The biophobia discussed in last week’s post makes a useful
example of the way that toxic ideas can have the same kind of impact on a
society as toxic waste of a more material kind.
This shouldn’t be a new point to any regular reader of this blog; I’ve
commented in these essays rather more than once that the crisis of our age is
not just a function of depleted resources and the buildup of pollutants in the
biosphere, important as these details are. To a far more important degree, it’s
a matter of depleted imaginations and the buildup of dysfunctional ideas in the
collective consciousness of our time.
Most of the rising spiral of problems we face as the
industrial age approaches its end could have been prevented with a little
foresight and forbearance, and even now—when most of the opportunities to avoid
a really messy future have long since gone whistling down the wind—there’s
still much that could be done to mitigate the worst consequences of the decline
and fall of the industrial age and pass on the best achievements of the last
few centuries to our descendants. Of the things that could be done to make the
future less miserable than it will otherwise be, though, very few are actually
being done, and those have received what effort they have only because
scattered individuals and small groups out on the fringes of contemporary
industrial society are putting their own time and resources into the task.
Meanwhile the billions of dollars, the vast public relations
campaigns, and the lavishly supplied and funded institutional networks that
could do these same things on a much larger scale are by and large devoted to
projects that are simply going to make things worse. That’s the bitter irony of
our age and, more broadly, of every civilization in its failing years. No
society has to be dragged kicking and screaming down the slope of decline and
fall; one and all, they take that slope at a run, yelling in triumph, utterly
convinced that the road to imminent ruin will lead them to paradise on Earth.
That’s one of the ways that the universe likes to blindside
believers in a purely materialist interpretation of history. Modern industrial
society differs in a galaxy of ways from the societies that preceded it into history’s
compost heap, and it’s easy enough—especially in a society obsessed with the
belief in its superiority to every other civilization in history—to jump from
the fact of those differences to the conviction that modern industrial society
must have a unique fate: uniquely glorious, uniquely horrible, or some
combination of the two, nobody seems to care much as long as it’s unique. Then
the most modern industrial social and economic machinery gets put to work in
the service of stupidities that were old before the pyramids were built,
because human beings rather than machinery make the decisions, and the motives
that drive human behavior don’t actually change that much from one millennium
to the next.
What does change from millennium to millennium, and across
much shorter eras as well, are the ideas and beliefs built atop the foundation
provided by the motivations just mentioned. One of the historians whose work
has been central to this blog’s project, Oswald Spengler, had much to say about
the way that different high cultures came to understand the world in such
dramatically different ways. He pointed out that the most basic conceptions
about reality vary from one culture to another. Modern Western thinkers can’t
even begin to understand the world, for example, without the conception of
infinite empty space; to the thinkers of Greek and Roman times, by contrast,
infinity and empty space were logical impossibilities, and the cosmos was—had
to be—a single material mass.
Still, there’s another dimension to the way thoughts and
beliefs change over time, and it takes place within the historical trajectory
of what Spengler called a culture and his great rival Arnold Toynbee called a
civilization. This is the dimension that
we recall, however dimly, when we speak of the Age of Faith and the Age of
Reason. Since these same ages recur in the life of every high culture, we might
more usefully speak of ages of faith and ages of reason in the plural; we might
also want to discuss a third set of ages, to which I gave a
suggestive name in a post a while back, that succeed ages of reason
in much the same way that the latter supplant ages of faith.
Now of course the transition between ages of faith and ages
of reason carries a heavy load of self-serving cant these days. The rhetoric of
the civil religion of progress presupposes that every human being who lived
before the scientific revolution was basically just plain stupid, since
otherwise they would have gotten around to noticing centuries ago that modern
atheism and scientific materialism are the only reasonable explanations of the
cosmos. Thus a great deal of effort has been expended over the years on
creative attempts to explain why nobody before 1650 or so realized that
everything they believed about the cosmos was so obviously wrong.
A more useful perspective comes out of the work of
Giambattista Vico, the modern Western world’s first great theorist of
historical cycles. Vico’s 1744 opus Principles of the New Science
Concerning the Common Nature of Nations—for obvious reasons, the
title normally gets cut down nowadays to The New
Science—focuses on what he called “the course the nations run,” the trajectory
that leads a new civilization up out of one dark age and eventually back down
into the next. Vico wrote in an intellectual tradition that’s all but extinct
these days, the tradition of Renaissance humanism, saturated in ancient Greek
and Roman literature and wholly at ease in the nearly forgotten worlds of
mythological and allegorical thinking.
Even at the time, his book was considered difficult by most readers, and
it’s far more opaque today than it was then, but the core ideas Vico was trying
to communicate are worth teasing out of his convoluted prose.
