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Dream On!‘Dream On!: A Philosophical Study into Why Big Visions “Fail”’, (incomplete) version 1 Chris Marsh, 12 May 2007
It is widely recognised that our world is in crisis, with endemic poverty, a succession of wars and conflicts, heedless mining of the natural resource base on which human life depends, and potential disruption of the feedback processes which, despite changes in solar activity and other challenging events, have made the planet a stable environment since life began. In this essay I argue that the state of crisis as a whole, and the various issues and problem areas, are symptoms of a global human society being stuck in a groove, worn deep and inescapable by repeated habits of behaviour and thought. This ‘stuckness’ of society means that its predominantly capitalism-serving patterns repeat without challenge or depth of awareness: of the consequences, of the absurdity, and of what else is possible. One category of consequence is that all the reforms which are tried, sometimes with world-changing passion on the part of campaigners, have marginal and usually temporary effects. A more interesting consequence, and the subject of this essay, is that visionaries such as Bill Mollison and Rabindranath Tagore, also ‘fail’ (the scare quotes indicating that visions can be reborn) to get their big visions to germinate, thrive and be propagated, to such an extent that the sick old growth withers away. I argue that the phenomenon whereby society is stuck in a groove can best be resisted and changed if it is understood in terms of a universal phenomenon which I call ‘habitude’.
The essay is structured as follows: 1. What is ‘habitude’? 3. Bill Mollison’s vision 4. Rabindranath Tagore’s vision 5. Conclusion: ‘dream on!’
1. What is ‘habitude’?
‘Habitude’, as used here, is the name of a ‘philosophical concept’ – in the particular sense that this term is used by Gilles Deleuze – in that it is a ‘multiplicity’, it totalizes or piles up its components, it has a history involving problems needing to be solved, and a present relevant to our time, and our becomings.1
‘Habitude’ is the name I have chosen for a philosophical concept based on the work of the biologist Rupert Sheldrake, specifically his ‘hypothesis of formative causation’. The need for a new term arose from looking at the social implications, and world-changing potential, of Sheldrake’s ideas, as set out in his first two books, A New Science of Life and The Presence of the Past.2 Sheldrake’s hypothesis is neatly summarised in the blurb of the later book:
In preparation for writing this essay I carefully re-read A New Science of Life, in its ‘new edition’ of 1985, and here I concentrate on that first book, and the controversy it sparked off when it was first published, some of which is recorded in an appendix to the new edition. I am arguing in this essay that the set of ideas which Sheldrake put forward as a contribution to science belong equally well, if not better, in the domain of philosophy.
A short digression here into what sort of philosophy I’m talking about. The word itself derives from friend of wisdom, and one thinks of the big philosophies of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant and so on, also the French philosophes, who were friends and sometimes rivals of each other, while relishing the broad spectrum of knowledge, ideas and skills. But there’s also the humble idea of ‘my philosophy’, which could be a belief in looking after one’s family, or homilies like ‘live and let live’, ‘do your best’, or negative ones like a belief in ‘hanging and flogging’ and locking up wrongdoers, also the belief that bad things shouldn’t happen to good people. Career aspirations, taking up causes, pursuing interests and personal goals, all come into this category. My concept of philosophy takes in both ‘high’ philosophy and the homely kind, because both are reflections of influences across society, perhaps the result of upbringing, conditioning and ideology in the Marxian sense – and one can see that as the morphic field of society, what it is that keeps the whole show on the road. Hence, what I mean by ‘philosophy’ is what moves us: intellectually and emotionally; socially and individually; and economically and tribally. And what I mean by ‘habitude’ is a philosophical concept that takes in all of that and equates it with probably the most complex morphic field there has ever been. I insist that habitude is a philosophical concept rather than a scientific ‘thing’ (Deleuze make science’s thing a ‘function’) because I question the idea of ‘explanation’, lumping that too into the philosophical pot. But Sheldrake is a scientist, and takes for granted the need for explanations, functions, models, experiments, and so next I shall explore the issue of ‘what is science?’ as revealed in A New Science of Life, and its critics and admirers.
