The Reenchantment of the World (45 page)

mimesis
that does not dispense with
cognitive knowing. But in lieu of such practices, how is the insight or
breakthrough of Learning III to be achieved? The alcoholic hits bottom;
the "trans-contextual individual" agonizes over his double bind until,
in a supportive environment, he finally makes it to creativity. But
since Bateson himself argues that "no amount of rigorous discourse of
a given logical type can 'explain' phenomena of a higher type,"39 it
is very likely that the deliberate triggering of Learning III can take
place only by way of traditional archaic practices. In other words, the
intellect generates yearnings for a larger type ot mental experience,
a wider consciousness, but it can only take you to the edge of such an
experience. The actual perception of subject/object merger, of the world
as being totally alive and sensuous -- in short, the "God-realization"
-- is a purely visceral event. If Bateson is not advocating traditional
practices, it is unclear how anyone can have this insight; and if he
is advocating them, then Learning III is going to be fraught with the
same sorts of political problems that these practices typically bring
in their wake.

 

 

What are these problems? The major one is that of transference,
blind devotion to the guru or teacher, which seems almost inevitably
to accompany the experience of "having one's mind blown." In all such
practices, the techniques of meditation, breathing, chanting, and so
forth serve to reduce external sensory input so that ego-consciousness
starts to take itself as its own object of scrutiny. To use cybernetic
terminology, the program (Learning II) goes into overload; it begins
to appear to itself as an arbitrary construct. The individual loses
his or her sense of reality, which now takes on a kind of floating
quality. Terror may set in, for the ego perceives itself as dying and
cannot imagine what will survive its dissolution. It is at this point
that the guru, or teacher, becomes crucial, because his existence is
living proof that something does in fact survive. His goal is to help
the novice negotiate the Abyss, the gap between mind and Mind. Finally,
the wall between conscious and unconscious breaks down completely,
and the sensation is that of being swamped, of being carried along
in an ocean of God-realization. This perception is experienced as one
of immense clarity, of suddenly waking up to what one feels is fully
real. If the process is successful, the student who makes it to Learning
III continues to experience a gap between mind and Mind, but now without
terror or ecstasy. Instead, he sees ego-consciousness as a tool: useful,
but hardly anything to stake one's life on. He knows that reality is
much larger than this; that, as Laing put it, the ego can and should be
the servant of the divine rather than its betrayer.

 

 

What next? What do you do with God once you've found Him? As the phrase
"awakening to ecstasy" suggests, the students life is irrevocably
altered. The sensation is that of emerging from darkness for the first
time, and knowing now (as in the Platonic parable of the cave) how truly
unaware one's previous "awareness" really was. All of one's feelings can
easily become focused on the teacher, now seen as a father writ large,
the person who made this liberation possible. We have all met the person
who is constantly quoting his or her therapist ("Well,
Tania
says
that . . . "), a tendency that is a variety of guruism. Direct guruism
is much worse; it is adulation of the blindest sort, the very opposite
of freedom. What began as liberation ends in worship; the believers life
is no longer his or her own. The guru's word is law.

 

 

And what is the guru's word? What is he actually teaching? Usually,
that his word
is
law! It would be bad enough if the process ended with
adulation of the teacher, and that was that. The real problem is that
the guru, especially in the context of a manipulative society, has a
hidden agenda, and it is more often power than money. So the student gets
deprogrammed, has his or her Learning II stripped away, sees ultimate
reality, and before the dust settles, as Michael Rossman puts it, "is
given a full prefab[ricated] structure to put in its place." But there
is, Rossman adds, a big difference between worshiping the mystery that
is revealed, and worshiping the revealer and his framework. There is
always a metacurriculum with a guru, and it is totalitarian -- hardly
the type of 'solve et coagula' that the alchemists had in mind.40

 

 

Nor is guruism the type of personality redefinition that Bateson had
in mind, and it seems to me that an important potential safety valve
is suggested in his work. The concluding pages of "Mind and Nature"
reveal that just before his death, Bateson was starting to move
toward a theory of aesthetics which could have provided a framework
of sacredness or beauty for the evolution from ego-consciousness to
something larger. Conceivably, such a theory could have been an open door
to the planetary culture described above; it now remains for others to
develop. Yet even if an appropriate theory of aesthetics is developed,
it is not clear how it could have a serious political impact. It would
have to be, as Bateson's own work is, an experience, a mode of living,
not a formula. This involves personal choice, in other words; a
politics
of self-realization may not be possible. A theory of
aesthetics might
be valuable to the individual explorer who is making the journey from
contemporary science to holism; ideally, it would enable him or her
to make that journey without falling prey to guruism. But one of the
strengths of Bateson's work is its relational quality; it is not enough to
discover the "vast ecology" for yourself alone. The converted alcoholic
includes in this ecology the other members of Alcoholics Anonymous and
their common struggle. This social emphasis is very positive in the case
of AA; the problem arises when the organization is not so benevolent,
not interested in health or freedom but in political aggrandizement
(usually in the name of health and freedom). Unfortunately, the desire
to exert power over others is the rule rather than the exception, and it
is hard to see how any theory of aesthetics would be able to influence
or control the phenomenon of guruism writ large. We need a safety valve
that allows the process of Learning III to occur but not get out of hand;
and since no one has managed to come up with anything like this, I feel
the need to make a few additional comments on the dangers of Learning
III and its possible political implications. Strictly speaking, the
following discussion is neither a critique of Bateson personally nor
of his work. Neither he nor it, as I suggested earlier, had or have
any sympathy whatever for the right-wing cultism that Learning III is
currently generating. Rather, it reflects my own fears that no holistic
philosophy to date has managed to provide adequate safety valves with
respect to the Learning III process, and thus that any discussion of
the process has to be accompanied by a warning note.

