The Curse of Descartes

Most of us love a bogeyman - or, in these politically correct times, a bogey person. On the crudest level, this is somebody we can blame for everything that we consider to be bad in the world. More subtly, the bogey is not exactly the source of all evil, but a shadow figure nevertheless, who constellates an approach, a stage in history maybe, a weltanschauung.

For a lot of people here in Scotland, where the collective memory is long and unforgiving, a major bogey remains Superdominatrix and Oppressor of all north of the Border, Maggie Thatcher. While her dark spectre continues to hover over the banks of the Clyde and clank through the blackened corridors of Edinburgh Castle at the stroke of midnight, there is no chance of David Cameron and his buddies capturing more than a handful of Scottish votes. A complete exorcism is in order, still waiting to be performed.

For maverick disciple of Carl Jung and founder of archetypal psychology James Hillman, the bogeyman comes in the form of 17th century philosopher-mathematician Rene Descartes, along with his less famous contemporary Marin Mersenne. And with good reason. I have already written about how the Cartesian view divides the world into living subjects, complete with human egos, and the rest of the universe, dead and 'out there'. Wielding his trusty sword of mathematics, Descartes also conclusively proved that animals have no soul; imagine the status ascribed to plants, rocks and the like. Inutterably dead, pure lifelessness. Humans do possess soul and psyche, but in the true spirit of the mechanistic worldview, this needs to be located physically. Descartes finally and triumphantly concluded that the soul resides in the pineal gland.

It will not be lost on the reader that these findings of one of the fathers of modern rationalism are totally mad. But the demented ramblings of Descartes are very much in accord with the great project of secular, rational, single-waveband humanism that has moulded most of what we know as modern western civilisation. They have won the day.

Another emanation of Cartesian folly concerns the quest to discover what is truly 'real'. Following his mathematical approach, our bogeyman's conclusion was that it is my thoughts that show me to be conclusively 'me'. In contrast, sense experience especially is not to be trusted as proof - of anything, really. Remember this, when you next take a walk in the park, and see the last of the spring blossom fall to the ground, feel the wind on your skin, hear the birds as they go about their springtime business. In terms of reality, this is all highly suspect and dodgy stuff indeed.

The legacy of the Cartesian faith in mathematics as the means to probe and express reality, along with its concomitant suspicion of the validity of 'quality', can be seen in the mindset and mindspeak of our modern politicians, economists, and the rest. One such manifestation is the tendency to answer almost any given question in the language of that low-level form of maths, statistics. In the UK, members of the former Labour Government were especially prone to this particular form of sorcery. Policy and progress were expressed almost exclusively in percentage increases or decreases, numerical targets, specific dates, and so on. This IS reality as viewed through the lens of single-waveband scientific materialism. Which suits politicians and the like perfectly well since, contrary to the consensual view, figures and statistics do not demonstrate a single, objective, incontrovertible reality, but can be manipulated to prove and justify just about anything. To quote Mark Twain, there are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics.

A sickening example of the soul-strangling effects of the post-Cartesian statistical view of the world emerged shortly before the recent election, when I took a cursory look at the various parties' policies on 'the environment'. These in the main turned out to be percentage figures for reductions in carbon emissions by particular dates. Nothing about love, care, respect, kinship, enjoyment even. Trees, rocks, birds, dolphins, all abstracted into figures; the Soul of the World reduced to percentage points on a piece of paper. Which, once more, suits the dominators just fine, as they can continue their own power agenda sanctioned by the god of the day, statistics. In truth, the only political parties to demonstrate any sense of 'environment' as directly experienced (ie outside the Cartesian box of hell) were UKIP (discourage windfarms) and the BNP (undergrounding for power transmission cables through areas of natural beauty). Does this mean that the anarcho-shamanism of Pale Green Vortex will be metamorphosing into shamanic far-rightism? Probably not. But it does demonstrate the infernal vision, the poverty of soul and imagination, that informs mainstream politics in general. Children of Descartes, born into sickness and the nexus of non-reality, we salute you.

Dominators everywhere

Dominators, dominator styles, dominator complexes: Pale Green Vortex is littered with references to these phenomena. But who and what are they?

I first came across talk of dominator culture in Terence McKenna's classic 'Food of the Gods'. He in turn had borrowed the expression from Riane Eisler's 'The Chalice and the Blade'. I finally got round to reading it....

The story goes something like this: Once upon a time, quite a long time ago, in the Mediterranean and Near East regions normally considered the cradle of western civilisation, people lived quite differently. Settled agricultural societies, at peace with one another, lived side by side. These Neolithic peoples worshipped the Great Goddess, and developed steadily their social organisations and technological prowess. Furthermore, to quote Eisler, 'Equality between the sexes - and among all people - was the general norm in the Neolithic.' This was not matriarchal society, but partnership society.

All began to change around 4200 BCE. Waves of invaders from the north and east came in on horseback. Warrior types, and with warlike male gods, slowly they subjugated the Old European groups. 'Now everywhere the men with the greatest power to destroy - the physically strongest, most insensitive, most brutal - rise to the top, as everywhere the social structure becomes more hierarchic and authoritarian' (chapter four - Dark Order out of Chaos). The day of the dominator is upon us. And the shape of western 'civilisation' has been largely determined by dominator mentality ever since.

A most important lesson from 'The Chalice and the Blade' is that there is no inevitability about the ways human societies go about things. Viciousness and dominator-style competitiveness, manifesting in power-based hierarchical forms of social organisation, is not hard-wired into our make-up, as the dominators and their one-eyed scientific apologists would have us believe. 'Warfare and patriarchy arrived with the appearance of dominator values' (Food of the Gods, intro). There is indeed a choice, but most humans are not even aware of it.

