Category: Ideas

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.

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.

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 20^th 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.

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 20^th 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 19^th and 20^th 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.

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 being	Example Whole	Symbolic Representation
Matter	Atom, molecule	m
Life	Cell, organism	m + l
Mind	Animal	m + l + x
Self-Awareness	Human	m + 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.

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
		Mind	Mind
	Life	Life	Life
Matter	Matter	Matter	Matter

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
		Mind	Mind
	Life	Life	Life
Matter	Matter	Matter	Matter

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.

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.

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 19^th 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 Being	Beings/Wholes
Civilisation	Societies/Cultures
Self-Awareness	Humans
Mind	Animals, Humans
Life	Cells, organisms
Matter	Atoms, 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 19^th and 20^th 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.

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.

It’s a curious fact about Jan Smuts’ Holism and Evolution that his argument revolves tightly around the concept called sometimes the Chain of Being and sometimes the Levels of Being and yet he never once mentions the concept in his book. Given how widely read Smuts clearly was, it seems highly improbable that he would not have been familiar with the levels of being and so the question becomes why he did not acknowledge it in his work, especially since it would have helped to clarify his main argument.

I suspect a large part of the reason why Smuts left it out was the fact that the levels of being is a concept that had been integrated extensively into Catholic theology and it was not fashionable among the scholarly and upper classes of Western nations at the time he wrote his book to reference Christianity. Smuts gives very little mention to religion in his book and where he does it is usually not favourable, so I’m guessing that could have been the reason for the omission.

Of course, Smuts also showed signs of reverence for the ancients in his book, another fashionable belief among the upper classes of the West at that time, and so he could very well have used them as the source for the levels of being since it was from Greek thought that the early Christians adopted the levels of being and incorporated it into their theology.

Despite the fact that we can all recognise the levels of being in practice, it’s also true that there is an inherent mystery to them and that is why philosophers, scientists and theologians have been talking about the subject for millennia. Even though Smuts doesn’t reference the concept directly, his entire book implies the levels of being and needs to be understood against the history of the idea.

Smuts’ implied levels of being concept is somewhat problematic and, in fact, he changes it during the book without making clear that he is doing so. This was of particular interest to me since the first version that Smuts proposes is almost identical to the one I used in my recent book, The Universal State of America, with civilisation or culture as a level above the human individual. That is how Smuts frames it near the beginning of the book only to do an about face at the end where he denies that culture/society is a Whole (and therefore a level of being).  

For our introductory purposes in this post, we don’t need to worry about this issue and we can focus on the less controversial areas. The two levels of being that Smuts shares with the historical tradition are matter and life and Smuts follows the traditional version whereby life is “higher” than matter. This gives us the table as follows:-

Level of Being

Life

Matter

Smuts then proposes “mind” as the next level. Mind is a complex thing. We might divide it into the unconscious and conscious realms as per the psychoanalysts. But there is also intellect, reason, logic, will, imagination and other faculties to deal with. We would want to say that humans share with animals the lower and some of the upper levels of consciousness but we would probably want to draw the line at logic, intellect and reason and say that these were unique to humans. Smuts is not clear on where he draws the boundary in his book. Again, for our overview here it’s not necessary to resolve these ambiguities, so let’s just put mind in the table as follows:

Level of Being

Mind

Life

Matter

Above mind there is a faculty that Schumacher calls Self-Awareness. Meditation or similar practices provide perhaps the clearest experience of what this means since they involve the deliberate control of the mind. This raises the question: what is doing the controlling? The answer is Self-Awareness (we might also call it the will, the soul or something else).

Self-Awareness seems to sit “above” consciousness since it can control or view consciousness as if from the outside. When you do exercises in meditation or concentration, you realise that the thoughts going through your mind seem to have a will of their own and trying to shut them up is no easy task. Moreover, those thoughts are often not your own but come from the external source of the collective psyche of society.

Smuts proposes a similar faculty for the level of being above mind which he calls personality. This is an interesting idea in itself and we’ll look at it in a future post. For now, let’s just use Schumacher’s formulation.

