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.

The introduction of network television to the United States in 1946 is perhaps the most obvious marker of the new postwar world. Baby boomers who grew up with television in the home automatically felt themselves to be inhabitants of a larger world and not just of their own local communities.

Television also brought with it a crucial sense of empowerment. Movies were shown in theaters, and though you might be able to choose between buying your ticket at a Lowe’s or an RKO, that was the limit of your control. But the television set was right there in your living room and you could switch channels at will. By the late 50′s, portable record players and transistor radios meant that every teen could carry their music around with them or bring it to a friend’s house.

And technological empowerment went far deeper than that, because the late 40′s marked the start of a wave of do-it-yourself fads and hobbies. Returning soldiers might become passionate about hotrods, hi-fi systems and tape decks enabled ordinary people to become involved in the fine points of sound reproduction, and even television had a strong do-it-yourself element in the early days of fiddling around with test patterns and rooftop antennas.

In the 1970′s, the technological revolution moved on to computers, and in the 80′s and 90′s to the Internet, but it continued to follow the guidelines laid down in the late 40′s. It has consistently been global in perspective, oriented towards personal ownership, and perceived as a tool for individual creativity.

But the most important question for me is how this technological revolution fits into the sequence of visions — and I believe it is most naturally seen as the response of the science vision to the romantic break of the 1940′s.

The morphing of science into technology had actually begun a bit earlier, as can be seen in King Kong (1933). Kong is an epitomal symbol of the science vision, and his brute animal strength, evolutionary fitness, and violent and destructive nature exactly mirror contemporary perceptions of the universe of science.

But once he is taken off his island, his physical superiority counts for nothing. He is easily bewildered by the urban landscape of elevated trains and skyscrapers and is eventually harried to his death by a swarm of biplanes. With all due respect to Fay Wray, it wasn’t beauty that killed the beast — it was the overwhelming power of advanced 20th century tech.

And that same overwhelming power was rapidly killing the science vision itself, stripping it of its transcendence and subordinating it to human control — a process that culminated in the modern science fiction of 1939-41, in which science was almost entirely limited to technological innovation.

But even the writers of modern SF were never fully convinced that advanced technology would remain under control. Isaac Asimov struggled with this question in his robot stories, and though Asimov’s positronic robots were guaranteed not to turn into Frankenstein monsters and destroy their creators, they also showed a disconcerting tendency to behave as if they had every right to make their own decisions and seek their own destiny.

The growing tension between the two members of the science-and-democracy partnership was a crucial aspect of the romantic break of the 1940′s. To all outward appearances, science had been reduced to a willing servant of society — and yet even human-created technology might potentially break loose and impact society in unpredictable and possibly undesirable ways.

This ambiguity acquired a real-world dimension when the first atomic bomb was dropped on Japan in 1945. Suddenly, it seemed entirely possible that our most advanced technology might take on a momentum of its own and destroy us all.

But at exactly the same time as large-scale technology was assuming this fearful aspect, technology in the hands of individuals was the one aspect of the science-and-democracy partnership that was still equipped to deliver on the partnership’s original promise of a better and brighter World of Tomorrow.

The late 40′s were marked by continuing economic uncertainty and a wave of political conservatism, which between them scuttled any hope of extending the New Deal to create a more abundant and equitable society. And when the economy got moving again in the 1950′s, it did so in the form of a top-down, profit-driven consumer society — a grotesquely compromised version of the utopian World of Tomorrow that had been imagined in 1939.

Even the glittering new tech toys of the postwar era were scooped up and exploited by that consumer society. And yet somehow both the do-it-yourself-ers and the later computer hackers managed to persist as an enduring nucleus of subversive thought and action — keepers of the dream of a citizenry empowered and uplifted by its access to technology.

In its quietly subversive stance towards the larger society, the heart of the technological revolution parallels both late 19th century occultism and the revolutionary mode that began in the 1790′s. All three attracted a cult-like following and were pursued fanatically by a small group of believers who saw in them a promise of escape from ordinary social conventions and restrictions. And each was regarded more skeptically, at best, by the vast majority.

But there is also one significant difference. Political revolution and occultism, despite having useful ideas to offer and worthwhile causes to champion, were ultimately failures. The belief of the revolutionaries that changing society could change human nature proved to be tragically misguided. The occult faith in the power of mind over matter has never amounted to much more than woo-woo.

But radical changes in technology really do bring about changes in society — and they do so without any need for coercion or proselytizing.

This has been true not only of the most recent technological revolution, but also of the three earlier ones — each of which was associated with the final stage of a scientifically-based vision.

The earliest was the Neolithic Revolution, which began in the late Ice Age and introduced not only the domestication of plants and animals but also pottery, metallurgy, and monumental architecture.

The second technological revolution is one that we in the West are less aware of, because it occurred largely while Europe was in the grip of the Dark Ages. Its chief center was in China, where it brought a surge of world-changing inventions that began with cast iron and paper in the 3rd-2nd centuries BC, moved on to metal horse stirrups and printing, and concluded in the 10th and 11th centuries AD with gunpowder and the navigational compass.

And the third began with the rise of modern science in the late 1600′s and continued through the Industrial Revolution of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

During each of these revolutions, the most sweeping changes in society came near the end. The explosive growth of personal computers and the Internet in the 1980′s, for example, corresponds closely to the Industrial Revolution moving into high gear in the 1780′s — or to the appearance of societies that were fully dependent on agriculture around 5000 BC.

It seems on a number of grounds that 1984 should be considered the pivotal year when society began to embrace the ongoing technological revolution wholeheartedly, instead of viewing it with ambivalence. That was when robots became heroes for children to emulate, instead of untrustworthy servants like HAL of 2001. And it was also the year that Apple made an explicit connection between technology and resistance to oppression.

The significant factor here may be that 1984 was the point at which the democracy-and-chaos partnership hit its own romantic break. That freed the adherents of the proto-countercultural holism vision and the emerging multiculturalism and creative imagination visions to start dreaming of alternatives to consumer society.

And that, in turn, allowed them to make common cause with the technological subversives — and to share their goal of a future of distributed networks, empowerment of the dispossessed, and universal human access to the tools of artistic and intellectual creativity.

Previous:

Visions of History

The Dance of the Visions

A list of all the visions.

A timeline of major events in the emergence of new visions since the 1700′s.

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.

Since then, I’ve learned that the roots of holism go back much further than the 1930′s — to the mid-19th century, in fact. But as recently as when I began this blog a year ago, I still thought of each new vision as starting off vague and fragmented and only gradually taking on focus and coherence.

Perhaps the biggest surprise for me has been realizing how well-defined every vision is from the moment of its conception. It seems as though each vision starts off with a set of core principles, which explicitly contradict the assumptions of its predecessor, and then expands upon the implications of those principles as it develops.

The democracy vision, for example, began in the 1600′s as a rejection of hierarchy and despotism and an assertion of equality and freedom. Chaos began in the 1700′s as a rejection of reason, and holism in the 1800′s as a rejection of scientific materialism and reductionism.

As a result, between the 1930′s and the 1960′s, there were actually five visions in play: the dominant science and democracy visions, the proto-countercultural chaos vision, and the emerging challengers to the dominant visions, holism and multiculturalism. And it was from the interplay among all of them that the romantic break of the 1940′s arose.

This can be seen clearly in the development of science fiction. When the science-and-democracy partnership formed about 1934-35, the two partners were roughly equal in weight, and story types which conveyed the awesome powers of the universe of time and space — mad scientists, alien invaders, unknown cosmic forces — remained prevalent.

