The Archetypal Calculus Part 7: A Quadrant Analysis of Corona

I mentioned in an earlier post that I had realised that my analysis of the corona event, collated in my book, The Plague Story, fitted quite nicely onto Wilber’s quadrant template. In my book, I had attempted to survey what was going on during corona from a holistic or integral point of view by incorporating a number of different perspectives. In this post, we’ll map those perspectives onto the quadrants with the aim of showing how the quadrants can be used to analyse real-world issues and not just abstract conceptions around wholeness and evolution.

With that in mind, let’s draw up a map of the “pandemic”. To refresh our memories, here are Wilber’s quadrants:-

We’ll now take each quadrant one at a time starting with the upper-right.

The upper-right quadrant: exterior perspective of the individual

Recall that the upper-right quadrant is concerned with holons (Wholes) in their exterior and individual perspective. From a scientific point of view, this equates to the categorisation and classification of objects for study. A classic example from biology is the grouping of various plants and animals into taxonomies based, for the most part, on external characteristics. Since we are talking about pandemics in this post, we are concerned with the field of microbiology and how it identifies its objects of study – microorganisms.

The beginning of the study of microbiology was tied to the invention of a new technology that allowed the microbial world to be seen for the first time. It was the Dutchman, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, who pioneered a new form of lens making that radically improved the quality of microscopes in the 1670s. A draper by trade, van Leeuwenhoek was trying to create a tool that would enable him to better gauge the quality of thread, but he would later turn his new invention to the microbial world and make numerous discoveries including being the first to identify bacteria.

Antonie van Leeuwenhoek

It took another two hundred years for other scientists to find the connection between bacteria and disease. Thus, a new category of pathogenic bacteria was created and the germ theory of disease was born. After decades of locating all kinds of pathogenic bacteria, scientists realised that there seemed to be diseases caused by things that could not be seen under a regular microscope. Since the name virus was already being used to mean something like “cause of disease”, this presumed category was called viruses. (The word virus comes originally from the Latin meaning “poison”).

Given that viruses were too small to see under a microscope, we had no real ability to identify them from an exterior perspective and thus their existence from a UR quadrant perspective was still speculative. That all changed with the advent of the x-ray and then the electron microscope. These allowed the creation of images and therefore the identification of viruses from an exterior, objective perspective.

Because we use the same word (microscope) for all of these technologies, the layperson may think that the identification of viruses was a simple extension of the method used to identify bacteria. There are a number of reasons why this is not the case.

Firstly, to paraphrase the meme, one does not simply do electron microscopy. You or I may purchase a cheap microscope, take a sample of something, stick it under the microscope and look at live bacteria with our own eyes. The same is not true for electron microscopes. Not only are electron microscopes seriously expensive, any sample needs extensive preparation before it is ready to be “seen” under such a microscope. Sample preparation requires a large amount of training as do the skills to calibrate the microscope itself. What’s more, the processing of the sample kills off anything that might have been alive in the sample. Electron microscopy can only show us things that are not alive.

A second big difference is that normal microscopes work off our everyday visual faculties including the rules of gestalt psychology which determine how we identify objects and patterns in the world. The same is not true for electron microscopes where the “image” must is constructed based on rules for how electrons bounce off the things they are fired at. A translation must be made back into the “language” of our everyday visual faculties.

There is one word which sums up these differences: abstraction.

Electron microscopy is far more abstract than regular microscopy. This abstraction manifests in much greater time for the preparation of samples, specialised skills in how to calibrate the microscope and different types of microscope. All of this creates more room for error to creep in. Furthermore, the technology itself requires specialists with significant experience in interpreting what they are seeing. Electron microscopy has become a full-time job in its own right. This is a far cry from the days when a tailor like Antonie van Leeuwenhoek could dabble in microbiology in his spare time.

In recent decades, virologists have begun using even more abstract technologies in their work. These take the problem of abstraction to a new level since they no longer even revolve around identifying objects from an exterior perspective but use genetic analysis instead.

The PCR is a classic example. Virologists attempt to identify a virus by finding genetic code in a sample. This is not the full genetic code of the virus but only a segment. How do we know this segment can uniquely identify the virus? Well, virologists need to figure it out. They do so according to agreed rules. Those rules have been changed three times in the last several decades, hardly a sign of stable and settled science.

Just like electron microscopes, the PCR is a complex piece of technology that requires extensive sample preparation and instrument calibration in order to produce reliable results. All of this introduces new layers of abstraction and more steps in the process where errors can be introduced.

There are two key points to make about all this. Unlike bacteria, which was originally discovered by a lay person (van Leeuwenhoek), viruses can only be “seen” by a select group of insiders – the experts. Unless you have millions of dollars lying around to buy the equipment and the time and money to learn how to use it, you will never be able to verify the results for yourself. That is true for us as laypeople and it is also true for scientists in related disciplines outside of virology including epidemiologists and doctors, both of whom must simply take whatever virologists say at face value.

The second point relates to the virologists themselves. Modern virology relies on the concatenation of evidence from numerous already abstract sources. Electron microscopy, PCR, cell culture experiments and other techniques are all abstractions in themselves, each prone to error and each requiring an understanding of rules of the abstraction in order to weigh up the evidence.

What inevitably happens in such circumstances, and I see this in my own line of work, is that the basics of the discipline get forgotten as the abstractions becomes ends in themselves. It is very easy for the basic method of science – formulating a hypothesis and devising ways to test it – to get forgotten.

When you combine this with the fact that virology is a closed shop that never gets criticised from outside, it’s a recipe for groupthink and delusion. As mentioned in last week’s post, this delusion is actually a form of dissociation and that is why intellectuals can often manifest symptoms that are indistinguishable from mental illness. The reason the average person doesn’t see it is because intellectuals talk in their usual calm and authoritative voice rather than rambling incoherently like your average mental patient. G.K. Chesterton summarised the dynamic with his usual incisive wit: the point of education is to learn not to take educated people seriously.

Should we take virology seriously? It is trapped in the fogs of abstraction like so much of other science these days. It doesn’t see any objects directly but only through its hyper-complex technologies. The basic object of study in virology is an abstraction. Take away the technology and the object disappears with it.

Abstractions are not inherently a problem, as long as they make accurate predictions about the world. But the record on virology is almost embarrassing in this respect. From the swine flu false alarm of 1976, to the AIDS hysteria, to SARS-1 and then covid, modern virology has an almost perfect record of being wrong and that is a strong sign that its abstractions aren’t real. It seems probable that there’s no there there.

For these reasons, we’ll list the technologies that lead us to believe there is such a thing as a virus in the UR quadrant as follows:-

Let’s move on to what might appear to be another categorisation problem relevant to a “pandemic” and that is the identification of disease. Disease, however, is actually a relationship between two objects. It belongs to what Smuts called a Field and what Wilber calls the “collective”. Therefore, it belongs in the lower-right quadrant and that’s where we now turn to carry out our analysis.

The lower-right quadrant: exterior objective perspective of the collective

The lower-right quadrant relates to systems viewed from their exterior interactions. Here we must make a very important distinction between what we’ll call sickness and disease. Sickness is the subjective feeling of illness and belongs in the upper-left quadrant. Disease refers to those aspects that are viewable from an exterior perspective. We you go to the doctor, you probably complain of symptoms and you talk about the subjective aspects of those symptoms. That’s sickness. The doctor then tries to match those up to externally visible signs of disease.

The human body is a system that aims to keep itself within an equilibrium as regards to vital functions. Disease is what happens when the equilibrium is breached and the functions no longer work as they should. Even well before the advent of modern medicine, it was obvious that the environment often played a key role in disease. As noted earlier, the word virus referred to poison in Latin and poison is source of disease i.e. it throws the body out of equilibrium. This gives us the recipe: system + poison = disease.

The germ theory of disease created a similarly simple formula: system + pathogen = disease. But even from the very beginning there was a problem with this because, for some people, adding a pathogen did not make them diseased. Nowadays, we know about the immune system and its role in the larger system of the human body. But we also know that bacteria and viruses are ever present and “infection” appears to be the normal state of affairs. Thus, the formula system + pathogen is redundant. The system itself already includes all kinds of bacteria and viruses which have been given the name microbiome and microvirome.

It turns out that “infection” is itself an equilibrium position. The question then becomes: what causes bacteria and viruses to get out of equilibrium? The emphasis shifts away from the simple presence of a pathogen and towards factors related to overall system health. These include diet, general environmental conditions and exercise.