Level of Being

Self-Awareness

Mind

Life

Matter

This gives us the levels of being as a series of properties. However, the way in which the levels of being were traditionally enunciated was as a list of beings. Smuts takes a similar approach but he call them “Wholes”, from whence comes his theory of Holism. We can add these beings or Wholes to the table as follows:-

Level of Being	Beings/Wholes
Self-Awareness	Humans
Mind	Animals, Humans
Life	Plants, Animals, microorganisms (cells)
Matter	Minerals (atoms, molecules)

Theological versions of the levels of being would add to the table extra levels above the human that pertain to God and other spiritual entities. Man’s role is then to strive upwards towards the spiritual and it’s this belief which certainly had a lot to do with the lack of attention paid to the lower levels of being prior to modern science. Matter was seen as something to be overcome. In some denominations, it was seen as inherently evil.

What opened the door to modern science was, in fact, a theological schism related directly to the levels of being. Descartes often gets the blame for splitting the mind and body and thereby severing the connection in the chain between matter, life and mind. Mind and body became separate substances or entities or whatever you want to call them. Having divided them, the question became how to put them back together i.e. how to explain the interaction between two substances that were now considered independent.

What is less well-recognised is that the theology of Luther and Calvin had also implied a division between soul and body since they asserted that nothing we do in the earthly realm of the body could make a difference to the fate of our souls. It is one of the many ironies around the Reformation that a belief system that was fixated on the spiritual should have given rise to modern materialism. By removing the importance of the body from theological considerations, the Protestants opened the way for scientific experimentation in that sphere, experimentation that the Catholic Church had previously suppressed.

This experimentation included the practice of vivisection. It’s a weird synchronicity that I just happened to read Patrick White’s book of that title, which I reviewed a couple of posts ago, before reading Smuts. The practice of vivisection, cutting open live animals, became justified within the Cartesian philosophy on the grounds that animals had no “soul” and were, therefore, little more than machines (automata). This led to some strange technical arguments about how the pain felt by animals had no “higher” meaning. Some apparently denied that animals felt pain at all. The vivisectors justified their practices on exactly this kind of philosophical basis. If anybody tells you philosophy doesn’t make a difference in the “real world”, cite vivisection as an example.

We can see that the schism that had taken place had broken the chain of being as inherited from the ancient world. The Reformation and the Cartesian philosophy opened the way for investigation into what had traditionally been considered the lowest of the levels of being: matter. The impressive results which followed led enthusiastic proponents to invert the paradigm. Matter became the “highest” level of being since it was the one we could know about with certainty. Some went even further and denied that anything existed beyond matter. Just as the vivisectors had used abstract arguments to convince themselves that the cries from the animals they were cutting up did not really denote pain, so too did scientific materialists use abstract arguments to convince themselves that nothing except matter really existed.

It’s against this backdrop that Smuts’ work needs to be understood. He was not alone in looking to overcome the schism that had been opened centuries earlier. Smuts took the implied primacy of matter and then combined it with the science of evolution to explain how the levels of being had evolved over time. The universe was no longer created from the top down, with all the various parts of the Wholes subservient to the power at the higher level of being. Rather, the lower levels of being were now the basis of reality. They provided the foundation on which the higher ones were built. This puts matter at the beginning of the story instead of God.

What makes Smuts’ version of this story ingenious is that he takes the results of materialist science and uses them to show that matter is a Whole, in fact, the first Whole. From the Whole of matter, he then charts the upwards progress through the other levels of being culminating in humanity. Atoms give rise to molecules which give rise to colloids and then cells, organisms, plants, animals and humans. Along the way, life is added to matter, mind to life and self-awareness to mind. The emergent story of evolution is one of creativity over time which tends towards increasing complexity.

As ingenious as Smuts’ argument undoubtedly is, does it do anything to address the central mysteries surrounding the levels of being? After all, the whole point of modern science is that it is able to explain how things work and not just that they work. Admittedly, I don’t keep up to date with the latest scientific research in this area, but I had a quick ten minute browse on the internet prior to writing this post and it seems that the science has not advanced much past where it was in Smuts’ day. That is, we still don’t know how life arose from matter let alone how mind arose from life or self-awareness from mind.

