The Archetypal Calculus Part 8: The Modern West as Cultural Holon

There’s one more concept of Wilber’s that I’d like to discuss in this series of posts, and it’s one that was central to the analysis in my book, The Universal State of America. In that book, I’d characterised the modern European (Faustian) civilisation as being Esoteric in nature as opposed to the Exoteric civilisation of the Classical world. Within Wilber’s four quadrants, this maps to the difference between Interior and Exterior and, since we are talking about collectives, to the lower-left and lower-right quadrants.

Wilber seems to have come across the same idea as I did. He distinguished between social holons, which are always tied to a geographic location, and cultural holons, which transcend geography. To say that modern European civilisation is Esoteric is to say that it is primarily a cultural holon. To say that the Classical civilisation was Exoteric is to say that it was primarily a social holon. The modern transcends geography and the classical was tied to it.

In practice, of course, all societies and cultures have both an interior and an exterior aspect and, thus, the social and cultural aspects are two sides of the same coin. The distinction here is one of degree. The Classical civilisation was an outwardly focused civilisation but it still had its interior dimensions. Meanwhile, the modern European is an inward-focused civilisation that still has an outward dimension. Since we are living through the mature phase of modern European civilisation, an understanding of it as a cultural holon can tell us a lot about the world we live in.

For most of human history, a culture was always tied to a locality for the simple reason that very few people ever travelled outside of the area in which they were born. What’s more, given that the social holon was tied directly to its geography, local conditions such as climate and availability of food would have had a major impact on society and culture. In these cases, we would say that the Esoteric and Exoteric were unified. The cultural holon and the social holon were one and the same.

For the majority of human history, it must have been the case that there were no cultural holons that were not tied to a social holon. The arrival of civilisation seems to have changed that. In fact, we may say that civilisation is the state of affairs where a cultural holon emerges and transcends the social holons from which it was born.

If we look back at the Classical civilisation, we see that even the Greeks took it for granted that culture was always fixed in a specific place. To be ostracised (kicked out of your local community) was seen as a fate worse than death. Socrates could easily have fled Athens after being sentenced to death. In fact, his friends had already organised it for him. The authorities at that time barely even bothered to stop somebody from running away, presumably because being outside the geographical area of the polis was the same as being dead from a political and cultural point of view.

It seems highly probable that the reason the Romans were able to form an empire whereas the Greeks were not was because the Romans were more willing to make the political and cultural sacrifices necessary to transcend the geographical boundaries of the polis. Nevertheless, we also know that the Romans had great respect for local customs and encouraged the peoples they conquered to continue to practice those customs. Once again, the assumption was that culture was specific to a location, and to break that connection would bring calamity.

Despite this background, however, we also know that there was a great deal of intercultural communication in the ancient world. Pythagoras, to take just one example, was said to have studied in Egypt. Meanwhile, there is clear evidence of the influence of the Levant and the Middle East on Greek thought. It seems, then, that the Greek intellectual tradition was at least partly a cultural holon which incorporated ideas from outside the geographical and cultural spheres of the Greek social holons.

The idea that civilisation is synonymous with cultural holons that grow out of social ones is essentially the same distinction that the historian, Spengler, made between culture and civilisation. For Spengler, the cycle of civilisation began in a geographical area and then expanded out into cultural holons that were no longer tied to a place. Nevertheless, Spengler insisted that the cultural holon that emerged later was fundamentally tied to the initial social holon and he believed that the geographical conditions of the initial social holon dictated the development of the culture by shaping its core ideas.

The main problem with Spengler’s analysis, however, is that it doesn’t match the facts of the civilisation he was most concerned with, i.e., the West (Faustian). In fact, modern western civilisation was born as a cultural holon created by the Catholic Church. From the very beginning, it had already transcended geography.