'The most important book since Darwin's "Origin of Species"', Ashley Montagu proclaims on the front cover of my copy of 'The Chalice and the Blade'. Well, it depends on who gets to read it. This is not the kind of book that official dominator channels are going to promote. Education in general, and history in particular, are most effective forms of social control. Imagine it: history lesson for the ten-year olds. 'OK kids, today we're looking at some of our ancestors. Well, unlike us, they lived happily side by side. They co-operated on many issues, didn't need armies or nuclear weapons, could go out on the streets at night, and bullying probably was unheard of. Now things are different, and you've got me.' How do you explain the supposed superiority of modern dominator-style 'progress' from that basis? You can't. Give that to the kids and the revolution will soon be upon us.

So the modern dominators had better keep quiet about the Neolithic partnership societies; they represent the death-knell of much of our modern way of life. Also best to keep under wraps what happened in the various outbursts of goddess-partnership vitality that have occasionally punched a hole in the skin of dominator culture: the witch burnings, the counter culture of the late 1960s and 1970s come readily to mind. As Terence Mckenna says: 'Dominator culture has shown a remarkable ability to redesign itself....'(Food of the Gods, chapter five). It has also cunningly developed the means to eliminate other possibilities from the arena of popular human consciousness. Brainwashing through selection and censoring of what is proferred as 'the truth'.

As it is, should we dare to look outside the dominators' box, 'The Chalice and the Blade', with its story of partnership societies, provides a myth from which to live. Not a utopia, nor a lost Garden of Eden that provokes mere nostalgia, but a vision of real possibilities, a myth to lead us on - and back to Gaia.

The Daimon's Blessing

'Know thyself' has been the maxim meted out to me by the daimon - at birth, at conception, in a previous lifetime, or in a dimension outside the consensual time- space continuum, I have no idea. Whatever, it lies outside the categories of choice, and is something over which I have little control. As examined by James Hillman in 'The Soul's Code', the daimon's calling appears to have shaped my life more than anything more conventional psychologies can come up with.

Much orthodox psychology circles round the so-called nature/nurture debate. On the nurture side, developmental psychology looks at a person from the viewpoint of the various influences on this life: parental relationships and early experiences are particularly scrutinised - familiar therapy territory. On the nature side, it's all genes, DNA, braincell chemistry: you're hard-wired and that's that. Archetypal psychologist James Hillman, however, proposes a third option, demonstrated by his 'acorn theory'. Just as the mature oak tree is already contained in the acorn, so is our personal destiny already present whan we are just little humans. Our 'calling' is to bring to maturity the particular shape, colour, flavour, of our own unique and individual acorn. And it is the daimon that facilitates the process, and with whom we must remain in contact in order to bring our life to fruition.

So the notions of daimon and acorn appear to describe (rather than explain) what has unfolded over the years of my life more satisfactorily than anything else I have come across. But to follow the daimon's calling of 'knowing myself' has involved abandoning the narrower confines of 'self' as enshrined in conventional ego psychology. To speak in Jungian terms, it has necessitated firstly a descent beyond ego into personal unconscious (including encounter with the Shadow), then entry into the collective unconscious (anima and archetypes). Still further, it has meant contact with what Jung tentatively refers to as the psychoid, and what Hillman approaches in his work on 'the soul of the world', where our connectedness with absolutely everything is brought into focus. Paradoxically, knowing yourself leads to the realisation that you are not a separate entity at all, but are intimately related to everything else. And for this leap into identity with the animal, plant and conventionally inanimate worlds, it may be necessary to leave behind Jung and his disciples, and take as guides and mentors those traditions that have not lost contact with these dimensions of reality in the first place - I am speaking primarily of so-called 'primitive' and shamanic cultures.

Attending to the call of the daimon has also led me back, into history, prehistory and beyond, in the search for origins. 'Who am I? Where do I come from?' I was on this track during my late teens when, in the quest for the origins of human nature, I read 'African Genesis' and 'The Territorial Imperative' by Robert Ardrey. In these tomes, Ardrey explores the 'killer ape' theory, stating that our australopithecine ancestors out on the East African plains evolved through cunning and learning how to kill, the implication being that violence is part of our inheritance and viciousness an ineradicable aspect of our nature.

I recall Ardrey devoting a good portion of his writings to baboon troops, which are strictly hierarchical, highly territorial, and not very kind and tolerant places to be. The lesson was not lost on me, and got me into a good deal of family trouble. I once told my father that he was acting out of a sense of head-of-family dominance. This was intended as a matter-of-fact statement, but my father took it as an accusation (probably sensing his own head-of-family dominance being challenged by a rebellious young buck), and never fully forgave me, I suspect.

As time has passed, I have come to view this search for our true nature through the discovery of our origins as a chimera. There is no starting point to our being human that defines us; nature contains an infinite number of possibilities, and we will most likely find there what our biases lead us to (as in the case of Ardrey). As an example, we can look at some of our closest non-human relatives. Chimpanzees are capable of considerable empathy and compassion, yet their lives are structured quite hierarchically, and they can be quite vicious. The chimp's closest relative the bonobo (sometimes called the pygmy chimp) is very different, however. Bonobo society functions in a far more co-operative way, with a polymorphous sexuality and generally more laid-back approach to life (the bonobo has been called the hippie ape). So a look into the past and at our non-human relatives can provide a sense of wonder and of endless possibilities. But as for finding a definitive moment that points to who we essentially are as human beings, this is a search doomed to failure.