July 12, 2024

Will collectivism, the herd instinct, be the end of us?  For the present purpose, we may distinguish between two kinds of collectivism.  There is a systemic collectivism of the sort attacked by so many modern writers:  the small-minded conformism of small towns; the uniformity of middle class suburbs, with their identical houses in which dwell identical families living identical lives, or at least so claim the writers infuriated by the complacency of the bovine bourgeois.   But there is another kind of collectivism, far more dangerous, an epidemic collectivism that lies dormant, hidden, and then suddenly erupts in uprisings, mobs, riots, revolutions, wars, world wars.  Society lives with a constant underlying fear of such eruptions.  The modern age is punctuated by them, heralded, perhaps, by the English Civil War in the mid-17^th century, followed by the French Revolution, the Russian revolution, the Nazi phenomenon, the anarchy of the 60’s, and, most recently, January 6.  We live in what W.H. Auden called the Age of Anxiety, and he was hardly the first or last to do so. 

Indeed, in a central essay, “The Drunken Boat: The Revolutionary Element in Romanticism,” Northrop Frye identifies such a fear of what lies under the ground beneath our feet as characteristic of modern mythology as it has developed since the Romantic era.  The “drunken boat” of his title is Rimbaud’s bateau ivre:

Here the boat is usually in the position of Noah’s ark, a fragile container of sensitive and imaginative values threatened by a chaotic and unconscious power below it.  In Schopenhauer, the world as idea rides precariously on top of a “world as will” which engulfs practically the whole of existence in its moral indifference.  In Darwin, who readily combines with Schopenhauer, as the later work of Hardy illustrates, consciousness and morality are accidental sports from a ruthlessly competitive evolutionary force.  In Freud, who has noted the resemblances of his mythical structure to Schopenhauer’s, the conscious ego struggles to keep afloat on a sea of libidinous impulse.  In Kierkegaard, all the “higher” impulses of fallen man pitch and roll on the surface of a huge and shapeless “dread.”  (214-15)

Frye does not identify the underlying unconscious power with collectivism, but my other major intellectual influence, Jung, most certainly did.  Jung’s idea of a “collective unconscious” emerged partly, yes, from his own psychological experiences and those of his patients—but it emerged also from his attempt to understand the repeated waves of mass psychosis that swept the world in his lifetime in the form of two world wars barely 20 years apart, followed by a Cold War that, when Jung died in 1961, was close enough to a third and last world war.  What he saw in all these eruptions were people taken over, possessed by powerful forces out of a deep level of the unconscious, their individuality and their very humanity dissolved into the collective consciousness of a mob or cult or ideological movement.  Since 2016, we have watched this happening yet again, culminating in the mob of January 6, 2020.  It is no wonder that zombie shows became popular on television during this period.  Trump’s MAGA followers are gripped by some collective force that, especially in his rallies, turns them into mindless, dangerous fanatics.  I have spoken of this before.  But the aftermath of Biden’s debate with Trump impels me to revisit the topic, because it raised the question of whether the center and left are not as vulnerable to herd instinct as the right. 

Trump’s debate tactic was simple and relentless, and unfortunately Joe Biden was having a bad night and was not able to stop him in his tracks, which I think should have been possible.  Trump is not invincible, but he is good at demoralizing his opponents by giving the impression that he is.  His method is to barrage his opponent with a firehose of lies, so many that his opponent cannot begin to refute them all.  What his opponent could do is to focus on a few central lies and refute them, but then begin teaching the audience what Trump is doing, how he is trying to manipulate them.  Trump could hardly stay off the topic of immigrants and how a tidal wave of criminals and rapists are totally overrunning the country.  Biden should have been prepared for this, and ready with quotations from law enforcement and other reputable sources that have repeatedly said that undocumented immigrants are as law-abiding as American citizens, minus the small number of bad eggs inevitable in any large group of people.  But then he could have addressed the audience:  “You know what he is doing.  He is trying to make you feel afraid.  He is trying to make everyone feel threatened.  And when people feel afraid, it is easy to get them to hate people they believe are threats.  He is trying to make everyone fear and hate, because then they are easy to manipulate.  He hopes that most people will say, ‘Well, where I live is not a broken-down hellhole of the kind he describes, but I guess it must be true in the rest of the country.’  But it’s not.  That’s the con job.  He is trying to manipulate with every single thing he says.  Yes, we have to control immigration, but Republicans blocked the bill that would have begun to do so because Trump told them to, so he could use the issue to campaign on.  His picture of America is utterly negative, and a calculated lie. 

