BOOK REVIEW : Steps to an Ecology of Mind by Gregory Bateson

Gregory Bateson (1904-1980) was an anthropologist amongst many other things. His central project was the application of systems theory or cybernetics (defined by Norbert Weiner in 1948 as “the scientific study of control and communication in the animal and the machine”) to the fields of anthropology, psychology, history and ecology. This collection of academic papers and public lectures presents his thinking over the period from 1935 until 1971. The title is a description of his aim. Just as ecology is the study of the interrelationship between living things in natural systems in search of an understanding of what allows those systems to persist as healthy functioning wholes, Bateson is operating according to the belief that the problems of society and the functioning of the natural world can only be understood by achieving “an ecology of mind” in which ideas fit together in an integrated system.

Some of the papers in this book make for challenging reading. Bateson is asking us to consider a different framework for viewing the world, to think outside the box. The box being our deeply ingrained misperceptions about the world. Living things, including ourselves, are systems which exist within larger systems. These systems are interconnected wholes within which all parts are in dynamic relationship with each other. Nothing can truly be understood out of context, and no change in the system can occur without change to the whole system. 

I found some of the abstract concepts to which Bateson introduced me a little hard to wrap my head around at times, but it is worth the effort. This book left me wondering why systems theory, particularly as Bateson applies it to learning and communication, is not taught in high school. Surely being able to understand how we think and communicate and the principles which determine our relationships with others are crucial to our ability to successfully manage life. 

But there is a reason why concepts so useful are not widely appreciated. They would represent a revolution, because faulty thinking goes to the very roots of our society. A mass breakout of sanity in the populations of the world would shake every aspect of our culture and economic activity to the very core. It would be the end of the world as we know it and the beginning of an adventure into the unknown.

Part I : Metalogues

“A metalogue is a conversation about some problematic subject,” Bateson explains. These are conversations between himself and his young daughter which playfully examine important ideas. One which I found particularly thought provoking was “What is an instinct?” in which Bateson points out that concepts like “instinct” and “gravity” are “explanatory principles” - “…an hypothesis tries to explain something but an explanatory principle — like ‘gravity’ or ‘instinct’ — really explains nothing. It’s a sort of conventional agreement between scientists to stop trying to explain things at a certain point.”

Part II : Form and Pattern in Anthropology

Bateson did research on indigenous cultures in New Guinea and Bali, the latter work in collaboration with his wife Margaret Mead. From these studies he identified the phenomena of “schismogenesis” in contact between different cultures, a phenomena which also applies to relationships between individuals. 

This is a kind of negative feedback loop in which the behaviour of one individual or group toward another elicits the kind of response from the second which elicits more of the same from the first. Schismogenesis can take a symmetrical form - in which each individual or group has similar aims and are competing with each other - or a complimentary form in which there is a relationship of difference between the two, such as dominance and submission or exhibitionism and spectatorship. 

A simple example is an arms race. One country builds some nuclear weapons, so another country builds some so there is a deterrent against the first country using theirs against them. The first country views this as threatening, so they build more of their own, and so on. The negative feedback leads to a world endangered by a plethora of nuclear weapons. 

It is easy to see how relevant an understanding of these kinds of processes is. Marriage breakdown is no doubt generally the result of some form of schismogenesis. Little irritating behaviours which illicit irritating behaviours from the other party which perpetuate the phenomena, gradually escalating until the relationship becomes untenable. 

Or consider relationships between subcultures within our society. The prejudices of one group against another group can inspire retaliatory behaviour which reinforces the prejudice, etc., etc. One need only look at the behaviour of people of opposing political beliefs on the internet to see how this plays out.

Part III : Form and Pathology in Relationship

What particularly attracted me to reading Bateson was his double bind theory of schizophrenia. 

I don’t suffer from this condition myself, but I have experienced a bipolar psychotic breakdown as a result of finding myself in a double bind. A double bind is a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation. I was in a position where I put all of my faith in someone who insisted on the importance of honesty. Honesty is a strong conscientious principle for me, so I agreed with this. But when I expressed honest criticism of this individual, I was told I was “deluded”. When I pretended to be sorry for what I said, i.e. I lied, I was warmly rewarded. It was important to me to be honest and I wanted to please the person who asked me to be honest, but I had to lie to please him. As a result of this relationship I ended up becoming delusional, being locked up in a mental hospital and becoming so depressed I needed shock therapy. 

So I can relate to Bateson’s accounts of people who end up suffering schizophrenia as a result of demands made of them by a parent giving mixed messages. A mother feels anxious about affectionate contact with the child and backs away from him when he shows natural affection. Unable to face such feelings in herself, she compensates with overt declarations of love. The child doesn’t know what to base his behaviour on - the withdrawal or the pretence of warm feelings. This is a very simplistic description of a situation Bateson analyses in great detail. 

