The Reenchantment of the World (56 page)

Post-Scarcity Anarchism
,
p. 285). Some of Henri Laborit's work argues this view as well.

 

 

Strictly speaking, heterarchy and egalitarianism are not the same
thing. Heterarchy is intransitive differentiation, which is not
identical to equality. But the two are so close that in actual practice
a heterarchical system would be virtually egalitarian.

 

 

30. René Dubos, "Environment,"
Dictionary of the History of Ideas
,
2 (1973), 126; C.H. Waddington, "The Basic Ideas of Biology," in
C.H. Waddington, ed.,
Towards a Theoretical Biology
, 4 vols. (Chicago:
Aldine Publishing Company, 1968), 1: 12.

 

 

31. Wilden,
System and Structure
, pp. 141, 354ff. Shannon, Weaver,
and W. Ross Ashby are typical of the early cybernetic writers.

 

 

32. Of course, this is a tricky issue. Whether a change was a true
alteration of a program, or part of the program all along, is a subject
that historians debate for nearly every major historical development. The
whole quantity-to-quality argument developed by Marx was designed to
overcome the tension between homeorhetic and morphogenetic development.

 

 

33. Bateson,
Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity
(New York: Dutton,
1979), p. 206.

 

 

34. Robert Lilienfeld,
The Rise of Systems Theory
(New York: Wiley,
1978), p. 70.

 

 

35. Ibid., p. 160.

 

 

36. Ibid., pp. 174, 263. Cf. William W. Everett, "Cybernetics and the
Symbolic Body Model,"
Zygon
7 (June 1972), 104, 107.

 

 

37. Carolyn Merchant,
The Death of Nature
(New York: Harper & Row,
1980), pp. 103, 252, 291; see also pp. 238-39.

 

 

38. In point of fact, the experiment did not work as described. As
Bateson tells us, the situation was so often on the verge of breaking
down that the trainer had to give the animal numerous rewards to which
it was not entitled in order to maintain his relationship with it.

 

 

39. See Chapter 7, note 27.

 

 

40. Rossman,
New Age Blues
, pp. 54-56. On the following paragraph
cf. Chapter 7, note 2.

 

 

41. According to Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman,
Snapping: America's
Epidemic of Sudden Personality Change
(Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1978),
pp. 11-12, 56, 161, there are currently more than one thousand religious
cults now active in the United States, using nearly eight thousand
techniques that fall under the rubric of what Bateson calls Learning
III. Many are run or guided by Madison Avenue experts, and the following
in these cults is not necessarily small: the Church of Scientology,
for example, has an estimated 3.5 million members in America alone.

 

 

42. Jerry Mander,
Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television
(New York: William Morrow, 1978), pp. 100-107.

 

 

43. Rossman,
New Age Blues
, p. 117.

 

 

44. Max Horkheimer,
Eclipse of Reason
(New York: The Seabury Press,
1974; orig. publ. 1947), p. 120. For material on
est
see Rossman,
New
Age Blues
, pp. 115-66; Peter Marin, "The New Narcissism,"
Harper's
,
October 1975, pp. 45-56; Suzanne Gordon, "Let Them Eat est,"
Mother
Jones
3 (December 1978) 41-54; and Jesse Kornbluth, "The Führer over
est,"
New Times
6 (19 March 1976), 36-52.

 

 

45. On the link between Nazism and the occult, see Jean-Michel Angebert,
The Occult and the Third Reich
, trans. Lewis Sumberg (New York:
Macmillan, 1974); Trevor Ravenscroft,
The Spear of Destiny
(New York:
Putnam's 1973); and Dusty Sklar,
Gods and Beasts
(New York: Crowell,
1977).

 

 

46. Lucien Goldmann,
Immanuel Kant
, trans. Robert Black (London: New
Left Books, 1971; orig, German publ. 1945, rev. ed. [French] 1967),
p. 122; reprinted with permission of the publisher.

 

 

47. William Irwin Thompson, "Notes on an Emerging Planet," in Michael Katz
et al., eds.,
Earth's Answer
(New York: Harper & Row, 1977), p. 211.