The reason Spengler all but ignores the influence of the Church on the nascent Faustian civilisation has much to do with the political and cultural turmoil that had taken hold in Germany in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. It is not a coincidence that this turmoil followed the fall of the Holy Roman Empire, the exact structure that had been erected by the Church in partnership with the warlords of northern Europe a millennia earlier.

In response to the fall of the Holy Roman Empire, the German-speaking lands were trying (and failing) to unify themselves into a modern nation-state for most of the 19th century and it took until 1871 to get the job done. The political crisis that was taking shape went hand-in-hand with a religious and cultural crisis as the elites of Europe increasingly rejected Christianity.

The French Revolution had already attempted to install a new political structure based on the Enlightenment principles of reason. Since this had ended in a dismal failure, European elites went off looking for other ways to ground a new politics. Marxist thought was one of these and it aligned itself with the notions of reason, science, and progress. In opposition to it, there arose a movement that turned to mythology, specifically ancient Norse and Germanic mythology. This fitted with the desire to find a spirituality that wasn’t based in Christianity. What’s more, since the mythologies were local to a specific geography (more or less), they were a natural match for the nationalist political movements that were springing up.

A big part of the reason why Spengler became an intellectual celebrity in Germany in the 1920s was because his work managed to straddle the priorities of both nationalists and imperialists. Spengler asserted that culture was always tied to a location. This pleased the nationalists who were attempting to align German culture with a new German nation-state. Meanwhile, Spengler’s analysis showed that Europe was in the civilisation part of the cycle and that the thing to do was to start an empire. This appealed to those with imperial ambitions. Thus, nationalism and imperialism came together.

In order to make his argument, however, Spengler had to completely ignore the influence of the Catholic Church in the formation of modern European civilisation. Since almost everybody – the Marxists, the nationalists and the imperialists – wanted the Church out of the way, this was not a problem from a propaganda point of view. However, it is a big problem from a factual point of view.

The truth is that modern European civilisation is unthinkable without the influence of the Catholic Church. It is not an exaggeration to say that the Catholic Church created modern European civilisation and it did so in ways that contradict Spengler’s claim that a civilisation is always born out of a particular geography, since it was clear that the Catholic Church was not “native” to the geography of northern Europe. It was an institution born out of the combination of Roman law and Jewish religion. The Church created a caliphate of Europe with the Pope as the head of what amounted to a federal system that existed alongside the local, geographically-specific political systems (kingdoms). In short, the Church had created a cultural holon—a holon that superseded geography.

Neither was the Church shy about defending, protecting and expanding its cultural holon. It actively fought against the social holons that it ruled over. There were battles against the various kings and nobility. There were also propaganda and ideological battles against the lay public and the folk religions that still had influence in various locations.

The history of modern Europe can, in fact, be seen as the effort on the part of the social holons to wrest power back from the cultural holon of the Church. The Reformation was very much motivated by just such political, economic, and cultural concerns. This battle was won earliest in the Protestant lands, especially Britain and the Netherlands. However, France and Germany were still trying to disintermediate the Church all the way into the late 19^th century. Thus, the political and ideological battles alluded to earlier were very much about trying to get the Church out of the way so that the State, whether capitalist, communist or fascist, could reign supreme.

None of this would have been necessary, of course, if the Church hadn’t been so dominant for so long. The fact that the battle needed to be fought at all is evidence enough that Faustian civilisation was from the very beginning a cultural holon, a transnational grouping based not around shared geography but shared ideology. 19th century nationalism was, therefore, an attempt to re-establish the primacy of social holons.

If cultural holons are not held together by geography, what are they held together by? The answer is stories, myth and ideology. The Bible was the foundational mythic text of the West. The power of this myth was evident right from the beginning. During the Crusades, peasants from northern Europe willingly and voluntarily signed up to walk thousands of miles to fight a war in a place they had never seen and had no direct political interest in. Such an undertaking would have been unthinkable to the average citizen of an ancient Greek polis. That is the power of a cultural holon.