Reading A New Science of Life with close attention one can be in no doubt that Sheldrake is a scientist. His credentials are exceptional, and his knowledge of his field of biology and beyond is awesome. In a way this makes his critics within the scientific community more scathing; it is one of their own who has gone berserk.3 But what a study of the book and the criticism reveals is the metaphysics: unprovable underlying assumptions, the ideology: capitalist-serving mind-set, and a general rigidity of thought, stubbornness and unattractive smugness and self-righteousness, of orthodox science in general. John Maddox, an editor of Nature and one of Sheldrake’s fiercest critics observes that his ideas ‘will have comforted all kinds of anti-science people.’ (Sheldrake, 1987, p.230), but a more generous interpretation would be that these ideas appeal to those who see through science to its weaknesses and insecurities – which would seem an odd idea to scientists and to science’s advocates like Maddox, who would almost certainly reject any suggestion that science, or the scientific community, has a psychology, let alone an insecure, even paranoid one.
What struck me twenty years ago when I first read Sheldrake, and still puzzles me now, is how caught up Sheldrake is in the very scientific community which his ideas subject to such radical challenge. One manifestation of this is Sheldrake’s obsession – as I see it – with proving his theories experimentally, as if he is desperate to be welcomed back into the fold by his erstwhile peers. One of his less critical reviewers, Dr Bernard Dixon, says that Sheldrake should have proved the ideas before publishing his ‘seductive and plausible book’. (Sheldrake, 1987, p.219) So I was fascinated to come across a video recording of a discussion: ‘Terence McKenna and Rupert Sheldrake speak on Morphogenetic Field Theory’, from 1988.4 I had never heard of Terence McKenna, and a peek at his entry in Wikipedia shows he had some truly way-out ideas, but this video shows him to have been highly intelligent and perceptive. In his long preamble and introduction to Sheldrake, McKenna praises him as ‘the greatest biologist of the age’, and for confounding the scientific paradigm by means of the most radical challenge with his re-visioning of causality. Terence McKenna also says that Sheldrake plays havoc with the notion of scientific experiment, which rests on the concept of restoration of initial conditions. Sheldrake’s theories of time dependent interlocking habits means that exact repetition is impossible, so that ordinary science cannot be prosecuted at all. Strong stuff! And accords with my feeling that it is the ideas that matter, not the proving of them. But when Sheldrake comes in, he modestly shrugs off the extravagant praise before launching into an account of his current and planned experiments, and I am sure I am not imagining the bemusement on McKenna’s face.
Sheldrake’s current experiments are aimed at proving the reality of telepathy, between people generally, and between pets and their owners. He has told me that the point of the experiments with respect to his theories, is to demonstrate influences acting at a distance and instantaneously. I can see that action at a distance is an aspect of how morphic resonance must operate, but proving it doesn’t prove the time dependent aspects of his model of causality, and so proving that telepathy happens wouldn’t prove the theory; some mechanism or explanation for the transmission of thought over distance might be fitted into the orthodox model of science. And then what?
A deeper concern I have than Sheldrake’s wasting time and opportunities to prove the crux of his theories is the very idea of ‘explanation’. I spent some time thinking about this several years ago, on an earlier occasion when I was concocting my own version of Sheldrake’s ideas, which then I was calling ‘pattern’. The relevance of that topic to the subject of this essay is marginal, being just an interesting aspect of the unstated assumptions and mind-set of science as a whole.5
If one rejects the assumption that ideas, to be any good, have to be proved valid by experiment, one is left with assertions and suggestions as to what ways of looking at things are interesting to explore. So be it. I assert and suggest – not in a bullying way – that it is worth exploring the idea that society as a whole is influenced by its morphic field, its patterns of the past.