By the end of the 30′s, however, the democracy vision had taken the lead, and science was reduced to a merely functional and supporting role. The two most influential new writers of 1939-41, Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov, were celebrated for pioneering a style of SF that focused on the social and psychological impact of technological progress rather than on scientific speculation. Those stories were the epitomal expression of the science-and-democracy partnership at its peak — with just a touch of chaos on the side.

But when the United States was drawn into World War II at the end of 1941, science fiction changed direction again and began to pursue far more fantastic and imaginative themes. Heinlein stopped writing for the duration, Asimov plunged into the galactic vastness of the Foundation series, and plausibility frequently took a back seat to the wacky and bizarre.

At the time, this change was attributed to the impact of the war. But since every dominant partnership appears to hit a romantic break at about the same point, it seems inevitable that no matter what the external circumstances had been around 1941-45, SF would have found some excuse to detour from the roadmap to the future laid out by science-and-democracy and follow a yearning for wider horizons.

That yearning for something more than the two dominant visions can provide is perhaps the most characteristic element of the romantic break. It is the initial source of the typical “romantic” quality of this phase, and its most immediate result is a great flowering of the three younger visions.

When Alexei and I wrote The World Beyond the Hill in the 1980′s, we carried our story of the conceptual development of science fiction only as far as 1945 — which was the point at which the trail of the science vision, whose evolution we had followed from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, finally petered out.

We originally had every intention of continuing with a second volume, which would have run from the 1940′s to the 1970′s. We expected that its central theme would be “consciousness” — which is to say, the chaos vision — and even had a tentative title, An Empire of Mind.

But as we started making lists of the authors and stories that would have to be included, it became clear that consciousness alone was not an adequate description. We tried switching our proposed title to A Multiplicity of Worlds, but that was more a matter of labeling the problem than of solving it. Eventually we turned our attention to other things and let the project drop.

I still have a fat folder of notes under that second title sitting in the file cabinet by my desk, however — and though they may be all over the map, some of it is pretty good stuff.

Here’s one note which lists all the most oddball SF stories of 1943-48 and suggests that their common message is, “Mind is not isolated from matter. Mind is not isolated from mind. Matter is not dead and inert — it is alive, in flux, creative, potentially sentient. All physical realities are mental realities and vice versa. We have access to knowledge and capacities beyond our conscious understanding and control.”

That’s a pretty accurate description of the most transcendent aspects of the holism vision. And here’s another note referring to certain stories of the late 40′s and early 50′s which depicted a variety of “decentralized, pluralistic, non-hierarchic, pastoral, semi-anarchic” future societies. That’s multiculturalism, for sure. And here’s a third which evokes the chaos vision, suggesting that the rejection of scientific determinism in the 40′s made possible “a fully existential SF grounded in flux, adaptiveness, and flexible systems of awareness.”

It’s clear that all three emergent visions were at a point of extreme creativity between about 1943 and 1953, fruitfully generating new imaginative possibilities even as the science-and-democracy partnership sank into being merely an ideological justification for things-as-they-were.

I suggested previously that the emergent visions were not yet operating at a level of cultural energy that would have enabled them to trigger the romantic break — and I still believe that’s true. But they were certainly in a position to take advantage of it when it occurred.

As for what does cause the break, I would suggest that the success in tackling old problems which accompanies the start of each dominant partnership quickly raises the level of expectation beyond what the partnership is actually able to deliver. This leads to a peculiar combination of attitudes — increasing cynicism where the partnership is concerned, mingled with a kind of free-floating idealism that is easily projected onto the newer visions.

The first phase of the romantic break is marked by a widespread openness to new possibilities, but soon the partnership begins to regroup and reassert its dominance and society in general grows more conservative. The French Revolution gives way to the Napoleonic Empire, the Wild West gets domesticated, or the Republicans secure a majority in Congress and go on an anti-Communist witchhunt.

As conventional thinking takes hold, hopes of a new world get squeezed out of the sphere of the achievable and into the realm of myth, dream, and fantasy. Those hopes may take the form of a nostalgic yearning for an Edenic world that no longer exists or that never was. They may be expressed in a studied cultivation of the bizarre, the perverse, and the self-consciously decadent. Or they may be channeled into a wild proliferation of heretical theories.

This second phase of the romantic break is a time of ever greater romanticism and ever greater cynicism. In the late 40′s, for example, science fiction seemed incapable of imagining plausible futures but was dominated on one hand by by stories of atomic doom and on the other by a revival of old-style pulp adventure, space opera, and science fantasy.

This dichotomy was not limited to American SF. Hollywood films in 1948-49 were similarly divided between the bleakness of film noir and the nostalgia idealism typical of classic John Wayne westerns, with very little middle ground. And in England, George Orwell’s 1984 was published in 1949 — while in the same year, J.R.R. Tolkien finally finished writing The Lord of the Rings and C.S. Lewis was at work on the first of his Chronicles of Narnia.

But amid all this speculative ferment and emotional turmoil, almost unnoticed, something extraordinary was starting to emerge out of the final phase of the science vision — a technological revolution. Of which more in the next post…

Next:

Part XIII(e): Tech Toys

Previous:

Visions of History

The Dance of the Visions

A list of all the visions.

A timeline of major events in the emergence of new visions since the 1700′s.

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.”

The recent discovery that in an early draft of the Declaration, Thomas Jefferson wrote “subjects,” and then defiantly smudged the word out and substituted “citizens,” displays a conscious rejection of hierarchy at the very moment of its occurrence.

This shift in attitude provided room for the development of hierarchy’s successor, the democracy vision, whose ideals of freedom and equality were explicitly anti-hierarchic. But the more general result at the time was to accelerate the subordination of hierarchy to reason.

The men of wealth and property who drafted the United States Constitution in the summer of 1787, for example, were eager to throw off the yoke of tyranny when it rested heavily on their own shoulders, but were far less enthusiastic about any democratic impulses that might threaten their own superiority.

The form of government laid out in the Constitution might fairly be described as a heavily rationalized version of a traditional hierarchy. There were no kings or hereditary nobles, and legitimate political authority came from the rationality of the system itself rather than divine right. But very little power was placed in the hands of ordinary citizens — who could not even vote for the president or senators — and until the Bill of Rights was added in 1789 at the demand of Jefferson and others, there were no guarantees of personal rights or freedoms.

The French Revolution, which began with the storming of the Bastille in July 1789, started off on a very similar basis, as the revolutionaries instituted a sweeping program of rationalizaton, not only in government but even in such things as the metric system of measurement. But as the Revolution progressed, it turned into something very different.

In October 1793, with France beset by enemies both internal and external, constitutional government was suspended and replaced by a “revolutionary government,” which was defended by paramilitary units and enforced by the Reign of Terror.

Robespierre, the most prominent leader of this revolutionary dictatorship, even stated explicitly, “If virtue be the spring of a popular government in times of peace, the spring of that government during a revolution is virtue combined with terror. … The government in a revolution is the despotism of liberty against tyranny.”

In these words, we can see the ideal of despotism which was central to the aging hierarchy vision being given a radical new twist. And this revolutionary despotism was conceived of as the protector of “virtue” — a word used at the time to represent the highest moral values of the reason vision.

During the Reign of Terror — which lasted until Robespierre himself lost his head to the guillotine the following summer — there was a frantic attempt to do away with every vestige of the old order. The Catholic Church, for example, was briefly supplanted by a Cult of Reason, and even the calendar was rationalized and renumbered, with the establishment of the republic as Year 1.

