On Solar and Lunar Knowledge

It occurred to me while writing last week’s post that the subject matter of the last few posts has provided yet more grist for the mill in support of my Devouring Mother analysis.

One of the issues I tried to resolve back in the early days after discovering the concept was when did the Devouring Mother appear on the scene? This led me back to Toynbee and Spengler and the idea that the Devouring Mother is actually the archetypal manifestation of the Universal State of Faustian culture; a position that I sketched out in this post.  

In the last few posts, I addressed what might seem like unrelated issues. Firstly, there was the question of reductionist science. Reductionist science ran out of steam in the second half of the 20^th century. The questions is: why? Was it because it became corrupted by money? Maybe. But the systems thinkers explanation was that all the low-hanging fruit had been harvested and science began to face domains where there appeared to be inherent and irreducible complexity.

Is that complexity really irreducible or do we just have to wait for more geniuses to show up and work their reductionist magic? That’s a tough question to answer. One thing we do know, so far the geniuses have not arrived. There have been few major breakthroughs in the post-war years and certainly nothing to rival the century before that.

Instead, we got what I call Technocrats. The Technocrats apply the reductionist method to domains where it does not work. If this was purely a matter of scholarship, the Technocrats would have been consigned to the dustbin of history for failing to produce valid results. But the Technocracy is not primarily concerned about science and knowledge. The main game is power. The Technocracy assists the execution of power by invoking “magic spells” that utilise the vocabulary of science.

The rise of the Technocracy has correlated with another development that I outlined in last week’s post: sabotage. This might seem unrelated to the problems of science and yet the underlying shared factor is the same: complexity. Sabotage works in complex environments. The more complex society has become, the more sabotage has developed an esoteric character.

These more esoteric forms of sabotage have slowly become ubiquitous in business, domestic politics and even geopolitics in the 20^th century. Timothy Mitchell (author of Carbon Democracy) noted that the British and Americans reverted to sabotage in the Middle East because they were not “strong” enough to hold the region by force. That’s only true if we compare against historical empires that were predicated entirely on military strength e.g. the Roman Empire.

But the “business model” of the Roman Empire was different from that of the British and American empires. It involved the payment of tribute and the projection of military power. The Roman Empire ended where the ability to project military force ended.

The British and American empires have been truly global in scope. This would never have been possible using traditional military means. Of course, the military is one aspect of those empires but it is part of a network of diplomatic, financial, business and deep state operatives. Military intervention is used only as a last resort. It is this network which has perfected the art of sabotage. To paraphrase US politician, Chuck Schumer, the deep state (the network) has 99 ways to sabotage you.

It is tempting to say that the use of sabotage to achieve political goals is a sign moral degradation or “weakness”. But it could simply be that sabotage is what works in complex environments. Von Clausewitz wrote in the 19^th century that war is the extension of politics by other means. That’s true enough. But as geopolitics became more and more complex, sabotage has become the main extension of politics by other means used by the British and American empires.

What does any of this have to with the archetype of the Devouring Mother?

Well, we don’t need any sophisticated psychological theories to see how these modern developments correlate with archetypal gender traits. The use of sabotage is an obvious one. Anybody that’s been through high school knows that boys naturally resolve their disagreements with their fists while girls use far more subtle methods including gossip, teasing, manipulation and social isolation. Boys use brute force. Girls sabotage each other. Boys are like the Roman Empire. Girls are like the US empire.

Given that the use of sabotage has correlated with the rising complexity of the modern world, there is another obvious gender parallel. Men are simple. Women are complex. Stand-up comedians and comedy scriptwriters have written thousands, if not millions, of jokes trading on this simple fact. As the world became more complex, it became more feminine.

This also matches the historical paradigm. By modern standards, the Roman Empire was really simple. You pay your tribute and we leave you alone. You don’t pay your tribute and we’ll send a legion to beat it out of you. The rules were clear and everybody knew where they stood. The mechanism of the Roman Empire was a man’s one: military force.

Most European kingdoms for most of modern European history were run on this same paradigm. Two armies assembled on a field and had the equivalent of a military boxing match that was conducted according to fixed rules. It really was like modern sport. Kings were the team owners. Generals were the coaches.

As I noted last week, in the 19th century the use of sabotage as an industrial relations bargaining technique began with the same kinds of brute force methods. Workers smashed machines and capitalists smashed workers. It was all very masculine.

But then things got more esoteric or, we might say, more feminine. Sabotage moved away from the schoolboy use of the fist and towards the schoolgirl use of gossip, slander and gaslighting. Rather than physically assault union leaders, capitalists would spread lies and innuendo about them through the press. They would destroy the reputations of their opponents in much the same way that a group of high school girls will destroy the reputation of another girl they don’t like. This marked the transition away from robber baron capitalism to something more subtle that I call Imperialism 2.0.