As the germ theory of disease became the latest scientific craze, scientists attributed many diseases to the system + pathogen paradigm which turned to be caused by general system health. Scurvy, beriberi and pellagra were all originally thought to be caused by microorganisms but turned out to be caused by an absence of vitamins in the diet.

What is true at the individual level is true at the collective. History shows a very close correlation between malnutrition and pandemic. The Spanish Flu came at the end of WW2. It is a little-remembered fact that the combatant nations of Europe tried to starve each other into submission during that war. As a result, many Europeans were significantly malnourished by the end of the war, having endured years of food rationing. Years of chronic stress from war and malnutrition certainly would have caused a population-level reduction of general health, opening the way for a pandemic.

The whole-of-system view allows us to account for another problem with the naïve germ theory of disease which is that some diseases have multiple “causes”. Pneumonia is a classic example since it appears opportunistically when the immune system is supressed, which is why it often shows up in patients suffering from other maladies and also in the elderly. In a very narrow sense, we might say that pneumonia is “caused” by a microorganism. But the true determining factor is overall system health.

Taking a holistic approach allows us to see disease in a more accurate light. For most of human history, malnourishment would have been a major source of disease. In the modern world, we have swung to the other extreme where over-nourishment is a problem leading to lifestyle diseases such as diabetes, obesity and high blood pressure. These also work to weaken the immune system and allow microorganisms to cause trouble.

There are other lifestyle issues in the modern world that affect general health. As Peter Duesberg pointed out in relation to AIDS sufferers, the massive increase in recreational and pharmaceutical drug use in the post-war years is the equivalent of poisoning the body. Occasional usage of drugs does not lead to long term effects unless the drug is severely poisonous (thalidomide, AZT). But long-term drug use is a very different story.

The vast majority of AIDS suffers were chronic drug users who imbibed multiple legal and illegal substances on a regular basis. Meanwhile, long-term drug use of both recreational and pharmaceutical drugs has become normal for a large section of the population in the post-war years. It’s obvious that such practices reduce general health.

The irony is that, having learned the benefits of sanitation, nutrition and how to avert the worst pollutants from industry, the post war years have provided possibly some of the most beneficial environmental conditions that humans have ever lived under. That’s why life expectancy climbed relentlessly and infectious disease all but disappeared. What did humans do when faced with such beneficial conditions? We started poisoning ourselves. Given that the word virus originally meant “poison”, blaming the resulting disease on virus is true, but only in the old meaning of the word!

We can summarise these considerations on our diagram by describing two approaches to disease: the germ theory and the holistic theory.

It is clear that the public health and biomedical bureaucracies in the modern West all favour the germ theory with its focus on pathogens and pay almost no attention to holistic factors. This is the number one reason why health outcomes and life expectancy are now in decline in many nations.

The lower-left quadrant: interior perspective of the collective

The lower-left quadrant is what we generally call culture. My initial analysis of corona identified two main concepts in this quadrant. First was what I called the Plague Story which was the way in which Hollywood had taken the traditional plague story that is one of the oldest known to man and adapted it to the modern world by portraying the scientists as heroes who would save the day in the event of a pandemic.

This portrayal of scientists as heroes in mythic narrative is highly ironic since many modern scientists think of themselves as the puncturers of mythology. It turns out that scientists are quite happy to be the heroes in stories told about themselves.

Since mythic narrative has been central to most religious traditions, it is also rather coincidental that modern science has become far less like the golden age of science and far more like the cloistered religious institutions of bygone eras. The heroic narratives created for scientists have evoked the same kind of awe once reserved for religion.

Against this backdrop, the abstractions of virology then become a feature and not a bug of the system. Just as religions often created fabulously complex theories that the lay person would never understand, science has now arrived at the same place. Modern science addresses its “congregation” in exactly the same way that the Catholic Church once did i.e. in a language that nobody understands an that is meant to be not understood. In short, science has taken on many of the aspects of religion in its relation with the public.

We can add these factors to our diagram as follows:-

The upper-right quadrant: interior perspective of the individual

The UR quadrant is about the subjective view of reality felt by each of us. There are as many of these perspectives as there are people. Nevertheless, we can identify certain patterns of reaction related to the “pandemic” and most of these are the time-honoured responses that all people have felt throughout history when a public hysteria takes hold. Among these are fear, anxiety and panic. Equally natural in such times are the desire for leaders who can explain the situation and promise to have everything under control.

Since all of us lived through corona and could see the various reactions for ourselves, there’s no reason to spend much time on this quadrant. There is, however, one less obvious reaction that caught my attention and which formed a chapter in The Plague Story, which was the genuine excitement that a section of the public felt during the lockdowns. It was clear that for some people corona was a thrilling experience that gave them the sense of living through something momentous. Such people really were living through a Hero’s Journey where the scientists were saving the day.  

My speculation is that this is related to the point made earlier about how the post-war years have delivered a period of stability and prosperity that is unmatched throughout history. For a non-negligible section of the population, this stability has translated into boredom. Recreational drug use is one “solution” to that problem. Hollywood movies are another.

So, funnily enough, is politics. Demanding radical change from leaders as a solution to boredom seems to me behind many of the “big issues” of our time. Politics itself has become part of the bread-and-circuses dynamic of the US empire.

Once more on the lower-right

With this we have covered the major points in all four quadrants. There are a number of smaller issues we could explore but there’s perhaps only one more worth touching on in this post.

The lower-right quadrant includes not just our interactions with the microbial world and the environment more generally, but also with our society. Thus, it encompasses political and economic systems. When we take that perspective, we find that enormous sums of government money have been made available to the biomedical and public health establishment in the post-war years and that these sums of money go up every time there is a public health scare.

That’s what happened with the swine flu false alarm in 1976, the AIDS hysteria of the 80s and then with corona. In each case, it’s not just the direct money given by government but also the fact that many top scientists have patents on the various technologies and therapeutics that are employed. Think of how much money got spent on PCR tests during and corona and then understand that somebody was earning a commission for each test not to mention the profits of the manufacturers and all the middlemen involved in the supply chain. Medicine and “science” now accounts for a sizeable portion of GDP in developed nations.

Karl Marx noted how the ideology of a society seemed to mirror its economic system. In the case of virology and public health, given the lock tight correspondence between public health scares and the amount of money earned, all the “scientists” involved in that system have a vested interest in the falling in line behind the narrative. This is even more true when the narrative is set from the mandarins at the top (Fauci) who have total control over funding, media access, awards etc.

The case of Peter Duesberg is crucial here since his career was destroyed due to his pointing out the obvious problems with the “science” around AIDS. Institutional science now treats dissenters the way the Catholic Church used to treat heretics. Science is not just failing due to abstractions and expensive technologies, it’s failing because the real scientists are given a choice between falling into line or having their career ended.

Once again, a comparison to Antonie van Leeuwenhoek is useful here. He can rightfully claim to be one of the founding fathers of microbiology. But he was a businessman in his normal life who was also heavily involved in civic activity in his home town. In fact, he never even attempted to become recognised as a scientist and only shared his discoveries with the Royal Society in London when convinced to do so by friends. Like so many of the great scientists, van Leeuwenhoek was driven not by money but by simple curiosity. Meanwhile, modern machine science is driven by money. Exactly as Marx would have predicted, that money has a significant influence on the ideology.    

Of course, for the corona hysteria, there was an extra special geopolitical dimension as the secretive, closed-shop of virology interfaced with the secretive, closed-shop of the Chinese communist party and the US deep state to create a microorganismic Frankenstein via gain-of-function research. Was this inscrutable abstraction an actual danger in the “real world”? The early data out of China suggested the answer was no, but who could trust that when the CCP had just locked down an entire province and, more to the point, who trusts the CCP?

Conclusion

We have seen in this post that the arrival of the germ theory of disease brought about a change in the meaning of the word virus from a generic cause of disease (a poison) to a specific object identified only by the abstractions. As Peter Duesberg showed in his book, Inventing The AIDS Virus, this shift of meaning saw virologists completely ignoring the obvious fact that almost all AIDS sufferers were long-term, heavy drug users, a fact which leads one to posit that AIDS was caused by poisoning. Instead of looking for that common sense answer, virologists were off in abstraction-land with their electron microscopes, their PCR tests and their computer models.

