The psychedelic counterculture that had started bubbling up in 1964-65 would remain in the background for a few years, partly because a distinctive 60’s culture was already in full flower. That was the hedonistic, sex-based “swinging Sixties” so nostalgically recalled in the Austin Powers movies — the Sixties of miniskirts, go-go dancers, birth control pills, the Playboy Philosophy, and James Bond movies.

That version of the Sixties was relatively superficial and mindless, although it did prepare the ground for more serious rebellions to come. When I started this series of posts I thought I could just ignore it, but it eventually dawned on me that anything described as “swinging” had to be an aspect of the chaos vision — which meant I needed to pay attention to where it fit in.

So I dredged up memories of my high school days — when I was learning most of what I knew about contemporary society from Mad Magazine — and it struck me that the swinging Sixties must have been largely an extension of the Hollywood hipster culture of the late 50’s.

The Hollywood hipsters reached the peak of their fame in the Kennedy years, when Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis, Jr., and other members of the “Rat Pack” were considered the very embodiment of cool. I was aware of them at the time, of course — at least on the Mad Magazine level — but it would never have occurred to my fourteen year old self that the Hollywood hipsters might be simply the glitzier cousins of the beatniks.

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Come mothers and fathers throughout the land
And don’t criticize what you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command
 Your old road is rapidly agin’.
Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand
 For the times they are a-changin’.

— Bob Dylan, September 1963

Between the summer of 1964 and the spring of 1965, an incredible number of things happened all at once as the visions began shifting and mutating.

The first upheaval to become widely visible was the student protest movement, which began as an outgrowth of the civil rights movement. The March on Washington in August 1963 — where Bob Dylan performed and which inspired “The Times They Are A-Changin'” — was followed a year later by the Freedom Summer of 1964, when young activists flooded into Mississippi to register black voters and some lost their lives.

That September, the University of California at Berkeley attempted to prevent civil rights advocates from soliciting donations on campus. When one former student was arrested while manning an information table, all hell broke loose. Thousands of students surrounded the police car and kept it from leaving until all charges against the activist had been dropped.

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Although the science-and-democracy vision would dominate Western culture through the 1950’s and into the 60’s, its initial mood of brash optimism had started to fade even before World War II ended in 1945.

The accumulated strain of the war years, the terrifying new reality created by the dropping of nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the onset of the Cold War all combined to create a mood of apprehension and paranoia. It was at this point that the chaos vision cut loose from the science-and-democracy partnership and became the primary vehicle for expressing dissatisfaction with the dominant culture.

The resulting mixture of chaos and cynicism is clearly visible in film noir, which combined a hallucinatory sense of an unstable and fundamentally treacherous reality with a profound alienation from the corruption and violence of society.

The roots of film noir are to be found in hard-boiled detective novels and German expressionist films of the 1920’s and early 30’s, both of which had embodied certain aspects of the chaos vision. But the genre developed fully only in the 1940’s — and particularly from 1944 on — when it played a central role in depicting the dark side of science-and-democracy.

Film noir was not to everyone’s taste — and there were plenty of other movies in the late 40’s that presented a more positive view of science-and-democracy — but it was far from alone in its expression of a newly independent and alienated chaos vision.

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Since I began this series of entries in early September, the world has moved very quickly — so quickly that intuition tells me I need to cut to the chase right now and leave my more detailed discussion of the emergence of the chaos vision for a later time.

It is becoming undeniable that the financial crisis which began a year ago has enriched the bankers while screwing everyone else. In just the last few weeks, public sentiment appears to have reached some sort of tipping point, and social critics are starting to suggest that our entire system may be fatally flawed.

Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story, which premiered on October 2, is dedicated to “questioning whether the whole incentive structure, moral values and political economy of American capitalism is fit for human beings.” And activist Arundhati Roy recently asked, even more pointedly, “Is there life after democracy?”