There is a strong connection between what he has to say here and both R. D. Laing’s work on psychosis and the family and Wilhelm Reich’s ideas about the effect that the neuroses of adults have on children. 

Bateson also gives a fascinating explanation for the cryptic verbal communication often exhibited during schizophrenic psychosis. 

Schizophrenia has a genetic basis, and Bateson gives consideration to the implications of this for identifying a predisposition for the “covert” schizophrenia betrayed by the parent and the “overt” schizophrenia which arises in their child.

Part IV : Biology and Evolution

Bateson scolds biologists and boards of education for “empty-headedness” in their battle with Creationists, pointing out that it is important for students to know about the evolution of understanding of evolution in order to properly recognise the problem of explanation it is trying to solve, and there is something to be appreciated in the way that the Book of Genesis framed the question : “Where does order come from?”

“In modern terms, we may say that this is the problem implicit in the Second Law of Thermodynamics: If random events lead to things getting mixed up, by what nonrandom events did things come to be sorted? And what is a ‘random’ event”. 

He also explores the implications of somatic change for evolutionary theory. Somatic change is adaption to an environment. If people go to live at a high altitude, at first they pant to deal with the thin air, but over time their lung capacity increases and breathing becomes easier. 

Can this kind of adaptation end up as a genetic change? 

Lamarck’s theory involving inheritance of acquired characteristics was discarded, but Bateson hypothesises that a random mutation may come after somatic change which gives the organism survival advantage by allowing what had been achieved by greater effort to be achieved without that effort. 

In order to survive an organism’s body has to be flexible to change, so if giraffes’ necks get gradually longer due to beneficial mutations which have survival advantage, their hearts will also have to be pumping more blood. This change in the demands on the heart is a somatic change. But at a later stage another random mutation may increase the size of giraffe hearts, this mutation having survival advantage because it reduces the effort needed and makes the giraffe more flexible to meet other challenges. In this way inheritance of acquired characteristics might appear to occur, even though it is not what is really happening.

In discussing dolphin language, Bateson points out that animal communication is all about relationship. In developing our own language, we humans acquired the ability to talk about specific things, and so our communication with each other about relationship is mostly conveyed by subtext and body language. Dolphins don’t have our body language repertoire, since they don’t have facial expressions or hands, so he surmises that dolphin language is a very complex, sophisticated language of relationship.

PART V : Epistemology and Ecology

Cybernetic explanation, Bateson tells us, is focused not on explaining why something is, but why something else isn’t. Natural selection is a perfect example. It explains the process of change in species by looking at how other outcomes were eliminated as unfit. 

Everything is looked at as potential information. There is redundancy in information to the extent that a message can be conveyed without some of that information being present. For instance if I type “sh*t”, the missing letter doesn’t stop you from knowing what I mean. Information can provide the form of something, redundancy within that form and the restraint that makes it that form and not another. All else “is noise, the only possible source of new patterns.”

How is it that we are an expression of a self-regulating balanced ecological system, and yet we are psychologically out-of-balance and bringers of chaos to that larger system? Bateson re-examines the Adam and Eve myth to see if we can learn something about how the conscious purpose for which we have such an advanced capacity compared to other animals has set us against nature — our own deeper nature and nature as a whole — and how it produces a projection by which we blame either ourselves or the system - “I have sinned” or “God is vengeful.” 

To address this dilemma we need to bring the unconscious into consciousness. Bateson sees art as particularly important in this process. He touches on the use of psychedelics, but with some scepticism. “What is required is not simply a relaxation of consciousness to let the unconscious material gush out. To do this is merely to exchange one partial view of the self for the other partial view. I suspect that what is needed is the synthesis of the two views and this is more difficult.”

He points out a great error in Darwin’s account of evolution, and that was to present the individuals or their family lines or the subspecies as the units of survival. The unit should actually be thought of as individual plus environment or family line plus environment etc., because those who destroy their environment end up destroying themselves. 

Similarly we can’t understand mind if we see it as contained simply in the brain of the individual. The concept of “mind” has to be flexible according to what we wish to explain. It is the realm of ideas. An idea is “a difference which makes a difference.” The ideas we perceive through our senses are parts of the whole which is our mind at that moment. 

But Bateson expresses the view that, just as there is a global ecosystem of which all subsystems and all species and all individuals are a part, so there is a larger Mind of which all of our minds are a part. “This larger Mind is comparable to God and is perhaps what some people mean by ‘God,’ but is still immanent in the total interconnected social system and planetary ecology.”

Part VI : Crisis in the Ecology of Mind

What are the harmful ideas which dominate our culture?

