August 15, 2025

The last thing we may want to read about right now is conflict, as we live through Trump’s attempt at a violent takeover of the entire country to install himself as dictator. As I write, he is invading Washington with the national guard, in addition of course to all the horrific ICE raids which mean we can’t go to Home Depot without fear of masked thugs sweeping up people around us, and maybe us as well. And at the same time, a steady 45% of the country cheer him on, making themselves complicit in evil as black as anything in American history, until finally it may be impossible for them to back away, because doing so would mean facing what they have done, what they have made possible. A lot of people are going to stay in willful denial indefinitely.

So I could perhaps be accused of bad timing in deciding to talk about William Blake’s definition of the imagination as “Mental Fight” and “intellectual battle.” We all yearn right now for peace, for harmony, for an end to conflict not only with those who have seized illegitimate power but with our own family, friends, and colleagues who have decided that they no longer support democracy. Peace and harmony are certainly a legitimate dream of the imagination, one that Blake makes provision for. In his self-created mythology, the imagination has two levels, corresponding to paradise and heaven in traditional mythologies. The lower level, of peace and love, he calls Beulah, an Old Testament word meaning “the married land.” My generation’s dream of a Woodstock nation, in which we would “get back to the Garden”—Joni Mitchell’s lyrics to “Woodstock” recognize exactly what kind of dream we cherished—is a Beulah dream, and I abide by it to this day. John Lennon’s “Imagine” is another definitive expression of the Beulah sentiment of “peace on earth, good will towards all”:

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world...

You don’t have to be college-educated to understand this dream. A bewildered Rodney King expressed it in 1992 when he asked, “Can’t we all just get along?” He said this, however, after having been beaten by the police, which caused a riot that trashed part of Los Angeles. Does that mean that the answer is “No”? Mythologically, this paradisal state of mind is identified with the Sabbath, the day on which God rested after seven strenuous days’ labor creating the universe, contemplating the result of his efforts and seeing that they were good. The other six days of Creation, however, were an active creative wrestling to bring order out of chaos. In some mythologies, the Creation myth is a combat myth, in which a heroic god defeats a monster who represents the powers of death and chaos. Sometimes the universe is made from the body of the monster, as Marduk in the Babylonian Creation myth fashions with world from the body of the defeated dragon-monster Tiamat. The Biblical God fashioned the world out of the tehom, usually translated “the deep,” a “waste and void of waters,” but mythologically the dragon-monster is the waters of a sea of death. The Biblical scholars say that tehom is etymologically related to Tiamat. Throughout the later books of the Bible this “dragon that is in the sea” is called Leviathan, and is revealed at last as Satan. And though Christ rejected violence in his time on earth, saying that those who live by the sword will perish by the sword, that is not the whole story. Christ will come again, and this time he will be a warrior, as Julia Ward Howe expresses in the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” with its imagery drawn from Isaiah and the Book of Revelation:

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:
          His truth is marching on....

I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel:
"As ye deal with My contemners, so with you My grace shall deal";
Let the Hero born of woman crush the serpent with His heel:
          His truth is marching on.

Christian nationalists thrill to the bloodthirsty images of Isaiah and Revelation: their fantasy of a “rapture” is largely taken up with them. They are intoxicated by Trump’s psychotic revenge upon his enemies, which means everybody, because to them this is the work of the Lord. But, despite what they might think, they do not own the Bible, which is capable of being interpreted in ways they would not be fond of. They ought not to like “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” because on its ideological level God’s day of judgment is identified with the Union cause in the Civil War—the side that fought against all those Southern generals whose statues the reactionaries want to set back into place. And it has a universal level beyond that, in which, as in Blake, the battle becomes a “Mental Fight” without necessarily precluding social activist struggle. Martin Luther King’s last sermon, delivered the day before he died, ended by quoting lyrics from the “Battle Hymn.” If the famous advocate of non-violent resistance uses imagery of spiritual warfare, the imagery must be capable of meaning something far beyond the power fantasies of authoritarians.

