Could American Transcendentalism serve as a philosophical foundation for the Occupy Wall Street movement? While this is perhaps worth exploring in some detail, here we shall be content to tread lightly – quoting from one of Henry David Thoreau’s (1817–1862) best works, his essay, Life Without Principle.

Reference: Thoreau, Henry D. ‘Life Without Principle’. In: The Writings of Henry David Thoreau (11 Volumes), Vol. 10 (Miscellanies), pp. 263-287. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1894.

The following extracts are presented in the order as they appear in the work.

Part 1

This world is a place of business. What an infinite bustle! I am awaked almost every night by the panting of the locomotive. It interrupts my dreams. There is no sabbath. It would be glorious to see mankind at leisure for once.
~ Henry David Thoreau (Life Without Principle, 1863)

I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself, than this incessant business.
~ Henry David Thoreau (Life Without Principle, 1863)

If a man walk in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.
~ Henry David Thoreau (Life Without Principle, 1863)

Most men would feel insulted if it were proposed to employ them in throwing stones over a wall, and then in throwing them back, merely that they might earn their wages. But many are no more worthily employed now.
~ Henry David Thoreau (Life Without Principle, 1863)

Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.
~ Henry David Thoreau (Life Without Principle, 1863)

You may raise money enough to tunnel a mountain, but you cannot raise money enough to hire a man who is minding his own business.
~ Henry David Thoreau (Life Without Principle, 1863)

If my wants should be much increased, the labor required to supply them would become a drudgery. If I should sell both my forenoons and afternoons to society, as most appear to do, I am sure that for me there would be nothing left worth living for.
~ Henry David Thoreau (Life Without Principle, 1863)

There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living. All great enterprises are self-supporting.
~ Henry David Thoreau (Life Without Principle, 1863)

You must get your living by loving.
~ Henry David Thoreau (Life Without Principle, 1863)

To be supported by the charity of friends, or a government pension, — provided you continue to breathe, — by whatever fine synonyms you describe these relations, is to go into the almshouse.
~ Henry David Thoreau (Life Without Principle, 1863)

Cold and hunger seem more friendly to my nature than those methods which men have adopted and advise to ward them off.
~ Henry David Thoreau (Life Without Principle, 1863)

The ways in which most men get their living, that is, live, are mere makeshifts, and a shirking of the real business of life, — chiefly because they do not know, but partly because they do not mean, any better.
~ Henry David Thoreau (Life Without Principle, 1863)

God gave the righteous man a certificate entitling him to food and raiment, but the unrighteous man found a facsimile of the same in God’s coffers, and appropriated it, and obtained food and raiment like the former. It is one of the most extensive systems of counterfeiting that the world has seen. I did not know that mankind were suffering for want of gold. I have seen a little of it. I know that it is very malleable, but not so malleable as wit. A grain of gold will gild a great surface, but not so much as a grain of wisdom.
~ Henry David Thoreau (Life Without Principle, 1863)

I asked myself why I might not be washing some gold daily, though it were only the finest particles, — why I might not sink a shaft down to the gold within me, and work that mine.
~ Henry David Thoreau (Life Without Principle, 1863)

Part 2

A man had better starve at once than lose his innocence in the process of getting his bread.
~ Henry David Thoreau (Life Without Principle, 1863)

It requires more than a day’s devotion to know and to possess the wealth of a day.
~ Henry David Thoreau (Life Without Principle, 1863)

The news we hear, for the most part, is not news to our genius. [higher self]
~ Henry David Thoreau (Life Without Principle, 1863)

We do not live for idle amusement. I would not run round a corner to see the world blow up.
~ Henry David Thoreau (Life Without Principle, 1863)

Shall the mind be a public arena, where the affairs of the street and the gossip of the tea-table chiefly are discussed? Or shall it be a quarter of heaven itself,
~ Henry David Thoreau (Life Without Principle, 1863)

I find it so difficult to dispose of the few facts which to me are significant, that I hesitate to burden my attention with those which are insignificant,
~ Henry David Thoreau (Life Without Principle, 1863)

If we have thus desecrated ourselves, — as who has not? — the remedy will be by wariness and devotion to reconsecrate ourselves, and make once more a fane of the mind. We should treat our minds, that is, ourselves, as innocent and ingenuous children, whose guardians we are, and be careful what objects and what subjects we thrust on their attention. Read not the Times. Read the Eternities.
~ Henry David Thoreau (Life Without Principle, 1863)

Read not the Times. Read the Eternities.
~ Henry David Thoreau (Life Without Principle, 1863)

Knowledge does not come to us by details, but in flashes of light from heaven.
~ Henry David Thoreau (Life Without Principle, 1863)

America is said to be the arena on which the battle of freedom is to be fought; but surely it cannot be freedom in a merely political sense that is meant. Even if we grant that the American has freed himself from a political tyrant, he is still the slave of an economical and moral tyrant.
~ Henry David Thoreau (Life Without Principle, 1863)

Do we call this the land of the free? What is it to be free from King George and continue the slaves of King Prejudice?
~ Henry David Thoreau (Life Without Principle, 1863)

What is the value of any political freedom, but as a means to moral freedom?
~ Henry David Thoreau (Life Without Principle, 1863)

We are warped and narrowed by an exclusive devotion to trade and commerce and manufactures and agriculture and the like, which are but means, and not the end.
~ Henry David Thoreau (Life Without Principle, 1863)

The chief want [i.e., what is missing] , in every State that I have been into, was a high and earnest purpose in its inhabitants.
~ Henry David Thoreau (Life Without Principle, 1863)

When we want culture more than potatoes, and illumination more than sugar-plums, then the great resources of a world are taxed and drawn out, and the result, or staple production, is, not slaves, nor operatives, but men, — those rare fruits called heroes, saints, poets, philosophers, and redeemers.
~ Henry David Thoreau (Life Without Principle, 1863)

I have not got to answer for having read a single President’s Message.
~ Henry David Thoreau (Life Without Principle, 1863)

Politics is, as it were, the gizzard of society, full of grit and gravel, and the two political parties are its two opposite halves, — sometimes split into quarters, it may be, which grind on each other.
~ Henry David Thoreau (Life Without Principle, 1863)

Not only individuals, but states, have thus a confirmed dyspepsia…. Why should we not meet, not always as dyspeptics, to tell our bad dreams, but sometimes as eupeptics, to congratulate each other on the ever-glorious morning? I do not make an exorbitant demand, surely.
~ Henry David Thoreau (Life Without Principle, 1863)

The other day I was walking around Brussels,  noticing, as I often do, the people walking in the streets, and also thinking about how I can help to make the world a better place. For some reason the words, “Each man a scholar” came into my head, as if whispered by a Muse (and yes, I understood this to mean ‘each woman’, too). What struck me was the intelligence in the faces I saw. Brussels is a very sophisticated city, and I have no doubt but that the people I was seeing were capable of great achievements. Yet I suspect that most of the bright, well-educated people, were going home to watch television, sink on the sofa, or just worry about life in general.

That’s when the words, “each man a scholar” came to me. Along with these few words came all at once a much broader and grander idea — or vision you might say. The idea is that in this age of computers and the Internet, the role of each person in their society is different. Each person, say, can become an expert in some small, but important subject, and share the results of their work with the entire world. Not only is that possible, it seems like this what God is calling us to do, for He has placed us on the earth, you and I, at the precise moment in human history where all this technology has become available.

This, I propose, is the most direct and fundamental solution to the problems that confront us today. The solutions to our problems — to hunger, poverty, injustice, disease, alienation, war — all exist. What we lack is a model for organizing ourselves to solve them. The Internet provides us with opportunity to forge such a new paradigm. Each person who is able — and I mean especially all those who are well-educated and oriented to computers in the first place — spend an hour or two every week donating their time to public service in this way?  (Written in 2008)

Modern technology has made the brick-and-mortar university in its present form obsolete.

Consider the following. For any given subject (e.g., Psychology 101), there are, in any semester, hundreds of lecturers delivering the course worldwide. The quality of the lecturers will vary considerably. Some will be outstanding and inspiring; some will be bland, uninformed, and unintelligible. Exactly one of these courses will be the best; the rest will be inferior. This means that only a small proportion of students will receive the best possible course. Some will even pay exorbitant sums for the privilege of getting mediocre or bad instruction.

But video and internet technology make it theoretically possible for every student to view the lectures of the best professor!

This produces a kind of paradox:  it is in the best interests of students to, if possible, watch the lectures of the best professor; yet they have paid money to attend inferior lectures and are usually required to do so.   The student truly desirous of quality education would end up watching both lectures!

