I truly thought I’d be almost done with the 1960’s by now and ready to move on — but in the course of writing the last several entries, I realized I didn’t know nearly as much about how countercultures get started as I thought I did. That’s something I need to sort out.

I’ve believed for years that the 60’s counterculture emerged directly out of earlier, more tentative expressions of the chaos vision and differed from them mainly in being energized by the decline of the science-and-democracy partnership. That image of energization was what I had in mind when I suggested (in “Moral Agents“) that each vision generates the seeds of its successor during its countercultural peak, because it grows over-confident then and starts to run up again its own limitations and moral weaknesses.

But as I worked on the succeeding entry (“The True Voice of Chaos“), I found myself saying something very different — that the first hints of discontent with the reason vision had been based not on morality but on boredom and that they had appeared as early as the 1730’s, prior to the peak of the reason-based counterculture.

As I thought about that, it occurred to me that perhaps each counterculture begins not as a mere amplification of what has come before but in an attempt to reinvigorate a vision that has already begun losing intensity and mystery as it gains mainstream acceptance.

Was there any suggestion of that happening prior to the rise of the 60’s counterculture? Indeed there was. Around 1962-63, the year that I was finishing high school and preparing to head off to college, the chaos vision appeared to have gone distinctly flat. Rock ‘n’ roll was dead, Hollywood hipsters like Frank Sinatra seemed outdated and irrelevant, and even the beatniks were past their glory days of the late 50’s.

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If Alice in Wonderland represents the peak of Lewis Carroll’s powers as a spinner of pure nonsense, then Through the Looking-Glass is something very different — and far stranger.

Carroll himself was well aware of this. When he was called upon in 1886 to write a preface for a facsimile edition of his original handwritten Alice’s Adventures under Ground, he concluded his otherwise conventionally sentimental remarks by quoting the reaction of a little girl whom he had recently asked whether she had read his books:

“‘Oh, yes,’ she replied readily, ‘I’ve read both of them! And I think’ (this more slowly and thoughtfully) ‘I think “Through the Looking-Glass” is more stupid than “Alice’s Adventures.” Don’t you think so?'”

Carroll offered this anecdote as a self-deprecating joke, but if we take the word “stupid” to mean “bizarre,” “baffling,” and “rationally incomprehensible,” the description becomes oddly apt. Through the Looking-Glass really is more stupid than Alice in Wonderland — and also more profound, more philosophical, and more deeply mystical.

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There is a special problem with inner experience visions that does not affect either scientific or social visions, and that is that the more we learn about ourselves and the world, the less able we are to take the stuff of inner experience at face value. So although the facts of inner experience barely alter, our interpretation of those facts becomes more and more circumscribed.

The shamans of prehistory were genuinely convinced that the mysterious beings they encountered in dreams and hallucinations were visitors from the spirit world. The prophets who created the great world-religions two thousand years ago were less willing to take spirit visitors at face value, but they believed implicitly in the possibility of divine revelation. The early modern creators of the reason vision may have had their doubts about revealed truth, but they were certain that the human mind was a microcosm of the Mind of God and human reason a reliable guide to higher knowledge.

But by the 1860’s, belief in the validity of higher knowledge of any sort was dissipating rapidly, as sophisticated modern intellectuals subjected the contents of their own minds to ever-closer scrutiny. The growing inclination of religion to turn to nature for proofs of divine intervention was one consequence of this radical loss of faith in inner experience. It is no coincidence that the word “agnostic” was coined in 1869 by Thomas Henry Huxley to describe a person who has concluded that any higher reality is not only unknown but unknowable.

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In the moment of total flux that was the 1860’s, with reason and science both mutating rapidly as they headed towards conjunction, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was perhaps the single person best suited to assimilate the possibilities and limitations of this new era and then see beyond them to something completely different.

In his day job, Dodgson was a professor of mathematics, with a professional awareness of the developments in mathematical logic that were helping to draw reason into the narrower confines of the reason-and-science partnership. In his free time, he entertained a lively interest in popular science and invention and was an avid amateur photographer, always getting his hands stained with chemicals and emulsions. On that basis alone, he might have seemed like a surefire advocate of the new reason-and-science partnership.

But despite his fondness for gadgetry, Dodgson had no attachment to the reductionist assumptions of scientific materialism. He was to all outward appearances conventionally religious, and the science books in his personal library were mainly of the sort which argued that science and religion weren’t really in conflict, no matter what anybody might say to the contrary.

Arguments of that sort were getting difficult to maintain by the 1860’s, however, largely as a result of the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859). By offering a mechanistic explanation for the adaptations found in living things, Darwin had effectively kicked the skids out from under the 18th century belief that the hand of God could be seen visibly at work in Nature. It was starting to appear that you could believe in science or in religion but not in both, a dilemma that people like Charles Dodgson found extremely painful.

But Dodgson had a secret way out, one that was not available to just anybody. In his private life, he was a covert heretic, a lover of nonsense and fairy tales and the strange whirling assumptions of the not-quite-emergent chaos vision. And even as science rudely thrust aside the assumptions of traditional religion, Dodgson’s alter ego of Lewis Carroll would concoct a unique amalgam of chaos and mysticism that would break through the constraints of both logic and science.

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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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