A Choice of Contemplations
John Michael Greer
Last week's post on the problematic nature of binary thinking went out
of its way to sidestep the most explosive of the binaries in
contemporary industrial culture. That was a necessary evasion; those of
my readers who are following the argument I've been developing over most
of the last two months have now had a week to mull over the point I've
raised in that post, to consider its pitfalls and possibilities, and to
get ready for a hard look the most sacrosanct binary of our time: the
binary between society as it is and society as we want it to become.
That's become a hot issue in the news of late, and a significant part of
that unfolds from the presence of the Occupy protests in various
downtowns. There's a complex magical context to that fact. The vast
majority of Americans these days believe that something has gone very
wrong with their country, but there's nothing like a national consensus
about what has gone wrong, much less how to fix it. By chance or design,
the Occupy movement has capitalized on this by refusing to be pinned
down to specific demands or specific critiques, mounting a protest in
which protest itself is the central content. Tactically speaking, this
is brilliant; it's created a movement that anyone with a grievance can join.
The movement has also displayed a deft hand at the sort of binary
thaumaturgy we discussed last week. Over the last few months, it has
capably promoted a narrative in which it claims to speak for 99% of
Americans while assigning its opponents the remainder. This is a
difficult trick for what is, after all, a tiny protest movement
supported by a minority of Americans, but I can't think of an example
since Lenin redefined his little revolutionary faction as "the Majority"
- that's what bolshevik means in Russian - where it has been carried off
with such aplomb.
As this example may suggest, I'm of two minds about the Occupy
phenomenon. If it follows the trajectory mapped out in a recent press
release, holds a national convention next July to set out its demands,
and forms a third party when those demands aren't met, American politics
could undergo a seismic shift. A successful third party in America
rarely remains a third party for long; in 1860, when the Republicans
first took the White House, the Whig party imploded and a political
landscape that had been fixed in place since the republic's early
decades changed forever. That could happen again, and if it does, it's
probably the Democratic Party's turn to land face first in history's
compost heap; after three decades pushing policies that could
uncharitably but accurately be described as GOP Lite, the Democrats are
practically defenseless against a strong challenge from further to the left.
Such a challenge might work out well, or it might not. If the movement
turns away from the options for change that our constitution provides,
though, things become much harder to anticipate, and some of the
possible outcomes are very ugly indeed. Mass protest movements, as
anyone who's followed current events knows well, are quite capable of
destabilizing a nation, but what comes into being in their wake is a
complete crapshoot. It's never safe to assume that the character of the
protests will be reflected in the system they put into power; both the
French and Russian revolutions began with lively participatory
democracy, and ended in the Terror and the gulags. There's no certainty
that successful mass protest in America will go the same way - but it's
critical for all concerned to realize that it could.
That brings us back in turn to the binary I mentioned above. I sincerely
doubt that there's anyone in America today who doesn't cherish the
thought that if only the right political changes were made, the world
would be a much better place. I have such thoughts fairly often, though
they're tempered in my case by the wry realization that the changes I'd
most like to see, if put to a popular ballot, would probably not get a
single favorable vote other than mine. Daydream politics of this sort
are now and then helpful, since that's one of the ways that people come
up with the currently unthinkable notions that will dominate serious
politics fifty years from now, but in times of severe social stress they
can feed into the sort of unwelcome consequences I've outlined above.
The structure of binary logic plays a large role in this. Remember that
the binary reaction is meant to produce snap judgments in stressful
situations, and it has no gray areas at all; a distant bit of color in a
tree is either food or it's not, the snap of a twig breaking in the
forest behind you is either a predator or it's not, and our
australopithecine ancestors didn't normally have to cope with things
that were partly food and partly a predator, and might turn into one or
the other depending on how a set of complex processes went. They also
didn't, as far as we know, have to deal with other australopithecines
trying to convince them that food was predators and predators were food.
Part of the human predicament is that we do have to deal with such
complex choices, where one thing can be an object of desire and an
object of fear at the same time; we have to do that with a nervous
system that still has most of its australopithecine reactions hardwired
into place; and we have to deal with the fact that other people are
trying to manipulate us against our best interests using those
reactions. Politics is only one of the arenas where this is a major
issue, to be sure, but the level of stress in politics is very often
higher than elsewhere, and it's thus far from rare for people who make
nuanced judgments in other contexts to fall into extreme binary thinking
when it comes to politics.