A second consideration is the monetary value of lectures. We know that, as supply increases, cost goes down — i.e., a  buyers market benefits consumers more than a sellers market. It is inevitable and certain that more and more courses, and ones of increasingly better quality, will be placed online, at lower and lower cost. Already one can buy world-class lectures from The Teaching Company, used, for $50 or less.  Eventually some philanthropist or enlightened government will place university lectures online for free. For a mere $1 million, high-quality lectures for all courses associated with a basic Humanities or Liberal Arts degree could be produced and placed online for fee-less viewing.

At this point, the monetary value of a college lecture would be $0; this would render it absurd for American universities to continue charging students $50k to $100k for a degree.

Would this render the brick and mortar university completely obsolete?  No — it would change its role.  Professors would be freed from the burden of delivering the same lectures year after year.  They could devote their time more to one-on-one mentoring and other types of activity which they and the students would find more fulfilling.

Thus, the role of the university will change.  But to fully understand the nature of this change, we must consider the educational needs of students and society in the coming decades.  This will be the subject of a subsequent post.

This essay by the eminent British philosopher and social critic, Sir Bertrand Russell (1872 – 1970) was published as the final chapter of his book, Why Men Fight (The Century Co., 1917; download).  It nicely  complements the theories of Pitirim Sorokin on social change — for example, Russell similarly emphasizes the role of integrality and alignment with a higher, transpersonal intuitive principle or spirit.

While my original plan was to supply only excerpts, it soon became apparent that so much merits quotation — it reads, as with Emerson’s essays,  as a steady stream of insights — that it would be simpler to supply  the entire piece.  Not long, it will reward the efforts of any activist who reads it — likely a better investment of time than perusing today’s headlines, and taking no more time.

Russell, who lived nearly 100 years, had the unique distinction of famously opposing both WWI and the Vietnam War!  In 1916, he spent six months in prison for his pacifism.

What We Can Do

Bertrand Russell (1917)

WHAT can we do for the world while we live!

Many men and women would wish to serve mankind, but they are perplexed and their power seems infinitesimal. Despair seizes them; those who have the strongest passion suffer most from the sense of impotence, and are most liable to spiritual ruin through lack of hope.

So long as we think only of the immediate future, it seems that what we can do is not much. It is probably impossible for us to bring the war to an end. We cannot destroy the excessive power of the State or of private property. We cannot, here and now, bring new life into education. In such matters, though we may see the evil, we cannot quickly cure it by any of the ordinary methods of politics. We must recognize that the world is ruled in a wrong spirit, and that a change of spirit will not come from one day to the next. Our expectations must not be for to-morrow, but for the time when what is thought now by a few shall have become the common thought of many. If we have courage and patience, we can think the thoughts and feel the hopes by which; sooner or later, men will be inspired, and weariness and discouragement will be turned into energy and ardor. For this reason, the first thing we have to do is to be clear in our own minds as to the kind of life we think good and the kind of change that we desire in the world.

The ultimate power of those whose thought is vital is far greater than it seems to men who suffer from the irrationality of contemporary politics. Religious toleration was once the solitary speculation of a few bold philosophers. Democracy, as a theory, arose among a handful of men in Cromwell’s army; by them, after the Restoration, it was carried to America, where it came to fruition in the War of Independence. From America, Lafayette and the other Frenchmen who fought by the side of Washington brought the theory of democracy to France, where it united itself with the teaching of Rousseau and inspired the Revolution. Socialism, whatever we may think of its merits, is a great and growing power, which is transforming economic and political life; and socialism owes its origin to a very small number of isolated theorists. The movement against the subjection of women, which has become irresistible and is not far from complete triumph, began in the same way with a few impracticable idealists — Mary Wollstonecraft, Shelley, John Stuart Mill. The power of thought, in the long run, is greater than any other human power. Those who have the ability to think and the imagination to think in accordance with men’s needs, are likely to achieve the good they aim at sooner or later, though probably not while they are still alive.

But those who wish to gain the world by thought must be content to lose it as a support in the present. Most men go through life without much questioning, accepting the beliefs and practices which they find current, feeling that the world will be their ally if they do not put themselves in opposition to it. New thought about the world is incompatible with this comfortable acquiescence; it requires a certain intellectual detachment, a certain solitary energy, a power of inwardly dominating the world and the outlook that the world engenders. Without some willingness to be lonely new thought cannot be achieved. And it will not be achieved to any purpose if the loneliness is accompanied by aloofness, so that the wish for union with others dies, or if intellectual detachment leads to contempt. It is because the state of mind required is subtle and difficult, because it is hard to be intellectually detached yet not aloof, that fruitful thought on human affairs is not common, and that most theorists are either conventional or sterile. The right kind of thought is rare and difficult, but it is not impotent. It is not the fear of impotence that need turn us aside from thought if we have the wish to bring new hope into the world.

In seeking a political theory which is to be useful at any given moment, what is wanted is not the invention of a Utopia, but the discovery of the best direction of movement. The direction which is good at one time may be superficially very different from that which is good at another time. Useful thought is that which indicates the right direction for the present time. But in judging what is the right direction there are two general principles which are always applicable.

1. The growth and vitality of individuals and communities is to be promoted as far as possible.

2. The growth of one individual or one community is to be as little as possible at the expense of another.

The second of these principles, as applied by an individual in his dealings with others, is the principle of reverence, that the life of another has the same importance which we feel in our own life. As applied impersonally in politics, it is the principle of liberty, or rather it includes the principle of liberty as a part. Liberty in itself is a negative principle; it tells us not to interfere, but does not give any basis for construction. It shows that many political and social institutions are bad and ought to be swept away, but it does not show what ought to be put in their place. For this reason a further principle is required, if our political theory is not to be purely destructive.

The combination of our two principles is not in practice an easy matter. Much of the vital energy of the world runs into channels which are oppressive. The Germans have shown themselves extraordinarily full of vital energy, but unfortunately in a form which seems incompatible with the vitality of their neighbors. Europe in general has more vital energy than Africa, but it has used its energy to drain Africa, through industrialism, of even such life as the negroes possessed. The vitality of southeastern Europe is being drained to supply cheap labor for the enterprise of American millionaires. The vitality of men has been in the past a hindrance to the development of women, and it is possible that in the near future women may become a similar hindrance to men. For such reasons the principle of reverence, though not in itself sufficient, is of very great importance, and is able to indicate many of the political changes that the world requires.

In order that both principles may be capable of being satisfied, what is needed is a unifying or integration, first of our individual lives, then of the life of the community and of the world, without sacrifice of individuality. The life of an individual, the life of a community, and even the life of mankind, ought to be, not a number of separate fragments but in some sense a whole. When this is the case, the growth of the individual is fostered, and is not incompatible with the growth of other individuals. In this way the two principles are brought into harmony.

What integrates an individual life is a consistent creative purpose or unconscious direction. Instinct alone will not suffice to give unity to the life of a civilized man or woman: there must be some dominant object, an ambition, a desire for scientific or artistic creation, a religious principle, or strong and lasting affections. Unity of life is very difficult for a man or woman who has suffered a certain kind of defeat, the kind by which what should have been the dominant impulse is checked and made abortive. Most professions inflict this kind of defeat upon a man at the very outset. If a man becomes a journalist, he probably has to write for a newspaper whose politics he dislikes; this kills his pride in work and his sense of independence. Most medical men find it very hard to succeed without humbug, by which whatever scientific conscience they may have had is destroyed. Politicians are obliged, not only to swallow the party program but to pretend to be saints, in order to conciliate religious supporters; hardly any man can enter Parliament without hypocrisy. In no profession is there any respect for the native pride without which a man cannot remain whole; the world ruthlessly crushes it out, because it implies independence, and men desire to enslave others more than they desire to be free themselves. Inward freedom is infinitely precious, and a society which will preserve it is immeasurably to be desired.

The principle of growth in a man is not crushed necessarily by preventing him from doing some definite thing, but it is often crushed by persuading him to do something else. The things that crush growth are those that produce a sense of impotence in the directions in which the vital impulse wishes to be effective. The worst things are those to which the will assents. Often, chiefly from failure of self-knowledge, a man’s will is on a lower level than his impulse: his impulse is towards some kind of creation, while his will is towards a conventional career, with a sufficient income and the respect of his contemporaries. The stereotyped illustration is the artist who produces shoddy work to please the public. But something of the artist’s definiteness of impulse exists in very many men who are not artists. Because the impulse is deep and dumb, because what is called common sense is often against it, because a young man can only follow it if he is willing to set up his own obscure feelings against the wisdom and prudent maxims of elders and friends, it happens in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred that the creative impulse, out of which a free and vigorous life might have sprung, is checked and thwarted at the very outset: the young man consents to become a tool, not an independent workman; a mere means to the fulfilment of others, not the artificer of what his own nature feels to be good. In the moment when he makes this act of consent something dies within him. He can never again become a whole man, never again have the undamaged self-respect, the upright pride, which might have kept him happy in his soul in spite of all outward troubles and difficulties — except, indeed, through conversion and a fundamental change in his way of life.