 

 

If the danger of Learning III is one of transference, we should not
be surprised at the mental colonization being practiced by numerous
right-wing cults, especially in the United States.41 In his book on
television, former advertising executive Jerry Mander has done a fine job
of explicating the process in the case of Werner Erhard's organization
'est,' though he is quick to point out that his selection of 'est' as an
example is virtually arbitrary.42 'Est's' approach includes many of the
classic techniques of Zen or yogic training -- meditation, visualization,
the deliberate reduction of sensory stimuli -- and the result is not
liberation, but a forest of clones. Est followers tend to dress alike,
talk alike, and use a jargon eerily reminiscent of Batesonian holism
("Mind," "context," "programming," and so on). The talk is all of "taking
responsibility for oneself," but the disciples have an ambiance that
bears an uncanny resemblance to that of Erhard, and have been dubbed
"talking parking meters" by the California press. The phenomenon of
'est,' writes Rossman, has given us "the spectacle . . . of relatively
intelligent people handing over their minds en masse";43 and this
willing abandonment of critical faculties on the part of his followers
has enabled Erhard to expand his base of operations significantly. His
enterprise now includes such public relations gimmicks as a fraudulent
"hunger project," and Erhard's appointment as a professor of "context"
(!) at Antioch's Holistic Life University. What 'est' teaches, from
a political viewpoint, is pure rubbish (victims always choose their
fate, presumably even babies napalmed in Vietnam), and need not concern
us here. The real cause for concern is that despite their widespread
popularity, Erhard, the Reverend Moon (Unification Church), L. Ron Hubbard
(Church of Scientology), and their ilk are relative amateurs. Most people
have steered clear of these organizations, and the political structure of
industrial society has up to this point been untouched by these Learning
III racketeers. But we have not seen the last of such false messiahs,
and sooner or later one of them, with government encouragement, might
catch on as a mass phenomenon. Erhard has tried to court people in
positions of influence and power, but without any known success. In
Nazi Germany, those adept at manipulating the unconscious did not need
to court the govemment; they
were
the government. "Hitler," wrote the
German sociologist Max Horkheimer shortly after the war, "appealed to
the unconscious in his audience by hinting that he could forge a power
in whose name the ban on repressed nature would be lifted."44 Current
conditions hardly rule out the possibility of a repeat performance.

 

 

The specter of fascism, of course, is often invoked by those who want
to rationalize their opposition to political change, but I sense that
in this case it is no idle threat. We are talking about reviving the
psychic underbelly not within the context of a traditional society
that is still in touch with its grounding, but within the framework
of a mobile, rootless, high-technology, sexually repressed, mass
society. The parallel with Germany after World War I is close, for that
was a society in which myth and symbol, sexuality and occultism, the
"natural" and the nonrational, were deliberately cultivated as antidotes
to an artificial, over-intellectualized, bureaucratized way of life.45
The psychic energy thus made available was enormous, and was brilliantly
colonized by the Nazis at immense rallies held in Nuremburg and Munich --
mimetic performances complete with giant swastikas and klieg lights --
for their own political purposes. "The people" were hardly the winners
in this officially sanctioned liberation" from their own repression.

 

 

It was the danger of such mysticism which Immanuel Kant had in mind
when he called reason (ego-consciousness) "the highest good on earth,"
"the ultimate touchstone of truth"; and commenting on this statement in
1945, Lucien Goldmann wrote:

 

 

The last twenty-five years have shown us how penetrating Kant's
vision was and how close are the ties which link irrationalism
and the mystique of intuition and feeling with the suppression of
individual liberties.46

 

 

Given enough social and economic chaos, and the increasing number of
self-proclaimed gurus, there is every reason to keep in touch with our
old deutero-learning.

 

 

The link between the nonrational and state power in general depends
upon an elitism that is implicit in most guruism. Most, but not all. The
shaman of traditional cultures spoke the voice of God (when in trance)
and that was that. He generally made no bid for secular control. But
in a civilization that has lost its own roots, teachers of Learning
III do not merely charge high fees for their services; some also, like
Erhard, want power of the most absolute sort. Their claim to it lies
precisely in the distinction between 'wakers" and "sleepers." There is a
spiritual pecking order here, a separation of orthodox from heterodox,
the self-realized from those who have not yet "awakened to ecstasy"
and who may never do so. William Irwin Thompson recently argued that
ego-consciousness being what it is, "we should trust no policy dealsions
which emanate from persons who do not yet have [the] habit [of Mind]. We
must not let anyone near the political process who has not stepped out
of small mind and encountered the fullness of Being."47 Thompson's
is an important point, but what is the alternative? Who is the "we"
Thompson is referring to? As he himself states in the next breath:

 

 

The difficulty with this idea is that it is a theory of
elites. . . . The Elite become the new policy-makers, the new
politicians, the new humanity, the new homo sapiens. . . . This
globalist elite could then make a rapprochement with the multinational
corporation executives to introduce a new authoritarian world-order.48

 

 

Holism, in short, could become the agent of tyranny, but in the name
of Mind, Learning III, or (God help us) God. It was not for nothing
that Orwell once remarked that when fascism finally comes to the West,
it will do so in the name of freedom.

 

 

Reflecting on the mechanical philosophy of the scientific Revolution,
Alfred North Whitehead once remarked that with its formulation. the
West found itself in the grip of an idea it could live neither with nor
without. Surely, the same thing can be said of Learning III, or
mimesis
in general. The disembodied consciousness of the modern
era is barbaric;
it is integral to the landscape described in the Introduction. But
the attempts to escape such a world by institutionalizing Learning
III have often been no less barbaric. The key phrase here is, "such a
world." Even total