods of emergence and dominance. That gets into a lot more territory I haven’t covered yet — but for what it’s worth, a preliminary listing is here.

Related:

A listing of all my posts on the cycle of visions can be found here.

A general overview of the areas of interest covered at this blog can be found here.

A chronological listing of all entries at this blog, with brief descriptions, can be found here.

It keeps nagging at me that even though I’ve spent the last three months writing about the chaos vision, I haven’t yet managed to define it in the way I’ve defined democracy in terms of freedom and equality or holism in terms of systems and emergent properties.

There are valid reasons for that. Inner experience visions are a lot harder to pin down than scientifically or socially based visions — and if you persist in trying to put labels on them, their essence is likely to slip through your fingers. As the hipsters knew, you either dig or you don’t.

But even so, I’m going to have problems discussing the changes that the chaos vision went through after 1968 if I don’t begin by laying out some of its key aspects and the circumstances under which they emerged.

I’ve described previously how the first hints of each new vision arise out of the disillusionment that inevitably sets in as its predecessor becomes culturally dominant. Chaos in the 1960’s, democracy in the 1910’s, and science in the 1840’s all had their weak spots, and it was the same with reason in the 1730’s. There were no great social crises during that period — just the opposite, in fact — but it was that very lack of excitement which sowed the initial seeds of discontent.

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I’ve been struck lately by the extent to which I personify the visions, describing them as though each one has its own agenda which it consciously tries to advance. Personification was considered a major no-no by my high school English teachers, but in this case I don’t think I’m wrong. The visions do display a consistent identity and sense of purpose which extends across diverse cultures and many human lifetimes.

I’ve even seriously wondered whether the visions might be the real agents of human history and we mortals only their mouthpieces — whether every choice we make and every opinion we express is just one vision or another manifesting itself through us. But although there’s an element of truth to that, it’s far from the whole story.

For one thing, the visions are not some sort of clockwork mechanism that got wound up at the beginning of history and have been running through a predetermined series of changes ever since. They’re far more like a toy hoop that can take any path but only keeps rolling as long as a human operator is there to maintain its momentum and guide it round the obstacles.

This factor of outside intervention has two main aspects, both of which originate outside the visions themselves. One is the ever-changing material conditions of human life, which constantly offer unforeseen challenges and novel opportunities. The other has to do with the demands made by certain moral imperatives that transcend the specifics of any one vision, although they are woven into all of them.

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In looking back over the previous entry, I noticed one glaring omission. I’ve been discussing the proto-history of holism as though it was spurred on primarily by its own internal imperatives, but this was far from the case. At every stage of its development, holism was subject to the impact of other visions — and the most crucial early influence was that of the science-and-democracy partnership at the time when it first formed in the 1930’s.

It troubles me when I overlook something that big, but I really shouldn’t be surprised. The longer I work with the visions, the deeper I go — and in this current series of entries I’ve been trying to pin down a number of things that I never considered before, such as the delicate mechanisms by which each new vision emerges from its predecessor.

One thing that’s been striking me as I work is how much the dance of the visions resembles a cross between a chambered nautilus and a Rube Goldberg device. From a distance, each vision seems to unfold smoothly and gracefully, forming an elegant addition to the series. But up close, the process is far more of a six-dimensional trapeze act, in which the senior visions hurl the new arrival from one unsteady perch to another even as they themselves are jigging back and forth into new configurations.

It’s a wonder that it ever comes out even — but somehow it always does.

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In recent entries, I’ve started describing how the holism vision emerged in the 1960’s as the successor to scientific materialism. Before I carry the story along any further, however, it seems important to offer a quick look back at where holism had come from and its earliest stages of evolution.

Just as the roots of chaos can be traced to the reaction against the growing dominance of reason in the late 1700’s, so the roots of holism lie in the reaction against scientific materialism in the late 1800’s. And like chaos, holism went through an extended period of proto-development, during which it was not yet an autonomous vision of the nature of existence but merely a collection of scattered objections and intimations.

Throughout the proto-history of chaos, human beings and the universe were considered to be fundamentally rational, and it was only rare heretics like Horace Walpole, Edgar Allan Poe, and Lewis Carroll who were fascinated by the gaps in reason — dreams and nonsense, madness and intoxication, bizarre beliefs and anomalous events.

These writers were all unique and solitary figures, and the glimpses they offered of a different construction of reality were limited and easily dismissed. Not until the dominance of reason had been thrown off in the early 20th century could these fragments be brought together and perceived as forming a whole.

The proto-development of holism was very similar, but played out in terms of science and cosmology rather than inner experience. It began as an attempt to counter the assertions of scientific materialism that true reality consisted of nothing but atoms hurtling through empty space, that living things were merely elaborate machines, and that higher values like love and morality were an illusion.

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When I started college in the fall of 1963, I had trouble getting my bearings both academically and socially, and by November I had fallen into something of a funk. It didn’t help my mood any when late one evening my roommate read out a particularly depressing passage from Tennessee Williams’ Night of the Iguana, which she was studying in her introductory humanities class.

