The Reenchantment of the World (47 page)

 

There is a famous papyrus in the Berlin Museum, No. 3024, titled
"Rebel in the Soul," and dating somewhere from 2500 to 1991 B.C. This
was the so-called Intermediate Period of Egyptian history, between the
Old and Middle Kingdoms, a time of total social breakdown, widespread
chaos, and disruption. It reflects an age similar to our own, in which
old values had collapsed and new ones not yet taken their place. The
document records something unheard of in bicameral culture -- an identity
crisis. Its author is preoccupied with the meaning of life, his self
(ego), the conflict between reason and emotion, and possible suicide. The
papyrus is hardly typical of hieroglyphic texts, and many Near Eastern
experts regard it as the only ancient Egyptian document of its kind. Its
emergence during the Intermediate Period is evidence for Julian Jaynes'
central argument, that when the subject/object distinction did occur in
ancient times, its function was a crisis function, the sounding of an
extreme alarm. What I have tried to argue in the present work is that
since 1600 A.D., and most visibly since the Industrial Revolution, the
West has been in a perpetual crisis, an unstable society in a state of
extreme alarm. Thus modern schismatic consciousness is regarded as normal,
but the times have not been "normal" for centuries. The correspondence
with the Egyptian Intermediate Period is clear here, but with a peculiar
twist. The lonely author of "Rebel in the Soul" was probably an enigma to
his contemporaries, in that he
found
his ego, whereas we tend
to regard psychotics today as enigmatic for having
lost
it. In
other words, we may now be moving toward health, whereas the Egyptians
of the Intermediate Period were at least temporarily moving toward
pathology. Reading the text, we cannot help but recognize a modern voice;
to our ears, for example, his words are often heroic. "Brother," says his
soul to him, "as long as you burn you belong to life." This is effectively
what Teiresias tells Odysseus when the latter visits him in Hades and
asks the prophet to show him the way home and put an end to his restless
search. But Teiresias is
disapproving
of this twenty-year search
for the Self; he hints to Odysseus that a life that is equivalent to
"burning" might be well worth giving up.62 Contemporary existentialist
philosophers such as Rollo May, by contrast, have made a career out
of the notion that such anxiety, and preoccupation with identity, is
a sign of health. They never seem to grasp that we, like the author of
"Rebel," live in times so crazy that 'Angst' and vitality get mistaken
for one another. Surely, as Christopher Hill would say, our is a world
turned upside down.63

 

 

The end of ego-consciousness hardly necessitates the end of life,
culture, or meaningful human activity. The existentialist position
of equating meaning with anxiety can only be maintained by ignoring
the major part of man's history on this planet. Ego-consciousness,
let alone the tradition of modern individualism, is a phenomenon with a
comparatively short history; it is hardly essential for human survival or
for a rich human culture, and may ultimately be inimical to both. Thus
ecologist Paul Shepard has pointed out that it was a devolution in the
Neanderthal brain which gave rise to the smaller-brained Cro-Magnon man
(ca. 40,000 B.C.) and Aurignacian civilization (ca. 23,000 B.C.), a period
remarkable for cave painting, the invention of nearly two hundred kinds
of tools, and a general burst of cultural activity.64 As Julian Jaynes
has pointed out, the neurology of consciousness is hardly set for all
time. We may be on the verge of such a period of dynamic devolution, in
which what is emerging is not merely a new society, but a new species,
a new type of human being. In the last analysis, the present species may
prove to be a race of dinosaurs, and ego-consciousness something of an
evolutionary dead end.

 

 

"When you bring your flesh to rest," the author of "Rebel" is told by
his soul,

 

 

And thus reach the Beyond,
In that stillness shall I alight upon you;
then united we shall form the Abode.

 

 

Who shall live in that Abode, and how they shall live, will be for future
historians to say. But given such a world, they may not feel the need
to do so.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NOTES

 

 

Introduction: The Modern Landscape

 

 

1. Morris Berman,
Social Change and Scientific Organization
(London and Ithaca, N.Y.: Heinemann Educational Books and
Cornell University Press, 1978).