The violence of a Trump or a Putin is the opposite of what Blake means. What does he mean, then? The imagination, he says, perceives in terms of Contraries, of opposites, and opposites conflict. They are, in that sense, at war. But in another, simultaneous sense they are at peace, for Contraries are also one, married to each other in the sense of the words of the marriage ceremony, that two shall become one flesh—and we recall that Beulah is “the married land.” Blake calls Beulah the State in which Contraries are equally true, and he titles his prose satire on the nature of Contraries The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. The Tao is a close analogy. The Taoist symbol of yin and yang which represent conflicting opposites yet united as one. There do exist false Contraries, however, opposites that cancel each other out or are mutually destructive: Blake calls a set of false Contraries a Negation. But true Contraries are equally valuable, equally indispensable one to the other, and in fact each is ultimately unthinkable without the other. The ”war” of Contraries is the very definition of creativity: “Without Contraries is no progression.” True Contraries are synergetic, and each releases the capacity of the other.

In a Negation, however, one Contrary seeks to eliminate the other—dominate it, suppress it, in the end to destroy it utterly. That is what Trump and Putin want to do to their “enemies,” who are enemies because they resist Trump’s and Putin’s will to power. This may sound abstract, but nothing could be more fiercely realistic. Authoritarianism seeks the end of all opposition. It seeks unity through absolute power and absolute rule, and justifies such totalitarianism as the ultimate virtue. And authoritarianism appeals to those who those who hope that a “strong” ruler will eliminate—in whatever sense of the word “eliminate”—what is disturbingly different and what is seen as out of control. At the heart of authoritarianism is a paranoia—the “strong” man must defeat the “enemies,” the “traitors,” those who are not true Americans and indeed not truly human. This is the heart of darkness: in Joseph Conrad’s famous story of that name, the authoritarian Kurtz travels to colonial Africa to redeem the “savages.” He disappears, but leaves behind a message: “Exterminate all the brutes.”

Final solutions that eliminate whatever is “other” are seen as a triumph for “us.” It is increasingly clear that Hamas and Netanyahu are locked in mutual paranoia that is resulting in mutually assured destruction. It is undeniable that each seeks the complete annihilation of the enemy, with the Palestinian people and the people of Israel merely along for the ride. But paranoia can take many forms. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has focused his paranoia on vaccines. They are alien, dangerous, no doubt part of a liberal plot. He cannot focus his paranoia on the Covid virus—it’s just a stupid piece of nature that kills people, but it isn’t an evil plot, unless of course you believe in the “Chinese virus” other conspiracy theory. In religion, fundamentalism may start as a theory of literal Biblical interpretation, but that literal meaning is the Truth. We have the Truth, and no one else does. Their other religions, or other interpretations of the Christian religion, are not only false—they are tools of the enemy, the Adversary. There is no dialogue with them: you don’t have a dialogue with the diabolic, you annihilate it. Here, the religious paranoia of Christian nationalism shades into the political paranoia of 4Chan. Democrats and liberals are not just mistaken, not even just corrupt and greedy—they are unspeakable evil that must be eliminated. In all these areas, it is declared that there are no Contraries. There is the one Truth and the one way, and they are ours.

True Contraries are equally valuable and equally necessary. The United States was founded as a union of true Contraries: E Pluribus Unun. Out of many, one. Unfortunately, this lends itself to the false interpretation that the many are to be subsumed into the One. To arrive at the truth of the Contraries, it is necessary to read the statement simultaneously in reverse. It is equally true that out of One come many, that we are inherently a pluralistic nation. This means that individuality and commonality are equal values, that we must work towards a society in which each enhances the other. Those of authoritarian predisposition will interpret the motto in a totalizing way: the state is more important than individuals, and individuals must sacrifice their autonomy to it. There is an opposite frame of mind, at times called libertarian, that says that, on the contrary, the individual is all-important and that all communal good must be subordinated to the good of the individual. Libertarians usually espouse a form of Social Darwinism that takes the form of an extreme individualism. It is the survival of the fittest, and the idea that I owe anything to anybody, much less to the “common good,” is a ploy used by the weak to encumber the strong. This makes Elon Musk different from Trump. Trump demands total loyalty to The Leader. Musk says of his employees that he will use them mercilessly, simply because he can. If they don’t like it, they can leave, start their own company, and become multi-billionaires on their own. Thus, extreme collectivism and extreme individualism are both toxic.

