Now that I’ve started trying to look at the system of visions as an interactive whole, rather than dealing with each vision in isolation, I keep finding new ways in which the development of the latest visions is driven by interactions among the older ones.

Most recently, I’ve been struck by the degree to which the association between chaos and holism emerged in precise resonance with the rise and fall of the reason-and-scientific-materialism partnership. The new association came into being at the same time as the partnership in the 1860’s, was closely associated with it during its peak in the 1870’s, and became increasingly independent after the partnership faltered in the 1880’s.

The key to this resonance, I believe, is that both the partnership and the new association combined an inner experience-based vision with a scientifically-based vision. As a result, they were addressing the same philosophical problems and responding to the same emotional needs — and were thus bound to be either collaborators or rivals.

Up to now, I’ve been emphasizing the intellectual basis of these associations between visions and how they grow out of our desire to construct a coherent picture of existence. But on the emotional level, something even more powerful and dynamic is going on — which might be described as the need for a sense of belonging.

When we have that sense on a personal level, it appears to us that everything in the world is in harmony and that we are in harmony with it. But if ever we lose it, we are beset by feelings of alienation, meaninglessness, or just plain wrongness.

Much the same is true in terms of the visions. As long as our various areas of experience can be reconciled within a context of higher knowledge, the culture as a whole remains in balance. But once they fall out of attunement, the entire society is overwhelmed by a pervasive sense of alienation.

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So — it’s time to tackle holism.

I’m finding, however, that I can’t simply jump into the middle of the story. I need to start with holism’s predecessor, scientific materialism, in order to trace out where holism came from and the special problems it was designed to solve.

In the previous entry, I discussed the associations that each socially-based vision forms with the scientifically-based vision that comes before it and the inner experience-based vision that comes after. These relationships appear simple and obvious to us, because they derive from the built-in affinities that human societies share with the natural world and with the human mind.

Reconciling scientific and inner experience visions is far more difficult, however, because the physical universe and the realm of dreams, hallucinations, and mystical intimations are as far apart on the spectrum of human experience as it is possible to get. Not only do we run into philosophical contradictions if we try to take both of them at face value, but even the seemingly elementary question of how mind and matter interact remains a profound mystery.

And yet, despite these impediments, our abiding conviction that all our experiences must derive from a common source compels us to keep devising formulas that will allow us to regard these two aspects of existence as facets of a single reality.

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At the end of the previous entry, I promised that this one would carry the story along by discussing the flowering of holism in the early 20th century. I soon realized, however, that I’d missed an important step in the development of the association between horizontalism and creative imagination — so I need to backtrack and deal with that before I move on.

When creative imagination started hanging out with horizontalism in the 1970’s, the relationship initially took shape within the terms of multiculturalism, and its chief exponents were neo-pagans and chaos magicians. But in recent years, the same association has been most apparent in the context of direct democracy, and its leading devotees are now computer hackers and self-professed pirates.

That may seem like a natural progression when viewed from the perspective of creative imagination — especially since there has always been a significant overlap between magicians and hackers — but from the viewpoint of horizontalism, the underlying dynamic is far more complex.

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As I’ve been tracing out the history of the chaos vision, I’ve come to a number of conclusions which affect my understanding of the development of the visions in general. Most strikingly, I’ve started realizing that the interactions among visions — which I’ve compared in the past to a Rube Goldberg device because of their seemingly chaotic nature — actually function with the precision and regularity of clockwork.

This comes as a surprise to me — but it probably shouldn’t. Rube Goldberg devices, after all, achieve the illusion of an effortless cascade of random impacts only through an exacting adjustment of angles and timing.

It does mean, however, that instead of viewing each individual vision as being bound from the start upon its own relatively fixed course, I’m going to have to reconceive of the entire system of visions as a single, elaborate piece of machinery whose evolution is subject to constant modification through the ongoing interactions of its parts.

That’s a challenge — so perhaps the best way to start is by pausing, taking stock, and devoting the next several entries to chronicling the various relationships that each vision experiences in the course of its lifetime.

