| Draft, partial, subject to revision |
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The core of the theory presented here is that a phenomenon related to Michael Washburn's RIST (Regression In the Service of Transcendence), which describes the early stages of individual transformation, might occur on a collective scale as part of a process of cultural transformation. The apparent goal of the transformative process is in both cases the same: a higher state of organisation which Washburn calls Integration. As in the individual case, social transformation would be expected to result not in a utopian end-condition but in some sort of incremental, evolutionary advance.
This paper will not look ahead to the more advanced reintegrative phase of transformation. I see little evidence that this has begun, and have little if any personal experience with it, so am disinclined to offer pure speculation with no supporting data. I will however note that while I will be concerning myself with the early stages of transformation characterised by RIST, the successful (but not guaranteed) conclusion of the whole process is in the attainment of a condition significantly improving on the starting point.
I will interject here that I have just finished Toynbee's Study of History , and sense a strong resonance between his analysis of the lifecycle of civilizations and the ideas I have arrived at from a "Transpersonal Sociology" perspective. At some point hopefully before the demise of Western Civilization, which appears just a bit more likely than it did prior to 9/11/01, I will integrate appropriate quotes from Toynbee into this writing. For the time being, my notes are at the end of the document, and I will content myself with repeating the one most clearly apropos here:
The schism in the body social, which we have been hitherto examining, is a collective experience and therefore superficial. Its significance lies in its being the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual rift. A schism in the souls of human beings will be found to underlie any schism that reveals itself on the surface of the society which is the common ground of these human actors' respective fields of activity; and the several forms which this inward schism may take must now engage our attention.
Apocalyptic prophesies, such as Revelations and the Native American myths involving the Great Purifier and the destruction of the present world and passage of the chosen and saved to the next one, can be seen as allegorical of the individual transformative process, especially as described by Stanislav Grof as a death-rebirth experience characterised by the sequence of Basic Perinatal Matrices, with particular reference to BPM III (titanic struggle, apocalyptic imagery) and BPM IV (final battle, death-and-rebirth, higher integration). I am proposing here that this transformative process may have a collective cultural analogue; as a corollary of this, I propose that apocalyptic imagery, as an outward, collective projection of the process of individual transformation, may be allegorically descriptive of manifestations of a collective transformation. That is, while taking no position on the literal truth of such prophesies, which are rather difficult to verify, I propose that they may contain some level of psychological truth applying to cultural as well as individual transformation.
I have been considering this matter for some years, and have only recently and with considerable trepidation begun to attempt to describe it because the theory is in all senses radical and the supporting data is still quite thin. It is my hope that I am correct and that this process is at present underway. The alternative to transformation appears to be a global society characterised by absolute capitalist hegemony, increasing concentration of wealth and power, spreading totalitarian control, ongoing environmental destruction, and continued reduction of all values to materialist greed: a sort of global strip-mine of the body and strip-mall of the soul. While I have no clear vision of what alternative futures may be, other than eventual environmental and social collapse and some sort of new Dark Age, I hope something better may be found. While the higher integration a transformative process might result in can not be defined before the fact, it would be expected to be an improvement over our present and probable future conditions.
The psychic structure or energetic economy of the individual comprises repressive structures which serve to shield the mental-ego from non-egoic potentials (see the work of Michael Washburn for an explanation of these concepts), to enable the delaying of gratification, and to inhibit behavior and desire inconsistent with the behavioral canon of the social milieu.
The social system of which the individual is a constituent member also has repressive structures and various economies. It is reasonable to assume that the structures of a society are in a relationship of reciprocal reinforcement with the psychic structures of the constituent members, and also that that there is substantial homology between psychic and social structures.
Given a close coupling between individual and social structures, it is reasonable to expect that disturbance of the psychic structures of a substantial portion of the individual members of a given society should affect social structures; also, one can expect that a disturbance of social structures should affect psychic structures in some or all of the members of that society.
Therefore, events such as warfare, economic distress, environmental pressure, or a discrediting or decay of the prevailing cultural canon, all of which are capable of perturbing economic, political and religious social structures, might also be expected to potentially perturb the psychic structures of members of the affected society.
If the cultural canon, comprising the core belief and value systems of a society, is strong, history shows that a society can survive and even be strengthened by external pressures. However, cultural canons can decline; they can be deanimated. The prevailing belief system can be discredited, lose adherents. The value system and behavioral pro- and pre-scriptions are at least partly derived from the belief system; their strength can decline along with it.
A substantial decline of the cultural canon will cause a strong, cohesive society to become a loose affiliation of individuals or family units bound together only by common interest and voluntary association. I suggest that in such an atomised society, psychic structures which were in a relationship of homology and reciprocal reinforcement with social structures rooted in the cultural canon will lose social support and reinforcement. While this effect may or may not be in itself sufficient to compromise these structures, it should at least tend to weaken them.
