When I was a kid in the 50′s and early 60′s, everyone in my generation knew for a fact that our world was radically different from the world of our parents and that there were things about it they would never understand.
Fifty years have passed since then without a similar youth culture arising to challenge the expectations of its elders, and the memory of what it was like is fading. Our own kids tend to minimize the importance of the “generation gap” and some dismiss our belief in it as a form of boomer exceptionalism. But the gulf was very real — and it was almost entirely a result of the technological revolution that began to transform society after World War II.
The first half of the 20th century had introduced numerous technological innovations, but none that resulted in sweeping social change. If you look at movies or cartoons from the 1920′s and 30′s, or even old family photographs, you get a strong sense that the wave of invention which began in the 1870′s hadn’t affected everyday life all that much.
People might go for a Sunday drive in the family car, but they never strayed very far from home. They might take in a Hollywood movie or listen to Roosevelt’s fireside chats on the radio, but those things merely opened a narrow window on an outside world that they weren’t part of themselves. Their own lives revolved around their home town or neighborhood, the local stores and businesses, and a familiar circle of family and friends.
But things started to change about the time of World War II. As I suggested some months ago, Bugs Bunny cartoons from the early 40′s are set in a fast-paced, modern, technological world, very different from the world of Betty Boop cartoons less than a decade earlier. And after the war, as soldiers returned home with a broader viewpoint and new possibilities in their heads, the changes accelerated.
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It’s been fun chasing after the more dramatic consequences of the “romantic break,” but it occurs to me that I’ve been neglecting the details of the break itself — what triggers it, how it unfolds, and what the basis is of the distinctively romantic mood that accompanies it.
The answers to all these questions turn out to involve a complex interplay between the two established visions which form the dominant partnership and the three younger emergent visions. And that, in turn, means that those emergent visions must play a significant role at a far earlier point than I had previously realized.
When I started working with the cultural cycles back in the 70′s, I interpreted what I was finding in the simplest terms possible — as a linear sequence of “worldviews,” with each new worldview displacing the one before it.
By the late 80′s, I’d developed a more elaborate model in which worldviews were the product of an overlapping sequence of visions of three different kinds — scientific, social, and inner experience. But I was still thinking in very linear terms and believed that only one vision of each type could be active at any given moment.
That was why I identified the period from the 1930′s to the 1960′s as the Era of Science and Democracy — with chaos developing on the sidelines and eventually bursting out in the 60′s counterculture. Even though I was aware that holism was emerging during this period, I did not see it as playing an independent role until the very end of the 60′s.
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If what I’ve written previously about the “romantic break” that gave rise to late 19th century occultism is correct, it ought to be possible to find an equivalent in other cycles.
There should, for example, have been a moment in the late 18th century when the increasing subordination of the hierarchy vision to the reason vision triggered an attempted reversal — one in which an updated version of hierarchy was seen as superior to reason, and society was regarded as holding an almost magical power to improve human nature.
According to the comparative timetables I worked out years ago, the period equivalent to 1877-83, when occultism emerged, would have been around 1783-94. And there was, of course, precisely such a reversal during those years: the French Revolution.
The French Revolution was a product of the era of hierarchy-and-reason, during which the old medieval notion of society as a pyramid — with the king at the top and the peasants at the bottom — was increasingly displaced by appeals to rationality.
When the hierarchy-and-reason partnership was created in the 1760′s, for example, it seemed acceptable for kings to continue to rule, as long as they did so as “enlightened despots.” But by 1776, even a parliamentary monarch like George III of England could be described in the Declaration of Independence as “marked by every act which may define a Tyrant.”
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During the last week, I’ve been looking over the work I did in the 1970′s on the cycle of static and creative phases, hoping to come up with clues as to the nature of the “romantic break.” But instead of finding answers, I keep being reminded of puzzles I was never able to resolve at the time.
By far the most significant of these has to do with the role played by changes in fashion.
I suggested in the previous entry that the concept of a recurring cycle of cultural phases grew out of my study of the development of science fiction — and that is true enough as far as it goes. Between January and August of 1972, Alexei and I wrote a series of columns on the history of SF, in the course of which I began toying with the notion that periods of major thematic innovation, like the 1930′s-40′s, seem to alternate with periods like the 1960′s when authors are mainly concerned with fine points of style and attitude.
That idea was only half-formed, however, when we finished the historical series and turned to other things. Alexei spent the fall of 1972 working on an essay about SF as modern myth, and I took up one of my other interests, the history of fashion.
But I must have brought some of my new historical perspective with me, because as I pored over images of 18th and 19th century styles, I was suddenly hit with an insight that women’s clothing seemed to alternate every few decades between two basic silhouettes, which I dubbed “organic” and “geometrical.” And when I jotted down my initial observations, I casually noted at the bottom of the page that “there seem to be marked correspondences with periods of modern science fiction.”
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Since doing the last entry, I’ve realized there is another aspect to the dominant partnerships that had never occurred to me before — and that means I’m going to have to sort it out before I can move on. So let me start at the beginning…
Back in the 1970′s, when I discovered there were patterns in the history of science fiction that also held true across other areas of culture, I had no inkling of the succession of visions that underlies those patterns. I only knew that cultures seemed to go through a recurring alternation of two distinct phases, which I labeled “static” and “creative.”
During a static phase, there would be profound alterations in cultural attitudes, but the fundamental institutions of society would remain untouched. In the succeeding creative phase, however, an accumulation of problems that the static period had failed to address would compel the introduction of far-reaching social and technological innovations. And then, when the most pressing issues had been resolved, the pace of change would slacken and society would drift back into stasis.