This was most assuredly Revolution as magical thinking, Revolution with the objective of forcing people to be rational, whether they liked it or not. As such, it was a reversal of values precisely equivalent to the reversal that would occur in the 1880′s when occultism reframed the fading reason vision and declared it superior to science — but carried out at a far greater cost in blood and lives.

The French Revolution failed on a multitude of levels, but it had set a powerful example that endured through the 19th and early 20th centuries. It offered a beacon of hope after the defeat of Napoleon, inspiring resistance to the forcible re-imposition of the old aristocratic order. And when the hierarchy vision finally collapsed, about the time of the Revolutions of 1848, the revolutionary mode became associated with utopian aspirations towards a more perfect society.

The democracy vision was also developing rapidly during this period, but it was still in the emergent phase and except in the United States was culturally marginal. From 1848 to the 1930′s, there was no dominant socially-based vision — and it was precisely during those years that the revolutionary mystique exerted its most powerful grip, from “The Communist Manifesto” (1848) to the Russian Revolution of 1917.

It was only after the science-and-democracy partnership became solidly established that the revolutionary mode started to wane. During the wave of populism that marked the late 30′s, much of the radical left — disgusted in particular by Stalin’s show trials of 1936-38 — either made common cause with the democracy vision or shifted its focus to the first intimations of democracy’s successor, the multiculturalism vision.

The full-on revolutionary mode did maintain some degree of influence for another full cycle, and even enjoyed a final surge of attention when the science-and-democracy partnership collapsed in the 1960′s, only to crumble and be swept aside during the heyday of the the democracy-and-chaos partnership in the late 1970′s and 1980′s.

By then, it was only the fanatical anti-communists on the right who still took the Red Menace seriously — and even today there are still some who shake in their boots at the word “socialism,” lie awake at night obsessing over Barack Obama’s plans for a Marxist dictatorship, or spin elaborate conspiracy theories that lead directly from the French Revolution to the now-disbanded anti-poverty group ACORN.

But speaking of the right brings up a very interesting point, because it seems that the right generated its own variants of the revolutionary mode, following exactly the same timetable as the left.

The earliest and most moderate of these was proposed by the Anglo-Irish statesman and political theorist Edmund Burke. Burke had been a supporter of the American Revolution and was initially inclined to offer cautious approval of the French Revolution — but within a few months he was proclaiming with horror that “the Elements which compose Human Society seem all to be dissolved, and a world of Monsters to be produced in the place of it.”

In November 1790, Burke published a pamphlet titled Reflections on the Revolution in France, which laid out the philosophical basis for his objections. His central argument was that because human society and human nature are too complex to comprehend rationally, established institutions and opinions which have withstood the test of time should not be tinkered with blindly, but should be respected as the most reliable supports of virtue.

By putting his faith in society rather than reason, Burke showed himself to be as much a product of the romantic break as the revolutionaries. But where the revolutionary mode on the left was radical in nature, aiming to do away with the old order, Burke’s ideal was to hold onto the collective wisdom of the past and add to it only in small incremental steps.

Burkean conservatism retained its essentially sober and moderate quality throughout the 19th century — which is to say, for as long as the reason vision remained dominant. But when the reason vision failed in the course of World War I, a far more virulent form of conservatism — fascism — was born in Italy out of a fusion of right-wing nationalism and left-wing revolutionary aspirations.

The chief hallmarks of fascism were a determination to subordinate the destiny of the individual to the will of an all-powerful state, along with a contemptuous rejection of Enlightenment values. In other words, it represented the ultimate assertion of the dominance of hierarchy over reason every bit as much as Soviet communism.

The reactionary dreams of fascism destabilized the world for a generation before being forcibly brought down by the military might of the science-and-democracy partnership. And following the fall of fascism, in the late 40′s and 1950′s, Burkean conservatism made an impressive comeback in a form which had largely come to terms with the democracy vision.

But now Burkean conservatism itself is on the decline, Traditionalism and anti-communism have fallen on hard time since the fall of the Soviet Union — and even though contemporary tea partiers may mouth many of the same old slogans, they show no signs of understanding the true Burkean temperament.

It is still too soon to say for certain — and these inverted visions do have unusual staying power — but for the moment it seems as though the long run of the revolutionary mode may finally be over, on both the left and the right.

Next:

Part XIII(d): A Multiplicity of Worlds

Previous:

Visions of History

The Dance of the Visions

A list of all the visions.

A timeline of major events in the emergence of new visions since the 1700′s.

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.”

It was the realization that two such very different cultural forms as science fiction and women’s clothing seemed to follow the same cyclical pattern of development that really seized my imagination and prompted me to devote the next several years to following out its implications.

Organic fashions appear at the start of every dominant partnership and typically highlight or exaggerate the secondary sexual characteristics. For women, this means an hourglass figure with the emphasis on a small waist and a rounded bust and hips — as in the examples above from the late 18th, late 19th, and mid-20th centuries. For men, it means a “manly” silhouette, emphasizing a broad chest and shoulders.

Geometrical fashions, which take over as a dominant partnership fades and reach their peak with the counterculture, are exactly the opposite. They not only downplay the female figure by camouflaging the natural curves of the waist and hips but subordinate it to a linear geometrical outline.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, this was accomplished with wide crinolines or hoop skirts, which produced a pyramidal silhouette. In the early 20th century and again in the 1960′s, it was most often achieved with garments that fell loosely from the shoulders to the hips, creating a rectangular outline. Men’s styles at these times were typically designed to present a willowy, juvenile, or even effeminate appearance.

Having arrived at my initial insight, I quickly became caught up in trying to bring other areas of culture into the cycles, determine whether they also extended to earlier periods and non-Western cultures, and establish precise timetables. In pursuit of that goal, I read histories and biographies and art books — but most of all I read histories of fashion.

Clothing styles provided my primary guide as I began to construct a chronological framework. The two basic silhouettes were easy to spot, and there were more subtle changes every few years which made it possible to mark off distinct sub-phases.

I did, however, have certain continuing doubts.

First was the general audacity of what I was proposing — a sweeping theory-of-everything of a kind that was completely out of favor in the late 20th century. But even worse was the utter implausibility of the idea that something as trivial and arbitrary as clothing styles could go through a recurring cycle with almost clockwork regularity. That more than anything else discouraged me for many years from attempting to publish what I had discovered.

In the course of those years, I worked to make the cycles more plausible. I came to see each cycle as dominated by its own distinctive worldview, then analyzed each worldview into a pair of dominant visions, and finally recognized the complex succession of emerging visions that I have been presenting here.

But I’m realizing only now as I look back that the subtle dance of the visions seems to operate in a very different context from the changes in fashion that I worked out 35 years ago. They may match up chronologically, but fashion has its own internal logic which is not controlled by the visions.

For one thing, the cycle of fashion appears far more deterministic. Similar forms reappear over and over at the same points in the cycle, regardless of which visions are in play.

For another, it doesn’t seem possible to link clothing styles to any particular vision, with the possible exception of socially-based visions. The casual styles which typify the 20th century may have some association with the democratic ideals of freedom and egalitarianism, but there is definitely no such thing as a “chaos vision” style or a “holism vision” style.

I’ve been vaguely aware of this problem for a while, but what really drove the point home was when I started trying to pin down the nature and timing of the “romantic break.”

The dates I’d laid out for the initial flowering of both technology and occultism were 1877-83 — and this was also a unique moment in the history of late Victorian fashion.