At the height of the AIDS hysteria, there were 1.25 researchers to every confirmed AIDS patient in the United States. It would have been possible to have each scientist study each patient directly. If they had done so, it would have been obvious that the disease was caused by a lifestyle centred around heavy drug use. Instead, the researchers were all tucked away in their laboratories churning out peer-reviewed papers, attending well-catered conferences at beach resorts, and receiving scientific awards. The result was the tens of billions of dollars were spent to achieve no tangible results; a failure that would be repeated during the corona debacle where perhaps trillions of dollars were flushed down the toilet for no benefit.

There’s a more general point to be made about the move away from the meaning of virus as “poison”, however. For most of human history, most people didn’t have enough in the way of food and nutrition. Read any history of Rome, for example, and count the number of times the words “famine” and “plague” appear in the same sentence. As a general rule, people at any time in history could have done with more food and not less.

This shared history seems to have blinded us to an obvious but little-known fact of biology which is that too much of something is just as bad, just as poisonous, as too little. That’s true of recreational and pharmaceutical drugs, it’s true of food and drink, it’s true of almost anything. Even water can kill you if consumed to excess. Over-consumption is just as bad as under-consumption.

Note, however, that this means that nothing is inherently poisonous, or inherently good for that matter. Something that seems inherently good, like water or food, may become poisonous. The only way you can know when something shifts from good to poisonous is to pay attention to the bigger picture. That is what holism and integral theory are about.

The Archetypal Calculus Part 6: Quadrant Fundamentalism

“May God us keep
From Single vision
and Newton’s sleep.”

William Blake

There’s a peculiar type of reaction we get to reading somebody else’s thoughts in written form, which can only ever occur, I think, when we’ve been wrestling with the same problems as the author for a period of time. One of the great benefits of reading is being able to change our perspectives on the world for a short time by looking at it through the lens of somebody else. Sometimes, the value in that comes just from the change of mental scenery as we get out of our own heads for a while. In such cases, we may enjoy the work in a passive fashion and then get back to our own thoughts.

But it’s a very different thing when the writer has captured something important to us, whether we have been pursuing that something consciously or whether it has been bubbling away in our unconscious. In that case, reading can be genuinely exciting. I’ve had that experience several times over the last few years with books such as Patrick White’s Voss, Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, and, of course, recently with the authors whose work we have been reviewing in this series of posts: Jan Smuts and Ken Wilber.

In relation to Wilber, I’m happy to admit that his quadrant analysis is simply a better version of a model I’ve been trying to put together over the last few years. I had been thinking about the difference between materialism and esotericism, for example, using the levels of being concept. What Wilber added was a second dimension: an x-axis to go with the y-axis. Thus, the quadrant map can be used to analyse holons at the various levels of being, from quarks all the way to humans and whatever entities we can imagine above humans.

Wilber’s quadrants also make clearer a point that I have made using the levels of being concept and that is what Wilber calls quadrant fundamentalism. Quadrant fundamentalism is where one quadrant is assumed to hold the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth to the exclusion of all other quadrants. In this post, we’ll look at three types of quadrant fundamentalism that, not coincidentally, arose in chronological order in modern western history: scientific materialism, historical materialism (Marx), and irrationalism (Nietzsche, Spengler).

To refresh our memory about each quadrant, recall that the upper right (UR) refers to the perspective of objective reality consisting of objects viewed externally. Meanwhile, the lower right (LR) refers to systems of objects, again viewed from the exterior. The upper row is the view of the individual, and the lower row is the collective.

Modern materialist science is a combination of these. Newton derived his law of gravitation by examining the solar system i.e. the interactions between the sun and the planets. Meanwhile, Ludwig Boltzmann and James Clerk Maxwell provided a systemic account of the movement of gas in a container.

Beginning in the 19th century, materialism began to turn its attention to ever more complex systems, including economies, societies, and ecologies. This created two problems. One was that the systems under study were no longer able to be simplified to the point where calculation could be made. To this day, there are still people who think this problem can be solved by throwing more computing power at the issue, hence pipe dreams like quantum computing.

The second problem has nothing to do with calculation, but rather the question of freedom. When it comes to societies and ecosystems, the holons being accounted for (animals and humans) have far more of an interior component to them, and trying to explain their behaviour from a purely exterior perspective glosses over this fact. If that interior, esoteric component really is a kind of “freedom”, then no amount of computing power will be able to account for it.

Scientific materialism gets around this latter problem by assuming that there is no such thing as freedom and, in fact, that all the interior, esoteric properties of holons are nothing more than epiphenomena. This is a classic example of quadrant fundamentalism since it assumes that the left hand quadrants are irrelevant.

Scientific materialism denies the importance of the interior aspects of reality

I’ve mentioned that it’s a weird synchronicity that I happened to read Patrick White’s novel The Vivisector right before Smuts and Wilber because it turns out that the vivisectors provide the perfect example to highlight the problem of scientific materialism, one that requires no technical understanding.

Recall that vivisection is the practice of cutting up live animals for nominally scientific purposes. The vivisectors had justified this practice with some strange philosophical doctrine whereby animals didn’t have souls and therefore couldn’t feel real pain. From the point of view of the quadrants, what the vivisectors were doing was completely ignoring the UL quadrant, which is the locus of feelings and emotions, including pain. This attitude was not limited to animals. A good example of how (some) humans were treated at this time can be read in a history of convict-era Australia. Robert Hughes’ The Fatal Shore is perhaps the most eloquent of those.

Thus, our first example of quadrant fundamentalism is scientific materialism and we can see that this ideology was not limited to the scientific domain but had broader social and political ramifications. We should acknowledge, of course, that scientific materialism led to some incredible breakthroughs and insights which very largely created the world we live in. This just shows that over-enthusiasm may be as strong a factor in quadrant fundamentalism as more negative traits.

While scientific materialism dealt only with atoms, molecules, and other inanimate objects, it did little harm. The harm came from believing that it could account for everything, even in the face of obvious evidence to the contrary. This leads into our second example of quadrant fundamentalism, which also belongs to the materialist camp since we can call it historical materialism following the work of Karl Marx.

Marx was primarily concerned with economies as viewed from their exterior systemic perspective i.e. the lower right (LR) quadrant. One of the main insights of historical materialism was how the economic system (the “base” in Marxist theory) seems to align with the ideologies that justify it. For Marx, ideology was just a symbol that pointed back to the economic base from which it was derived. Thus, feudal economies, capitalist economies, and socialist ones all have a certain type of ideological structure that goes with them. The base determines the ideology. Taken to an extreme, this notion proposes that our individual beliefs (UL) and our cultural beliefs (LL) are nothing more than stories that justify the economic system in the LR quadrant.

In historical materialism, beliefs and ideologies are just pointers to economic reality

Historical materialism captures a very important truth about individuals and societies. You might have heard the saying, it’s hard to make somebody understand something when their salary requires that they don’t understand it. How we earn our living does affect our thinking. We are naturally predisposed to have a favourable opinion of the institutions from which we receive our daily bread. Even people who hate their job and constantly complain about it prove Marx’s point, which is that the job determines the ideology. A lot of the self-loathing we see in the modern West is due to the rise of bullshit jobs. Marx realised that the ideologies circulating in the public sphere are often there to justify a particular economic state of affairs. This all happens automatically and unconsciously.

It’s true to say that the LR quadrant has a strong effect on the UR and LL quadrants, especially as those relate to moral and political ideology. That insight is not just valid but crucial to an understanding of human affairs. The problem, once again, begins when we come to think that this explanation accounts for everything in the world. In the case of historical materialism, it means that all other quadrants are reduced to the LR. Any interior states whatsoever are now viewed as nothing more than reflections of the economic system. Ironically, this gives the historical materialist an excuse to exercise power at the ideological level instead of the material, which is now the main form of political power exercised in western nations.

One example of historical materialist quadrant fundamentalism comes from a work by one of the best Marxist thinkers, Georg Lukacs, in his book The Destruction of Reason. The overall point of the book is highly valid since it presents an analysis of the existential crisis that occurred in the German-speaking lands in the 19th and 20th centuries and shows how this accompanied an economic and political crisis. That is a valid and important perspective on the matter. But Lukacs takes it way too far by explaining away the entire philosophies of great thinkers like Nietzsche and Kierkegaard.

Lukacs’ treatment of Nietzsche is particularly grievous. I’ve read pretty much all of Nietzsche’s work. If I were to write a list of the top 10 themes in Nietzsche’s philosophy, socialism, economics, and imperialism would not be on that list. These topics probably wouldn’t even be on a top 20 list for the simple reason that Nietzsche wasn’t primarily concerned with them. Yet Lukacs argues that Nietzsche’s philosophy was motivated by the imperialist politics that Germany ended up taking. He even chastises Nietzsche for not understanding either socialism or economics in general.