There is a certain intellectual stance that denies that Contraries can be unified, that such a notion is irrational, violating the law of non-contradiction, an attempt to have one’s cake and eat it too. Such a claim has to be “demystified” in the name of “rigor.” Such a skepticism is useful insofar as it is put to the use of what Blake called “clarification of error,” a primary function of the imagination. It is easy for all of us to minimize certain kinds of conflict, alienation, or oppression in the name of social harmony, turning a blind eye to the fact that social harmony and a semblance of unity may be possible only if certain groups do not complain, do not rock the boat. Sure, racism, sexism, and homophobia are bad, but everyone should just be patient and not be an “extremist” by complaining too loudly—we’ll deal with all that someday, but it has to happen slowly. This is the kind of go-along-to-get-along attitude that Martin Luther King emphatically rejected. When conventional society wants for convenience to see no evil, the skeptic is there to be the one who speaks truth to power. This was the role of the Biblical prophet, who told the truth to the face of the king and defied the yes-men who were his priests. Blake identified with this role, which is why he called his mythological poems Prophecies. At its best, radical literary theory when I was young tried to play this role, pointing out where the emperor had no clothes. Blake’s character Rintrah is such a prophetic figure, the voice crying in the wilderness. But Blake, unlike some of the radical theorists, understood that Rintrah was only half the story. Rintrah himself has a Contrary, a figure called Palamabron, and without Palamabron to balance him, Rintrah becomes increasingly a bitter crank. Palamabron is, in a sense, sociability itself—true sociability, not just gregariousness. He is the moderation, affability, flexibility, spirit of pragmatic compromise, and above all sense of humor that makes social life possible. He may need Rintrah to keep him honest, but a society of Rintrahs is inconceivable—his is always the lone voice from the margins. We cannot all live in the desert.

Besides, Rintrah too needs to be kept honest. A certain type of skeptical critic denounces any union of Contraries as mystification, and then walks away before answering the question of how, then, we are to live. No, the ironic skeptic insists, if you have community, then it is going to be at the cost of a literal or figurative violence to whatever doesn’t fit into the unity. Always look behind the scenes for the violence that keeps the harmony in place, the lesson of Ursula K. LeGuin’s fable “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” Such a critic plays the role Blake called the Idiot Questioner, who is always questioning but never capable of answering. Sometimes the claim is that “how are we to live” has no answer. At most we vacillate between the opposites. A poem by Yeats on this theme called “Vacillation” begins, “Between extremities man runs his course.” In a book called A Vision, Yeats elaborated this ironic point of view into an entire theory in which history is the vacillation between the two extremes he called primary and antithetical. The primary is the spirit of unity and cohesion and collectivity: the antithetical is, well, antithetical to it, a spirit of individualism and the will to power. Degrees between full unity and full individuality are graded according to the phases of the moon, from dark to full. What did this lunar wisdom get Yeats? A type of lunacy, resulting in a flirtation with fascism because it was “antithetical” to the democracy whose collectivism Yeats despised. A late prose work called On the Boiler, ranting about a “just war,” shows where the “tragic view of life” that opposites must always war ends up—in a kind of despairing nihilism. So it looks as if we must try to figure out how the many and the one can be unified Contraries.