“Americans are generous people who believe in helping those in need, but Trump tries to make them feel self-protective by claiming that undocumented immigrants get all kinds of money and aid that they themselves don’t get.  Undocumented immigrants get limited emergency food, shelter, and medical care on a temporary basis, not a free ride.  Maybe they shouldn’t be where they are, and we have to try to prevent that, but what would he do with those who are already there, let them starve or die of exposure?  His way of controlling them was to separate children from families and put people in cages.  Now he is talking about detention camps.  He wants to make Americans as mean as he is, and I trust the American people enough to think that his manipulations won’t work.  Americans are smarter than that.  They are not the dupes he seems to think they are.” 

Clear back in 1963, in The Educated Imagination, Northrop Frye understood what people like Trump are about, and provided the inevitable parallel:

We tend to look down on the person who responds to such appeals emotionally: we feel he’s acting childishly and like an irresponsible citizen if he allows himself to be stampeded.  Of course there’s often a great sense of release in a purely emotional response.  Hitler represented to Germany a tremendous release from its frustrations and grievances by simply acting like a three-year-old child: when he wanted something he went into a tantrum and screamed and chewed the scenery until he got it.   (139-40)

Sounds familiar.

Yes, if you are politically informed and psychologically astute, all of this is simple and obvious.  I don’t think it is to many people.  Nor is this just a Trump and American thing.  The Guardian recently interviewed people in small towns in rural France about why they voted for the far right.  The people interviewed said it was because immigrants were overrunning the whole country, taking jobs, refusing to assimilate.  When asked if there were any immigrants in their town, they said no.  When asked if they had ever talked to an immigrant, legal or illegal, they said no.  This is just what they had heard in the media.  One way to push back against the attempt to gain power by making people fearful is simply education.  That should be, at least partly, the job of the journalists and pundits.  Instead, they have become part of the problem, which brings us to the herd instinct hysteria on display after Biden’s weak debate performance. 

I do not intend to turn this newsletter into a political blog, and the following foray into politics is means to the eventual end of talking about consciousness and the mental creation of reality.  However.  Before liberals and progressives start feeling too superior to those hapless lemmings on the right, we should do some thinking about how kneejerk-reactive we are capable of being.  Trump wants to make people very, very afraid.  We are making ourselves very, very afraid, and because of it we are stampeding.  We all, whatever our political convictions, have this collectivizing tendency seemingly built into us, and we need to be more aware of it lest it be our undoing.  The reaction to what was admittedly a startlingly weak debate performance has been, in my opinion, wild collective panic unwarranted by the actual situation.  There are two questions which are being elided, but which are quite different.  One is whether Biden is in actual cognitive decline because of his age.  The other is whether he sometimes has problems with presentation, with dramatizing himself and his ideas.  So far as I can see, the evidence of cognitive decline is nonexistent.  That could change if new evidence appears, but right now the evidence of his ability is that he is capably dealing with two dangerous wars and an economy that he has rehabilitated until it is the envy of the West, while at the same time positioning the United States to confront climate change, all this despite a toxic political environment.   There is no evidence that the country has been run for him by invisible others, as was true under Reagan and Bush.  I think Biden is genuinely bewildered that he is not allowed to stand on his record, but is instead judged entirely on whether he forgets somebody’s name momentarily. 

