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History
Humanists are men of action, not ivory tower specialists. Men like Pericles, Cicero, Lorenzo de Medici, Franklin, Jefferson, and the mandarins of China. Indeed, one reason humanism developed in Florence and not elsewhere is that they had no university.
Still, there is one study that appeals to all humanists and that is history, not so much the outer history of demographic events so beloved of the scientists, but inner history, the history of challenge and response, changing consciousness, energy and stagnation, civilization and barbarism, the moral of history. This is the kind developed by Lord Clark and Arnold Toynbee and Alan Watts, and the mandarin 'censors' of China. Inner history is easier to trace in the arts than in politics, and easier to express in myth than in laws.
From a humanist perspective, several remarkable global patterns emerge in addition to those discussed by Toynbee, Clark and Watts. There is the cyclical variation of forms of consciousness in Western civilization for one thing. Another interesting pattern is the way the forms of rationality taken in various cultures since the Socratic axis 2500 years ago all complement one another. It is as if each were developing something the other lacked.
The humanists in China made her well-governed and stable, a model of harmony and balance for a long time. The Yogis made India timeless and meditative. The middle-Eastern prophets contributed a sense of history and destiny and the uniqueness of events. Could it be that the African contribution will be 'soul' and 'barbaric' vitality? The Amerindian contributes an ecological sense of spiritual harmony with the Earth. The Western contribution is the Socratic spirit which leads to science and to instability. The instability and polarized consciousness found in the West (finding no common ground between divinity and the devil) led to the physical conquests of the time of the Chariot which have so changed the entire world.
Today, we need to synthesize all these contributions. Each form of rationality by itself runs into difficulties. In China, the development of humanism without specialized science resulted in stagnation, while in India, Yoga without science or humanism resulted in the negative view of life on this earth, and an escapist, fatalist, cyclical world-view. The linear, prophetic world-view of the mid-East needed to be corrected by the cyclic world-view of India, and vice-versa. Africans and Amerindians needed the stimulus and contact of a more turbulent world. The West has once more been led to the same soul-deadening exhaustion that overcame the Romans, although we are still in an early stage of it, perhaps corresponding to about 50 AD Our arid intellectualism and materialism needs to be corrected with the mythic insights of the Amerindian, the spiritual science of India, the humanism of China, the vitality and tribalism of Africa, and the poetry of the middle-East.
The fact that there is a remarkable complementarity of cultures, quite 'coincidental' and unknown until today is a powerful reason for believing in the Whole-Earth moira of the collective unconscious. This moira is bringing everything to an explosive focus at the end of this century, preparatory to the transition to a new world synthesis.
But will it be a smooth transition? Maybe we'll have a dark age first. This can only be avoided by a change in consciousness (fig. 23). Most people in all times and places find it impossible to escape from their own form of consciousness and are thus unable to imagine that anything could change fundamentally. If this petrification persists, a dark age is unavoidable, no matter how well we solve our outer problems.
It took a thousand years of darkness (dark=unconscious) for Western civilization to find itself after the exhaustion of the Romans, a thousand years before the advance of the dangerous critical spirit could begin again. Neither a universal state nor a new religion sufficed to save the Romans. They made their journey to the East and became Byzantine and salvaged something. In the long run the total collapse and 500 year total rebirth of the Western half of the Roman empire was more fruitful. Something like this could also be our fate. We could create the universal state, and adopt uncritically the Yogis as gurus (the journey to the East) and this idolatrous mimesis (to use Toynbee's ponderous phrases) would be our Byzantinazation.
The way out of this is a return to Tribal conscious for the West. Since this is a native element, we won't be tempted to be slavish and thus uncreative. And since we have two quite different forms of Tribal consciousness in our own history (Greek and Gothic) and two quite different external forms of Tribal consciousness (Amerindian and African) to use, there is no chance we shall simply revive a dead civilization.
History is more an expression of consciousness than anything else. It is relatively fruitless to change institutions unless you also change consciousness. Conversely, once consciousness is changed, other changes come about almost automatically. A case in point is the libertarian system of government set up in the United States by the Tribal men of the Enlightenment (especially Jefferson). It has turned out to be even more tyrannical than the old Aristocratic governments of Europe, simply because Practical consciousness cannot understand liberty, except possibly the liberty to exploit. Practical societies are always rigidly uniform in all the things Practical men believe important, more out of social pressure and the customs of enforcing the law, than out of form law. Practical men cannot tolerate diversity.
By contrast, Tribal societies at their ideal peak permit and encourage tremendous diversity of class, occupation, clothing styles, and ideas, within a larger cultural harmony which all share. Think of the Prolog to the Canterbury tales, men and women of such diverse life styles and clothing styles, most of them as colorful as the courtiers in a Limbourg illumination, all of them sharing an experience as they share life, with perfect harmony, sure that each is playing his role in the divine scheme of things. Gothic men at their best had a marvelous sense of the wholeness of the cosmos, which reached a peak with St. Francis of Assisi singing troubadour songs to the birds and to brother fire and sister wind and feeling it to be discourteous to be richer than his fellow man.