Women’s clothing in the early 1870′s was lush and flamboyant, featuring an elaborate overskirt draped around a bustle, but starting in 1876/77 it became a great deal simpler. Dresses were severely tailored and almost masculine in their lack of decoration, with smooth lines that hugged the figure instead of billowing outwards. Even the bustle all but vanished, only to return in 1882/83 and assume an increasingly extravagant form.

Even more striking, however, is that the same impulse towards simplicity and severity appears to occur at the time of each romantic break. To the right is a series of examples — one each from 1790, 1881, and 1942 — and they all display similar characteristics.

The message of these stripped-down styles has nothing at all to do with reason or science or democracy. Instead, they appear to express a practical, no-nonsense attitude, one appropriate to the moment when a dominant partnership reaches its peak of power and effectiveness. The statement they make is, “Hey. I know what I’m doing. Trust me. You won’t regret it.”

So what we may have here is a form of non-verbal signaling at a pre-linguistic and therefore pre-human level. And that brings to mind something else that occurred to me recently — which is the extent to which I’ve been using the term “dominance” in describing the visions.

Not only have I regularly been speaking of visions becoming dominant or forming a dominant partnership, but in the previous entry I suggested that the romantic break might result from a struggle for dominance between the senior and junior members of the partnership.

A focus on social dominance would certainly go along with the other instinctual elements that appear to be built into the cycle of fashion, but what’s particularly interesting is that this only applies to the more senior visions. It suggests that the dominant visions may be caught up in instinct-level relationships which have far less influence over the emergent visions.

And if that is the case, it could also explain the difference between the “organic” fashions that appear when a dominant partnership is formed from the “geometrical” fashions that typify countercultural periods.

Organic styles, no matter how refined and elaborated, project a very basic sexual message. The focus for women on a narrow waist and broad hips signals, “I am young and fertile.” The focus for men on a muscular chest and shoulders responds, “I am a strong hunter and will provide for your children.”

Geometrical styles, in contrast, say something like, “We are neotenic beings, with a childlike openness to new experiences, and are not obsessed with the old imperatives of survival and reproduction.”

All of this suggests that on some level, every dominant partnership involves a reassertion of ancient, pre-human modes of relationship — and every counterculture involves a challenge to those modes. That is why partnerships are always dedicated to social stabilization, and why as they age they tend to rigidify into elite ideologies. It’s ultimately about power and control.

The specific instincts which underlies organic fashion seem likely to go back to the Homo erectus stage of human evolution, which began about 1.8 million years ago. That was when our ancestors lost their ape-like body proportions and developed well-defined waists and hips and shoulders.

The same set of biological changes probably also led to men and women forming long-term partnerships in order to feed and protect their bigger-brained children through an extended period of maturation. Once pair-bonding became the norm, women whose body proportions proclaimed their youth and fertility, and men who had the physical appearance of being good providers, would have had a definite advantage in attracting mates.

And their relatively brainy children — who pioneered the peculiarly human phenomenon of adolescence — may have established the neotenic, exploratory, sexually undifferentiated, and non-dominance-obsessed prototype for every counterculture.

The visions themselves almost certainly go back no further than the appearance of the first modern humans. But it’s starting to appear as though we’ve been engaged in a 200,000 year long jam session, where the old biological imperatives provide the steady beat, measuring out proportional intervals of time, while the visions furnish the wild, improvisational melody.

Next:

Part XIII(c): The Revolutionary Mode

Previous:

Visions of History

The Dance of the Visions

A list of all the visions.

A timeline of major events in the emergence of new visions since the 1700′s.

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.

These three sub-phases were easy to identify, but the sequence within the creative phase seemed a lot murkier. The best I was able to do was divide it into an initial “classical” period — marked by a sense of balance and harmony in both society and the arts — and a succeeding “romantic” period, characterized by increasing tensions between idealism and cynicism, rebellion and repression, imperial ambition and artistic disengagement.

My hope was that the details of the creative phase would become clearer to me as I lived through the 1980′s and 90′s — but even that didn’t help much. The difference between the sunny Reaganoid optimism of the 80′s and the dark, Goth-y angst of the 90′s was apparent, but the dynamics remained as obscure to me as ever.

Since then I’ve been able to gain additional understanding of the creative phases by considering each one as the rise of a particular dominant partnership. From that perspective, it’s clear that during the classical period the partnership is new and fresh and society is largely unified behind it, while the romantic period is shaped by a loss of faith that is simultaneously undermining and liberating.

But I’ve never figured out the reason for that loss of faith. In part because I’ve been looking at things from the point of view of the emergent visions, I’ve taken it for granted that the dominant partnership eventually just goes sour. But that can’t be right. With the visions, nothing ever “just” happens.

There’s a sharp “break” between the classical and romantic periods, and that sort of thing takes a high level of cultural energy to accomplish. Since the emergent visions are too weak and culturally marginal to serve as the source of that energy, it can only come from some tension within the partnership itself.

And that brings us to a second mystery.

Last December, in discussing the emergence of the chaos vision, I offered a few reflections on the reason-and-science partnership of the late 19th century:

With science moving beyond its ken, the only role that remained for reason was to become a mere adjunct to science — to dwindle into the sort of rational deduction that we see exalted in the Sherlock Holmes stories. This accommodation was what made possible the reason-and-science partnership that dominated Western culture from the 1860’s until World War I.

The reason vision did not give in easily to this loss of status. The late 1800’s brought forth a colorful flurry of occult systems, psychic revelations, and pseudo-scientific speculations intended to prove that there were things in the universe which lay beyond the knowledge of science — but all of it was ultimately a dead end. Reason had passed its sell-by date, and it was time to move on.

I didn’t feel altogether comfortable about dismissing the 19th century occult flowering so casually, but I was hot on the trail of chaos and occultism seemed like an unnecessary distraction. Looking back, however, I can see that the anomaly I tried to sweep under the rug offers vital clues to the nature of the romantic break.

Here’s my current thinking on the matter:

I believe that when a partnership is first constructed, its senior and junior members appear roughly equal. But as it starts to bring about sweeping changes in everyday life, the more dynamic junior vision leaps ahead, not just on a practical level but also in terms of dominance.

At that point, the senior vision is forced to make a choice. It can step back gracefully and accept its subordination to the junior vision, or it can fight to stay on top. Or else — and this is what actually seems to happen — it can do both at once, splitting into two separate reality-states like Heisenberg’s Cat.

For the reason-and-science partnership which formed in the 1860′s, the turning point came about 1877. In that year, Thomas Edison’s invention of the phonograph set off a 25-year period of world-altering inventions which made it clear that it was technology and not the powers of the rational mind that would determine the shape of the 20th century.

But 1877 also saw the publication of Madame Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled, which — together with the founding of the Society for Psychical Research in 1882 — launched a fervent attempt to reassert the power of mind over matter and the superiority of pure thought over physical science. That effort was successful in a way — but its inevitable cost was that occultism passed beyond the limits of reason and into the realm of magic.

There was something a bit twisted about the occult worldview from the outset. Instead of accepting the power of science over the human mind — which was the normal belief of the time, expressed in stories like “The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde” (1886) — it asserted the exact opposite. This inversion of values was a major factor in the self-consciously perverse and decadent mood that marked the end of the century.

There was even a kind of madness about 19th century occultism, which bestowed upon it power and longevity far beyond anything enjoyed by the reason vision, but which also cursed it with a tendency to become unhinged and do great harm. On all those grounds, occultism might be described as the reason vision’s undead vampire counterpart or perhaps its evil mirror-twin.