Collective consciousness is mesmerized by performance, by surface appearance.  It is captivated by what we accurately call political theatre, which paralyzes critical thought, and manipulates people with a good—or a bad—show.  This is hardly a modern phenomenon.  It is one of Milton’s major themes throughout his work. All of his major works—Comus,  Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes—are basically debates.  Action is either nonexistent or subordinated to a verbal agon or contest.  And every single time, the point of view that is presented as impressive and attractive turns out to be a wolf dressed up as grandma. In Paradise Lost, the portrait of Satan in the first two books is so titanic and extraordinary that people have been saying ever since that Satan is the true hero of the epic.  To grant the devil his due, Satan is a gifted self-dramatizer.  That is to say, he is a powerful con artist.  But he is helped by the fact that his opponent seems to have no dramatizing capability at all.  Everyone agrees that God the Father in Book 3 comes off dramatically as cold, pompous, and self-righteous.  The angels in heaven applaud him, but they seem collectively hypnotized.  In the end, though, we see who intends good and who is driven by malice and vengefulness.  But by that time, it is too late. 

If we calm down and analyze why Biden came off so poorly, the first reason is that, simply, bad performances happen.  Ask anyone whose job entails performance for an audience:  an athlete, a musician or entertainer, a teacher.  Performance depends on the ability to draw on deeper energies, and sometimes that happens and sometimes it doesn’t, for reasons you will never quite understand.  It happened to Barack Obama, normally as polished and articulate as Biden is not. In 2012, we watched him sit passively and let Mitt Romney walk all over him.  The audience effect was a similar panic, though not as intense. Second, Biden says he was ill, and he looked it.  He is normally pale and soft-spoken, but that night he was pallid, and his voice was thin and nasal.  He simply had no energy.

Third—every error or less than perfect and polished sentence Biden speaks has been relentlessly analyzed and exaggerated by the media.  Collective thinking has taken over, and the media have decided that Biden is unfit, and they are manufacturing “evidence” to prove it, not only to prove it but to force him out of the race.  The media—the pundits and the publishers—have decided to be kingmakers.  If you read accurate transcripts of any unscripted speech by anyone at all, you might well question that person’s cognitive ability.  It will be a tangle of ungrammatical sentences, thoughts forgotten in mid-stream, names confused, um’s and ah’s, hesitations.  I mean people actually trying to articulate something substantial, not just ask for red paint in the hardware store.  I know because I listen to such language in every class discussion.  And my own spontaneous, ad lib responses are not examples of polished prose either.  People do not speak as coherently as they think they do.  The media note Trump’s far greater lapses and go on.  With Biden’s lapses, they fixate, out of collective panic.  Heather Cox Richardson reported that the ABC transcript of Biden’s interview with George Stephanopoulos was edited so that it was made to look like dialect, dropping the “g” on the end of words.  I have read that the New York Times has by now published 192 articles about Biden’s defects.  I’m not going to count them, but that seems about right.  Story has it that the Times publisher is pursuing a vendetta because Biden refused to grant the Times an exclusive interview, but whatever—the Times is only the worst offender. 

Fourth, as is well known, Biden has a speech disability.  When people stutter, it is not a motor problem but a psychological one.  Many, many people lose their fluency with language when they feel they are on display, that people are looking for ways to criticize the way they speak, about which they are self-conscious to begin with.  It is why people are petrified of public speaking.  Could we say that such people should not then run for public office, because speechmaking and debate are part of the job requirements?   What does that response imply about our boasted inclusiveness and sensitivity to people with disabilities?  In another context, there might well be anger if a disabled person’s speech was not only criticized but used as evidence of incompetence and grounds for exclusion.  We are so sensitive to disabilities—look at all the curbs with wheelchair ramps and special parking places we’ve provided.  But if someone’s ways of speaking demand a bit of  understanding, patience, and even respect, well, that may be different.  In 2010, The King’s Speech won the Academy Award for Best Picture, the true story of how George VI of England was faced with the prospect of giving speeches during wartime despite being afflicted with a severe stutter.  He learned how to do so with the help of a gifted speech therapist.  People can learn how to cope with stuttering, and Biden does so most of the time.  But people fail to realize that when Biden struggles for words occasionally, or what comes out is a bit mangled, it is not necessarily evidence of decrepit age. 