Gothic man was playful, colorful, and fantastic in everything he did, from Cathedrals to crusades (which were larks, conducted with absolute chivalry, nothing like modern 'crusades'), and because he was close to the roots of his being he was filled with joy and ever close to the miraculous. Of course, there were discordant notes, such as EVERYMAN (a very late medieval work) and 'Dies Irae' and other religious works which show a somber and puritanical streak in the life of the times as well. In the new cities, new developments such as banking and printing were paving the way for capitalism, Puritanism, and exploration.
It was Puritanism which caused the transition from Gothic and Renaissance Tribal consciousness to middle class Practical. Puritanism had a lot to do with the other institutions of the World-Machine, and Puritanism itself was forged by the upsurge of hellfire and damnation ideas, preached by Savonarola, painted by Hieronymous Bosch. Puritanism came out of the same lurid forge that produced witch hunts, religious wars, the apocalyptic engravings and paintings of Durer and Schoengauer, and the almost psychotic visions of Bosch. The intensity of religious feeling in the Northern cities caused by printing and engraving biblical subjects was incompatible with the Aristocratic humanism and scepticism of the Renaissance popes and the Reformation was the result.
For two hundred years, the Puritanical middle class consciousness remained in secondary importance in Western civilization (except in Holland), while the Aristocratic Princes, higher clergy, monarchs, gentry, and academics continued in various modified and Hellenizing forms of Tribal consciousness. After 1800, the middle class, Practical minded, technological, exploitative, other-directed pioneers and captains of industry rose to dominance and became a majority, an overwhelming majority in the United States.
Meanwhile, a Faustian counterpoint to many trends in the World-Machine had appeared and also grew in importance while the Tribal Aristocracies declined. At first they (the Fausts) were known as romantics. They rejected the machine and all machine-like thinking. They detested absolute power, artificiality, classicism, and the world-view of the Enlightenment. They reacted against what they regarded as the banality of domesticity and the tidy-mindedness of the middle class. Never more than a small and despised and discordant minority, they could not really improve anything fundamental nor create any lasting alternative to the old absolutism or the new Victorianism. But they were very effective as spoilers and initiators of cataclysms.
Rousseau was the first, followed by such greats and/or monsters as Wordsworth, Napoleon, Beethoven, Chopin, Van Goth, Gauguin, Wagner, Schoenberg, Hitler, Marx, Lenin, Nietsche, Hegel, Picasso, Bobby Seale, Dostoevsky, Stanley Kubrick, and so forth. They were self-destructive, usually dying young, going insane, contracting syphilis or tuberculous, or some similar thing. Why? Because of their simultaneous love/hate for middle class mothers, wives, daughters, fathers, brothers, etc. They usually have middle class origins. This ambivalence (which produces neurotic guilt and anxiety) is beautifully explored by Dostoevsky in Crime and Punishment. Raskilnikov loves his mother, but destroys her. Marmeladov loves his noble, long-suffering, angelic wife Katerina, but he causes her tubercular death by his self-destructive alcoholism. The lurid pathology of the characters in Crime and Punishment applies in lesser degree to all those of Faustian consciousness.
Faustian consciousness produced so many isms and schisms because the Faustian man was always in revolt against the establishment, and the works of each successive wave of Fausts were first shocking, then accepted, then part of the hated establishment, thus the necessity for revolting again and again and again. The fact that Faustian consciousness is defined as a reaction against Practical consciousness makes the two fundamentally alike.
This fragmentation of effort has contributed to the barbarism of the Twentieth Century, and has means that the brilliant inventions of a Van Gogh or Wordsworth have gone for nought, and have had no lasting effect.
The violence of Hitler, Napoleon, Black panthers and SDS seem incompatible with the romantic sensitivity of Wordsworth, Beethoven or Chopin. But romantic sentimentality ignores and denies all reason, all possibilities of a science of intuitive meaning, any possibility of a canon of good taste, or balance, or harmony. Likewise, Napoleon and Hitler ignore all the rational arguments against war, and all the moral limitations on the conduct of war. Romantic sentimentality and Faustian egotism are part of the same thing, the rejection of any limitation on the self. In fact, the self of a Faust is illusory, and he is a driven and pathological man.
Today, you can easily identify people as being one of these three types (or in transition). If they are narrowly practical and believe the real world is entirely a matter of competition in war or business, if they react with puritanical shock at any 'deviant' behavior (anything fundamentally incompatible with their own life-style, such as smoking pot), if they show no awareness of the values of aesthetic or intuitive works, then they are certainly Practical. If they are shocking, self-destructive, contemptuous of everything Practical (a good test is their reaction to Norman Rockwell), but fundamentally wedded to the materialistic world-view of the World-Machine, then they are certainly Faustian. This includes most specialists, intellectuals, artists likely to be hung in existing museums, most professors, and a good many people with long hair, especially if they are actually dirty (most Tribal types are not). Practical man is compulsively tidy and domestic. Faustian man is dirty and unconventional in domestic habits just in compulsive rejection of Practical life. Tribal man is neither dirty nor fanatically clean (there are more significant things in life than worrying about smelly armpits!).
Why is all this important? Because what is mainly needed now is an inner transformation. Without it, the outer changes are useless.