Outward prohibitions, to which the will gives no assent, are far less harmful than the subtler inducements which seduce the will. A serious disappointment in love may cause the most poignant pain, but to a vigorous man it will not do the same inward damage as is done by marrying for money. The achievement of this or that special desire is not what is essential: what is essential is the direction, the kind of effectiveness which is sought. When the fundamental impulse is opposed by will, it is made to feel helpless: it has no longer enough hope to be powerful as a motive. Outward compulsion does not do the same damage unless it produces the same sense of impotence; and it will not produce the same sense of impotence if the impulse is strong and courageous. Some thwarting of special desires is unavoidable even in the best imaginable community, since some men’s desires, unchecked, lead to the oppression or destruction of others. In a good community Napoleon could not have been allowed the profession of his choice, but he might have found happiness as a pioneer in Western America. He could not have found happiness as a City clerk, and no tolerable organization of society would compel him to become a City clerk. The integration of an individual life requires that it should embody whatever creative impulse a man may possess, and that his education should have been such as to elicit and fortify this impulse. The integration of a community requires that the different creative impulses of different men and women should work together towards some common life, some common purpose, not necessarily conscious, in which all the members of the community find a help to their individual fulfilment. Most of the activities that spring from vital impulses consist of two parts: one creative, which furthers one’s own life and that of others with the same kind of impulse or circumstances, and one possessive, which hinders the life of some group with a different kind of impulse or circumstances. For this reason, much of what is in itself most vital may nevertheless work against life, as, for example, seventeenth-century Puritanism did in England, or as nationalism does throughout Europe at the present day. Vitality easily leads to strife or oppression, and so to loss of vitality. War, at its outset, integrates the life of a nation, but it disintegrates the life of the world, and in the long run the life of a nation too, when it is as severe as the present war.

The war has made it clear that it is impossible to produce a secure integration of the life of a single community while the relations between civilized countries are governed by aggressiveness and suspicion. For this reason any really powerful movement of reform will have to be international. A merely national movement is sure to fail through fear of danger from without. Those who desire a better world, or even a radical improvement in their own country, will have to cooperate with those who have similar desires in other countries, and to devote much of their energy to overcoming that blind hostility which the war has intensified. It is not in partial integrations, such as patriotism alone can produce, that any ultimate hope is to be found. The problem is, in national and international questions as in the individual life, to keep what is creative in vital impulses, and at the same time to turn into other channels the part which is at present destructive.

Men’s impulses and desires may be divided into those that are creative and those that are possessive. Some of our activities are directed to creating what would not otherwise exist, others are directed towards acquiring or retaining what exists already. The typical creative impulse is that of the artist; the typical possessive impulse is that of property. The best life is that in which creative impulses play the largest part and possessive impulses the smallest. The best institutions are those which produce the greatest possible creativeness and the least possessiveness compatible with self-preservation. Possessiveness may be defensive or aggressive: in the criminal law it is defensive, and in criminals it is aggressive. It may perhaps be admitted that the criminal law is less abominable than the criminal, and that defensive possessiveness is unavoidable so long as aggressive possessiveness exists. But not even the most purely defensive forms of possessiveness are in themselves admirable; indeed, as soon as they are strong they become hostile to the creative impulses. “Take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or What shall we drink, or Wherewithal shall we be clothed ?” Whoever has known a strong creative impulse has known the value of this precept in its exact and literal sense: it is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents men from living freely and nobly. The State and Property are the great embodiments of possessiveness; it is for this reason that they are against life, and that they issue in war. Possession means taking or keeping some good thing which another is prevented from enjoying; creation means putting into the world a good thing which otherwise no one would be able to enjoy. Since the material goods of the world must be divided among the population, and since some men are by nature brigands, there must be defensive possession, which will be regulated, in a good community, by some principle of impersonal justice. But all this is only the preface to a good life or good political institutions, in which creation will altogether outweigh possession, and distributive justice will exist as an uninteresting matter of course.

The supreme principle, both in politics and in private life, should be to promote all that is creative, and so to diminish the impulses and desires that center round possession. The State at present is very largely an embodiment of possessive impulses: internally, it protects the rich against the poor; externally, it uses force for the exploitation of inferior races, and for competition with other States. Our whole economic system is concerned exclusively with possession; yet the production of goods is a form of creation, and except in so far as it is irredeemably mechanical and monotonous, it might afford a vehicle for creative impulses. A great deal might be achieved towards this end by forming the producers of a certain kind of commodity into an autonomous democracy, subject to State control as regards the price of their commodity but not as to the manner of its production.

Education, marriage, and religion are essentially creative, yet all three have been vitiated by the intrusion of possessive motives. Education is usually treated as a means of prolonging the status quo by instilling prejudices, rather than of creating free thought and a noble outlook by the example of generous feeling and the stimulus of mental adventure. In marriage, love, which is creative, is kept in chains by jealousy, which is possessive. Religion, which should set free the creative vision of the spirit, is usually more concerned to repress the life of instinct and to combat the subversiveness of thought. In all these ways the fear that grows out of precarious possession has replaced the hope inspired by creative force. The wish to plunder others is recognized, in theory, to be bad; but the fear of being plundered is little better. Yet these two motives between them dominate nine-tenths of politics and private life.

The creative impulses in different men are essentially harmonious, since what one man creates cannot be a hindrance to what another is wishing to create. It is the possessive impulses that involve conflict. Although, morally and politically, the creative and possessive impulses are opposites, yet psychologically either passes easily into the other, according to the accidents of circumstance and opportunity. The genesis of impulses and the causes which make them change ought to be studied; education and social institutions ought to be made such as to strengthen the impulses which harmonize in different men, and to weaken those that involve conflict. I have no doubt that what might be accomplished in this way is almost unlimited.

It is rather through impulse than through will that individual lives and the life of the community can derive the strength unity of a single direction. Will is of two kinds, of which one is directed outward and the other inward. The first, which is directed outward, is called into play by external obstacles, either the opposition of others or the technical difficulties of an undertaking. This kind of will is an expression of strong impulse or desire, whenever instant success is impossible; it exists in all whose life is vigorous, and only decays when their vital force is enfeebled. It is necessary to success in any difficult enterprise, and without it great achievement is very rare. But the will which is directed inward is only necessary in so far as there is an inner conflict of impulses or desires; a perfectly harmonious nature would have no occasion for inward will. Such perfect harmony is of course a scarcely realizable ideal: in all men impulses arise which are incompatible with their central purpose, and which must be checked if their life as a whole is not to be a failure. But this will happen least with those whose central impulses are strongest; and it will happen less often in a society which aims at freedom than in a society like ours, which is full of artificial incompatibilities created by antiquated institutions and a tyrannous public opinion. The power to exert inward will when the occasion arises must always be needed by those who wish their lives to embody some central purpose, but with better institutions the occasions when inward will is necessary might be made fewer and less important. This result is very much to be desired, because when will checks impulses which are only accidentally harmful, it diverts a force which might be spent on overcoming outward obstacles, and if the impulses checked are strong and serious, it actually diminishes the vital force available. A life full of inhibitions is likely not to remain a very vigorous life but to become listless and without zest. Impulse tends to die when it is constantly held in check and if it does not die, it is apt to work underground, and issue in some form much worse than that in which it has been checked. For these reasons the necessity for using inward will ought to be avoided as much as possible, and consistency of action ought to spring rather from consistency of impulse than from control of impulse by will.

The unifying of life ought not to demand the suppression of the casual desires that make amusement and play; on the contrary, everything ought to be done to make it easy to combine the main purposes of life with all kinds of pleasure that are not in their nature harmful. Such things as habitual drunkenness, drugs, cruel sports, or pleasure in inflicting pain are essentially harmful, but most of the amusements that civilized men naturally enjoy are either not harmful at all or only accidentally harmful through some effect which might be avoided in a better society. What is needed is, not asceticism or a drab Puritanism, but capacity for strong impulses and desires directed towards large creative ends. When such impulses and desires are vigorous, they bring with them, of themselves, what is needed to make a good life.

But although amusement and adventure ought to have their share, it is impossible to create a good life if they are what is mainly desired. Subjectivism, the habit of directing thought and desire to our own states of mind rather than to something objective, inevitably makes life fragmentary and unprogressive. The man to whom amusement is the end of life tends to lose interest gradually in the things out of which he has been in the habit of obtaining amusement, since he does not value these things on their own account, but on account of the feelings which they arouse in him. When they are no longer amusing, boredom drives him to seek some new stimulus, which fails him in its turn. Amusement consists in a series of moments without any essential continuity; a purpose which unifies life is one which requires some prolonged activity, and is like building a monument rather than a child’s castle in the sand.

