The period from about 1934 to 1945, when the emerging chaos vision was subordinated to the science-and-democracy partnership, provided an essential stage in the new vision’s development.

Prior to 1934, chaos was still very much the rebellious offspring of reason. Even as it rejected all expectations of a rational universe, it remained dependent on those expectations to give structure and purpose to its rebellion.

By the early 40’s, however, the chaos vision had developed its own identity and sense of purpose. These owed nothing to the reason vision but were derived from the most far-reaching implications of the newly-created synthesis of science and democracy.

The nature of the change can be clearly seen in the difference between Warner Brothers cartoons of 1940-41 — which included the first appearances of Bugs Bunny — and Betty Boop cartoons of just eight years earlier.

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The collapse of the reason-and-science partnership around 1915 permanently undercut faith in reason and for a time also weakened belief in scientific materialism. As described in the previous entry, this provided a window of opportunity for the emergence of a successor to the reason vision — what might be called the chaos vision, since it conceived of existence as endlessly in flux and without fixed form or laws.

The period of maximum openness to new ideas lasted until about 1934, when the science-and-democracy partnership began to crystallize. At that point, faith in science was restored and bizarre or dreamlike expressions of chaos fell out of favor.

Betty Boop and the Marx Brothers were cleaned up and made less nihilistic. Supernatural horror waned in popularity, while the far more science-friendly genre of science fiction flourished. Cartoons and comics increasingly pursued realistic artwork and straightforward narratives.

By the late 30’s, Walt Disney had set new standards for visual realism with his first full-length feature, Snow White (1937). Around the same time, a trend towards pulp-style adventure in comic strips and in the new medium of the comic book climaxed with the introduction of Superman in 1938.

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Crazy-Town

At the same time as the partnership of science and democracy was being put together and then coming to dominate Western culture in the 1930’s and 40’s, a new vision based on inner experience was gradually emerging at the artistic and philosophical fringes of society.

For the previous two centuries, the workings of the human mind had been defined primarily in terms of reason. Reason was considered the highest mental function, the dividing line between human and animal, civilized and savage.

A partnership between reason and science had dominated Western society from roughly 1865 to 1915, in much the same way that the partnership of science and democracy would dominate the mid-20th century. The alliance of those two visions underlay the Victorians’ utopian faith in progress and provided them with a justification for their conquest and colonization of “backwards” nations.

As the 19th century ended, however, there were growing doubts that either the universe or human beings were truly rational — doubts that appeared to be fully confirmed by the horrors of World War I. By the early 1920’s, reason, progress, and civilization itself were widely regarded as sentimental illusions concealing a far bleaker underlying reality.

The twenty years or so between the failure of the reason-and-science partnership around 1915 and the construction of the science-and-democracy partnership starting about 1934 were a strange, wild time. It was a moment of bitter disenchantment and decadence, but also an era of extreme openness to heretical new ideas.

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In the first of this series of posts, I began a discussion of how human history has been shaped by a series of differing visions of the fundamental nature of existence.

These visions are of three distinct types, depending on whether they are based on insights drawn from the observation of nature, from the prevailing social structure, or from inner experience. As the extent of human knowledge in all three areas increases, new visions are formulated that provide an ever-broader perspective — but the same three types recur over and over again.

Throughout the course of history, one vision of each of the three types has been present in every culture. Except during relatively brief periods of transition, however, just two visions actively influence the day-to-day functioning of the society, while the one which is undergoing reformulation develops in relative obscurity on the sidelines.

The two dominant visions gradually establish a tightly integrated partnership, which provides the culture with a set of universally accepted consensus beliefs that help maintain its integrity, coherence, and sense of purpose.

From the 1930’s to the 1960’s, for example, the consensus beliefs of the United States grew out of a partnership of two visions that were most commonly known at the time as “science” and “democracy.”

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Over the past month or so, I’ve started sketching out the rudiments of three different ancient visions of the underlying nature of reality — the scientifically-based transformative vision, the socially-based kinship vision, and the inner experience-based spirit vision.

In various combinations and interpretations, these three visions guided and defined all prehistoric cultures. Even today they underlie the worldviews of the few remaining groups that still preserve an archaic hunter-gatherer or tropical gardener lifestyle.

However, for most of the world — that is, all the parts which undertook the transition to farming, urbanism, and finally civilization — the three archaic visions eventually proved inadequate to deal with changing conditions. They failed one after the other and were replaced by others that took better account of new scientific knowledge, new possibilities of social organization, and new understandings of inner experience.

As time went by, those later visions failed as well and were replaced by still newer ones. This process of successive replacements of visions as they fall out of touch with current realities has continued uninterrupted — and at an increasingly accelerated pace — ever since.

I have been observing, classifying, and attempting to understand this progression of visions for over thirty years. There are still many things about it that I cannot explain, but there are certain basic points that I recognized very early and have never had reason to doubt.

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