I can’t recall at this point just what the quote was, but it knocked me into one of the blackest moments of despair I have ever known — a state in which all action seemed futile and life merely an extended prelude to death.

One online guide to the play describes its main character as suffering “from existential dread, a fear that the world is absurd and without meaning, a fear that beyond the grave lies absolute nothingness.” That sounds about right. It was precisely that kind of existential nausea — which had arisen out of the cross-breeding of chaos with scientific materialism in the late 30’s — that knocked me for a loop.

It took a day and a half for me to throw off the blackness and start appreciating the beauty of the world again. And just then, someone stopped me on the path to my dorm and said, “Have you heard? The president’s been shot.”

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The psychedelic counterculture that had started bubbling up in 1964-65 would remain in the background for a few years, partly because a distinctive 60’s culture was already in full flower. That was the hedonistic, sex-based “swinging Sixties” so nostalgically recalled in the Austin Powers movies — the Sixties of miniskirts, go-go dancers, birth control pills, the Playboy Philosophy, and James Bond movies.

That version of the Sixties was relatively superficial and mindless, although it did prepare the ground for more serious rebellions to come. When I started this series of posts I thought I could just ignore it, but it eventually dawned on me that anything described as “swinging” had to be an aspect of the chaos vision — which meant I needed to pay attention to where it fit in.

So I dredged up memories of my high school days — when I was learning most of what I knew about contemporary society from Mad Magazine — and it struck me that the swinging Sixties must have been largely an extension of the Hollywood hipster culture of the late 50’s.

The Hollywood hipsters reached the peak of their fame in the Kennedy years, when Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis, Jr., and other members of the “Rat Pack” were considered the very embodiment of cool. I was aware of them at the time, of course — at least on the Mad Magazine level — but it would never have occurred to my fourteen year old self that the Hollywood hipsters might be simply the glitzier cousins of the beatniks.

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Come mothers and fathers throughout the land
And don’t criticize what you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command
 Your old road is rapidly agin’.
Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand
 For the times they are a-changin’.

— Bob Dylan, September 1963

Between the summer of 1964 and the spring of 1965, an incredible number of things happened all at once as the visions began shifting and mutating.

The first upheaval to become widely visible was the student protest movement, which began as an outgrowth of the civil rights movement. The March on Washington in August 1963 — where Bob Dylan performed and which inspired “The Times They Are A-Changin'” — was followed a year later by the Freedom Summer of 1964, when young activists flooded into Mississippi to register black voters and some lost their lives.

That September, the University of California at Berkeley attempted to prevent civil rights advocates from soliciting donations on campus. When one former student was arrested while manning an information table, all hell broke loose. Thousands of students surrounded the police car and kept it from leaving until all charges against the activist had been dropped.

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Although the science-and-democracy vision would dominate Western culture through the 1950’s and into the 60’s, its initial mood of brash optimism had started to fade even before World War II ended in 1945.

The accumulated strain of the war years, the terrifying new reality created by the dropping of nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the onset of the Cold War all combined to create a mood of apprehension and paranoia. It was at this point that the chaos vision cut loose from the science-and-democracy partnership and became the primary vehicle for expressing dissatisfaction with the dominant culture.

The resulting mixture of chaos and cynicism is clearly visible in film noir, which combined a hallucinatory sense of an unstable and fundamentally treacherous reality with a profound alienation from the corruption and violence of society.

The roots of film noir are to be found in hard-boiled detective novels and German expressionist films of the 1920’s and early 30’s, both of which had embodied certain aspects of the chaos vision. But the genre developed fully only in the 1940’s — and particularly from 1944 on — when it played a central role in depicting the dark side of science-and-democracy.

Film noir was not to everyone’s taste — and there were plenty of other movies in the late 40’s that presented a more positive view of science-and-democracy — but it was far from alone in its expression of a newly independent and alienated chaos vision.

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Since I began this series of entries in early September, the world has moved very quickly — so quickly that intuition tells me I need to cut to the chase right now and leave my more detailed discussion of the emergence of the chaos vision for a later time.

It is becoming undeniable that the financial crisis which began a year ago has enriched the bankers while screwing everyone else. In just the last few weeks, public sentiment appears to have reached some sort of tipping point, and social critics are starting to suggest that our entire system may be fatally flawed.

Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story, which premiered on October 2, is dedicated to “questioning whether the whole incentive structure, moral values and political economy of American capitalism is fit for human beings.” And activist Arundhati Roy recently asked, even more pointedly, “Is there life after democracy?”

“The question here, really, is what have we done to democracy?” Roy exclaims. “What have we turned it into? What happens once democracy has been used up? When it has been hollowed out and emptied of meaning? What happens when each of its institutions has metastasized into something dangerous? What happens now that democracy and the free market have fused into a single predatory organism with a thin, constricted imagination that revolves almost entirely around the idea of maximizing profit?”

Moore and Roy are rightfully distraught at the damage that free market capitalism has done to Western democracy — but my own perspective is both more apocalyptic and more positive. I see the current state of acute distress as an indication of the coming collapse of the democracy-and-chaos partnership.

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