To do so, we must take a very long view. Life evolved out of the Contraries we are speaking of. In Darwinism, these are competition and cooperation. I am not a scientist, but some respected biologists feel that an ideological bias has crept into Darwinism over time, turning it into what they call neo-Darwinism. Neo-Darwinism lays as much stress as possible on competition, struggle, and the survival of the fittest. It minimizes the role of cooperation and interdependency, sometimes even dismissing the idea as sentimentality. Theirs is a tough-guy version of evolution, and easily mutates, so to speak, into “social Darwinism,” in which human life too is dog-eat-dog, but that is a good thing because those organisms that fail to compete are inferior and better eliminated. Lynn Margulis finally forced mostly male Darwinists to concede that the cell, the basic building block of biology, came into existence as a result of cooperation: the mitochondria were not originally part of the cell, but established a symbiotic relationship with it. Since then, we have seen the rise of an environmental movement that stresses cooperation and living in harmony and balance. Any natural environment is an ecology, an intricate system of interdependencies, and it is because we have violated the webwork of life that we have produced catastrophic climate change.

It is always worth looking at right-wing ideology psychologically. Why has there been such a fierce rejection of the idea of climate change? The disagreement is not based on science. Rather, on a level usually slightly below consciousness, it is a backlash to the idea of interdependence and mutuality. That is “woke,” that is effeminate: nature is there to be mastered and exploited, so drill, baby, drill. The resistance to Covid precautions was the same. So is the denunciation of any kind of social safety net as “socialism.” “Socialism” implies the abhorrent idea that we are mutually interdependent and must look out for one another. Thus the targets of MAGA rage and conspiracy theories are those things that imply mutuality and cooperation.

It is admittedly hard for those of us detached from such an attitude to wrap our heads around the fact that this attitude of apparently extreme individualism is in fact a manifestation of its apparent opposite, an extreme collectivism. Extreme individualism and extreme collectivism are not true Contraries at all but rather a Negation. Both are false. The kind of fake individualism that is really just a failure to grow up and be socialized, that says, “I’ll do whatever I want, and that’s my freedom,” has nothing to do with real individuality. It is what Milton called “license” rather than liberty—and it is always the expression of a mob spirit. You cannot be a Trump voter and still believe in climate change or government medical insurance—you will be swiftly ejected from the cult, probably accompanied by death threats. This is not exactly individualism.

To understand true individuality and true commonality we have to proceed according to a deeper understanding of evolution. Although Darwinists insist that evolution is blind and random and has no teleology, it is nonetheless true that life evolved from the simple to the more complex, and that consciousness increasingly emerged out of that complexity. This meant a development from single-celled organisms towards the emergence of plant life, and eventually towards animal life. Joseph Campbell, in The Way of the Seeded Earth, the second volume of his Atlas of World Mythology, quotes a poetic passage from Spengler’s Decline of the West describing plant and animal life as the two modes of organic being, two ways of being alive, which give rise to two kinds of mythology, expressing the values of commonality and individuality, the Contraries that define human life. This may not be science, but it is evocative mythmaking on a scientific basis:

“Consider,” Spengler writes, the flowers at nightfall as with setting sun they close, one after another. There is about the movement something uncanny that sinks into one: a disturbing sense of mystery before this blind, dreamlike, earthbound manner of being....A plant is nothing of itself. It forms a part of the landscape in which chance made it take root. The twilight, the chill, and the closing of every flower: this is not cause and effect, not danger and willed response, but a single process of nature that is taking place around, with, and within the plant. The individual is not free to look out for itself, to will for itself, or to choose. | But an animal can choose. It is released from the bondage to all the rest of the world. That swarm of gnats there dancing still on our walkway; a solitary bird still flying through the evening; a fox approaching stealthily a nest: these are little worlds for themselves within another, larger world.... | Bondage and independence: that finally is the deepest differentiating feature of all vegetable and animal existence....The herd huddling together trembling in the knowledge of some danger; a weeping child clinging to its mother; the individual is despair striving to find a way to his God: all such are seeking to return from life in freedom to that vegetal bondage out of which they had been emancipated into solitude. (8-9)