We see more evidence for the power of myth centuries after the crusades. As literacy became more widespread and people were able to read the Bible for themselves in the aftermath of the Reformation, many Puritans and Protestants in Britain and then the United States came to believe that they were the direct descendants of the tribes of Israel.

We know this is not literally true. But there is a metaphorical reading in which it is true. A cultural holon transcends geography and biology. If you belong to the same cultural holon as the tribes of Israel, as evidenced by your reading of the same holy book, then you are a member of that holon and you are a descendant of former members. The absence of a geographical and biological connection does not preclude the possibility of membership in a cultural holon.

It is because modern European civilisation was a cultural holon right from the beginning that its influence could eventually spread to cover the entire globe. We tend to explain that expansiveness in materialist terms: technology and military capability. Yet, we know for a fact that the Chinese had just as much technological advantage and maritime capability centuries earlier than Europe and that the Chinese had made forays into foreign waters. Why didn’t they take up the opportunity to expand overseas?

Almost certainly, one of the main reasons was the connection to their home geography. Chinese culture was first and foremost a social holon, just as the Romans had been and just as most cultures throughout history have been. It was because European culture was a cultural holon that it could expand to all corners of the globe.

It may very well be that the ability to retain a cultural holon across enormous distances was made possible by the new technology of the printing press and the increasing rates of literacy among the population. (Another coincidence here: the Chinese had invented the printing press centuries prior to Europe but it had not become popular there while, in Europe, it was instrumental in the cultural and political revolution that was the Reformation).

It was thus that the pilgrims in America and the other settlers in the New World carried their King James Bible and their copies of Shakespeare as permanent reminders of their identity. They also received news and information in written form. This facilitated the transmission and renewal of a cultural holon that transcended geographical boundaries.

Although the printing press undoubtedly made a huge difference, the key point is that all this was an extension of the same dynamic which had existed right from the beginning of modern Europe in the institution of the Church. The Church had created a cultural holon, and even as the influence of the Church waned, the form of the cultural holon remained.

Thus, the political battles of the 19^th century were just as much cultural battles over control of the cultural holon. (The culture wars are not new). The intellectuals, scholars and artists had stepped into the roles previously inhabited by popes, bishops and priests.

Viewed this way, a number of aspects of modern Western culture come into sharp focus. For example, Nietzsche’s famous assertion that God is dead really amounts to saying that the cultural holon that had tied together modern Europe from the beginning (the Catholic Church) was failing. That cultural holon was based on belief in God, but it had also been the foundation of a political structure that had existed for a millennium. That’s why there was a simultaneous political and cultural crisis in Germany once the Holy Roman Empire dissolved, and that’s why Marx, Nietzsche, Spengler, and many others were furiously trying to piece together a new ideology to fill the vacuum.

What was happening was an attempt to replace one cultural holon with another. The battle ended up boiling down to a three-way contest between communism, capitalism, and fascism (nationalism), each with their own respective ideologies. We should remember that many intellectuals at this time swapped freely between these alternatives. Mussolini is perhaps the most famous. He was originally a communist who later changed teams to fascism/nationalism.

It is not a coincidence, either, that Mussolini was a journalist and newspaper editor. Hitler was an author and orator. Lenin, Stalin, and Mao were primarily intellectuals. In a cultural holon, the mastery and control of the flow of ideas are as important to political power as the control of the army was to the Caesars of Rome.

Thus, the battle for political power in the mature modern European civilisation has been far more a battle of ideas than a battle of physical strength. Perhaps the causative factor in the rise of modern communication technology is not actually the scientific breakthroughs that made such technology possible but rather the imperatives that follow from the battle for control of cultural holons.

If the modern West has always been primarily a cultural holon, and if cultural holons are predicated on communication across geographical boundaries, then the evolutionary struggle resolves to those who can communicate farther and faster. The internet then appears as the logical endpoint—the ultimate technology that enables the cultural holon to truly encompass the globe. It’s no surprise that the battle of modern politics increasingly takes place online, which is to say that it really takes place in the mind.