19 Feb 2008 @ 09:37, by John Grieve
This is my sixth Millennium Essay which I wrote a few years ago. I circulated it informally and this is the first time it has been published.
Essay 6: MindSpirit over Matter ----- Matter Undermined
The Crystal Palace
There is a white elephant, or a pink elephant, or any manner of unwelcome guest, which is inhabiting the magnificent crystal palace of civilization, and which everyone has long ignored or looked at with embarrassed glances and wished would just dematerialise and go away. The Crystal Palace, as you will recollect, was built in London to house the 1851 Great Exhibition, and epitomized for that generation all the magnificent achievements and promise of the nascent Victorian capitalist society. The term was also used by Dostoevsky, in his “Notes from the Underground”, in a more ironic way and counterposed to the darker, underground parts of reality and our psyches, later so well exploited by the theories of Nietzsche, Freud, the existentialists and others. The crystal palace is representative of reason, rationalism and science---while the underground is symbolic of the emotions, the unconscious (the Id) and irrationalism.
The white elephant or unwelcome guest at the table of civilization is in fact the theory of civilization: any theory of civilization which is deep and goes to the root of a contradictory and problematic phenomenon and form of society.
Of course there are experts on civilization just as there are experts on tic-tacks and asparagus tips. But the real radical theories of this subject have been consistently ignored for the past 250 years, people like Rousseau, Fourier, Edward Carpenter, Freud, Marx and Engels and more recent ones.
The Missing Link
It is my contention, that what everyone is ignoring with such nonchalant intensity, is in fact, in its radical form, the missing link which can unify and unite the many partial, different and separate facets and aspects of the world, which in their diversity and complexity so intimidate, confuse and mislead so many people at the present time.
Alienation is Separation
The reason why a radical theory of civilization can re-unite and re-integrate our understanding not only of civilization itself but also many other things, is because many theories of civilization, sometimes anarchist sometimes marxist, which go to the root of it all, point to the great separation between things (Alienation) which deeply characterises civilized society.
The fragmentary and confused state of this knowledge of our basic form of society, is itself a symptom of the alienated nature of civilization, and the fact that theories are beginning to be advanced to counter this, is a sign that the age of holism and reintegration of everything is well under way.
From Tribal Network to Civilized Hierarchy
Undifferentiated tribal society is a sort of community-based society of localised, decentralized networks. For many reasons, in the development of civilization, this became a centralised pyramidal collection of hierarchies. In these circumstances a Network of networks collapses into a Hierarchy of hierarchies.
Furthermore, the undifferentiated tribal society where everything, from politics to magic, was mixed together in a holistic mish-mash, became a highly separated, differentiated society where there are 6 or 7 distinct levels which we can schematically identify as:
Psycho/Spiritual
Economics
Social (Classes)/Civil Society
Religious/Science
Political/ (The State)
Military/ (The Army)
The Law of Analogy
It is my belief that everything is analogous. If this were not so, it would be impossible to make comparisons. It is only possible because although things are different, they are basically the same
A glass prism, for some reason, differentiates a single beam of white light into a rich, colourful beam of many hues. We are richer for those colours, beautiful though white light is. Similarly, the prism or hierarchy, of a civilised society, differentiates the mixed, holistic beam of white light of undifferentiated tribal society, into a highly complex and colourful mix of different levels comprising economics, social classes civil society, in fact all the things I’ve just outlined and more.
Because the different levels are basically analogous, it is noticeable that equivalent statements can be made about phenomena on different levels. For example (1) On the psychological level the “unit” of alienation is the EGO. (2) On the political level the “unit” of alienation is the STATE. (3) On the level of the Economy the “unit” of alienation is MONEY. It is my belief that there exists a whole multitude of equivalent statements connecting things on different levels.
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