A plant is rooted. It is part of a larger environment and dies if it is uprooted from that environment. It is part of a system, and it is the system that is the real individual, in a manner of speaking. The human body is an animal body, yet it is grounded, to use the appropriate term, in this kind of prior commonality. The cells in our bodies are not truly individuals but exist only as part of a larger whole. It is this commonality that comes first. Individuality, which comes with consciousness, evolves from a prior communal existence and only gradually frees itself from a collective state. Vegetation is rooted, but animals are free ranging. They are thus liberated, but at a price: the price of solitude, of being cut off from the larger whole. Animals are individuals, and the price of individuality is loneliness, as Spengler observes. Yet some mythologies stress that our connection with the universal ground of being is not necessarily lost. It has only receded into the unconscious, and various rituals re-establish it periodically. In his Avatar series of films, James Cameron is trying to imagine an alien race, the Atevi, who have not lost this connection to the larger whole.

Life evolved out of the sea, and the emergence onto land is another metaphor for the growth of individuality and independence. The marine world, like the jungle or forest, is one. It contains animals, but those creatures live surrounded by their world: they are one with it and cannot be parted from it, as the plant cannot be parted from its soil. The fantastic process by which some animals crawled up somehow onto the land, grew legs and lungs and thus once again achieved a kind of individual existence, haunts us. The sea is a primary image of the unconscious. In the Biblical Creation myth, the first act is the rising of land out of the sea, and this is twinned with the command, “Let there be light.” Northrop Frye, in The Great Code, makes a case that the Genesis Creation myth, if not read literally as a piece of outmoded cosmology, is a myth of coming to consciousness: “We get a little closer to this question when we realize that the central metaphor underlying ‘beginning’ is not really birth at all. It is rather the moment of waking from sleep, when one world disappears and another one comes into being” (128). In Paradise Lost, Milton daringly has Adam describe his own creation by God, which means that he describes what it feels like to come into being, “As new wak’t from soundest sleep” (8.253). There is a tour de force long passage describing how Adam experiences dawning consciousness as a miracle rather than a routine. So little does he understand this mystery that when he first falls asleep, he thinks he is passing out of being again: “There gentle sleep / First found me, and with soft oppression seiz’d / My drowsed sense, untroubl’d though I thought / I then was passing to my former state / Insensible, and forthwith to dissolve” (8.287-90).

Consciousness awakens out of unconsciousness, but not without a certain amount of struggle. The combat style of Creation myth symbolizes the struggle of consciousness to emerge from the unconscious, which always exerts a regressive pull. We are always in danger of lapsing back into unconsciousness again. As is fairly common knowledge in the days of ultrasound, the birth of a child out of the waters of the womb recapitulates the emergence of life out of the sea: at one moment of development, the fetus has vestigial gills. And the baby continues after birth to be both physically and psychologically attached to the mother, through nursing and maternal care. One of the origins of sexism lies here, as the woman is associated with the unconscious state that still exerts its attraction. Most of Freud is built on this idea that the ego’s individuality struggles to free itself from the unconscious, which means to resist the lure of the maternal. Resolving the Oedipus complex means detaching from the original desire for the mother, who secretly represents the effortless bliss of unconscious unity with the other. Freud opens a late work, Civilization and Its Discontents, by describing what a friend of his considered the “true source of religious sentiments”:

This, he says, consists in a peculiar feeling, which he himself is never without, which he finds confirmed by many others, and which he may suppose is present in millions of people. It is a feeling which he would like to call a sensation of “eternity,” a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded—as it were, “oceanic.” (11)

Freud goes on to say that,

Our present ego-feeling is, therefore, only a shrunken residue of a much more inclusive—indeed, an all-embracing—feeling which corresponded to a more intimate bond between the ego and the world about it. (15)

However, he debunks this feeling in typical Freudian fashion: this is simply a regression to the state of the infant at the breast. In passing, Freud also notes another state in which the ego does not draw a line of demarcation between self and other:

At the height of being in love the boundary between ego and object threatens to melt away. Against all the evidence of his senses, a man who is in love declares that “I” and “you” are one, and is prepared to behave as if it were a fact. (13)