The influence of occultism was far from merely negative, of course. It may have been abused by the Nazis, but it also inspired a succession of major schools of art — Art Nouveau, Art Deco, abstraction, and surrealism — as well as several genres of imaginative fiction, including the lost race story, occult horror, and sword and sorcery.

All of these had a somewhat overwrought quality, however, and typically contained elements of horror and perversity. And as the science-and-democracy partnership settled into place in the 1930′s, occultism began to be rejected as old-fashioned, implausible, hysterical, and racist.

And that might have been the end of it — except that it wasn’t. Once the science-and-democracy hit its own romantic break about 1941, an updated and streamlined form of occultism began to make a comeback.

This retooling of occultism can be seen in the affection of the abstract expressionists and early beats for Asian and Native American religion. It appears particularly clearly, however, in the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien.

Tolkien, who was born in 1893, grew up at the height of occultism’s popularity, and occult ideas were woven into his initial conception of Middle-Earth. The Hobbit, published in 1937, contains almost no trace of these elements, but as Tolkien worked on The Lord of the Rings in the early 40′s, one of his primary goals was to resolve his own ambivalent feelings about occult power.

This he accomplished chiefly by distinguishing between the benevolent magic of Wizards and Elves and the dark powers of Sauron, a distinction which is perhaps most apparent in Galadriel’s reaction when Frodo asks her to take the One Ring:

“You will give me the Ring freely! In place of the Dark Lord you will set up a Queen. And I shall not be dark, but beautiful and terrible as the Morning and the Night! …

She stood before Frodo seeming now tall beyond measurement, and beautiful beyond enduring, terrible and worshipful. Then she let her hand fall, and the light faded, and suddenly she laughed again. …

“I pass the test,” she said. “I will diminish and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.”

As a result of shedding its more power-trippy elements, occultism was able to establish a fruitful association with the emerging chaos and holism visions. In this revised form, it would exert a major influence on the psychedelic counterculture of the 60′s.

And though the occult belief that there is a non-physical reality which can be mastered by the human mind was never entirely compatible with the chaos vision, for which ultimate reality is incomprehensible, that very tension helped generate the chaos vision’s own successor.

For followers of the creative imagination vision, it seems, the true nature of ultimate reality can never be known — but its power can be invoked through the use of appropriate symbols and rituals. And that may be the ultimate occult legacy.

Next:

Part XIII(b): You’ve Got the Look

Previous:

Visions of History

The Dance of the Visions

A list of all the visions.

A timeline of major events in the emergence of new visions since the 1700′s.

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.

Doubts as to the reality of objective knowledge had been implicit in the chaos vision at least as far back as Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, where they were associated with the first intimations of holism. Similar doubts had resurfaced whenever the science vision faltered, as it did in the years immediately following both world wars. But with those rare exceptions, the concept of objective knowledge remained a central article of faith for as long as science was dominant, from the 1860′s right up to the 1960′s.

As a result, when the science vision finally failed, one obvious reaction was to conclude that all knowledge is subjective, each person’s feelings are as valid as the next’s, and any claims to special expertise are a fraud.

This attitude was widespread in the 60′s and has remained a commonplace of our society ever since. But for those who were prepared to follow up on the clues offered by holism, there was a more sophisticated alternative.

Since the 19th century, it had been taken for granted that objective knowledge was the special province of detached outside observers. The scientist, the explorer, the anthropologist, the psychologist, and the newspaper reporter were all seen as capable of understanding and interpreting events in a way that was impossible for the people who were actually involved in them.

But that belief began to falter around 1965. Bob Dylan’s line, “Something’s happening here but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones,” which mocked the pretensions of a Time magazine intern, was one sign of the new attitude. The same shift was already well underway in science fiction, as signaled by the willingness of Paul Atreides in Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965) to acquire the wisdom of an exotic culture by being absorbed into it.

Within a few more years, this new faith in participatory knowledge was being put into practice. Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968) represented an attempt to report on the psychedelic counterculture from within, employing its own attitudes and vocabulary. And the term “Gonzo journalism” was coined in 1970 to describe Hunter Thompson’s use of an even more flamboyant and participatory style.

By then, it was a truism among the counterculture that reporters invariably missed or mangled the real story and that the only way to understand anything important — psychedelic drugs, the anti-war movement, or the experiences of blacks and other minorities — was as a participant.

These changes in the chaos vision were subtle, complex, and slow to reveal their meaning. By contrast, the alterations which took place in democracy were simpler and unfolded much more quickly — essentially during the Watergate years of 1972-74, when there was an abrupt shift from perceiving democracy as a structure of formal laws and institutions to viewing it as a system of relationships.

When Nixon resigned, the universal reaction was that “the system worked.” But what exactly was the “system” that had worked? Clearly not the government, since the institution of the presidency had been thoroughly undermined and corrupted. And not the laws, since Nixon had gotten off without being held responsible for any crime.

Instead, it seems that “the system” was understood as consisting of the loose network of crusading reporters, Congressional investigators, and conscience-stricken whistleblowers who had gradually peeled away the cover-up of the Watergate burglary.

This revised perception of democracy exactly paralleled the ongoing shift from seeing reality in terms of the physical laws of the science vision to interpreting it in light of the systems theory of holism. In the years that followed, trust in “the system” would only grow stronger as faith in government continued to decline.

By 1974, then, democracy and chaos had both been reformulated along more holistic lines and were almost ready to join together in a new dominant partnership — but not quite. Chaos was still associated in the public mind with the disruptive effects of the anti-Vietnam War movement and the violence of groups like the Weather Underground and was not yet ready to be offered a leadership role in society.

The collapse of 60′s style radicalism which followed the fall of Hanoi in April 1975 would significantly alter the national mood by 1976-77. That final moment of hesitation, however, provided a window of opportunity during which it was possible to explore the more subversive implications of the reconfiguration of chaos and democracy. And the major vehicle for that exploration was Saturday Night Live, which premiered on NBC in October 1975.

SNL quickly became known for its irreverent post-Watergate political satire, in which even presidents might be held up for mockery. But an even greater distinction was its devotion to what might be described as gonzo comedy — a style of over-the-top absurdism typified by John Belushi’s Samurai Delicatessen or almost any routine by frequent SNL guest Andy Kaufman.

The chaos vision had been associated from the start with humor and nonsense, but there had never been anything quite like this new form of comedy. It was radically different from the slapstick of silent films, the screwball comedies of the 1930′s, or the hipster comics of the late 50′s. It might be described as participatory to the max — no clown makeup that can be wiped off, no ironic asides or winks to the audience, just total identification with a bizarre alternate reality.

But even as SNL and its friends and associates were redefining the outer limits of humor, the country as a whole was taking a sharp turn to the right — and that put a decisive stamp on the final form of the democracy-and-chaos partnership.

In 1976, the Democrats passed over a variety of more conventional candidates to nominate a peanut-farmer from Georgia. Jimmy Carter was the first president from the Deep South since before the Civil War, and his election both coincided with and further intensified a frenzy of appreciation for all things country — from country music and citizen’s-band radio to Smokey and the Bandit (1977) and The Dukes of Hazzard (1979).

The anti-authority postures and rowdy personas of this material clearly mark it as a core manifestation of the new synthesis of democracy and chaos. But by focusing on a nostalgic image of rural America, while airbrushing out the problems of urban workers and minorities, it imparted a distinct conservative flavor to the emerging partnership, one which only grew stronger with the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan.