Ageism has played a role for a long time in the attacks on Biden’s competence, but age is simply the disability that happens to us all, though in very different ways.  We assume that grandpa is confused because he’s 80.  Maybe he is, maybe not.  One of my favorite political commentators just said, sure, we all want to be old and still as capable as we once were, but it’s a fantasy.  This writer is a feminist.  If a woman were disqualified simply because she was a woman, as Biden is disqualified simply because he is old, and therefore “it stands to reason” that he is declining, the writer would be furious.  The press holds it against Biden that he avoids them, preferring to govern out of sight as much as possible.  It makes sense for him to do so—he is not a performer like Obama—and he faces a kind of discrimination when he does so that others do not face.  

There is a widespread clamor for “someone younger,” but what people really want when they say that is “someone reassuring.”  Biden has a warmth and unpretentious down-to-earth manner that normally would endear him, but right now people want something more.  Trump appeals to people’s fears on the right, but liberals and progressives are just as terrified and traumatized by what has happened since 2016.  People complain endlessly that debates and speeches are worthless because they reward performance over substance, and they do:  a Reagan is always going to come off better than a Michael Dukakis.  But right now, people want a strong performance that they can cling to for reassurance.  “Please, make me feel safe again,” is the unspoken yearning, and believe me, I sympathize with it. Still, I think the clamor for Biden to step down is crowd emotion, not pragmatism.  I recognize and respect the fact that there are a lot of very intelligent people who do not agree with me, but I urge people to think seriously about the matter. 

Whether this view is correct or not, democracy is always vulnerable to the contagiousness of collective emotion, which is why many writers and thinkers of the past regarded it contemptuously, as the worst form of government, not the best.  Shakespeare appears to be one of them.  He is not, to put it mildly, a man of the people, whom he invariably portrays as easily manipulated and whipped up into a mob, as Mark Antony does in Julius Caesar, turning his audience against Caesar’s assassins with a cunning speech.  Coriolanus is the tragedy of an uncompromising man who refuses to suck up to the crowd, treating them with contemptuous defiance.  But his proud resistance brings him down.  The ideal monarch is one whose speeches and public performance can manipulate the people for their own good, as in Henry V, where the battle of Agincourt is won by means of Henry’s speech morale-raising speech beforehand to his desperately outmatched soldiers.  Political theatre can be for a good cause, and the ability to perform in speeches and debates can be a gift, as it was for Lincoln and Churchill, who had what George VI lacked.  But political performers can easily become demagogues, and it is the task of journalists to combat this tendency, as Edward R. Murrow combated one of Trump’s precursors, Eugene McCarthy, dramatized by George Clooney in his film Good Night and Good Luck (2005).  McCarthy employed the same tactics as Trump, whipping up irrational fear and hatred, about Communists rather than immigrants, because in such a condition people become very suggestible.  Murrow belonged to a generation of television journalists who became models of what journalism at its best can contribute to the cause of democracy  Some of us trusted Walter Cronkite more than we trusted any politician; there was also the Huntley-Brinkley Report and 60 Minutes.  The networks lost money on the news shows but supported them anyway for the prestige they garnered.

Progressive writer Thom Hartmann, in an article in AlterNet, argues that this began to change in the 1990’s, resulting in a return by the major news sources to the “yellow journalism” of the 1890’s and early 20^th century.  Yellow journalism was a tactic invented by William Randolph Hurst—in other words, Citizen Kane—to make a profit by sensationalism.  That is what the mainstream media now do, and some of the progressive media as well.  Trump’s lies and verbal gaffes are underreported because they aren’t sensational, merely what Trump does, hence not newsworthy.  One slip of Biden’s tongue, however, pushes people’s buttons and gains millions of clicks.  The media do not really favor Trump.  What they favor is what causes a sensation, to the point where now they are at least somewhat willing to generate such events.   This is all the more disheartening because there is an ocean of disinformation on the Internet, much of it Putin-subsidized, trying to confuse this and other issues, and the mainstream media’s task should be to provide a counterbalance.  The reason that Biden’s remarkable list of accomplishments is virtually unknown to the public is that the media refuse to talk about them—that would be boring.  I have decided this week to stop reading all political opinion writers whatsoever.  They are producing a situation that makes a second Trump term very likely.  Kamala Harris does not have a realistic chance of defeating Trump, but magical thinking is in the air, driven by collective panic.  I have had enough, and will not bring up the matter again. 