This is where we get the conviction, which is limited to the fringes in
ordinary times but spreads rapidly into the mass of the population in
times of extreme social stress, that the existing order of society is
the worst possible state of affairs, and that any change to it must
therefore be a change for the better. This is binary logic in its purest
form: the existing order is bad, therefore whatever replaces the
existing order must be good; since the existing order is bad, it's
equated with every other bad thing, even those that contradict each
other {1}, while whatever is to replace the existing order, since it's
good, can't be bad in any sense. Add in white-hot emotions on all sides
of the equation, and you get today's fringe politics - and quite
possibly the mainstream politics of tomorrow.
Still, the binary reaction isn't the only factor at work. Another bit of
practical psychology that's been used by operative mages for a very long
time also comes into play, especially when the politics of an age are
more intently focused on denouncing the existing order than in offering
a coherent alternative to it. You'll find this principle expressed in
different ways in magical traditions, but the phrasing I first learned
is to my mind the one that expresses it best: what you contemplate, you
imitate.
It's important to realize, before we go on, that this phrase means no
more than it says, which is simply that the more attention you focus on
something, the more likely you are to imitate it. In particular, it
doesn't mean that you can get anything you want simply by wanting it
badly enough, or concentrating on it long enough; your own thoughts,
words, and actions will be shaped by whatever most often fills the
center of your attention, but if imitating whatever fills the center of
your attention won't get you what you want, the effect isn't going to
help you. Contemplating a new toaster oven, in other words, won't get
you one, it'll simply make you imitate one - which is not exactly a
useful thing under most conditions. If what you want to accomplish can
be done by changing your thoughts, words, and actions, on the other
hand, contemplation on carefully chosen subjects can accomplish a great
deal; this is one of the major working tools of magic.
Like the binary reaction, the contemplation reaction has roots reaching
deep into our evolutionary history. One of the reasons that mammals have
been the dominant land animals on this planet for the last fifty million
years or so is that they evolved the trick of supplementing inherited
behavioral patterns with learned ones picked up early in life from one
or both parents. Watch kittens learning how to hunt from their mother,
and you're seeing one of the foundations of mammalian dominance; the
kittens watch every move intently, and then imitate the repertoire of
motions in play. Rinse and repeat, and your kittens have a set of
behaviors that are nicely adapted to local conditions. Primates do this
even more than other mammals; there's a reason we all know the phrase
"monkey see, monkey do."
Every religious tradition that's been around long enough to put together
a decent collection of magical technique uses the resulting reaction to
the hilt. Visit an old-fashioned Catholic or Orthodox church, a Hindu
temple, a Tibetan Buddhist monastery, or what have you, and you'll find
yourself surrounded by a wealth of imagery, designed and created
according to precise patterns handed down by tradition, inviting you to
contemplation. In religions such as Islam and Judaism, which reject
representational images, exactly the same effect is produced by the
words of sacred texts that are in many places ablaze with vivid verbal
imagery.
A Buddhist burning incense before an image of a bodhisattva, a Christian
prayerfully studying the narratives of the Bible, or for that matter a
Druid standing with arms outstretched in the midst of circle of trees in
the rain, taking part in the dance of the natural world, are all
contemplating that which they hope, in their own way, to imitate. All
three, and their equivalents in other traditions, are aware of the other
side of the balance; the Buddhist affirms the reality of suffering, the
Christian likely considers original sin as a fact of existence, the
Druid knows full well that the dance of nature also includes pain and
death, but the devotional and meditative practices of these and other
faiths carefully balance such reflections with a more sustained
contemplation of exactly those things the believer seeks to imitate.
Still, the intellectual assent and emotional exaltation of the
worshipper in the presence of the holy are not required to give the
effect we're discussing its power. The contemplation effect is
remarkably independent of the other activities of the mind, and in
particular, it works regardless of the thoughts and feelings you
associate with the object of contemplation. One of the more bitterly
ironic narratives in recent American history shows this independence in
action.
When the neoconservative movement burst on the American scene in the
last years of the 20th century, some thinkers in the older and more,
well, conservative ends of the American right noted with a good deal of
disquiet that the "neocons" had very little in common with conservatism
in any historically meaningful sense of that word. In the Anglo-American
world, conservatism had its genesis in the writings of Edmund Burke
(1729-1797), who argued for an organic concept of society, and saw
social and political structures as phenomena evolving over time in
response to the needs and possibilities of the real world. Burke
objected, not to social change - he was a passionate supporter of the
American Revolution, for instance - but to the notion, popular among
revolutionary ideologues of his time (and of course since then as well),
that it was possible to construct a perfect society according to
somebody's abstract plan, and existing social structures should
therefore be overthrown so that this could be done.