Subjectivism has other forms beside the mere pursuit of amusement. Many men, when they are in love, are more interested in their own emotion than in the object of their love; such love does not lead to any essential union, but leaves fundamental separateness undiminished. As soon as the emotion grows less vivid the experience has served its purpose, and there seems no motive for prolonging it. In another way, the same evil of subjectivism was fostered by Protestant religion and morality, since they directed attention to sin and the state of the soul rather than to the outer world and our relations with it. None of these forms of subjectivism can prevent a man’s life from being fragmentary and isolated. Only a life which springs out of dominant impulses directed to objective ends can be a satisfactory whole, or be intimately united with the lives of others. The pursuit of pleasure and the pursuit of virtue alike suffer from subjectivism: Epicureanism and Stoicism are infected with the same taint. Marcus Aurelius, enacting good laws in order that he might be virtuous, is not an attractive figure. Subjectivism is a natural outcome of a life in which there is much more thought than action: while outer things are being remembered or desired, not actually experienced, they seem to become mere ideas. What they are in themselves becomes less interesting to us than the effects which they produce in our own minds.  Such a result tends to be brought about by increasing civilization, because increasing civilization continually diminishes the need for vivid action and enhances the opportunities for thought. But thought will not have this bad result if it is active thought, directed towards achieving some purpose; it is only passive thought that leads to subjectivism. What is needed is to keep thought in intimate union with impulses and desires, making it always itself an activity with an objective purpose. Otherwise, thought and impulse become enemies, to the great detriment of both.

In order to make the lives of average men and women less fragmentary and separate, and to give greater opportunity for carrying out creative impulses, it is not enough to know the goal we wish to reach, or to proclaim the excellence of what we desire to achieve. It is necessary to understand the effect of institutions and beliefs upon the life of impulse, and to discover ways of improving this effect by a change in institutions. And when this intellectual work has been done, our thought will still remain barren unless we can bring it into relation with some powerful political force. The only powerful political force from which any help is to be expected in bringing about such changes as seem needed is Labor. The changes required are very largely such as Labor may be expected to welcome, especially during the time of hardship after the war. When the war is over, labor discontent is sure to be very prevalent throughout Europe, and to constitute a political force by means of which a great and sweeping reconstruction may be effected.

The civilized world has need of fundamental change if it is to be saved from decay — change both in its economic structure and in its philosophy of life. Those of us who feel the need of change must not sit still in dull despair: we can, if we choose, profoundly influence the future. We can discover and preach the kind of change that is required — the kind that preserves what is positive in the vital beliefs of our time, and, by eliminating what is negative and inessential, produces a synthesis to which all that is not purely reactionary can give allegiance. As soon as it has become clear what kind of change is required, it will be possible to work out its parts in more detail. But until the war is ended there is little use in detail, since we do not know what kind of world the war will leave. The only thing that seems indubitable is that much new thought will be required in the new world produced by the war.

Traditional views will give little help. It is clear that men ‘s most important actions are not guided by the sort of motives that are emphasized in traditional political philosophies. The impulses by which the war has been produced and sustained come out of a deeper region than that of most political argument. And the opposition to the war on the part of those few who have opposed it comes from the same deep region. A political theory, if it is to hold in times of stress, must take account of the impulses that underlie explicit thought: it must appeal to them, and it must discover how to make them fruitful rather than destructive.

Economic systems have a great influence in promoting or destroying life. Except slavery, the present industrial system is the most destructive of life that has ever existed. Machinery and large-scale production are ineradicable, and must survive in any better system which is to replace the one under which we live. Industrial federal democracy is probably the best direction for reform to take.

Philosophies of life, when they are widely believed, also have a very great influence on the vitality of a community. The most widely accepted philosophy of life at present is that what matters most to a man’s happiness is his income. This philosophy, apart from other demerits, is harmful because it leads men to aim at a result rather than an activity, an enjoyment of material goods in which men are not differentiated, rather than a creative impulse which embodies each man’s individuality. More refined philosophies, such as are instilled by higher education, are too apt to fix attention on the past rather than the future, and on correct behavior rather than effective action. It is not in such philosophies that men will find the energy to bear lightly the weight of tradition and of ever-accumulating knowledge.

The world has need of a philosophy, or a religion, which will promote life. But in order to promote life it is necessary to value something other than mere life. Life devoted only to life is animal without any real human value, incapable of preserving men permanently from weariness and the feeling that all is vanity. If life is to be fully human it must serve some end which seems, in some sense, outside human life, some end which is impersonal and above mankind, such as God or truth or beauty. Those who best promote life do not have life for their purpose. They aim rather at what seems like a gradual incarnation, a bringing into our human existence of something eternal, something that appears to imagination to live in a heaven remote from strife and failure and the devouring jaws of Time. Contact with this eternal world — even if it be only a world of our imagining — brings a strength and a fundamental peace which cannot be wholly destroyed by the struggles and apparent failures of our temporal life. It is this happy contemplation of what is eternal that Spinoza calls the intellectual love of God. To those who have once known it, it is the key of wisdom.

What we have to do practically is different for each one of us, according to our capacities and opportunities. But if we have the life of the spirit within us, what we must do and what we must avoid will become apparent to us.

By contact with what is eternal, by devoting our life to bringing something of the Divine into this troubled world, we can make our own lives creative even now, even in the midst of the cruelty and strife and hatred that surround us on every hand. To make the individual life creative is far harder in a community based on possession than it would be in such a community as human effort may be able to build up in the future. Those who are to begin the regeneration of the world must face loneliness, opposition, poverty, obloquy. They must be able to live by truth and love, with a rational unconquerable hope; they must be honest and wise, fearless, and guided by a consistent purpose. A body of men and women so inspired will conquer — first the difficulties and perplexities of their individual lives, then, in time, though perhaps only in a long time, the outer world. Wisdom and hope are what the world needs; and though it fights against them, it gives its respect to them in the end.

When the Goths sacked Rome, St. Augustine wrote the “City of God,” putting a spiritual hope in place of the material reality that had been destroyed. Throughout the centuries that followed St. Augustine’s hope lived and gave life, while Rome sank to a village of hovels. For us, too, it is necessary to create a new hope, to build up by our thought a better world than the one which is hurling itself into ruin. Because the times are bad, more is required of us than would be required in normal times.

Only a supreme fire of thought and spirit can save future generations from the death that has befallen the generation which we knew and loved. It has been my good fortune to come in contact as a teacher with young men of many different nations — young men in whom hope was alive, in whom the creative energy existed that would have realized in the world some part at least of the imagined beauty by which they lived. They have been swept into the war, some on one side, some on the other. Some are still fighting, some are maimed for life, some are dead; of those who survive it is to be feared that many will have lost the life of the spirit, that hope will have died, that energy will be spent, and that the years to come will be only a weary journey towards the grave. Of all this tragedy, not a few of those who teach seem to have no feeling: with ruthless logic, they prove that these young men have been sacrificed unavoidably for some coldly abstract end; undisturbed themselves, they lapse quickly into comfort after any momentary assault of feeling. In such men the life of the spirit is dead. If it were living, it would go out to meet the spirit in the young, with a love as poignant as the love of father or mother. It would be unaware of the bounds of self; their tragedy would be its own. Something would cry out: “No, this is not right; this is not good; this is not a holy cause, in which the brightness of youth is destroyed and dimmed. It is we, the old, who have sinned; we have sent these young men to the battlefield for our evil passions, our spiritual death, our failure to live generously out of the warmth of the heart and out of the living vision of the spirit. Let us come out of this death, for it is we who are dead, not the young men who have died through our fear of life. Their very ghosts have more life than we: they hold us up for ever to the shame and obloquy of all the ages to come. Out of their ghosts must come life, and it is we whom they must vivify.”

THE END

Thus, for example, in 1965, a typical UC resident undergraduate student paid the equivalent of $2000 in today’s dollars.  Now the same student would pay more than $11,000.

Because inflation effects are removed in the chart, the dramatic increase over time reflects only misplaced priorities, greed, irresponsibility, and the callous willingness to place students in debt.

Students and their families should not accept this.  To begin, they should demand an immediate moratorium on all tuition and fee increases.

The red line shows the actual average undergraduate (resident) tuition + fees across CSU campuses, from 1975/76 to 2011/12.

The blue line shows what tuition + fees would be if they increased only because of inflation.  These numbers are calculated based on historical Consumer Price Index data (specifically, the CPI-U, which applies to urban consumers). 1975 is used as the base year.

The ratio of the height of the two lines gives the rip-off index — or how much tuition and fees have hyperinflated relative to general cost of living — for a given year.