One of the articles I browsed was about a team of scientists trying to produce a cell that could divide successfully by removing different genes to figure out the minimum number that was needed. This is the same old reductionist approach of trying to break everything down into base elements. Note that this is also the same practice of vivisection only practiced at the micro-organic level, and instead of cutting up the phenotype we now cut up the genotype in the hope that we will find the answer there.

Herein lies a key point about the difference between the analytic and the holistic approach. The analytic wants to break everything down to the smallest irreducible components and then reverse engineer the whole process. The holistic approach starts with Wholes. For example, in relation to organisms, you start with the Whole which is the organism itself.  The Whole then organises its own development by drawing in and coordinating the assembly of lower elements. This is the process of metabolism and metabolism is one of the key features that separates life from non-life.

In Smuts’ explanation, the process of self-organisation at the Life level of being is an extension of the Matter level of being where we see that matter is “selective” i.e. it can attract and repel other entities. One of the differences is that a living Whole does not just attract or repel, it changes the other entity since that entity is put into service for the creation and reproduction of the living Whole itself. We’ll go into this topic more in a future post.

There is one last aspect of the levels of being worth touching on and it is one that Smuts also spends a great deal of time analysing in his book, even though he uses different words to denote it. This is the distinction I have been using extensively for the last couple of years between the Exoteric or outer aspect and the Esoteric or inner, hidden aspect.

It wasn’t that long ago that the atom was believed to be an indivisible base unit of reality. In that model, we could say that the atom was entirely Exoteric in nature since, setting aside forces that may emanate from it, it seemed to have no inner or Esoteric aspect to it. All that changed with the ideas around neutrons and electrons and then quantum mechanics. I haven’t kept up to date with the latest science, so I’m not sure where the latest theories are at, but what these developments did was to give even the base elements of matter an Esoteric dimension that had previously been missing.

Smuts acknowledges that even base matter has an Esoteric dimension. Therefore, it’s no longer a distinction between entirely Exoteric matter and entirely Esoteric mind but rather a gradient. Nevertheless, it’s true that the Esoteric dimension becomes more important as we ascend the levels of being. The internal (Esoteric) workings of a cell are incredibly complex. The internal complexity increases as we get to the organism where the inner workings arguably become the dominant property. By the time we get to mind, we seem to be entirely in the Esoteric, although mind too may connect back to matter via the unconscious. That leaves Self-Awareness which philosophers have been telling us for thousands of years is entirely Esoteric.

Rather than thinking of the levels of being using the up-down metaphor, we can think of them as being internal (Esoteric) and external (Exoteric). The addition of each new level of being results in an Esoteric intensification of the entity in question. There is more going on “inside” the cell than in the atom. There is more going on “inside” the mind than in the organism. But we must be careful not to think of these as separate entities. The mind is “in” the body. The severance between the two came with Luther and Descartes. We need to learn to put them back together.

A human being, a plant and a rock are all composed of matter. What differentiates them is the intensity of their Esoteric resonance. We assume that a rock has almost no Esoteric resonance. It’s for this reason that rocks, and matter in general, are amenable to the reductionist, mechanical method of explanation because the mechanical method is entirely concerned with Exoteric factors. Since plants, animals and humans are composed of Exoteric matter, we can apply the mechanical method to them too. It’s not wrong to do so, but if we only apply the mechanical method, we leave out all the Esoteric properties of those entities. Since the Esoteric become more dominant as we get higher up the levels of being, the mechanical method works less and less well. What’s needed then is another method that takes into account the Esoteric.

Would we call this other method “science”? Smuts seems to think we can and yet there is an inherent contradiction here. Smuts fully acknowledges that the Esoteric is creative, dynamic and evolutionary. In fact, he lauds that creativity and associates it with freedom. But science is supposed to be concerned with what can be known with certainty. If the Esoteric is free, then it need not follow the rules of science. How does one “do science” on the Esoteric given the whole point of science is to garner reproducible results? This is a question that Smuts doesn’t answer.

