When I described Julian Assange a few entries back as the living embodiment of the holism vision, I meant it quite literally. It was not intended as a metaphor. That really is how these things appear to work.

We humans may believe we invent the visions — but it might be equally true to say the visions invent us. At every step, they push us to become more fully human, or even larger than human. And they operate as if they have a life and identity of their own, going well beyond anything consciously intended by their makers.

In the course of writing these entries, I’ve repeatedly found myself saying things like “the holism vision did such-and-such” and wondered if I was just using lazy shorthand for “the adherents of the holism vision.” But it doesn’t feel like shorthand. It feels like a truthful description.

If the visions really do possess a kind of autonomous existence, however, that raises the question of how they organize, maintain, and perpetuate themselves.

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The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart has been a beacon of sanity for many of us over the last decade, but since his official Rally to Restore Sanity two weeks ago, some of the luster seems to have worn off.

Last Thursday, Stewart appeared with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow to explain why he had concluded the rally by characterizing MSNBC as the liberal equivalent of the far-right wingnuts at Fox News. I didn’t watch the interview, however.

I had been more than a bit disheartened that instead of the rally achieving mythic reconciliation with Stephen Colbert’s simultaneous March to Keep Fear Alive, as I had hoped, it had simply turned Colbert into a cardboard villain and melted him. That unconvincing triumph over the shadow self was what led up to Stewart delivering the plea for civility and moderation that included a false equivalence between MSNBC and Fox.

In the aftermath, I agreed with those who described the rally as no more than an extended episode of The Daily Show — the comedic equivalent of 1979’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Or perhaps not even that good, because it seemed as though Stewart had missed a crucial opportunity to take on a larger cultural role and there would be no second chance to get it right with his own Wrath of Khan.

I would discover, however, that Stewart had not merely missed the chance but had actively avoided it.

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After I’d finished writing “The Great Migration Revisited” last week, I kept thinking about the mythic implications of sex with Neanderthals — and that led me, by a natural progression, to thinking about Lady Gaga.

I’d started thinking about Lady Gaga anyway, because she’s clearly important in terms of the cultural cycles that I’ve been charting and I want to understand where she fits in. But I haven’t been able to make much of her as a singer — her music frankly sounds to me like warmed-over bad-girl pop and I don’t hear anything new in it.

Lady Gaga as performance art, though — that’s something I can work with. So I took a book out from the library, Lady Gaga: Critical Mass Fashion by Lizzy Goodman, and I’ve been studying it for clues.

The first thing that strikes me about Gaga is the progression of her style, which went from basic rock ‘n’ roll outlaw in 2007, to hot blond with lots of leg and cleavage in 2008 — and then suddenly in early 2009 to a variety of outfits in which the human form seems to vanish under patterns of geometrical abstraction: triangular plates, spikes, bubbles, hoops, or disco ball mirrors.

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At this point, I’ve said pretty much everything I feel a need to say about the sequence of visions over the last few hundred years. My immediate plans are to pick up where I left off a year ago with the development of the earliest visions, interspersed with entries on the latest intellectual, social, and political developments.

But there’s one big question I’m still wrestling with. That’s the matter of those mysterious “shadow” visions that seem to parallel and influence the normal visions without ever losing their separate identity.

Like the ordinary visions, the shadow visions come in three flavors — scientific, social, and inner experience — and a new one pops up whenever a normal vision of the same type starts to falter. For that reason, I originally took them to be offshoots of the normal visions — but I’ve gradually come to the conclusion they form a continuing stream of their own, one that may even be older than the ordinary visions.

There is something very primal about the shadow visions. They appeal more to the emotions than to the intellect. They invoke the symbology of blood and sex, and though they can release powerful positive aspirations, they can equally well inspire destruction and terror.

They also seem to lack any firm philosophical or moral basis. In fictional terms — and at times in actuality — they are represented by the mad scientists, bomb-throwing anarchists, and occult secret masters who aim to revolutionize the world without much thought as to what comes after.

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The story I’ve been telling for the past year is almost up to the present day, and I’m starting to think longingly of getting back to the Paleolithic. But there are still a few points left to cover.

There’s not a lot to be said about the period from 1993 to 2008. I see those years as equivalent to 1950-63, when the science-and-democracy partnership was at its peak of unchallenged dominance and chaos and holism were developing slowly at the margins.

In much the same way, democracy-and-chaos has been in the driver’s seat until just recently. The Clinton years brought us an emphasis on the touchy-feeliness of the domesticated chaos vision. The Bush years featured a late-stage, repressive, we-had-to-destroy-the-village-in-order-to-save-it obsession with democracy.

But the financial meltdown of 2008-2009 has brought the democracy-and-chaos partnership to a state of collapse. Democracy has become a hollow shell, and chaos is floundering without the steady hand of democracy to channel its hyper-individualism. Only the Tea Partiers, who pride themselves on their contempt for both government and the common good, appear to be fully in touch with the moment.

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There’s much more going on during a romantic break, of course, than simply a new “shadow” vision popping up to reject the dominant partnership. The same spirit of opposition also infuses the emergent visions, provoking them to bring forth dreams of utopian alternatives to the existing order of things.

It seems as though every dominant partnership makes its most significant contributions during its initial phase, when it is focused on basic problem-solving. But as it shifts from innovation to consolidation, a kind of ruthless pragmatism takes over. That shift is what provokes the distinctive mixture of cynicism and frustrated idealism that marks the romantic break.