For 2011/12, the ripoff index is obtained by dividing actual tuition + fees ($6,519) by what would be expected by inflation alone ($810), giving 8.04.

Interpretation:  after adjusting for inflation, the financial burden on students and their families to pay tuition and fees at CSU today is 8 times greater than in 1975!  Moreover, by this standard, CSU students are being ripped off twice as badly as UC students.

In addition we should note that, unlike their parents, students today may find that their degree has no value in securing a good job.

Some might reply that $6,519 per year isn’t terriby expensive.  To that the response is two-fold.

First, this means that the four-year bill for a CSU diploma is presently over $26,000, which is a hefty amount.

Second, the fact is that, a generation ago, the people of California chose to create a second university system that placed virtually no financial burden on students.  Little by little the commitment to suppy a higher education to every eligible and motivated student eroded.

We need to reassert and live up to the original vision of the California Master Plan for Higher Education:  that some form of higher education ought to be available to all regardless of their economic means, and that academic progress should be limited only by individual proficiency.

Sources:

• CSU Budget Office

• Consumer Price Index data

A spreadsheet (.xls) with all data and calculations is available on request.

See also:

College Tuition: Inflation or Hyperinflation?

The red line shows the actual average undergraduate tuition + fees across University of California campuses, from 1975/76 to 2011/12.

The blue line shows what tuition + fees would be if they increased only because of inflation.  These numbers are calculated based on historical Consumer Price Index data (specifically, the CPI-U, which applies to urban consumers). 1975 is used as the base year.

The ratio of the height of the two lines gives the rip-off index  — or how much tuition and fees hyperinflated relative to general cost of living — for a given year.

For 2011/12, the ripoff index is obtained by dividing actual tuition + fees ($11,064) by what would be expected by inflation alone ($2,506), giving 4.41.

A simple way to interpret this is as follows:  after adjusting for inflation, the financial burden on students and their families to pay tuition and fees at UC is 4.41 times greater than in 1975!

Sources:

•         UC historical tuition/fees data
•         CPI-U historical data

See also:
College Tuition: Inflation or Hyperinflation?

Open Letter to Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA)

The Honorable Barbara Boxer
United States Senate Foreign Relations Committee
112 Hart Senate Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20510-0505
March 25, 2012

Dear Senator Boxer:

Best greetings. Thank you again for your having recently introduced legislation to effect the rapid removal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan. While appreciative of this step, I am nonetheless moved to write to request a cessation of drone missile strikes in Pakistan; and that the Senate conduct hearings on these covert operations.

Your House colleagues last year held hearings on the legal aspects of the strikes. Despite certain points of disagreement, the witnesses unanimously recommended Congress to exercise considerably more oversight in the matter.

Those hearings, however, did not go far enough. More fundamental than the question of conformity to international law is that of morality: as Seneca put it, “Propriety forbids what the law allows.” I believe that the immorality of these strikes ought to be apparent to every American official and citizen. Some of the more salient problems are these:

1. Assassination. Assassination is universally regarded as odious and morally repugnant. Only in the case of dire necessity is it deemed acceptable — and only then with great reluctance, and even remorse. One or two strikes, if truly necessary to neutralize top terrorists, might be considered necessary. But ten strikes should raise an alarm; and 200 strikes, the current approximate number, show that all moral restraint has been abandoned.

2. Inhumanity. The mechanized, inhumane nature of these killings makes them even worse. With conventional war, there is at least a sense of honor, courage, and mutual respect among combatants. But with drones the victims are slaughtered like animals, with no chance to flee, to surrender, or to fight back – thereby at least gaining an honorable death. Nothing in the strikes acknowledges the humanity of those slain.

3. Proportionality. These attacks are mainly aimed at Taliban militants, not terrorists. Thus the principle of proportionality, a basic tenet of Just War doctrine, is violated. The Taliban never attacked the United States; in their minds, they are defending their homeland. There is no justification to resort to such extreme, violent, and inhumane methods against them.

4. Civilian casualties. There seems little disagreement but that the strikes kill many civilians as well as combatants.

5. Escalation. In pioneering the use of drone missile warfare, the United States is setting a dangerous precedent, which other countries will certainly follow.

6. Covert nature. The covert nature of the operations — run, as they are, by the CIA, and with no accountability whatsoever — makes them even more prone to abuse and excess.

7. Psychological effects. This important topic may be subdivided as follows:

(a) Effects on operators . Soldiers in combat are themselves subject to risk. In a sense, a soldier is in a “kill or be killed” situation. Thus, when a soldier kills, the conscience, which strongly resists killing, is less injured. But a drone operator, remotely located, is not subject to risk or threat; his or her actions are mere killing (i.e., not motivated by a genuine instinct of self-preservation). Clearly this must have severe negative consequences for the psychological well-being of the operator. We are taking decent American young people and inducing them to be merciless killers and assassins.

(b) Effects on American citizens . The effect above necessarily carries over to the American public, who are ultimately responsible for these actions.

(c) Effects on Pakistanis . Innocent Pakistanis in the region are subjected to great psychological distress because of these attacks. Villagers must watch in mortal dread as drones circle for hours before missiles are actually launched, producing a state of generalized fear, terror, and helplessness. Indeed, news reports from Pakistan have alluded to increased incidence of serious depression and other psychiatric conditions resulting from the attacks. Added to this is rage over the violation of their national sovereignty.

(d) General effects. The strikes contribute to the mistaken belief that societal problems can be solved or improved in any way by resorting to violence. It is most ironic that the United States wishes to fight terrorism by affirming the legitimacy of unusually inhumane and violent measures.

Beyond these moral problems are simple utilitarian ones: that the strikes are doing more harm than good by earning recruits for al-Qaida, radicalizing Pakistan, and ruining the reputation of America and her truest democratic principles.

It appears abundantly clear to me that these strikes are not just unwise and morally wrong, but evil. I ask you to consider these points, and, should you conclude similarly, urge you to act to end the attacks.

Respectfully yours,

John Uebersax, PhD

Introduction

Pitirim Sorokin, a leading 20th century sociologist, is a name you should know. Consider this quote of his:

The organism of the Western society and culture seems to be undergoing one of the deepest and most significant crises of its life. The crisis is far greater than the ordinary; its depth is unfathomable, its end not yet in sight, and the whole of the Western society is involved in it. It is the crisis of a Sensate culture, now in its overripe stage, the culture that has dominated the Western World during the last five centuries. It is also the crisis of a contractual (capitalistic) society associated with it. In this sense we are experiencing one of the sharpest turns in the historical road…. The diagnosis of the crisis of our age which is given in this chapter was written…. Gigantic catastrophes that have occurred since that year…strikingly confirm and develop the diagnosis…. Not a single compartment of our culture, or of the mind of contemporary man, shows itself to be free from the unmistakable symptoms….

Shall we wonder, therefore, that if many do not apprehend clearly what is happening, they have at least a vague feeling that the issue is not merely that of “prosperity,” or “democracy,” or “capitalism,” or the like, but involves the whole contemporary culture, society, and man? …

Shall we wonder, also, at the endless multitude of incessant major and minor crises that have been rolling over us, like ocean waves, during recent decades? Today in one form, tomorrow in another. Now here, now there. Crises political, agricultural, commercial, and industrial! Crises of production and distribution. Crises moral, juridical, religious, scientific, and artistic. Crises of property, of the State, of the family, of industrial enterprise…Each of the crises has battered our nerves and minds, each has shaken the very foundations of our culture and society, and each has left behind a legion of derelicts and victims. And alas! The end is not in view. Each of these crises has been, as it were, a movement in a great terrifying symphony, and each has been remarkable for its magnitude and intensity. (P. Sorokin, SCD, pp. 622-623)

Background

Pitirim Alexandrovich Sorokin (1889 – 1968) was born in Russia to a Russian father and an indigenous (Komi, an ethnic group related to Finns) mother. Like other intellectuals of his age, he was swept up in the revolt against the tsarist government. He held a cabinet post in the short-lived Russian Provisional Government (1917), and had the distinction of being imprisoned successively by both tsarist and Bolshevist factions. Eventually sentenced to death, he was pardoned by Lenin, emigrated, and came to the US. There he enjoyed a long and distinguished academic career, much at Harvard University, where he served as head of the sociology department.

His experience and acute observations of Russian politics left him uniquely suited for understanding the transformational forces of the 20th century. By 1937 he published the first three volumes of his masterpiece, Social and Cultural Dynamics, but he continued to refine his theories for nearly three more decades.

Based on a careful study of world history – including detailed statistical analysis of art, architecture, literature, economics, philosophy, science, and warfare – he identified three strikingly consistent phenomena:

1. There exist two fundamental, alternative cultural patterns, broadly characterized as materialistic (Sensate) and spiritual (Ideational), along with certain intermediate or mixed patterns.
2. Every society tends to alternate between materialistic and spiritual periods, sometimes with transitional, mixed periods, in a regular and predictable way.
3. Times of transition from one orientation to another are characterized by many wars and crises.