All this is not political argument for its own sake.  Its larger context is an examination of collective consciousness, set within the still larger context of the nature of consciousness itself.  Why is humanity so vulnerable to being collectivized?  The two most famous martyrdoms in Western history, those of Jesus and Socrates, were the result of mob mentality.  The human race prides itself on its consciousness, which is supposed to distinguish it from the unthinking animals.  But a collectivized group or society is not conscious.  Consciousness has been submerged in a wave of fear, from which is often derived the secondary emotion of hate.  The word “stampeded” implies that such a reaction occurs also in the animal kingdom, where, as with us, it is not survival-oriented but, usually, the reverse.  Insofar as there is a thought process in collectivism, it is driven not by reason or genuine feeling but by paranoia—in other words, by a form of fearfulness—and takes the form of the pseudo-thinking of conspiracy theories.  This kind of thinking makes otherwise intelligent people stupid:  all critical thinking and common sense go out the window as people believe things out of need.  It might seem puzzling that people are so eager to credit conspiracy theories, whose common element is that ordinary reality is just appearance, beneath which lurks some kind of network of sinister forces.  Why would people want to adopt such a nasty view of things? But such theories provide a justification for people’s irrational fears.  

If humanity is going to destroy itself, it will be because collectivized fear and hate have gotten the upper hand.  Nevertheless, I do not believe this.   The kind of Chicken Little thinking that says that apocalypse, or at least horrible dystopia, is right around the corner, and there’s no use having kids, is itself a form of collectivized panic.  People like to quote Leonard Cohen’s “The Future”:  “I have seen the future, brother: it is murder.”  But if you read the lyrics to that song, you realize the speaker is a persona, and not one that you want to identify with.  That’s the greatness of the song, because it’s hard not to assent to its bleak vision of the apocalypse.  It provides that “tremendous release” from terrors and frustrations that Frye spoke about, so we feel its temptation.   

Consciousness?  It would be a good idea if anybody tried it, as either Shaw or Chesterton is alleged to have said about Christianity.  But what is it, really?  I remember reading when I was young a statement that plants had an IQ of 10.  I am fairly sure this is unscientific nonsense, but what was meant was the minimal ability to respond to stimuli.  Those plants must be pretty smart to turn towards the light, as if it were a conscious decision.  But it points towards something that is true, namely, that there are many purposive activities that occur without consciousness.  Nor would we wish it otherwise.  I am happy that much of the team effort that is my body is autonomic.  I do not want to be responsible for regulating my body temperature, breathing, and heart rate.  Those may be left on cruise control, thank you very much.  But then there is the middle ground of habit, brilliantly studied by William James and by Samuel Butler in a book, Life and Habit (1878) that greatly influenced Northrop Frye.  We acquire new types of behavior by practicing them until they become habits—and when they do so, we are no longer conscious of them.  From tying our shoes and buttoning our shirts to driving to playing guitar, we do things that we once had to learn consciously and laboriously but which we now do automatically—in fact, the less we think about such activities, the better, because then we become self-conscious and mess them up.  So Butler wittily concludes that the goal of life is to become as unconscious as possible.  The Renaissance writer Castiglione, in The Courtier (1528), said that the courtier was characterized by sprezzatura, which means a spontaneous and unself-conscious grace.  As the word “grace” implies, this may be partly a gift, but may be partly acquired by discipline and practice, in a kind of social yoga—it may become habitual.  

But it is consciousness that first conceives and tries to implement new kinds of behavior, pulling away from the running of the autonomic routine.  That is its nature:  it is a faculty of innovation, a declaration of freedom from the old ways, and probably developed out of need, because humanity is not adapted to the natural environment and so must invent such things as clothes, shelter, and fire that the animals do not need.  Consciousness has a second function in addition to innovation and problem solving, however.  Those bodily activities that are internal and regulatory remain mostly autonomic.  Consciousness does not have to get involved in the process of digestion, for example.  But the body needs interchange with the outer world in order to acquire basic needs such as food and drink, shelter, needful possessions such as clothes and tools, sex, and the means to be safe and secure.  The impulse towards such gratifications is “desire,” what Freud called the pleasure principle, and its twin is the will to power that drives the individual to gratify desires, especially in competition with others.  Jung sometimes calls such impulses “instincts,” but they are not hard-wired behaviors such as in the animal world.  They do drive people, however, and resist the control of the conscious ego.  Much of human history, therefore, has consisted of a contest between desire, rooted in the unconscious, and the efforts of consciousness to repress, discipline, or sublimate—meaning, rechannel—such energies in order to make civilization possible.  Out of both struggles—the struggle to innovate and invent and the struggle to discipline desire—emerges self-consciousness, which is consciousness turned back on itself, examining itself, wrestling with itself, a kind of recursive loop that, as I suggested in a previous newsletter, some thinkers seem to regard as the distinctively human form of consciousness. 