The decay of the cultural canon, and the concommittent loosening of social and psychic structures, would be from an evolutionary species-centric perspective a natural, positive and adaptive response to a situation in which collective psychosocial structures and the behaviors associated with them have become sub-optimal. An example is discussed below.
Collective derepression would be expected to manifest in a manner dependent on the psychosocial context, on the actual repressive structures being compromised. I will speculate about what might be expected in the current context, with the caveat that these effects may only apply to the current historical moment, and not be generic to the phenomenon per se.
A core characteristic of patriarchal monotheist cultures is devaluation and repression of the feminine. This is a complex phenomenon comprising:
To approach this in another way, patriarchal monotheism can be viewed as mental-egoic consciousness projecting itself, its organisation and its values onto the heavens and then worshiping the result. The values of patriarchal monotheism are those of the mental-ego. The complex anti-feminist anti-naturalism of patriarchal monotheism is a projection of and justification for the mental-ego's repression of non-egoic psychic contents. The existential guilt and unease the the mental-ego feels towards the non-egoic is transmuted to Original Sin, then (in Judaic-rooted religions) blamed on the female in a breathtaking act of cowardice.
Having sketched out some opinions about repression and denigration of the feminine in patriarchal monotheism, and having alluded briefly to the homology and reciprocal reinforcement between this social structure and the psychic organisation of mental-egoic consciousness, we can move on to a consideration of the unwinding of those structures.
I think this process is well-enough advanced that I need not comment extensively on it.
At present, allowed by and evidence of the deanimation of the patriarchal monotheist cultural canon, we see overt Goddess-centered pagan religions such as Wicca. The whole New-Age movement tends towards nature- and Goddess-worship and feminine values, The importance of Mary within Catholicism, and the doctrine of her Assumption, also points in this direction.
This should be self-evident.
Let me just list Greenpeace, Earth First, the Green Party, Amnesty International, American Indian Movement for the time being.
Being the inner core of the phenomenon, this is less obviously manifest. I think it can be inferred from the effects listed above. I would suggest that the existence of Analytical and Transpersonal Psychology is in itself evidence of this revaluation,as mental-egoic consciousness turns from asserting it 'exists because it thinks' to a stance of interest in its origins and hidden aspects.
At the present level of psychosocial development, sexual and aggressive impulses must be controlled by repressive structures in order for complex societies to function. The fact that cultural values alone are insufficient to the task and that criminal codes and punitive force are required, and only partially effective, demonstrates the strength of the drives in question and the difficulty of restraining them.
[Notes: Sexual Derepression already partially discussed. Discuss 'War and rumor of war', random acts of violence, especially 'schoolyard shootings' and other juvenile violence, and road rage].
The transformational process described by Michael Washburn and others is noted as being of necessity idealized: a stylized, linear imaging of a process that instantiates idiosyncratically. While one is unlikely to experience much Integration before experiencing Regression, stages may overlap and progress can reverse: rather than a linear ever-ascending progression, the spiral path we discuss can wander and meander like the irrational, crazed, exuberant, abundant, whimsical and vital thing it seems to be. Indeed, it there are core purposes in life, then one of them appears to be to spread (these ideas are explored more fully in this paper) and another appears to be to transform towards higher degrees of complexity, organisation and integration. If it should turn out to be true that this is a core motif of living systems, then both individual and cultural transformation would be examples of it.
Societies are composed of individuals who are spread across a spectrum of psychological development. Even in the most advanced societies, there are substantial numbers of people who seem more body-egoic and pre-operational than fully mental-egoic and formal-operational. Given this spectrum, it is possible that processes occuring in such aggregates of heterogeneous elements could be quite spread-out, with for example elements of Integration appearing in some before Regression is widespread, or possibly Regression appearing very readily in those who are already naturally so inclined. Alternately, society might exert something like a harmonic phase-locking effect on its members; this would reduce such diffusion and amorphousness.
There appears to be a substantial increase in female bisexuality, or at least in its visibility, particularly among younger women. Speaking anecdotally, from limited personal experience, but also alluding to the music of Ani Difranco, who seems like an excellent example {and who would probably flame me for calling her an example of anything}, I would suggest that unlike the revanchist lesbian-separatists of the previous generation, these women are strongly female without being essentially hostile to or disinterested in men. They are energetic, and capable of typically masculine aggressiveness, combativeness and competition when they so choose. However, they do not appear to have lost touch with the feminine, tho' they seem in general to be emotionally somewhat cooler, a bit harder and much more self-contained that previous norms of female behavior would dictate. While they are perhaps less receptive, emotive and romantically 'loving' than more traditional women (indeed, they seem rather skeptical about 'love', as perhaps we all should be), they tend to be much more interesting and capable people. Yer typical non-frilly riot grrl is much more likely to fancy snowboards, firearms and kayaking than makeup, designer clothes and fancy restaurants.