Characteristics of the two primary cultural patterns and one important mixed pattern are outlined below.

Sensate (Materialistic) Culture

The first pattern, which Sorokin called Sensate culture, has these features:

• The defining cultural principle is that true reality is sensory – only the material world is real. There is no other reality or source of values.
• This becomes the ubiquitous organizing principle of society. It permeates every aspect of culture and defines the basic mentality. People are unable to think in any other terms.
• Sensate culture pursues science and technology, but dedicates little creative thought to spirituality or religion.
• Dominant values are wealth, health, bodily comfort, sensual pleasures, power and fame.
• Ethics, politics, and economics are utilitarian and hedonistic. All ethical and legal precepts are considered mere man-made conventions, relative and changeable.
• Art and entertainment emphasize sensory stimulation. In the decadent stages of Sensate culture there is a frenzied emphasis on the new and the shocking (literally, sensationalism).
• Religious institutions are mere relics of previous epochs, stripped of their original substance, and tending to fundamentalism and exaggerated fideism (the view that faith is not compatible with reason).

Ideational (Spiritual) Culture

The second pattern, which Sorokin called Ideational culture, has these characteristics:

• The defining principle is that true reality is supersensory, transcendent, spiritual.
• The material world is variously: an illusion (maya), temporary, passing away (“stranger in a strange land”), sinful, or a mere shadow an eternal transcendent reality.
• Religion often tends to asceticism, or attempts at zealous social reform.
• Mysticism and revelation are considered valid sources of truth and morality.
• Science and technology are comparatively de-emphasized..
• Economics is conditioned by religious and moral commandments (e.g., laws against usury).
• Innovation in theology, metaphysics, and supersensory philosophies
• Flourishing of religious and spiritual art (e.g., Gothic cathedrals)

Integral Culture

Most cultures correspond to one of the two basic patterns above. Sometimes, however, a mixed cultural pattern occurs. The most important mixed culture Sorokin termed an Integral culture (also sometimes called an idealistic culture – not to be confused with an Ideational culture.) An Integral culture harmoniously balances sensate and ideational tendencies. Characteristics of an Integral culture include the following:

• Its ultimate principle is that the true reality is richly manifold, a tapestry in which sensory, rational, and supersensory threads are interwoven.
• All compartments of society and the person express this principle.
• Science, philosophy, and theology blossom together.
• Fine arts treat both supersensory reality and the noblest aspects of sensory reality.

Western Cultural History

Sorokin examined a wide range of world societies. In each he believed he found evidence of the regular alternation between Sensate and Ideational orientations, sometimes with an Integral culture intervening. According to Sorokin, Western culture is now in the third Sensate epoch of its recorded history. Table 1 summarizes his view of this history.

Table 1
Cultural Periods of Western Civilization According to Sorokin

Based on a detailed analysis of art, literature, economics, and other cultural indicators, Sorokin concluded that ancient Greece changed from a Sensate to an Ideational culture around the 9th century BC; during this Ideational phase, religious themes dominated society (Hesiod, Homer).

Following this, in the Greek Classical period (roughly 600 BC to 300 BC), an Integral culture reigned: the Parthenon was built; art (the sculptures of Phidias, the plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles) flourished, as did philosophy (Plato, Aristotle). This was followed by a new Sensate age, associated first with Hellenistic  (the empire founded by Alexander the Great) culture, and then the Roman empire.

As Rome’s Sensate culture decayed, it was eventually replaced by the Christian Ideational culture of the Middle Ages. The High Middle Ages and Renaissance brought a new Integral culture, again associated with many artistic and cultural innovations. After this Western society entered its present Sensate era, now in its twilight. We are due, according to Sorokin, to soon make a transition to a new Ideational, or, preferably an Integral cultural era.

Cultural Dynamics

Sorokin was especially interested in the process by which societies change cultural orientations. He opposed the view, held by communists, that social change must be imposed externally, such as by a revolution. His principle of imminent change states that external forces are not necessary: societies change because it is in their nature to change. Although sensate or ideational tendencies may dominate at any given time, every culture contains both mentalities in a tension of opposites. When one mentality becomes stretched too far, it sets in motion compensatory transformative forces.

Helping drive transformation is the fact that human beings are themselves partly sensate, partly rational, and partly intuitive. Whenever a culture becomes too exaggerated in one of these directions, forces within the human psyche will, individually and collectively – work correctively.

Crises of Transition

As a Sensate or Ideational culture reaches a certain point of decline, social and economic crises mark the beginning of transition to a new mentality. These crises occur partly because, as the dominant paradigm reaches its late decadent stages, its institutions try unsuccessfully to adapt, taking ever more drastic measures. However, responses to crises tend to make things worse, leading to new crises. Expansion of government control is an inevitable by-product:

“The main uniform effect of calamities upon the political and social structure of society is an expansion of governmental regulation, regimentation, and control of social relationships and a decrease in the regulation and management of social relationships by individuals and private groups. The expansion of governmental control and regulation assumes a variety of forms, embracing socialistic or communistic totalitarianism, fascist totalitarianism, monarchial autocracy, and theocracy. Now it is effected by a revolutionary regime, now by a counterrevolutionary regime; now by a military dictatorship, now by a dictatorship, now by a dictatorial bureaucracy. From both the quantitative and the qualitative point of view, such an expansion of governmental control means a decrease of freedom, a curtailment of the autonomy of individuals and private groups in the regulation and management of their individual behavior and their social relationships, the decline of constitutional and democratic institutions.” (MSC p. 122)

But, as we shall consider below, at the same time as these crises occur, other constructive forces are at work.

Trends of our Times

Sorokin identified what he considered three pivotal trends of modern times. The first trend is the disintegration of the current Sensate order:

In the twentieth century the magnificent sensate house of Western man began to deteriorate rapidly and then to crumble. There was, among other things, a disintegration of its moral, legal, and other values which, from within, control and guide the behavior of individuals and groups. When human beings cease to be controlled by deeply interiorized religious, ethical, aesthetic and other values, individuals and groups become the victims of crude power and fraud as the supreme controlling forces of their behavior, relationship, and destiny. In such circumstances, man turns into a human animal driven mainly by his biological urges, passions, and lust. Individual and collective unrestricted egotism flares up; a struggle for existence intensifies; might becomes right; and wars, bloody revolutions, crime, and other forms of interhuman strife and bestiality explode on an unprecedented scale. So it was in all great transitory periods. (BT, 1964, p. 24)

The second trend concerns the positive transformational processes which are already at work:

Fortunately for all the societies which do not perish in this sort of transition from one basic order to another, the disintegration process often generates the emergence of mobilization of forces opposed to it. Weak and insignificant at the beginning, these forces slowly grow and then start not only to fight the disintegration but also to plan and then to build a new sociocultural order which can meet more adequately the gigantic challenge of the critical transition and of the post-transitory future. This process of emergence and growth of the forces planning and building the new order has also appeared and is slowly developing now…

The epochal struggle between the increasingly sterile and destructive forces of the dying sensate order and the creative forces of the emerging, integral, sociocultural order marks all areas of today’s culture and social life, and deeply affects the way of life of every one of us. (BT, 1964, pp. 15-16)

The third trend is the growing importance of developing nations:

“The stars of the next acts of the great historical drama are going to be — besides Europe, the Americas, and Russia — the renascent great cultures of India, China, Japan, Indonesia, and the Islamic world. This epochal shift has already started…. Its effects upon the future history of mankind are going to be incomparably greater than those of the alliances and disalliances of the Western governments and ruling groups. (BT, 1964, pp. 15-16)

Social Transformation and Love

While the preceding might suggest that Sorokin was a cheerless prophet of doom, that is not so, and his later work decidedly emphasized the positive. He founded the Harvard Research Center for Creative Altruism, which sought to understand the role of love and altruism in producing a better society. Much of the Center’s research was summarized in Sorokin’s second masterpiece, The Ways and the Power of Love.

This book offered a comprehensive view on the role of love in positively transforming society. It surveyed the ideals and tactics of the great spiritual reformers of the past – Jesus Christ, the Buddha, St. Francis of Assisi, Gandhi, etc. – looking for common themes and principles.

We need, according to Sorokin, not only great figures like these, but also individuals who seek to exemplify the same principles within their personal spheres of influence.  Personal change must precede collective change, and nothing transforms a culture more effectively than positive examples. What is essential today, according to Sorokin, is that individuals reorient their thinking and values to a universal perspective – to seek to benefit all human beings, not just oneself or ones own country.