One useful way into those ideas is to start where Vico did,
with the history of law. It’s a curious regularity in legal history that law
codes start out in dark age settings as lists of specific punishments for
specific crimes—“if a man steal a loaf of bread, let him be given twelve blows
with a birch stick”—without a trace of legal theory or even generalization.
Later, all the different kinds of stealing get lumped together as the crime of
theft, and the punishment assigned to it usually comes to depend at least in
part on the abstract value of what’s stolen. Eventually laws are ordered and
systematized, a theory of law emerges, and great legal codes are issued
providing broad general principles from which jurists extract rulings for
specific cases. By that time, the civilization that created the legal code is
usually stumbling toward its end, and its fall is the end of the road for its
highly abstract legal system; when the rubble stops bouncing, the law codes of
the first generation of successor states go right back to lists of specific
punishments for specific crimes. As Vico pointed out, the oldest form of Roman
law, the Twelve Tables, and the barbarian law codes that emerged after Rome’s
fall were equally concrete and unsystematic, even though the legal system that
rose and fell between them was one of history’s great examples of legal
systematization and abstraction.
What caught Vico’s attention is that the same process
appears in a galaxy of other human institutions and activities. Languages
emerge in dark age conditions with vocabularies rich in concrete, sensuous
words and very poor in abstractions, and and transform those concrete words
into broader, more general terms over time—how many people remember that “understand”
used to mean to stand under, in the sense of getting in underneath to see how
something works? Political systems start with the intensely personal and
concrete feudal bonds between liege lord and vassal, and then shift gradually
toward ever more abstract and systematic notions of citizenship. Vico barely
mentioned economics in his book, but it’s a prime example: look at the way that
wealth in a dark age society means land, grain, and lumps of gold, which get
replaced first by coinage, then by paper money, then by various kinds of paper
that can be exchanged for paper money, and eventually by the electronic
hallucinations that count as wealth today.
What’s behind these changes is a shift in the way that
thinking is done, and it’s helpful in this regard to go a little deeper than
Vico himself did, and remember that the word “thinking” can refer to at least
three different kinds of mental activity. The first is so pervasive and so
automatic that most people only notice it in unusual situations—when you wake
up in the dark in an unfamiliar room, for example, and it takes several seconds
for the vague looming shapes around you to turn into furniture. Your mind has
to turn the input of your senses into a world of recognizable objects. It does
this all the time, though you don’t usually notice the process; the world you
experience around you is literally being assembled by your mind moment by
moment. We can borrow a term from Owen
Barfield for the kind of thinking that does this, and call it
figuration.
Figuration’s a more complex process than most people
realize. If you look at the optical illusion shown below, you can watch that
process at work: your mind tries to make sense of the shapes on the screen, and
flops back and forth between the available options. If you look at an inkblot
from the Rohrshach test and see two bats having a romantic interlude, that’s
figuration, too, and it reveals one of the things that happens when figuration
gets beyond the basics: it starts to tell stories. Listen to children who
aren’t yet old enough to tackle logical reasoning, especially when they don’t
know you’re listening, and you’ll often hear figuration in full roar:
everything becomes part of a story, which may not make any sense at all from a
logical perspective, but connects everything together in a single narrative
that makes its own kind of sense of the world of experience.
It’s when children, or for that matter adults, start to
compare figurations to each other that a second kind of thinking comes into
play, which we can call abstraction. You have this
figuration over here, which combines the sensations of brown, furry, movement,
barking, and much more into a single object; you have that one over there,
which includes most of the same sensations in a different place into a
different object; from these figurations, you abstract the common features and
give the sum of those features a name, “dog.” That’s abstraction. The child who
calls every four-legged animal “goggie” has just started to grasp abstraction,
and does it in the usual way, starting from the largest and broadest abstract
categories and narrowing down from there. As she becomes more experienced at
it, she’ll learn to relabel that abstraction “animal,” or even “quadruped,”
while a cascade of nested categories allows her to grasp that Milo and Maru are
both animals, but one is a dog and the other a cat.
Just as figuration allowed to run free starts to tell
stories, abstraction allowed the same liberty starts to construct theories. A
child who’s old enough to abstract but hasn’t yet passed to the third kind of
thinking is a great example. Ask her to speculate about why something happens,
and you’ll get a theory instead of a story—the difference is that, where a
story simply flows from event to event, a theory tries to make sense of the
things that happen by fitting them into abstract categories and making
deductions on that basis. The categories may be inappropriately broad, narrow,
or straight out of left field, and the deductions may be whimsical or just
plain weird, but it’s from such tentative beginnings that logic and science
gradually emerge in individuals and societies alike.
Figuration, then, assembles a world out of fragments of
present and remembered sensation. Abstraction takes these figurations and sorts
them into categories, then tries to relate the categories to one another. It’s
when the life of abstraction becomes richly developed enough that there emerges
a third kind of thinking, which we can call reflection.