Although love “cannot be stigmatized as pathological,” it is clear that Freud regards it as just as much an illusion. We are not one with the universe. We are not even one with another human being. Freud’s late theory of a “death drive” is also premised on the lure of the original state of passive, conflict-free unity with the “other.” Such a unity is found only in unconsciousness, and unconsciousness is equivalent to death. Thus we all have the urge to submerge the ego in some “oceanic” state. Freudianism could be defined as a Mental Fight to free oneself from what of our identity is still immersed in the unconscious, and thus to stand alone but independent in the midst of a remote and indifferent reality. Those things that give us a sense of connection—religion, love, and art—proffer illusion. The Freudian ideal is that of the Vulcan race in Star Trek, a detached rationality and a Stoic resignation.

Up to a point, Blake would have agreed with Freud. The psyche began on the level of non-sentient reactions—of, basically organic chemistry. A plant turns toward the sun, but the response is autonomic. Animals are conscious, but much of their behavior is still ruled by the hardwired responses we call instincts. Human life retains an autonomic ground that includes breathing and digestion, and it has some instinctual responses such as fight-or-flight. But we have achieved that distinctive mark of humanity, free will. In the opening chapters of Genesis, what seems at first like a crude folktale of a talking snake duping humanity into eating some forbidden fruit is actually a profound parable. Crude interpretations of the Fall assume that a rather malicious God has devised an arbitrary test of obedience, but another view is possible. When Adam and Eve ate the fruit, they were not exercising their free will but rather following their unconscious instincts, symbolized by the serpent. They were behaving, in effect, like children, who are ruled by the drives of the unconscious, pleasure and power. In the terms of the poet who dramatized their story in Paradise Lost, they were slaves to “license,” not true liberty. True liberty is the result of a disciplined consciousness that has learned control over its lower impulses. It is capable of delayed gratification and of temperance—moderate, rational choice. Adam and Eve grabbed the fruit and glutted themselves with it like greedy children, despite being carefully instructed why they should not do so. After eating the fruit, Milton shows them getting into a completely childish squabble, then sobbing and saying there was no use living.

In Paradise Regained, which retells the story of Christ’s temptation by Satan in the wilderness, Milton shows Christ, the Second Adam, reversing the first Adam’s uncontrolled, impulsive, basically unconscious behavior. Satan offers every kind of thing that those who remain in the thrall of unconscious drives—which is, unfortunately, the majority of people—will try to grab. Christ refuses, not because he is a pleasure-denying ascetic, but because he is a true individual. He rules his drives: they do not rule him. Some critics castigate Milton for making Christ so combative, but Paradise Regained is exactly what Blake meant by Mental Fight. The whole poem is a barbed, fierce, witty debate. Christ does not triumph over Satan by any supernatural means but by the power of words, the articulate precision of an awakened individuality. Milton does not buy the excuse of “original sin,” the idea that the human will is crippled so we have to wait passively for some deus ex machina to redeem us. No, his Christ is a model of what we could be, of what God wants of us, which is basically to wake up. That is why Christ is so caustic about those who choose to remain sunk in their unconscious collectivity because it is easier, sheep who want a “strong leader” as a shepherd to pasture them:

And what the people but a herd confus’d,
A miscellaneous Rabble, who extol
Things vulgar, and well weigh’d, scare worth the praise?
They praise and they admire they know not what;
And know not whom, but as one leads the other;
And what delight to be by such extoll’d,
To live upon their tongues and be thir talk,
Of whom to be disprais’d were no small praise.
His lot who dares be singularly good.
(3.49-58)

Sounds for all the world as if he had been taking a look at social media. This means that to be good is to be singular. For an example, Christ names Job, who had to hold out against his own friends and wife, and Socrates, “who next more memorable?”