Well, yes, Nietzsche didn’t understand socialism or economics because he was not primarily concerned with either subject. Why would he be? He was a professor of philology. He was, in fact, a genius at philology, and his philosophical writings reflect his background. Having himself made the claim that Nietzsche’s writings were related to socialism and imperialism, Lukacs then posthumously criticised Nietzsche for not knowing anything about socialism or imperialism.

What makes Lukacs’ analysis even worse is that it’s not hard to find passages in Nietzsche where he was explicitly warning about the emerging imperialism in Germany at that time. In fact, Nietzsche seems to have foreseen the calamity of the world wars and we have to remember that he was almost a lone voice in that respect since most respectable thinkers of the time believed war was a thing of the past.

In short, Lukacs was imposing his own ideology on Nietzsche. Having already decided that philosophy (UL quadrant) must always be a flimsy excuse for economic materialism (LR quadrant), he simply stated that Nietzsche’s philosophy must be an example of exactly that, even when Nietzsche’s philosophy directly and explicitly contradicts this reading.

We can now start to get a sense of what quadrant fundamentalism is using the examples of scientific materialism and now historical materialism (Marxism). Quadrant fundamentalism is what happens when you attempt to “reduce” one quadrant to the terms of another. But it goes a step further by denying the other quadrants altogether. Sometimes this is done explicitly. Most of the time, it is done unconsciously.

The vivisectors (scientific materialists) denied the UL quadrant (the pain and suffering) in the animals that they were cutting up. For them, animals were simply machines that had no souls and therefore could not feel pain. In truth, the vivisectors had denied their own UL quadrant. They ignored the evidence right in front of their eyes. Thus, quadrant fundamentalism is a form of dissociation. The vivisectors had dissected their own psyche.

Historical materialism is a more sophisticated version of the same dynamic. Rather than completely ignoring another quadrants, it views the phenomena of those quadrants as nothing more than symbols that point back to the LR quadrant i.e. economic interest. Thus, Lukacs can claim that the entire output of two of the great philosophers, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, was little more than a cover for imperialist interests. This requires him to ignore what both of those philosophers have to say about their own positions because whatever they say is a priori just a cover for economic interests.

The irony is that it is exactly this denial of the interior states of reality that motivated Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and the other existentialist thinkers. They were railing against the de-spiritualisation and de-humanisation that came with materialist dogma. So, too, was another thinker that I’ve written about a lot over the past few years: Oswald Spengler. Spengler was heavily influenced by Nietzsche, but just like Lukacs took the work of Marx too far, so did Spengler take Nietzsche too far and end up with his own form of quadrant fundamentalism.

Spengler’s quadrant fundamentalism was the mirror image of the historical materialists in that he wished to reduce all other quadrants down to the LL i.e. culture. Whereas Lukacs saw ideology as a symbol pointing to economic interest (LR), Spengler saw everything, including science and even mathematics, as a symbol pointing back to culture. Culture was the fundamental reality of the world, and all thought, architecture, art, and other human activities were to be explained as a working out of the core themes of a culture that came into being at the birth of that culture.

In Spengler’s world, everything is culture.

Once again, it has to be said that there is much truth in the basic idea that culture influences the other quadrants. To take just one example, there is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which has a lot of supporting evidence from linguistics and cognitive science and says that our native language influences not just our conscious thoughts about the world but our real-time interpretations of it. That is, what we perceive in the world is influenced by the ontological commitments baked into the language we speak. The same is true for other aspects of the culture to which we belong. Clearly, the LL quadrant affects the others.

However, just like the scientific and historical materialists, Spengler takes a truth about the world and amplifies it to the point of fundamentalism. In fairness, he doesn’t try to hide his position. Towards the end of the first volume of Decline of the West, he openly states that the individual is nothing and culture and society are everything. For him, the UL quadrant, subjective reality, is nothing more than a set of symbols that get their meaning from the LL. This is a form of reductionism that is identical to materialism only in the other direction.

The irony of the whole thing is that the validity of Spengler’s analysis comes from an appeal to a kind of cultural “intuition,” which really amounts to nothing more than Spengler’s own interpretation of the world. Thus, Decline of the West is almost entirely a book of Spengler’s own subjective interpretation of the world. In a book of more than a thousand pages, Spengler barely cites any other thinkers or scholars in support of his analysis. He doesn’t need to, because the assumption is that he has a direct line of communication with the culture via instinct or intuition.

It’s for this reason that when Spengler gets something obviously wrong, it calls into question his entire framework because it makes us doubt his intuition. I mentioned in a post about a year ago a grievous error in Spengler’s interpretation of Dostoevsky’s great novel The Brothers Karamazov. The details of the error are not important except to say that Spengler ignored all the most basic facts of the novel to come up with an interpretation whereby the character Ivan represents the “Russian soul.” Since Spengler relies almost entirely on Dostoevsky to justify the existence of his purported “Russian soul”, this error almost entirely collapses the whole argument.

Here we see that Spengler had done to Dostoevsky what Lukacs did to Nietzsche, namely, to read his own ideological bias into the other’s work. We can see, therefore, that quadrant fundamentalism implies a lack of empathy. There is an unwillingness to understand other people and other quadrants on their own terms. What is peculiar in these cases is the extreme lack of empathy on display.

The vivisectors had to completely ignore the cries of pain from the animals they were cutting up. Lukacs had to completely ignore what Nietzsche himself says in his own philosophy. Spengler had to completely ignore the reality of the characters in The Brothers Karamazov as well as the basic facts of the plot and the larger themes of the novel, which Dostoevsky was clearly exploring. This unwillingness to understand others on their own terms before imposing an ideological interpretation on them is at the heart of quadrant fundamentalism.

This brings us to the final twist in the story because what Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche were all about was re-instating the dignity and importance of the individual in the face of these de-humanising ideologies. It could be argued that they, too, went overboard and committed their own version of quadrant fundamentalism. All could be charged with a kind of radical subjectivism that locates the source of truth entirely in the individual. For example, Dostoevsky’s Alyosha character has precisely no interest in science, politics, and certainly not economics, while Nietzsche’s superman is the one who can create their own values free of the vagaries of the mob.

I don’t think this is actually true of any of these thinkers, and it’s precisely for that reason that I rate them all much higher than Spengler and Lukacs, both of whom definitely did descend into quadrant fundamentalism. In fact, all three have much in common with Smuts in that they did not deny the other quadrants but asserted that individualism was a late arrival on the scene and represented the forefront of evolution. This also seems to be Wilber’s position. It’s not about solipsistic individualism, but integrated individualism.

Even though I don’t believe Nietzsche, Kierkegaard or Dostoevsky fell into quadrant fundamentalism, it seems that our society is committing exactly this error as we speak. Especially in the last few decades, we find the belief emerging that individuals may declare a self-identity and society must fall into line. The trans debate is the ultimate manifestation of that dynamic. Thus, as a society we have now slipped into a fourth version of quadrant fundamentalism in which individuals (the UL quadrant) are encouraged to deny all scientific, cultural and social realities i.e. all the other quadrants.

The good news is that this is the last form of quadrant fundamentalism that has not yet been tried. I think it’s safe to say that we have now reached Bingo. Maybe we are now ready for a truly integral approach.

Bingo!

The Archetypal Calculus Part 5: Wilber’s Quadrants

Long term readers would know that I often write my blog posts in an exploratory fashion. Especially with series of posts such as this one, I set out to answer a question or explore a topic as opposed to having a position already worked out in advance. One of the things that happens semi-regularly when I do this is that I’ll get a key part of the answer to a particular topic from a reader.

A prime example of that was back in my Age of the Orphan series of posts. In that series, I had set out to explore and define the Orphan archetype in more detail. A huge breakthrough came when a commenter (h/t Austin) referred me to the work of Rene Guenon. From Guenon I got two concepts that became crucial to the Orphan analysis and which led directly to what ended up becoming my most recent book The Universal State of America.

Rene Geunon

Firstly, there was the Exoteric/Esoteric distinction, which has a long tradition in theology, Guenon’s primary concern in his writings. I had been focused on the Esoteric (psychological) dimensions in my archetypal analysis but what Guenon made me realise was that the Esoteric and the Exoteric are two sides of the same coin and to examine one without the other was an error.