 

 

48. Ibid., p. 213. I have fudged a bit here; Thompson is referring not to
his own statement, but to that of Jonas Salk in his book,
The Survival
of the Wisest
. Unfortunately, there is not much difference between the
two. Thompson's own statement necessarily involves a distinction between
shepherds and flocks, which he does not seem to see.

 

 

49. Julian Jaynes,
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the
Bicameral Mind
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976).

 

 

50. Bruce Brown,
Marx, Freud, and the Critique of Everyday Life
(New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973), p. 17.

 

 

51. Horkhelmer,
Eclipse of Reason
, pp. 122-23.

 

 

52. See the two articles by Dasmann in
The Ecologist
for 1976, cited
in note 6 to this chapter.

 

 

53. Gorsline and House,
Future Primitive
. Berg defines a bioregion
as "a geographical area united by particular natural characteristics
(plants, animals, soils, watersheds, climate) and by human influences
that bear on the region" (personal communication).

 

 

54. Marshall Sahlins,
Stone Age Economics
(Chicago: Aldine Publishing
Company, 1972).

 

 

55. Robert Curry discusses the map in "Rainhabiting the Earth: Life
Support and the Future Primitive,"
Truck
, no. 18 (1978), pp. 17-40. The
map is reproduced on page 190 of the same issue, and was originally part
of Occasional Paper no. 9 of the International Union for Conservation of
Nature and Natural Resources (Morges, Switzerland). Curry's article may
also be found in John Carins, ed.,
The Recovery of Damaged Ecosystems
(Blacksburg, Va.: Virginia Polytechnic University Press, 1976).

 

 

56. Berg and Dasmann,
Reinhabiting California
, pp. 217-18.

 

 

57. Ibid., p. 217.

 

 

58. Mander,
Four Arguments
, pp. 104-5. Blake was making the same
point when he wrote: "Earth and all you behold: tho' it appears without,
it is within."

 

 

Although this distinction between nature-based religions and guruism
is crucial, ecology is probably not by itself a sufficient guarantee
against fascism, as Daniel Cohn-Bendit points out in a recent interview
in
Le Sauvage
(No. 57, septembre 1978, p. 11). In June 1978, he
notes, one Hamburg ecological party was openly fascist, taking the
line of "Blood and Soil," and combining its anti-nuclear stance with a
platform that was antigay, antifeminist, antiSemitic, etc., and highly
nationalistic. Although, as I have indicated, regionalism is intrinsically
opposed to nationalism, in practice the line gets somewhat slippery. This
was certainly the case in France, where regionalist proponents such as
Charles Maurras wound up supporting the Vichy government.

 

 

59. Gorsline and House,
Future Primitive
.

 

 

60. Wilden,
System and Structure
, pp. 21, 25; Jacques Lacan, "The
Mirror Phase," trans. Jean Roussel,
New Left Review
, no. 51 (1968;
orig. French version 1949), pp. 71-77.

 

 

61. Robert BIy, "I Came Out of the Mother Naked," in
Sleepers Joining
Hands
(New York: Harper & Row, 1973), pp. 29-50.

 

 

62. Homer,
The Odyssey
, Book XI.

 

 

63.
Rebel in the Soul
was translated most recently by Bika Reed (New
York: Inner Traditions International, 1978), and excerpts are reprinted
here with the permission of the publisher. The first translation into a
European language was into German by A. Erman in 1896, and there have
been a number of others, for example, John A. Wilson's translation,
"A Dispute Over Suicide," in James B. Pritchard, ed.,
Ancient Near
Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament
, 3d ed. (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1969; orig. publ. 1950), pp. 405-7, or Hans Goedicke,
The Report About the Dispute of a Man with his Ba
(Baltimore: The
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970).