This conservative bias may have been in part a result of the extreme polarization that was a legacy of the 1960′s. The initial challenge for any dominant partnership is to stabilize and unify society, and that means establishing a consensus on which everyone can agree. If the only universally acceptable expression of the democracy vision was based on a romanticized image of a small-town past, and the only acceptable image of chaos was built around cowboys and outlaws, then that was what would necessarily prevail.

But there was also a second factor at work. Just as the influence of the chaos vision was minimized in the mid-1930′s, once its work of catalyzing the emergence of the science-and-democracy partnership was over, so the holism vision was pushed to the margins in the late 70′s. At the same time, the most holistic aspects of the reconfigured democracy and chaos visions were excluded from the new partnership as well.

It appears to be a fixed rule that every dominant partnership will attempt to wipe out all philosophical assumptions that are not compatible with its own intellectual premises. These more radical interpretations are never lost, however, but fall into that cultural netherworld where emerging visions slowly incubate their arguments until the dominant partnership weakens and the time is ripe for a new counterculture to be born.

During the last 35 years, for example, while American society has been dominated by a final nostalgic re-imagining of the democracy vision, the radical notions of participatory democracy spawned in the 70′s have joined forces with the multicultural vision.

And even as the dominant version of the chaos vision has been characterized by extreme subjectivity, ruthless hyper-individualism, and a surly kind of vigilantism, the new ideal of participatory knowledge has moved into alignment with the creative imagination vision.

For Alexei and me, this period of marginalization has often been deeply frustrating. In 1975, a new world had seemed so close we could almost taste it — and then it all slipped away. But that is the nature of the cycle whereby each dominant partnership engenders the next counterculture — and each counterculture in turn engenders the next dominant partnership.

Next:
Part XIII(a): The Romantic Break

Previous:

Visions of History

The Dance of the Visions

A list of all the visions.

A timeline of major events in the emergence of new visions since the 1700′s.

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.

The science-and-democracy partnership, for example, was rooted in the 1600′s, when the spirit of open inquiry which underlies modern science was inspired by revolutionary yearnings for freedom and equality. In the same way, the democracy-and-chaos partnership began with the 18th century realization that the unalienable rights of man can flourish only in a context of government by the consent of the governed. And the chaos-and-holism partnership that will come into being perhaps a dozen years from now was already implicit in the mid-19th century recognition that an evolving universe must be one whose basic nature is unfixed and constantly changing.

But there is more to the philosophical underpinnings of a dominant partnership than that initial spark. By the time a partnership comes into being, its senior member has lost most of its original visionary fervor, but it has evolved instead into a sophisticated intellectual structure that promises to provide a definitive explanation for all of existence.

When the science-and-democracy partnership was constructed in the 1930′s, for example, it was based on the belief that a single set of physical laws would ultimately be found to underlie everything in nature — including human society and the workings of the human mind. So powerful was this belief that for a time even the chaos vision was subordinated to it.

Between about 1937 and 1942, it briefly appeared that all of human experience could be fitted within a single theoretical framework. A vast amount of cultural energy was released by that intellectual synthesis — which is why science fiction, comic books, and several other areas of popular culture all experienced a golden age during those years.

But it couldn’t last. In the course of World War II, chaos gradually began to move off into darker and more irrational areas of human mentation. Those tentative notes of rebellion in the 40′s and 50′s would pave the way for chaos to break away entirely when the science-and-democracy partnership collapsed in the 1960′s — and that in turn would set up the conditions for a new synthesis based on the pairing of democracy and chaos.

The democracy-and-chaos partnership, which attained its definitive form between 1979 and 1984, was structured around a belief that the democratic model of dynamic interactions among different interest groups offers a better understanding of the way the universe actually works than the overly-schematic mathematical formulas of 20th century physics.

This new philosophical model — whose explanatory power has been greatly enhanced by the use of computer simulations — is currently being applied to everything from interactions among different areas of the human brain to interactions among simple physical particles.

But there is something odd going on here, because not only is the underlying philosophy behind democracy-and-chaos still vibrantly creative, even as the partnership itself falls into ruins on the political level, but the older science-and-democracy philosophy remains active and influential as well.

This is perhaps most apparent in the field of economics. It’s no coincidence, for example, that Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman has confessed that he was influenced as an adolescent by Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series (1942-49), possibly the ultimate expression of the philosophy of science-and-democracy:

Admittedly, there were those science fiction novels. Indeed, they may have been what made me go into economics. Those who read the stuff may be aware of the classic Foundation trilogy by Isaac Asimov. It is one of the few science fiction series that deals with social scientists — the “psychohistorians”, who use their understanding of the mathematics of society to save civilization as the Galactic Empire collapses. I loved Foundation, and in my early teens my secret fantasy was to become a psychohistorian. Unfortunately, there’s no such thing (yet). … Someday there will exist a unified social science of the kind that Asimov imagined, but for the time being economics is as close to psychohistory as you can get.

I don’t have a complete explanation for why there should be this kind of “lag” in the philosophical aspects of the partnerships as compared with the political aspects. It may be that the more abstract implications of each synthesis develop only gradually and then are equally slow to fade. But I also see an additional factor that may be at work.

I’ve noted previously that in each partnership the senior vision is subordinated to the junior vision, supporting the younger vision’s goals rather than its own. But this is not only true of the visions themselves, but of the entire areas of human experience from which those visions are drawn. The result is something like the game of rock-scissors-paper, with each area of experience trumping a second and being trumped, in turn, by a third.

Every partnership between an older social vision and a younger inner experience vision, for example, leads to a belief that the overriding purpose of society is to further the aspirations of its most outstanding members. The identity of those favored individuals varies, from the shamans and warriors of ancient times to the highly-paid entertainers and risk-taking entrepreneurs of the era of democracy-and-chaos. But the principle remains the same.

Similarly, each partnership in which an inner experience vision is subordinated to one based on the physical universe inevitably concludes that individuals are at the mercy of cosmic forces — though this acknowledgment can be expressed in ways that range from worship of a benevolent creator god to Lovecraftian terror of ravenous other-dimensional monsters.

And any partnership between a vision based on the physical universe and one based on human society will tend to perceive nature as having no other purpose than to be exploited for the benefit of civilization, as was the case with science-and-democracy.

These conclusions don’t always go down easily, of course. Partnerships which subordinate the needs of society as a whole to those of a favored elite tend to incite rebellion on the part of the dispossessed. Those which subordinate the individual to the cosmos produce dissidents like the occultists and religious fundamentalists of the late 1800′s, who questioned the validity of scientific materialism. And those which subordinate nature to civilization eventually produce a tree-hugger backlash on behalf of the natural world.

But for those who do believe, it’s possible to believe in two of these subordinations at once — to conclude, say, that the individual trumps society at the same time as society trumps nature.

This is why our own culture can accommodate the conclusions of both science-and-democracy and democracy-and-chaos — with nature being left sitting in the ashes like Cinderella. Only when a chaos-and-holism partnership arises and nature is once again seen as trumping the individual will the science-and-democracy model finally be discarded.

Meanwhile, there is a disconcerting duality apparent in the policies of the Obama administration, with the philosophical assumptions of science-and-democracy and those of democracy-and-chaos often seeming to point in opposite directions.

War and national security, for example, along with the economy, are still dominated by the science-and-democracy approach of attempting to invent a “formula” for victory and apply it single-mindedly. These are the areas where Obama has been most scathingly criticized from the left.