The second big idea I got from Guenon, which is central to the Orphan archetype, was initiation. Initiation also needs to be understood as having an Esoteric and an Exoteric dimension and this distinction became key to my Orphan analysis. But initiation also implies a second archetype: the Elder. The Elder is the one giving the initiation. The Orphan is the one receiving it. This gave me another crucial insight into the archetypes which is that they must be understood in pairs (Child-Parent, Orphan-Elder). All these became core concepts that drove the analysis of what ended up becoming my most recent book.

Another important referral I received from a reader was during another series of posts this time exploring the Devouring Mother archetype. I was following an idea introduced by Jung in his book Answer to Job where he suggested that the incorporation of the feminine in the modern world was the expansion of the Christian trinity to a quaternity.

Jean Gebser

The referral in this case was from a commenter named William and was to Jean Gebser’s work The Ever Present Origin. It turned out that Gebser and Jung were both trying to address the same problem that Jan Smuts and a number of other thinkers at that time were writing about which was how to heal a perceived rift that had opened in western civilisation.  I’ve mentioned that Descartes often gets the blame for that rift and yet what both Jung and Gebser had noted was that the Catholic Church was involved too.

What Smuts and other holists posit is that even base matter like atoms and molecules have a tiny bit of “mind” in them and that this mind is the precursor to the more obvious forms of mind in living organisms. This idea had been explicitly stamped out by the Catholic Church many centuries earlier. The Church had ruled matter to be “inert” and had persecuted those, such as the alchemists, who explored any ideas to the contrary. It was only once the Church’s influence had waned sufficiently that thinkers could once again consider the idea that matter was not inert.

If we consider the point made a couple of posts ago that modern holism is the rediscovery of the ancient concept of the levels of being, it has two big differences from earlier versions of that idea. The first is that matter is now given full membership, so to speak, alongside the more traditional Esoteric ideas around spirit. The second is that the levels of being are not eternal Platonic forms but show evolution and change. A third difference that might not seem related at first was the one that Jung pointed out, which was that these changes corresponded with the rise of the modern feminist movement, and this was not arbitrary since matter had also traditionally been associated with the feminine.

All of these were the breadcrumbs I had been following ever since I realised that the pattern of dominance exercised in the modern West in recent decades followed the Devouring Mother archetype. What almost all these thinkers have in common is a concern with the idea of Wholeness, of trying to heal a perceived split in the western mind/soul. Inadvertently, I had stumbled onto the same pathway through my archetypal analysis.

But, I had also been on that pathway in another respect since I make extensive use of systems theory in my line of work and the systems theorists of the 20th century were also trying to incorporate the lessons of materialist science into a more holistic view. Without realising it, I have been practising a form of holism in a practical sense for more than a decade. No doubt it’s for all these reasons that’s Jan Smuts’ Holism and Evolution resonated with me so much.

But here is where the story takes a familiar twist because yet again I set out to write this series of posts in an exploratory fashion and yet again it is a referral from a reader (major hat tip to Jinasiri) which has unlocked new insights. This time the referral is to the work of Ken Wilber. As it turns out, Wilber was majorly influenced by both Smuts and Gebser. In fact, the breadcrumbs I have been following in the last four years were almost the same ones Wilber had discovered. The big difference is that he’s been following them for a lot longer; fifty years to be exact.

Wilber and I even have the same hair cut

Even though I could see the relevance of Wilber from a quick overview of his work, I hadn’t intended to read him as part of this series of posts since I had other things planned. Sometimes, though, the universe has other ideas. I was doing an internet search for a related topic and what should pop up except a link to some of Wilber’s writing. I began reading and didn’t stop. Given that the topic of this series of posts was to try and figure out where my most recent book, The Universal State of America, fitted into the grand scheme of things, I have now found the definitive answer. It fits within Wilber’s Integral Theory. It’s fits so well, in fact, that I was astonished how many of the exact same conclusions I had drawn had already been covered by Wilber. (Even my Devouring Mother analysis is almost identical to what Wilber calls the Mean Green Meme).

These correspondences make a lot of sense since, from what I can tell, Wilber started in an almost identical place as myself with a focus on psychology and particularly on developmental psychology. For example, Wilber divides the human lifecycle into three parts:  pre-personal, personal and spiritual. These map exactly onto the archetypal progression I have been using of Child (pre-personal), Orphan-Adult (personal) and Elder (spiritual).

Wilber then made the same connection that I did and it’s one that fits within the theory of holism. If humans are Wholes and they show developmental stages, then other Wholes should also show developmental structure over time. Wilber makes this explicit by using the concept of the holon (a Whole composed of parts that are also Wholes). Thus, Wilber’s integral theory seems to me to be a logical and rigourous expansion of Jan Smuts’ original idea of holism, which Smuts had always said was intended as an introduction.

I’ll be covering some of my main takeaways from what I’ve read of Wilber in the next few posts, but the concept of his that has given me the answer to the question that motivated this series of posts (where does my archetypal calculus concept fits into the larger schemes of thing?) is, I think, his most interesting idea. It’s called the AQAL framework and it revolves around two of the major concepts I have been working with in the last four years; namely, the Exoteric-Esoteric distinction I picked up from Rene Guenon and the individual-collective distinction I picked up mostly through Jung (collective unconscious). Combining the two gives four quadrants as follows:-

The four quadrants are four perspectives on any given holon. Smuts noted that every Whole had a Field and that the Field is just as important as the Whole itself. In Wilber’s quadrants, the Fields are covered in the lower row which is the collective axis while the upper row covers the individual. Thus, the holon concept combined with the four quadrants captures both the Whole-Part distinction within a Whole as well as the Whole-Field distinction that connects Wholes externally to their environment.

This scheme can be applied to any holon. We can look at an atom in its individual interior and exterior form as well as how the atom connects with others from interior and exterior perspectives. The same is true of molecules, cells and organisms. By the time we get to humans, the interior individual form is our first person subjective experience while our body is the external, objective view. Humans also belong to collectives (culture, society, civilisation) which can be analysed from interior and exterior points of view.

The upper right (UR) quadrant of the AQAL diagram relates to what we generally call modern materialist science. This is the view of the world concerned with what can be known via the exterior aspects of individual holons. The lower right (LR) view is also concerned with the exterior aspects but looks at how holons fit into systems. This is where the systems thinking, cybernetics and ecology movements of the 20th century belong.

The upper left (UL) quadrant is the one we all know intimately since it’s about our immediate sensations and impressions of ourselves and the world. The lower left (LL) is about what we can generally call culture but importantly, at least from my point of view, it includes the Jungian concepts I have been using extensively such as the collective unconscious and the societal unconscious (the specific things pushed out of the collective consciousness). Toynbee and Spengler’s cyclical analysis of history also belongs in the LL quadrant, especially Spengler who was concerned to find the shared meanings that unified a culture.

We can see, then, that the quadrant model is a map and a very useful one at that. Although I didn’t know it at the time since I hadn’t read Wilber, my first book on corona, The Plague Story, was actually an attempt at an integral analysis since it aimed to incorporate perspectives from all four quadrants. Meanwhile, my book on the Devouring Mother belongs firmly in the LL quadrant since it focuses on collective psychology.

Thus, Wilber’s map has taught me something about my own work over the past four years. What about the theme of this series of posts, the archetypal calculus?

I can now see that my archetypal calculus concept is actually the beginnings of the same move that Wilber himself made of searching for a link between the individual and collective axis not just at the psychological level but at all the levels of being. It turns out that I have been inching towards a holistic or integral analysis without knowing what to call it (interestingly, Wilber himself sometimes uses the term integral calculus to refer to his concepts).

All of this would have made me an ardent supporter of the quadrant model but there’s one more brilliant trick that Wilber pulls that adds even more clarity to the situation. To the four quadrants he added an inside/outside property. The argumentation for this gets a little technical but it turns out that the concept of archetype provides an ideal example to explain the importance of this property.

The UL quadrant is all about the perceptions, sensations, emotions and thoughts which we experience directly and immediately throughout our lives. In Wilber’s language, this is the inside view of the interior individual perspective. But there is also an outside view of the interior individual perspective. The outside view attempts to find structure in the ceaseless flow of interior reality. One of the ways to do that is to divide the flow into archetypal phases such as Child, Orphan and Adult. The reason this works is because there are archetypally distinct interior patterns that hold for everybody during those phases of life.

