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I’ve written a lot in this blog about my belief in the fundamental connectedness of people, of living beings in general, of things in general. And I suspect it has been a waste of time. There are only two likely reactions anyone might have to this notion at this point in history: “Duh, who didn’t know that?” or “Are you insane?”

If you look at the world around us right now, it certainly doesn’t look like what one might call “an organic whole.” The level of social fragmentation and conflict appears to be historically high and increasing, as does the level of conflict between human beings and Nature. No one seems to be able to agree about anything, especially in reference to how we might solve any of these problems –we can’t even agree what the problems are – but everyone seems to be ready to fight to the death to push the solution they like. It’s a situation I’ve taken to summing up like this: Where there’s a will, there’s a won’t.

Philosophically, theologically, ecologically, there’s widespread acknowledgment that everyone and everything is interconnected; that, indeed, all is one. But there’s also widespread antipathy toward that idea, widespread efforts to divide and conquer, to impose some form of absolutism or exclusivism, which means the conversion or eradication of everyone who believes in anything else: My way or the highway.

Even among people who say they believe in the kinship of all humans, the unity of existence, you don’t find many who behave accordingly. On the contrary, mostly they’re just promoting another absolutist/exclusivist ideology and contributing to the general fragmentation.

Now, if I suggest that the real solution to this problem involves each person looking inward and disengaging from mass culture and mass thinking, it might seem as if I’m promoting an even more intense degree of disintegration. After all, everyone else seems to think the answer is for everyone to unite, to join up, to enlist in some movement or other. But that’s just an invitation to choose sides in the war of exclusivisms.

Real unity begins at home, so to speak. People who are fragmented inwardly cannot bring about any kind of world except one that is likewise fragmented. Conversely (contrapositively, actually), a unified world can be brought about only by people who are personally unified.

This is, of course, the overall message of Plato’s Republic (see esp. 443d-444a), and it is a theme that has remained constant in the Western tradition from that time to the present. Plotinus, for example, reiterates:

“Know Thyself” is said to those who, because of their selves’ multiplicity, have the business of counting themselves up and learning that they do not know all of the number and kind of things they are, or do not know any one of them, not what their ruling principle is or by what they are themselves. (Enneads VI.7.41. Trans. A.H. Armstrong, Loeb Classical Library/ Harvard University Press.)

The message remains fundamental right through the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, as evidenced by a statement of the alchemist Gerhard Dorn (quoted several times by Jung): “Thou wilt never make from others the One that thou seekest, except there first be made one thing of thyself.”

And of course it’s a basic principle in the synthesis offered in the 20th century by Gurdjieff and Ouspensky: “First of all, what man must know is that he is not one; he is many. He has not one permanent and unchangeable ‘I’ or Ego. He is always different.” (P.D. Ouspensky, The Psychology of Man’s Possible Evolution, First Lecture.)

The tradition is, of course, full of advice and techniques for the individual to attain self-unification, but the overall idea is presented beautifully in my favorite passage from Plato’s Phaedo:

Now we have also been saying for a long time, have we not, that, when the soul makes use of the body for any inquiry, either through seeing or hearing or any of the other senses — for inquiry through the body means inquiry through the senses — then it is dragged by the body to things which never remain the same, and it wanders about and is confused and dizzy like a drunken man because it lays hold upon such things?

Certainly.

But when the soul inquires alone by itself, it departs into the realm of the pure, the everlasting, the immortal and the changeless, and being akin to these it dwells always with them whenever it is by itself and is not hindered, and it has rest from its wanderings and remains always the same and unchanging with the changeless, since it is in communion therewith. And this state of the soul is called wisdom. (Plato, Phaedo, 79c-d; trans. by Harold North Fowler. Available online at http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/.)