It is my present opinion that women of this type, regardless of their expressed sexual orientation, are psychologically healthier and more balanced that more traditional women, and may represent the leading edge of the psychosocial transformation about which I speculate. It should be noted that Bonobos, which are genetically close enough to Chimpanzees to interbreed, are culturally very different from the latter, being pansexual, matriarchal and relatively nonagressive, and it is interesting to consider the culture of lesbian and bisexual women in relation to this. It is perhaps too far a stretch, but still worth suggesting that the strong symmetries between human patriarchal-monotheist culture and male-dominant Chimpanzee culture might be mirrored by equally strong symmetries between human matriarchal-polytheist culture and female-dominant Bonobo culture.
Given a fixed resource base, a limited ecological niche, behavior leading to population increase would evaluate as positive, neutral and then negative as the carrying capacity of the system is approached. If allowed to exceed carrying capacity, continued population growth leads to degradation of the containing environment, and on to die-back of the population; if environmental degradation is severe, carrying capacity of the system is reduced for some duration: by overshooting a stable population-level, the species is forced back to a lower level for some possibly long duration. This is clearly sub-optimal.
Such cycles of bloom and collapse are common in non-human species, where behavior is mostly inflexibly determined by biology. Human behavior, while still rooted in primal drives, is also both individually and collectively more flexible. This mutability creates the possibility that a human population approaching its highest sustainable population level could by some combination of decreased birth-rate and increased mortality stop population growth before the point of die-back and collapse. (I am leaving out technological increase in resource availability, the method of choice to date which is probably reaching certain natural limits).
Mortality rates could be increased by warfare, reduction in health care, and various more exotic but not unprecedented mechanisms such as human sacrifice, infanticide, and cannibalism. A rather more appealing alternative would be a reduction in birth rate by contraception or changes in sexual behavior such as abstinence or substitution of non-reproductive sex-play for canonical sexual intercourse.
One of the world's major belief-systems is what I will call the patriarchal monotheist worldview. While heterogenous, worldviews founded on patriarchal monotheism have certain common characteristics, any of which might not be true of a given sect but are true of most others. For example, most patriarchal monotheist religions, with exceptions such as the Quakers and Jehovah's Witnesses, tend towards militarism and violent intolerance of other belief systems, particularly those which are non-Patriarchal-Monotheist. At present this tendency is mostly held in check by the competing Humanist Industrial Capitalist Rational Materialist worlview, which I would suggest is characteristic of and dominant in most industrialised First World countries, be they nominally Lutheran, Catholic, Sunni, Buddhist, Shinto etc, but has historically amply proven itself fanatically and sadistically genocidal.Thus population reduction thru increased warfare or other violent means might be easily compatible with this cultural canon.
The patriarchal monotheist worldview also tends to rigidly structure sexual behavior towards procreation, often actively encouraging proliferation, and strictly and expressly forbids all non-procreative sexual activity. As with violent intolerance, this tendency is rather blunted where the Rational Materialist influence is strong, and still clearly visible in most fundamentalist sects. Changes in sexual behavior other than widespread abstinence are thus incompatible with most forms of this worldview.
For purposes of theoretical exposition, I have presented a simplified and generalized case-study of a current example of conflict between a cultural canon or belief-system or worldview and a species-wide behavioral change, overall stabilisation and reduction of population, that would appear to be highly desirable if not mandatory as evaluated from a species-centric long-time-horizon frame of reference. In the actual current situation, of course, populations have already mostly stabilized or reduced in First and Second World societies, which are often still nominally Patriarchal-Monotheist but in actuality have mostly completed the transition to Rational-Materialism that started with the Renaissance, grew thru the Enlightenment and became dominant during the Industrial Revolution. But the roles of patriarchal monotheist religions in the Third World are sufficiently clear examples of what I describe.
religious belief-systems in general corresponding to pre-adult psychological development, remaining somewhat paleo-logical, affectively dominated, pre-egoic in nature, and maintaining some contact, however distorted, with trans-egoic/numinous potential;
rational materialism corresponding to the Middle Mental-Egoic stage of psychic organisation, being intellectual, egoic, affectless, and both deracinated from pre-egoic foundations and impervious to trans-egoic potentials;
current modern rational materialism beginning to correspond to the Late Mental-Egoic stage of psychic organisation, sharing the characteristics of the Mental-Egoic stage but adding existential angst and guilt, doubt, nullity, etc., and inasmuch as it corresponds to a Late Mental-Egoic psychic organisation, may be liable to some social equivalent of derepression of pre-egoic contents including sexual and aggressive impulses, infusions of energy, constellation of archetypes, increase in synchronistic phenomena, borderline states, contact with the Numinous, etc.; or social manifestations of these derepressive phenomena occuring in significant numbers of members of said Late Mental-Egoic society.