Now, it turns out we can do the exact same thing with the collective interior quadrant (LL). Recall that this quadrant is about culture in the broadest sense of the term and therefore includes language, myths and stories, shared emotional and psychological states and anything involving shared meaning and experience. It was the comparative scholarship of the 19th and 20th centuries which, perhaps for the first time in history, had enough cross-cultural and historical data and enough scholarly rigor to attempt to find the structures that were at play in culture. Thus, there was an explosion of interest in linguistics, anthropology, comparative mythology, comparative theology, comparative history and others. All of these were predicated on the outside perspective of collective interior reality (culture). All looked to find structure in the flow of culture. Both Freud and Jung also worked in this space by extending psychology into the collective domain.

It was the connection between UL and LL that I made in my book The Universal State of America and that’s why I made such heavy use of scholars such as Joseph Campbell, Arnold van Gennep, Freud, Jung, Spengler and Toynbee. My archetypal calculus attempts to connect the outside view of the individual interior with the outside view of the collective interior. As mentioned earlier, this was the same move that Wilber had also made in his career and we’ll talk about his adoption of the concept of spiral dynamics in a future post.

When you posit a theory that is an abstraction of other theories, that’s called a metatheory. Thus, my archetypal calculus is a metatheory, so is Wilber’s integral theory and so is Smuts’ holism. It turns out, however, that metatheories also fit into the quadrant model and the reason is because theories always must take the outside perspective. In my opinion, a big part of the reason that the quadrant model is so valuable is because it reminds us of what we are apt to forget which is that we are always taking a specific perspective on the world.

When creating theories, we are always working on the outside perspective and when the theories come together we get excited and we might even start to believe that the model we have constructed is reality itself. That is an occupational hazard of creating theories. The quadrant model reminds us of that hazard by making clear that no theory, no outside perspective, can ever reduce or eliminate the first person inside perspective.

But things get more meta than that because the integral and holistic model also allows for first person interior perspectives that include theoretical models. A person who has internalised the lessons of integral theory and who incorporates those ideas into their view of the world now has a different first person perspective than they would otherwise have. Such a person reacts differently to phenomena they perceive in the world. The same is true of any other worldview, of course, and so the quadrant model also allows for the phenomena whereby our model of the world actually determines our first person understanding of the world. In short, it makes culture explicit while not losing sight of the fact that culture always takes place in the “real world” denoted by the right hand side of the quadrant diagram.

The quadrant model, therefore, serves as a reminder to all theorists to be very careful of, to put it colloquially, believing your own bullshit. In a more technical sense, what happens is that the theorist loses touch with the other quadrants that seemingly do not affect their theory. The theorist’s UL quadrant, their personal experience of the world, can be completely overwhelmed by their theory. They see everything only through that lens.

One of the seeming side effects of this tendency to believe that one’s model of the world is reality itself is a pessimism that comes from thinking that all questions had been resolved and the machinery of the world discovered once and for all. That was a trap that the scientific materialists fell into. It is also a trap that the theorists who discovered the lower left quadrant in the 19th and 20th centuries fell into. Among the worst culprits was Spengler.

Spengler’s theory of history was very much focused around the outside perspective of the lower left quadrant. Like Toynbee and Vico, he attempted to give structure to this quadrant by identifying repetitive features and cycles that cultures and civilisations go through. Spengler asserted that the structures he had found were eternal and this led him into the pessimism of endlessly repeating cycles. We can find the same pessimistic attitude throughout history and at least as far back as the book of Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament:

The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.

This is the shadow side of the outside perspective on interior reality. That perspective can be liberating, as Wilber points out with typical American optimism. But it can also destroy life by denying all becoming, change and novelty. The solution is to get a life, which means to reconnect with the other quadrants and, perhaps most importantly, with the inside aspects of those quadrants.  

Curiously enough, we see a similar pessimism today, albeit in a far more sophisticated form, in the theory of postmodernism. As it happens, Wilber’s quadrants provide the perfect way to understand that dynamic. In fact, the quadrant model allows us to see that Spengler and other thinkers of his ilk in the 19th and 20th centuries were, in fact, the precursors to postmodernism. This is a big part of the reason why we have been seeing a kind of neo-fascist authoritarianism rearing its ugly head in recent decades and it is no coincidence that this authoritarianism has been incubating among the scholarly class in the universities. We’ll go into detail about that in the next post.

The Archetypal Calculus Part 4: Wholes and Fields

In last week’s post, I ended with the claim that there were two errors made by thinkers such as Spengler in relation to the nature of society, culture, and civilisation. The first was to apply the organic mode of understanding to a level of being “higher” than that mode, and the second was to apply it to something that was not a Whole in the first place.

It is worth reiterating that these “errors” are not the categorical kind of errors we are still used to thinking about when it comes to the subject of being wrong. We still want to believe that when somebody is wrong, they are 100% wrong, and their position can be completely ignored. Holistic thinking claims that this attitude is invalid, at least in relation to seriously thought out paradigms that have been stood the test of time. The scientific materialists are not entirely wrong, only partially wrong. The same goes for those who put all their faith in the organic and mental realms. What holistic thinking aims to do is find a way to integrate the truths of each viewpoint.

This notion of partial truth or falsity is mirrored in some of the core concepts of holism. Smuts often refers to “partial Wholes” or “limited Wholes” in his book. These share some of the properties of Wholes without actually being Wholes. To illustrate these notions, we can use Schumacher’s levels of being concept.

If we denote matter, life, mind, and self-awareness by the letters m, l, x, and y, respectively, then what we find is that each level of being adds one new property on top of the properties that already existed. Since holism assumes that these properties were added successively over time, this also represents the chronological order in which they arose. We can represent this as follows:-

Level of beingExample WholeSymbolic Representation
MatterAtom, moleculem
LifeCell, organismm + l
MindAnimalm + l + x
Self-AwarenessHumanm + l + x + y

Shown this way, we can see that the problem of scientific materialism is not that it focuses on matter since matter is present at each stage of evolution and all Wholes are made of matter. The problem is to assume that matter is all that matters (see what I did there?). When you do that, you get only partial truths.

Since Smuts asserts that cultures and civilisations are limited Wholes, it follows that characterising them as Wholes is also not entirely wrong, since they share a number of properties with Wholes. This raises two questions. 1) What is a Whole? 2) If civilisation is not a Whole, what is it instead?

We have already listed some examples of Wholes including atoms, molecules, cells, organisms, plants, animals, and humans. What properties do all of these have in common that make them Wholes? A Whole must have some power of self-action, preservation, and renewal. A Whole must have parts. Those parts must work together to maintain the Whole as a unified entity. A Whole has structure, and, at higher levels of being, a Whole has functions. In general, a Whole is a creative synthesis that evolves over time in both its internal relations and its relations with its environment.

It’s in this latter property, a Whole’s relations with its environment, that we get to the second main concept we need, which is the Field. Smuts defines a Field as what lies behind the sensible data. When we look at the external world, we see things, objects, and gestalts. That is the sensible data that we receive from the world about Wholes. What lies behind the sensible data are the Fields.

The simplest way to summarise what this means is that a Field is the set of relationships the Whole has with the world. Fields are about influences, interactions, and interrelationships. These occur at all levels of being. For higher Wholes such as animals and humans, we belong to Fields in the physical realm such as causality, gravity, electromagnetism, etc. We also belong to organic fields, such as ecosystems. Finally, we belong to mental fields, and that is where culture, society, and civilisation come into the picture. To learn to “see” Fields we must become used to looking not for Wholes but for the relationships between them.

It follows from this that Wholes and Fields always go together. You cannot have one without the other. This, of course, raises a classic chicken-and-egg problem of which came first, the Whole or the Field. How it all began is a question we will set aside for now in the interests of brevity. How it gets maintained, however, can be known since Wholes and Fields are in a constant process of symbiosis. Each of us is a Whole born into a society and culture (a Field). From the very beginning, we are brought forth into an array of different Fields in the physical, organic and cultural realms.

Fields can be incredibly powerful. We all live on a planet that is part of a Field known as the solar system. If the position of the Earth within that Field were to change significantly, the prospects for ourselves would not be good. You might even say that we rely on that Field. Viewed this way, we can see why some people might assert that Fields are, in fact, more important than Wholes.

A prime example of a Field, and one that is close to my heart since I did my degree in the subject, is human language. What we call the English language is a Field that is created by the interrelationships and interactions of the Wholes (people) who speak the language. We learn our native tongue only through our interrelationships with other people. In cases where a person grows up without such interrelationships (e.g., the wolf boy of Aveyron), they fail to learn a language or learn it only to a lesser degree of fluency.