Reflection is thinking about thinking: stepping outside the world constructed
by figuration to think about how figurations are created from raw sensation,
stepping outside the cascading categories created by abstraction to think about
where those categories came from and how well or poorly they fit the sensations
and figurations they’re meant to categorize. Where figuration tells stories and
abstraction creates theories, reflection can lead in several directions. Done
capably, it yields wisdom; done clumsily, it plunges into self-referential
tailchasing; pushed too far, it can all too easily end in madness.
Apply these three modes of thinking to the historical
trajectory of any civilization and the parallels are hard to miss. Figuration
dominates the centuries of a society’s emergence and early growth; language,
law, and the other phenomena mentioned above focus on specific examples or, as
we might as well say, specific figurations. The most common form of
intellectual endeavor in such times is storytelling—it’s not an accident that
the great epics of our species, and the vast majority of its mythologies, come
out of the early stages of high cultures.
If the logical method of a previous civilization has been preserved,
which has been true often enough in recent millennia, it exists in a social
bubble, cultivated by a handful of intellectuals but basically irrelevant to
the conduct of affairs. Religion dominates cultural life, and feudalism or some
very close equivalent dominates the political sphere.
It’s usually around the time that feudalism is replaced by
some other system of government that the age of faith gives way to the first
stirrings of an age of reason or, in the terms used here, abstraction takes
center stage away from figuration. At first, the new abstraction sets itself
the problem of figuring out what religious myths really mean, but since those
narratives don’t “mean” anything in an abstract sense—they’re ways of
assembling experience into stories the mind can grasp, not theories based on
internally consistent categorization and logic—the myths eventually get
denounced as a pack of lies, and the focus shifts to creating rational theories
about the universe. Epic poetry and mythology give way to literature, religion
loses ground to secular scholarship such as classical philosophy or modern
science, and written constitutions and law codes replace feudal custom.
Partisans of abstraction always like to portray these shifts
as the triumph of reason over superstition, but there’s another side to the
story. Every abstraction is a simplification of reality, and the further you go
up the ladder of abstractions, the more certain it becomes that the resulting
concepts will fail to match up to the complexities of actual existence. Nor is
abstraction as immune as its practitioners like to think to the influences of
half-remembered religious narratives or the subterranean pressures of ordinary
self interest—it’s utterly standard, for example, for the professional thinkers
of an age of reason to prove with exquisite logic that whatever pays their
salaries is highly reasonable and whatever threatens their status is
superstitious nonsense. The result is that what starts out proclaiming itself
as an age of reason normally turns into an age of unreason, dominated by a set
of closely argued, utterly consistent, universally accepted rational beliefs
whose only flaw is that they fail to explain the most critical aspects of
what’s happening out there in the real world.
In case you haven’t noticed, dear reader, that’s more or
less where we are today. It’s not merely that the government of every major
industrial nation is trying to achieve economic growth by following policies
that are supposed to bring growth in theory, but have never once done so in
practice; it’s not merely that the populace of every major industrial society
eagerly forgets all the lessons of each speculative bubble and bust as soon as
the next one comes along, and makes all the same mistakes with the same dismal
results as the previous time; it’s not even that allegedly sane and sensible
people have somehow managed to convince themselves that limitless supplies of
fossil fuels can somehow be extracted at ever-increasing rates from the insides
of a finite planet: it’s that only a handful
of people out on the furthest fringes of contemporary culture ever notice that
there’s anything at all odd about these stunningly self-defeating patterns of
behavior.
It’s at this stage of history that reflection becomes
necessary. It’s only by thinking about
thinking, by learning to pay attention to the way we transform the raw data of
the senses into figurations and abstractions, that it becomes possible to
notice what’s being excluded from awareness in the course of turning sensation
into figurations and sorting out figurations into cascading levels of
abstraction. Yes, that’s part of the project of this blog—to reflect on how we
as a society got in the habit of thinking the things we think, and how well or
poorly that thinking relates to the world we’re actually encountering.
It’s at this same stage of history, though, that reflection
also becomes a lethal liability, because wisdom is not the only possible
outcome of reflection. Vico points out that there’s a barbarism of reflection
that comes at the end of a civilization’s life cycle, parallel to the barbarism
of sensation that comes at the beginning—and also ancestral to it. Reflection
is a solvent; skillfully handled, it dissolves abstractions and figurations
that obscure more than they reveal, so that less counterproductive ways of
assembling raw sensation into meaningful patterns can be pursued; run riot, it
makes every abstraction and every figuration as arbitrary and meaningless as
any other, until the collective conversation about what’s real and what matters
dissolves in a cacophony of voices speaking past one another.