 

 

Julian Jaynes discusses the document on pp. 193-94 of
Origins of
Consciousness
, arguing that its language is not what the translators
took it to be, namely genuine self-dialogue. Thus he writes that
"all translations of this astounding text are full of modern
mental impositions," whereas what is really going on is auditory
hallucination. Though it is true that there are as many translations as
there are translators, I believe Jaynes is somewhat confused. He argues
that the voice of the soul here cannot be a modern one, in that bicameral
consciousness mandates that we translate it as auditory hallucination;
yet he also argues that the document dates from a period of societal
breakdown, and that it was in such periods that bicameral consciousness
also broke down and ego consciousness emerged. But this means precisely
that gods, or auditory hallucinations, are converted into selves, or
interior voices. For this reason, I think we can take the contemporary
translations as accurate.

 

 

64. Paul Shepard,
The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game
, pp. 125, 283.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Glossary

 

 

Alembic: Egg-shaped glass container with a tube extending from the top.
A standard piece of alchemical laboratory equipment in which many of the
essential operations of alchemy, especially distillation, took place.

 

 

Analogue knowledge: Also called iconic communication. The range of
nonverbal (excepting poetry), affective communication and perception
by which we come to know the world, including fantasy, dreams, art,
body language, gesture, and intonation. Contrasted with 'Digital
knowledge,' which is verbal-rational and abstract. Cf. Dialectical
reason, Kinesics, Primary process.

 

 

Animism: Belief that everything, including what we commonly regard as
inert material objects, is alive, possesses an indwelling spirit.

 

 

Archaic tradition: Used in this work interchangeably with the following
terms: esoteric tradition, sympathy/antipathy theory, Hermetic
tradition, Homeric or pre-Homeric mentality, mimesis (qv), animism
(qv), totemism, participation, original participation, gnosticism,
doctrine of signatures, and participating consciousness.

 

 

Strictly speaking, these terms are not identical. For example, the
Hermetic tradition includes alchemy, which was probably not practiced
during the pre-Homeric period, and which certainly postdates animism and
totemism. Nor is all participating consciousness necessarily original
(animistic).

 

 

However, common to all these terms is the notion that in a literal or
figurative sense, everything in the universe is alive and interrelated,
and that we know the world through direct identification with it,
or immersion in its phenomena (subject/object merger). The archaic
tradition, however, is not one of pure phenomenology, for its assumes
the existence of natural laws or relationships that human beings
can learn as a science. Among the most ancient of these sciences is
totemism, the perceptible manifestation of indwelling spirits by icons
or carved images. The medieval science of these correspondences --
whereby plants, animals, minerals, parts of the body, and so on were
seen as consciously displaying the influence of particular stars or
planets -- was called the doctrine of signatures. Sympathetic magic
was also based on the theory that certain things naturally went with
(were sympathetic to) certain other things.

 

 

Atomism: The doctrine, which includes material atomism, that any
phenomenon or object is no greater or less than the sum of its parts. It
assumes a phenomenon is explained when it has been broken down into
its constituent parts, which can then (at least theoretically) be
reassembled. Contrasted with Holism (qv).

 

 

 

 

Cartesian paradigm: Dominant mode of consciousness in the West from the
seventeenth century to the present. Defines as real that which can be
analyzed or explained by the scientific method, a set of procedures
combining experiment, quantification, atomism (qv), and the mechanical
philosophy. The world is seen as a vast collection of matter and motion,
obeying mathematical laws.

 

 

Circuitry: In cybernetic theory, the interrelation of parts, or of
message exchange. The principle of circuitry holds that no variation
can occur in one part of the system or circuit without setting off a
chain reaction that is felt at every other point.

 

 

Coding: The programming or standardization of a person by his or her
culture into its ethos (qv) and eidos; also, the program or mode of
organization of the culture at large. See also Learning II, Tacit
knowing, Gestalt, Paradigm. In cybernetic theory, coding refers to
the translation of information into a set of symbols for meaningful
communication.

 

 

Context: Stated or unstated set of rules within which an event or
relationship takes place.

 

 

Cybernetics: Study of human control functions and the machines designed
to replace them. More broadly, the science of messages, information
exchange and communication.