But none of this explains the herd instinct of collective consciousness.  In his late work, Freud threw out some brilliantly intuitive suggestions that cast light on the phenomenon.  In Civilization and Its Discontents (1930),  he spoke of a feeling that a friend of his called the “oceanic,” the feeling of being, on a deep level, at one with the universe, immersed in the ocean of being.  Freud believes in such a feeling only as an illusion, since for him reality consists of a separation between the subject and the objective world, but grants that the feeling itself may be real.  In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) to the consternation of some of his followers, Freud postulated a “death drive” by which human beings unconsciously seek the unity with all things that they feel they have lost—essentially the “oceanic,” because the only way to achieve unity with the world is in death, at least in Freud’s tragic perspective.  This idea of a yearning for a lost unity is not original with Freud.  It derives ultimately from Romantic mythology, which was in turn influenced by certain kinds of religion such as neo-Platonism and Gnosticism.

 But we can understand how this notion accounts for collective consciousness without a great deal of intellectual apparatus.  Children are conscious but not fully self-conscious.  When that happens in adolescence, it is a fall out of childhood feelings of identity with the environment.  The difference between self and other suddenly appears as a sharp and painful break, and the result is adolescent angst and loneliness.  More than that: the result is anxiety and feelings of being unsafe.  Safety is achieved by belonging, so that adolescence becomes the age of groupthink, of fads and cliques and various forms of collective behavior.  Groups are bound together by common elements—the same fashions, the same slang, the same tastes in music, and the need to fit in can result in a certain amount of dysfunctional behavior.  Those who have nowhere to belong may become school shooters.  In later life, people who have not navigated this state of development successfully may become cultists, including MAGA cultists.  There is a need to submerge oneself in some large identity that will both sustain and protect, and the need is impervious to the arguments of reason. 

Yet deeming collective behavior merely arrested development at the adolescent level is too dismissive.  Adolescents deserve more respect for their angst.  What they perceive is real: the alienation of consciousness from the universe, what in Christian terms is the Fall.   Consciousness is responsible for all the achievements of civilization and culture throughout history—but those are bought at a price of a tormented state of isolated being that is what religion calls damnation.  A consciousness trapped in such alienation may reach the point of nihilistic despair, the only relief from which is in a rage to destroy both self and universe.  Hence suicide bombers and mass shooters.  But hence also fascistic and neo-Nazi authoritarian movements, which are always driven by fury and resentment.  The cause of that resentment is projected on various scapegoats but the real cause is the hopeless condition of conscious existence.  This is the “motiveless malignancy” of someone like Iago.  Science fiction has been prolific of scenarios in which the human race destroys itself, the ultimate cause of our extinction being consciousness itself, which may turn out to be not one of nature’s better inventions.  

As M.H. Abrams shows in his landmark book Natural Supernaturalism (1973), Romantic mythology—and all modern mythology is in some way post-Romantic—recreates the Christian myth by interpreting it as a fall from unity into separateness and division, the cleaving of the subject from the object.  Some Romantics were influenced by a similar interpretation in neo-Platonism and some versions of Gnosticism.  The Romantic hope is that the Fall is fortunate, as older doctrine had it, which means that there has to be some redemptive power that re-unites subject with object, consciousness and its other, but neither by denying the reality of the other, which is mere “magical thinking,” or by denying the subject by submerging consciousness regressively into some collective mode of being.  Rather, what is needed is a true union of opposites that Blake called Contraries.  The philosophical language for this was “identity-in-difference.”  And the power that unites opposites while preserving them is the imagination.  Christian Romantics, influenced by Milton’s idea of the Inner Light, might identify the imagination as the indwelling form of God.  Anti-Christian Romantics might identify it as the replacement of the whole pantheon of deities, who were always just projections, with human creative power.    