A significant portion of the book is devoted to the subject of yoga (remarkable for a book written in 1954), which Sorokin saw as an effective means of integrating the intellectual and sensate dimensions of the human being. At the same time he affirmed the value of traditional Western religions and religious practices.

The Road Ahead

Sorokin’s theories supply hope, motivation, and vision. They bolster hope that there is a light at the end of the tunnel, and that it may be not too far distant. The knowledge that change is coming, along with an understanding of his theories generally, enables us to try to steer change in a positive direction. Sorokin left no doubt but that we are at the end of a Sensate epoch. Whether we are headed for an Ideational or an Integral culture remains to be seen. It is clearly consistent with his theories that an Integral culture is attainable and is something to seek:  a new Renaissance.

A similar view was expressed by Frijtof Capra, who, in his book, The Turning Point, suggested we are on the verge of one of the greatest cultural transitions ever:

The rhythmic recurrences and patterns of rise and decline that seem to dominate human cultural evolution have somehow conspired to reach their points of reversal at the same time. The decline of patriarchy, the end of the fossil-fuel age, and the paradigm shift occurring in the twilight of the sensate culture are all contributing to the same global process. The current crisis, therefore, is not just a crisis of individuals, governments, or social institutions; it is a transition of planetary dimensions. As individuals, as a society, as a civilization, and as a planetary ecosystem, we are reaching the turning point…

During this phase of revaluation and cultural rebirth it will be important to minimize the hardship, discord, and disruption that are inevitably involved in periods of great social change, and to make the transition as painless as possible. It will therefore be crucial to go beyond attacking particular social groups or institutions, and to show how their attitudes and behavior reflect a value system that underlies our whole culture and that has now become outdated. It will be necessary to recognize and widely communicate the fact that our current social changes are manifestations of a much broader, and inevitable, cultural transformation. Only then will we be able to approach the kind of harmonious, peaceful cultural transition described in one of humanity’s oldest books of wisdom, the Chinese I Ching, or Book of Changes: “The movement is natural, arising spontaneously.” (Capra, pp. 32-34)

One reason that change may happen quickly is because people already know that the present culture is oppressive. Expressed public opinion, which tends to conformity, lags behind private opinion. Once it is sufficiently clear that the tide is changing, people will quickly join the revolution. The process is non-linear.

Christianity and Islam

Viewed in terms of Sorokin’s theories, the current tensions between the West and Islam suggest a conflict is between an overripe ultra-materialistic Western culture, detached from its religious heritage and without appreciation of transcendent values, against a medieval Ideational culture that has lost much of its earlier spiritual creativity. As Nieli (2006) put it:

“With regard to the current clash between Islam and the West, Sorokin would no doubt point out that both cultures currently find themselves at end stages of their respective ideational and sensate developments and are long overdue for a shift in direction. The Wahabist-Taliban style of Islamic fundamentalism strays as far from the goal of integral balance in Sorokin’s sense as the one-sidedly sensate, post-Christian societies of Northern and Western Europe. Both are ripe for a correction, according to Sorokin’s theory of cultural change, the Islamic societies in the direction of sensate development (particularly in the areas of science, technology, economic productivity, and democratic governance), the Western sensate cultures in the direction of ideational change (including the development of more stable families, greater temperance and self-control, and the reorientation of their cultural values in a more God-centered direction). Were he alive today, Sorokin would no doubt hold out hope for a political and cultural rapprochement between Islam and the West.” (Nieli, p. 373)

The current state of affairs between Christianity and Islam, then, is better characterized as that of mutual opportunity rather than unavoidable conflict. The West can share its technological advances, and Islam may again – as it did around the 12th century – help reinvigorate the spirit of theological and metaphysical investigation in the West.

Individual and Institutional Changes

Institutions must adapt to the coming changes or be left behind. Today’s universities are leading transmitters of a sensate mentality. It is neither a secret nor a coincidence that Sorokin’s ideas found little favor in academia. A new model of higher education, perhaps based on the model small liberal arts colleges, is required.

Politics, national and international, must move from having conflict as an organizing principle, replacing it with principles of unity and the recognition of a joint destiny of humankind.

A renewal in religious institutions is called for. Christianity, for example, despite its protestations otherwise, still tends decidedly towards an ascetic dualism – the view that the body is little more than a hindrance to the spirit, and that the created world is merely a “vale of tears.” Increased understanding and appreciation of the spiritual traditions of indigenous cultures, which have not severed the connection between man and Nature, may assist in this change.

Sorokin emphasized, however, that the primary agent of social transformation is the individual. Many simple steps are available to the ordinary person. Examples include the following:

• Commit yourself to ethical and intellectual improvement. In the ethical sphere, focus first on self-mastery. Be eager to discover and correct your faults, and to acquire virtue. Think first of others. See yourself as a citizen of the world. Urgently needed are individuals who can see and seek the objective, transcendent basis of ethical values.
• Cultivate the Intellect: study philosophy; read books and poetry; listen to classical music; visit an art museum.
• Practice yoga.
• Be in harmony with Nature: plant a garden; go camping; protect the environment.
• Reduce the importance of money and materialism generally in your life.
• Turn off the television and spend more time in personal interaction with others.

A little reflection will doubtless suggest many other similar steps. Recognize that in changing, you are not only helping yourself, but also setting a powerfully transformative positive example for others.

The Supraconscious

Sorokin’s later work emphasized the role of the supraconscious — a Higher Self or consciousness that inspires and guides our rational mind. Religions and philosophical systems universally recognize such a higher human consciousness, naming it variously: Conscience, Atman, Self, Nous, etc. Yet this concept is completely ignored or even denied by modern science. Clearly this is something that must change. As Sorokin put it:

By becoming conscious of the paramount importance of the supraconscious and by earnest striving for its grace, we can activate its creative potential and its control over our conscious and unconscious forces. By all these means we can break the thick prison walls erected by prevalent pseudo-science around the supraconscious. (WPL, p. 487)

The reality of the supraconscious is a cause for hope and humility: hope, because we are confident that the transpersonal source of human supraconsciousness is providential, guiding culture though history with a definite plan; and humility, because it reminds us that our role in the grand plan is achieved by striving to rid ourselves of preconceived ideas and selfishly motivated schemes, and by increasing our capacity to receive and follow inspiration. It is through inspiration and humility that we achieve a “realization of man’s unique creative mission on this planet.” (CA, p. 326).

References

• Capra, Fritjof. The Turning Point: Science, Society, and the Rising Culture. Simon and Schuster, 1983.

• Coser, Lewis A. Masters of Sociological Thought. 2nd ed. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977.

• Nieli, Russell. “Critic of the sensate culture: rediscovering the genius of Pitirim Sorokin“. The Political Science Reviewer (Intercollegiate Studies Institute), 2006, 35: 264-379.

• Sorokin, Pitirim A. Social and Cultural Dynamics. 4 vols. 1937 (vols. 1-3), 1941 (vol. 4); rev. 1957 (reprinted: Transaction Publishers, 1985). [SCD]

• Sorokin, Pitirim A. The Crisis of our Age. E. P. Dutton, 1941 (reprinted 1957). [CA]

• Sorokin, Pitirim A. Man and Society in Calamity. E. P. Dutton., 1942 (reprinted: Transaction Publishers, 2010). [MSC]

• Sorokin, Pitirim A. The Reconstruction of Humanity. Beacon Press, 1948. [RH]

• Sorokin, Pitirim A. The Ways and Power of Love. 1954 (reprinted: Templeton Foundation Press, 2002). [WPL]

• Sorokin, Pitirim A. The Basic Trends of Our Times. Rowman & Littlefield, 1964. [BT]

• Suburban Emergency Management Project. “Influence of Catastrophes on Political Organization: The Sorokin Perspective.” Biot Report #467: October 11, 2007.  Accessed: 9 August 2010.

Last weekend I drove my elderly father somewhere and, while waiting for him, felt an impulse to check the trunk of his car.  While straightening out the messy trunk I noticed a road map and sensed it would be useful. When we got home, I placed the map in my own truck and didn’t think about it again.

That is, not until later, when I drove from Paso Robles (California) to Pleasanton, 200 miles north, where I consult.  On Interstate 101, just north of Salinas, there was a large traffic jam – unusual for a Sunday afternoon.  It  promised a long, nerve-wracking delay, so I pulled off the road, hoping to wait it out.  Then I remembered the map: maybe it would show a back-road to bypass the traffic.  As luck would have it, the map covered the Salinas area, and, what’s more, showed a back-road nearby.

I backed up on the roadside and headed to the alternate route – and a ramble through the hills north of Salinas, an area I’d never previously visited or knew existed, surrounded by oak trees and small farms.  This ended at the mission town of San Juan Bautista, a laid-back place where chickens still roam about.  From there I cut back over to Interstate 101, having bypassed the traffic.