“(a) It’s us against the environment.

 (b) It’s us against other men.

 (c) It’s the individual (or the individual company, or the individual nation) that matters.

 (d) We can have unilateral control over the environment and must strive for that control.

 (e) We live within an infinitely expanding “frontier.”

 (f) Economic determinism is common sense.

 (g) Technology will do it for us.”

We need to think in terms of flexibility, Bateson insists. New technologies can allow us to support increases in population, but the more we push the limits of the system and the more we depend on such technologies, the less flexibility we have. The same thing applies for individuals, our ability to survive and to thrive depends on our flexibility, the ease with which we can change our thinking and our behaviour in the light of changing realities.

Steps to An Ecology of Mind is a book overflowing with profound thinking about what really matters. I only wish it were less relevant today than it was when it was first published.

BOOK REVIEW : How Soon Is Now? : From Personal Initiation to Global Transformation by Daniel Pinchbeck

Can the human  race survive? That is the question addressed by this book.

I’m not sure when I started thinking that we were doomed. Perhaps some time in the 1980s. It seemed obvious to me. We have an economic system dependent on ever-increasing levels of growth, which means ever-increasing consumption of material goods and energy, the production of which are eating away at our ecological life-support systems. Even before there was much attention being given to climate change, it was clear that we were headed toward a metaphorical cliff, and the fact that very few people, at the time, seemed to want to acknowledge it made it seem as if a solution was unlikely. Then, as now, I tried not to think about it too much, but it hung like a black cloud over my head.

Pinchbeck, after much inner-exploration with psychedelic drugs, has come to the belief that we have unconsciously brought this crisis upon ourselves as a way to motivate ourselves through the process of a dramatic metamorphosis as a species - that it is our initiation by crisis into existence as a specie organism - a fully-integrated global society. A similar idea has been expressed by Bruce Lipton and Steve Bhaerman in their book Spontaneous Evolution (Hay House, 2009), which he credits as an influence.

One of the problems with the ecological crisis (not to mention associated humanitarian and economic crises) is that they inspire feelings of fear and guilt in many of us. Fear and guilt can be paralysing emotions. How are we to be motivated to act? Those who would motivate us flood us with scary facts, but these just make us feel more frightened, guilty and hopeless, and so we turn off and seek some form of comfort in more materialism or superficial escapism.

What we need more than scary facts is hope. We need a vision of how something can be done. And Pinchbeck does a great job of outlining such a vision. Of course he can only sketch in the broad outlines of what is possible. He’s not a specialist in energy systems or farming or economics. He has to point us in the direction of those who can help us in these areas.

This is a consistently fascinating book. Pinchbeck’s hyperactive mind and personal, indeed sometimes confessional, approach ensure that. But I didn’t find it an easy book to approach. There is a bitter comfort in putting things in the “too hard” basket. I start to read that I should give up eating meat and minimise buying new products and a large part of me says, “Let the planet burn. Let the innocent people die. I’m not going outside my comfort zone.” And I don’t even drive a car. What is the response likely to be from those who live far outside the bounds of ecological limits? I’m reminded of Matthew 19:24 “…it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” There’s no room for excess baggage aboard the specie individual.

What is at the basis of this stubbornness? When faced with a challenge, sometimes we grasp it enthusiastically and sometimes we put our head in the sand. I don’t want it to be implied that I’m not a good person. That isn’t what Pinchbeck is saying, but it is how it feels. And how it feels is what matters to motivation. Why does it give us pleasure to do things which deep down we may feel we shouldn’t? Why does the rich celebrity who travels to Africa and sees people living in poverty (and does some charity work there), nevertheless live in a ridiculously ornate mansion? In our insecure state there is a kind of relief to be found in defying what our conscience tells us we should do. This is also the lure of the forbidden. Are we going to squirm in humiliation beneath the bully who says “You mustn’t!” or are we going to feel the power and release of screaming “I will!” To my mind this is the key impasse to the realisation of the kind of plan that Pinchbeck puts forward. His emphasis on the spiritual underpinnings of the transformation acknowledge this, but I think that there are aspects of this psychological dimension that need to be understood more clearly.

The cultivation of unconditional self-acceptance will need to provide the grounding for change. A fully self-accepting individual need not experience a call for a change in their lifestyle as a condemnation. It is through unconditional self-acceptance that we unleash our capacity for the love of others and thus provide a basis for true community. Without this there is a danger that a spreading cultural imperative to adopt an ecological lifestyle might manifest itself in a toxic culture of eco-shaming, equivalent to some of the examples we see today where political correctness has taken a particularly hostile form - decentralised authoritarianism in which individuals take out the frustration of self-imposed discipline by victimising anyone who doesn’t do likewise, or doesn’t appear to be doing likewise. A healing evolution has to be motivated by warm and generous feelings.

