My theory of history as a sequence of visions, which I described in the previous entry, grew out of an earlier version of the same idea in which I saw every historical era as shaped by a distinctive worldview that sets the tone for its art, technology, and social institutions. I was forced to set that simpler approach aside, however, when I attempted to define the worldviews of the 19th and 20th century more precisely and realized that each one had consisted of several discrete components.

I gradually developed that insight into the concept of a sequence of visions, each one rising and falling on the heels of the one before. As I did, I came to perceive every worldview as the product of a unique partnership between two mature visions, supplemented by a third, slightly younger vision that plays the outsider role and serves as both a source of novelty and a focus of discontent.

Although the specific visions differ from one era to the next, there is always one of each type — scientific, social, and inner experience. This means that taken in concert, they provide the basis for a well-balanced philosophical synthesis which for a time appears capable of explaining all of existence.

Eventually, though, every such synthesis develops cracks. It fails to deliver on its promises, the component visions fall into conflict, and finally it comes apart at the seams — setting off a brief but intense period of intellectual and political turmoil.

And when the turmoil ends and the dust clears, everything has changed. The oldest vision of the three has been discredited and discarded, the second in line has been reformed and modernized, and the outsider vision has cast off its wild, adolescent ways and turned into a mature and dependable leader of society.

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It’s been just over three years since I started using this blog to lay out a theory of human history as controlled by an evolving sequence of visions of the underlying nature of reality.

My original intention was to present the basic elements of this theory in a simple manner and then work my way forward from prehistoric times, showing how the successive visions have been manifested in historical events, philosophy, and art. However, I soon found myself caught up in something very different — a prolonged attempt to refine the theory itself.

Since then, I’ve been wrestling with fundamental questions involving the dynamic behind the rise of new visions and the decline and fall of old ones. Over the last year, I’ve finally answered most of those questions to my own satisfaction — but in the process, this blog itself has become a sorry tangle, a veritable bird’s next of overlapping themes and repeated self-corrections.

So what I mean to do is start afresh — at least to a degree. I’m not going to rehash arguments I’ve already made or attempt to prove that the sequence of visions exists and works the way I say it does. That’s what the last three years have been about. Instead, I plan to sketch out the broad picture and then trace the sequence of visions through history, pretty much as I meant to do in the first place.

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I’ve gotten awfully deep in the weeds the past few months as I’ve tried to pin down the exact mechanisms underlying the cycle of visions. But I’m coming back round to where I started last fall — with Robert Heinlein and the chaos vision — and the end finally appears to be in sight.

This extended side-quest began when I realized there had been two very different approaches to the chaos vision in 1940’s SF. For writers like Robert Heinlein or Isaac Asimov who were still attached to scientific materialism, chaos might appear as either a tolerable anomaly or an apocalyptic threat to order and sanity. But for someone like Henry Kuttner or Fredric Brown, the wacky workings of the subconscious mind were an essential means of navigating the fluidity and uncertainty of a holistic universe.

That surprised me, because I’d previously thought of the visions as unitary paradigms that might evolve over time but but were self-consistent at any given moment. Now I needed to figure out how a single vision could present two such very different faces simultaneously — and I found my answer in the associations that each vision forms with those immediately senior and junior to it.

I’d been aware of those associations for a long time, but I’d regarded them as merely alliances of convenience, like the current affiliation between the internet-based holists of Anonymous and the radical horizontalists of Occupy Wall Street. I hadn’t believed these alliances could affect the visions in any deep and permanent way — but I found myself forced to conclude that they did.

That conclusion, in turn, brought forth answers to questions that had baffled me for years: What keeps the cycle of visions in motion? Why does every vision eventually wear out and lose its original transcendence? And what enables mature visions to enter into socially powerful partnerships even though their native transcendence has been exhausted?

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Over the past few entries, I’ve been trying to pin down the exact sequence of events that took the holism vision from being a hot new thing in the late 1910’s and early 20’s, to becoming culturally marginalized in the middle 30’s, and then into a fruitful association with the new-born horizontalism vision by the end of the decade.