In his book The Critical Path (1971), Northrop Frye says that a society is founded upon a “myth of concern” that is an embodiment of its identity and values, that which holds it together and enables it to survive. As such, it is collective, valuing the welfare of the group over that of the individual. A society is “primitive,” not according to the level of its technology but according to how far it remains on this original, largely unconscious level of collectivity. On this level, life is ritualized and changeless, and things are done “because they’ve always been done this way.” What was good enough for grandpa is good enough for all time. Social roles are prescribed, and a basic conformism rules every aspect of life. It is, in short, life on the collective level of an anthill, with the “traditional values” of a myth of concern in place of the rule of instinct. Art on this “primitive” level is collective, formulaic, and impersonal, as in myth and folk tale. But society may—although there is probably no historical law dictating it—develop in the direction of an increasing individualism, which results in innovation and change. Through this process, the imagination slowly formulates a counter-myth to act as a Contrary to the myth of concern. Frye calls this counter-myth a “myth of freedom.” At the heart of the myth of freedom is what we in academia call “critical thinking.” Its first principle is that the unexamined life is not worth living. Traditional values should be tested to see whether they are based on true wisdom or just habit. Scientific method, which demands testing and empirical evidence, becomes part of the myth of freedom. So does democracy in its true form, which is that of the voluntary union of free and enlightened individuals choosing for themselves, not subordinated to the collective authority of kings, aristocracies, and churches who demand absolute obedience. That is the problem of democracy: it can only work in a society of true individuals who are awake enough and mentally active enough to rule themselves. To the degree that its citizens are still unconscious, collectivized herd animals, democracy degenerates into the kind of mob rule that has caused many intelligent thinkers to doubt that it is workable.

When we say that a society needs critical thinking, we are not talking about abstract, analytical reasoning, of the type exemplified by computer programming. I hesitate to make sweeping judgments here because I am myself utterly incapable of such abstraction, but I do find myself wondering. To reason abstractly is to think as a machine thinks. “If A, then B” really does not involve thinking at all in the sense of conscious awareness and individuality. It is automatic—it is “programming.” A gift for it often seems to appear in those who are in fact not socialized—and, yes, I mean Elon Musk. The fact that AI can, or will soon be able to do it more efficiently than human beings may hint at something. I am not the only one whose intuitions run along these lines. In science fiction, “artificial intelligence” has been portrayed in two contrasting ways. Negatively, such intelligence cannot understand or accept anything that is not strictly logical, like the robot in Lost in Space who kept repeating the joke phrase “That does not compute” when coming up against the ways of human beings. Such “intelligence” is very impressive, even godlike to some people because it is free of the messiness of the human condition. But intelligence is a lot more than abstract reasoning. What we long for is “artificial intelligence” as exemplified by Data, the android in Star Trek: Next Generation. Or even by the silly R2D2 in Star Wars. If we develop such machines, they will be fellow creatures—fellow human beings—and we will have to further individualize our society, loosen our myth of concern enough to allow yet another kind of difference its full human rights.

The imagination is a progressive force in history, and in literature it takes the form of a Mental Fight. For 40 years I have taught the “classics,” the Great Books, the “canon,” and I have taught them as an agon, a contest in which the imagination is struggling for clarity. The idea that there is a set of books that embody “Western tradition and Western values,” a repository of universal wisdom and timeless truth is a chimera. I use that word advisedly. “Chimera” is sometimes used merely to mean an illusion, but mythologically it is more than that. A chimera was a beast with the head of a fire-breathing lion, the body of a goat, and a tail that was a serpent. So it was a three-in-one that represents a parody of the kind of ideal three-in-one unity of the Trinity. A Jungian interpretation I found on the internet says it can symbolize the conflict and chaos within us, which is not a bad way of thinking about it. When Blake’s cosmic being Albion falls, the elements of his psyche shatter into separate “complexes,” as Jung would call them, that are at war with one another even though the are the psychic components of one being. A chimera is a single beast whose unity is nevertheless chimerical, for it is actually a composite of disparate animals. It was probably a most fractious beast, at war within itself, for it is hard to imagine a lion, goat, and serpent getting along very well trapped in one body. The literary tradition is like that, a seeming unity that can also be viewed as a body of contradictions.