I suspect that some may be very nervous about Pinchbeck’s references to Marx and calls for a post-capitalist economic system. The problem is that we’ve seen capitalism bring us rapid technological development and an increase in material comfort for a larger proportion of the world’s population. And we’ve seen an alternative - communism - produce most of the worst horrors of the 20th Century. Capitalism’s success was riding on temporary trends. Now it’s in trouble. Can we transition to something which suits our needs better while avoiding the catastrophe that was communism? Again, I think a lot hinges on the psychological. Has capitalism worked well because it accommodates our selfishness, allowing that selfishness to be the motive engine that drives it, or is our selfishness a product of capitalism? Are we encouraged to want more and compete more because the system doesn’t foster a sense of community which would be counter-productive to it? Of course the two are not mutually exclusive, but I think new economics will be more likely to succeed if the insecurity of ego which lies at the heart of our selfishness is healed.

Pinchbeck also examines the subject of sexuality. Is our materialistic consumption partly fed by pervasive disappointment in our erotic lives? Are we meant to be monogamous? I think this is an important subject to look at. It’s been a troubled area for Pinchbeck himself. But when we repress any aspect of our being we also end up repressing our capacity for openness, honesty, spontaneity and generosity - our capacity for love. So if we are going to have a community which functions more smoothly and productiveness, it needs to be one which knows what to do about erotic desires as an alternative to repressing them. There is unlikely to be a one-size-fits-all answer to this, something which Pinchbeck acknowledges.

When it comes to spirituality, Pinchbeck really throws it all in. He even touches on reincarnation, clairvoyance, tele-kinesis and astral travel. (David Icke’s lizard men get a mention to.) This may lose him credibility in the eyes of many, but he does provide a lot of food for thought for the open-minded. Do these things seem more credible to someone who has taken ayahuasca? Maybe. Since I’m not prepared to take some of these things with a handful of magic mushrooms, I’ll take them with a grain of salt, but it is important to acknowledge that he is only presenting these things as “maybes” and the fact that he has a very open minded on these subjects doesn’t diminish the importance of the bulk of what he has to say. I think he is right that we will need something similar to the religious spirit - a shared vision of something greater than ourselves to unite and motivate us.

He places a lot of importance on the media as a possible way of generating fast change. If new trends spread like wild-fire across television and social media, why not the enthusiasm for this rescue mission along with all the information we will need to bring it about? And look at how the propaganda effort turned around U.S. society to fight World War II. It has to be said though that it is easier to appeal to our hedonism, our paranoia about germs crawling around our bathroom or our latent aggression and xenophobia, than it is to genuinely inspire us toward a community effort. We need autonomous individuals, not sheep, but with that caveat aside I think he is right that both mass and social media can provide us with the network we need to share practical skills and information as well as the kind of vision Pinchbeck provides us with in his book - one of a bright future that yet may be.

Thoughts on Jeremy Griffith's "Freedom : The End of the Human Condition" - Part 19

“Non-Religious Pseudo-Idealistic Causes”

Because he feels that our whole human history has been driven by guilt - i.e. driven by our need to battle against, and eventually find liberation from, the guilt produced in our insecure minds by the condemnation of our genetic programming for selflessness, Griffith grades the level of alienation (departure from responsible truthfulness) involved in any movements which run counter (or try to run counter) to our destructive or anti-social tendencies according to how little emphasis they place on guilt (how “guilt-free” they are). This is faulty reasoning. If we understand that how truthful we are capable of being is dependent on how self-accepting, and thus free of dogmatic armouring we are, we can see that less guilt can tend to lead to more truthfulness in our thinking. This is not to deny that we may achieve unawareness of feelings of guilt by blocking them out or transcending them, and thus being less truthful in our thinking. But we can’t assume that that is always the case. Guilt-inducing forms of idealism, such as religion, are, in and of themselves, corrupting of self-acceptance and thus of our ability to think truthfully. This explains the spectacular levels of irrationality we often see exhibited by religious fundamentalists.

As I have said above, each of the causes he discusses have been pursued with varying degrees of idealism vs. pragmatism, dogmatism vs. free thinking. Each addresses itself to a serious problem. Sometimes the cure may be worse than the disease, but the successes have also to be acknowledged. Communism under Stalin was monstrously oppressive, but the socialists in Britain after the Second World War established a welfare state which greatly improved the lot of the poor and thus the health of that society as a whole. Having a healthy impact on society is less a case of being left wing or right wing and more a case of how self-accepting the individual is and thus how generous and open and non-oppressively they can pursue their ends. Stalin had very seriously compromised self-acceptance. He was a psychopath. That had nothing to do with his politics.