In today’s world, in which we are barraged 24 hours a day by stimuli from our immediate environment and even more from our expansive electronic environment; in which we imagine ourselves constantly “connected” with our friends, family and business associates by our wireless devices and other kinds of electrical umbilical cords; in which we turn our attention incessantly from one outrage to another, from the latest missing child report to the latest natural disaster to the latest celebrity scandal to the latest political uproar to the latest phony “reality” show development to the most recent “friend” update on our favorite social networking site – each one of our “interests” is just one more fragment of our soul torn off and sucked into the diffuse cloud that constitutes what we imagine to be our identity.

Strange as it may sound, the cure for this condition – and it is truly a sickness, of the soul – is to care less, to care about fewer things, to stop wasting our attention and our life-energy on things that don’t matter and which we can do nothing to change, and to focus on the one thing that is truly within our power to alter for the good: our own minds.

All Outside

I pulled out C.G. Jung’s Psychology and Alchemy (volume 12 of the collected works) last week for the first time in several years. It’s a large book, and a lot of it is aimed strictly at the practicing Jungian psychologist and is fairly unintelligible. However, the opening essay, “Introduction to the Religious and Psychological Problems of Alchemy,” is a lot more interesting than it sounds. Anyone who’s read Jung’s “Modern Man in Search of a Soul” or “The Undiscovered Self” will recognize some of the same themes. Here are some points I consider exceptionally well-put:

“Western man is held in thrall by the ‘ten thousand things;’ he sees only particulars, he is ego-bound and thing-bound, and unaware of the deep root of all being. ... The Western attitude, with its emphasis on the object, tends to fix the ideal – Christ – in its outward aspect and thus to rob it of its mysterious relation to the inner man.”

“Christ the ideal took upon himself the sins of the world. But if the ideal is wholly outside, then the sins of the individual are also outside, and consequently he is more of a fragment than ever, since superficial misunderstanding conveniently enables him, quite literally, to ‘cast his sins upon Christ’ and thus evade his deepest responsibilities – which is contrary to the spirit of Christianity. ... If the supreme value (Christ) and the supreme negation (sin) are outside, then the soul is void: its highest and lowest are missing.”

“It may easily happen ... that a Christian who believes in all the sacred figures is still undeveloped and unchanged in his inmost soul because he has ‘all God outside’ and does not experience him in the soul. His deciding motives, his ruling interests and impulses, do not spring from the sphere of Christianity but from the unconscious and undeveloped psyche, which is as pagan and archaic as ever. The great events of our world as planned and executed by man do not breathe the spirit of Christianity but rather of unadorned paganism. ... Christian civilization has proved hollow to a terrifying degree: it is all veneer, but the inner man has remained untouched and therefore unchanged. His soul is out of key with his external beliefs; in his soul the Christian has not kept pace with external developments. Yes, everything is to be found outside – in image and in word, in Church and Bible – but never inside. Inside reign the archaic gods, supreme as of old. ...”

“The Christian missionary may preach the gospel to the poor naked heathen, but the spiritual heathen who populate Europe have as yet heard nothing of Christianity. Christianity must indeed begin again from the very beginning if it is to meet its high educative task. So long as religion is only faith and outward form, and the religious function is not experienced in our own souls, nothing of any importance has happened. It has yet to be understood that the mysterium magnum is not only an actuality but is first and foremost rooted in the human psyche. The man who does not know this from his own experience may be a most learned theologian, but he has no idea of religion ....”

Reasonably Irrational

I’ve been trying for some time to heap scorn on one of the central tenets of orthodox economics, namely the concept of the “rational investor.” Anyone who follows the markets can see quite clearly that investors behave irrationally at times, or have we forgotten the dot-com bubble? But the theory remains firmly in place, not because economists are stupid or because they’re deliberately trying to mislead people, but because the whole structure of mainstream economic theory would collapse without it.