 

 

2. Russell Jacoby,
Social Amnesia
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1975), p. 63.

 

 

3. Herbert Marcuse,
One-Dimensional Man
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1964),
pp. 9, 154.

 

 

4. Studs Terkel,
Working
(New York: Avon Books, 1972).

 

 

5. Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb,
The Hidden Injuries of Class
(New York: Vintage Books, 1973), pp. 168ff.

 

 

6. The elaboration of this process is perhaps the greatest contribution
of the Frankfurt School for Social Research, whose most familiar
representative in the United States was Herbert Marcuse. A summary of
their work may be found in Martin Jay,
The Dlalectical Imagination
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1973). On the popular level, Vance Packard
has provided much evidence for this view of the totally manipulated
life in books such as
The Status Seekers
,
The Hidden Persuaders
,
and several others.

 

 

7. Joseph A. Camilleri,
Civilization in Crisis
(Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1976), pp. 31-32. The incredible emphasis on sexual
technique, as opposed to emotional content, is reflected in the
voluminous proliferation of sex manuals in the last fifteen years,
by now a multimillion dollar business.

 

 

8. R.D. Laing,
The Divided Self
(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1965;
first publ. 1959).

 

 

9. For a report on a study of performance anxiety among first graders,
which was carried out by William Kessen of Yale University, see Barbara
Radloff, "The Tot in the Gray Flannel Suit,"
New York Times
, 4 May
1975. "You have to play by the rules of the game if you are going
to survive," she states, "in a corporation, or in first grade." The
distinction between inner vitality and outer sterility which is familiar
to all high school students formed a persistent theme in the rock music
of the 1950s. Chuck Berry's songs, such as "School Days" and "Sweet
Little Sixteen," are perhaps the prototype.

 

 

10. Camilleri,
Civilization in Crisis
, p. 42. Information such as this
can be collected, at this point, by merely reading daily newspapers and
popular journals. My own sources include:
Newsweek
, 8 January 1973
and 12 November 1979;
National Observer
, 6 March 1976;
San Francisco
Examiner
, 24 March 1977 and 10 July 1980;
San Francisco Chronicle
,
29 March 1976 and 10 September 1979;
New York Times
, 16 March 1976;
Cosmopolitan
, September 1974; and a general survey of such articles
provided in John and Paula Zerzan,
Breakdown
, which was published
in abridged form in the January 1976 issue of
Fifth Estate
. The
quotation from Darold Treffert is from this pamphlet. For an extended
critique of American drug use, see Richard Hughes and Robert Brewin,
The
Tranquilizing of America
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979).

 

 

11. According to a 1972 Finnish study, Poland, the Soviet Union, and
Hungary are respectively first, second, and third in world per capita
consumption of hard liquor. See
San Francisco Chronicle
, 8 September
1978. My information on French and German suicides comes from a 1979
report of San Francisco's Pacific News Service by Eve Pell, "Teenage
Suicides Sweep Advanced Nations of the West."

 

 

12. Dr. Edward F. Foulks, a medical anthropologist at the University
of Pennsylvania, has argued that madness may be a way by which the
human species protects itself in such times of crisis, and hence that
psychosis may be a form of cultural avant-garde (see the report on his
work in the
New York Times
, 9 December 1975, p. 22, and the
National
Observer
, 6 March 1976, p. 1). Much of the work of R. D. Laing points in
this direction, and it has been a theme in a number of Doris Lessing's
novels. See also Andrew Weil,
The Natural Mind
(Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1972).

 

 

13. Robert Heilbroner,
Business Civilization in Decline
(New York:
Norton, 1976), pp. 120-24.

 

 

14. Willis W. Harman,
An Incomplete Guide to the Future
(San Francisco:
San Francisco Book Company, 1976), chap. 2.

 

 

 

CHAPTER 1. The Birth of Modern Scientific Consciousness

 

 

1. Christopher Marlowe,
The Tragedy of Doctor Faustus
, ed. Louis
B. Wright and Virginia A. LaMar (New York: Washington Square Press,
1959), p. 3; reprinted by permission of Simon and Schuster.