There is another interesting property of language, however, and one that is directly relevant to the larger Field we call civilisation. It is possible to learn a language that is “dead”. Latin is a prime example. There are no native speakers of Latin anymore, but we can learn that language through written records. Since written records are derived from a live speech community that once existed, learning a language in this fashion amounts to connecting backwards in time to the prior state of a Field.

The English languge, of course, has an enormous number of words derived from Latin and so it is very much a language built out of a relationship with the past, just as Faustian civilisation in general was built on such a relation with the Classical world.

This highlights a point that Smuts made about Fields which is that they stretch backwards to the past and also forwards to the future. The philosophical doctrine of determinism says that once we have learned the rules that govern Fields we can predict the future with absolute certainty. Holism rejects this notion since it allows for the emergence of novelty, which cannot be predicted in advance.

Part of how this novelty occurs is because the rules of Fields are made to be broken. Language provides another useful frame to understand this idea since language consists of a dizzying array of rules, all of which are learned and internalised as we grow up in a culture where that language is spoken. These rules include syntactic, semantic, phonetic, phonological, and morphological rules, and that’s before we get into idiom, vernacular, style, and a host of unspoken meta-rules.

We may break the rules of language for artistic or humorous effect, such as in puns. If we break the rules of language in an unsophisticated fashion, we end up speaking nonsense. Repeated breaking of the rules in this fashion will have ramifications related to the Field in question. Keep speaking nonsense, and bad things will happen. You might accidentally become an economist, a public health bureaucrat, or the President of the United States. For most of us, repeated breaking of the rules will see us punished or excluded from the Field altogether (e.g., people will stop talking to us and we cease to be a member of the speech community). The same is true in the organic and physical domains, where breaking the rules leads to illness, injury, or death.

This brief introduction gives us some idea of the difference between Wholes and Fields. Nevertheless, trying to nail down the definitive differences between them is a very difficult exercise that has been perplexing thinkers for a long time.

Holism claims that Wholes are unified syntheses which are greater than the sum of their parts. But the same can be said for Fields. Holists point out that Wholes may act with a unified purpose encompassed in a cognition of that purpose. Clearly, some Fields can do that, too. What’s more, as both Schumacher and Smuts pointed out, the highest human attainment of Self-Awareness (Smuts’ Personality) is rare, and even those who get to that level invariably slip back into a lower level of being. It’s as if Self-Awareness is a new Whole that is trying to come into being but hasn’t been fully realised yet. But couldn’t the same be said for civilisation? If Toynbee and Spengler are correct, civilisation has come into being perhaps only a couple of dozen times and then slipped away again.

In order to play Devil’s Advocate, I’d like to finish with a thought experiment. What if both Self-Awareness and Civilisation are two new Wholes that are in the process of coming into being and may, in fact, be fighting each other for supremacy? This is plausible within the holistic framework since Smuts called his book Holism and Evolution, and what evolution implies is that new Wholes are always in the process of coming into being.

Recall that one of the properties of Wholes is that they subsume their parts. The Whole is not just greater than the sum of its parts; it is qualitatively different from them. An implication of this, which is glossed over by the holistic thinkers, is that the parts must give up their own agency. That means that lesser Wholes have been progressively losing agency to greater ones over time. Atoms lost their agency to molecules, who lost theirs to cells.

The same is true for organisms. When I decide to get a glass of water from the kitchen, the lesser Wholes that constitute my body (e.g., cells and organs) do not get a say in the matter. They must follow the agency of the larger Whole of which they are a part. Now, it may be the case that I have an injury or illness, which means that some of those parts may impede my goal. We call that state of affairs disease, and this relates back to a point I’ve made numerous times, which is that the word healthy is etymologically related to the word whole. Illness and disease violate the unity of purpose that resides in the greater Whole. The parts of the Whole are failing to do their job of following orders.

Although exponents of holism like to frame their theory in rosy terms, the truth is that there is an implied domination in the progression of Wholes as the greater subsume the lesser. When it comes to atoms and molecules, we don’t think much of it, but it becomes far more important when it is ourselves who are involved. It was Nietzsche who worked through the ramifications of this and built it into his philosophy as will to power.

If, indeed, there are new Wholes coming into existence, they build on top of what is there by creating a higher agency that the lesser Wholes will follow. If civilisation is a new Whole that is emerging, then we would expect it to become the higher agency built on top of the existing Wholes which are human individuals. The individual then gets subsumed within the larger Whole of civilisation. This is exactly what Spengler enunciated in Decline of the West, but he was certainly not alone. Thinkers including Plato, Hobbes and many others have posited a similar idea.

This works within the holistic theory since we know that civilisation is a relatively new phenomenon in the overall arc of human history and post-dates the arrival of humans as Wholes. If civilisation were a new Whole, we would expect it to establish dominance over humans as individuals. This is exactly what the historical record suggests, and that’s why Toynbee named the elites of the second half of the cycle of civilisation the Dominant Minority.

It is this dominance that we see in dystopian works of fiction such as 1984, Brave New World, and The Matrix. We all got a taste of what such a dominance feels like during the Corona hysteria.

Putting it all together, we can hypothesise that civilisation is a new Whole that has emerged perhaps only in the last several thousand years. If that were true, it would appear in the chronology of Wholes as follows:

   Civilisation
  MindMind
 LifeLifeLife
MatterMatterMatterMatter

The alternative idea to this is the concept of Schumacher’s Self-Awareness, Smuts’ Personality or Nietzsche’s übermensch. These are concepts for the individual not as a physical hero but a person capable of self-actualisation. This self-actualisation sits above both body and mind. It is primarily an Esoteric notion and this works within the framework of Holism which assumes that the creativity of new Wholes must arise first in the Esoteric domain and only later become solidified.

We can place this idea in the chronological table as follows:-

   Personality/Self-Awareness/übermensch
  MindMind
 LifeLifeLife
MatterMatterMatterMatter

Having played Devil’s Advocate, let’s finish with the way in which Smuts’ model would explain the relationship between the individual and civilisation.

Civilisation is a Field, which is to say, a set of relations. But we know from Toynbee and Spengler that the relations are dominated by the elites of civilisation. We might think of them as a sub-Field inside the larger Field. It is the willingness of the general public to acquiesce to the elite sub-Field that constitutes civilisation, a process which intensifies in the latter stages of the civilisational cycle by what Toynbee called proletarianisation and which I identified with the Orphan archetype.

Thus, even if civilisation is a Field and not a Whole, it can still dominate Wholes. This is true even of the elites. Smuts himself made the point that the leaders of nations are often lacking in what he called Personality. It seems that allowing the Field of civilisation to dominate individuality constitutes a renunciation of the pursuit the highest form of individuality we have called Self-Awareness.

This battle between the individual and civilisation is the central theme of one of my favourite novels, one that I have written about several times over the last couple of years: Dostoevsky’s The Brother Karamazov. Alyosha represents the Self-Aware individual in its highest manifestation, while the Grand Inquisitor represents the elites of civilisation, who would burn even Jesus at the stake in the name of power.

Civilisation “wins” to the extent that individuals are willing to give up their freedom to self-actualise. It is perhaps the case that civilisation and individuality are now in a kind of arms race and the dominance of the former can only be negated by the strengthening of the latter. It is Alyosha vs the Grand Inquisitor.

The Archetypal Calculus Part 3: Organisms and Civilisations

Apart from the general clarity of his writing and thinking, one of the reasons I like Jan Smuts as a figure in general is because he was not just a scholar but a successful statesman. Smuts played an integral role in the foundation of the state of South Africa and then the League of Nations and the United Nations. He was so respected in Britain that there was actually a plan to make him Prime Minister during WW2 if Churchill died. In short, he was a man of action as much as a man of intellect.

Of more importance, I think, is that Smuts derived his ideas in Holism and Evolution from within what was then the mainstream western tradition of scholarship. He was a Cambridge graduate, after all. The fact that mainstream western thought could produce a thinker like Smuts is evidence that the intellectual culture of the West was far more interesting and even radical one hundred years ago than it is today. In the aftermath of WW2, ideas like Smuts’ have been pushed to the fringe and we’ve seen what remains of intellectual culture in the West coalesce around an unholy alliance between scientific materialism and postmodernism. That’s where we remain today: skewered between two equally pathological ideologies. Smuts holds the prospect, however unlikely, that we can reconnect with a better alternative that connects back to the western tradition rather than deconstructs it.

