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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There’s a new article at Washington Monthly, titled “Who Broke America’s Jobs Machine?” that I found quite interesting in itself — and even more interesting for the light it sheds on the visions. It indicates a major change of direction during Roosevelt’s New Deal, previously unknown to me, that appears to be directly related to the emergence of the holism vision in the late 1930’s.
Authors Barry C. Lynn and Phillip Longman argue that starting after World War II, the American economy served as a reliable job-creating machine, with innovative small businesses constantly providing new opportunities for employment and investment. This process was disrupted, however, when the Reagan administration allowed consolidation to take place in nearly all major industries, resulting by the 1990’s in the formation of monopolies and near-monopolies with no interest in innovation.
These corporate Goliaths, Lynn and Longman explain, feel no need to innovate because they find it easier to increase profits by jacking up prices or squeezing their suppliers. At the same time, their dominance inhibits the start-up of potential competitors, or else they buy them out before they can get established. The result is that the job market shrinks and investors have no place to put their money except into financial bubbles.
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Although I’ve been working at understanding the visions for many years, I’ve always tended to focus on the obvious stuff — the fully developed visions that define a culture’s institutions and self-image. This series of entries marks the first time I’ve looked really closely at emergent and proto-emergent visions, and the journey has been full of surprises.
For one thing, I keep discovering that tracing the visions back in time is a lot like falling down Alice’s rabbit-hole. You take a tumble into the abyss and then fall seemingly forever — only to land with a gentle bump at the bottom and find yourself confronted with even greater mysteries.
As I was finishing up the previous entry, for example, I realized that Lewis Carroll was not the only one wrestling with the concept of personhood around 1865-70. He may have taken the philosophical implications to a level of absurdity that no one else would have dared to contemplate, but he was far from alone on the quest.
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As so often seems to happen with this blog, in the course of writing the previous entry I found myself talking confidently about something I’d previously had no inkling of — in this case, the central role played by the concept of “personhood” in the chaos vision. But now that I hear myself saying it, it makes perfect sense.
At the present moment, personhood is a primary moral touchstone of our culture. It defines our most basic values, and questions about precisely who and what can be considered a person lie at the heart of our most heated debates — from abortion to the hunting of whales to the question of whether corporations have a right to free speech.
This position of moral authority goes back to the 1960’s, when personhood was first used to trump the belief of the failing science vision that it was legitimate to treat human beings as objects. The concept of personhood is much older, however. It is as old as the chaos vision itself and is based directly on that vision’s understanding of inner experience.
Simply stated, if you have an inner life — dreams, imagination, self-awareness — you are a person. Without an inner life, you are at best a zombie. And it is the gray areas which generate the arguments.
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I’ve generally been referring to the development of the 1960’s counterculture as if it was all one continuous process. However, it actually consisted of two very different phases, the first extending from 1961 to 1967 and the second from 1968 to about 1976.
The initial phase was dominated by the interaction of two factors. One was the loss of faith in the science-and-democracy partnership that followed the Cuban Missile Crisis and the assassination of John Kennedy. The other was the ongoing realignment of chaos away from scientific materialism and towards holism.
Although they began independently, by 1964 these two factors had begun to interact with one another and create a positive feedback loop. As science-and-democracy collapsed, the science vision was increasingly discredited and its successor, the holism vision, was energized. This shift of cultural energy accelerated the turning of the chaos vision away from science and towards holism, and that in turn provided chaos with the energy and self-confidence to further challenge science-and-democracy.
Every part of this loop was important, but the most pivotal aspect was the rejection of the notion of a mechanistic universe in which nature, society, and even human beings could all be treated as physical objects and manipulated as if in a scientific experiment.
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In the last few years before the 1960’s counterculture found its voice, a dawning sense of the universe as an all-embracing whole was already bubbling up into consciousness. It was still nothing that could be put into words but it was present on an intuitive level, and in 1963-64 it was being expressed more clearly in the music than anywhere else.
Surf music may have been the first to tap into the new holistic awareness, but a similar message was present in Phil Spector’s “wall of sound” — a technique epitomized by the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” (1963) — and in the harmonies of early Beatles songs. (Not surprisingly, in 1966 the Beach Boys would fuse the wall of sound with surf rock in their groundbreaking Pet Sounds.)
By 1965, a recognition of the latent power in the music had inspired even Bob Dylan to go electric. But the new awareness was not yet accessible to everyone. The outraged folkies who thought Dylan had betrayed them didn’t get it — and neither did the clueless Time magazine intern whose interview of Dylan just before his first electric performance is believed to have inspired the classic line, “Something’s happening here but you don’t know what it is, do you Mr. Jones?”
Right now, at the start of 2010, we’re coming close to the equivalent of that “Mr. Jones” moment, but we’re not quite there. Amazing things are about to happen, there is a sense of almost intolerable imminence — but they haven’t happened yet. And this time, of course, the primary vision will be not chaos but holism, which is in the process of moving away from an alignment with the failed democracy vision — and its model of progress through political reform — and into an alignment with the next social vision.
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Move a single piece in the kaleidoscope and all the rest shift in response — revealing new patterns so obvious you wonder how you missed them the first time. But until that one piece shifts, the pattern remains hidden.
Two months ago, in an entry titled “The Search for Meaning,” I discussed the transition that took place during the 1960’s from visualizing chaos in terms of old-fashioned scientific materialism to visualizing it in terms of holism.
In the hipster version of the chaos vision, the one which had grown stale and tired by 1963, chaos was identified with a universe of soulless atoms plowing blindly through empty space. It was that concept which resonated with black turtlenecks, heroin, abstract expressionism and cool jazz.
But the version of chaos that gave rise to the counterculture drew upon a new image of the universe as a web of energy in which everything flows into everything else. And that holistic embodiment of chaos found its own resonances in paisley and tie-dye, marijuana and LSD, psychedelic art and psychedelic rock.
I wasn’t wrong in my understanding of the transition — but I went astray in thinking that it began only after the rise of the counterculture. The realignment of chaos towards holism actually started several years earlier and was the catalyst which made the counterculture possible.
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