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I keep thinking I’m finally about to beat my way out of the 1940’s — and then I realize there are still crucial pieces I need to put in place. For one thing, it doesn’t seem possible to make sense of chaos without taking account of its interactions with the democracy vision.

I’ve emphasized in past entries that each type of vision relies on visions of one of the other types to fill out its picture of existence. Inner experience visions draw upon scientific visions for concrete embodiments of their mystical intimations. Scientific visions depend on social visions to provide a humanly relevant context for their raw facts and theories. Social visions look to inner experience visions to offer a transcendent justification for their allocation of political authority.

These influences tend to be highly abstract and even metaphysical in nature — but there are also simpler countercurrents that flow in the opposite direction. Chaos, for example, provided democracy with a philosophical justification based on the universal capacity for higher knowledge, while in return it acquired an attachment to the ideals of individual freedom and universal rights without which such a democracy cannot function.

This kind of reverse influence occurs primarily during a vision’s earliest phases, when it is mystical and free-floating and has little need of concrete embodiments, political justifications, or proofs of human relevance. In the case of the chaos vision, this means that the crucial engagement with democracy began in the late 18th century and was pretty well complete in the opening decades of the 20th.

The product of that interaction might aptly be called “democratic chaos,” since it is not an integral part of either vision but a synthesis that combines elements of both. That synthesis was well established by 1920 and has changed little since, but it remains a vital force in our culture to the present day.

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I interrupted my excursion through 1940’s science fiction several entries back because I kept feeling there was something important going on in Robert Heinlein’s short novel Waldo that I hadn’t yet come to grips with. And though I still don’t have the complete answer, I’ve become convinced that the underlying dynamic of that story is to be found in the nexus between higher knowledge and elite control.

There’s a strange tension in Waldo, which I believe arises from the fact that Heinlein was confident of his own ability to cope with a universe in which nothing is certain and anything is possible but seriously doubted whether the average person could entertain such a belief without compromising their sanity.

He therefore performed a kind of fictional bait-and-switch, starting off with hints of chaos on the loose but then swapping in a conclusion where Chaos is easily reduced to Order to suit the preferences of a nobody-in-particular like Waldo. And he cut the story short before this double-shuffle could be exposed as the con job it was.

Moreover, it wasn’t just higher knowledge that Heinlein felt most people were unable to handle, but difficult facts or decisions of any kind. Over and over, his stories were constructed as arguments for the necessity of elite control.

This was not a widely-held position at the time. The period from roughly 1915 to 1970 was dominated by a struggle to eliminate the old 19th century class system, and the populist impulse was particularly strong in the late 1930’s and early 40’s. But there were always a few people who, like Heinlein, had little faith in self-government and pinned their hopes on the emergence of a new elite based on merit rather than heredity.

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I finished the previous entry with an expression of surprise at the idea that the first half of the 20th century might have produced an outbreak of higher knowledge as world-changing as those of the first millennium BC and the Renaissance. But the more I think about it, the more sense it makes — and I’m realizing that my doubts were based on nothing but my own prejudices.

One of those prejudices involves my dislike of the kind of American exceptionalism which proclaims that there has never been a time or place in the history of the world to equal the contemporary United States. I’ve always hated that attitude, and part of what drew me to the idea of historical cycles in the first place was a desire to demonstrate that whatever is happening here and now has happened many times before.

But setting the boosterism aside, there really was a great historical turning-point in the early 20th century that was centered in the United States. This was not due to any special American virtue, but was because the U.S. — like Classical Greece or Renaissance Europe — had the advantage of being on the periphery of the civilized world and therefore free of the most extreme forms of elite domination.

A more serious source of my doubts, however, was the fact that 20th century culture offers nothing to equal either the grandeur of the great philosophical and religious formulations of the ancient world or the brilliance of the art and literature of early modern Europe. The best American popular culture — whether pulp fiction, Hollywood films, or jazz — displayed an impressive blend of energy and grace, but it also suffered from a relative shallowness and superficiality.