(As a side note, what both scientific materialism and postmodernism have in common is that they form the nexus of political power wielded by the elites of the West. Materialism delivers the military and economic muscle and postmodernism forms the basis of internal political power which takes place in the psychic realm and which I have characterised by the Devouring Mother archetype. One of the missing elements in the thinkers that have formulated ideas similar to Smuts is how the exercise of power shapes evolution. This is particularly strange in Smuts since he was first and foremost a politician and had been involved in the operation of power at the highest levels. Nevertheless, his analysis completely ignores power as a operative principle.)

If we consider the thinkers who have pursued the paradigm which Smuts laid out in 1926, almost all of them are on the fringe. Gregory Bateson, Gerald Weinberg, Jean Gebser, Francisco Varela and others are hardly household names. Of more interest, perhaps, is Ken Wilber. I admit, I haven’t read any Wilber and hadn’t even thought of him in relation to this series of posts before a reader (hat tip to Jinasiri) put me onto him. It turns out that Wilber’s work looks to be a direct continuation of Smuts’ and Wilber acknowledges that influence.

In that respect, it’s fascinating that Wilber’s “integral” movement apparently became very popular and then crashed equally as quickly in the 2010s. I admit I missed all of that, but I’ll be very interested to read about it since it’s a sign that there is some renewed interest in holistic and integral thinking. More generally, it’s clear that I need to read Wilber since he is the one who seems to have most rigorously pursued the holistic paradigm sketched out by Smuts.

Smuts at the founding of the UN

I’m not sure why Wilber’s movement crashed, but it’s noteworthy that Smuts’ own contributions in the political sphere are not doing too well these days either. Smuts was an integral player in the formation of the United Nations, an institution that is not exactly in a good state.

Meanwhile, Smuts’ other major political achievement, the founding of the nation of South Africa, isn’t looking too crash hot either. The country looks to be on a pathway to becoming a failed state and, in any case, is throwing its hat in with the BRICS bloc, something that would have horrified Smuts for multiple reasons.

There’s another important political angle that relates broadly to these issues and that highlights yet again that seemingly abstract philosophical issues do make a difference in the “real world”. Smuts fought against the Nazis and the Nazis had adopted an ideology that was in large part grounded in the ideas related to Holism which appeared in the 19th and 20th centuries.

We saw in last week’s post that the version of the levels of being that Smuts implied in his work was the one that had been handed down from antiquity and modified by the Catholic Church. Smuts placed the human at the top of the hierarchy. He called that level of being personality. It corresponds to E.F. Schumacher’s self-awareness.

Level of Being
Self-Awareness
Mind
Life
Matter

It should be no surprise that the Church had placed God at the top of the tree and that was the version of the levels of being that formed the basis for much of modern European civilisation. As the Church’s influence waned in the 19th century, most thinking Europeans no longer placed God at the top. That left the human as the highest level of being by default and many philosophers, Nietzsche being perhaps the most vociferous, embraced that outcome. Smuts belongs broadly in that camp since he places personality at the top of his hierarchy.

Another thread which arose in western thought in the 19th century was increased attention on the collective aspects of society and civilisation. This included anthropology and comparative history and mythology among others. From this vantage point, Smuts’ model would be criticised as being far too individualistic and leaving out the influence of society.

What’s at stake here is the question of whether civilisation/society is a Whole. The collectivist thinkers implied that it was and that it was more important than the human. Let’s follow that idea and place civilisation/society in the table as follows:-

Level of BeingBeings/Wholes
CivilisationSocieties/Cultures
Self-AwarenessHumans
MindAnimals, Humans
LifeCells, organisms
MatterAtoms, molecules

Recall from last week’s post the error that scientific materialists make which is to apply the mechanical method of analysis to the levels of being higher than Matter. What makes this error difficult to identify is because the Wholes at the higher levels of being also resonate at the level of Matter. Therefore, it’s not categorically wrong to apply the mechanical analysis. Rather, the error is to assume that mechanical analysis can provide a complete picture of reality. When we solely apply the mechanical analysis, we not only leave out aspects of the higher Wholes, we leave out their most important aspects.   

What we saw in the 19th and 20th centuries was the same kind of error as scientific materialism only now it came not from applying the mechanical paradigm to where it did not belong but from applying the organic paradigm to where it did not belong.

Just a slightly less complex version of New York City, right?

With the advances in biology that happened in the 19th century, we saw the same enthusiasm for the organic mode of being as the Newtonian and Cartesian revolutions had created for the mechanical mode. That enthusiasm led many thinkers to believe that the organic mode held the answers to all questions. One of the domains it was assumed to hold the answers to was the social and civilisational.

Perhaps the main property that differentiates the Life level of being from Matter is organisation. A living organism reproduces itself through a constant process of metabolism by which external sources are broken down and reconfigured into the material that renews the structures of the organism. The parts that make up the structure of the organism cooperate to achieve that outcome but the level of cooperation and coordination required surpasses anything that can be explained on cause-and-effect grounds. Thus, in the organic domain, cause-and-effect is not the primary mode of explanation but rather stimulus-and-response.

Because organic Wholes have a fundamental property of organisation and self-reproduction, it is at the Life level of being that the concepts of health and pathology become valid. In the world prior to Life, there was no sickness and health. There was only cause-and-effect.

Health is the equilibrium position in which the organism successfully reproduces and renews itself. Pathology is the breakdown of the organism’s processes of renewal. Thus, the nexus of meanings around the terms Whole, Health and Holy apply to the organism and we also get the concept of the sacred as the process by which wholeness, health and holiness (equilibrium) are re-established.

It is clear that there are many points of overlap between organisms and societies. We have seen that organisms have structure, that they constantly renew that structure through a process of metabolism and that the breakdown of the processes of renewal leads to pathology (illness). Societies seem to share these properties at some level. They have political, legal, religious and economic structures. Those structures are renewed and reproduced over time and also defended from attack in the same way an organism protects itself. In morality and ethics, societies construct norms that are there to ensure its “health”. All of this seems very much like an organism.

The comparative historians, including the two I have written about extensively over the past couple of years, Toynbee and Spengler, seemed also to find that civilisations can “die” and this added an extra correspondence with the organic domain. It was Spengler who made this correspondence overt by explicitly likening civilisations to organisms. For him, the death of a civilisation was explained by the loss of vigour that accompanies old age. Toynbee disagreed with this claim by pointing out that civilisations are not organisms.

It’s noteworthy in this respect that Spengler created a distinction between the statesmen and aristocrats who acted out of “instinct”, a direct reference to the organic realm, while the philosophers, theologians and other practitioners traditionally associated with realm of Mind were relegated to an inferior status as far as their influence on civilisation went. The irony is that Spengler was an intellectual who fell in with the Nazis, many of whom were also intellectuals. Their ideas had tangible real world effects. In fact, the society-as-organism metaphor was right at the heart of Nazi ideology.

Most people would be aware that the Nazis had concocted for themselves a view of civilisation as being either healthy and strong or weak and decadent. The master race was the one which could meet the Darwinian survival of the fittest. All this belongs to the realm of organism. So, too, did the Nazi predilection, which Spengler shared, of characterising political enemies as diseased or disease-carrying animals such as rodents and insects. If the state was an organism, then something had to be causing it to be “unhealthy”.

Arguably the most important way the state-as-organism metaphor played out in fascism was in the type of political system that followed from its logic. We have seen that one of the defining features of the organism is its self-organisation. The organism relies on an incredible coordination of parts and functions which keep it alive. In order for that to work, the lesser parts must be subservient to the Whole.

If the state is an organism, it follows that citizens are the parts and their job must be to serve the interests of the Whole. Thus, fascism in particular and communism less directly follow from the metaphor of state-as-organism.

Just as scientific materialism is a category error that comes from applying the “rules” of the domain of Matter to all levels of being, fascism and communism commit a similar category error by applying the rules of the organic domain to the higher domains. Spengler committed the same error by applying the organic mode to civilisation.

In fact, there’s a dual error at play because not only has the organic mode been applied to a domain that is “higher” than itself, but that domain is not even a Whole in the first place. The unspoken assumption in this entire train of thought has been that society and civilisation are Wholes. This is an easy mistake to make since they do share some of the properties of Wholes. Smuts sometimes called them “limited Wholes”, but mostly he referred to them as “Fields”. In the next post, we’ll go into detail about the difference between Wholes and Fields.