2. Habitude: its operation on and implications for society
Having read Marx and Marxist literature, I am familiar with the ‘base and superstructure’ model of society and the materialist conception of history. Marx’s best known statement on these ideas is this:
(Karl Marx: Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859))
The point of referring to the ‘base and superstructure’ model here is that a parallel can be drawn between that idea and the comparison Sheldrake makes between alternative approaches in science: those which emphasise energy (cf. the material economic base) and those which emphasise form (cf. the ideological superstructure). I don’t, of course, mean this to be a literal and exact parallel, rather that models include perspectives that can have opposite tendencies. Sheldrake points out in an early chapter of A New Science of Life (NSL) on ‘The Causes of Form’ that form operates in a different direction from energy, in particular from the second law of thermodynamics. To put this very roughly, in the latter, the lower the temperature, the less energy and the more entropy or disorder in the thermodynamic sense; in the former, the lower the temperature the more form, since a chemical may crystallise at low temperatures, when it is heated the crystals disappear into liquid which has less form, and when heated further, the liquid becomes a gas, with the least form.
The two opposite tendencies with the ‘base and superstructure’ model are the forward thrust of the economic base as new production and distribution technology is devised, and a lag and drag from the ideological superstructure which tends to keep existing arrangements in place. The big hope from a Marxist perspective is that the forward thrust must win out, as it has in the past, resulting in successive structures of society: from primitive communism, through chattel slavery and feudalism to capitalism, thence to the final stage of advanced communism. This is the ‘materialist conception of history’ (MCOH), which I have merely sketched here. One aspect of the MCOH is the teleological feel to it, despite the emphasis on materialism, and Marx’s insistence that ‘It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.’ There is still in Marxism a belief in progress. In his conversation with Terence McKenna, Sheldrake replies to McKenna’s questions on creativity that beliefs in progress, and a forward pull towards a desired end – a possibility that he is open to but is not the focus of his work – derives from Judeo-Christian thought. I have heard it said that Marxism shares that root, a notion that loyal Marxists would obviously reject. But another view of creation which Sheldrake puts forward in that discussion is that increasing form, and progress in that sense, is characteristic of the universe as a whole. From the moment of the Big Bang the universe began to expand and cool, and in the process material structures of increasing complexity emerged: first sub-atomic particles, then atoms, molecules, eventually life and further complexification. That idea is not teleological.
The idea of, or belief in, progress, has consequences; it is not just something that is either right or wrong, true or mistaken, but a force in itself. It is especially a force in philosophy. Philosophy scholars see themselves as riding a wave of change, with an inbuilt assumption that new and better insights continue to emerge. I recently listened in to a lecture which was part of a distance learning course in film studies. The speaker put forward the view that twentieth century epistemology has replaced the Enlightenment project of understanding the ‘World’ or ‘Nature’ or ‘Man’ by means of ‘Reason’, by a focus on the ungeneralisable ‘Individual’ and the specific ‘Local’. He also suggests that the old project had a strong idea of history, applying logic, such as Hegel’s dialectics, to studies of society, culture and politics, and that this too has been abandoned in the twentieth century.
I am inclined to question this view of ‘now’ versus ‘then’, on the grounds that no fundamental change has occurred in the twentieth century, only a stage in the evolution and growth of ‘capitalism’, with the individual continuing to be subject to the tyranny of the state which serves capitalism. ‘Capitalism’ need not refer to a distinct economic period of class-divided society, but to the centrally governed urban society of alienated individuals which has gradually and unevenly replaced the more natural arrangements of rooted, rural, self-governing (even when subject to taxation by despotic rulers), highly diverse cultures and communities that has existed around the world, and certainly in Europe (Anderson, Europe in the Eighteenth Century, 1987, p.69), for most of human existence. I see capitalism as having had a ‘duration’ of three centuries of historical time, but with a multiplicity of stages piled up like a Deleuzean ‘dry-stone wall’. (Deleuze, What is Philosophy?, 1994, p.23)
This is where habitude as a philosophical model comes in. As an alternative to the MCOH model, and any of the philosophical models from the ancient Greeks through to postmodernism, we have the idea of the morphic fields of society as grooves ground deeper and deeper with repetition. But most interestingly, one can see that the 300 year old groove of the capitalist period may have become very deep and seemingly inescapable, but that there is also a groove of many thousands of years duration made by the long history of rooted cultures and communities. These two grooves are ‘chreodes’ in Sheldrake’s terms (see Fig. 5 illustrating ‘the concept of the chreode as a canalized pathway of change’. NSL, p.54), and however deep the capitalism groove or canal becomes, the travel of society down it is not inevitable, and the influence of the older and more enduring canal is still present, and one can think – romantically perhaps – that it is waiting to welcome us back.