“The question here, really, is what have we done to democracy?” Roy exclaims. “What have we turned it into? What happens once democracy has been used up? When it has been hollowed out and emptied of meaning? What happens when each of its institutions has metastasized into something dangerous? What happens now that democracy and the free market have fused into a single predatory organism with a thin, constricted imagination that revolves almost entirely around the idea of maximizing profit?”

Moore and Roy are rightfully distraught at the damage that free market capitalism has done to Western democracy — but my own perspective is both more apocalyptic and more positive. I see the current state of acute distress as an indication of the coming collapse of the democracy-and-chaos partnership.

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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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A story that went up yesterday at Science Daily caught my eye because it relates to the next post I’ll be putting up — but it’s also pretty cool in itself.

It seems that according to a new study, exposure to things that don’t make sense actually enhances overall cognitive functioning, because it kicks the brain into working harder to find structure and meaning.

According to researcher Travis Proulx, “The idea is that when you’re exposed to a meaning threat –– something that fundamentally does not make sense –– your brain is going to respond by looking for some other kind of structure within your environment. And, it turns out, that structure can be completely unrelated to the meaning threat.”

Proulx and another researcher had one group of subjects read a slightly condensed version of a Kafka story which presented a nonsensical and nightmarish series of events, while another group read a version which had been heavily edited so that it made more sense.

Both groups were then given a test that involved finding hidden patterns in letter-strings — and the group which had read the surreal version was able to identify more patterns and with a higher level of accuracy.

In a second study, people who had been made aware of contradictions in their own behavior also did better on the test. “You get the same pattern of effects whether you’re reading Kafka or experiencing a breakdown in your sense of identity,” Proulx explained

I’m going to have to think about this one a bit more before I comment on it, but I expect I’ll be referring back to it fairly often. It seems to explain an awful lot about human behavior — from the most impressive feats of creative innovation to run-of-the-mill batshit crazy.

Related:

A listing of all my posts on higher knowledge 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.

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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A few months back, I suggested here that fairy tales are far more ancient than generally acknowledged, and that rather than being just a few hundred years old they may date from around 3500-2500 BC.

So it’s nice to see that a new anthropological study has come to much the same conclusion. According to a story published today in the Telegraph:

Dr Jamie Tehrani, a cultural anthropologist at Durham University, studied 35 versions of Little Red Riding Hood from around the world. …

Contrary to the view that the tale originated in France shortly before Charles Perrault produced the first written version in the 17th century, Dr Tehrani found that the varients shared a common ancestor dating back more than 2,600 years.

He said: “Over time these folk tales have been subtly changed and have evolved just like an biological organism. Because many of them were not written down until much later, they have been misremembered or reinvented through hundreds of generations. …

“The oldest tale we found was an Aesopic fable that dated from about the sixth century BC, so the last common ancestor of all these tales certainly predated this. We are looking at a very ancient tale that evolved over time.” …

The original ancestor is thought to be similar to another tale, The Wolf and the Kids, in which a wolf pretends to be a nanny goat to gain entry to a house full of young goats.

Stories in Africa are closely related to this original tale, whilst stories from Japan, Korea, China and Burma form a sister group. Tales told in Iran and Nigeria were the closest relations of the modern European version.

I would definitely like to see a detailed account of this study, and I hope that the method will be applied to other folktales, as well, since it has the potential for illuminating many obscure channels of cultural transition.

The idea of a close link between Iran and Europe, for example, is particularly interesting, since I’ve seen it suggested elsewhere that the Grail legend may be of Iranian origin and derive from what Omar Khayyam referred to (in Edward FitzGerald’s translation) as “Jamshyd’s Sev’n-ring’d Cup.”

For now, however, it’s simply nice to have confirmation that fairy tales — and the worldview they embody — really do have very deep roots.

Iram indeed is gone with all its Rose,
And Jamshyd’s Sev’n-ring’d Cup where no one knows;
But still the Vine her ancient Ruby yields,
And still a Garden by the Water blows.

Related:

A listing of all my posts on the roots of civilization 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.