Put simply, economists believe that economies and markets function efficiently because people naturally choose the courses of action that are most likely to give them the greatest benefit. In this obviously naive belief, economists are clinging to the ideas of those theorists of the so-called Age of Reason, such as John Locke and Adam Smith, who laid the foundations of our modern political and economic systems. For Locke and Smith and their like-minded contemporaries, “reason” alone is sufficient to guide all human life and unlock all the mysteries of existence, while “unreason” is all bad and a great impediment to our progress as individuals and as a society.

In particular, the thinkers of the 18th-century “Enlightenment” – many of them Deists, including a number of the founding fathers of the United States – identified “unreason” with traditional and “emotional” forms of religion. After all, they were keenly aware of the violent upheavals of the 15th and 16th centuries, when partisans on both sides of the Reformation engaged in repeated and vicious wars to promote or defend their theological positions.

These cutting-edge 18th-century opinions still hold sway with a large number of contemporary thinkers. Richard Dawkins, for example, in “The God Delusion,” voices the opinion that religious belief persists in our time mainly because of bad parenting (i.e., parents teaching their children religion), and if only we could rid ourselves of this irrational belief in the supernatural, the world would quickly enjoy unprecedented peace and harmony.

The main problem with this whole line of thought is that it takes into account only a small part of the human psyche while denying and devaluing the rest.

This was already the response of the Romantic movement, which followed close on the heels of the Enlightenment and celebrated the emotions and fantasies that had been swept out of the tidy Neoclassical worldview of Locke and Smith. The Romantics restored “irrationality” to a place of value and usefulness, perhaps even giving it too high an estimation; these swings of the pendulum do tend to carry to extremes.

It’s a bit ironic that the rationalists of the Age of Reason looked to ancient philosophy for support for their arguments, because the ancients actually had a much more balanced view of human psychology. In particular, Plato and his followers clearly delineated the psyche into an irrational and a rational part, and though they did argue that the rational soul should rule the individual psyche, they contended that the psyche as a whole should aim to serve a higher, super-rational level of being. (To be technical, this “higher level” is called nous in Greek and is translated generally as “spirit” or “intellect,” depending on the inclinations of the translator; neither term really works very well, in my opinion.)

There are many, I’m sure, who will find it absurd to accord any value to irrationality. But consider: Are our sense-perceptions rational? Of course not; they simply report the facts of our environment to our emotions and our thinking. What about instincts? No, but they're pretty useful in keeping us from starving to death and so on.

What about emotions? Well, as Carl Jung pointed out, there is in fact a kind of emotional logic, which is why he defined "feeling" as a "rational function": We can rate and rank and judge things according to how they make us feel, good or bad, better or worse. And that kind of evaluation seems pretty important to our well-being. But in our modern worldview, dominated by the belief that “rationality” consists entirely of verbal or numerical logic, it doesn’t make the cut.

And let’s not forget the importance of irrationality in creativity, in making breakthroughs. Logical analysis just breaks things down or connects one existing thing to another; it doesn’t produce anything new.

However, ignoring or denying the existence or importance of these things doesn’t make them go away; instead, it simply sweeps them under the mental rug, into the unconscious – something else a lot of contemporary thinkers like to pretend is nonexistent. And from their lurking-place in our mental shadow, they can feed on our basic appetites and drives, and grow large and powerful enough to dominate us now and then, causing all sorts of embarrassing problems and bloody conflicts.

In addition, there’s a tendency toward the thoroughly unproven and frankly rather smug belief that “we” – that is, the intellectual inheritors of the Western (specifically, the Northwestern European) worldview – are the only really rational people, while “they” – all those mostly darker people in the rest of the world – are irrational (“medieval,” “emotionally volatile,” “politically immature,” etc. etc.) and therefore in need of our benevolent (of course) guidance (or the firm hand of a dictator chosen by us).

It scarcely needs to be said, but I’ll state that I don’t think “we” are as rational as some of us like to believe, nor are “they” as irrational. And in any case, I think we need to practice irrationality to some extent. You might say that the problem isn’t that we’re irrational, it’s that we just aren’t very good at it.