As a final conundrum in this respect, Smuts puts forward the interesting conjecture that matter used to be far more creative than it is now. In other words, matter went through a creative phase before settling down into the seemingly predictable and reliable phase in which we now view it. The reason we don’t find spontaneous creation in matter in our time is because the creative, Esoteric part of the world has moved “upwards” to the higher levels of being. It follows that science would once upon a time not have worked on matter, even if there had been scientists around to study it, because it was too unstable. Isn’t it the case that what we call science only works on those domains that have ceased to be creative and that science will only ever work on life, mind and self-awareness once those domains have ceased being dynamic and creative too.

It is exactly these kinds of issues that were behind ideas in the 20^th century of finding a “third way” of doing science that could somehow incorporate the Esoteric and creative dimensions of the world. We’ll also look at some of those ideas in future posts.

A friend of mine once said to me, “Simon, you suck at marketing.” Now, I have to admit I was rather pricked by this accusation, although in hindsight I could see his point. There is an inherent tension between any creative activity and the marketing activities which go alongside it. When handled properly, that tension is healthy. At an abstract level, the creative activity brings something new into the world and the marketing activity ties that new thing to what already exists. Both of these processes are necessary, although arguably it works better if the person doing the creative part is not the same as the person doing the marketing part. Maybe that’s what my friend was hinting at.

The context in which the above discussion took place was one which I have mentioned previously on this blog: the Melbourne indie music scene of which I used to be an active member. Music provides a good case study for how marketing works because it is separated into genres. While genres do often denote categories that are meaningful from a musical standpoint, they are also vehicles for marketing because they allow new bands to be easily grouped together with those that already exist.

In practice, the choice of genre happens automatically in the types of instruments and the musical background of the people in the band. Choice of band name is also crucial. If you happen to be playing thrash metal, calling your band “Dreamy Daisy and the Lollipops” isn’t going to work. A good marketer would recommend you change it to something like “Psycho Susie and the Splatterers”. Most of the time, bands can figure this part out for themselves.

Paying attention to basic marketing concerns is a good idea. But it’s also true that letting marketers run the show is a very bad idea. Since marketers are always looking to connect back to what already exists, the easiest thing to market is what already exists. Put marketers in charge and they will systematically remove anything which doesn’t conform. Any novelty disappears and is replaced by a never-ending parade of mediocrity.

Marketing should never inform the creative process. It should come at the end of that process. When done properly, marketing fulfils a useful function which is to help integrate the new thing into what is already there. Is marketing actually required to achieve that outcome or are marketers hijacking a process that would happen “organically” anyway? I suspect it’s a bit of both. Good marketers are like good farmers: they can enhance and build on natural processes. But there’s always a very fine line between enhancing natural processes and twisting them beyond all recognition. As a society, we’ve allowed our marketers to well and truly step over that line. 

As it happens, I’ve recently had to wrestle with the issue of marketing again with the completion of my most recent book. As a self-published author, I’m left to do my own marketing. This has its advantages but it’s a job I would outsource if I could. In fact, for the Universal State of America I did spend quite a long time trying to find a publisher that might be interested in the work. My search came up empty. Marketing is about linking a new work to an existing milieu. What happens when that milieu doesn’t exist?

But my difficulty was not just about marketing. If I had presented the Universal State of America in a scholarly setting, I would have been forced to connect the ideas in that book to their intellectual precedents since that is a basic expectation in any scholarly work. My freedom not to have to do that was valuable since it allowed me to be more creative in exploring the ideas in the book but it came with the drawback that I had not identified the intellectual milieu to which the book belonged.

Now that the book is finished, I’ve had time to think about that issue in more detail and it’s the question which I will be exploring in this series of posts. The question is: where does an “archetypal calculus” fit into the broader scheme of western thought?

Now, it has to be said, the phrase “archetypal calculus” is one that would have any marketer wailing in opposition. Not only is it ambiguous and therefore unable to provide a clear link to existing ideas, it also contains the word calculus, which is guaranteed to trigger the latent trauma that many people will have from being dragged kicking and screaming through that subject during high school maths class. Ambiguity and vaguely negative connotations are not qualities that make for good marketing.