It is easy to make fun of the chimera of the “classics.” In 1909 and 1910, Charles W. Eliot published what came to be known as the Harvard Classics, a 50-volume collection of books that purported to represent what Matthew Arnold called “the best that has been thought and said” in our culture. Eliot wanted to provide a way for those who could not afford to read the classics at Harvard to educate themselves. There is a noble intention here nestled amidst multiple ironies. Anyone could get a valuable education out of reading the Harvard Classics, and it is interesting to note that almost all of the works it includes are still generally regarded as valuable—unlike, say, the Nobel Prizes for literature or, for that matter, the Academy Awards for Best Picture, which have been sometimes given to authors and works that immediately sank out of sight. But what kind of unity do the fifty volumes possess? Should a reader simply start with volume 1 and end with volume 49?—volume 50 is a Guide that provides historical background. But the arrangement is not historical, nor is it alphabetical like an encyclopedia, so that the reader would start with Aristophanes and end with Zola. Read consecutively, the first author is...Ben Franklin? Volume 49 ends with the Elder Edda. Why? And there are some Buddhist texts suddenly tucked into one volume.

Still, I am not saying that literature is simply a random pile of works. But the idea that they all fit together to provide a kind of seamless garment of Western wisdom (with some Eastern embroidery) is really just an article of faith. “Faith” is also a word chosen advisedly, because what I am describing is also true of the Bible which has been “redacted”—a scholarly euphemism meaning stitched together—out of wildly different and in fact contradictory sources and authors but is supposed to reveal one Word that we have to understand for our salvation.

The texts of our civilization are in fact neither a chimerical ideal unity nor an equally chimerical body of monstrous contradictions. They can be studied as what Frye called an “order of words,” that is, as a total structure not of truths or ideological certainties but of patterns of imagery, narrative, and genre. My book The Productions of Time was an attempt to do exactly that. But that “order” is at the same time a battlefield, a creative strife of Contraries, an attempt to progressively expand vision by identifying and casting out error and evil. In this it forms what Frye called a “secular scripture,” a term he applied to romance that could be expanded to all works of the human imagination. For the Bible too has always been read as a unity and a total vision, yet at the same time it puts forth the idea, most clearly in what is called “typology,” that there is a progressive refinement of that vision, a striving through the darkness of history towards a final revelation.

Next week, I would like to continue by examining how the Mental Fight of Contraries organizes the history both of literature and of that understanding of literature that we call criticism. Frye called the second volume of his study of the Bible and literature Words with Power. Like it or not, we are presently at war. An armed attempt is being made at a military takeover, an occupation of our cities. Frye wrote his book about Blake, Fearful Symmetry, as in a very real way his contribution to the war effort, and the same could be said about much of Jung’s later writing as well. The tactic of the enemy is to confuse us, to overwhelm us with a sense of chaos and demoralized despair. The situation is, if anything, more dire than in the 1940’s, for now the battle front is here at home and not abroad. There is an attempt to intimidate us with police and military power. What kind of power do words have confronted with brute force and the threat of force? Religious or not, we may want to consider that the Bible considers words the ultimate power. God created the cosmos through the power of his Word, and so—I mean this quite seriously—does everyone who writes and teaches. Jesus had no power but the power of his words, yet it was enough. Milton shows how Christ defeated Satan in the desert by the power of his language. We at least have it somewhat easier, for Satan was a smooth and cunning rhetorician, while our enemy cannot put together a single coherent sentence. And if he could, it wouldn’t matter, for it would only be yet another lie.

References

Campbell, Joseph. Historical Atlas of World Mythology, Volume 2: The Way of the Seeded Earth. Part 1: The Sacrifice. Perennial Library, Harper & Row, 1988.

Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. Translated and edited by James Strachey. Norton, 1961.

Frye, Northrop. The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. Edited by Alvin A. Lee. Volume 19 in The Collected Works of Northrop Frye. University of Toronto Press, 2006.