At present though, society is ‘stuck’ within its predominantly capitalism-serving patterns, which repeat without challenge or depth of awareness: of the consequences, of the absurdity, and of what else is possible. I move on now to a consequence of this, which is that visionaries such as Bill Mollison and Rabindranath Tagore, fail to get their big visions to germinate, thrive and be propagated, to such an extent that the sick old growth withers away. So what big visions am I talking about? I start with Bill Mollison.
3. Bill Mollison’s vision
[What follows is incomplete, notes to suggest what is coming in this section.]
Bill Mollison is the co-creator of an idea and practice called ‘permaculture’. As one can see from an extract from his Introduction to Permaculture, this is one monster of a vision, and tremendously exciting – potentially – but has somehow not reached the mainstream of society. It is, however, defined in the dictionary as ‘permaculture n. the development of agricultural ecosystems intended to be sustainable and self-sufficient. – ORIGIN 1970s: blend of PERMANENT and AGRICULTURE.’ (Concise Oxford English Dictionary, Eleventh Edition, OUP, 2004).
I intend to do a similar thing with this idea as I did with Sheldrake and go back to the first book: Permaculture One, first published 1978, which I have on order. (I have a number of Mollison’s and others’ books on permaculture, but not this one.) Meanwhile, a symptom of Mollison’s ‘failure’ is my recent resignation as Chair and Trustee of the Permaculture Association ( Britain), and my letter of resignation is a useful starting point for introducing the issues. What went wrong for permaculture, in Britain anyway, is that a sect formed around it and hid it away, rather like a Gollum, a troglodyte hoarding to itself its ‘precious’.
I have written a great deal about land degradation over the years, and about why I am convinced that this is far and away the most important area of concern in the world. Twenty years ago I criticised the environmental pressure groups for neglecting land degradation in favour of future threats, primarily what was then referred to as the ‘Greenhouse Effect’, now more usually Climate Change and Global Warming. Despite the future threats now apparently being with us and a near-consensus of climate experts convinced it is happening, I still believe a land use revolution is what is needed.
A land use revolution needs a framework, a set of principles and approaches defining it. Bill Mollison devised such a thing, and called it ‘permaculture’. [History of permaculture in Britain. Why Britain matters.]
However, for revolution to happen, a body of momentum needs to have built up exerting pressure against the resistance of the status quo. Habitude, as the philosophy and mind set of global human society, exists as driving force taking us down the rutted road to disaster, making revolutionary change well-nigh impossible.
4. Rabindranath Tagore’s vision
Rabindranath Tagore’s vision was (indirectly) the subject of my MA dissertation in 2006. His vision was not the only one of its kind. In the 1920s and 30s a number of men (women were being thought of by world-changing men but were not drivers and innovators) with wonderful ideas about how to make the world a better place, who did practical work in various places to seed the kind of changes they envisaged. Tagore’s friend and colleague, Leonard Elmhirst was one, as was another, less close friend, Patrick Geddes (see extracts from their correspondence).
1 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. by Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson (London: Verso, 1994, first published 1991), pp.15-34 2 Rupert Sheldrake, A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Formative Causation, new edition (London: Grafton, 1987, first published 1981) and The Presence of the Past (London: Collins, 1988) 3 [To follow: summary of the criticisms in A New Science of Life, Appendix to be added.] 4 http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8346001127958763110&q=sheldrake [accessed 12 May 2007] 5 [To come: restatement of my examination of ‘explanation’ from ‘pattern’ material.] |