The first step in that sequence was when the democracy vision emerged from the counterculture of the 1910’s in the perfect Goldilocks position — neither too old and tired nor too new and untested — to be accepted as the consensus vision of the era.

The second step came when democracy entered into a partnership with a pared-down version of scientific materialism, depending on the older vision to reinforce its bottom-up view of society while not getting in the way of its agenda of human triumphalism.

The third step took place around 1934, when the chaos vision was hauled into the orbit of the emerging scientific-materialism-and-democracy partnership, at the cost of its long-time relationship with holism.

And the fourth occurred in 1936-39, when holism responded to its growing isolation by forming a new association with horizontalism.

When I first discussed this series of events, I compared it to a Rube Goldberg machine, with visions randomly bouncing off each other — but I’m finally starting to understand that it was both orderly and inevitable.

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For a brief period in the early 1920’s, holism might have appeared to be on the verge of sweeping scientific materialism aside entirely. It had the philosophical ambition, the artistic creativity, and the popular excitement that the older vision lacked. And yet that never happened. Instead, scientific materialism made a triumphant comeback, pushing the holism vision to the margins of the culture, where it would remain for the next several decades.

On one level, there was nothing strange about this, since the same thing happens at the end of every counterculture. The powerful dynamic that has favored change and innovation burns itself out and is replaced by a widespread impulse to retreat from the sea of infinite possibility and regroup in more familiar territory.

Once that urge to restabilize the culture takes hold, it quickly becomes obvious that the newest visions are not yet mature enough to provide the basis of a social consensus. They are too mystical and otherworldly, or too radical and untested in the crucible of practical politics, or too prone to fly off in all directions. They need more time to ripen and discover their place in the larger scheme of things.

In the case of the 1920’s, this means that society could not cast its lot with the upstart new association of chaos and holism — but neither was it prepared to revert to the discredited partnership of reason-and-scientific-materialism. Instead, it gravitated towards the sweet spot between those two extremes: the democracy vision.

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The most radical implications of W.E. Ritter’s philosophy of “organismalism” could not have been apparent when he published The Unity of the Organism in 1918.

For one thing, there was a crucial vagueness in his assertion that “the organism in its totality is as essential to an explanation of its elements as its elements are to an explanation of the organism.” Was he simply trying to say that science could not understand cells or organs without a recognition of the roles they played in the complete organism? Or did he have something deeper in mind?

Over the next few years, however, both the vocabulary and the concepts of the new philosophy came into sharper focus. By 1926, Jan Smuts had introduced the more streamlined term “holism,” which he defined in the 1927 Encyclopedia Britannica as “the theory which makes the existence of ‘wholes’ a fundamental feature of the world.”

“It regards natural objects, both animate and inanimate, as ‘wholes’ and not merely as assemblages of elements or parts,” Smuts explained. “It looks upon nature as consisting of discrete, concrete bodies and things, and not as a diffusive homogeneous continuum. And these bodies or things are not entirely resolvable into parts; in one degree or another they are wholes which are more than the sum of their parts, and the mechanical putting together of their parts will not produce them or account for their characters and behaviour.”

Ritter was quick to adopt this simpler terminology of wholes and parts. In a book co-authored with one of his students in 1928, he wrote, “Wholes are so related to their parts that not only does the existence of the whole depend on the orderly cooperation and interdependence of its parts, but the whole exercises a measure of determinative control over its parts. … Structurally, functionally, and generatively, they are reciprocals of each other.”

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I’ve spent the past two weeks battling my way through the book which is considered to be the first expression of holism as a coherent philosophy: W.E. Ritter’s The Unity of the Organism; or, The Organismal Conception of Life (1918). Ritter’s work is generally acknowledged to have set off the flood of holistic writings that appeared over the following decade — but I’m finding it hard to understand just why it made the impact it did.

For one thing, the book doesn’t seem to have much to do with holism as we now know it. For another, it’s not particularly well-written, but is as awkward throughout as its title. I’ve been tempted to conclude that it merely said the right things at the right time to appeal to people who were desperate for any alternative to mechanistic science.