I soon recognized that there was also a consistent sequence of sub-phases within this larger cycle. A static phase, for example, always begins with a brief period of extreme cultural stagnation. This is succeeded by the explosive development of a counterculture, which battles against the complacency and falsity of the larger society. And the eventual burnout of the counterculture stimulates a concluding period of fragmentation and questioning — which sets up the conditions for the transition to a new creative phase.
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Of course, it’s more complicated than that.
It’s always more complicated than that — which is why I’ve been trying my best to say only what is absolutely necessary and not get lost in the details.
But there are important things I’ve left unsaid about the 1970′s — so let’s rewind a bit and consider what was going on during that painfully fragmented decade, during which everything seemed to be flying off in all directions.
Perhaps the easiest way to understand the 70′s is by comparing them to the very similar period from the late 1910′s to the early 1930′s, when democracy and science were reshaped under the influence of chaos in a way that ultimately enabled them to come together as a new dominant partnership.
In much the same way, first chaos and then democracy were reconfigured in the 60′s and 70′s under the influence of holism, which acted as a catalyst in the process without being noticeably altered itself. This period of extreme fluidity began with the failure of the science vision around 1964-65 and concluded with the formation of the democracy-and-chaos partnership in 1976-77.
The first significant change was when the chaos vision broke away from the science-based assumption that there must be a single fixed standard of objective truth.
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In looking back over the previous entry, I realized that I’d understated the importance of dominant partnerships when I implied that they are merely practical and results-oriented. Their surface appearance may be designed to meet the immediate challenges of the moment, but there is also something far deeper and more enduring to be found in the philosophical connection which binds each pair of visions together.
That philosophical connection is necessary because we humans experience life in three very different modes — physically through our senses, emotionally through our family and social relationships, and implicitly through our dreams and inner reflections. Each of these modes gives rise to a radically different image of the universe, and yet we maintain an unshakable conviction that they all point to the same ultimate reality. As a result, we persistently attempt to harmonize these various pictures with one another.
Where each vision represents a model of reality drawn from just one area of experience, every partnership represents an attempt to synthesize two different areas. Compared to the visions themselves, partnerships are intellectual and somewhat arbitrary — which is why they always fall apart in the long run. But at their peak, they provide a brief glimpse of ultimate oneness that can be a source of brilliant artistic and cultural creativity.
The roots of any partnership go back to long before the partnership itself is constructed — to the moment when what will become the senior vision first gains self-awareness through being touched by intimations of what will become the junior vision. The overpowering sense of higher unity which is present at that moment will persist over many generations, even as the two visions go through their separate evolutions, to become the glue that eventually binds them together in a dominant partnership.
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The collapse of the science-and-democracy partnership in 1965 may have left the democracy vision in a state of demoralization, but that was nothing compared to the trauma produced in the United States by the Watergate crisis and its aftermath. The steady stream of revelations about the Nixon administration’s misdeeds and the CIA’s abuses of power which poured out from 1972 to 1976 shook the entire nation to its core and provoked an almost inexpressible sense of revulsion and cynicism.
The official conclusion after Nixon resigned was that the system had worked, but it hadn’t really. The Watergate crisis left behind a deep and abiding distrust of government, along with a tendency to see conspiracies everywhere.
That distrust was most intense in the United States, of course — but then, so was the democracy vision itself.
Visions expand their sphere of influence as they develop, but they tend to be nurtured originally in fairly limited regions, and they have the most lasting impact in those same regions. The reason vision, for example, was quintessentially French. The science vision was most strongly rooted in England and Germany. And the democracy vision has been at the core of America’s identity as a nation since 1776.
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My mother was a little bit psychic and more than a little bit mystical — but that was usually as far as it went. There was one occasion, though, on which she declared, “I want to try an experiment” — and the results were very strange indeed.
In the late 50′s, my father had started bringing home a little extra income, and he began cautiously putting some of it into the stock market. My mother initially played no part in his investment decisions, but one night she must have decided she wanted to try playing the market her way, because she asked me to come over and sit on her lap and hold her hand.
I complied somewhat awkwardly, wondering what was going on, since I was perhaps ten or eleven and clearly too big to fit comfortably on her lap. “I’m going to read out five names,” she said, “and I want me to tell you which one you like.”
She went through her list, and though none of the names meant anything to me, one caught my ear. “Ang Wupp!” I repeated. “That sounds funny. I like that one.”
So at my mother’s direction, my father bought shares of stock in what turned out to be Angostura-Wuppermann, at that time the US distributor of Angostura Bitters.
And the stock immediately started to go up. And up. It went from something like $9 to perhaps $15 over the next week.
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I’ve been thinking on and off about the differences between the chaos vision and the creative imagination vision, and it’s occurred to me that one of the most obvious is that chaos is heavily dependent on the concept of the subconscious, while creative imagination isn’t.
Chaos didn’t start out in the 18th century with a theory of the subconscious, but it did focus heavily on the whole range of non-rational mental states, from dream to madness to supernatural terror. And when the chaos vision started getting more organized in the late 1800′s, Sigmund Freud’s concept of the subconscious provided the first really satisfactory explanation for all those anomalous states.
The reason-and-science partnership was at its peak just then, and human beings were seen as primarily creatures of reason. But Freud’s theory suggested that it was only the conscious mind that was rational, while the subconscious was the natural home of everything that reason excluded — sex and violence, nameless fears and inexplicable urges, primitive instincts and childlike wonder.
In the first half of the 20th century, as reason faded and the chaos vision took on greater authority, the subconscious became correspondingly more powerful as well — perhaps even more powerful than the conscious mind. In science fiction stories of the 1940′s and 50′s, the subconscious was frequently represented as either a vast unknown territory, full of ghosts and archetypal presences, or a kind of shadow self with its own knowledge and agenda.
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