The difficulty in naming these concepts comes from the fact that many of them belong to a genuine paradigm shift that happened in the 19^th century which was centred mostly around the work of Darwin and Wallace. It’s no coincidence that Varela was a biologist. So, too was Gregory Bateson. Alfred North Whitehead made the Organism the centre of his new philosophy. What was taking place was the attempt to define a new metaphysics based on the lessons learned from biology.

Difficulty in naming concepts at a lower level is an indication that something is missing from the larger philosophical framework. What was needed, then, was a new framework. That’s what the cybernetics and systems thinkers were trying to do. That’s was Varela, Bateson, Whitehead and others were trying to do. What we’ll be doing in this series of posts is summarising the results of their efforts.

Until recently, this is a task I would have shied away from and here’s where the story takes a twist.

The trouble with the cyberneticians such as Varela is that their work is highly technical. I admit I haven’t read Whitehead, but his work has a reputation for also being incredibly dense and with the same mathematico-logical focus as Varela. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but personally I’m pretty much allergic to having to learn a brand new symbolic language in order to do philosophy, especially if that language is logic-based.

Bateson also shared the habit of coming up with ambiguous names. Consider Bateson’s phrase epistemology of the sacred. This is problematic because the word epistemology is ambiguous and so is the word sacred. Putting the two together creates ambiguity squared. The combination also has the connotation of sacred knowledge which Bateson would not have liked since he was trying to ground his analysis in the results of science. (Or, perhaps it is better to say he was trying to find the sacred in science).

Another of Bateson’s phrases was an ecology of mind, which combines two broad concepts into a more ambiguous concatenation. Finally, there is the title of his great book – Mind and Nature: a Necessary Unity. Well, if they’re a unity, then why do we have two words for them? More to the point, what word should we use to denote the unity?  

Of course, the most obvious candidate for that word would be “God”. Bateson’s epistemology of the sacred hints at just that conclusion. That was never going to be a possibility, however. What all the thinkers we have mentioned had in common was that they were coming at the problem from within the sciences and, more specifically, the life sciences. Since Darwinism had precipitated the final collapse of the old God of Christianity, at least among the educated classes in Europe, referring to God was always going to be a non-starter.

But there’s another reason why the religious angle would not have been suitable in this context. We noted above that these thinkers were trying to create a new epistemology, a new way of knowing. The reason they had to do that was because they were stuck in the old paradigm that had been brought over from the Classical civilisation through the Catholic Church. Europe had inherited from the ancients the idea of truth as being eternal and unchanging. What biology and the other life sciences needed was a framework which allowed for becoming, creativity and change. There really did need to be a new definition of “truth” and so Bateson’s reference to epistemology is totally accurate.

Smuts was born on a farm in the Cape Colony in 1870. As the second-eldest brother, in the Afrikaner tradition he was destined to be the one to take over the family farm while his elder brother received an education. When his brother died young, Smuts became the one to receive the education instead. It turned out he was a brilliant intellect. He ended up studying law at Cambridge where he excelled to such an extent that some of his professors thought him one of the greatest scholars to ever set foot in the place.

Smuts graduated in law and could have gone on to a career in that field but chose to return to his homeland where he got involved in politics. Since the Boer War was just around the corner, political service ended up becoming military service and Smuts would also become a great military leader including later in the world wars where he was a core part of the war cabinet in London and a trusted adviser to Winston Churchill.

(As a side note, Smuts represented South Africa at the Treaty of Versailles negotiations and slammed the deal as not a peace treaty but a “20 year armistice”. Given the treaty was signed in late June 1919 and we all know what happened in September 1939, that’s got to go down as one of the more precisely accurate predictions in political history).

Smuts was primarily at Cambridge to study law and so his knowledge of biology and the other subjects covered in Holism and Evolution came not from the position of a specialist. I’m quite sure that is the reason for the clarity of presentation in the book. Smuts was not the kind of guy to get bogged down in the details. It’s noteworthy that Gregory Bateson also worked in a wide range of disciplines in his career including biology, psychology and anthropology. This cross-disciplinarity seems to be a key factor in the new kind of thinking which is based not primarily on deduction or induction but abduction: the ability to see shared patterns across different domains. The only way to see shared patterns across domains is to know the basic ideas from those domains and that’s what Smuts had achieved during his scholarly period.