And yet I keep feeling that buried within the clumsy language is a message that is as relevant today as it was a century ago — if we can only tune our ears to catch what Ritter was really saying.

At the present moment, after all, the holism vision has lost much of its original transcendence. It’s in serious need of something that can remind it of its origins and stretch it beyond its present limitations — and how better to do that than by dialing up the radio message from the past that is The Unity of the Organism?

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In previous entries, I’ve suggested that a counterculture is born when the senior member of a dominant partnership is discredited, the partnership collapses, and the junior member is left demoralized and directionless. As I focus on the development of the holism vision in the early 20th century, however, I’m reminded that the collapse of a partnership is actually an extended and complex process.

For one thing, each dominant partnership undergoes a final revival during the period immediately preceding its collapse. At that time, the intellectual ferment and political turmoil of the “romantic break” die down, the younger visions are pushed to the margins of society, and there is an overwhelming desire for social stabilization and tranquility.

But it’s exactly that desire which leads to disillusionment with the partnership when it fails to make good on its promises of security.

Then, even after the senior vision has failed and brought the partnership down with it, the junior vision does not immediately relinquish its hold on the social consensus. Instead, lacking any external constraints on its authority, it becomes more arrogant and self-willed than ever — and the resulting moral void is what really triggers the start of the counterculture.

This dynamic can be seen on full display at the present moment. An initial crisis — the attacks of September 11 — provided the conditions for a final revival of the democracy-and-chaos partnership in something resembling its classic Reagan-era configuration. In the upshot, however, the Bush administration not only undercut democracy but helped bring on a second and more devastating crisis, the great financial meltdown of 2008.

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Like all newborn visions, the holism vision in the 19th century was almost impossible to express directly. Intimations of it can be glimpsed in art and imaginative fiction, or in off-the-cuff remarks by otherwise conventional scientists, but it was never consciously articulated. Even when it became more visible towards the end of the century, it remained largely ineffable.

The easiest way to trace the emergence of holism is thus through its association with the slightly older chaos vision. Between about 1886 and 1926, these two visions operated in concert to challenge the faltering but still dominant partnership of reason and scientific materialism.

The association of chaos and holism was a natural rival to the existing partnership. Both combined an inner experience-based vision with a scientifically-based vision, and both were intended to reconcile mind with matter and human beings with the cosmos. However, they did so from different starting premises and arrived at very different conclusions.

The pairing of reason and scientific materialism emphasized objective knowledge based on an arms-length relationship between a rationally-constructed material world and a human mind which could stand outside that world and master its secrets.

In stark contrast, the pairing of chaos and holism focused on participatory knowledge of a cosmos that might never be fully comprehended but could be engaged with through empathy and intuition. And the shift from one model to the other defines almost everything that differentiates the early 20th century from the 19th.

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I have never had a satisfactory explanation for how the cycle of visions might have gotten started or for what makes it repeat in such a regular manner. This lack of a plausible mechanism prevented me from writing about the visions for many years, until I finally decided to just jump in and say what I know and leave the larger questions for later. But in recent months, I think I’ve finally started to catch sight of an answer.

Part of that answer has to do with the complex web of associations and mutual influences among the visions that keeps the system in motion. The underlying dynamic however, appears to involve the constant tension between higher knowledge and ordinary knowledge.

Those two forms of knowledge are typically in disagreement about the nature of reality, but occasionally we manage to identify some aspect of our everyday experience with our mystical sense of being participants in a larger and more meaningful universe. The most powerful of these intimations have the potential of developing into a vision that is shared by an entire culture.

When a new vision appears, its ready access to higher knowledge enables it to become a vehicle for creativity and inspiration, capable of sending people out to build machines, found empires, or upgrade their moral standards. But over time, every vision starts to identify with what it has already brought into being and lose sight of higher possibility. It grows narrow and defensive, becomes a vehicle for power politics and elite control, and dooms itself to failure and replacement.

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