The European Dream (62 page)

Barfield views history as an unfolding of human consciousness. His insights into history dovetail with Sigmund Freud’s insights into the history of each person’s own mental development. We touched very briefly on the subject of the dialectical pull between individual differentiation and collective integration in chapter 5 and again, in a little more detail, in chapter 13.

Freud, recall, starts with the idea that in the earliest stage of development, an infant experiences an undifferentiated union with his mother. The self is not yet formed. The baby experiences his mother as a whole. There is not a sense of “the I” and “the other,” but only of what Freud called the “oceanic” feeling of oneness. That unity breaks down when the infant realizes that his every urge and desire can’t be met immediately. His mother’s breast is not always available. The baby begins to distinguish between his desires and the objects of desire denied him. The feeling of omnipotence, that “he is the world,” is undermined by the restraints imposed on him by the outside world. The “pleasure principle,” says Freud, is challenged by the “reality principle.”

The baby slowly becomes aware of his own separation from his mother and the outside world as well as his dependency on external forces, over which he has little or no control. He experiences the anxiety of separation as death and begins fashioning various mental defenses to deny the pain he is feeling. The rest of one’s life, according to Freud, is spent in attempting to recapture the feeling of oceanic oneness, while denying the original loss because the pain of separation, dependence, and death is more than one can bear.

Freud refers to the original feeling of oneness as the “life instinct,” or eros. The feelings of bodily contact, sexuality, and love are all a part of the life instinct. As a baby develops, he is increasingly separated from unconditional eros by toilet training, schedules, and other external restraints. The child compensates for the sense of loss, anxiety, and powerlessness he feels by sublimating his bodily feelings and substituting what Freud calls the “death instinct” for the life instinct. He denies his original separation by becoming detached and by seeking autonomy. He attempts to control events, dominate his surroundings, and assert his own individuality. Every parent is aware of the “terrible twos,” when the child begins to assert himself and claim a sense of autonomy in the world.

The death instinct continues to shadow each child through adolescence and adulthood. People surround themselves with substitutes to try to regain the sense of oceanic oneness they experienced as infants. Freud believed that the Christ story served as a surrogate for the loss of the original feeling of oneness by offering God’s unconditional love and the hope of eternal salvation. In the modern era, nationalist ideology became the favored substitute. Patriotic fervor gives many people a sense of being part of a larger, loving, immortal whole. Ideology often serves the same purpose. Many capitalists and socialists have found refuge in an all-embracing ideological bubble.

At the same time, our technologies and material possessions come to substitute for our own repressed sense of bodily loss. They become, in effect, surrogate extensions of our bodies, and we increasingly surround ourselves with them to fill the void left by our own sense of bodily loss with our own mothers. But in our pursuit of ever more advanced technologies and greater material success, we become ever further removed from the original participation we seek to reclaim. Psychologist Norman O. Brown notes that “the more the life of the body passes into things, the less life there is in the body, and at the same time the increasing accumulation of things represents an ever fuller articulation of the lost life of the body.”
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Virtual-reality environments and genetic-engineering technologies are the most recent attempts to create technological substitutes in hopes of recovering the human body. Unfortunately, argues Brown, the “sequestration of the life of the body into dead things” in the name of technological and material progress only draws humanity further into the realm of the death instinct.
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It is the gnawing fear of death, which the baby first experiences upon the initial separation from his mother, that has, up to now, driven so much of human progress. The history of civilization for Freud, Brown, and other psychologists is little more than the projection of the death instinct out onto the external world.

We have created great pyramids, grand cathedrals, and majestic sky-scrapers to secure a measure of immortality, hoping to cheat death and find that elusive sense of being, that oceanic oneness that remains deep in the memory trace of every person that has ever lived. Our near obsession with creating a material cornucopia in the modern era is so powerful exactly because it is a substitute for the cornucopia we experienced in infancy at our mother’s breast.

The death instinct has become pervasive over the course of the modern era. We have increasingly detached ourselves from the body of nature, severed its relationships, deadened it into bits and pieces, and expropriated it in the form of property, all in an effort to inflate our individual being in the world. Enlightenment science, market relations, and nation-state governance all work in tandem to create the illusion of the autonomous individual, free of any dependency on the natural world. We increasingly live out our lives in a cocoon of technological and economic autonomy. We are no longer surrounded by living nature but, rather, by dead artifacts.

The tragedy of it all is that we long thought that by becoming increasingly autonomous and less dependent on nature, we could better assure our security and be free. Now the death instinct, the aggressive drive to master and deaden nature, has come back to plague us in the form of global threats such as climate change, nuclear proliferation, growing poverty, and social upheaval. We have sought to make ourselves more secure, only to end up more vulnerable than ever before. We have, in effect, arrived at the very brink of our own self-induced annihilation. The death instinct has prevailed.

Freud had little to say in his own day about how to turn the human predicament around. Barfield, however, has made an attempt at offering a new historical framework for addressing the human condition. For Barfield, historical consciousness seems to follow a path not too dissimilar from the path each person follows in the development of his or her own individual consciousness. Human history, like individual history, observes Barfield, is conditioned by the dialectical pull of two competing forces, one seeking unification and interdependence, or the life instinct, the other seeking separation and independence, or the death instinct. The great unfinished task before civilization is how to reconcile these two contradictory forces.

Barfield outlines three stages in the history of human consciousness. He points out that for most of history, human beings lived as hunter-gatherers. Paleolithic existence was, by its very nature, lived in close and deep participation with the natural world. Humans enjoyed a non-sublimated bodily intimacy with the life around them, as well as with their own bodies. The few remaining hunter-gatherer tribes in the Amazon rain forests, the jungles of Borneo, and the other remaining pockets of wild nature still enjoy a kind of unrepressed bond with the natural world.