The New Age Movement

The New Age Movement actually tries to address the key problem for we humans, which is our psychological state. It has provided useful techniques for healing, but it has also often been given to high levels of irrationality and the cult of personality. It does have one major advantage over religion (apart from the absence of guilt) and that is that it is not authoritarian or dogmatic. It may be largely self-directed, but that means that it is relatively free of the sickness of trying to force one’s idealism on others.

Feminism

Griffith says : “Yes, the Feminist Movement maintained that there was no real difference between people - and especially not between the sexes.”

This seems a gross generalisation to me. There has been great diversity amongst feminists. I think some feel that there really is a major difference between men and women. Others feel that the difference in roles is more based on socialisation. But Griffith himself admits that women can perform very masculine roles, e.g. Margaret Thatcher.

What seems to bother him about the feminist movement is a lack of compassion for men, an inability to understand why we have been patriarchal. This is understandable when we consider the issue of armouring. Patriarchy is an armoured state. Armouring exists as a defence. To criticise the armoured individual is to increase their need for their armour. So, while feminism has been a shot in the arm for women, who have been oppressed by the patriarchal order for so long - while it gave them a strong sense of sisterhood - it didn’t make it easier for men to abandon patriarchal behaviour.

Environmentalism

Griffith says : “…the Environmental or Green Movement … removed all need to confront and think about the human state because all focus was diverted from self onto the environment — as the aforementioned quote acknowledged, ‘The environment became the last best cause, the ultimate guilt-free issue.’”

I was involved with the environment movement for a while, and I wouldn’t say that it was entirely “guilt-free” for me. The concept of “sinfulness” in religion can seem abstract, but there is nothing abstract about considering one’s carbon footprint, i.e. contribution to global warming. The degree to which people in the environment movement realistically address the problems which confront us varies. Sure you have people who just want to hug trees and put themselves in front of a bull dozer, but you have others who are trying to find practical pragmatic solutions to real problems.

Griffith is right that the root cause of our environmental problems is our own life style and thus our own psychology. I’m sure many, if not most, environmentalists would agree with that statement. But Griffith’s bullshit theory is not the answer to that problem.

A sign of how uncritically Griffth will use a quote which seems to support something he is trying to say is that he uses this quote from Ray Evans, whom he refers to as “an Australian business leader and political activist” : “‘Environmentalism has largely superseded Christianity as the religion of the upper classes in Europe and to a lesser extent in the United States. It is a form of religious belief which fosters a sense of moral superiority in the believer, but which places no importance on telling the truth.” As usual he insists on putting words in other people’s mouths by making it “…telling the truth [about the real issue of our corrupted condition]” Whether Ray Evans actually believes we have a “corrupted condition” we don’t know.

So who is this Ray Evans who thinks that telling the truth is so important? According to Source Watch : “Evans was Executive Officer at Western Mining Corporation (WMC) from 1982 until 2001, during which time he was a close associate of WMC CEO Hugh Morgan. "My role was to engage in the culture wars and provide him with feedback," Evans says of his work for Morgan.”

So he has been a representative of the mining industry which is threatened by the arguments of environmentalists.

Does he have a commitment to telling the truth?

The quote Griffith uses comes from a document Evans wrote in 2006 called Nine Facts About Climate Change (The Lavoisier Group).

I’m not a climate scientist. Neither is Evans. But if you want to decide for yourself how good Evans is at telling the truth, you might want to read that document and then read a critique of it which seems to fairly convincingly expose it as composed mostly of, often ludicrous, misinformation. I’ve only read a little of Green Scientist’s critique, but enough to decide who I think has the most respect for the truth :

http://n3xus6.blogspot.com.au/2007/03/ray-evans-nine-facts-about-climate.html

http://n3xus6.blogspot.com.au/2007/03/ray-evans-nine-facts-about-climate_10.html

http://n3xus6.blogspot.com.au/2007/03/ray-evans-nine-facts-about-climate_18.html

http://n3xus6.blogspot.com.au/2007/03/ray-evans-nine-facts-about-climate_21.html

http://n3xus6.blogspot.com.au/2007/03/ray-evans-nine-facts-about-climate_23.html

In his youth Griffith was himself a member of the environmentalist movement. His search for the Tasmanian Tiger was an example of the more escapist form of environmentalism in which the real issues of human behaviour are left behind.

Political Correctness

There is good reason to criticise political correctness. It is a censorship of the ability to express anything other than positive feelings in many situations, and the negative feelings which are not expressed or acknowledged will tend to build up. The sickness festers below the surface when what is needed is for it to be drained off through healthy forms of expression and thus be able to heal. Politically incorrect humour provides an important safety valve here. 