At the same time, other aspects of foreign and domestic policy are edging towards the democracy-and-chaos approach of arriving at mutually-satisfactory arrangements through negotiations among all affected parties. And that approach has been under constant attack by the Cheneyite right.

But neither the conservative nor the liberal approach seems capable of dealing with a disaster like the current BP oil spill. That will change only when a chaos-and-holism partnership is constructed in the 2020′s and set to the task of cleaning up the messes left by its predecessors.

Once that happens, the lingering influence of science-and-democracy will be dispelled, chaos will be shorn of its egotism and reduced to an abstract philosophy of existence, and nature will again be in the driver’s seat.

But those developments are still a good ways off. The problem before us now is to nurture a holism-based counterculture that can challenge the existing order of things and develop the tools for dealing with greater troubles that lie ahead.

Next:
Part XII(c): He Who Tastes, Knows

Previous:

Visions of History

The Dance of the Visions

A list of all the visions.

A timeline of major events in the emergence of new visions since the 1700′s.

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.

The United States was already a beacon of democracy when it was still a small and struggling collection of former colonies, and it became a major world power as the democracy vision rose to dominance in the first half of the 20th century. But when the democracy vision faltered, so did America’s sense of identity and purpose — and that presented a serious problem.

Partnerships between dominant visions are always designed to meet the most pressing needs of the moment, and unlike the visions themselves, they are intensely practical and results-oriented. Their purpose is first to restabilize society after the turmoil of the countercultural period and then to provide consensus guidelines for further development.

The details of each partnership, however, are not foreordained. The only firm rule is that the junior vision will set the direction, the senior vision will play a subordinate and supportive role, and the two will be harmonized by a philosophical framework that makes the pairing seem inevitable. But the nature of that framework, and which aspects of each vision will be emphasized to fit within it, are always a matter of choice and judgment.

When Jimmy Carter was elected president in 1976, he was well aware of the problems besetting the democracy vision. In July 1979, he told the American people, “I want to talk to you right now about a fundamental threat to American democracy. … It is a crisis of confidence … that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation.”

But Carter’s proposed solution — that Americans reaffirm their national virtue by consuming less and turning down the thermostats — did nothing to address the problem of restoring the country’s self-esteem. Ronald Reagan offered an answer that was far more attractive, as well as being more in tune with the freewheeling, individualistic spirit of the chaos vision, and it enabled him to defeat Carter in the 1980 election and set the tone of the nation for the next thirty years.

Reagan’s first secret was that he promised Americans a brighter tomorrow. When he announced in November 1979 that he was running for president, he told his audience, “Someone once said that the difference between an American and any other kind of person is that an American lives in anticipation of the future because he knows it will be a great place.” And he went on to decry “those in our land today … who would have us believe that the United States, like other great civilizations of the past, has reached the zenith of its power.”

But Reagan’s second and more potent secret was that he based this dream of continuing greatness on a radical redefinition of democracy — one in which it was seen not as a system of government, but as a guarantee of freedom from government.

This represented a radical inversion of all previous understanding. The assertion in the Declaration of Independence that “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed” expresses an underlying assumption that governments, not people, possess the power to establish justice, promote the general welfare, and so forth. What is special about democracy is that it legitimizes those functions through popular consent, in what Lincoln described as “government of the people, by the people, for the people.”

For Reagan and his disciples, however, government has no unique capacities of its own but exists only by usurping powers which rightfully belong to individuals. As a result it can never be truly legitimate, even when it adheres to the forms of democracy. Its only acceptable role is to remain as small and unobtrusive as possible.

Reagan began his 1981 inaugural address, for example, by inveighing against the “economic affliction” of sustained inflation before suggesting, “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem. … We are a nation that has a government — not the other way around. And this makes us special among the nations of the Earth. Our Government has no power except that granted it by the people.”

In his second inaugural, Reagan boasted that “our new beginning is a continuation of that beginning created two centuries ago when, for the first time in history, government, the people said, was not our master, it is our servant; its only power that which we the people allow it to have.”

Between 1981 and 1985, of course, Reagan had beaten back inflation by having Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker raise interest rates to induce the prolonged recession of July 1981 to November 1982. So much for government not being the solution.

And in the long run, Reagan’s small government rhetoric has served to justify a radical enhancement of government power in the name of “freedom,” combined with a reckless agenda of tax cuts and deregulation which has resulted in an upward redistribution of wealth to the already wealthy while exploding the federal deficit.

But on the theoretical level, the construction of democracy-and-chaos as a system in which government must bow to the desires of individual citizens proved strangely persuasive. Despite its heavy burden of American exceptionalism, it has won over other nations, as well. Even the anti-globalization protesters who chanted “This is what democracy looks like” in Seattle in 1999 were expressing a faith that the true spirit of democracy resides not in the formal structures of government but in individual actions.

This extreme subordination of democracy to chaos is, to be sure, not greatly different from the way in which reason became the handmaid of science in the reason-and-science partnership of the late 1800′s — or the way science was reduced to a means of engineering the affluent society in the science-and-democracy vision of the mid-20th century.

But for those of us raised in the final days of democratic idealism in the 1950′s and early 60′s, it has been particularly painful to see the democracy vision reduced to a banal formula of free enterprise and meaningless consumer “choice,” or to find free elections becoming increasingly irrelevant in the face of an onslaught of corporate financing.

At this point, though, there’s no going back. The democracy vision has suffered a series of body blows from which it will not recover — and the Citizens United decision of January 2010 may come to be reckoned the moment at which it died.

The institutions of self-government are not about to vanish, of course, any more than the practice of scientific thought and experiment ended when the science vision failed in the 1960′s. But the belief that democracy possesses a kind of magical power to vanquish the evils of tyranny and corruption and shape a better future for everyone is gone beyond recalling.

As democracy fails, the democracy-and-chaos partnership is also coming unwound — which means that the chaos vision will soon be set adrift, as democracy was in the late 60′s, and no longer serve as a roadmap by which the society charts its course.

Even now, chaos has largely degenerated into a justification for individualism run amok, while providing almost a parody of its original faith in intuition and instinct. Present-day devotees of the chaos vision see no value beyond personal self-indulgence, no possibility of a common good on either the social or the environmental level, and only elitism in any suggestion that there might be a better method than gut instinct to formulate national policy.

This kind of last-ditch devotion to chaos has now become the exclusive territory of the right wing in America, which appears determined to defend it at all costs, even if it means throwing the most historical achievements of the democracy vision overboard.

But whether it is Tea Partiers aping the chaos-based counterculture of the 60′s, right down to the tie-dye shirts and calls for civil disobedience, or Republican senators doing their best to paralyze the federal government, all this frantic oppositionism is doomed to irrelevance.

Over the next decade or so, the chaos vision will undergo the same series of humiliations as the democracy vision did between 1966 and 1976. First it will be shunted aside, as newer visions race ahead in a holism-based counterculture. And then it will manage to disgrace itself even further, before finally being allowed to return in a much altered and diminished form as the humble servant of holism.

But the construction of chaos-and-holism is unlikely to be directed by the desires of the United States, which may even remain lost in a haze of nostalgia for democracy-and-chaos as the rest of the world moves on.

Next:
Part XII(b): Theories of Everything

Previous:

Visions of History

The Dance of the Visions

A list of all the visions.

A timeline of major events in the emergence of new visions since the 1700′s.

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.

But then (as my mother explained it to me) the head of the New York Stock Exchange called up the president of Angostura and asked, “Do you have any idea why your stock is skyrocketing like this?”