The science-and-democracy partnership, for example, was at its best during the New Deal years of the middle and late 1930’s — but with the onset of World War II, this period of social reform came to an end. Democratic freedoms became the stuff of wartime propaganda even as they were being suspended for the duration. By the end of the war, the United States and its allies had adopted policies, such as the bombing of civilians, that would have to be considered war crimes by any objective standard.

The equivalent moral breakdown for the democracy-and-chaos partnership occurred between about 1984 and 1987. It was marked by the Reagan administration’s illegal arming of the Contras, the Iran-Contra affair of 1985-86, the savings and loan scandal, and the “greed is good” mentality skewered in the 1987 film Wall Street.

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“Some dishonest Booksellers, called Land-Pirats, who make it their practice to steal Impressions of other mens Copies.”
— J. Hancock, Brooks’ String of Pearls, 1668 (quoted in the Oxford English Dictionary)

“The last man in the world sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door.”
— Fredric Brown

In 1984, Steven Levy concluded his book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution with a melancholy epilogue titled “The Last of the True Hackers.”

“A man who called himself the last true hacker sat in a room on the ninth floor of Tech Square,” it begins. “His name was Richard Stallman, and he spoke in a tense, high-pitched voice that did not attempt to veil the emotion with which he described, in his words, the ‘rape of the artificial intelligence lab.’ He was thirty years old. His pale complexion and scraggly dark hair contrasted vividly with the intense luminescence of his deep green eyes. The eyes moistened as he described the decay of the Hacker Ethic at Tech Square.”

As explained by Levy, Stallman saw the ethic which had emerged among the original computer hackers of the late 50’s and 60’s as a form of communal anarchism based upon “a concern for constructive cooperation.” But in the 70’s, that first generation grew up, entered the corporate world, and accepted its restrictions — most notably the enforcement of software copyrights.

Around the same time, the Pentagon bureaucrats who controlled access to ARPAnet — the earliest form of the Internet — became obsessed with security measures. And though Stallman fought “to delay the fascist advances with every method I could,” he found himself without allies.

“I don’t believe that software should be owned,” he told Levy. “Because [the practice] sabotages humanity as a whole. It prevents people getting the maximum benefit out of the program’s existence.”

That interview in the fall of 1983 marked a moment of great frustration for Stallman. But in his very despair can be seen the signs of a romantic break about to explode.

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A few months ago, I wrote about how each dominant partnership gives rise to a philosophy that attempts to explain all aspects of existence in terms derived from its two member visions.

In that entry, I focused on the philosophy of science-and-democracy, whose core belief was that everything in existence could be reduced to simple universal laws like those of physics, and I identified Isaac Asimov’s Foundation stories as an epitomal early example.

I also suggested in passing that the philosophy of democracy-and-chaos, which arose in the 1980’s, was structured around a belief that “the democratic model of dynamic interactions among different interest groups” provided a better basis for understanding the universe than the mathematical formulas of science.

Since then, however, I’ve realized that I was mistaken — if only because any model based on “dynamic interactions” has to be an aspect of multiculturalism. The actual philosophy of democracy-and-chaos is both simpler and broader, and the best way I know to explain it starts with the Foundation stories.

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The closer I get to the present, the more difficult it is to make out exactly what’s been going on with the visions — and I’m finding creative imagination particularly challenging. This is partly because it’s still in its proto-stage, overshadowed by holism and multiculturalism, and has yet to take on a fully distinctive form.

But even the initial crystallization of creative imagination remains obscure. I’ve pegged it as falling around 1978-81, because I see those years as being equivalent to 1936-39, when multiculturalism emerged, but I haven’t been able to come up with any literary or artistic examples from that time. My suspicion is that visions based on inner experience, being the most esoteric, take longer than social or scientific visions to make a significant public impact.

I do see clear signs of a shift reflected in Alexei’s and my own work. In the late summer of 1979, as we were embarking on the final version of The World Beyond the Hill, Alexei wrote an introductory chapter that pulled together much of what we had been attempting to say since the early 70’s. It was so full of strange new ideas, however, that we soon realized it didn’t fit into our history of science fiction. We wound up detaching it from the book and submitting it separately for publication under the title “Science Fiction and the Dimension of Myth.”

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Every vision encounters a pivotal moment early in its development when it helps midwife the birth of the vision immediately following it and in the process becomes able to shake off the influence of earlier visions and discover its own true shape and purpose.

For holism, that moment came between about 1936 and 1939. Multiculturalism was born in those years as an extension of the holistic understanding of the natural world to human society, and in return it provided holism with the means to move beyond its original philosophical and scientific roots and become a complete vision of existence.

The proto-holism of the 1920’s and early 30’s was deeply concerned with abstract questions of matter, life, and mind, but it didn’t have much relevance to everyday life. It took the social ideals of multiculturalism to reinvent a holism that did not merely dream of getting back to nature but was ready to provide blueprints for how human beings might live in a more organic relationship to one another and to their environment.

That unsuccessful Frank Lloyd Wright project of 1939, in which seven unique houses were related organically to each other and to a central farming area, was one such blueprint. But there have been others since — all of them showing a strong family resemblance — as holism and multiculturalism have continued to develop and mature together.

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