But Griffith goes overboard in his tirade : “This is not to say that in a critical battle, such as the one humanity has been involved in, showing care and compassion towards those who were suffering from the effects of the battle was not important. It was very important, because although we have all been involved in the upsetting battle, selflessness is still, as has been repeatedly emphasised, what binds wholes together; it is the glue within humanity’s army. However, while caring for those struggling to keep up was important, it was obviously more essential to support those on the frontline who were still carrying on the battle to ensure the war was ultimately won.”

This makes sense if humanity was actually engaged in a collective battle, as Griffith’s central thesis says, but I don’t believe this is true. Each of us has been engaged in our own private battle, while giving and receiving support from others. That battle has been the battle to maintain our self-acceptance, and we don our armour to fight that battle. In Griffith’s conception, the more combative right-wing members of society have been bravely fighting for us all. But, in truth, this combativeness has been a particular approach to dealing with the insecurity which comes from criticism, especially from idealism. How much we contributed to society was dependent on how generous or creative we were. Combativeness has always been an insecurity-based sickness which has drained energy from society. But we couldn’t help but become combative when criticism, often in the form of idealism, undermined our self-acceptance. Griffith is right that the combative need our concern as well, but not as loyal attendants and supporters of their campaign. We need, rather, to recognise that they are victims of their own insecurity and need healing and liberation as much as anyone else.

We can see so clearly in statements like the following that what Griffith is seeing in “pseudo-idealists” is a projection of his own denied self. Deep down he knows what he is and what he has been engaged in, but unable to face the truth he sees it as a paranoid projection on the world around him : “Their conduct was completely selfish and not at all the selfless, idealistic behaviour they made it out to be and deluded themselves it was.” How many socialists, feminists, environmentalists etc. do you know who believe themselves to be “selfless”? But we do know someone who believes himself to be selfless.

Postmodernist Deconstructionist Movement

I don’t know a lot about this, so I’ll try to wing it.

Griffith says : “While language is artificial it nevertheless models a real world, so to say that just because language is artificial there can be no universal truths is ridiculous, but again, when the need to escape the truth becomes desperate, any excuse will do; just baffle the world, and yourself, with intellectual baloney, such as this from Jacques Derrida, one of the high priests of deconstructionism, who gave this highly intellectual (instinct/soul/truth-less) description of why truth supposedly doesn’t exist: ‘Every sign, linguistic or nonlinguistic, spoken or written, as a small or large unity, can be cited, put between quotation marks; thereby it can break with every given context, and engender infinitely new contexts in an absolutely nonsaturable fashion. This does not suppose that the mark is valid outside its context, but on the contrary that there are only contexts without any center of absolute anchoring’”

The way I understand what Derrida is saying is this : If you take any idea out of its context it loses its meaning. Therefore context is all that really matters.

This is the essence of holism. Nothing can be understood except within the context of a greater whole. Contrary to his claims, Griffith isn’t a holist and doesn’t understand holism.

But doesn’t what Derrida says sound like a critique of Griffith’s method, i.e. to take quotes out of context and try to build his own picture of the truth with them?

This is the way I understand post-modernism or deconstructionism. Imagine there is a murder. The police are investigating. There are ten witnesses, but no video footage of what happened. As usually happens, everyone’s story is markedly different. How are the police going to come to the most accurate understanding of what happened? They first record everybody’s narrative. Then they find out more about the lives and characters of the witnesses. By understanding the context in which their narrative fits - what their biases are - they try to detect what factors might be causing each person’s narrative to be distorted in a particular way. And so they deconstruct their narratives in order to be able to deduce from them a more objective account of what actually happened.

In a way, by trying to interpret the things people say in the context of how innocent or upset he feels they are, Griffith is himself practicing a crude form of deconstructionism.

Griffith makes the complaint we so often hear about right-wing conservatives being underrepresented in the national public broadcasting networks of the UK and Australia. I think this is because their tendency to cling in a reactionary manner to outdated dogmas makes them less capable of commentating in a meaningful way about the changing realities of the world. (Just look at right-wing American commentators like Bill O’Reilly and Ann Coulter, who are not capable of any kind of coherent analysis and can only give in to their insecure need to spew venom.) They are part of the old world which is dying, not the newer, healthier world which is being born. Which is not to say that more left leaning journalists can’t sometimes be superficial.

Griffith says : “…finally, the totally dishonest, completely alienated, definitely autistic postmodernist movement; again, ‘autism’ is ‘a complex mental structure insuring against recurrence of…unthinkable anxiety’ — in this case, ‘anxiety’ about being extremely corrupted/upset/hurt/soul-damaged in your infancy and childhood.” Again we can see Griffith’s projection of his own situation onto the world, here in a particularly suggestive form.