The need for cross-disciplinarity explains why the new paradigm which Smuts wrote about has been stifled in the post-war years since we have seen the increasing specialisation of scholarship. Alongside the commercialisation of knowledge, this has created several generations of siloed scholars all stuck down in their own rabbit holes, certainly not an environment conducive to holistic thinking. Instead, it produces what the Germans call fachidioten; subject-matter idiots.

We’ll get into the details of his work in later posts, but the primary thrust of Smuts’ viewpoint mirrors that of Bateson and the other thinkers mentioned above. What was needed was a concept which generalised the new object of study that biology had discovered and which seemed also to extend into psychology, sociology and other domains too. For Bateson, that concept was Mind. For Whitehead, it was Organism. The problem with both of these, as Smuts pointed out, is that they already refer to specific concepts in both biology and psychology and to generalise them was to lose the valid differences that they already denoted. Smuts’ proposal for the generic concept was Wholes, hence the concept of Holism.

Again, we’ll look at the details of this concept in future posts. For now, there is one key point I would highlight and it’s a point I’ve made in several posts over the last couple of years. The word whole is etymologically related to the words healthy and holy. All of them are related to the concept of the sacred, which is the process by which wholeness, health and holiness are temporarily relinquished in order to allow something new to be integrated. It is no coincidence that process was also central to Whitehead’s philosophy.

Thus, I would argue that Smut’s Holism and Bateson’s epistemology of the sacred deal with holiness and the sacred not as adjectives or nouns but as verbs (processes). Process is a cornerstone of the new paradigm. Since process implies time, time also becomes a central concern.

All of this was born out of the paradigm shift that had come from within science itself in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. Bateson, for example, saw his work as attempting to address the schism he believed had been introduced by Newton and Descartes. That schism can be called, using Whitehead’s phrase – scientific materialism. It features a single minded focus on mechanical explanation. Mechanical explanation worked beautifully in the fields of classical physics and chemistry, but that paradigm had begun to breakdown in the 19th century and something new was needed.

This breakdown was not limited to the austere surroundings of university departments and science faculties. The industrial revolution was predicated on mechanical explanation and there can be no doubt that this was the cause of enormous ructions in the political and cultural sphere too.

If all this is true, the question then becomes why are we still stuck in the old paradigm, even as the real-world problems with it seem to mount by the day? Our society has continued to pursue industrialisation and mechanisation well beyond the point of diminishing returns. The reason is because our economy and, perhaps more importantly, our geopolitical power is based on them. The people who run our societies are addicted to that money and power and are not going to give them up without a fight.

And so, here we are, almost a hundred years after Smuts published his great work. Having seemingly exhausted the physical aspects of industrialisation and mechanisation, we now pour vast sums of money into trying to mechanise intelligence (AI). Not only is that intellectually and spiritually wrong, it is increasingly turning into a political nightmare as well. Smuts saw in his concept of Holism the key to freedom and I don’t think it would surprise him in the slightest to see that more and more mechanisation has only led to less and less freedom in our society.

Thus, Holism and related ideas are not only worth pursuing for their intellectual promise but for their political aspect too. At the very least, those of us who aren’t interested in sleepwalking into the mechanist dystopia that is being laid for us can use the philosophical ideas of Smuts, Bateson, Whitehead to understand what is happening to try and navigate a different pathway. The promise of the new paradigm is that it does not require us to renounce modern science. On the contrary, the new paradigm comes from within science itself.

All of those are good enough reasons to discuss these issues. But, from a more personal point of view, Smuts has finally given me the clear and concise overview of the domain that has enabled me to see where my concept of the archetypal calculus fits into the larger scheme of things. I half-jokingly called it a theory of everything in a recent post and, actually, I was far closer to the truth than I knew. Whether the archetypal calculus is better seen as an element within Holism or whether they are, in fact, the same thing is something I am still working through. Maybe we’ll get to an answer to that question by the end of this series of posts.