“Beats me,” the president of Angostura replied. And the head of the Stock Exchange spread the word around and the stock slid back to where it had started — but not before my father had managed to get out with a nice little profit.

Now it’s one thing to have a sudden urge to buy a lottery ticket for the first and only time in your life — as my father-in-law once did — and come up with a winning number. In a situation like that, the ticket already exists and somebody was bound to get it. You haven’t done anything to upset the cosmic balance.

But in the case of Ang Wupp, something happened that had no earthly reason to happen.

Did my mother’s venture into magic actually cause the anomalous rise of that stock? There’s no way of knowing, but I suspect my mother believed it had, because she never repeated the experiment.

And I was left with the lesson that fooling around with magic without knowing what you’re doing is all too likely to have unforeseen consequences.

A few years later, we moved from Manhattan to Queens, and while taking a long meandering walk of exploration around the neighborhood, I stumbled upon Angostura-Wuppermann’s headquarters. It was a strange and unsettling moment of recognition — like one of those fantasy stories in which the protagonist wakes still clutching the talisman that proves their dream-adventures actually happened.

A little googling reveals that in the early 1960′s, Angostura-Wuppermann was indeed located at 79-20 Barnwell Ave, Elmhurst 73, N.Y., about a mile from my family’s apartment — so it’s not surprising that I would have come across it. But though I took a lot of later walks in the area, for some reason I never found that particular block again.

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.

I grew up reading those stories, and for a long time I believed in the assumptions of Freudian psychology — though I never found them of very much use in understanding my own abilities and limitations. But when I look back over what I’ve written here, I realize that at some point I must have lost my faith in the subconscious, much as other people gradually and almost imperceptibly lose their faith in a god or gods.

I’ll grant that much of my writing is produced through methods that would formerly have been attributed to the subconscious. When I get into a groove and start asking the right questions, I find myself spontaneously coming up with apt examples, striking metaphors, and answers I didn’t know I knew. I trust the process because it works, but I also can’t help wondering, “Gee, where did that come from?”

The old answer, of course, would have been “from the subconscious.” But I simply can’t believe that everything new and surprising which enters my awareness has previously been stored away in some basement filing cabinet of my mind, just waiting for the proper request slip to call it up. Why would I think that for a moment? It’s not as though these are ideas that I’ve repressed or forgotten, or that an automatic subsystem could have been assembling in some mental back room while I wasn’t looking.

What it really feels like is that everything I stumble upon — the theories, the connections, the interpretations of classic songs and stories — comes not from my own mind but from out there someplace in the noosphere. And any time I manage to grab onto the corner of a particularly fruitful question and start following the thread, significant pieces will begin spontaneously tumbling into my lap and assembling themselves in meaningful patterns.

That process certainly lies outside my conscious control — to the point where merely trying to work things out rationally can put me off the track for days. But to say that much of creativity is unconscious is very far from implying the reality of a “subconscious mind.”

I’m reminded of an old story about the Middle Eastern trickster figures Mullah Nasruddin, which Alexei reworked some years ago as a Tale of the Old Space Ranger:

One day the Old Space Ranger called up Catalog Central on his planet.

“Do you have bubble forms?”

“This is Catalog Central. If it is listed in your computer, we have it.”

“What about life support systems?

“Oh, yes.

“An engine. Do you have that?”

“Yes.

“Guidance systems?”

“Yes.”

“In that case,” said the Old Space Ranger, “why don’t you build a spaceship?”

That catches a lot of the flavor of what it’s like to work on this blog. I’m able to order whatever I might want from Catalog Central — but the catalog isn’t in my head. Instead, it’s out there in the cloud somewhere, and I rely on the Google and Wikipedia to supply precisely what I need when I need it.

That concept of the cloud — the extended network — may be the real crux of the difference between chaos and creative imagination.

The chaos vision was addressed to the understanding of a culture which had given up believing that there was anything magical and mysterious “out there.” No spirit realm, no Heaven, no Mind of God. Just the physical universe and the human mind.

And since the physical universe was a random bunch of atoms bouncing around blindly, and the conscious mind had no room for dark corners or unknown spaces, it meant that the entire weight of inner experience had to be crammed into the individual subconscious.

Boy, did it get crowded.

It’s actually much simpler, and a lot less claustrophobic, to think of higher knowledge as a kind of distributed network, spread around here, there, and the other place. Some of it in my mind, some in yours, some hidden in old books, some concealed in the workings of nature.

And all of this data is susceptible of being swapped around as freely and easily as living creatures swap around bits of DNA, and for much the same reason. It’s built on a common code-base and is part of a single universal system — which is why it’s also accessible to be data-mined in order to construct new meaningful wholes.

But to say as much immediately raises the question of what constitutes a “meaningful whole.”

Here it’s worth referring again to the Old Space Ranger story. Catalog Central is the exact opposite of a meaningful whole. It’s a grab-bag of everything that exists, raw material waiting for someone to sort through it and pull out pieces to be set to a higher purpose.

But doing that requires a special kind of vision — the ability to look at a junk heap and see in it the makings of something new and wonderful. And this is where the Old Space Ranger comes in, with his seemingly childlike question, “Why don’t you build a spaceship?”

In the context of the story, the Old Space Ranger represents the voice of inspiration. But in real life, where does the inspiration to build a spaceship come from?

It comes from creative imagination. And creative imagination — the ability to look at what is not yet and imagine what might be — grows out of a sense of purpose.

A sense of purpose is a distinctly human characteristic. Robots don’t have it, even when they’ve been programmed to give the illusion that they do. But in recent years, I’ve run across two stories of robots acting in ways that appear almost human.

The first of these — which I haven’t been able to find online — involved a group of robots which had been instructed to head for the brightest source of light in their vicinity. For some reason, one of them was left unattended in a dark corridor with a door at the far end that was slightly ajar — and by the time its bewildered handlers caught up with it, it had made its way out into the parking lot and was headed towards the sunshine.

The second account concerned a robot which was fitted with rudimentary wings and instructed to get its body as far off the ground as possible. Within a few hours, it had discovered the basic principles of flight — but along the way it had tried such creative cheats as folding its wings down and walking on their tips or climbing on top of nearby objects.

Both these robots seemed to mimic a human sense of purpose far more closely than any device which has been designed merely to pass a Turing test by engaging in idle conversation. This may be because they were not given a specific sequence of steps to follow but were provided with an objective and left to work out the best way of achieving it on their own.

But there’s more to it than that, because the particular goals those robots were handed — “strive upwards” and “seek the light” — have something peculiarly transcendent about them. These are among the most enduring and powerful metaphors of personal, social, and spiritual growth, and it’s no coincidence that they would endow even robots with at least a touch of higher purpose.

I suspect that a very similar imperative may be hard-wired into us humans as well. For one thing, if you’ve been instructed to strive upwards and seek the light, but without being given any specifics, you might plausibly conclude that the answer was to build a spaceship and go zooming off to the stars.

But the same imperative could easily underlie every aspect of the creative imagination vision. That impulse to look beyond the junk heap and see larger possibility is the source of magic, morality, and wisdom. It is what enables us not only to recognize existing patterns but also to create new, higher-order patterns.

It is thus the dynamic that powers creative change. And it may even be the source of the strange assurance expressed in the Whole Earth Catalog that “we are as gods.”

Next:
Part XII(a): Democracy Inverted

Previous:

Visions of History

The Dance of the Visions

A list of all the visions.

A timeline of major events in the emergence of new visions since the 1700′s.