Things jammed up again, however, a few miles further, past Gilroy, but Fortune relented a second time:  again the map showed a handy side road.  This time I was treated to a shady jaunt through a horse ranching area.

I picked up the interstate again south of San Jose.  At this point there was no traffic jam per se, just the ordinary ordeal of five lanes (each way) of congested, fast-moving traffic.  I’ve driven this stretch many times in recent months, but this time noticed it in a new way.  There was something palpably unpleasant, agitating about it — a kind of negative energy or ‘vibration’, one might say.  It was as though the collective angst and frustration of all the drivers was pooled together and could be felt.  What made me notice it so vividly this time was precisely that I had spent the previous hour on tranquil back roads.

It reminded me of a story I once read about a modern Arctic explorer – a man who kayaked from Greenland to Alaska.  He described how, after months in the wilderness, he returned to civilization and felt ill, disoriented, and out of place.  Even as early as arriving at Alaska’s North Shore oil fields – with no other person present, but merely the signs of modern civilization – he felt nauseous.

That’s something like how I felt, though on a lesser scale.  The abrupt change confronted me with something that I, and perhaps most other people, usually try to ignore or forget:  that modern urban life is radically out of balance and against our needs and wants as human beings.  If we weren’t habituated to it, we might see that it’s literally sickening.

Remember this commercial?

In 2001, when 9/11 occurred, I was living in Los Angeles. I was involved in the effort to save Ahmanson Ranch, one of the few remaining undeveloped tracts of land in LA Country and an important wildlife refuge.  This brought me into confrontation with the materialistic values of my native Southern California and with the “greedy corporate mentality” that was trying to develop Ahmanson Ranch over everybody’s objections.

When I saw the first images of the Twin Towers in flames, my first reaction (after initial disbelief, and natural concern for the victims) was something like, “Well, what else did people expect!”  I wasn’t consumed with hatred for the terrorists or a thirst for revenge.  Rather, it seemed apparent to me that American society had become so completely dissociated from Nature, and from human nature, that this result was almost predictable.

The Gaia Hypothesis

I’ve kept these thoughts mostly to myself these last 9 1/2 years.  But the experience last weekend somehow jogged my unconscious, and I saw how they could be expressed in terms of the Gaia hypothesis.  A short definition of the hypothesis is as follows:

The Gaia Hypothesis is the theory that living organisms and inorganic material are part of a dynamic system that shape Earth’s biosphere, in Lynn Margulis’s words, a “super organismic system”  The earth is a self-regulating environment; a single, unified, cooperating and living system – a superorganism that regulates physical conditions to keep the environment hospitable for life.”  Source: www.kheper.net

Flavors of the Gaia hypothesis range from a New Agey kind of metaphysical view (‘Gaism’ as a of religion), to a more scientific view based on ecology, biology, and systems theory.  In any case, the Gaia hypothesis comports with intuition, common sense, and experience alike in suggesting that, if you push Nature around enough, you can expect push-back.  (“It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature!”)

Consider an example.  Some suggest that a bee-hive is really a super-organism.  If one bee starts doing things against the good of the hive, it can expect, first, a few angry pokes from the others, and, if that doesn’t work, to get stung.  A superorganism has feedback and control mechanisms built-in. The only way a complex system can survive long is if it has such mechanisms.

By 2001, society had, in my view, already broken down in Los Angeles.  Traffic was horrendous.  There was no affordable housing in the city or nearby areas.  Many people were driving 60 miles to and from work because they couldn’t afford to live any closer.

Greed and Selfishness

Others responded with personal real estate speculation: the game was to buy the most expensive property one could afford, on the assumption that, with continued increase in house prices, one would build up a large equity within 5 years, to be taken as profit.  In short, people denied or ignored the unlivable lifestyle, hoping that, in a few years, they could cash in. Never mind that, besides literally betting the farm on the wrong assumption that real estate would appreciate indefinitely, this scheme only worked by passing on the burden of higher prices to the next buyer.  It was completely greedy:  “let the other poor sucker pony up an extra 50 grand for the house, even though its intrinsic value hasn’t changed, and put it in my pocket.”

Real estate developers and banks (and the federal government) were only too happy to accommodate this personal greed by building and financing bigger houses.  Families of 2 or 3 were buying 5 bedroom mansions (the bigger the house, the more money to be made on speculation.)  On every developable piece of land the largest possible house was built.  Cookie-cutter villas were packed into grids so densely that neighbors could reach out their windows and shake hands.

This also negatively affected the workplace.  Californians were now deeply in debt, stuck with large mortgage payments.  Because keeping ones job became essential, nobody would dare do or say anything to jeopardize their paycheck. Working in the pharmaceutical field, I witnessed a remarkable decline in the conditions and values of the industry.  What began as an earnest attempt of idealistic professionals to make medicine, cure disease, and reduce human suffering became an endless quest for yearly, double-digit corporate profits, to be achieved at any cost.  The industry was surviving more by endless mergers and restructuring than by producing anything.

This same pattern was being played out in other industries and regions of the United States.  We were clearly a culture in decline.  This had not happened suddenly.  Dire warnings about the environment and society had begun in the 1950′s.  In 1982, the remarkable movie, Koyaanisqatsi: Life out of Balance, supplied a vivid artistic portrayal of the problem.  But despite foreshadowings of what was to come, nobody took the warnings to heart. By 2001 things were at least twice as bad as in the 80′s.   Much more ominously, nobody was even talking about the problems any more, much less trying to address them.  All interest was on a series of political and pop-culture distractions:  Bill Clinton, Rush Limbaugh, O. J….one media circus after another.

Note the uncanny and chillingly prophetic, almost subliminal scene at 1:43 in this clip.  That’s not one of the Twin Towers collapsing.  This was filmed 20 years before 9/11.

The Gaia hypothesis implies that, when things get too far out of balance, a correction is inevitable.  It seems reasonable to try looking at the 9/11 disaster in this way.  Some may object:  but it was Osama bin Laden and the terrorists, not Nature, that did this.  That’s almost irrelevant; maybe, in theory, ‘Gaia’ could have responded with a wholly natural event, like an earthquake or flood.  But if that had occurred, would we have paid attention, or would we have just written it off as a random event?  Instead, perhaps Nature chose to act by pushing some borderline terrorists over the edge in their disordered thinking. Stranger things have happened.

What should have ocurred soon after 9/11 – after looking after the survivors, caring for the affected families, and taking sensible security precautions — would have been to ask: “what have we done to make these people so mad at us?”   Possible answers aren’t hard to find.  It suffices to say that, not only have we done our best to destroy our country, but we’ve also managed to export our crass materialism to the rest of the world.  Can this be said out loud yet:  if we weren’t Americans, we’d be angry with America, too?  In fact, we were already blowing ourselves up – witness Timothy McVey and Ted Kaczynski.

Instead our leaders fell back on the most ridiculous response imaginable, claiming:  “they hate us because we’re free!”   Rather than engage in any kind of concerted self-examination, we externalized all blame and lashed out, throwing not one, but two hellish, trillion-dollar temper tantrums in Afghanistan and Iraq, unleashing new aggression and violence to further upset the planet.  As a consequence, we are, in 2010, much worse off.

Implications of the Gaia Hypothesis

Fortunately, the Gaia hypothesis has a positive aspect.  If the Earth is something like a superorganism, hopefully it still wants to keep us around; we do manage to do nice things now and then when we try.  Perhaps, like God, Gaia chastises those whom she loves: the point is not to destroy, but to improve us, and, ultimately, to place us back on the road to happiness.

Let’s get back on track, America.  Let’s, first of all, end this wretched war in Afghanistan, and not start any new wars.  Then let’s admit the problems that face us – environmental deterioration, urban sprawl, lack of planning and foresight, inane or nonexistent cultural values, a political climate of continual hostility and ill-will, domestic injustice, and indifference to the needs and suffering of the rest of the world.

The recent, interminable succession of crises and catastrophes was in a general sense, accurately predicted by the Harvard sociologist Pitirm A. Sorokin as early as 1937.  Based on an exhaustive analysis of world history, Sorokin saw that severe crises inevitably accompany a transition from one cultural epoch to another.  But he also recognized that, at the same time a culture becomes decadent, a contrary force emerges – and this force gathers strength rapidly.  We have already seen signs of this counter-force in the form of people like Gandhi and Martin Luther King and emerging ideas like the environmental movement, the 1960′s peace movement, holistic health, sustainable living, and more recently anti-globalization concerns.  The path forward is there – it’s just a matter of enough people disengaging from the mentality of the dying ultra-materialist culture.

I can think of no better way to end this post than with the words of the 1969 Joni Mitchell song, “Woodstock”:

We are stardust, we are golden,
Caught in the devil’s bargain.
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the Garden.