All of this matches up to the increasingly complexity of the world starting in the 19^th century and accelerating all the way up until our time. If we accept the premise that men are simple and women are complex, we might posit that increasingly complexity leads to an increase in the feminine. First the world became more complex. Then it became more feminine. Nobody planned it that way. It just happened. But perhaps there’s something more archetypal going on.

Solar knowledge aims to bring everything into the light. The rules of sport, the rules of war and the “laws nature” achieved through reductionist science are all prime examples of solar knowledge. They are out in the open for all to see.

To change metaphors: solar knowledge is like a big net. Its strength is that it can capture a wide area of reality. But the gaps in the netting are also very wide and all kinds of things can slip through; things that are too small to matter. Lunar knowledge is concerned with the things that slip through the net. In Jungian terms, lunar knowledge is the Unconscious.

Solar knowledge wants to shine a light on everything. But when you try to shine a light on the things that have fallen through the gaps in the net, you are doing the opposite of reductionist science. You are increasing the number of variables and this leaves you unable to calculate laws anymore. That’s the problem of complexity. Translated into Graves’ terminology, it may be that complexity is inherently lunar. Applying solar reductionist science to it does not work.

The problem for the modern West is that we have told ourselves that reductionist science is the sum total of everything that can be known. We live in a culture which thinks solar knowledge is all there is and lunar knowledge doesn’t exist. In that case, everything that falls through the net of solar knowledge is seen as superfluous, redundant epiphenomena.

What if we’re wrong? What if those things do matter? Then we have ignored a whole realm of reality that is going to creep up on us quietly in the night, under a full moon, and whack us over the back of the head. Interestingly, this really is how many people think nowadays. There is an underlying anxiety which is caused by complexity but which, I think, Graves would attribute to the absence of lunar knowledge in our culture. We can’t handle complexity. More specifically, we try and resolve complexity by reverting to solar knowledge instead of dealing with it on lunar terms.

We might further hypothesise that the more solar knowledge has expanded in the form of reductionist science and industrial society, the more things have fallen through the net and the more “energy” has been building in the lunar realm. That could explain the outbursts of irrationality that we saw in the 20^th century and which are plaguing society today.

What happened in the 20^th century was that we ran out of things to apply the reductionist method to. Rather than acknowledge that fact, we continued to apply the method where it didn’t belong. This has led to the degradation of solar knowledge seen in the Technocracy. If we assume, with Graves, that solar knowledge equates to the masculine, can it also be a coincidence that there has been a degradation of masculinity in the general culture in the post-war years?

As society has become more complex, solar knowledge has become less able to handle it. This is not just a problem in science. Modern governments operate through a bureaucracy and a bureaucracy is also predicated on solar knowledge. It runs on rules. But the world has become too complex for bureaucracies to deal with. Therefore, it has become too complex for governments to deal with.

If complexity really is the domain of lunar knowledge, then our lack of such knowledge is the problem. Graves traces this all the way back to Christianity, but we can also see that the Reformation made things even more lopsided. Protestantism did away even with the cult of Mary which was Catholicism’s way of acknowledging the validity of lunar knowledge.

There’s one more twist in the story. We can say with confidence that mainstream western culture does not know how to deal with lunar knowledge. And, yet, we have acknowledged that the British and especially the US empires have been run on the lunar. The US Empire and its allies have perfected the techniques which the British Empire had begun to develop (interestingly enough during the long reign of a Queen). These techniques, including sabotage, seem to be based in lunar knowledge. That is why we live in the world of the Devouring Mother. The Deep State is lunar, not solar.

The institutions of modern western society – parliament, civil service, bureaucracy –are based on the assumption of solar knowledge. But these institutions became incapable of handling the emergent complexity of the world. Rather than dismantle them and replace them with something else, we kept their external façade but within they took on a form based in lunar knowledge. It’s precisely because the West did not know how to handle lunar knowledge that we had to keep up the appearances of the old solar order. In reality, the operation of politics has become lunar.

We might be tempted to call this development “fraudulent” or even “satanic” or “demonic”. Graves would say that this just reveals the old biases of the Christian church which actively suppressed the lunar. Both Graves and Jung believed that the challenge ahead of us is to learn to once again incorporate lunar knowledge. Jung saw the dogma of the Assumption of Mary by the Pope as a big step towards that end. Graves believed the solution lay in poetry and the arts.

Jung also recognised a big risk. The failure to find a balance could lead to the destruction of the solar altogether and we would wind up in barbarism. It’s not a question of either/or. There must be a balance of the lunar and solar.

One of the ways to address that risk would be to acknowledge and fix the imbalance that has occurred within solar knowledge itself. Solar knowledge is not synonymous with reductionist science. It only became that way since Descartes and Newton. It’s not hard to see why we exulted this form of science. The results have been incredible. But if, indeed, we have reached the limits of reductionist science, then what is needed is a way to expand solar knowledge again so it encompasses more than just reductionism.