To oversimplify a vast, heterogeneous number of texts, neo-Platonism and some Gnosticism began with a God who was absolute unity, the One.  Such a God is unknowable, even to himself, because that is the nature of consciousness.  A pure subjectivity is unconscious.  The subject knows itself only by objectifying itself into an object of contemplation.  In Christian terms, this means that the Father generates or “begets” the Son, who is “consubstantial” with the Father and yet other.  The metaphor for self-contemplation is the mirror, which is often an ironic metaphor because my image in a mirror is not really me but an illusion.  Still, it enables me to know myself.  The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan theorized about a “mirror stage” around 18 months at which a child recognizes itself in the mirror as itself.  In Lacan, this is a stage of progress and yet alienated illusion, a kind of narcissism.  But in Dante’s Divine Comedy, the Father and Son are said to mirror each other in perfect love, different and yet one.

 Yet there is, of course, a third person to the Trinity.  If Father and Son are Contraries, to use Blake’s term, the Holy Spirit is the principle of their unity.  In a less patriarchal mythology, the trio would be Father, Mother, and Child.  The unity is, however, not static, but a process.  The Renaissance was fond of the image of the 3 Graces, as in Botticelli’s painting La Primavera.  In the standard iconography, the Graces dance naked in a ring.  One has her back to the viewer, moving away; the second is facing toward the viewer; the third is halfway between, uniting the group.  This can be an emblem of the imagination: two opposites united by a third factor in a continuous, transformative process, a dance, the dance of all life.  The imagination unites subject and object in a process of mutual transformation. Its verbal expression is the metaphor, A is B, in which two opposites are identified by a “linking verb,” a form of the verb “to be” that is also significantly known as a “copula.”  It may also unite the elements of the mind:  consciousness, the unconscious, and the interchange between them.  Theodore Roethke has a poem titled “The Dance,” one of “Four for John Davies,” a Renaissance poet who wrote a long poem called Orchestra based on the metaphor of the cosmos as a dance.  Roethke captures the joy of the dance that is the imagination:

Is that dance slowing in the mind of man
That made him think the universe could hum?
The great wheel turns its axle when it can;
I need a place to sing, and dancing-room,
And I have made a promise to my ears
I'll sing and whistle romping with the bears.

Collective consciousness is a false solution to the problem of the ordinary self and its frightened alienation.  It is the great temptation, the temptation to lose the self, melting into the greater collective, an act that is really a regression back into the unconscious itself, drowning in the oceanic.  Freud was right to call this a death drive.  The alternative is an expansion of identity beyond mere ego consciousness into a way of perceiving that sees all things as differentiated, yet united.  What does this mean politically?  It means—well, democracy.  It means E Pluribus Unum—out of many, one—but interpreted to mean neither the merely collective unity of the “melting pot” nor the aggregate unity of many mutually-hostile tribalisms.  Such a vision is not an abstraction.  As lived experience, it is the opposite of the fear and hate of collective consciousness: in other words, it is quite simply love, that bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.  Where there is love, fear and paranoia vanish like fog when the dawn renews the world for yet another day.  That is the only apocalypse there is, but it is enough. 

References

Frye, Northrop. “The Drunken Boat: The Revolutionary Element in Romanticism.” In The Stubborn Structure:  Essays on Criticism and Society.  Methuen, 1970.  200-17.  Also in Northrop Frye’s Writings on the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries.  Edited by Imre Salusinszky.  Volume 17 in The Collected Works of Northrop Frye.  University of Toronto Press, 2005.  75-91.

Frye, Northrop.  The Educated Imagination.  Indiana University Press, 1964.  Also in ‘The Educated Imagination’ and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1933-1963.  Edited by Germaine Warkentin.  Volume 21 in The Collected Works of Northrop Frye.  University of Toronto Press, 2006.  436-94.