When we pass from the 'unrelated' civilizations, which arose out of the Yin-state of primitive society, to those later civilizations that were in varying ways and degrees related to 'civilized' predecessors, it is obvious that in their case, though there may have been some degree of physical challenge to stimulate them too, the principle and essential challenge was a human challenge arising out of their relationship to the society to which they were affiliated. This challenge is implicit in the relationship itself, which begins with a differentiation and ends with a secession. The differentiation takes place within the body of the antecedent civilization, when that civilization begins to lose the creative power through which, in its period of growth, it had at one time inspired a voluntary allegiance in the hearts of the people below its surface or beyond its borders. When this happens, the ailing civilization pays the penalty for its failing vitality by being disintegrated into a dominant minority, which rules with increasing oppressiveness but no longer leads, and a proletariat (internal and external) which responds to this challenge by becoming conscious that it has a soul of its own and by making up its mind to save its soul alive. The dominant minority's will to repress evokes in the proletariat a will to secede; and a conflict between these two wills continues while the declining civilization verges towards its fall, until, when it is in articulo mortis , the proletariat at length breaks free from what was once its spiritual home but has now become a prison-house and finally a City of Destruction. In this conflict between a proletariat and a dominant minority, as it works itself out from beginning to end, we can discern one of those dramatic spiritual encounters which renew the work of creation by carrying the life of the Universe out of the stagnation of autumn through the pains of winter into the ferment of spring. The secession of the proletariat is the dynamic act, in response to the challenge, through which the change from Yin to Yang is brought about; and in this dynamic separation the 'affiliated' civilization is born.
Revolutions are violent because they are the belated triumphs of powerful new social forces over tenacious old institiutions which have been temporarily thwarting and cramping these new expressions of life. The longer the obstruction holds out the greater becomes the pressure of the force whose outlet is being obstructed; and, the greater the pressure, the more violent the explosion in which the imprisoned force ultimately breaks through.
Patriotism....has very largely superseded Christianity as the religion of the Western World.
The schism in the body social, which we have been hitherto examining, is a collective experience and therefore superficial. Its significance lies in its being the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual rift. A schism in the souls of human beings will be found to underlie any schism that reveals itself on the surface of the society which is the common ground of these human actors' respective fields of activity; and the several forms which this inward schism may take must now engage our attention.
Schism in the souls of members of a disintegrating society displays itself in a variety of shapes because it arises in every one of the various ways of behvior, feeling and life which we have found to be characteristic of the action of human beings who play their part in the geneses and growths of civilizations. In the disintegration phase each of these single lines of action is apt to split into a pair of mutually antithetical and antipathetic variations or substitutes, in which the response to a challenge is polarized into two alternatives--onw passive and the other active, but neither of them creative. A choice between the active and the passive option is the only freedom left to a soul which has lost the opportunity (though not, of course, the capacity) for creative action though being cast for a part in the tragedy of social disintegration. As the process of disintegration works itself out, the alternative choices tend to become more rigid in their limitations, more extreme in their divergence and more momentous in their consequences. That is to say, the spiritual experience of schism in the soul is a dynamic movement, not a static situation.
To begin with, there are two ways of personal behaviour which are alternative substitutes for the exercise of the creative faculty. Both of them are attempts at self-expression. The passive attempt consists in an abandon in which the soul 'lets itself go' in the belief, by giving free rein to its own spontaneous appetites and aversions, it will be 'living according to nature' and will automatically receive back from that mysterious goddess the precious gift of creativity which it has been conscious of losing. The active alternative is an effort at self-control in which the soul 'takes itself in hand' and seeks to discipline its 'natural passions' in the opposite belief that nature is the bane of creativity and not its source and that to 'gain mastery over nature' is the only way of recovering the lost creative faculty.
Nevertheless we do find, as a matter of fact, that, of the three fractions into which a disintegrating society is apt to split, it is the dominant minority that succumbs most readily to the sense of promiscuity, and the ultimate result of this proletarianization of the dominant minority is a disappearance of that schism in the body social which is the index and penalty of social breakdown. The dominant minority in the end atones for its sins by closing a breach that has been its own handiwork and merging itself in its own proletariats.
In a kind of reverse Clockwork Orange classical conditioning process, adolescents in movie theaters across the nation, and watching television at home, are seeing the detailed, horrible suffering and killing of human beings, and they are learning to associate this killing and suffering with entertainment, pleasure, their favorite soft drink, their favorite candy bar, and the close, intimate contact of their date.
Operant conditioning firing ranges with pop-up targets and immediate feedback, just like those used to train soldiers in modern armies, are found in the interactive video games that our children play today. But whereas the adolescent Vietnam vet had stimulus discriminators built in to ensure that he only fired under authority, the adolescents woh play these video games have no such safeguard built into their conditioning.