While hunter-gatherers experienced some sense of self, it was not yet well developed. They lived their lives in a relatively undifferentiated way, as part of a larger social whole that, in turn, was perceived to be part of an even larger undifferentiated nature. Their day-to-day lives were lived deep inside the temporal rhythms and spatial restraints imposed by the natural world. Mother Earth was regarded less as a metaphor and more as a primordial mother, and treated with the same love, respect, and awe as they might confer on their own tribal mothers. And like their own mothers, hunter-gatherers depended on Mother Earth for their sustenance and used various ritual means to placate her in order to secure her benevolence.

The beginning of agriculture marked the onset of the second great period of human consciousness. Human beings began to domesticate wild plants and animals for productive use. With agriculture came a steady detachment of human beings from nature and even one’s own bodily nature. The idea of the self began to slowly emerge out of the undifferentiated fog. As mentioned in chapter 5, the late medieval and early modern eras saw a rapid advance in “man’s” detachment from nature and a steady differentiation into the kind of autonomous self we know today. The emergence of the totally detached, autonomous self brought with it an increasing self-awareness on the part of human beings. With self-awareness came the sense of personal volition, the belief in one’s ability to affect the world around one’s self. The gain in self-awareness and personal sense of identity has come at a very high price, however—the loss of intimate participation and communion with the natural world.

The evolutionary history of the species, argues Barfield, has recapitulated the evolutionary history of each individual’s own personal development. The human race has gone from an undifferentiated oneness with Mother Nature to a detached, self-aware isolation from her. In the process, we have lost that primordial sense of oceanic indivisibility that is the life instinct and instead have settled for a new relationship with nature based on domination from a distance, with all of the deleterious systemic effects that flow from our attempts at mastery. Humanity has, indeed, passed from the life instinct to the death instinct.

So where does this leave humanity? Barfield suggests that we are on the cusp of the third great stage in human consciousness—the stage where we make a self-aware choice to re-participate with the body of nature. It’s here that Barfield’s ideas align with the thinking of European intellectuals, scientists, and visionaries, who increasingly view the world as an indivisible living entity deserving of respect and care.

The third stage of human consciousness shifts our notion of engagement from the geosphere to the biosphere. Geopolitics has always been based on the assumption that the environment is a giant battleground—a war of all against all—where we each fight with one another to secure resources to ensure our individual survival. Biosphere politics, by contrast, is based on the idea that the Earth is a living organism made up of interdependent relationships and that we each survive and flourish by stewarding the larger communities of which we are a part.

So how does Barfield suggest we reconcile the drive for individuality with the desire for oceanic oneness? Were it not for the death instinct, we would never have separated ourselves sufficiently from that oceanic oneness to create a sense of the self and, with it, self-awareness. And without self-awareness, we would not be able to exercise volition, make personal choices, and exercise our individual will. On the other hand, self-awareness and individuality have only made us all the more aware, and thus anxious, about our own finite existence and mortality. The anxiety, in turn, fuels our aggressive drives to master, deaden, and expropriate everything around us, in the hope of inflating our being and warding off our own inevitable demise.

The solution to our dilemma lies in integrating the life instinct and death instinct in a new unity. The early-twentieth-century poet Rainer Maria Rilke provides us with a clue. He wrote, “. . . whoever rightly understands and celebrates death, at the same time magnifies life.”
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In other words, we can’t really begin to live until we first accept the fact that one day we will die. How do we come to terms with our own death and make the choice to live? By making a self-aware decision to leave the death instinct behind, to no longer seek mastery, control, or domination over nature, including human nature, as a means of fending off death. Instead, accept death as part of life and make a choice to re-participate with the body of nature. Cross over from the self to the other, and reunite in an empathetic bond with the totality of relationships that together make up the Earth’s indivisible living community.

The decision to re-participate, to choose the life instinct, is quite different from the kind of original participation that marks the life of the infant or the early development of the human species. In these other instances, participation is not willed but is, rather, fated. The self is not developed sufficiently to make self-aware choices. In the case of an infant, dependency determines the relationship between the mother and baby. In the case of our Paleolithic forebears, fear of nature’s wrath, as much as dependency, conditioned the relationship. To re-participate with nature willingly, by exercising free will, is what separates the third stage of human consciousness from everything that has gone before. By freely choosing to be part of nature, one retains one’s unique identity, while embedding oneself in the oceanic oneness of the biosphere.

In a post-modern era characterized by increasing individuation, where personal identity is fractured into a myriad of sub-identities and meta-identities, reintegration with the whole of the biosphere may be the only antidote encompassing enough to ensure that the individual does not lose all of his or her moorings and disintegrate into a nonbeing.

Some observers of the post-modern psyche are growing concerned about the loss of personal identity in an increasingly thick world. Kenneth J. Gergen, professor of psychology at Swarthmore College, notes that young people today must navigate their way in a highly dense globalizing culture with competing demands streaming into their central nervous systems from every conceivable direction. In their efforts to mediate all of the stimuli and accommodate all of the possible connections, young people continue to create new sub-selves and meta-selves—in effect, giving over bits and pieces of their persona to each new relationship just to stay engaged in all of the networks that surround them. The fear is being excluded. If being propertied and enjoying autonomy and exclusivity was the sine qua non of the American Dream, having access and being embedded is the much sought-after goal in the new era. Worried they may lose access, young people divide their attention into smaller and smaller fragments just to keep up with all the possible connections beckoning them. Gergen warns,