 

 

2. Francis Bacon,
New Organon
, Book I, Aphorism XXXI, in Hugh G. Dick,
ed.,
Selected Writings of Francis Bacon
(New York: The Modern Library,
1955). This and subsequent excerpts printed with the permission of Random
House, Inc.

 

 

3. "Pure" historians of ideas have tended to see Bacon as irrelevant, or
even detrimental to the growth of modern science, partly due to their own
reaction against Marxist historians such as Benjamin Farrington (
Francis
Bacon: Philosopher of Industrial Science
[New York: Collier Books,
1961; first publ. 1949]), who see Bacon as a cultural hero. The most
extreme expression of this is C.C. Gillispie,
The Edge of Objectivity
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), pp. 74-82.

 

 

4. In addition to Farrington's work, good discussions of this point can
be found in two books by Paolo Rossi:
Francis Bacon
, trans. Sacha
Rabinovitch (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968), and
Philosophy,
Technology and the Arts in the Early Modern Era
, trans. Salvator
Attanasio (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1970). See also Christopher Hill,
Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution
(London: Panther Books,
1972), chap. 3.

 

 

5. Bacon,
New Organon
, Book I, Aphorism LXXIV.

 

 

6. Ibid., Aphorism XCVIII.

 

 

7. There is, of course, a large literature comparing Eastern and Western
science and modes of thought. A fine one-volume summary is Joseph Needham,
The Grand Titration
(London: Allen & Unwin, 1969).

 

 

8. This and all of the quotations from Descartes are taken from his
Discourse on Method
, trans. Laurence J. Lafleur (Indianapolis: The
Liberal Arts Press, 1950; original French edition, 1637).

 

 

9. A spirited discussion of this disparity can be found in Pierre Duhem,
The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory
, trans. Philip P. Wiener
(New York: Atheneum, 1962; original French edition 1914), chap. 4.

 

 

10. Descartes,
Discourse
, p. 12.

 

 

11. A.R. Hall,
The Scientific Revolution
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1956),
p. 149. My earlier statement, that for Descartes "all non-material
phenomena ultimately have a material basis," is thus not strictly
true. For Descartes, 'res cogitans' and 'res extensa' were distinct
entities; it was Descartes' disciples who made mind epiphenomenal and
attempted to swallow up the former by the latter -- as is commonly done
in science today. Despite Descartes' original sophistication, mainstream
Cartesianism came to be identified with materialist reductionism.

 

 

12. I am adopting the distinction between critical and dialectical
reason made by Norman O. Brown in
Life Against Death
(Middletown,
Conn.: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1970; orig. publ. 1959).

 

 

13. The best one-volume discussion of Galileo's work, to my mind, is
Ludovico Geymonat,
Galileo Galilei
, trans. Stillman Drake (New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1965).

 

 

14. Piaget has reported his findings in a large number of works. The
latest study is
The Grasp of Consciousness
, trans. Susan Wedgwood
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976). To preclude any confusion in
the following discussion and in Chapter 2, I should state that I am not
an Aristotelian and am not suggesting a return to the Thomistic synthesis
of the Middle Ages. Rather, my interest in Aristotle here and in Chapters
2 and 3 is related to the presence of participating consciousness in his
work. There is obously more to Aristotle than this, including his laws
of logic and noncontradiction which run directly counter to the notion
of participation, and which constitute the basis of much contemporary
scientific reasoning to this day.

 

 

15. It should be clear that to enter the world of modern science is to
enter a world of abstractions that violate everyday observations. From
1550 to 1700 Europe did enter wonderland, as surely as Alice did when
she fell down the rabbit hole. But the fall, I would maintain, was not
clean. Certainly the dominant culture of science and technology linked
to the creation of material wealth is the other end of the drop, and
students training for positions in that culture are quickly reeducated
to the Newtonian/Cartesian/Galilean mode of perception; but privately,
and emotionally, we still operate in the common-sense world of immediate
experience -- a world in which objects naturally fall to the center of the
earth, and all motion obviously requires a mover. We even retain traces
of animism, over the years developing an almost personal relationship
with a favorite chair or lamp, even though we "know" it is nothing but
wood or metal.