Why would he feel that post-modernism, i.e deconstructionism, poses such a terrible threat to the world? Because his “liberating understanding of humanity” might be deconstructed. It is his “autistic” “complex mental structure” which is the only thing standing between himself and some terrible anxiety he experienced in his infancy or childhood. What that was we can only guess, but his tendency to see so many things as “an attack on innocence” is suggestive.

Death by Dogma

Griffith has been blind to the subtleties of these social phenomena, and has lumped them altogether as a “death by dogma” which would “crush the human face forever”, because he is seeing himself reflected in the mirror of the world. Those of us who are not blinded by our own delusions can see that, while there are some within these movements who dogmatically insist on restricting freedoms in favour of an idealist conception of how the world should be, this is the exception rather than the rule. It is Griffith who is promoting a rigidly idealism-demanding dogma, which, were we to fall for it, would indeed “crush the human face forever”. While I’m sure he believes in it himself, his “defence for humanity” is a fraud.

“The Abomination That Causes Desolation”

Griffith believes that “the abomination that causes desolation”  which the prophet Daniel warned about, and which was also referred to by Jesus, is a reference to what he terms “pseudo-idealism”, i.e. socialism, feminism, environmentalism, political correctness, post-modernism, etc.

I won’t deal with the Daniel version as that is pretty long and complicated.

Here is the passage where he cuts and pastes together bits from Matthew 24 & Mark 13, with his own extrapolations :

“Referring to ‘the sign…of the end of the age’, Christ said that ‘At that time many will turn away from the faith and will betray and hate each other [a great deal of upset will develop], and may false prophets [pseudo idealists claiming to be leading the way to peace and a new age of goodness and happiness for humans] will appear and deceive many people…even the elect [even those less alienated, still relatively sound and strong in soul, will begin to be seduced by pseudo idealism] — if that were possible. See, I have told you ahead of time…Wherever there is a carcass [the extremely upset], there the vultures [false prophet  promoters of delusion and denial to artificially make the extremely upset feel good] will gather. Because of the increase in wickedness [upset], the love of most will grow cold. So when you see the “abomination that causes desolation” spoken of through the prophet Daniel, standing where it does not belong [throwing out real religion and falsely claiming to be presenting the way to the human-condition free, good-versus-evil-deconstructed, post-human-condition, better, correct world] — let the reader understand — then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains. Let no-one on the roof of his house go down to take anything out of the house. Let no-one in the field go back to get his cloak. How dreadful it will be in those days of great distress [mindless dogma and its consequences] unequalled from the beginning of the world until now — and never to be equalled again. If those days had not been cut short [by the arrival of the liberating understanding of the human condition], no-one would survive’.

Griffith here uses this bit from Mark : “…So when you see the “abomination that causes desolation” spoken of through the prophet Daniel, standing where it does not belong…” But the equivalent passage in Matthew 24:15, says “So when you see standing in the holy place ‘the abomination that causes desolation,’ spoken of through the prophet Daniel…”

We’ve seen how Griffith is projecting his situation onto the world. We have also seen that idealism has been a thought virus which has been the source of all of humanity’s problems. It is thus “the abomination that causes desolation”. How is it “in the holy place”? Griffith identifies idealism with holism. The word “holy” means “whole” or “of the whole” and holism is the acknowledgement of wholes. But idealism and holism are incompatible. Idealism is dualistic - it is founded in the division of behaviour into “good” and “bad”. Holism is necessarily pragmatic, inclusive rather than exclusive.

So why would this be such a problem? If we were to be convinced by Griffith’s argument that idealism is in our genes, then we would have no defence against it and its corrosion of our self-acceptance, and thus our capacity for love. Destroy our capacity for love and you destroy the human race. To speak metaphorically we would have been branded by Satan for eternal damnation.

The Transformed Lifeforce Way of Living

Griffith’s answer to the question “where to from here” is what he calls “The Transformed Lifeforce Way of Living” - basically an appeal to repression and transcendence of our “upset” in deference to his view of what an ideal world should be like. He insists that this is not a new religion, because it is not deference to a deity but to “knowledge”, i.e. his crackpot theory.

When I became a “life member” of Griffith’s organisation it was called The Centre for Humanity’s Adulthood. Then it became The Foundation for Humanity’s Adulthood. At that time they were the subject of a current affairs program which, by implication, presented them as a cult. They fought a long legal battle to defend themselves against “defamation”. They won, at least on some key points. Later they changed their name again to The World Transformation Movement.

Ironically, in 1987, Stuart A. Wright, in his book Leaving Cults: The Dynamics of Defection, used the the term “World-Transforming Movements” to describe certain kinds of cults, including The Children of God, The Unification Church, and Hare Krishna.