By and large, Burke's stance was the intellectual driving force behind
Anglo-American conservatism from Burke's own time until the late
twentieth century, though of course - politics being what they are - it
was no more exempt from being used as rhetorical camouflage for various
crassly selfish projects than were the competing ideas on the other end
of the political spectrum. Still, beginning in the 1920s, a radically
different sense of what conservatism ought to be took shape on the
fringes of the right wing in America and elsewhere, and moved slowly
inward over the decades that followed. The rise to power of the
neoconservatives in 2000 marked the completion of this trajectory.
This new version of conservatism stood in flat contradiction to Burke
and the entire tradition descended from him. It postulated that a
perfect society could indeed be brought into being, by following a set
of ideological prescriptions set out by Ayn Rand and detailed by an
assortment of economists, political scientists, and philosophers, of
whom Leo Strauss was the most influential. It called for a grand crusade
that would not only make over the United States in the image of its
ideal, but spread the same system around the world by any means
necessary. It argued that bourgeois sentimentality about human rights
and the rule of law should not stand in the way of the glorious
capitalist revolution, and went on to create a familiar landscape of
prison camps, torture, and aggressive war waged under dubious pretexts.
Neoconservatism, in other words, was not conservatism at all; it was to
Communism precisely what Satanism is to Christianity, a straightforward
inversion that adopted nearly every detail of the Third International's
philosophy, rhetoric and practice and simply reversed some of the value
judgments.
The magical principle we've just discussed explains this bizarre bit of
ideological transformation. The main figures in the neoconservative
movement entered public life in one or another of the panics over
Communism that swept through the American right every decade or so from
1919 until just before the Soviet Union's collapse. Like most political
panics, these focused obsessively on the feared and hated Other, and a
glance back through the biographies of prominent figures in
neoconservatism shows plenty of involvement in that pastime. The result
of this fixation of attention was utterly predictable to anyone with a
grasp of magical theory: what the "neocons" contemplated, they imitated.
The same process can be seen in action all through the culture of
denuciation that has replaced civil discourse in so much of contemporary
life. From the evangelical preachers whose spluttering polemics about
homosexuality provide an interesting counterpoint to their propensity
for being caught in compromising positions with their boyfriends, to the
militant atheists whose hostility toward religion is neatly matched by
their eagerness to match the intolerance and self-righteousness of its
least impressive forms, today's society is well stocked with object
lessons relating to this branch of magical philosophy. Still, such
reflections are less important just now than the issues raised at the
beginning of this essay.
The decision on the part of the Occupy movement to create a protest with
protest itself as its only fixed content was, as I suggested earlier, a
brilliant tactical stroke. What makes for good tactics, though, may not
be equally wise as strategy. If the movement proceeds along the lines
mentioned already, moving to the formulation of demands and then to the
pursuit of active political goals, it has a good chance of dodging the
inherent strategic weaknesses of its tactical choice. The longer it
tries to avoid formulating its own coherent vision, though, the more
likely it is to find itself following out the implications of someone
else's vision. That may happen by way of the contemplation effect -
there's a reason why revolutions so often end up installing governments
all but identical to the ones they overthrow - or by way of any of
several other modes of derailment; as history shows, a movement of the
kind we're discussing can run off the rails in any of a remarkable
number of ways.
Of course, the peak oil movement is at least as vulnerable to deflection
along these same lines. From its beginning, a great many people in that
latter movement have focused attention on visions of a very troubled
future. That focus was reasonable and indeed inevitable, especially
early on; over the last three centuries, and more particularly over the
last three decades, modern industrial civilization has backed itself
into a very tight corner, and that reality needs to be recognized;
trying to imitate a fantasy of sustainable growth by contemplating it,
while refusing to recognize the hard material constraints that make it a
fantasy, is exactly the kind of confusion between what magic can do and
what technology can do that occupied an earlier post in this series {2}.
Again, contemplating a toaster oven won't get you one; it'll just make
you more prone to overheat and burn the toast.
Yet it's important to balance the recognition of inflexible planetary
limits with a clear sense of the way human consciousness responds to
such reflections, and to avoid the pitfalls that come from spending too
much time contemplating what you don't want to imitate. There are any
number of ways to attain the necessary balance; those of my readers who
follow religious, spiritual, or magical traditions have ample resources;
those who don't may find the regular contemplation of nature and natural
systems to be an effective response; and of course one of the many
reasons why I've encouraged readers who are interested in pursuing the
"green wizardry" advocated in these posts to collect books and other
information sources from the appropriate-tech movement of the 1970s is
that these tend to be stocked with colorful visions of the future we
could have had - and even though that future is water under the
micro-hydro turbine at this point, imitating it is by no means a useless
strategy even this late in the game.
One way or another, though, what you contemplate, you imitate. Choose
your contemplations well.