I wrestled with that dilemma with for a week — until it finally struck me that this apparent shallowness was, as they say, not a bug but a feature.

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Since there’s nothing that human beings can’t crap up, even higher knowledge has its downside.

Many of the problem arise because there are never more than a few individuals who can consistently experience the insights of higher knowledge in a focused manner. It therefore falls upon those few — the shamans, prophets, and visionaries — to convey their intuitions to the rest of us in the form of art, philosophy, and religion.

But as they do, distortions inevitably creep in. Compromises are made with what the audience already believes to be true. The message is watered down to look more like the simple cause-and-effect of ordinary knowledge. And insights that can not be simplified may take on an air of impenetrable mystery that discourages further inquiry.

The result is a kind of “higher knowledge for dummies” — which is as close as most of us are likely to get to the real thing. And though even this diluted version may trigger flashes of genuine higher knowledge in those who embrace it, it can also act as an impediment if they take it at face value and refuse to seek further.

And this is what happens in ideal situations, when those transmitting the messages of higher knowledge do so with no thought of personal gain. If elements of ego and dominance are allowed to intrude, things can go very wrong indeed.

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I’m not done with my survey of wacky 1940’s science fiction, but I’m finding that I can’t proceed without taking a break to define more clearly what I mean by “higher knowledge.”

I’ve made a variety of assertions about higher knowledge in the course of these entries. Each of them is true within its own frame of reference, but they come at the subject from different angles and have different implications, and I suspect that even my own thinking on the subject has gotten a bit fuzzy and could use some sorting out.

I suggested two years ago that from a scientific viewpoint, higher knowledge can be understood in terms of a theory that the human brain generates sudden “neuronal avalanches,” which spark intuitive insights by creating novel connections among scattered bits of information.

When I first mentioned this idea, I associated it with recent speculation that an evolutionary leap to a new form of brain organization around 80,000 years ago might have distinguished us modern humans from our equally intelligent but less creative forebears. I still believe that, but I’m now convinced that the change must go back fully 200,000 years, to the very dawn of our species, and that we humans have from the start been the people of higher knowledge.

The theory of neuronal avalanches, however, can only take us so far — because our sudden intuitive flashes lead not only to the recognition of new relationships among existing information, but also to what appear to be profound insights into the nature of reality itself.

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Heinlein’s story Waldo is endlessly fascinating but also endlessly frustrating, because it is so self-contradictory. It starts off as a sharply delineated roadmap of the shift from reason to chaos — but then abruptly turns on its heels and attempts to stuff chaos back into the box of scientific materialism. And there’s no obvious reason why.

The story presents us with two very different representatives of higher knowledge. One is the ancient hex doctor, Gramps Schneider, who still holds by the assumptions of the reason vision and apparently regards the Other World as a literal spirit realm. The other is the mad Dr. Rambeau, who embraces chaos and sees the universe as a place of total uncertainty where anything can happen.

Waldo, in contrast, has absolutely no awareness of higher knowledge and believes only in scientific materialism.. He dismisses Rambeau as unhinged but is willing to give credence to Schneider’s statements — at least to the extent that he can redefine them in his own materialistic terms.

He therefore starts by assuming that “everything Schneider had to say was coldly factual and enlightened, rather than allegorical and superstitious.” This leads him to the conclusion that Schneider must be describing an alternate universe, “a literal, physical ‘Other World’ … even though he had not used conventional scientific phraseology.” And on that basis, Waldo develops a theory in which both occultism and Fortean anomalies can be plausibly explained “from the standpoint of a coextensive additional continuum.”

A similar argument can be found in many SF stories of the period where superstitious native beliefs are shown to have a rational scientific foundation. In this case, however, Heinlein leaves the reader with a not-so-subtle implication that Gramps Schneider is the person of genuine knowledge and Waldo the hapless native trapped in an overly-limited frame of reference.

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