This summary of some of the defining features of such organisations is worth thinking about :

http://jmscult.com/forum/index.php?PHPSESSID=a6bf7b2947d8cc56b272fcdf3ab92c5e&topic=856.msg2099#msg2099

Griffith says : “Regarding the degree to which we should each investigate these explanations, obviously it is necessarily to sufficiently verify to our own satisfaction that they are the liberating understandings of the human condition that the whole human race has been tirelessly working its way towards for some 2 million years — but we shouldn’t risk investigating them to the extent that we start to become overly exposed and confronted by the truths they reveal… The more intelligent and/or the more educated in the human-condition-avoiding, denial-based, mechanistic, reductionist paradigm, who pride themselves on being able to think and study and grasp new ideas, will initially be especially tempted to study these understandings beyond what their varying levels of security of self can cope with, but it won’t be long before everyone learns that such an approach is both psychologically dangerous and irresponsible and, in any case, unnecessary.”

As you can tell from my analysis here, I have looked deeply into these ideas. Griffith is not wrong about the psychological danger involved in doing so. I ended up in a mental hospital strapped down to a hospital bed after a suicide attempt. I was begging the doctors and nurses to kill me because I felt that the whole history of humanity was going to come to nothing entirely because of a failure on my part. Griffith’s ideas are incredibly toxic if you truly absorb them and take them on board. The combination of extreme idealism and the false frame of reference created by his attempt at explaining our psychology can easily put a person in a sanity-destroying double bind situation. The good news is that I gradually picked up the pieces of my shattered self, came to understand what was wrong with Griffith’s theory, and in so doing found security, happiness, freedom from depression (which had plagued me since my teens) and the creative inspiration to pursue my writing.

I highly recommend reading praising reviews of Griffith’s books and also watching the videos on his website in which members of the WTM talk about what his ideas mean to them. I think you will see evidence of a general tendency to praise his “understandings” to the roof, but with little evidence of a fluent understanding of them. I don’t blame them. Don’t go to hell if you can avoid it. For me it is fine. I can now study Griffith’s work all day with no problems, because I know which bits are truthful and which bits are not. In fact I understand Griffith’s work better than he does himself, because I am on the outside of his psychosis looking in. He has to be evasive of things which I don’t.

A Summing Up

What makes Griffith’s writing hard to dismiss is that there is so much truth in it.

He says : “Similarly, the Bible states that ‘the truth will set you free’ (John 8:32), and while we know this statement to be truth, the problem has been that all the partial truths — such as that humans are the most brutal and destructive animals to ever walk the earth — condemned our upset state, fuelling it further, which means that, ultimately, for the truth to genuinely set us free, it had to be the full truth that explains why humans are all good and not bad.”

The central problem with Griffith’s work is that his “defence for humanity” is not true. This means that he is bombarding us with what he calls “partial truths” which “condemn” us without having made it safe to do so. It may feel safe to him, because he doesn’t see himself as being in the category of any of those who might be “condemned”. He is not aggressive. He is not a materialist. He doesn’t recognise himself as being alienated. And he is certainly not a mother whose inability to love her child has rendered that child autistic. He is not being “condemned”, at least on a conscious level, by these grim facts. He feels that it is now safe for him to confront us with these hard to face facts and also idealistic expectations, because he has provided us with a compassionate dignifying understanding of why we are so fucked up, an explanation which “proves”  that we are all immensely heroic.

What he is trying to do is to provide a collective character armour for all of humanity. Even if it were not a bullshit explanation for our behaviour, what we need is not more armour. What we need is that our enemy be killed so that it is safe to leave our armour behind. And the enemy we have to kill is idealism. What we need is to liberate our capacity for love (including forgiveness). Idealism - such as the expectation that we should be “selfless” - is corrosive to our self-acceptance, our love of ourselves, and thus of our ability to love others. It is love (unconditional self-acceptance and acceptance of others) which will give us the ability to face all of those grim facts. Once a mother realises that her child doesn’t expect her to be perfect and that the cultivation of self-acceptance can heal any psychological damage she might inadvertently do to her child’s emotional make-up, she will be able to relax and open up to a fuller and more joyful loving relationship with that child. We have been too loaded down with grim facts while having the nourishment we need to face them sapped by idealistic expectations.

It is true that “the truth will set you free”, because it is our lies which imprison us and separate us from each other, but before we can become truthful we have to become unconditionally self-accepting, so that we are invulnerable to criticism or feelings of shame about those aspects of ourselves or our situation we have been trying to hide with those lies. And an accepting and forgiving attitude towards others also makes it easier for them to put aside their defences and be set free.

Photo from World Transformation Movement Facebook page